Ash Return of the Beast

CHAPTER 33



Later That Day…

The afternoon sun filtered in through the half-drawn blinds in Harlan Bodine’s small, third-floor, two-bedroom apartment as he sat on the edge of the bed that once belonged to his son, Robbie. Harlan’s life changed dramatically a year ago, the day his beloved 16-year-old son committed suicide, shot himself in the head, an hour after leaving a Mega Therion concert.

Prior to that, Harlan’s wife had abandoned both of them when Robbie was just 10 and Harlan raised him on his own from that point on. But Robbie couldn’t seem to stay out of trouble in spite of Harlan’s best efforts to keep him on the straight and narrow. Still, the kid had a brightness, a spunk about him that Harlan admired, treasured really, as it reminded him of himself. He never gave up on the kid and there was always hope that things would work out. Then came the boy’s obsession with Mega Therion. It wasn’t even the band so much as it was the band’s strangely charismatic leader, Rye Cowl.

Robbie’s fixation on Cowl was just another phase, a typical teenager’s quest in search for his own identity. That’s what Harlan kept telling himself. But he soon sensed something else was going on, something considerably more worrisome than a harmless phase. He found books about witchcraft and demonology in Robbie’s room. The boy was changing. It was subtle at first but gradually the signs became dramatically more apparent. He was taking a noticeable and disturbing turn toward a dark side that Harlan had never seen before and the entire transformation, Harlan believed, was somehow connected to Robbie’s obsession with Rye Cowl.

Now, sitting on the edge of Robbie’s bed, Harlan turned a gun over and over in his hands, with a box of shells by his side. The small but powerful pistol was a rare Russian-made semi-automatic used by the KGB. It was known as a ‘silent pistol’ because it fired special cartridges that suppressed their own sound, in effect, a built-in silencer. It was the perfect weapon for what he had planned. He’d had the gun in his coat pocket when he and the other protestors gathered at the concert hall to support Pastor St. Martin’s ill-fated demonstration against Rye Cowl but he didn’t have a chance to use it. It would have been a bad idea, anyway. Too many people.

That was then. This is now, he thought. He stopped fidgeting with the gun, tightened his grip on it, raised it up at arm’s length and took aim at the poster of Cowl that Robbie had left tacked to the wall. Cowl was somehow responsible for his son’s death. He couldn’t prove it but that didn’t matter. He just knew it was true. He was also certain that Cowl was somehow responsible for the deaths of all those preachers. There was one sure way to find out.

Harlan had been following Bloodhound Morran’s articles in the paper. He knew about the 9-day intervals between the mysterious deaths and there were now three days left until the next one––that is, if Cowl was still alive by then. And if he wasn’t––and if the ninth day passed without another attack on a preacher––that would be all the proof he needed.

With the life-like image of Cowl in his sight, Harlan zeroed in on a point between the musician’s eyes and pulled the trigger. -CLICK- Sayonara, you satanic son of a bitch.

But drawing a bead on a poster was one thing. Pulling it off for real was another. He considered several possible scenarios and rejected them one by one. They were all too risky and most were too complicated. Then it hit him. The idea was so simple he had to run it through his mind several times to make sure he wasn’t overlooking something. It couldn’t be that easy. Could it?