Prologue

The sky was overcast, but the storm had already come. The shining oak coffin set before him proved this to Kenneth. His eyes were heavy as he listened to the preacher drone on and on about the salvation of the soul, the love of God, the tragic end to his sister’s short life. What right did this man have to say such things? Kenneth wondered. He was at least forty years the dead girl’s elder.

“God,” Kenneth said to himself, staring at the cemetery’s grassy floor.

“And the Lord, with his omnipresent grace, shall bless us all—shall take this young woman into his loving bosom….”

Suddenly, Kenneth stood, enraged, and shouted at the preacher. “If ‘God’ is so loving, so all powerful, why doesn’t he bring her back? Why did he let her die! She didn’t deserve to die.…” His mother’s arm was around his back; she was lowering him into the metal folding chair and cooing into his ear, as if he were a baby:

“It’s alright, Kenny. It’s OK.” No one called him Kenny. No, Delilah had called him Kenny…

“That is not for me to say, young man,” the minister finally answered, and Kenny’s rage returned with a vengeance.

He wrenched himself from his mother’s arms. “Then maybe it isn’t for you to say that God is ‘merciful,’ that He is good!” His grammar sucked right now but he didn’t care. “Maybe you’re pissing me off by saying it!” His mother was holding him back. And, at a malnourished fourteen years old, he was kept in place easily.

“This is an abomination,” the minister said in a harsh whisper. “You will show respect for the Lord in this sacred place!”

“Like hell I will!” Kenneth caught his mother in a moment of weakness and pulled himself free of her grip. He moved to the coffin and draped his arms over it, allowing his head to come to rest atop the cool, smooth wood. He began to weep. “She was eighteen, she was an angel...” He spoke to the coffin directly. “You weren’t supposed to die, Delilah.” Just then, as if in answer, he heard a faint knocking on the other side of the lid. He jumped backward, stumbling and almost falling. “Delilah?” he tried to say.

She screamed.

He nearly died.

“Help!” came a female shriek from inside the box. He could hear fists pounding, accompanied by desperate, shivering sobs. “Help me! Why won’t anyone help me?” The last word carried out into a wretched cry.

“She’s alive!” he yelled, trying to open the lid. The coffin was sealed tightly shut. “Somebody get a crowbar, she could run out of air!”

“I’ve had about enough of this.” The reverend pulled him away by the back of the shirt and signaled to the pallbearers. “This has gone on long enough. Please, gentlemen.”

Four burly men approached his sister’s casket, lifting it and then using the attached wires to begin lowering it into the earth. All the while, she continued to scream.

“What are you doing?” Kenneth demanded of the holy man. “Let her out!”

“Please, escort this young man elsewhere.”

His mother, looking sad—she could hear Delilah as well, couldn’t she? They all could!—put her arm back around his shoulder and tried to pull him away from the scene.

The burly, faceless men were lifting shovels and—oh, God—they were burying her. And she was still screaming!

“Stop!” he shrieked at the top of his voice. “Stop it now!” The screaming ceased.

“Kenny!” the now-muffled voice of his sister pleaded from beneath a growing layer of soil.

“Delilah!” He was being pulled away now not only by his mother, but also by his father, who had been dead for just over seven years.

The preacher reached inside his leather trench coat—had he been wearing that before?—and removed a small, black pistol.

“No,” Kenneth whispered.

The man fired. The pain, which felt less like a bullet wound and more like an intense asthma attack, began in Kenneth’s stomach and circulated through his lungs and other organs, finally consuming his entire body in a cold and lifeless blaze. He fell to the ground.

“Help!” Delilah yelled.

Through blurring eyes, he watched the preacher. His vision faded to black for a moment, and when he was able to focus again the holy man was not there. It was simply Jonathan Rogers, a yellowed smirk visibly brightening his dull, brown eyes even through the thick, rectangular glasses and the clump of greasy, black hair which covered the entire right side of his gangly face. The trench coat seemed in place now—yes—just like the gun he held so proudly in his scrawny left hand.

The single picture that Kenneth had ever seen of the emo bastard had been in the local newspaper three years ago—no, last week. It had been an obituary, not two slots from his older sister’s. The photo had been black and white, a prim school picture from maybe a year before. There had been eyeliner and dark lipstick on the face, and he hadn’t been smiling, but at least the hair had been combed back, the cloths neat. Perhaps that was the only reason that the parents had chosen it.

“A troubled child,” it had read. “Double-murder-suicide deemed no one’s fault.” And then, the clincher:

“May he rest in peace.”

“Burn in hell!” Kenneth choked. He could barely breathe. God, his lungs were small. He was going to die. He wanted to die…

Jonathan smirked wider, lifting his gun once again. Jonathan, Kenneth reasoned, no matter how many bullets he put into his own head, would likely never die.

“Evil like that doesn’t die,” Delilah said. She was lying next to him now, bleeding to death through a wound in her neck. Oddly, she bled both blood and embalming fluid. “It festers, gains power…until it’s destroyed. We have a purpose, brother.”

Jonathan cocked the hammer.

“Don’t do it!” Kenneth begged.

Finally, Jonathan spoke. “The world wasn’t made for people like us.”

The gun fired. At his skull. He awoke.

“God,” he said. He was sitting up in bed, the sun spilling into the nearby window, and sweat covering every inch of his body. But he was still in the dream. How could they shoot her? Why couldn’t the others hear her? Why wouldn’t Jonathan die? He didn’t deserve to live when Delilah….

The fog began to clear. Kenneth became somewhat aware of his surroundings, and tried to take a deep breath. His lungs burned, tightened. He was having a severe attack of asthma.

He searched frantically for his rarely-used inhaler. Where was it? He needed to breathe! Now! He dug in the messy drawer of his nightstand and finally knocked it free. It slid under the bed. He got down on his knees, his insides screaming like Delilah in her grave, and finally felt his hand fall over it. He brought it to his mouth and inhaled sharply, finally feeling the attack begin to subside. He sat on the blue carpet of his bedroom, his back against the side of the bed, and took several more healing breaths.

Memories of the dream returned, and they made his heart race. It was just a dream, he reminded himself. In our modern times, there was no premature burial. Science had advanced too far.

Yes, he reasoned, Death is final, the Bible was written by madmen, and dreams are only dreams…

He was seventeen, and he was alive. Unlike Delilah, Jasmine and Jonathan Rogers, who had been dead for almost three years.

When his vitals relaxed a bit more, he sat up and made his way to the bathroom to prepare for the day ahead.