Читать книгу The Apostle - J. Kerley A. - Страница 12

Teresa Mailey opened her eyes. Or had she? The dark with her eyes open was darker than the dark behind her eyelids. Her head ached and she felt her stomach tumble and pushed herself up from what felt like a hard dirt floor, a wave of dizziness too much for her stomach to handle and she vomited between her hands.

What happened?

Pictures began to return to her head: Working until four and walking out to her car. As she departed the lot she noticed the road seemed darker on the right. She stopped and discovered a shattered headlamp, a thoughtless shopper had backed into her car. She’d headed to her mother’s trailer court to pick up Bobby, winding down the road from the main highway, darker than usual, like the streetlights had all burned out at once. She’d reached the final turn to find a tree branch in the center of the road and crept to the ragged limb, sighing. Teresa had gotten out, road dust blowing into the beams of her headlamps and dragged it to the side of the road. Until … until …

Footsteps somewhere in the dark.

“Hello?” she had called in the enveloping darkness. “Is someone there?”

Until hands like steel covered her mouth and tape covered her screams and a cloth bag fell over her head.

And now she was here, wherever here was, stinking with a smell of burned meat and motor oil, lightless, as black as death. She could feel flies lighting on her bare arms.

“Please … who’s there?” Teresa called out, her mouth so dry the words came out as a rasp. “What do you want?”

“Sinner …” The words a hiss. “Jezebel …”

The sound of footsteps again. Her head jerked to the sound, but all Teresa saw was black. “I have a baby,” she pleaded. “He needs me to take care of him.”

The footsteps again. Hands held before her, Teresa walked until stopped by a wall, rough and wooden and she felt her way along its surface, trying to hold her breath and keep her feet from making sounds. Get out! her mind screamed. Find a way out.

The footsteps again.

“HELP!” Teresa shrieked into the darkness. “SOMEONE HELP ME!”

The whispering voice moved closer, the words becoming a growled sentence. “For he is the servant of God, an avenger who carries out God’s wrath on the wrongdoer …”

Heart pounding, like a hammer, sweat pouring down her covered face, Teresa retreated down the wall until her flailing hands found the shape of a window, but wood where glass should be. A shuttered window? Her fists pounded the wood like a drum.

‘’SOMEONE PLEASE HELP ME!”

Bam. The wood answered back with a single staccato sound. Had someone heard her?

“I’M IN HERE,” Teresa yelled. “HELP ME!”

Bam answered the wood. Then again, bam.

An object hammered her side and she grunted with pain. Something skittered across the floor. “HELP!” she screamed again. “PLEASE HELP M—” A punch to her sternum knocked the words from her mouth. Again, she felt the breath of something moving past her head. She dropped to a knee and held her hands against whatever seemed to be hitting her. The footsteps again, the hissing, poisonous voice …

“Then the LORD rained upon Sodom, And upon Gomorrah brimstone and fire from the Lord out of heaven …”

Something struck Teresa’s face and she tumbled backwards in a spray of blood and pain. Her hand went to her nose but it was no longer there, just a flat lump of shrieking pain. When she fought to her knees something hit her in the side of the neck and the blackness turned red, then white, then black again.