Anatomy of Evil (14 page)

The sight took her breath away. “My husband…has those same burns.”

“Once you're marked, it stays with you.”

“How do we prevent others from discovering the portal?” asked Kelly. “We won't be the only ones.”

“For decades, the island was mostly desolate, a few thousand local natives at most,” said Beck. “But now that they've opened it up for tourism… Your guess is as good as mine. If you ask me, they should obliterate the island altogether.”

“What about the rumors of a second inversion bomb? It was in the professor's book. He said it might still be in a nuclear weapons storage facility somewhere in the United States.”

Beck said nothing for a long moment. His eyes narrowed, and Kelly could tell he was choosing his words very carefully.

“If a second bomb of this nature exists, I have only one word of advice.”

She asked him for it and he responded.

“Pray.”

Chapter Twenty-Two

The pounding rhythm of the wiper blades fought the hard splatter of rain as Kelly drove through the darkness, following the piercing beam of her headlamps lighting up the highway. Periodic stops for coffee kept her refueled to go all the way without sleep. She gripped the wheel tight in sweating hands as her mind raced to assemble a plan for coping with Rodney's descent.

She believed Calvin Beck. To any outsider, his claims would appear to be the ravings of a madman. But everything he said applied an explanation to the strange sequence of events in Kiritimati.

She could no longer think of Rodney as the same man she loved and married and accompanied to the island vacation. His body had become possessed and the man now living in her house was a stranger who became more dangerous with each passing day.

She stacked her priorities and number one was obvious: Christina's safety.

Kelly knew she had to keep Christina away from Rodney. There was no telling what he might do to her in his deteriorating mental state. In Atlanta, she had called her parents and asked them to watch over Christina for a few more days. She confessed she was having problems with Rodney that needed to be sorted out, alluding to a crisis in their marriage that could be interpreted any way they wanted because they wouldn't land on the real reason: the devil had taken his soul.

Let them think it's alcoholism or an affair
, she figured.
The important thing is that Christina does not return to the house until Rodney is gone.

Rodney gone.

She could only think of one way to do that: turn him in. Turn in the cop to the cops. It was the only way to save him from himself. She had all the ingredients she needed scattered throughout the house—the drugs, guns, merchandise and money he had acquired through bribes, extortion and theft, probably from other criminals. The physical evidence was her lead for getting him locked up someplace where he couldn't cause any further harm. Once he was detained, she would demand a medical examination of Rodney's physical condition and a thorough investigation into the present dangers off the shores of Kiritimati. She would pursue treatment for Rodney and the other three passengers on the boat that strayed into the aftereffects of Project Erebos. She needed to contact Gary's wife, Carol's husband and one of Sam's closest friends, perhaps someone from his church. She needed to share her latest discoveries with them. Together they would create a complete picture of what happened.

She recalled Beck's story of six servicemen sucked into the vortex of the red storm, emerging as “disciples of the devil”, ultimately taken away and locked up where they could do no harm.

Was that also the fate for Rodney, Carol, Sam and Gary? How would their incarceration be explained? Could this be the catalyst to reopen the files on Project Erebos and go public with the devastating consequences of nuclear bomb tests more than half a century ago?

Kelly arrived home under a dark cover of clouds and drizzle as the night gave way to dim strains of daylight.

According to her watch, Rodney would be on duty,
should
be on duty, but she knew that was not a reliable conclusion. She entered the front door prepared for the unexpected.

The living room was dark, curtains drawn, and she almost didn't see him seated on the end of the couch, wrapped in a dark robe, hunched forward as if deflated.

Kelly froze and remained near the door in case she needed a quick getaway.

A long moment of silence passed and then he lifted his head to look at her.

“Kelly?” he said softly.

She reached over to the wall and turned on the light.

He gazed at her from across the room. She studied his face. It had a softer look than she had seen in weeks. Instead of a cold, blank expression, he appeared frightened and lost. His eyes looked wet. He had been crying.

“Help me,” he said in a small voice.

She approached him slowly.

He held out his hand.

She grasped it. He held tight.

“Please don't ever leave me again,” he said in a thin, fearful voice, like a child. He had never looked so vulnerable.

“Rodney, what's happening?” she asked him.

“I don't know…”

She felt a wash of relief. The old Rodney had returned. The sickness had lifted.

“I…I asked for some time off from work,” he told her. “I told them it was for health reasons. I've been having blackouts. I feel sick, but I can't pinpoint it, it's all over…”

Kelly kneeled alongside him. She looked into his eyes. “Rodney, listen to me. You
are
sick. Something is trying to take control of you. It gets in your head. It's not just you. It's also Gary and Sam and Carol…”

“We're all sick like this?”

“Do you remember anything from the past few weeks?”

“Some. A little. It's like a dream. I don't know what I did, or if I'm imagining it. Kelly, did…did I do bad things?”

She nodded.

He looked at the ground. “Oh my God.”

“I forgive you, Rodney,” she said. “I want to help you.”

“I've had so many horrible thoughts. I finally called out for God to save me. Kelly, I've been praying. I felt so sick inside, I started to pray. I put all of my mind to it, all of my focus. And the more I prayed, the clearer I felt, like a shadow was lifting. I prayed for the sickness to leave me. I prayed for you and for Christina. Christina… Where is Christina?”

“She's staying with my parents at the farm,” Kelly told him. “I've been so worried…that you were becoming dangerous.”

Rodney's face lit up with alarm. “I didn't hurt her, did I?”

“No, no, sweetheart, you didn't. But I had to take precautions. You haven't been yourself.”

“God will get us through this. We'll pray together…”

“You need to see a doctor. All four of you need to be examined. A CAT scan, blood tests…”

“I'll do whatever you think is right.”

“We'll defeat this thing, Rodney. We can make you pure again.”

“I love you,” he told her in a heartfelt voice. He reached out and they embraced. She sat down with him on the couch, continuing to hold his hand.

“What's wrong with me? How did this happen?” he asked.

“You got sick at the island. When you went fishing, the second to last day, out on the ocean. I've been researching the island's history…”

Rodney said, “The red storm!”

“Yes,” said Kelly. “The red storm. There's an area of sea off the coast where they detonated an experimental nuclear weapon in 1962. They called it an inversion bomb.”

“Do I have radiation poisoning?”

She hesitated. “Rodney, I'm going to ask you to believe some things that are going to sound incredible…but it's the only explanation I have.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I met with a man who is an expert on the history of Kiritimati. A college professor who wrote a book. Then I talked to a man who experienced everything back in 1962. What he described…it's everything that has happened to you.”

Sitting with Rodney on the sofa, she told him all she had learned in the past few days. She described the bomb blast that created an opening to another dimension, piercing the barrier between the physical world of the living and the afterlife of the damned. She told Rodney about the bomb's shroud of secrecy and denial.

She expressed her fears that a second inversion bomb might exist, locked away in a nuclear storage facility, capable of creating another gateway to hell somewhere else on the Earth's surface.

Rodney listened in complete silence, absorbing every word, and Kelly couldn't tell if he was skeptical or simply astonished by the rollout of information that defined his condition and the greater existence of evil.

When she was done, she said, “I know in my heart that you are not an evil man. You are stronger than this sickness. If anybody can beat it, it's you. We will do it together, through love.”

She reached for his hand.

He pulled it back. His hand was balled up in a fist.

She looked into his eyes.

In that moment, his face changed, like the drop of a curtain. The scared, vulnerable expression vanished, replaced by the cold, hard face she had seen the prior weeks.

He allowed one emotion: he smiled.

Then he laughed, a hard laughter, the sound of scorn and triumph.

“I fucking tricked you, you little bitch,” he said.

She gasped, breathless, and inched away from him on the sofa. He raised the fist.

“Do you think I don't know what you're up to? I've been looking at your web browser history. I've been tracking your movements, your credit card purchases, where you buy gas, your library books, your phone calls. Do you think you ever really had me fooled? The only one here who is fooling anybody is me, because I am not saved by God, I am not good ol' boy Rodney from the past, I am not anything different than the man who returned from Kiritimati with a new mission in life to accept and spread the truth of evil across this ridiculous world of false good.”

“Rodney…” she said, trembling, still backing away from him, preparing to flee.

“Shut up,” he told her. “You are finished talking. You have told me everything I need to know. I've cleaned the house of evidence. You have nothing on me.”

Kelly leaped from the couch. She scrambled to the door but he was upon her in a split second, grabbing her by the hair. He pounded his fist into her face, breaking her nose with a splatter of blood. He punched her hard twice more until she fell bloody and limp to the living room floor.

As she stirred, he called out, “You can come out now.”

Kelly looked up from the floor, one eye already swelling shut. She saw three figures enter the living room from another part of the house.

It was Gary, Sam and Carol.

“Yes,” said Rodney, standing over his battered wife. “They have been here the whole time. Listening. Learning. Filling with valuable knowledge that will enable us to take our mission to the next level.”

“Hello, Kelly,” said Carol, stepping over her. “It's nice to see you again.” She delivered a hard kick across Kelly's face with her boot.

Kelly sank back to the floor, blood pooling in her mouth.

Gary knelt down. “Can I share something I've never told you before? Are you sure you won't mind?”

Kelly said nothing, racked with pain.

“You have an amazing ass,” said Gary. “I love it and I love your sweet mouth.” Gary grabbed her blouse. He pulled hard, tearing it. “You never show enough skin, Mrs. Martinez. Let's get a good look at your assets.”

Kelly tried to fight him off, but in seconds he had torn off her blouse.

Sam leaned forward, another face hovering over her. His head was shaved. He held a Bible.

It was the Bible given to Kelly by her grandmother on the day of Kelly's confirmation at age 13. It was one of the most treasured belongings in her possession.

Sam began to tear pages out of the Bible, letting them fall down on her, each one gentle and soft yet stinging with emotional pain.

“You really believed for a second that Rodney was all better…because he prayed to God?” asked Sam. “So naïve. So sad.”

Sam continued to shred pages out of the Bible with a regular, steady rhythm. Gary put his hands on her breasts, groping hard. When she protested, Carol delivered a few more sharp kicks to Kelly's legs.

Rodney spoke. “You need to understand something, Kelly. I want you to listen carefully. I haven't changed. The Rodney you see today is not a variation of my true self. This has always been me. I just stopped lying. All of us stopped lying. Carol, Gary, Sam… We're no longer trying to be what others expect from us. Our jobs, our church, our laws, our families…these things will not define us. It is our primal instincts that represent the core of who we are. What you see today is not a change thrust upon us. This runs so much deeper. This, my love, is the great unmasking.”

Gary began kissing Kelly's bloody mouth, continuing to fondle her breasts.

She screamed and he clamped a hand tightly over her mouth.

“Don't scream,” said Gary. “Because then you won't be able to hear what I have to tell you. Do you remember Tonya? The woman who used to work in my store? The woman they found murdered? She made love to me with her last dying breath. It was beautiful. I experienced her death from the inside in the most intimate way you can imagine. I felt her skin grow cold.”

“And do you know what's amazing?” said Carol with a sharp grin. “Nobody has accused Gary or considered him a suspect. None of us will be suspects in your murder, either. Do you know why? Because we have alibis. We're the nicest bunch of people you'd ever hope to meet! You know my reputation, don't you? Sweet Carol Henning, she wouldn't hurt a fly. Once I found a spider in my office, and my coworkers laughed at me because instead of killing it, I wrapped it up carefully in a tissue and took the elevator downstairs and walked across the front lobby and went outside and across the sidewalk and into a little garden where I set him free. I couldn't bear the thought of harming a little spider. The entire office thought I was crazy. But I had never killed a living creature of any kind my entire life, not even a mosquito as it stung my flesh and sucked my blood. I let it live. I let everything live. So I figure… I've got some catching up to do.”

Carol kicked Kelly in the face.

Gary began pulling down Kelly's pants. He flipped her onto her stomach and sunk his teeth into her bare buttocks.

Sam continued to shred the Bible, page by page, creating a layer of paper across the floor that served as a bed to the madness.

Carol kicked Kelly in the back of the head again, and this time Kelly snapped into unconsciousness, out cold.

Kelly awoke naked and bloodied in the basement, hands bound behind her back by a thick rope.