The Stolen Gospels (6 page)

“And who runs the system?” Dixie Lou asked, rhetorically.

“Men!” several women said, simultaneously.

In the distance, Lori heard what sounded like the rhythmic throb of a jet helicopter.

“Some of you have attended these circles before,” Dixie Lou said. “But such experiences pale in comparison with what lies in store for womankind!”

Lori found herself staring at the statuette, which stood amid the burning candles. The figurine was strangely familiar, something that . . . or representing something that . . . lay just beyond the reach of her memory.

“Men have written most of the history books,” Dixie Lou was saying in the background of Lori’s awareness. “But think of this: What about
her
story books? Instead of history, written by men about men, herstory is
our
story, the tale of female journeys written by us. Much of our past is veiled in mystery, because men have perverted and destroyed the truth. They have rewritten it in order to maintain themselves in power, making themselves look good at our expense.”

Lori didn’t fully agree with what she was hearing. Sure there had been abuses by men against women over the centuries. Every intelligent, liberal-thinking person knew that. But she liked boys and one day she would like men. Besides, things had gotten better for women, hadn’t they? Weren’t most American men treating the ladies in their lives with respect now, as equals?

She sighed, wished she knew the truth about her father, not the distorted, incomplete version told by her mother. She didn’t know where he was, if he was alive or dead. All such inquiries she’d made to her mother had been rebuffed. She missed him, remembered fun they’d had together when she was small . . . before he went away.

As Lori watched, Dixie Lou adjusted the position of the statuette.

Suddenly something surged in the girl’s mind, a powerful but unformed and unclear thought.

She locked gazes with Dixie Lou, and a violent shudder passed through the black woman, whose dark eyes were open wide in shock and fear. Dixie Lou pulled her hand away from the statuette, and her lips moved without making a discernible sound.

The noises of the helicopter grew louder, a throbbing, vibrating intrusion. To Lori, the craft seemed to be passing directly overhead at very low altitude. Almost too close, it seemed.

Dixie Lou snapped to awareness. Her gaze darted around wildly, like a trapped animal.

The noise grew louder still, and remained that way for several moments. Then a percussive explosion shook the house, followed by the thunderous crash of glass, and the glare of bright lights outside. Through the window Lori got a glimpse of a helicopter. A uniformed man knelt on the running board, firing an automatic rifle at the house. Another man behind him hurled something that crashed through a kitchen window. A second explosion rocked the house.

Camilla scrambled for cover, pulling Lori with her. The girl grabbed for her purse, but dropped it.

Screams filled the air, and the guide dog barked. Something heavy landed on the roof. Men shouted outside, amidst the helicopter noise and gunfire.

“What the hell is going on?” the blind woman cried out. Then she screamed as the front door burst open, followed by a burst of gunfire that tore through her chest and face. Her horribly mutilated body thudded to the floor. Another woman wailed, “Oh God, I’m dying! Who would do this to us? Why?”

Concealed from the gunmen by a couch and desk that had been moved aside for the meeting, Camilla and Lori crawled toward the hallway behind them. Bullets shattered a glass-fronted Victorian cabinet, and Camilla complained of pain in her lower legs. Then something exploded by the right side of her head. She crumpled to the floor.

“Mom!” Lori cried out. She saw two men in the living room, carrying automatic rifles. Silver-and-black uniforms with caps, and black cross insignia on the lapels and arms.

Fighting tears of rage, she dragged her mother into the hallway and then into a large hall closet, pulling the door shut behind them to form a dark cocoon.

Lori’s heart raced. She felt her mother’s wrist, checking for a pulse. It was erratic.

“I’ll be okay, sweetheart,” Camilla assured her, struggling to speak. Her voice faded. “I’m . . . fine.”

Lori suppressed a sob. She felt the wrist again. The pulse was slow.

“Mom!” she husked. “Mom!”

No response.

How badly was she hurt? There wasn’t enough light to see, and the girl was afraid to poke around on the head, for fear of exacerbating the injury. Her mother’s legs had been wounded, too, so Lori worried about a severed artery. Hurriedly, she removed her own long cotton stockings and tied one tightly around each of her mother’s thighs, hoping these makeshift tourniquets would slow any loss of blood.

Sticky wetness covered the right side of Camilla’s head, a definite wound, so this was the side Lori kept up, atop her lap. It seemed to her that the wound would bleed less this way. She prayed it was only superficial.

Hugging her mother tightly, she wished she hadn’t been disrespectful to her. Camilla was unresponsive, breathing irregularly.

“Mom, can you hear me?” Lori whispered.

Still no answer. The breathing became more erratic, then settled into a regular pattern.

Oh God
, Lori thought.
Please don’t let my mother die! Take me if you must, but not her
! She remembered seeing the blind woman hit by gunfire and falling. And many of the others. They had to be dead. It was so horrible, so senseless.

The thickly-carpeted closet was devoid of objects. Desperately, Lori felt in the darkness around the edges of the rug. Lifting a corner she found a smooth, hard surface beneath. There was no hatch leading to a crawl space, no escape.

An explosion rocked the house. Shouts came from another room, and more gunfire. The dog started barking again, then gunfire sounded and the animal yelped.

“Four minutes!” someone called out. Lori couldn’t tell if it was male or female. The voice was peculiar, a high-pitched whine.

She heard the voice again, a little farther away this time, shouting commands. This person seemed to be in charge. Gunfire rang repeatedly.

A woman cried out: “Save us, oh She-God!”

She-God again?
Lori didn’t understand. Dixie Lou had said the entity was all-powerful, and what else? She couldn’t recall.

Cautiously, she opened the closet door, but it bumped into something. She pushed harder, saw that a woman’s body was blocking the door. Squeezing out through the opening, she identified Su-Su Florida on the floor, not moving. Blood ran from her side, pooling on the hardwood beneath her.

Feeling the woman’s carotid artery, Lori detected no heartbeat at all.

“She’s dead,” a voice said, startling the girl. Turning quickly, she saw Dixie Lou Jackson, who had emerged from another doorway. Blood ran down her face, from a deep gash high on her forehead. “That way,” Dixie Lou said, pointing to a closed door at the end of the corridor. She gave Lori a shove in that direction, but the girl resisted.

Going back, Lori dragged her mother out into the corridor, while Dixie Lou protested, trying to get her to go the other way. Dixie Lou went ahead.

Struggling with the almost lifeless weight of her mother, the teenager made her way to the door just as Dixie Lou opened it. Breathing hard, the UWW officer leaned against the door jamb.

The door opened into a garage, but not the one in the front of the house that Lori had seen upon arrival. On the side of the house, then? At the rear? In the confusion she had lost all sense of direction. The small garage, illuminated by an overhead bank of lights, contained only one vehicle—a sleek, black van with tinted windows and mirror-like tires and wheels. Everything high-gloss.

“Help me into the van!” Dixie Lou said.

But Lori pushed by her and pulled her mother toward the vehicle instead. Cursing and muttering at the teenager, Dixie Lou stumbled behind her, and closed the door behind them.

Lori tried to open the rear passenger side door of the van, but it wouldn’t budge.

“Get out of the way,” Dixie Lou said. She touched what looked like the same black hand-held transmitter she had used inside the house, for control of the music and holo-recording system. The van’s door slid open, and the rear seats folded flat into the floor.

Lori laid her mother on the floor and propped a folded blanket under her head, while Dixie Lou went around toward the driver’s side door. Suddenly the black woman cried out, and fell on the concrete, face down. She twitched and groaned. Hurrying to her, Lori saw another wound, on the back of her neck.

As quickly as she could, Lori helped her into the front passenger seat and engaged the safety harness, which clicked over her the moment it was touched. Lori also had contact with Dixie Lou.

Abruptly, the teenagers neck flopped to one side. “What are you doing?” Dixie Lou asked.

Lori hesitated, because she had received a strange tingling when she touched the woman, somewhat like when she felt the paper of the goddess circle flier. She shook her head to clear it, said, “I’m going to drive. I don’t have a license, but I know how anyway.”

“Not necessary. Get me the remote control. I just had it a moment ago. Look outside for me.”

Lori did as she was told, found the unit and climbed into the driver’s seat, closing the door. She handed the device to Dixie Lou, who fumbled with it and swore, trying to make it work. Finally, she slammed it down on the console and said, “Doesn’t work. You’ll have to drive after all.”

Fighting to remain conscious, with blood running down her forehead and neck, Dixie Lou muttered something about a homing signal they were supposed to pick up, and she must have damaged the transceiver when she fell.

Following additional instructions, Lori punched a code on a dashboard computer pad. The engine surged on, and the garage door slid open behind the vehicle.

“Let’s go, let’s go!” Dixie Lou said. “Drive this thing fast.”

“OK.” Lori put the van in reverse.

Seeing a black handgun on the console between her and Dixie Lou, Lori grabbed it. The gun, a .45 long-barrel, was heavier than her mother’s .38 that she had used for target practice, and was one of the new rapid-fire automatics, but she thought she could figure it out. On the handle of the weapon she saw what looked like a sword-cross design.

For a moment, the woman met Lori’s gaze, with eyes full of pain. “I hope you know how to use that,” she said.

“I do.” Lori released the safety and cocked the weapon, then laid it on her lap. With a silent prayer, she nudged the accelerator and roared backward out of the garage, onto a side driveway. The house was illuminated in spotlights from the helicopter, which hovered noisily overhead. Flashes of illumination came from the house as the van backed up.

From somewhere, men shouted. In the rear of the vehicle, her mother struggled to call her name, the word barely rising above the din. “Lori . . .”

“Just hold on, Mom. I’ll get us out of this.”

But bursts of gunfire sounded and bullets thudded into the front of the van, narrowly missing Dixie Lou. For a moment, Lori lost control of the vehicle. It smashed against a landscape rock and stopped momentarily. Then she corrected the steering, bumped the accelerator and resumed backing up.

Seeing uniformed men rush onto the driveway behind her, she opened the electric window by her, put her head out and fired at them, pulling the trigger until the clip was empty. She saw two of the assailants fall.

“Good shooting!” Dixie Lou said as Lori continued to steer in reverse, wildly.

Lori’s body shook uncontrollably. Tears streamed down her face. She threw the empty gun on the console, next to Dixie Lou. What was going on here? She could not imagine.

I killed those men!
It was the first time she’d ever fired a gun at anyone.

At high speed, Lori whipped the van onto a private lane that ran behind the houses. She wished she’d been able to get her mother into a safety harness, hoped she wasn’t getting banged around too badly back there. The helicopter and more men could be seen in one direction, so Lori went the opposite way, rocketing past backyards and houses with the vehicle’s headlights off. The lane curved down to a main street and she turned a hard right onto it, with tires screeching as she accelerated. She took several turns and side streets at Dixie Lou’s instruction, and soon the whining, throbbing noise of the helicopter and the gunfire could no longer be heard. Occasional street lights illuminated the way, so she could see well enough without the headlights.

A siren sounded, and a police car raced by in the opposite direction, blue lights flashing.

“That was a BOI attack,” Dixie Lou said, holding a cloth on the back of her neck. “Trained killers.” She let loose a torrent of expletives.

Lori didn’t know what she was talking about, but didn’t care. She only thought about her mother. Now she felt a steeliness in her soul over the men she had shot, and knew she would do it again if she had to.

Suddenly a car roared down a side street and pulled directly in front of the van, without bothering to pause at the stop sign. Lori slammed on her brakes to avoid a collision.

“How do I turn on the headlights?” she asked.

“We can’t use them. We must be extremely careful.”

The black woman kept craning her neck to look up at the sky. Lori did that too as she drove, and listened for helicopter noises. She didn’t hear any.

Calling for her mother, she received no response. The breathing remained slow. In a passing street light she glanced back and saw Camilla huddled on the floor, with the stocking tourniquets visible on her legs.

Her heart jumped when she again heard helicopter rotors throbbing.

The sound grew louder.

Following Dixie Lou’s order, Lori pulled the dark van into a driveway, beneath a large tree.

The aircraft seemed to be directly overhead, and Lori saw the terrifying wash of a searchlight over the streets and houses.

She prayed.

The noise grew very loud, then diminished and disappeared.