Absence of Faith (34 page)

"Ah, shit! Shit!" he managed to get
out as he watched the hood of the car crumple in slow motion and
the large tree trunk loom up and swallow him.

A few minutes later a white pickup
truck that had seen too many miles and too many seasons pulled over
- its lights focused on the back of the damaged Crossfire. Two men
got out and walked over to the driver's side.

"Well is he alive or dead?" the one
with the shaved head said.

"I don't know. You know how to
check his breathing or something like that," the other replied
putting his hands in the front pockets of his worn and faded blue
jeans.

"Look dummy, you take two fingers
and you put them on the side of his neck and you feel for a pulse,
a heartbeat. Now do it! We got to get out of here before someone
comes," the man with the shaved head said.

"Okay, okay, I'm doing
it."

"Well, do you feel
anything?"

"Yeah, I guess," the other man said
looking stupefied.

"Look out, idiot, I'll do
it."

The man with the shaved head placed
his two fingers on Nick's neck and turned to the other
man.

"See that's how you do it. Now
let's get him into the truck," the man said.

The two men struggled to open
Nick's door, which was hard to open because the front fender was
pushed against the door. After several tries the door popped open
with a sound of metal scraping on metal.

"He really fucked up this car," the
man with the blue jeans said. "Too bad it was a nice
car."

"Yeah, this was a stroke of luck
for us. I don't know how we would've gotten him," the other man
replied.

They dragged Nick out of the car
and towards the old white pickup truck struggling with his weight
and bulk.

"Sure is a heavy son-of-a-bitch!"
the man with the shaved head said between gasps.

"Yeah."

The men struggled to lift Nick's
limp body onto the truck bed. A gash on Nick’s forehead gushed
blood down his face. Some of it had turned dark and dried. They
covered him with a canvas tarp and closed the tailgate. The man
with the shaved head took a red gasoline can from the rear of the
truck and poured it under the car near the gas tank. Then he poured
a trail towards the truck about twenty feet long. He also took the
gas cap off of the Crossfire. He put the gas can back in the truck
and got in the passenger's side.

"Now, when I say go, you GO!" he
said. The man took a book of matches out of the glove compartment
and lit the entire book. Then he dropped the matches on the
gasoline trail.

"GO! GO! GO!" he yelled.

The matches ignited the gasoline
and the flames flashed like lightening towards the wrecked car. The
truck sped off like a bullet vanishing into the encroaching
darkness.

O
wen Sutton
was intensely involved in
Jurassic Park
by Michael Crichton,
a bestseller about dinosaurs that are cloned and recreated for an
amusement park, when an explosion rocked his house. He dropped the
book and shuddered - he instantly thought a Tyrannosaurus Rex had
kicked its way into the front of his house, destroying everything
in its path. He didn't know if he should hide under the bed or run
out. Finally, he summoned enough courage to run out and confront
the beast. He stopped dumbfounded when the house was
intact.

He entered the living room and saw
a flickering light bounce off the sheer curtains that covered the
window facing the road. He approached the window cautiously, not
really comprehending what to expect, and looked out across the long
expanse of his front yard and through the trees towards the road.
He shook with fear. Again, he had to muster up enough courage to
get closer to see what had happened. He opened his front door and
ran towards the tall flames that were beginning to consume the
large oak tree on the other side of the road. When he approached
the road, he saw the twisted, gnarled metal hulk that was once a
red Crossfire. He looked hard to see if any heads were inside the
car now enveloped in flames. He began to feel the heat from the
burning wreck and he knew that if anyone was still in the car it
was too late for them. He ran back to the house and dialed 911. He
was still gasping for air and he could barely get his finger to
stop shaking long enough to push the right numbers on the keypad.
He decided he was going to stick to the diet his doctor had
prescribed to him weeks earlier. Minutes seemed like hours and then
he heard the sirens and saw the red flashing lights bounce off the
trees in his front yard. He went into the kitchen, opened the
cabinet above the sink, and took out a bottle of brandy. He shook
as he poured the dark golden liquid into a highboy glass, spilling
some on the white granite counter. He filled the glass halfway and
downed all its contents in a single swallow.

"Damn dinosaurs," he said and went
back into the living room to watch the activity outside his house.
His hands still shook.

* * *

Jerry Vandergarde pulled up to red
flashing lights reflecting and bouncing around the glass in his
windshield. The fire trucks had already arrived and several
firefighters were spraying the burning car with expanding, yellow
foam. Jerry parked a few car lengths away and walked toward a
uniformed officer standing near one of the large pumper
trucks.

"What happened? I got the call at
home," Jerry said.

"It's your partner's car all right,
but there's no sign of him," the young officer replied.

"If I know him, he probably walked
away from it and is now down the road looking for a ride home. Has
anyone checked the wooded areas?" Jerry said.

"No. Not that I know
of."

"Okay. I'm going to call for more
help. Can you spare me some men to search the area?"

"Yeah, McBride and Ross are over
there. We got this under control," the officer said.

Jerry went back to his car and made
a call to headquarters. Several minutes later a police car pulled
up and a second car arrived several minutes after that. Jerry
gathered the police officers, gave them instructions, and the men
vanished into the nearby wooded area. Jerry walked closer to the
burned car, which was charred and smoking now and moved his
flashlight around the wreckage. He washed the light over the
driver's seat, the passenger seat, and then the small rear seats.
Sweat formed on his forehead from the heat of the smoldering car.
He looked at the driver's side door and then he saw that the grass
was crushed and some of it torn out in a long path that lead to the
edge of the road. He walked along the edge of the road and saw wide
tire tracks with thick treads etched into the grass.

Jerry pulled his pocket radio out
of his back pocket and pressed the talk button.

"Captain Buranski?"

Jerry released the button. A bolt
of static blared out of the tiny loud speaker.

"Captain Buranski?"

"This is Buranski. Is that you
Jerry?"

"Yeah, I need road blocks on every
road that feeds off this one going north. Have your men search all
vehicles in the area. I think Nick was kidnapped."

* * *

Nick felt a cramped sensation in
his left arm and slowly the pain began to intensify as he reached
full consciousness. He moved the arm slightly and the pain ignited
into a blaze. It was dark and it smelled musty. His face and head
also ached. He moved his hand and felt that he was lying on his
stomach on some kind of metal with deep grooves. The metal was cold
and hard. He reached around to his left arm and found something
covering him; something rough and stiff.
Canvas
, he thought.
He gingerly felt along his arm's length, checking for a broken
bone. It was ok. Suddenly he realized the loud rhythm of
crickets...thousands of them. It was getting louder and louder.
Fear washed over him.

Where am I?
he thought.
The car...the turn...am I dead? No. I can't be dead...my
arm.
He slowly moved his body up. Pain streaked across every
limb, every muscle, and his abdomen.
Damn, I feel like shit
,
he thought. He felt along the canvas looking for the edge. When he
found it, he slowly moved it over his head and peered out. Total
darkness. He moved forward and his hand touched a wall. His hand
followed it up to the edge and pulled himself up. The cool, damp
air streamed over his face, and made him more alert. He moved his
hand down his right leg to his calf and felt the hard metal of his
22-caliber pistol. He pulled himself up. From the faint light of
the moon, he saw he was in the back of a pickup truck. He was
looking at the cab to see if anyone was there when it began to blur
out of focus, and then it slowly faded away.

T
he six men
climbed the small hill. When they reached the top they could barely
see the tall spire of St. John's Roman Catholic Church in the
silvery light. The men wore navy blue work pants and shirts so they
were not readily visible despite the dim glare of the full moon.
They descended on the church like a pack of red wolves running the
200 yards to the back of the church in minutes. When they reached
the white stucco building, they crouched down and opened their
backpacks in unison as if they had rehearsed the scenario many
times. The first man took out a long crow bar and wedged its flat
end between the door and frame a few inches above the
doorknob.

"Crack!" the wood gave way and the
door easily splintered revealing the door's bolt. He jammed the
crow bar between the doorjamb and the bolt and pried the bolt back
and the door opened.

The six men quickly entered and the
last man closed the door behind him. They ran through a narrow
hallway, up two flights of stairs and then poured out into the
altar area like a swarm of flies. Their bright Xenon flashlights
created a disco-like scene as the bluish white beams danced around
the narrow passageway and into the main church area. The men dug in
their backpacks and pulled out small hatchets and sledgehammers.
They looked around moving their beams in all directions. Then one
of them slammed his hammer into the statue of the Virgin Mary
beheading the five-foot structure. Large chunks of the icon broke
off and crumbled into thousands of smaller pieces that ran away in
all directions when they hit the oak floor. The cracking of the
statue seemed to signal the start an all out frenzy. The other men
quickly began smashing other statues and two men used hatchets on
the altar making large gashes in the old wood. One grabbed the
chalice burse, ripped it from the altar, and threw it on the floor.
Another man tore the altar cover off and placed it in a pile next
to the burse. Another man came over with a half gallon jug of clear
liquid and carefully poured it over the pile of cloth and then
placed a small cardboard box the size of a deck of cards under the
pile. He slowly pulled a small string out of the box.

"Okay, let's get the hell out of
here!" he shouted.

The men rushed out of the area,
down the narrow stairway and through the hallway to the back door.
Once outside they sprinted back into the woods like a heard of deer
running from a predator. The men vanished into the blackness of the
backwoods like peccant specters.

Within minutes a there was a low
rumbling inside the church until the pressure was so great that the
six 12-foot stained glass windows blew out almost simultaneously.
White-hot flames spewed out of the gaping holes like gigantic
blowtorches instantly burning away the wooden walls. Within seconds
the entire structure was a large fireball with wild, violent flames
racing upward.

When the first fire truck arrived
nine minutes later, the 40-foot spire had collapsed taking what was
left of the roof. Twenty-two minutes later the walls fell into a
fiery pile of charred and deformed wood. Four firemen focused two
hoses on the fire merely to contain the flames. Within minutes,
there was nothing recognizable in the pile of blackened wood and
metal. One firefighter approached the chief surveying what was once
a thriving, living church.

"I have never seen a fire burn so
hot so fast," the firefighter noted.

"Definitely arson," the chief said.
"Unlike the other four - they used a hell of an accelerant. They
must have used jet fuel or something just as powerful because
whoever did this wanted to make sure this church was completely
destroyed."

"Welcome everyone. Welcome to the
good times!" Kyle Mabus said to the coven of thirteen individuals,
who had joined his cult. Other groups of thirteen stood nearby and
conducted a similar ceremony.

"Satan and I would like to thank
you for showing faith in him. We are sure we can all work together
to finally defeat the diseased minds of the prophets of the world
who seek to condemn our mighty lord Lucifer. Our master has
regained his position of prominence in the world and those of us
who help him will be rewarded beyond our wildest dreams. Those who
work against him will have unfortunate events," he said.

"Worship here consists of three
basic rituals," he went on. "Sexual - to fulfill a desire;
Compassionate - to help one another and Destructive - to eliminate
anger, annoyance and hate. Tonight we have prepared the path for
you to make contact with Satan. Nidel is our altar tonight...you
see her naked before her master. She represents carnal power and
lust," Kyle said pointing to Nidel, the woman with the long red
ponytail. She was lying on her back nude on a table behind him. The
table was raised with two cinder blocks under each leg.