The Mysterious Case Of The Goddess Jeans - Part III

CHAPTER 3

Suddenly her body gives a violent jerk, and she is sitting bolt upright. Her face devoid of expression, seems carved out of marble. She stares straight ahead into space, but she is listening for something. A second later her phone beeps. She picks it up from the table with a trembling hand and sure enough an address pops up on the screen. She looks at it for a moment and then springs up from the sofa, grabs her handbag and dashes towards the door of the café.

"HEY! Wait for me… I'm coming with you… Goddammit! WAIT…!" V____ opens his wallet and throws down some cash on the table and rushes after her. The waiters, the manager, and the rest of the customers in the café stare after them.

He runs out of the front door just in time to see her getting into a cab.

"HEY! Wait for me!"

She holds the door open; he jumps in and slams it shut.

"Go!" she issues a peremptory order to the driver and off they go.

She is sitting rigidly staring straight ahead.

"Care to share where we are headed?" V____ asks very quietly.

She hands him her phone. The address indicates a factory area, a kilometer or so beyond the city limits, a favourite haunt of gangsters, local thugs and other shady characters.

"Holy crap." V____ breathes inaudibly, or so he thinks. "But I am with a goddess, aren't I?!"

"A goddess who kills both perpetrator and victim," she says, her face frozen. "But I tell you V___, this time I will rather die than…" her voice cracks, but she bites her lower lip so hard she can taste her own blood.

V____ takes her hand in his and holds it tight.

"Faster!" she urges the cabby. The driver senses a note of hysteria in her voice and expertly manoeuvres the cab through traffic, takes judicious shortcuts and finally clears the city limits within fifteen minutes. Once in the outskirts, it takes them another ten minutes of bumpy, broken-down roads and potholes to reach the spot. It is a vast deserted area with a single huge derelict building and a few shanties and dilapidated tool sheds dotting the landscape. The large building is obviously a former factory, probably a rice mill, long abandoned by its owners.

"There." She points to the entrance of the factory on the western side.

"Are you sure you wanna go in there, just the two of you?" the cabby says.

"What's your plan? Let's do a bit of recon, ok?" begins V____, "I will creep up behind those shrubs close to the entrance and try to get a peek into what's going on inside…."

S____ is already striding towards the building. "I know what's going on inside," is all she says, her voice dull.

With a sigh of resignation V____ follows, requesting the cabby to hang around, just in case.

"Dun worry, Sir & Madam, I got your backs!" The cabby is tall and brawny and obviously up for an adventure. He quickly takes a car jack handle and ratchet wrench from the trunk of his cab and brings up the rear.

S____ has already reached the entrance and pushed the heavy door open. Dark, musty interior. Dripping black walls. Pigeons cooing high up on the rafters near the ceiling. Rusty, broken-down equipment lying around here and there. Using these as cover they creep farther along towards the far end of the building. From behind a large old rice milling machine they see, about forty feet away in a clear spot near the eastern wall, a dirty, ragged young girl barely ten years old, in tattered clothes. She is thrashing helplessly around on the ground, gagged, and bound. V____ can see her huge, terrified eyes staring out of a thin, starved face. Two men are standing over her menacingly, with their backs to V___ and S___.

V___ notices, to their advantage, another door on the eastern side about ten feet behind the girl.

The intentions of the two men are obvious. One of them is already unzipping his trousers. Both of them are giggling like two hyenas closing in on their prey.

"I'll go first," the first guy says. "Then we can take turns…. Hehehe!"

S___ and V____ exchange glances.

"I will tackle the two guys. You carry the girl out through the door on the other side. On count of three. One. Two…"

V_____ looks at her incredulously. He can hear her voice clearly in his head, but she has not moved her lips once. "That's not creepy at all! How the heck does she..?" He mutters under his breath.

As soon as they come out of cover, the girl on the floor stops struggling and looks directly at them. Alerted, the two guys start turning around. Out of the corner of his eye, V____ spots some jerry cans in the far corner to his left. It seems they contain some sort of liquid combustible. He is about to warn S____ when -

"And go." 

A sudden whooshing sound and a bloodcurdling yell shock everyone out of their wits.

With a single leap she is at least twenty-five feet up in the air, two huge fiery wings unfurling on her back, flying towards the two men. The wings are approximately fifteen feet across, aglow with flames shooting out of every feather. S___'s entire body is burning like a red-hot furnace, and the diamond stud on her waistband is coming alive. In the next second a beam of blinding white light blasts out of the diamond.

The two miscreants are scurrying for cover and howling in terror as the laser beam approaches them.

"The GIRL! Get her out of here!!! NOW!!!" S____ screams. Her voice is no longer human.

V____, galvanized out of his stupor, springs into action. Just at that moment a burning rafter crashes down from the ceiling in front of him and blocks his way. He leaps forward right through the raging flames and reaches the girl, who is writhing frantically on the ground. With superhuman strength he scoops her up in his arms, his back and hair already on fire, rushes to the exit and bursts out through the door. He staggers a few steps and collapses on the ground along with his frail burden.

The cab driver who has taken a detour around the building from the other side sees them and rushes forward. In the next instant the entire eastern wall, and half the building blows up with a deafening explosion.

With the conflagration roaring behind him the last words that V____ remembers saying are "S____, you… …"

Then everything goes black.

                                                                                                                               ************

D____, a software engineer in her late thirties, stares and stares and stares at the girl sitting opposite her in the AC Volvo bus. She looks like a typical Gen Z college sophomore in a tank top and ripped blue jeans, but there is something positively uncanny about her.

"And what's with that huge fake blue sapphire on her waistband?" D____ muses.

Her eyes travel up towards her co-passenger's face in cool appraisal, studies her firm chin, dimpled cheeks, heart shaped face, the headphones, her arched eyebrows and finally stops at the middle of her forehead. It is a nice forehead. Bright, proud. And then D___ gasps in disbelief, her head spinning, the air around her shimmering like the ripples on the surface of a lake when a pebble is dropped into it... 

Bang in the middle of the forehead between her eyebrows, a soft glow is pulsating around something… what is it? Oh My God! Is that… a third eye…?!?

THE END