A Game of Gods: The End is Only the Beginning (The Anunnaki Chronicles Book 1) (4 page)

9

Tarifa, Southern Spain

After walking in the rain for more than twenty minutes, Eva finally stopped at her chosen spot. They had reached the end of land, and starting from that point in front of them was the great Mediterranean Sea. She held a surgical knife in her right hand, hiding it behind her back, hiding it from the man towering in front of her.

The man, drowning in her beguiling brown eyes, had tears in his own eyes.

She had silky brown hair that wavered unto his chest whilst touching his white cotton shirt from the little distance that separated them. But the breeze couldn't move his long wavy locks. Drops of Rain washed the dull Sun down the horizon. The sky was orange and so was her mind. The rain poured down furiously; pinching the couple standing on the sandy shore of the
Costa de la Luz
, looking into each other, eye to eye. Hers were unmoved, and his were guilt-ridden.

The woman, pale as a ghost, spoke ‘
Vamos a vivir juntos para siempre
.
 Justo como lo habíamos deseado
.
Podemos, ¿No?
’ She raised her face to look into his eyes, seeking an answer.

He spoke nothing nor did his eyes break the vow of his mouth. She looked downward in what was more a spiral penalty for being a woman in freezing rain and a tear dropped down on the beach. It merged with the water that came with the sea.

‘
El
Silencio
… The silence explains it all’ She said, ‘you leave me no other option now,’ She wiped the tears off her face ‘This is the last time you are going to see me… You wouldn't see me again.’

He didn't respond.

He couldn't.

She lifted her face again, looked into his eyes.

They were diluted by tears which she knew would go away as soon as the man returned to his virgin prey.

‘But before I leave, I would like to,’ She paused; her right hand paved a slight movement. Hidden behind her back was a surgical knife, packed tightly within the pack of her fist. She tightened the grip over the knife, preparing it for the final blow, ‘gift
you
,’ she paused again, drew the knife towards his chest screaming, ‘
MUERTE!
’

She was wild and furious on the spur of moment. She was parting with a gift of death!

The man responded with quick reflexes, caught hold of both her hands at one go and snatched the knife.

But she screamed again ‘
Tus corazón es mío!
’ She was insane; He could control her physically but couldn’t fight her speed. She was physically weaker, and that he knew very well. But she had the quickest of moves and most flexible body for she was a well trained Flamenco dancer. That was her strength and he had to rule over her weakness to bring down her strength.

He had to be strong and act wisely, swiftly. He closed his eyes, and raised his hand to stab her.

Once, then took out the knife.

The second time.

Then the third.

Finally, he let it rest there forever. She wasn't screaming anymore, the knife staked through her breast, drilling her ribs, boring into her Heart. Blood oozed of her breast, the white traje almost red from the left centre of her body.

They dropped on the wet sand, merging with the water though this time the combination resulted in a transparent red sea that spread like blood spreading through arteries inside the body, from one branch to the other and so on into the incoming waves of Mediterranean Sea.

She silently wept in pain, took her palm off her blouse where she had placed it, looked at her palms, they were red with blood.

She gathered courage and took in one last breath and whispered into the air ‘I am sorry that I trusted a tramp like you,’ she coughed, ‘God will see you on the Day of Judgement… God…’ And then came the moment, She lost consciousness and her body collapsed on the beach, an angelic white face hitting the wet sand, sending a huge splash of water over the man's head.

The man turned around and started walking away. Away from the woman who had lived for him and whom he had used just like the teenager in his room at the motel.

The body lay there… the sea kept covering her with blankets of waves periodically.

10

Mumbai

Pakhi held onto her tears tightly and as soon as the elevator’s metallic doors parted, she rushed out of it. Across the hallway she went past the reception without giving any notice to the dozen people staring at her, including the pretty receptionist who had envied the dynamic reporter’s beauty half an hour ago. Two minutes later, Pakhi was standing outside the heritage building. Narendra saw her and started his van, but instead of waiting for the van outside the hotel, she had already started moving towards the taxi stand. He dashed in front of the lady who was fighting hard from breaking into a heartfelt session of sobbing. He opened the door to the adjacent seat for her. She looked away from the van.

‘What’s wrong dear?’ A concerned Narendra enquired.

‘Can you please leave me alone?’ she replied while looking away.

‘Why? Didn’t the interview go well? Please get inside the van.’

‘Please! Mr Narendra, I can take care of myself. Could you give me some time alone? I do not want to be bothered right now.’ Pakhi begged, her eyes were red with tears waiting to be set free.

Narendra saw that very well. He nodded ‘Sure, just call me when you are ready.’ Saying this Narendra waved his hand and then drove away leaving the lady to herself on a busy roadside.

She called for a cab and got into it. It was damp inside the cab and smelt like pungent fern all around. She sulked in partly and then rubbed her eyelids with her hands. The cabby was an aged Sikh, who concentrated his senses firmly in his driving. She got half the privacy she had requested for.

That son of a bitch!
Pakhi cursed Khalid Abdullah in her mind.

Khalid Abdullah had touched her at the place where it hurt the most without even moving a gold covered finger of his. It was her ego that was keeping her together. She would die under the pressure of concealing her emotions but would not cry in front of other people; even it was her own mother. She was a feminist, to the hardest core, and would never accept defeat from a
man
even if it were of the smallest gauge at the psychological level. There were certain beliefs that made her difficult to
bend
, the reason why she was so vulnerable to
break
. She sulked in again without letting the tears roll down. For the first time in her life, she had started to hate Miah
Malhotra
Abdullah. Miah who was her icon for almost a decade suddenly lost the tonnes of respect that she drew from herself.

‘You are the whore... but your husband calls me one!
I will make each one of you pay for insulting me. Every single person who is insulting and mocking at me now, will be dealt the day I become a huge media person. The biggest ever! I will expose each and every one of you. Till then I have to be strong. I cannot waste my precious tears on such bastards and whores. I have already wasted much on someone before, but it never affected him because he had just one aim… one passion…’
Pakhi encouraged herself and wiped off the tear that was hanging on the edge of her lower eye lash. ‘These tears are my strength! I cannot let them go’ she said to herself.

Half an hour later, Pakhi called out to the cabby ‘Just around that corner, please.’

As instructed by his passenger, the old cabby pulled his ambassador to the corner and waited for the passenger to pay and get off.

Pakhi gave a crisp five hundred rupee note and got off the ambassador and walked towards a shabby apartment in front of her. The tears were wiped off her face. She wanted that time off from any known face to boost her morale and she got just what was needed. She eyed the barred elevator at the end of the floor and started walking towards it. As soon the door opened, she entered the concealed chamber and hit the button on the elevator’s wall.  Unlike the elevator at the Taj, this one was a small one with no liftboy. This was just an apartment elevator, tacky at every inch of it, which clearly depicted the class of people who lived there. There was a sledgehammer lying on the floor in the corner with a spanner and a mechanic’s toolkit. Some mechanic must have forgotten his kit inside the elevator. The elevator’s movement upward was so much jerky that the spanner kept hitting the sledgehammer’s head making clinging sounds and Pakhi almost feared getting out of that place alive, but she was well used to the elevator. However, that was years ago, when she would come here regularly. Nevertheless, the elevator was no less shabby at that time either, only it smelt better at then.

The elevator stopped in between, but the door did not open. She stood inside, worried. She pressed the button on the wall, but nothing happened. She feared getting stuck inside the creepy elevator, but then it shook and came into motion once again.

The elevator finally came to a stop on the seventh floor and this time the doors parted and she came out of it. She walked towards the apartment right in front of her, the place which she used to come back during her college days. As she walked towards the door, strange feelings of nostalgia started building up around her; she could actually see things from the past happen around her once again. She liked what she saw, but those were the same things she could not run away from.

A haunting past!

11

Suffocation was something he had not wished for at this moment, at that place, because that was exactly what he was going through emotionally. For the past couple of weeks he could not find peace in anything that he did… anywhere he went he would be hear the voice, a voice so shrill and sharp that it scared him to the tip of the smallest hair on his body. Initially he ignored the voice as mere delusion due to work related stress and spending sleepless nights. However, with each day that passed,
the voice
seemed to come nearer to him. He could almost hear things very clearly now and he knew it was not the stress or the sleep, for he had become an insomniac owing to the haunting voice. He had found other alternatives to curb the voice. But the voice would quickly catch up with him. The voice kept whispering into his ears and he had lost his sleep. He had not slept for the past six days ever since he had announced his untimely
retirement
from what he did best… making films.

Muyete!
The voice whispered.

Manav screamed on top of his voice. He had administrated a powerful dose of sleeping pills into his nerves to get rid of the voice and find his way into the world of unconsciousness. Things had faded in front of his eyes; he hardly saw the tacky interior of his apartment. He could not smell the filth around him either. He heard nothing but the whispers of the voice. He cried out loud and tears rolled down his eyes like a great ocean during a catastrophic tsunami. Like a baby, he curled on the broken couch, with his knee bent up to his face, a tight string of metal binding his ankle with his thigh, to deregulate blood circulation to gain an induced state of trance.

Zeb mi vrom di yell! Bileez….
The voice quivered in the most haunting of tones he had ever heard. The syllables were not clear at all, he could not even identify the language in which the voice spoke. It seemed too far away from him, but it was approaching him for sure.

With all the consciousness that was left in him, he pulled the string to make it tighter. He shrieked like a tortured new born and then slowly passed out. The voice slowly faded away and into numbness did he go… slowly…

This was exactly how he had projected the thoughts fading into numbness at the time of death in one of his movies, but now it was happening to him for real. He was not sure if he was dying or if he was put to sleep successfully.

There was a thudding noise. Someone had broken into his apartment.

12

Five Minutes Ago

Shakti Apartments, Navi Mumbai

She kept knocking on the door, but nobody was answering and then she heard a loud cry from inside. She recognized the male voice instantly and did not take any further ado to learn that something had terribly gone wrong inside. She turned the latch, just to try her luck. The door was locked from inside. The only solution was to break open. She took few steps back and turned around to see there was anyone who could be of help. However, she could not see even a single soul around. The apartment seemed to be deserted. And then it struck her, just because she was a woman did not imply that she could not break open the termite laid wooden door. She could do it on her own. Taking in a deep breath she launched herself onto the door. There was hardly any impact on the door, it shook by a millimetre, however Pakhi felt a sudden pain injected into her right shoulder with which she had banged on the door. She patched the injured shoulder with her left hand and looked around again to find something hard to hit on the door. She was not going to give up. She remembered the sledgehammer she had seen inside the elevator. At once she ran to the elevator, praying for the sledgehammer to be there, she pressed the button to call the elevator.

‘I hope its owner did not come back and take his toolkit. Take away everything; just leave the damn sledgehammer there. That’s all I need!’ She said to herself as the elevator’s door opened. She was praying to an unidentifiable entity, being an atheist she did not identify God. The elevator’s door opened and she quickly scanned the entire floor of the elevator but alas she could not find the sledgehammer or the abandoned toolkit anywhere.

‘Damn!’
She cursed at her ill-luck, ‘Wait! The elevator just descended from upstairs and there is only one floor above this. So, the person who used it before me must have got off there.’ Saying this to herself she pressed the button for up and then with a jerk the elevator came into motion. She moved upwards. ‘Oh! I hope I find the guy with a sledgehammer right in front of me!’

The elevator opened, and she saw what she had prayed for… A man in a mechanic’s suit at a distance of a few countable feet and just next him lay the mighty sledgehammer. Pakhi ran towards the man and asked unhesitatingly ‘Can I take this hammer, please? I will bring it back in five minutes.’

The man turned towards the lady in distress, but before he could ask her anything Pakhi pleaded ‘Please, It’s urgent. I will bring it back.’ She suddenly stumbled her trembling hands into her jeans’ pocket and brought all the currency notes she had inside and placed it on the floor in front of the kneeling mechanic, ‘Here… keep it, I will bring this back.’ Without waiting for his consent Pakhi picked up the sledgehammer and ran into the elevator and in a minute she was out of the elevator and running towards Manav’s apartment.

The sledgehammer was heavy and it was taking its toll on her already injured shoulder, yet she fought the pain and panted towards the door. The hallway seemed longer than before. She had come here so many times in the past; the visuals kept passing around her. Her eyes were filling quickly. She pulled the hammer backward with all the strength she could produce in her arm and then swashed forward onto the door’s surface.

BANG!

With one single blow into the door, a huge hole was created near the lock. She pulled out the hammer and dropped it on the floor instantaneously. She felt a burden unload off her physical self, but there was something heavier inside her heart which she had not been able to unload for a long time now. She put her right hand through the hole and then turned the door latch and pulled opened the door.

The screams had stopped. She rushed inside. She had no idea what she was about to witness. Whatever the matter, it was not just a sensational news report for the prime time slot, but something way beyond.

Beyond her own self.