Fires Rising (16 page)

"Bigger than when I saw it."
Did it actually grow in size? Become bigger? Stronger?
Suspicious of several accusatory stares, Jyro took a long, nervous breath, blew it out, and motioned for Timothy to continue.

"I watched as the workers dragged the body parts to the hole. They…they slit open the torsos and tilted them over the edge so that all the blood and guts dumped out into it. Jesus…" he moaned, "there was so much blood…" He began to sob, shoulders hitching up and down.

"Go on, kid," Jyro said, tugging his beard. "It's important you tell us what you saw."

Timothy nodded repeatedly, speaking as he did so: "After a few minutes, it'd…it'd started shooting up out of the hole."

"What did?" Weston asked, eyes skirting back and forth between Timothy and the downed man.

"The blood."

"The blood?"

"Yes..." He nodded again. "It looked as if there was some kind of pump down there. It just started squirting up in these thin streams and was splashing against the floating chalice. It seemed as if the chalice was absorbing it, because I didn't see anything dripping back down into the hole. The whole time this was going on, the construction workers kept on with the bodies, dumping the blood into the hole; it seemed that for each body they gutted, another stream of blood would shoot up.

All on its own,
Jyro thought.
Like the blood on the floor that stirred demonic life into the waste in the toilet. Did it stir some sort of life into the chalice?

Timothy halted, breathing in deeply through his nose in a struggle to gather some composure. "Some of the bodies…even though they were dismembered, I could
see them
…they were
still alive
. They were gutted! Gutted! And yet, I…I could hear them moaning, I could see the mouths moving on them! One of them, just a torso with only the head attached…he was looking over at me. His eyes, were bloody and…and
bulging
…and moving…and his mouth was opening and closing as if trying to speak to me…"

With this, Timothy trailed off. He started crying hysterically, hiding his face in his trembling hands.

"Jesus kid, why didn't you say anything when you first came upstairs and found us?"

Timothy shook his head, confused, stammering through his tears, "I…I don't know. I was in shock at the time, and the images of what I'd seen…I could only vaguely remember them. It was as if they were being blocked, as if something was trying to stop me from talking about it. Now…I mean, now I can remember everything…" The boy ran his hands through his hair and shouted, "
Jesus Christ, what's happening?"

"The shit's hitting the fan, that's what," Wilson said.

Jyro shook his head and gripped his cheeks, looking sorrowfully at the men, all of them, eight strong now plus one boy, gazing back at him in their pathetic states, tattered before they arrived, now beaten down like roadkills, each and every one of them looking worse than Jesus must've after rising from the dead.

"Lotta good my years as an altar boy did me," he uttered.
   

Sudden, unmistakable silence filled the room. Weston shot Jyro a serious glance, eyes wide, mouth falling open. "
You
were an altar boy?" he asked, face flaming with shock.

Jyro nodded. "Yeah. Why?"

"So was I."

"I…was…too…," Wrath added without delay, suspicion and shock narrowing his watery brown eyes. "And then after that, a minister."

Right away, the others followed suit, and in seconds the group of vagrants caught amid the tainted walls of the Church of St. Peter discovered that in their lives prior to falling from grace and turning to the streets of Manhattan, had once either been altar boys, ministers, or priests.

Holy men.

Wilson said, "I suppose it's obvious now as to why
we
were the ones called here, eh Jyro?"

Jyro nodded in utter astonishment, realizing now with the sudden onset of this revelation that his prior assumption of some rationale for them being here was in fact justifiable.

He nodded, smiled with no humor, and replied, "Well then, my brothers, lets figure out how we go about getting our hands on the chalice."

D
arkness prevailed like a deadly virus. Not a single pinpoint of light sliced through the windows all around him. The street posts spanning the length of the block were out, standing vague and frozen like sentries at the gates of some dark palace. In an appropriate bond, heaven's boundless canopy lay gray and dismal across the sky like a woolen blanket, cloaking the moon, the stars, and the city's uppermost rooftops.

In the distance however, Manhattan's power burned on, the faraway lights like dim beacons on a dark, billowing ocean. For this, Pilazzo was thankful. Head down, he raced away from the church as quickly as his aching legs would take him. Not once did he look back, knowing that regardless how this all played out, he'd never set foot inside the Church of Holy Innocents again. It was tainted now…tainted by a pure, nameless evil.

But what perils lie ahead, in my church? The church that awaits me?

His footsteps echoed in the night, slapping the gritty ground not unlike they had upon escaping Holy Innocents. Guided solely by the dim and distant streetlights—
(beacons)
—he turned the corner and raced across the street, onto the sidewalk of 2
^nd
Avenue. Here, thankfully, a few scattered posts burned on. He thought,
I'm having a breakdown, and I'm going to die soon
, feeling the heat of the night attacking him. He began to feel ill, and imagined it a physical symptom of fear. Then he came to realize that he hadn't eaten in over twenty hours. He briefly recalled stories of mystics who'd experienced stigmata and had apparently gone
weeks
without consumption, their claims of being guided solely by God reinforcing their constraint for food. He wondered if this was happening to him now.

Guided by God…
 

The strength bled out of his legs, and he saw no choice but to slow down. Walking now, he could feel his lungs burning, wheezing for precious air. Lightheaded, he nearly collapsed onto the pavement.

A sudden blare of light emerged in his mind's eye, and in this light he beheld an image, that of the crumbling Church of St Peter.
My home—my sanctuary.
The image appeared as a defined silhouette, beckoning him forward just as the words scrawled in ash upon his bedroom wall did. He again came to realize that he was being guided by some greater power, and the clues being provided to him would point the way.

Your church awaits…

So he forced himself to press on, conscientiously seeking out the stability of the parking meters for precious support. He reached the street corner and leaned against a mailbox, a flyer slapped on its rusty hood advertising a techno nightclub called
Atmosphere
. He swallowed past the lump in his throat and peered across the street to the opposite corner. It appeared unreachable, caught in shadows of darkness and light.
  

Heaving and sweating, his thoughts whipped about his mind like grains in a sandstorm, demanding that he move on with his journey into the unknown…into the impending war of Good vs. Evil.
I can't!
his fatigued body screamed, wishing for the time and energy to reconsider the peculiar events leading him here. But he knew this possibility did not exist. Some higher authority,
God!
, needed him in a specific place, and the time to go there was now, without delay. He only hoped his mission would in some way be explained to him upon his arrival at St Peter's.

He looked around and saw that the city continued to lay in terrible silence, with no cars or cabs racing back and forth on 2
^nd
Avenue. Typically, in the early morning hours, life existed everywhere in the city, lacking only the congestion of the daytime hours. Here and now, looking both ways, he could see that nothing existed.

Nothing…except for the man standing in the middle of the street, staring at him.

The man remained at a distance…a
safe
distance Pilazzo immediately gathered by his intense, troubled stare, his downcast scowl; in some inconceivable way, this strange man—the only other living being in sight—appeared afraid of
him
.

Pilazzo straightened his body and slowly stepped backwards, across the sidewalk. He kept his eyes trained on the man, who wore jeans, a dirty white tee-shirt, and a leather utility belt wrapped around his waist.

The man was a construction worker.

Standing with his muscled arms at his sides and his dark, blazing eyes fixed upon the priest, the worker opened his mouth and released a screeching howl on par with something a dog might make upon having its leg chopped off.
 

Pilazzo backpedaled into the storefront behind him. A loud crash sounded as the store's gate, loose upon its hinges, wavered back and forth.

His thoughts quickly triggered back to the construction workers he encountered on the subway platform the previous day.
They were scared of me,
he remembered. With an odd mixture of sick dread and relief, he saw that this man remained unmoving like the other workers had, stiff and wide-eyed in the center of the street. Thin runners of spit, like windswept webs, hung from his gaping mouth. Despite the warmth of the night, his breath was visible as it unfurled from his wet lips.

Pilazzo staggered along the length of the gate then darted across the street. Heart pounding furiously, lungs pulling hopelessly for air, he continued racing away from the man, down the sidestreet toward 3
^rd
Avenue.

Just ahead, another figure emerged from an apartment well.

Pilazzo gasped. He put his hands to his heart, expecting a jolt of pain or even a twinge of an ache, but felt nothing.

Nothing but fear, and the clear image of horror before him.

In the semidarkness, Pilazzo could see the figure—a man—hauling a body out of the well. Holding it by the arms, the man dragged it down the sidewalk, toward the priest.

Pilazzo skidded to a stop against a parked sedan, now aware of sirens blaring in the distant, of acrid smoke saturating the air.

Fire.

The man looked at Pilazzo, grunted. The flickering light of the streetlamp he passed under reflected off his sweaty, hairless dome.

Dear God, what is happening…?

The man was a construction worker, this one clothed in jeans and an orange safety vest. Tattoos ran the length of his flexing arms. His clothing was painted with patchy, black stains. The motionless man in his grasp appeared to have been a homeless vagrant, judging by his tattered clothes and straggly beard. He was dead, having met his fate beneath the thrust of two orange-handled screwdrivers jutting from his eyes like road flares. Fresh blood poured from his sockets down his face. His pants, bunched to the thighs, bared legs coated with grime-puckered scabs.

The worker stopped, then grasped the body by its matted hair and arched the head back, placing the vagrant's face beneath the streetlamp's flickering light. The screwdrivers wavered up and down like batons in the hands of a tarmac guide.
   

The worker laughed, deeply, gutturally.

Pilazzo was momentarily paralyzed, unable to gather even the slightest bit of momentum in his legs. In his mind, a voice whispered,
Your church awaits
, and this simple line of remembrance provided him with the fortitude to carry on with his task, whatever it might be.

He heard a shuffling noise behind him. He spun around. The worker that had stood in the middle of the street was now leaning against the corner street-sign. His eyes were rolled up into his skull, baring only stark whites. His teeth were bared, white and glimmering.

From around the corner, another man joined him, his profession of a city laborer evident by the yellow hardhat on his head…and the circular saw in his hands, its electrical cord dangling like a tail. He jabbed the saw forward, grunting with each derisive movement,
"Uhrr…uhrr…uhrr…
, childishly emulating the saw's rev.

Breaking his sense of paralyzing terror, Pilazzo slid between a pair of parked sedans and staggered across the street. Only now did he see the clear logic of screaming out loud in the deadly silence of the night—death seemed the only end-result in allowing the workers to maintain their quiet approach upon him. He grabbed at his hysterical thoughts, and managed, somehow, to corral them, brain once again bellowing,
Your church awaits!

He lurched drunkenly down the sidewalk, peripherally seeing even more workers gathering, not coming after him but keeping a watch on him from a distance with their poisoned, white gazes. They were murderers, Pilazzo thought. Each and every one of them, accessories to a crime that would land them in jail forever.

Or Hell…

But it didn't really matter at the moment. Something dark and evil was influencing them, just as something
good
attempted to guide him forward and provide him with a safe harbor that discouraged the workers from killing him.

He glanced over his shoulder and saw with horror six or seven men now—all of them construction workers—milling about on the sidewalk with utter disregard for the dead man at their feet, possessing eyes pointed unwaveringly in his direction as he fled down the street.