The Demon Senders (18 page)

“I understand,” Flannigan said.

“One other thing. Something that came out of nowhere and, if I was a religious man, I would say is so perfect that it’s a gift from God. You have a sender working for you that has no idea what the fuck she is yet. I think she’s served you as much as she’s gonna. You need to kill her and anyone else she may have spoken to about your plans. I know you fucked up by asking her to get information for you. Stupid, fucking idea that you now have to clear up before something blows up in our faces.”

“I lived up to my end of the bargain,” Flannigan snapped. "You didn't say I would have to kill anyone."

"Yet, here I am, telling you to kill someone. Just do it before she knows what the hell she is. You’ve already cleared everything so that you can accompany me back to Novak’s area, correct?”

“Yes, but I still…”

“You don’t need to know why you have to go to Novak’s area or what you’re going to do when you get there. Just do what the fuck I tell you, when I tell you. Got it?”

“Got it,” Flannigan said, her teeth grinding together. "And then you'll let him go? You promised that you would let him go."

"I'm a man of my word."

“And me?” Cardinal O’Keefe asked.

“You, holy and righteous Father O’Keefe, you’re coming with me.”

<<<<>>>>

Henry gave his final instructions to his assembled. Each was ready and each had their unified part of the mission. Though Henry knew that, ultimately, his plan hinged on Phillip being successful, it was only the earthly works that he could control. Phillip was on his own, but Badr’s plan to create mass panic was ready and controlled. Novak was nothing more (and nothing less) than muscle. It was Novak that would travel the world and destroy what remained of the senders. Henry’s plan to rout out the senders was working perfectly and had already resulted in the death of three senders. Nine more and Earth would be cleared.

He knew there were many moving parts to his plan. He also knew that many of the pieces were set in motion only to serve as distractions. Badr spreading vials of plague was nothing more than a statement that a new leader was in command of the realm. So many others attributed the black death to the evil lord back when the plague had killed so many. But Henry knew the impotent leader had nothing to do with it. He also knew that those who inhabited the realm, believed there was someone behind the horrible spread and he wanted them to know that this time, it was his hands, the hands of Henry Winchester that brought so much suffering to humanity.

As he climbed into his car, reluctantly succumbing to Novak’s pleas and demands and allowing him to ride along, Henry nodded his head to Badr and to Flannigan then pulled the car door shut. After Badr turned and headed back to the front door and Flannigan started walking to her car, Henry turned to O’Keefe who was sitting beside him in the passenger’s seat, and said, “You know that I need you to kill her?” He gestured his head towards Flannigan. “When you get to Novak’s pond and after Novak rips that sender’s head off, you grab hold of that witch. Novak already knows what to do then.”

Novak grunted from the back seat. “I’m gonna make that tasty bitch squeal before I crack her skull wide open,” he said.

“Do what you want,” Henry said. “Just make it quick. I won’t be anywhere’s near the place but I will get a report from O’Keefe. So if you fuck up, I’ll know.”

“I won’t fuck it up,” Novak snapped. “The whole scene is a setup, so it will be a piece of cake to take care of the sender then to get the drop on Flannigan. That tasty bitch won’t know what hit her till I’m deep inside her.”

“If you’re so willing to kill off members of your team,” O’Keefe said after several minutes of shared silence, “what can I expect from you when I’m no longer needed?”

“Don’t be an idiot, O’Keefe,” Henry said. “Your position in the church will prove valuable to me for a very long time. What do you think the idiot people will start to think when they hear the black death made a triumphant return?”

“That some terrorist cell somehow got their hands on vials of a mutated strain of the plague?” O’Keefe answered.

Henry said, “They will believe whatever the fuck the authorities tell them to believe. They’re sheep. They do what they’re told, believe what they’re told to believe and think what they’re told to think.”

“Not all of them,” O’Keefe said.

Henry said, “I don’t care about all of them. Just enough of them to hit the tipping point. You start rolling out a bunch of shit about the ‘end times’ and how the plague is an expression of God’s anger, and your sheep will start blatting loud enough to hypnotize themselves into a state of delirium.” Henry paused. “You think I’m going to kill you all off once this is over?”

“The thought had crossed my mind,” O’Keefe said.

“You didn’t ask about Badr. I went through a lot of energy to figure out a way he can be safe after his sheep pull off step one. Want to know why?”

“Because you won’t be done with him after spreads that shit around in the air,” Novak said.

“The sheep start blatting about end of days, largely because of what you’ll be saying and largely because it’s true. But the sheep have a ridiculously short attention span. If a few million people end up getting infected with the plague and ten or twenty-thousand die, it will be huge news in the minds of the sheep the world over for a few months. Then, the epidemic will be stopped, people will stop getting sick and dying and things will return back to normal. The sheep will go back to watching their fucking reality shows, trying to forget how shitty their own lives are, and everything I planned out and Badr executed will be history.
 

“See, that’s where those idiot terrorists back in two thousand one made their mistakes. They blew their load in one day and never followed it up. They should have spread out their attacks over a few months. Take down the towers in September, hit the Pentagon in November and follow them up with a few bombings in key cities in January. The sheep would have never recovered.

“But I’m not going to let that happen. I won’t make that mistake. Just when the sheep start deciding whether it’s safe to let their paranoid guard down or not, Badr will hit again. Another calamity right out of the Bible and you, Cardinal O’Keefe, will be the only one the sheep turn to.”

There was silence in the car as they made their way out of the Cleveland area and headed east.

It was nearly an hour before the silence was broken.

“What about me?” Novak said. “If you’re thinking about sending me off, you better think again.”

“You’re too damn fucked up to ever get rid of. You’ll soon be free to do whatever the hell you want to do. On this realm.”

“Whatever I want?” Novak asked.

“Whatever you want.”

Part Three:

The Setup

Phillip must have drifted (though fully unaware of his movement) for several hours before settling on a direction. Henry had offered him no suggested direction or probable course when he set off on a certainly impossible mission. Choosing where to go took time. He settled on going deeper. Though he knew going the path he had decided on would be more difficult than if he had elected an ascending route, he felt his target would be beneath his current location. As if being lower than anything else served some twisted desire of his quarry.

Once his aim was established, Phillip struggled against the pulls of resistance to break free of where they were drawing him. He felt as if his target had grown instantly aware of his intentions and had set forth whatever obstacles remained in his arsenal to halt Phillip in his journey. To turn him back. To demonstrate the feebleness of such a mission.

“Why,”
Phillip thought,
“would he want to keep me away? Is it possible that he is actually worried about what I can do to him?”

He glanced at the object he was carrying in his hands, still wrapped in burlap cloth, bound tight with a string of decaying greenish fibers. Its weight was certain; the object felt heavy in his hands, but he knew, somehow, that what he carried was not a weapon. He wasn’t expected to kill the governor of his realm but only to unwrap the contents of the package, and toss it to the realm’s commander.
 

Henry had warned him about unwrapping the object.

“Remember,” Henry had said, “you do not want to see what you’re carrying. Neither will he. It will destroy him.”

Yet despite Henry’s repeated admonition, the object called to Phillip. It wanted to be seen. It whispered in a voice too quiet for even Phillip to hear, “Show me. Remind them all.” Phillip wished for a satchel or at least large enough pockets in which the object could be hidden. Carrying its weight was simple enough, but the object seemed to carry its own heavy burden. One much too heavy for Phillip to even consider budging away from gravity’s demands.

Henry had told him, “Three days. You have to complete your part within three days. No sooner and no later.”

“I have no fucking way to know when a day ends and a new one begins,” Phillip had snapped back. “No way to time my execution with whatever the hell it is that you’re planning over there. This won’t work, Henry. Drop the thing now before it’s too late.”

“You goddamned pussy. You’re worried about something that doesn’t even matter here. It’s always three days. Always. Take a shit and it takes three days. Have a conversation, three days. Everything is three days. Haven’t you learned anything yet? You haven’t figured anything out yet, you stupid fucking moron.”

“Then why tell me that I have to do it in three days, exactly?”

“You can’t hesitate. You can’t delay. Follow him, find him and raise him to the ground. One, two, three.”

If Henry was to be believed, Phillip was struggling through his day one. The pull was so strong at times that it whisked him away from his course. Each time he was pulled away, the struggle to regain his direction became more challenging. Without the ability to choose or the vision to navigate by a landmark meant that Phillip had only an internal sense to chart his steps by. And with each mustered effort, his internal senses drew less and less retrievable.

He was lost in a world filled with nothing but the lost. His anger grew, and with nothing but rage and crippling fear to drive him, he blasted out a scream so desperate and vacant of hope that the shadowy figures of those he passed were sent scurrying for imagined cover, their arms raised against an expected blow.

There was no passing of time, of that, Henry was right. There was no light that waxed or waned and no gradual change in temperature. There was just the continual diffused brightness that originated somewhere well beyond his reach or sight. It wasn’t a light, he realized as he surrendered to the pull and abandoned his course, it was a glow. A pulsing, nearly palpable glow that was certainly without a center point. It was just there. Everywhere and, like him, nowhere.

Jen and Lisa hadn’t planned for how quickly—and badly—the weather could turn in late February in the Northeast. When they left the D.C. Metro area and headed north on Interstate 95, there was a promising, damp chill in the air but the sky was clear. As the two reached the Pennsylvania border, the heavy sky started to spit out its promises in the form of wet snow. The driving ping of hail sounded a disturbing roll of high pitched noises, filling the car with disconcerting sounds.

“You’d think that me being from Upstate New York,” Lisa joked, trying to ease the obvious concern on Jen’s face, “that I’d be used to driving in shit weather.”

“Think we should pull over?” Jen asked. “Congresswoman Flannigan isn’t scheduled to hit Upstate till tomorrow afternoon anyway.”

“And miss hitting my old hot spots tonight?” Lisa continued the joke. “No way. It isn’t bad yet. If it does get slippery, we’ll find a spot to wait out the storm. We’ll just have to check the weather to make sure we aren’t sitting around waiting for a bigger weather problem to arrive.”

The two drove north for another two hours before the storm began to drop heavy snow and send gusty winds. It was outside of Scranton, Pennsylvania when the two, after confirming with the weather app on Jen’s phone that the storm was going to increase in intensity over the next several hours before tapering off to light flurries well after midnight, decided to stop for the night.

“Tomorrow looks clear,” Jen said, relieved to be getting off the sometimes treacherous Route 81. “So long as the roads are clear, we should be able to head out before nine in the morning.”

“Gets us to the Utica area around one in the afternoon. Hope that Flannigan scheduled an afternoon meeting.”

After checking into a major hotel chain, booking the sole remaining single room, Lisa and Jen walked across the parking lot to the adjoining chain restaurant. Once seated in the bar, Lisa, as was her tendency, started off the conversation.

“Chain restaurant and chain hotel. Nothing like a glamorous getaway from the office, huh?”

“Gives us more time to figure out what we’re going to do if we ever do find Congresswoman Flannigan. Plus, I’m not used to snowstorms. It was freaking me out.”

“Well, now the only thing we need to worry about is walking back to room 326 in a blizzard.” Lisa gestured to the window, through which she could see that the storm had picked up its intensity.
 

She ordered an apple martini for herself, while Jen chose a Riesling. “And do us a favor,” she said as the waitress began to turn and put in their drink orders at the bar, “tell any guy who wants to buy us a drink that we live an alternative lifestyle. That should keep them talking and away from our table, right Jen?”

Lisa raised her right hand, requesting a “high five” from her table-mate who was wondering how it was possible that she could blush so quickly and so completely.
 

“You always know how to make friends and influence people wherever you go, Lisa!”

After the second round of drinks was delivered and half consumed, Lisa’s cell phone belted out her “Someone Like You” ringtone, Adele’s hauntingly melodic voice cutting through the noisy barroom area. “It’s Jason,” she said after checking the caller ID. “Give me five.” Jen slid her finger across the phone’s screen, held the phone up to one ear while covering the other with her free hand. She stood, and nodded to Jen before leaving the crowded and noisy barroom area.