She tried to not let this scare her. Even though she couldn’t hear Zion, she was still connected to them by a string. Getting back would be easy. She just had to keep going until she found Arrow and Clive. A familiar rumbling sounded in the distance. Her heartbeat increased and she stopped to take a few calming breaths.
“It’s just a storm.” She told herself, but she knew a storm didn’t chase people down underground tunnels. Her body knew it was something much more sinister but she couldn’t figure out what.
The path began to widen slightly and the fog thinned. When she reached a clearing she could see the strange library she had stumbled across before. She remembered that if she kept going straight it would take her back to her house. She tied part of the twine on a tree branch behind her so she would be able to get back here if necessary. Instead of going straight or going right to the library, she made a left and began making her way off the beaten path.
This part of the realm was dark, but not covered in mist. Tall fir trees dotted the landscape and the dirt took a deep dip into what looked like a ditch because it immediately went back up and she could feel her shoe land on hard blacktop. A couple dim streetlights lined the road and the limbs of the trees reached over the road like they were fighting to grasp the strands of dusty light breaking through the gloom. The yellow lines on the road stood out like they had been freshly painted.
Not hearing or seeing anything, she began walking along the right side hoping it would lead somewhere important. Her mind wandered while taking note of the sound of crickets, creaking branches, and the echo of her footsteps.
Like the sound of thousands of little footsteps, the rain started. A few more steps and she was in the downpour and couldn’t hear crickets or her footfalls. This made it even harder to anticipate when a car came pealing around the corner. It was a brown car longer than it was tall with fake wood paneling on the sides. This was all she saw as it trundled towards her with no sign of stopping. She instinctively backed up and fell into the ditch, rolling over her head and landing on her butt.
As she pulled her tangled mess of hair out of her eyes, she was able to watch just as the car overcorrected and began slipping out of control into a hitchhiker on the other side of the road. She couldn’t look away as the person was nailed in the torso by the front bumper and dragged along several feet.
“No!” Harmony screamed as she saw them go flying off into the other ditch, bloody and bent at an odd angle.
The car stopped and the passenger door flew open. Rachel Jones flew out, hysterical.
“No. No. No!!!!” She was much younger than the Rachel Harmony had met at New Creation Rahab. Her cheeks and nose were rosy from crying and the cold rain that drenched everything. A long black skirt stuck to her skinny legs and she was wearing a blue peasant top. Her hair was starting to stick to her cheeks and neck as the rain and tears mingled on her face.
A nondescript male figure left the driver’s seat and came to stand beside Rachel. “It’s a shame.”
“A shame? A shame?? Is that all you’re going to say?” Rachel demanded. Her usual calm control and joy were nowhere to be found. She hiccuped and sniffed at the same time, barely able to say, “You never gave him a chance.”
“He wouldn’t let me.” The nondescript man said.
“Dad, he’s your son.” Rachel said. “Your own flesh and blood.”
“That doesn’t make it any easier to try to love him!” Rachel’s dad was angry.
Rachel didn’t respond but bent by her dead brother’s side. The apparitions flickered and things shifted to now show an ambulance and police car on the scene. The rain had stopped. Rachel and her dad were being questioned.
“Why was he out here so late?” The police officer asked.
“He…” Rachel glanced at her dad. “Glen had a drinking problem. We wouldn’t let him drive to his friend’s house so he said he would walk.” Tears continued to seep from her eyes and down her face.
“We figured we should go look for him but it was raining. We couldn’t see him. I lost control.” Rachel’s dad said.
The police officer chewed the back of his pen thoughtfully. “This must be hard for you, Reverend Smith.”
Harmony watched from her place in the ditch as the Reverend seemed to take great pains to show his sorrow by lowering his eyebrows over his eyes and bowing his head, touching his lips with his fingertips. When he had done this for a few beats he said, “It has been my cross to bear. I never understood it.”
“You never bothered to!” Rachel screamed.
It all dissolved before Harmony’s eyes then and the street returned to being empty. She waited a moment and cautiously peered down the ribbon of black highway. The same car came pealing back into her line of sight and the headlights nearly blinded her. She instinctively knew she was watching Rachel’s brother’s death scene play out again because not a single detail changed. Knowing what would happen she looked away, but she could still hear the crunch of bones breaking as the car made contact.
Running across the road behind the accident, Harmony rushed into the woods before she could hear Rachel’s screams. Once she was under the shelter of the trees and the dark, she threw up. When she had finished, she wrapped her arms tightly around her torso and began to walk again.
She tried to ignore the mental image of what she had just seen, but it continued to play out in her mind over and over again. She had never imagined that Rachel had suffered so much. Her joy was contagious and she was such a loving person to everybody she came in contact with. Harmony now realized why Rachel had such a heart for addicts.
“How could she believe in a god that allowed her brother to be killed? How could she believe in the god that her father believed in?”
None of it made sense to Harmony.
It then occurred to her that maybe it was just a nightmare that had been consigned to this place by a microchip. Even so, it was a horrific dream to suffer under regardless.
“I am near. I am close. I am many.”
Harmony froze mid-stride.
“I am near. I am close. I am many.” The voice whispered again.
Like a chorus of snakes, the voices continued to hiss and slither through the woods. When she thought she knew where the voice was coming from, it would suddenly sound in the opposite direction.
“I feel you here.” The voice whispered again.
Harmony began to move her feet. One foot in front of the other away from the voices, but no matter where she walked, it surrounded her. She whimpered and held on to the fishing twine for dear life as she continued to work her way through the woods and hopefully away from whatever was speaking to her. She felt nothing but cold in her bones when it spoke.
She broke through the tree line and fell onto her knees before the downtown of an abandoned town. In front of her was a park bench that she pulled herself up onto. She could still hear whispering behind her but couldn’t make out what the voices were saying. Even though her legs were screaming at her to stop, she stood again and began running towards the dirty buildings.
Each business was a yellowish brown and covered in all kinds of grime and debris. Doors were hanging off some of these places and glass display windows were cracked and shattered on the concrete. The only thing that seemed to have life in this place was a movie theatre down at the end of the road. A couple of bulbs around the marquee were still blinking dimly. When she was level with it, she tied some of her fishing twine around a parking sign. Tentatively, she approached the doorway. Once she was close, she realized the glass had been busted out of the frames long ago. The shards crunched under her shoes as she walked inside.
Once in the lobby, she could see a few dim lights on over the popcorn machine and candy cabinet. She continued deeper into the place until she reached the bathrooms which were still lit up. She walked inside to do her business but was surprised to see Heidi standing before her in all her fearsome glory.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
CLIVE WAS MOTIVATED by his fear and righteous anger as he trudged through the sludge and the slime that covered the landscape. He also did his best to not think about the blood that mingled below his feet. Even though he handled blood in his job, it wasn’t the same. There was something purifying about surgery. Eventually, the blood stopped and the wound was sewn up by surgical thread. The blood in this realm just seemed to be endless and trickled over rocks and through the grasses and the mud. The entire place reeked of death and ugliness.
Clive hated it.
