Chase Baker and the God Boy: (A Chase Baker Thriller Series Book No. 3) (23 page)

Soon the light shifts and the
silhouette of a body takes shape. The body comes closer, its footsteps echo on
the concrete floor. The closer the person comes, the more I can tell she is a
woman. When she is closer still, I can see that she is not just any woman.

She is Elizabeth.

Eyes fill. Heart beats.

“Elizabeth,” I say. “I saw you…”

She raises her hand, smiles,
brings her fingers as close as she can to my lips without actually touching
them.

“I know what you saw,” she says.
“I felt your presence when it happened. I knew you were close.”

“But not close enough.”

“That’s my fault. I left
you
,
remember? At the train station.”

I look her up and down. Her hair
is clean and long, parted neatly on the side. She’s wearing a clean, black,
T-shirt and a pair of green cargo pants, leather Cleopatra sandals on her feet.
She looks like she’s never been healthier. Even her toenails are painted a light
shade of red.

“But I never stopped loving
you,” I say. “I never stopped thinking about you.”

“I never stopped loving you
either, Chase. But I knew I would never be happy until I located the statue.
And finally, I did.”

“Are you happy now?”

She cocks her head over her
shoulder.

“That’s a very good question,”
she says bright eyed. “You know, this state I am in…It’s all new to me.”

Raising my hand slowly, I
attempt to touch her. But she backs away.

“Unh uh, pal,” she says from the
corner of her mouth. “You can’t do that.”

“Why not?”

“I’m in transition.”

“What’s that mean exactly?”

“It means I’m not of the earth
anymore, but I’m also not of heaven. I’m transitioning.”

“Where to?”

“To another life, duh.”

“You’re going to be born again,”
I say like a question.

“Here’s what I know so far about
being…well…not alive,” she says. “It’s all true. We live again. Until we get it
right.”

“Does that mean
we
have
the chance to try again? As in you and me?”

Her expression softens.

“You never know.” Then, “But
before that, you must do something.”

“I’m listening.”

“Do you still have the key?”

I pull it out of my shirt,
holding the leather necklace it’s attached to.

“You must find a way to unlock
the Golden Kali Statue. Only when you unlock it and open its doors will Kali
return to where she belongs in the belly of the statue. For inside the belly of
the statue is a portal that leads to a universe unto itself. I know it sounds
like something out of ‘Close Encounters,’ but it really is something you cannot
possibly comprehend in your present state.”

“My alive flesh-and-blood state
here on little old earth.”

“Excellent,” she says, grinning.
“My ex can be taught.”

I allow the key to drop back
inside my shirt.

“I understand the need to
destroy Kali. But what I don’t get is why you sent me the key in the first
place if you knew you needed it to kill the evil God? Why not hang onto it, and
when Kashmiri wasn’t looking, insert the key into the statue on your own and
destroy the resident evil?”

She shakes her head.

“I knew I wouldn’t live long
enough to get the chance. Kashmiri’s eyes were always on me. So, I made the
decision to send it on to the one bad ass person I could trust to get ‘er done.
Now it’s up to you…bad ass.”

“How can I possibly get to the
statue, Elizabeth?”

She grins again, nods.

“You’re Chase Baker,” she says.
“Famous Renaissance man. You’ll find a way. You always do.”

Raising her hand, she kisses her
fingertips, and blows the kiss my way. I’ll be damned if I don’t actually feel
the kiss on my lips. It’s enough to make me cry. She winks at me then turns and
begins to walk back into the light. I stand there stunned, paralyzed. In a
matter of seconds, she simply vanishes. I feel my eyes grow heavy then, as the
concrete corridor begins to close in on me, the light that swallowed up
Elizabeth pouring into my nostrils and my open mouth.

Then…

When I come to, I’m lying on my
side on the back of a flat-bed truck. Ribs stinging from my dropping onto them,
deadweight. Holy crap, I’m definitely not twenty-one anymore. I’m not thirty or
forty either. Everything hurts now. As my eyes focus, I can see that Tony is
lying beside me, in the back of a pickup truck. But Anjali and the boy are
gone.

“Tony,” I say, “you awake?”

“Yeah,” he says. “I never really
passed out from that sleeper gas. I held my breath for as long as I could. The
floor opened up, and we took a ride down a metal slide until we finally dropped
directly into this truck bed. That fucker, Kashmiri, has thought of everything.
You clunked your head and went night-night.”

…Just a dream…Elizabeth came to
me in a dream…She kissed me in the dream and it felt so real…She gave me
instructions. Explicit instructions…

“What about Anjali? The boy?”

“They were removed. I played dead.
The bandits took our weapons and the kid and his mother, then left you and me
here.”

“How long I been out?”

“Two, three minutes. No more.”

I feel for my .45. It’s gone. But
the two sticks of dynamite are still there, shoved deep inside my pants, and
hidden by my shirt tail. With my having landed on my stomach and chest, the
bandits never saw them. Rather, they never thought to look for them. I sit up,
take a better look at the truck. It’s a red Toyota 4X4 with a cage set inside
the back bed. The cage door, which now takes the place of the truck’s tailgate,
is padlocked. No wonder they haven’t bothered to bind our hands and feet.
They’d rather transport us like wild animals.

We’re parked in some kind of
underground garage that houses other trucks and heavy-duty digging equipment. When
the truck’s engine fires up and it pulls ahead, I grab hold of the iron bars
and pull myself up. The truck proceeds up a ramp to an overhead door that’s
opening as we’re moving towards it so that by the time we reach the top of the
concrete ramp it’s fully raised.

Pulling out into the hot jungle
sun, we follow a gravel road flanked on both sides by Thuggees, their faces
masked and the signature yellow sash draped around their waists. All of them
screaming in their foreign tongue, their fisted hands raised into the air,
their black eyes angry, filled with a hate that seems to emanate from their
cells, like a bone deep cancer. Now I see why the Thuggee was the most feared
terrorist organization on earth during the nineteenth century. They were the
incarnation of evil, as are the men who line this road. They have the power of Satan
on their side in the form of Kali, and that makes them a viscous,
indestructible, almost superhuman force, at least in their own minds. They also
have a God Boy who, through no fault of his own, possess the conduit-like power
to conjure up the darkness. There is a fine line between good and evil. Only a
razor’s edge separates them. One cannot exist without the other, and we possess
both in our hearts. If I had to guess, I would say that the God Boy and his
mother are about to make the ultimate sacrifice to the evil God, and that Tony
and I are right behind them.

Soon, the road comes to an end only
a few feet before the open diamond deposit. The truck driver pulls the truck
around so that Tony and I face the deposit directly. Chained to the concrete
posts is Anjali. Behind her, the statue of Kali has been raised from out of the
blue diamond, its eight arms opened wide, six of the hands holding the gold
metallic impression of freshly cut out human hearts, one hand holding a curved
sword, the final hand holding to the hair of a freshly severed human head. The
statue appears to be glowing in the bright shine of the blue diamond like it’s
about to come alive, just like the stone Kali who attacked us in the depths of
the mine.

Parked directly to my right, maybe
twenty feet away, is another pickup truck that sports an iron cage on its flatbed.
Placed inside it is Rajesh, now dressed in his gold turban, tunic, and
trousers. Obviously, Kashmiri is not taking a chance on the God Boy being
suddenly rescued by the good guys.

A sea of Thuggees are kneeling
before the diamond deposit. They are waving their hands in the air and engaging
in charismatic chanting in time with the pounding of drums and the blaring of
horns. Now arriving, while surrounded by a special team of red-sashed Thuggees,
is Kashmiri. He’s back to wearing his ceremonial red robe and the horned
head-dress, his face having been painted with red and black stripes. Gripped in
his right hand, is the ceremonial wood staff, its head carved in the form of a
giant cobra. There’s no indication that he’s in any pain whatsoever from the
round he took in the thigh, or even that he’s been shot at all. He moves in a fluid
if not graceful manner without so much as a hint of a limp. Maybe Kali has healed
his wound. Or, more realistically, perhaps he made the God Boy touch him, and
like many others, his bullet wound was mended on the spot.

He takes a moment to bow obediently
to the God Boy, then turns back to the diamond deposit, positioning his bare feet
on its edge. Anjali’s clothing has been removed and now all she wears is a slim
white gown. She’s struggling against the chains that secure her to the concrete
posts, but she is not screaming, as to do so would compromise her integrity,
her defiance in the face of certain murder. But with all the chanting and drum
beating, it would be impossible to hear her regardless.

“He’s gonna cut her heart out,”
Tony says, grabbing onto the bars beside me. “That son of a bitch is going to
cut her, Chase, and there’s not a goddamned thing we can do about it.”

The sky begins to grow dark, the
sun entirely covered up. Lightning strikes off in the distance and the very jungle
ground we occupy seems to tremble like a severe aftershock.

“He’s summoning the beast,” I say. “He
doesn’t want to use the God Boy’s body for his evil purposes. Rather, he’s
using the boy’s good, God-like power as the catalyst for dredging up Kali. In return,
he will give Kali Anjali’s soul.”

“More like he’s using the God Boy
as bait,” Tony points out. “If Kali can swipe the power of a good God and twist
it inside out, she’ll be even more powerful. Even more evil. I can bet dollars
to donuts that with each of these ceremonies, a little bit more of that kid
dies.”

A cold wind blows. The now
blackened sky begins to open up with a pounding rain, and hailstones the size
of golf balls.

“We’re about to get pummeled,
Chase,” Tony says, placing his hands on his head.

A bolt of lightning strikes the center
of the blue diamond deposit making the diamond glow brilliantly as if a switch
has been turned on. Kashmiri raises his head up to the heavens, but I know in
my heart that he is speaking to a Satan that resides in the deepest depths of
the underworld. The Thuggees are chanting themselves into a frenzy, entirely
oblivious of the hailstones pelting them on the head and face, oblivious of the
rain, oblivious of the thunder.

Kashmiri lets loose with a scream
that turns my blood to ice water. That’s when a geyser of steam and a brilliant
ray of blue light emanates up from the blue diamond’s center, and the giant ghost
face of Kali appears, her mouth opened wide and screaming from the depths of
her tortured underworld existence. I catch a glance over my shoulder at Rajesh,
and I can see that he is down on his back, his six arms and two legs trembling
violently while a seizure overtakes his body. Kali is literally sucking the
goodness out of the boy along with his life. It’s no wonder he’s so sickly, so
close to death.

Kashmiri’s feet levitate off the
ground and he begins to float over the diamond deposit toward Anjali and the
face of Kali. She spots him and passes out from fright. It’s just as well. She need
not be conscious for what he’s about to do to her.

When he is within inches from her,
he pulls the half-moon shaped blade from his sash, presses the tip against Anjali’s
heart, and at the top of his deep voice, begins to chant something to Kali in a
loud voice. It’s then that I remember the two sticks of dynamite I have stuffed
in my pants.

“Tony, give me a hand.”

I pull out the first stick and my
lighter. I hand him the lighter.

“Fire the bitch up. Then take
cover.”

The rain and hail pelt our heads.

“Take cover
where
exactly? You’ll
blow us both to Kingdom Come.”

“That woman is about to die. Then we’re
next. And Kingdom fucking Come is already here ‘case you hadn’t noticed.
Blowing the lock on the cage is our only option.”