A Summertime Journey

a fee. It was one of his uncle’s careless friends who didn’t double-check the lock on the basement door. He carelessly rushed out of the basement and the house after an extremely violent sexual session with Abel. His uncle hadn’t known; he was asleep, drunk, in his chair. That’s when Abel escaped. He was discovered by a passing motorist, crawling on all fours down the road, nothing on but a diaper.
Internal bleeding and a fractured collarbone hospitalized him for nearly a month. He was malnourished and had cigarette burns all over his body, including on his tongue. He also had scars on his back and legs from being whipped with a wire hanger. But the most gruesome discovery for the medical professionals was when they discovered his uncle had pounded small finishing nails into the bottom of Abel’s feet so he could not stand, walk, or run away. His knees were calloused and raw from living this way. His aunt and uncle were arrested and subsequently convicted. The judge stated that he had never in his nineteen-year career encountered more despicable and sick individuals as Abel’s aunt and uncle. Abel spent the rest of his teenage life in foster homes, juvenile detention, and the streets, honing his skill craft he would use as an adult psychotic serial killer. I want to believe that I saw remorse and relief in Charlie’s eyes, but I will never really know.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
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“GRAB THEM AND GO now—hurry,” I hear Emma in my head. I quickly look around as the world is crumbling into itself. I spot Joey and Jeremy and grab each of them by the hand and start running toward the stairs. The entire factory is collapsing; the crumbling building and screams are so loud now I can’t even hear myself think. I imagine what the outside will look like if we make it—the orange sky, the red desert, and all of the grouplings converging on this factory. It will look like Hell. We reach the ground floor and burst through the heavy metal factory doors.
We crash into each other, just as we did when we exited the Thriftway Building, a tangled mess of arms and legs. I still have my eyes closed, afraid of what I will see when I hear Jeremy from on top: “Joey, you touch my balls again, and I’m going to fucking kill you, douchebag.” All three of us start pushing and shoving to get other off one another. I open my eyes, and it’s dark and cool, calm—not an orange, vulture-filled dark. We’re standing in the same spot we met Charlie in the beginning, at the rear of the Thriftway.
Everything is back to normal. Joey and Jeremy seem fine. It’s true: death in Sheol is not eternal. I wonder if they remember what it was like as Charlie’s grouplings? I don’t think I’ll ever ask. We start looking around for Ryan but can’t find him. We hear the angry cowboy still yelling and smacking his bat against the dozer. We take off running, releasing a string of “Fuck you!” and “Suck my cock!” expletives and nervous laughter. We run to Jeremy’s house, the warm air in our faces; his is the closest and makes the most sense. We rush in with Jeremy in the lead; luckily, no one is home.
Once inside his bedroom, we finally stop to catch our breath, sweat dripping down our oily faces and our clothes sticking to our bodies. Joey and Jeremy lie on the bed, and I kick off my shoes and flop down on the black beanbag. We hang out in Jeremy’s room so much that I automatically hit the ON button to his Panasonic cassette stereo. We must have fallen asleep because when I wake up, the sun through the window assaults my eyes. I blink feverishly and rub them so long and hard I fear the blood vessels are popping. I stop. Thank God we survived. How did we survive? What did we survive?
The other two stir awake and sit up. There’s an awkward silence for what seems like an eternity as we all three stare at each other. In my mind, I’m trying to figure out what happened, or if it really happened at all. I’m confused, and I know Jeremy and Joey are, too. I finally break the silence. “Do either of you remember what happened last night?” I ask. They both shake their heads left and right without a word, and I drop it. We sit there, each thinking our thoughts, trying to sort out the night. I don’t think any of us ever did. We have never talked about that night, each of us believing a reality that our minds can cope with and chalking the rest up to getting high and having a horrible dream. If we had compared notes, we would have realized that all three of us have the same story, and I don’t think any of us could live with that reality. The only evidence that any of it was real is Ryan.
Buried in a shallow grave covered with rocks in the Oregon high desert, the authorities found Ryan’s body. The rumor is that a gypsy devil-worshiping cult kidnapped Ryan. They severed his tongue so he could not scream and tortured him mercilessly. It was so heinous; they mutilated his limbs.
Why couldn’t Ryan have died in Sheol instead of our world? He would still be with us today.


CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
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BOISE BOY STILL MISSING
Boise - Earlier this week, local authorities reported finding the remains of missing Boise, Idaho, teenager Ryan Collins, in a shallow grave in the Oregon high desert approximately 50 miles from the Oregon-Idaho border. It was reported the teenager had been abducted in Boise, possibly by an unknown number of adults traveling through the area in a 1970s blue-and-white Volkswagen minibus.
The police reported that the group might be part of a band of vagrants with devil-worshipping ties to a church in Southern California.
At the time