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Ian ran hard and surprisingly fast, considering his injuries.
He wanted to yell out in both pain and anger, but he feared giving the Watcher
too much time to react.
Suddenly, his peripheral vision caught a brightness approaching
on his left, and he thought--or at least hoped--it was guardian angels coming to
his aid for this one last desperate attempt at stopping the madness he’d
started. He welcomed them. How could he fail now with God’s very own watching
over him, ready to take him home when his task was at last accomplished.
Sandy was crying bitterly as her headlights fixed squarely on
the beast. It didn’t pay any heed to the spot lights approaching, only seemed
spellbound at the despicable place in front of it. If what she was planning to
do worked, she would never see John again, never see Sylvester again, never
realize the joy of a happiness that had eluded her all her life. She would only
feel the eternal pain of loss. No matter where she was, that would be her Hell.
But that was why she chose to do this selfless act. She, after all, had nothing
really to live for if not for the love she’d lose by not sacrificing herself
to stop this beast. The world without one less 'peanut-butter-skin freak' was
worth the world.
“John,” her lips quivered.
“John,” she whispered one last time.
She closed her eyes, locked her elbows and floored the V-8.
Malignant sursurations that wafted out from that door rose to
triumphant cheers from the infernal spectators as the Watcher’s hand found its
link on the other side. It slowly pulled from the searing hole a massive, black
hand. Attached to that hand was an arm laced with bulging veins and pustules
that seeped an oily, vomit-colored cream, like pheromones carrying a wretched
scent that excited the demon-child and made it squeal in baneful delight and
chatter its choir of fangs. Soon, the shoulder of a beast that was nearly twice
the size of the Watcher appeared from the portal as it sought to free its god of
Pandemonium. The new world was only moments away, and the Watcher would share in
its rightful place among the damnable elite, sit on a throne of its own next to
the Prince of Darkness.
With all the power it could muster in its partly human body,
the demon summoned one last string of words together and spat out boldly for all
to hear, “I am Luccifer’ss Jesusss. I am hisss only begotten ssonn!”
With the roaring light of a legion of angels now completely
surrounding him, Ian, only a few more steps away from the creature, cried out
his last earthly cry, “And I am your Judas, you son of a bitch!” He lunged
himself at the beast.
The Watcher turned in the instant before impact. It beheld both
truck and priest converge on the very spot as Lucifer himself had only one step
yet to take to ascend to his throne. Its mercuric eyes lit up in astonishment at
the pathetic, little dingoes nipping at its heel. The demon barely had the time
for a shriek of angry disbelief, when a sudden force knocked it and its
progenitor back into the wretched portal, and the doorway immediately closed
shut.
John was bleeding in more places than he knew he had
veins to supply the blood. His head felt like it had been stuck under the tires
of the Ram as it spun past him. His vision was blurred from the knock on the
head, and he could only lay in unblinking shock upon the cold, wet grass unable
to move as he watched the Ram disappear in the gloom on the other side of the
oak tree. That was the last thing he remembered before unconsciousness replaced
the haze with a quiet blackness all its own.
©2004 StoriesByEmail.com
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