Otherland (16 page)

CHAPTER 27

Lydia dragged Jacob’s body from the attic, using a crib mattress to get him down the stairs as carefully as possible. She clicked on the news while awaiting his return, even though everything in her being wanted to go after her son now, and she was practically screaming panic and fight.

She’d finally gotten her son back, and now he was gone again, in the clutches of the worst evil, and once again, she was waiting on Jacob to be there. She should have just left him there, instead of going in after him. Now Cherise was dead, and her son was gone, and Jerome now hated her guts, all because she wanted to save the Light knight that had never been there for her in all her human life. God, love sucked!

The anchor males and females at the news stations were all talking rapidly about the emergency crisis happening around the world. Prison breaks, power outages, people killing each other. Stores being looted. Buildings set aflame. She stopped flicking through channels on News 9 to the only live anchorperson that wasn’t hysterical, rather smiling.

“Demons and dark spirits have been let loose in the human world, and they are causing wreckage wherever they go. You will not win. You cannot fight. For all you religious Revelations’ believers that believe the righteous will survive, you’re WRONG. The righteous are the first to go, so that in the end, the only world that will remain, the only survivors, will be the Dark souls, the evil, the non-righteous.

“If you want to survive, you need to stop being good and righteous. It’s survival of the fittest, and only those most capable of doing all the things your human-laws forbid will survive. You must fight. You must kill. You must disregard any faith or belief you’ve ever had in goodness. ... If you want to survive, that is.” This was followed by horrible, cruel laughter.

They’d gotten to the media.

Lydia clicked the TV off a hundredth of a second before she had the urge to throw the remote into the television. She was overwhelmed. Everything inside her wanted to go after her son, with all her nagging parts telling her that she had a much bigger role to fulfill, and that her son was at least remotely safe, because they were using him as bait to get her to do exactly what she wanted to do and go after him. While they waited for her to come, she knew they would keep him alive. But what kind of mistreatment would the innocent babe have to endure in the meantime.

“Jacob, come
on!
” she shook his body harshly.

He opened his eyes. She refused to show him the relief that she felt, and instead showed irritation.

“We got a world falling apart and I’m sitting here stupidly waiting for you to come through,” she whined.

“I made it, didn’t I? Just like I promised. I’ve never been that path before. I’ve always just been placed on the path by the elders. My Light friend, whom I’d been keeping at my home, brought me to the Light tunnel, but I had no idea where to go from there. Thank you for pulling me through, less I would have been lost in there forever. It’s never been this bad before, at least as far as I can remember.”

“I don’t want to hear it, Jacob. Here you’re supposed to be a Light knight working for an all-seeing, all-knowing higher power, and you have no idea what you’re doing, because instead of figuring things out for yourself, you’re too busy waiting on your
Father
to tell you what to do, and provide you the answers.
He
can’t help you. He can’t help any one of us. He can’t even help himself as his world gets taken over. When there is no place that the good people can go to, and no place to threaten those who want to choose bad to choose differently, then what is there? Nothing. Nothing but suffering with no hope on earth and no hope elsewhere either.”

“What is it, Aliyah? Why are you so angry? I’m here for you, not because I was told to.”

“No, you’re right. You’re absolutely right,” she flailed her arms. “But not because you’ve finally gone against
him
, but because he’s not answering you or telling you what to do, leaving you on your own, all alone, because
that
is the
only
thing he’s good at.”

“Stop it, Aliyah. You know you have always made me uncomfortable and placed me in positions I don’t want to be in when you talk against him like that.”

“Then prove me differently, Jacob. Tell me what he’s doing right now to protect all those that believe in him? You’re his Light knight. Has he told you anything? Or is Otherland falling to evil and the Nothingness, the same as this world we were given life to? You hear those sounds? The screams? The cries? All those that ever believed, all those good, now suffering, while he doesn’t do a god damn thing about it,” she continued to rant furiously.

“He’s got his reasons. He knows what he’s doing. I believe that 100 percent.”

“Of
course
you do,” she said with a type of dark resentment neither of them had heard before from her. “Your belief, and only your belief, is what kept your existence feeling so right and comfortable and nice, regardless of anything you saw to the contrary, while other people, like me, were left alone to fight the battles and take care of the situations without
any
higher power helping us along the way to make us feel better about things.

“While you’ve spent your life doing by your master’s bidding, me and people like me have actually been doing the work and sacrificing
everything!
Was it not he
that sent Dwayne back here, allowed him to walk the earth, again? If he is truly all-knowing, then he would have known that all of this would happen, and he could have avoided all of it had he kept Dwayne from coming here and just allowed me to get my child and be gone. You look at him like a perfect power, but he is not, because none of this, any of it, would have happened, if not for his decisions.”

“You will not change my beliefs, no matter what you say. We’ve already been through this many times over,” Jacob said firmly.

“Nor will you change mine. He’s got my son, Jacob. And both our worlds are falling to ruins. So you can keep believing whatever you want to believe to keep yourself as negligent and oblivious as possible, but I’ve got a world to save, and
he’s
got nothing to do with it. God forbid I actually hope that I be able to live a decent life after everything else I’ve been through. And I honestly don’t know why I even bother with you anymore. You’re never there when you’re needed, just like
him
.”

“Right now, more than any other time in the world, we need people to believe, Aliyah.”

“You’re right, but you and I differ in what the people need to believe in. So, why don’t you just sit there and do what you do best? Nothing. While I actually take care of the situation.”

“Aliyah.”

“Don’t follow me. You and I are literally worlds apart.”

“Then why did you come back for me,” he cried after her.

“You’re right. I should have just left you in there uselessly calling for your Father to save you. But you see, that’s the part you’re not understanding. He didn’t save you. Cherise and I did, and she lost her life because of it, and I, once again, lost my son. And yet you still choose him. Goodbye, Jacob. Whatever mess you find yourself in next. I won’t be there.

“Let your
Father
get you out of it that you believe in so much, but I can promise you, he won’t. Then it’ll be too late for you to finally understand the life that I know, the way things really are, where prayer won’t do a god damn thing to make your life better. Your life is up to you, and that’s all it comes down to. Go ahead. I’m sure the churches are filled to the brink right now of people praying to be saved instead of saving themselves. You might as well join them, right before everyone inside is burned alive.”

“Don’t shun me like this. I want to go with you. My duty – .”

“Your duty,” Lydia scoffed. “Nothing but. Why don’t you figure out how to do things of your own accord, your own free will? Until then, stay away from me!” she said dangerously.

She was gone before he could tell her that his heart loved her and wanted to protect her, and that he’d chosen that above his duty moments before he’d realized it had been his duty all along, but it’s something he’d had to figure out himself. She left before he could tell her that he was only human, and he’d made mistakes, but he had no intention of making those same mistakes. And she was gone before he could warn her that she was turning dark, and if she turned dark, he would lose her forever.

Chapter 28

Just as the Dark soul had said, Jerome was easy pickings, as he paced back and forth, back and forth, in the emergency hospital wing, less caring about his mother-in-law, and more caring about taking his anger out on those that had resulted in his wife’s death. More than anything, those he called Lydia.

Dwayne entered him easily, reassuring him with their similar goals and their sole hatred, at the moment, for the same girl. “If not for Lydia, your life would be the same. Now everything has changed … because of her. Your mother-in-law wants to keep protecting her, because it’s the only way she can feel close to Cherise, but how many people do you want to lose because of Lydia? Would you sacrifice your own children to protect her?

“You never liked her from the get-go. The only reason you tolerated her was because she was Cherise’s friend. Cherise is dead, now, because of her. She’s not here to stop you from doing what you should have done the moment Lydia’s presence began threatening your life. Get rid of her. Only then can you be safe.”

On a normal day, the emergency wing of a hospital took forever. This was no normal night. People were being brought in by the case load with injuries far worse than Jerome’s mother-in-law’s broken hip and injured head. Less than five hours since the hundreds of Dark souls had been released into this world, and this was all they’d accomplished, with still one hour remaining before the sun started coming up.

Centuries on top of centuries for humans to establish everything they did, and all it took was less than five hours to destroy it all. The security of work, money, safety, gone, leaving nothing but destruction in its wake. Humans, so unbelievably weak. Even Jerome could care less about the downfall of the world, wrought in his grief over his wife’s death.

He saw with unseeing, uncaring eyes the mass of bloodied, wounded, dying people being rushed through the halls, because it only served to irritate him that all those stupid people were keeping his mother-in-law from getting the treatment she needed so that he could take care of his business.

So Dwayne had Jerome call a couple more of his boys. “I need you to sit wit’ my mother-in-law. I got some stuff I need to take care of.”

And the more of his boys rejected him on the basis of having to protect their own families, their own selves, the darker he became, welcoming Dwayne to possess him more and more, without him even knowing he was being possessed. He urged Jerome’s thoughts to call Gerald. “I’ll be right down,” possessed Gerald said, just as they’d planned. Gerald would take care of the mother-in-law, while Jerome was free to carry out the rest of Dwayne’s plans.

***

Lydia punched the News 9 anchorwoman in the face, knocking her out on live TV.

“Keep the camera on me. She’s been possessed.” She yanked the microphone away from her unconscious body, watching and listening to the Dark soul scream as it left into the remaining night.

“There are Dark spirits everywhere, but the only way they can possess you is if you become as dark as they. The only way to survive is if you keep your light, keep your goodness, hold your crosses. I don’t give a shit what you do, just do whatever you can to keep them from possessing you,” she said on live TV. “If you kill, if you do things you don’t feel good about, if you break the laws, they WILL get you. They will possess you. And you’re as good as done.

“You must fight them by not giving in. Keep your light. It’s the only thing that will protect you, the only thing that will save you. Don’t give up. Fight. Fight for everything that you have inside you, fight for everything you’re worth. You must fight, but not by killing people. Those people are possessed. Restrain them, knock them out, whatever you have to do, but know this, their body is not evil. It is what is inside them.

“Killing their body will not destroy what is inside them. Stay strong and don’t stop fighting for what is right, and what you believe in. Whatever you believe in, don’t stop believing, no matter what.”

Lydia’s cell-phone rang for the eighth time. 24-hour news. That’s what this station promised. And some staff remained – those that knew that there were things going on that were bigger than their families – or perhaps the ones that remained didn’t have any. Who knew.

She beckoned to a scrawny, nerdy, pasty white male that had probably spent his life dreaming about stardom, and gave him the mic. “Everything I just said, keep repeating it. We got 45 minutes before daylight, but the more people possessed, the more problems we’re going to have.” He gave her an awkward thumbs-up with a toothy smile. She’d just given him a chance of a lifetime.