A Summertime Journey

understand. Charlie referred to them as Erebus. Charlie had to bring the three boys into Sheol to make the journey, but they don’t know it yet—not yet. They’ll figure it out soon enough—how night became day, how Charlie and Joey can communicate without words, and how vultures can grow to the size of a compact sedan.

CHAPTER NINETEEN
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I TURN TO CHARLIE and ask, “Where are we going? What makes you think we will follow you?”
Charlie stops walking, stops humming to himself, turns, and looks at me. His face is sweating, and I can smell the evil on him. I can visualize it protruding out of his pores on his face as he looks into my eyes—it makes me sick and scared at the same time.
He says, “If you ever want to see Ryan again, you’ll follow me. If not, he’s already dead, and so are all of you.”
“Well, where are we going? Why do you need us?”
“All three of you have something I need for my journey. Think of yourselves as tools, tools I need.”
“Are we going to die?” I ask. He looks at me again and with a smirk says, “Define ‘die.’”
We arrive at a red Camaro with a single white stripe down the middle, and he motions for us to get in. This car has seen better days; it’s filthy. You can barely see through the windows and the rust has burrowed itself so far into the metal that if you touch it where it has cancer, it crumbles. I crawl into the backseat with Jeremy. Charlie sits shotgun, and Joey jumps behind the wheel. The smell immediately assaults my nose, singes my nose hairs, and turns my stomach. I wish someone would open a window, I think. Charlie grabs the window crank and slowly turns until the window is half-open.
“You don’t know how to drive, Joey, get the fuck out of there,” I’m able to spurt out between my labored breathing. Joey ignores me and turns the key to the car. It rumbles to life, and black smoke shoots out of the tailpipes. He grabs the shifter and accelerates. Wow, maybe he does know how to drive. I glance at Jeremy, and he has his shirt pulled up over his nose, and water is coming out of his eyes. As we travel down the road, I notice something odd—there are no other cars. I start to look around and we’re not in Boise, Idaho, anymore, at least not the Boise I know. The buildings are here, the roads are here, but that’s it. There’s no one in the stores, no one walking down the streets, and there’s a strange hue to the landscape. Blue skies and white clouds are traded for an orange horizon extending to the heavens. It’s like I’m wearing a pair of shooting glasses: everything is hued, but all the landscape features are crisp so you can see every detail. Where the hell are we?


CHAPTER TWENTY
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CHARLIE IS STARTLED AND frantically looks around with panic and, yes, even fear. The last thing he remembers is getting up to take a piss. But he’s not in his cell anymore. This room looks ancient, with crude, large gray bricks and stones set into the walls and on the floor. He thinks to himself that he must be dreaming he’s in a castle dungeon. There’s little light illuminating the room, and he can’t figure out its source. As he’s making his way against the damp, cold stone wall looking for an exit, he feels more than he sees a sudden bright light so intense it obstructs his thoughts.
Voices shrilling the most demonic, agonizing sound he has ever heard fill his ears and mind. The voices crescendo and pierce the back of his eyeballs; the pressure in his head feels like it is going to explode. He collapses onto the ground, scratching at his skull and starts screaming himself, wishing he were dead. The problem is—he already is.
When Erebus brought Charlie back, they gave him a single mission: go to the epicenter and unlock the portal that will merge Adamah and Sheol. If Charlie can unlock the realm for Erebus, they can rule both worlds, and the world, as we know it in 1984, will cease to exist. They tell Charlie that one of the boys is the navigator. He’s been crossing between worlds his entire life; only he thought he was dreaming. The other two boys are needed to unlock the portal; they’re the chosen ones. Picked because of their lineage that has been lost and forgotten for hundreds of years, they will be the sacrifice, and their blood amalgamated will be the key to the lock.


CHAPTER TWENTY- ONE
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THE LEGACY LANCE AND Jeremy’s ancestors left? It was death on a scale so massive and grotesque they’re considered the vilest humans to ever walk the earth—so evil that all records of them abolished and no stories or songs made of them for memorialization. Centuries ago, their ancestors ruled through fear, torture, and death. After violent land battles, they forced the living soldiers to collect and harvest all of the dead regardless of side and ordered the flesh stripped off the bones before leaving the battlefield. Mounds of skin, muscle, fat, and innards were piled so high they were thought to touch the sky. The decay, stench, and gore drove many mad, and they took their own lives only to join the mounds. Better to be dead and in peace than living this horror. They ordered the captured slaves to build ceremonial walls and décor out of the bones around their newly conquered kingdoms. It was often family members of the conquered building with bones of their loved ones. Thousands upon thousands, sometimes tens of thousands, of dead were used for landscaping. This technique was very effective for keeping the commoners in a state of fear and ensured their rule was safe from uprisings. Their ancestors’ favorite feast to dine on during