Number of the Beast (Paladin Cycle, Book One) (2 page)

Peter opened the back
door. Several wooden boxes with Apple logos were stacked on the
back seat. Leaning in, he pried one of the boxes open to confirm
they were laptops.

“
You can trust in God. I
won’t lead you astray.”

Peter closed the door. He
walked to the rear of the vehicle and lifted the trunk. Three
crates filled the compartment.

Atticus came up beside
him. He grinned at the 9mm, .357, 5.56 and shotgun
ammunition.

With a wave of his arm,
Peter flagged the second guard. “All clear. Open the
gate.”

“
Righteous,” said the
driver as he drove forward.

Atticus wiped his hands on
his olive tunic. He couldn’t wait to try out the new FN SCAR-L. No
one knew where that strange guy got all the supplies, but he always
brought the best provisions. Never used or broken, only the top of
the line tech that the compound didn’t have the resources to craft
themselves.

More rattling came from
the barn. Atticus grinned. As Gawd’s car rounded the corner to the
warehouse, Atticus clapped Peter on the shoulder. “I’ll be seeing
to that serious matter now.”

Buckeye,
Texas—May 20th

Amy’d only been to
Sherry’s house a few hundred times...this year. So her four
cylinder Escort should be able to find it on its own. But somehow
she missed the driveway. She swung a U-turn on FM 2025 and turned
down Sherry’s long windy drive. Weeping willows lined both sides.
Drooping branches swept across Amy’s car as if to say
hello.

In front of the trailer,
Sherry reclined in a red and beige lawn chair. Pink floral pajama
pants and a white tank hung loose on her emaciated body. Her dark,
long hair clashed with her pale skin and sunken cheeks. She bounced
Jennie, her two-year-old, on one knee. The toddler giggled while
grasping at a broken piece of plaid webbing that had separated from
the plastic frame of the chair.

As Amy traversed the lumpy yard,
Sherry waved, a joint between her fingers.

From the back of the
trailer, five Rottweiler’s rounded the corner. Barking, foaming at
the mouth, Rusty, Dusty, Busty, Mutton and Puff-daddy surrounded
Amy. She patted each one on the head before pushing her way
through, careful to avoid the craters the dogs had dug into the
dirt, dirt that probably once hosted a lush, green lawn.

“
How goes the potty
training?” Amy asked.

Sherry rolled her eyes.
“Sucks.”

“
She’s only two. Give it
time.”

Sherry shrugged. “You’re
looking better.”

“
Ten days. Ten whole
days.” No more night terrors. No more sleepless nights. No more
zombie medications.

No more tears.

Sherry put her joint out
on the plastic arm of the chair. “Then why are you
here?”

“
I got to be
sure.”

Sherry scooped up her daughter and
headed toward the trailer. The screen door squeaked in protest and
Amy followed her inside. Sherry buckled Jennie into a high chair.
With her daughter entertained by a handful of Cheerios scattered on
the tray, Sherry sat in one of the metal folding chairs surrounding
the table.

Amy sat across from her and offered
her hand, palm up. The sticky table-top nearly glued her arm
down.

Cold, slender fingers grasped Amy’s
wrist. The fingers of other hand traced along Amy’s palm. Slowly.
Meticulously. Amy remained motionless, holding her breath, and
prayed that Sherry would find no bad vibes in her
reading.

But the slow frown curling
Sherry’s lips caused Amy’s heart to sink. Sherry’s brows lowered
and a look of bewilderment seized her face. With a gasp, she let go
of Amy, snatching her hand away. She cradled it against her chest
as if she’d been burned. “Go!”

“
Goodness! Is it that
bad?”

“
Leave and don’t ever come
here again.”

“
I don’t understand.” But
Amy stood.

Sherry plucked her
daughter from the highchair. She stepped backward, toward the
living room. “I said leave.”

Amy dug into her purse for her
wallet.

“
Keep your twenty bucks,”
Sherry screamed, “and get the hell out!”

When Amy refused to leave Sherry’s
trailer without an explanation, Sherry had spilled all. She called
‘It’ demonic and extremely powerful. ‘It’ had given Amy the night
terrors that fateful week only ten days ago and ‘It’ was not
gone.

Amy stood at her kitchen sink,
refilled her glass with water and guzzled it empty.

The ‘It’ that had given her the night
terrors for seven straight days, the night terrors that she thought
had ended ten days ago, the night terrors that had made her
violently ill to her stomach, the night terrors that stole sleep
from her night after night after night, for seven darn
days.

The visions had disturbed
her rest in vague segments: a pair of panthers tore flesh from some
helpless creature. A giant scorpion poisoned thousands of faceless
children with its lethal stinger. A demon-witch, who kept men
chained to a cave wall, cast spells, bringing chaos and
destruction. Tornados several miles wide accompanied by a
catastrophic earthquake crumbled the Earth like a rotten pecan.
Fire consumed ancient woodlands. Ice, thick as the trunk of a
century-old elm, buried the earth’s deserts.

At least Shane, her live-in boyfriend
of four years, had been home and not hundreds of miles away on the
rig in Pecos.

First night of the nightmares Amy had
woken four times, bawling and crying into her pillow. Shane had
dragged her from the bed and cooked her favorite, homemade mac ‘n’
cheese. In the early hours of the morning they had finished eating
and she was beginning to feel calmer. Shane teased about screwing
the nightmares from her pretty head.

And that was exactly what he’d
done.

Amy smiled at the memory. Her face
flushed, but this time not from the Texas heat.

She leaned over the sink
and dribbled water on the back of her head.

Maybe everybody in town was right
about Sherry. She was a fake and a liar. After all, it had been ten
whole days since the nightmares and she didn’t feel any presence
around her, dark or otherwise. Sherry just wanted Amy’s
money.

But Sherry had refused Amy’s twenty
spot.

Damn.

Amy shook her long, blond strands and
straightened. She scooped her wet hair and draped it down her back.
Flipping around, she lifted her chin and glanced at the
refrigerator. Stuck to the center of the door was a picture of her
and Shane at Galveston beach.

Shane wasn’t due home for
days but maybe he could come home early. Amy pushed off the sink.
She took a step toward her purse hanging on the back of the chair.
She’d call and explain what happened at Sherry’s. He’d have to
understand.

That’s when she saw the rodent. Right
smack dab in the middle of her tiled kitchen floor.

Dead.

Bloody.

Headless.

Freya! That darn cat.

Hands on her cheeks, she
closed her eyes. Sherry was right. A very dark energy had latched
onto her. Bad things were happening. No wonder Sherry wanted her to
leave so badly, so quickly.

Amy was no good to be around. She was
a menace. This poor rodent gruesomely, senselessly murdered. Oh
this wretched spirit. Why wouldn’t it leave her alone?

What was the ‘It’ that was haunting
her? And what had she done to deserve it?

She snatched the spray bottle from
under the sink. Two parts water, one part lemon juice. One big fat
onion marinating at the bottom. Dashing down her hall, she sprayed
the walls, around the bathroom door, bedroom door, linen closet and
the wood floors.

Amy sprayed the curtains in the living
room, the sofa and the recliner.

Returning to the kitchen, she set the
bottle on the table. She grabbed a thick stack of paper towels and
scooped up the rat.

The rodent’s spirit would
haunt her. She’d read about it many times. People and animals with
untimely deaths haunted their place of demise.

The poor rat would need a proper
burial. Buried whole. With its head.

She stood on her porch and scanned the
grass for any sign of the missing head.

Sacred Oaks forest
bordered the property. The spooky woods seemed unnaturally
quiet.

The woodland reserve
harbored many secrets that some believed to be ancient evils.
Others, like Shane, swore the stories were nothing more than rumors
that lonely, old biddies cooked up.

At twenty-three, Amy was
too young to call herself an old biddy but she believed those tales
to be a lot more than folklore. Her heart told her so and if she
learned anything from her aunt it was to trust her own
instincts.

A quiet voice inside her
head told her she was being irrational and maybe even a bit looney.
Her Aunt Carol had drilled craziness into her head since she was a
little bitty girl. For over a decade, Aunt Carol had been a
permanent resident of El Paso Psychiatric Center. And for a whole
year, Amy had lived in a neighboring wing.

While most
fourteen-year-old girls spent their time gossiping and painting
their nails, Amy spent her time talking to ghosts. She was fourteen
when she started hearing Vicky’s voice in her head...three years
after Vicky’s death. And by seventeen, Amy’s mom had had enough. So
she booked Amy a room at the psych ward…with her aunt.

Some families had to deal
with hereditary diabetes or high blood pressure, but Amy had
inherited the crazy bug.

Amy was released five
years ago, deemed sane and fit to return to normal society. And she
was determined never to return. She wasn’t crazy.

Not crazy.

A mantra she repeated
daily. If only to convince herself, if nobody else.

# # #

Pecos, Texas

Three hot as fuck,
long-ass days into his two-week stint in the oilfield and Shane was
already saddled with the worst part of his job as a derrick hand.
Confined on the rooster board and laying pipe and changing bits
sucked but was a fuck load better than casualty collecting in the
Iraqi desert.

Instead of eating MRE’s on
the daily, for two weeks of every month, he lived and worked
hundreds of miles from his home, which was a lot better than living
in a war-ravaged shithole across the sea.

But two weeks out of the month he was
without Amy. A man shouldn't have to be away from his woman so damn
much.

Shane
pushed through the double doors into the rec room. Stale coffee,
blue collar musk and sweet chewing tobacco always lingered. As he
approached the vending machine “
Thrown Out
of the Bar”
by
Hank Williams III
sounded from his
pocket. He scrubbed his filthy hands on an even filthier rag before
answering his phone.

“
Sweetheart, hold up a
sec,” he said. Raking his free hand over his grimy forehead and
standing impatiently against the steel cage surrounding the vending
machine, he said, “I can’t do anything when I’m five-hundred miles
away.” He listened to Amy’s frantic voice as she wailed on about
her search for a rodent’s head. “Did you look under the porch?”
Despite not giving a shitpie about the rat’s head, his stomach
knotted from hearing how stressed Amy’s silly superstitions had
made her. He recalled that age-old expression about a nervous cat
on a hot tin roof and chuckled at the visual. “What about in
Alamo’s doghouse?”

Tall and lanky Birch, his closest bud
and co-worker, waltzed into the rec room.

“
Maybe you could give the
rat a burial without its head,” Shane said. That response warranted
him an exaggerated huff from the other end of the phone.

Birch circled his finger at the side
of his head while mouthing ‘loco’.

Shane flipped him off, and
turned his back toward Birch. “Call Carmen. I don’t want you being
alone tonight.” Birch’s laughter grated on his eardrums and Shane
shook his head. “Me too. Bye.”

Shane dropped coins in the vending
machine. After popping the tab on the Dr. Pepper he guzzled the can
half empty. When he took a seat, he began shuffling a deck of Iraqi
Most Wanted playing cards. He caught a glimpse of Amir Rashid
Muhammad's fucking smirk and big goddamn nose.

Blood, bullets and bombs.
Air raid sirens. Wipe 'em all off the fucking planet and let God
sort it all out.

Birch tapped the white
tabletop. Shane jerked a glance at Birch just as he opened his
mouth to speak, but Shane held up a hand. “You say anything about
Amy or that phone call and I’ll put my boot up your sparkly clean
ass.”

In his unstained jeans and shirt,
Birch gawked, mouth agape, before grinning and grabbing a broom
from the corner. He held the black broom extended then swiped it
through the air like some goofy Jedi-janitor.

“
Rise of The Mages III is
going to own the box office this weekend,” Birch said. “And we’re
stuck in BFE.”