The Wrath of Jeremy (24 page)

Mary questioned, “What do we do now?” The
cloth began glowing again and at the same time, the troops came
through the doorway and commenced shooting toward them, but some
invisible shield that came from the cloth surrounded them and
allowed the shots to ricochet and hit the troops instead. All the
shots fired bounced back, killing each and every troop that stood
on the roof: instant death from ricochet of their bullets. As soon
as all twenty or more guards were killed, Mary’s tear-filled eyes,
from seeing this violence, asked, “What now?” Her mind was warped
from the blood, the brutality her mentality swallowed, and all she
desired to see was the ground below.

Abruptly, the sun began to turn in the skies,
fading to black, turning the day to night. The light from the cloth
glowed brighter: it was as if the sun’s light went directly into
the cloth, giving it life, giving it energy, birthing it with
powers unknown. “My feet are burning,” Mary yelled. The cloth shot
out fire from its body, lifting from the roof of the cathedral and
allowing Jeremy, Mary and Sam to lift with it. It floated all the
way to the ground and the light ended and their feet stopped
burning. As soon as they reached the ground, they started running
away and Mary yelled out, “Wait a second, what about David,
Gabriel, and Michael?” The girls grabbed onto the cross together,
and Mary asked the cross, “God—whoever you are—could you please
guide us to David, Gabriel and Michael?”

The cross’s luminosity burned through the
darkness, and their eyes followed it, noticing the sun beginning to
show again. But the sun only shined to one area, and that area was
the jail across the street from the cathedral. Once they noticed
the lit jail, the sun showed its full light and glistened over the
village once again.

“I guess they’re in that building,” said Sam
before they ran over to it and entered in a place that they didn’t
know was a jail.

Swiftly, Jeremy realized he left the holy
cloth on the ground outside, saying, “I’ll be right back.” He ran
outside, as Mary and Sam ran deeper into the jail, and he found the
cloth. Jeremy grabbed it and when he turned around to face the jail
again, the cloth began to shine.

“You shall not be harmed. Be brave, and you
shall not see death,” the voice said from the light. Jeremy ran to
the jail again, noticing the girls were nowhere to be found. Two
guards came out from behind a corner and clutched Jeremy by his
worn-out wrists. He made an endeavor to fight them to get free, but
because of his hunger and thirst, Jeremy was too frail for battle.
They pitched him in a jail cell where the girls were nervously
sitting, crying out to each other in trepidation and terror. Their
teary eyes saw Jeremy entering the cell, and when Sam saw him, she
immediately ran up to Jeremy and embraced him ever so tightly. Of
course Mary was going to do the same, but not so much like Sam did,
and Jeremy noticed it, too.

“I thought they killed you,” Sam said, drying
her tears with Jeremy’s shirt.

“Are you alright, Jeremy?” asked Mary, also
hugging him while Sam still embraced him.

“Yeah. But what I need you two girls to do is
grab the cross again. After we somehow get out of here, we have to
know which direction to run in.” Jeremy dried the sweat from his
face with the holy cloth that was around his neck, and watched the
guards, seeing them talking to each other.

“The guards took it away, Jeremy, they put it
on that table,” Sam explained, pointing toward a table that was
directly in front of their cell.

“Where’s Gabriel, David and Michael?”

“We’re right next to you,” Michael yelled
out. Jeremy turned to his right and saw only a wall in his view.
“I’m behind the wall,” Michael said sarcastically, knowing Jeremy
wouldn’t catch on to his whereabouts.

“Do you know how we could get out of here?”
asked Jeremy.

“Nope, but I’m kind of beginning to like it
here. They already fed us water and chicken,” Michael replied.
Jeremy then saw light in the middle of the room, thinking of the
word “chicken” rotating around his mind like a marble falling down
a circular slide.

“I heard that before,” Jeremy said out loud.
Silence took over the room, darkness came to Jeremy’s eyes, and the
dirty ground below started to move about, its particles frolicking
around in a circular motion. Suddenly, Jeremy fell to the ground,
beginning another flashback that he wasn’t ready for.

In this realm of Jeremy’s mind, he found
himself in clouds, seeing six angel children in his view. He walked
slowly toward them, noticing they were holding hands and singing a
song while their wings flew around with them as they ran around in
a circle.

“Ashes, ashes, we all fall—” the children
sang, holding laughter, falling to the ground in a swarm of
giggles.

“I’m sick of playing this game, we play it
every day,” one child said, getting up from the ground; Jeremy was
trying to make out their images.

“Hey, I know, how about we see if Lucifer is
still up to the task that he’s been telling us every day for a
while he will take on?” another child said. He pushed Lucifer into
the middle of the circle, adding, “How about it, Gabriel, do you
think Lucifer could do it?”

“I don’t know, David, I think he’s too much
of a chicken,” the angel Gabriel replied. The other angels started
laughing while Lucifer embarked on weeping at their words and
actions. “Do you think he’s up to the task, Michael?”

“No, he’s nothing but a little lightning bug
chicken,” replied the angel Michael as they began pushing Lucifer
around in a circle, like a ball. “Come on, Lucy, you always said
you had more powers than Father, why don’t you prove it?”

Lucifer dried his tears with his glowing
wings and answered, “I will prove it to thee, but not today!”

The angel Michael ran up to Lucifer and
pulled out a feather from his left wing, yelling out, “When will
you do it?” Those words, the question of such an evil bearing,
echoed in Jeremy’s mind, shielding his eyes with confusion as to
whom these angels were, and why they were depicted doing actions of
an evil nature. His eyes widened, pushing his mind to understand
these scenes that his pupils dilated to, when suddenly he blinked,
and turned away from the angels.

“It will be very soon,” Mary stated. Jeremy
woke up in panic, with perspiration all over his face and body.
Jeremy awoke from a deep, sleep-like trance, seizing the memory of
bearing those angels and hearing their words still in his eyes,
causing a brief moment of serenity to come to his voice.

“What will be very soon?” Jeremy asked. He
dried his face, full of sweat, with the cloth, and sat there with
perplexity in his mind.

“December twenty-fifth, I was telling Michael
that December twenty-fifth will be coming up very soon,” Mary
answered; Jeremy noticed it was night-time. He looked outside
through a little window in their cell and wondered what it was he
saw in his subconscious self, yearning for answers.

“How long was I out for?”

“You’ve been sleeping for three hours,”
replied Sam.

Jeremy looked more closely out the window and
then ran toward it, shouting, “Hey, I know how to get out of here!”
Jeremy noticed he screamed it out too loud, so he said again, but
in a much lower tone, “I know how we all could get out of here.”
Looking back at the guards, he saw that no one was there so he ran
up to the window even closer and saw that the wall was made of dirt
mixed in with soft clay. He began pounding on it lightly, creating
a small hole that blew hot and cold desert wind in.

“Well, genius, how could we get out of here?”
Michael asked in the other cell, not being able to see Jeremy at
all. Jeremy then made a hole as big as Mary’s little figure and
started pounding on it more and more, finally creating a hole that
was three times the size of Sam’s body. They jumped out of it
slowly, not hearing Michael asking again, “Hello, how could we get
out of here?”

Suddenly, Michael heard pounding on his wall
from the outside, and in a matter of two minutes, Michael noticed
the wall cracking. A hole was finally made and Michael climbed out
of it and said with happiness, “You’re a frickin’ genius,
Jeremy.”

They all ran to Gabriel’s cell and did the
same thing. After they broke through David’s wall, one guard came
into the room where the cells were and discovered their prisoners
were missing.

“Go and hide, I’ll be right back,” Jeremy
mumbled. He ran to the entrance of the jail and entered it. The
guard ran into each of their cells, searching for their bodies
while Jeremy grabbed the cross from off of the table. He ran out of
the jail building and walked unnoticed over to where Gabriel,
David, Michael and the girls were standing. “Alright, here you go,”
Jeremy whispered in the darkness, handing Mary and Sam the cross.
It started to shine its light toward the East, soaring through the
darkened, star-lit skies. “Alright, I guess we go that way.” They
all ran toward the stars, glimpsing them gleaming down onto the
desert that they were about to enter, wondering how long it would
take the troops to figure out which direction they went. Each of
them knew the darkness was their protection, but once light came, a
new quest for hiding would have to come into action: a quest they
didn’t covet at all.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

T
hey journeyed for
another five days, totaling ten so far for their long, tiresome
voyage that the boys knew they had to take on. Yet Mary and Sam,
deep in their thoughts, desired a motive, other than the boys’
sickness, for why their feet should make another step, but their
thoughts never became vocal; they just wanted to finish this
journey. All of their mouths proceeded to get drier as the sand
reflected the sunlight while each day passed, creating a permanent
sand-like texture on their tongues, which felt as if it was being
embroidered or burnt by the heat of the sweltering sun.

On the tenth day of their walk, their stroll
on what was turning into a life or death condition, the fatigue
became too great for Mary. Her knees gave out, and her body
collapsed to the sandy ground. Since she was the last in line,
while they all hunched over and walked like zombies through the
sand of the titanic desert, no one knew or saw Mary plummet,
leaving her there as she faced the sun with her eyes fastened shut.
Mary didn’t even make a sound, a peep, all she could feel was
numbness. Her last glimpse was of sweat squeezing out from her
pores and plummeting to its death, hitting the hot sand and
evaporating faster than her drained heart could pump. As she lay
there, they still wandered, but then Gabriel stopped and turned
around to see who was behind him, and saw that Mary was far away
from them all, lying on the sand very still. Since Gabriel was
third in line, with Jeremy leading them, and David second, and
Michael behind Gabriel, he was able to stop Michael’s stride by
holding up his hand and pushing him in the torso. Gabriel was too
tired to talk, speak or yell, and, seeing that David and Jeremy
were still walking, Gabriel gawked at Michael and then glared at
Mary, hoping Michael would follow his eyesight to her body.
Immediately, Sam, who was next after Michael, walked up to their
standing figures and saw that Gabriel was looking at something
behind her. So Sam, as well as Michael, followed Gabriel’s fatigued
eyesight and searched through their foggy and unfocused eyes,
peering at the direction Gabriel was looking in, and trying to
focus on the spot. They wiped their eyes over and over again, and
tried to block out the smoldering sun by covering the sun with
their hands and creating a sort of sun shade for their eyes.
Michael and Sam peered through the salt-like sweat that burned at
their eyes and finally saw a figure lying silent on the sweltering
sand, with a fragile face baking in the rays of the sun. It
resembled Mary—it was Mary!

With a gulp of hot air, Gabriel inhaled, and
yelled out with pain to his dry throat, “Stop, Mary needs water!”
Jeremy and David stopped, looked out in front of them, and then
turned their heads, seeing Gabriel, Michael and Sam walking toward
Mary’s figure. Jeremy and David walked quickly, with whatever
energy they had left, and reached Mary, kicking sand up in the air
by accident and hitting Mary in the face with it. They all knelt
down and brushed the sand away from her face. “She needs water,
guys,” Gabriel said again. All Sam could do was rub Mary’s head and
hope that one of the guys would come up with a plan.

Jeremy began crying silently, not knowing
what to do, confused as to where he was going to get water for Mary
and the rest of them. But his tears changed when unexpectedly David
shouted, “Just leave her be, she wasn’t supposed to come here
anyway!”

Jeremy’s concerned brown eyes shot toward
David and glared at him with uncertainty. “Are you crazy? What’s
gotten into you, David?” yelled Jeremy. He pushed David in the
chest and he fell to the hot sand, with all of them looking at
David in silence, not knowing how to react to his actions and
words. Before David could push back, a mirage in the distance came
to their sights, resembling palm trees that brought hope to their
souls of hunger and thirst.

“My God, we’re saved,” David screamed,
starting to run toward the palm trees.

As David ran, Jeremy and the rest stayed
behind with Mary, and watched as she began coughing with pain.
Jeremy screamed toward David, “David, it’s not real, it’s just a
mirage!” Jeremy then turned back and noticed Mary smiling, smirking
at Jeremy’s eyes widening with hurt in them.

“I’m going to die now, aren’t I? I am, aren’t
I?”

“No, Mary, you’re not going to die,” replied
Gabriel. Jeremy’s voice was silent in Mary’s weakness. Then, as
Jeremy started to rub Mary’s forehead, the cross started shaking in
Sam’s grip, shooting out light. It flew out from her grip and fell
to the ground, and Jeremy looked at it and picked up the shiny
cross in an angry fashion.