The Shepherd (16 page)

Before she could regain her bearings, the man was upon her.

She tried to crawl down the hallway, but he grabbed her belt with his right hand and a fistful of her hair with his left. He lifted her from the floor and slammed her underside into the wall, smashing in the drywall and sending dust into the air. He reared back and tossed her down the hallway like a garbage man tosses a bag into the truck.

She struck the floor with a thump that shook the house and caused more pictures and decorations to fall from the walls. She tasted something metallic in her mouth and realized it was her own blood. Her pain was great, but she had to be strong. More than her life was at stake.

Where’s Dwight?

She was halfway into the kitchen and could see through the entryway into the living room. She could see Dwight asleep in his chair. She called to him in a frail, battered voice, but he showed no sign of movement.
Can’t he hear me?
She cursed him for not coming to their rescue.

She got to her feet and stumbled into the living room. The space once held such fond memories of Christmas time and presents under the tree, birthday parties, and her children’s first steps. As she stared at her husband, all of those happy memories instantly faded away.

Dwight sat lifeless, soaked in his own blood. His throat had been slashed from ear to ear. His eyes still showed his last moments of terror, and his mouth hung open in a soundless scream.

She felt weak in the knees and almost collapsed from the shock. A sense of utter hopelessness washed over her. She wanted to give up, accept the inevitable, and invite the killer to get it over with. But the thought of her children kept her going. She would stop him. She would kill him.
I have to.

Her husband’s killer took his time making his way down the hall. He strolled in much the same way a man without a care in the world would stroll through a park on a summer day. It was as if he wanted to savor every moment of the chase.

She ran to the kitchen and straight to the knife block that rested on the countertop. From it, she pulled the largest knife, the one she never used because she was too afraid that she’d manage to cut off a finger or stab it into her leg. In the current situation, however, it was just right.

She flipped back around to face her attacker.

“Stay back,” she said. She held the knife out toward him and readied herself, but he didn’t even glance at the weapon. The confident look in his eyes added to her dread. He didn’t seem human.

“What’s your name?” he said.

She hesitated.

“Name!” he said with bite.

“Alice.”

“Ah…well, welcome to Wonderland, Alice.” He glanced around the tiny kitchen, nodding his head like an old friend. “You have a lovely place here. Quaint, but quite lovely, nonetheless. It has a very homey feel to it.” He spoke to her as if they were preparing to sit down and have coffee.

He looked deep into her eyes and continued in a serious yet soothing tone. “The concept of home is one that has been pondered and sought after from the time of man’s earliest existence, a place that we can call our own, a place where we belong. It’s more of a state of mind than a place, even though most merely associate home with a tangible location rather than an abstract concept. Home is somewhere that we all search for and many will never truly find. I envy the fact that you’ve made a home for yourself. That’s something that I’ve never had, and I suppose that I never will.”

“Who are you? What do you want?” Her voice trembled, but she forced out the words.

He seemed to consider her questions carefully. “Pardon my manners. My name is Francis Ackerman. And I want the world to make sense. I’ve always believed that there are no answers. No meaning. No point to our existence. But I’m not so sure anymore. I sometimes wonder if we are all just wandering through the darkness alone. But other times, I think that maybe I’m the only one in the dark.”

He paused a moment and then continued. “Though I am certain about what I am going to do. I’m going to release you from the pain of living in mediocrity and obscurity. I’m going to set you free.”

She sobbed. “Oh, God, please—”

“God?” he said. “There is no God. I’m your god now. I giveth…and I taketh away.”

Her eyes hardened with anger, and her hands ceased their trembling. It was gut check time. “There is a God,” she said, “and I’m going to prove it to you.”

On the final word, she thrust the knife at him, hoping to ram it deep into his belly.

He dodged her advance, seized her outstretched arm, and back-handed her across the face.

She dropped the knife and fell into the wall. But she did not go down. She regained her faculties and made a dash from the kitchen and back down the hall. Her only hope of salvation rested in the master bedroom, hidden under the mattress.

She moved faster than she thought possible. She turned the corner into her bedroom, slid to the ground, and stuck her hand under the mattress to retrieve the revolver.

She groped blindly, found the gun, and pulled it from its resting place. It was kill or be killed now, and she harbored no reservations concerning what she was about to do.

She whirled around, gun in hand.

He was almost on top of her.

She aimed the weapon at his chest, closed her eyes, and pulled the trigger.

She expected to hear a loud bang echo through the house as she ended the life of her attacker and saved her own. She expected to hear a deafening pop and crackle like on television. But she heard nothing—only silence.

She opened her tightly clenched eyes and looked up at the killer’s smiling face. Astonished, she glanced at her own hand and saw that he had grabbed the gun as she fired and blocked the hammer from contacting the bullet.

“I told you there was no God,” he said. “Sweet dreams… little lamb.”

He ripped the gun from her hand and struck her across the face with it. The blow was too much for her to withstand, and she succumbed to darkness.

He was back in the Big Apple. He was a cop again. The time that had lapsed between past and present seemed to have sifted away like sands in an hour glass. The events between his last night as a cop and the present day seemed to be a fleeting memory of another life that he had lived in a dream.

Marcus had been a young homicide detective investigating a bizarre string of murders. Evidence had come up missing, and his superiors had told him to drop the investigation. But he was never one to let things go. He discovered a pattern among the killer’s madness and followed his lead to that street on that night.

A scream shattered the air.

His heart froze in his chest for a moment and then erupted with blood pumping fire, as if it were a snowball thrown into the fires of Hell. Everything seemed so real. And yet, it wasn’t. The street transformed before his eyes. The buildings bent and distorted into wild, incongruent shapes. The walls mutated into what looked like black tar—except that they possessed sharp edges like a billion tiny razor blades. The street became a river of blood, and the sidewalk fissured and cracked, as if an earthquake had struck but forgot to quake. It seemed like the entire landscape was alive and wished to devour him. Again, the scream beckoned him to an alley that looked like a gateway into some dark and ominous new dimension.

He had been here before. He remembered now. None of this was real. It wasn’t live. It was like a re-run of the past. Only in this re-run, the scenery in which the events had taken place assumed the dark characteristics of the events themselves.

Still trapped within the dream, he summoned all of his inner strength and let out a scream that was silent to the world of the waking but loud enough to break the trance of his sleep.

He awoke to a pounding in his brain that felt like a thousand tiny workers laying railroad tracks inside his head. For a moment, he forgot where he was and what had happened. He gained a moment’s worth of comfort in blissful ignorance. Then, it all came rushing back.

He was bruised and battered, running from a conspiracy that possessed a depth he could not fathom and incorporated players reaching far and wide. He had no way to know who he could trust or what he was going to do next. The only thing that he knew for certain was that he had to keep moving. He had to find somewhere safe, and he had to do it fast.

Bringing himself up on unsteady knees, he retrieved the handcuff keys from the slumbering officer. He uncuffed himself before smashing the cruiser’s radio. He searched the cop and found a cell phone in his pocket. He checked it, but the battery was dead. He smashed it as well. Leaving the crash behind, he walked toward a farmhouse that rested on a hill about a mile down the road.

He couldn’t make out the exact details of the house, except for the pole light that shone like a beacon in the night and the outline of some structures. He hoped to find a vehicle on the property that he could
borrow
and commence with the only plan he had: to get as far away from Asherton as possible.

~~*~~

As Marcus blended into the darkness, the officer watched his former prisoner move away from the scene of the crash. He retrieved another cell phone strapped under the driver’s seat in the ruined cruiser. He put a hand to his throbbing forehead and dialed. “Mr. Director? This is Michaels. I’m not gonna make it to the rendezvous. He kicked out the back window and crashed the car. I’m sorry.”

“That’s fine, Michaels. Are you alright? Do you still have the package?”

“Negative, sir. The package is on the move. I’m not sure what direction he’s heading in. I’m…I’m a little turned around, so I’m not sure of our exact location.”

“Don’t worry, Michaels. I know exactly where he is. We’ve had to improvise a bit, but everything is still going according to plan. We’ll be in position.”

As Alice slumbered, Ackerman saw to the children and then picked up the phone that rested beside Alice’s bed. He dialed a number that he knew by heart.

“Hello, Father Joseph speaking.”

“Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned.”

“What have you done, Francis?”

He sat down on the edge of the bed. “I dreamt of the dark man again last night. I—”

“Please, turn yourself in. This has to end.”

He was silent for a moment, but then said, “As I said, before you rudely interrupted, the dark man visited me again last night. I’m sure you think of Lucifer when I describe him—a man of seeming beauty but with a face that the shadows seem to follow. A man who walks amongst the light, although the light never seems to touch him. There was a time when I might have agreed with you. I thought it was Satan himself, but then I wondered if maybe the dark man was my father. Now I’m beginning to feel that the dark man is what I’m becoming. I think he’s me.”

“What have you done, Francis?”

He spun the chamber of the revolver that he had commandeered from Alice. “I’ve taken a family. We’re gonna play.”

“No, please. Lord, grant me strength. Why?”

He could hear in the priest’s voice that the man was crying. Oddly, it gave him no satisfaction.

“Why do you have to kill? And don’t feed me any of the fairy tales that you tell your victims. I want to know why. I want to understand.”

He hesitated a moment and then gazed at his own reflection in the mirror above Alice’s dresser. He realized that tears had formed in his eyes as well. “Because it’s the only time I really feel alive. The only time I don’t feel hollow…and I can forget the pain. To know that I hold someone’s existence in my hands… It’s euphoric. It’s transcendent. The greatest feeling you can imagine. I can’t stop.”

“I wanna help you. The doctors can help you. They said you were responding to treatment…that you were making progress.”

He dried his tears and sat up straighter. A scowl formed on his face. “The doctors didn’t really wanna help me. They just wanted to study me. To learn what makes me tick. I’m tired of being a lab rat.”

“Your father was sick. You know why he did all that to you. The doctors aren’t like that. They wanna help you, but first, they need to understand you. I’ll be with you every step of the way.”

“I know what my father did and why. And that makes it even worse. I could maybe accept what he did if I thought that he was evil or disturbed, but he wasn’t. Not really. He experimented on me for his own pride. A damn psychology study. An experiment. That’s what they called me, The Experiment. I was nothing but a guinea pig…nothin’ but a rat in a maze. It was all just a game. Life is just a game.” He scratched at his scars until crimson stained his fingernails.

“You’re wrong, Francis.”

“Oh, really. About what?”

“Your father. There’s nothing I can say that will erase the past, but if in some twisted way it gives you comfort, I do know one thing for sure…”

“I’m listening.”

“Your father didn’t hurt you for his work. He did it because he was a sick man…and evil in every sense of the word. We all have evil inside us, and we can’t fight it alone.”

“You really believe in good and evil?”

“Of course I do. There’s always balance. Heaven and Hell. Angels and Demons. Darkness and Light. Good and Evil. Heroes and Villains. But things usually don’t seem that clear-cut on the surface. Bad things happen to good people, but there is a reason for everything. The Bible says, ‘And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose.’ God has a plan for us all, but we have to choose to walk the path. If we could step outside time and space, maybe we could understand the reasons, but we can’t. We have to live by faith that we—”

He hung up the phone and reflected on Joseph’s words. He walked to the kitchen and sat down at the table across from Alice.
Everything has an opposite.

He reveled in her simple beauty and wondered what ugliness existed in the world to counterbalance such radiance. She looked at peace as she slumbered across from him. But she would awaken soon, and her peace would fade like a dream cleansed from her memory in the ether between worlds.