Not of This World Read online

  NOT OF THIS WORLD

  A GROUP X CASE • BOOK 1

  J. A. BOUMA

  Copyright © 2022 by J. A. Bouma

  All rights reserved.

  EmmausWay Press

  An Imprint of EmmausWay Media Group

  PO Box 1180 • Grand Rapids, MI 49501

  www.emmauswaypress.com

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  This book is a work of fiction. The characters, organizations, products, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and experience, and are not to be construed as real. Any reference to historical events, real organizations, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual products, organizations, events, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Unless otherwise noted, all Scripture quotations are from New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright © 1989 National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

  Scripture quotations noted as being from the NIV: Holy Bible, NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION®, NIV®, is copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.® Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.

  CONTENTS

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  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  Author's Note

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  Also by J. A. Bouma

  About the Author

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  PROLOGUE

  Full moons and restless hearts with nothing to do are just what the doc ordered on a night like tonight.

  Or the Devil, as the case may be.

  What’s the saying?

  Idle hands are the Devil's workshop. Or is it idle hands are the Devil's tools? Ahh, no, I got it: Idle hands are the Devil's playground.

  Oh, bother. All of the above is more than apropos.

  For every night—nay, every day!—the streets are alive with possibilities because they’re teeming with people, with sheeple, with the unwashed masses who lumber and lurch with outstretched hands searching for a handout of what only I and my brethren can offer. Where the shadows speak of things forbidden yet offer the promise of what we offer.

  Life.

  Or at least a temporary reprieve from their life. A little dose of something-something to take away the bite of disappointment and regret, to soothe the brokenhearted and broken-spirited, to offer a reprieve for the desperate, the lonely, the downtrodden.

  Yessiree, that’s my aim, that’s my purpose, that’s my unbidden pleasure wandering across the great expanse of this Third Rock from the Sun!

  Or so the sheeple believe…

  You know what I see when I walk down the street? Any of them, just take your pick. They’re all the same.

  Tree-lined or trash-lined. Suburban sprawl or urban slum. A dirt country road or cobbled High Street. Makes no difference to me and my gang.

  Because, see, they’re all the same. They smell the same.

  And what do I smell?

  Opportunity.

  Can sniff it a mile away because I can spot them a mile away.

  Shuffling about from cubicle to cubicle. Wandering aimlessly down the clearance aisle at the vanilla department store you could swap for any suburban tchotchke joint selling crap slapped with that “Made in China” label. Darting the rug rats around town from soccer practice to piano lessons. Clearing leaves from the gutters or scraping chewing gum off the bottom of their shoe. Sloping up their toddler’s puke or changing their octogenarian mother’s soiled undergarments every thankless day.

  Sheeple, is what they are. The whole lot of them!

  But they’re my sheeple, you see. The ones whose lives are small and pathetic. The downtrodden and upwardly mobile alike. Doesn’t matter whether they’re wearing a suit or slumming it in sweats. Whether they call a two-story row house home or the inside of a cardboard box. Makes no difference to me who they are, how they dress, where they live.

  Because, see, it’s opportunity, all the way down. The whole lot of them are just waiting for me to give them what they want—what they long for.

  Life.

  And the opportunities abound to give ‘em what they want. Opportunity to distract and detract. Opportunity to numb away the pain and gain a follower. One that will always come back for more. One that will stop at nothing to get what I offer. Something that is even better than life.

  Escape.

  Because when it comes to life on this Third Rock from the Sun, there’s nothing more to live for. Nothing more than a needle straight into a vein pulsing with life, just waiting to dull the senses and numb away the pain and frustration of a small life unlived. Or a Chase Sapphire Reserve with a ten-G limit and the empty back seats of a Cadillac Escalade filled to the brim with junk. Even a cocked pistol shoved straight into the kisser, aimed at the brainstem, would do the trick.

  I prefer the needle. So does my clientele.

  Except…

  What’s that there?

  Oh, yes. A steeple.

  A steeple for the sheeple.

  Sitting smack dab in the middle of my opportunity. At the intersection of hope and despair. Manned by a pastor or priest. Or suppose womanned, as the case may be.

  Someone who gives the sheeple something to live for. Something to satiate their God-shaped hole, as one chap put it a few centuries ago.

  With a proposition I can’t offer…

  No matter. Yessiree, opportunity abounds. From sea to shining sea. Or any old street corner will do.

  Except…

  Who’s there? The man bending low to offer a Dasani bottle and sack lunch to the hobo lying in the gutter with a rubber hose still wrapped around his arm?

  Father Rafferty, that’s who.

  Just can’t help himself, can he? Doing his darnedest to do unto the least of these, and all that other crap the Name-Who-Shall-Remain-Nameless spouted off two millennia ago.

  Now the man’s putting an arm around the hobo stinking like a gym bag! Offering him his coat straight from his back, even.

  Those words from The Nameless come to mind.

  ‘I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you gave me clothing.’

  Check, check, and double-check!

  And wait, what is this?

  The man’s pulling something fro
m beneath his cloak, gesturing toward the hobo moaning and groaning something fierce.

  At least he was. The fella seems a bit brighter now, with a skip in his step that wasn’t there a moment ago.

  Before Padre showed his mug in these parts.

  Naughty, naughty, Father Rafferty.

  He’s been a very bad boy. A very bad boy, indeed. Which is ironic, because that gesture was the least of his sins.

  Believe me. I know all and see all.

  Padre tangoed on the wrong side of the tracks. Should have stuck with hearing confessions and fondling the marbles of altar boys.

  No matter.

  I can deal—with him or her, with whatever it is standing in the way of my opportunity.

  Because I can kill.

  And will.

  I am Chaos. And I’m just getting started.

  CHAPTER 1

  Elijah Fox loved mojitos with a passion that burned bright and strong.

  And not just because of the white rum that set his brain buzzing and twitching fingers at ease. It was more than that. More what snowbird grannies and vacationing middle-age managers alike craved in their tropical drink of choice.

  Yeah, the crushed mint and lime had something to do with it. As did the sugar (always a downfall) and soda water (loved how the bubbles tickled his tongue and nostrils). The combination of sweetness, tart citrus, and herbaceous mint flavors certainly did the body good. A perfect tropical trifecta, it was.

  But it was more than that. It was everything that surrounded the mojito. The furniture, if you will.

  The high sun blazing to beat the band in a cloudless sky at the equator, kissing the cheeks and back of the neck with a burn that faded into a golden-brown tan. The white-sand beaches dotted by a rainbow spectrum of umbrellas and beach towels. The crystal-clear ocean water lapping ashore. Even the rug rats scrambling to build sandcastles or collect shells and sea glass.

  Ahh, what a life that was.

  And it had been Elijah’s life too, the past few months. Shirtless under a beach umbrella on Playa Blanca, olive skin singed by Mother Nature’s rays until he perfected the proper sun lotion dosage before he got a wicked-coovey tan (that’s a cool-groovy neologism mashup, for the uninitiated). Half-drained mojito in one hand, Kindle with Steven King’s latest yarn in the other. Powdery white sand between his toes, with his equally white Jack Russell rescue sandwiched between his legs. Nothing but rays to catch, time to kill, and mojitos to drink before his new gig.

  Director of operations for Group X, the investigative arm for the Order of Thaddeus, ancient defender and protector of the Christian faith. With his former partner, Georgina Anderson, from the Federal Bureau of Investigation at his side. The pair had cut their teeth on solving cases of the more paranormal variety that stumped Uncle Sam’s men in black.

  And there he was: back in Washington, DC, and back in the saddle of an investigative arm solving cases of the more supernatural variety—only this time for Jude Thaddeus, or at least his long-lost religious order.

  The Lord sure worked in mysterious, if ironic, ways.

  And Elijah was content with that. Had always been, learning at a young age that the wind blows wherever it pleases, including the Spirit’s, as John’s Gospel quotes Jesus.

  Early in his life, he had clung to a daily breadcrumb of Scripture many people take out of context and slap on their life, using it as a sort of rabbit’s foot for everything that goes right and wrong in their life. Racing through the DC streets, he quoted Jeremiah 29:11 to himself:

  For surely I know the plans I have for you, says the Lord, plans for your welfare and not for harm, to give you a future with hope.

  For an eight-year-old boy who lived in a five-story cesspool that was more a perpetual porta john than anything resembling a moderately up-kept Motel 6, the verse was the lifeline that kept him going. Of course, no one quotes the rest of the passage, the next three verses:

  Then when you call upon me and come and pray to me, I will hear you. When you search for me, you will find me; if you seek me with all your heart, I will let you find me, says the Lord, and I will restore your fortunes and gather you from all the nations and all the places where I have driven you, says the Lord, and I will bring you back to the place from which I sent you into exile.

  Sure, the passage reflects the heart of Yahweh for his people, a God who is ‘ready to forgive, gracious and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love,’ as the Book of Nehemiah and other places in the Hebrew Scriptures testify. But most Westerners who quote the good prophet Jeremiah haven’t been exiled to corrupt authoritarian regimes by Yahweh himself!

  As he matured in his faith, Elijah preferred the commentary James, the brother of Jesus, offered on the matter in the fourth chapter of his book:

  Come now, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we will go to such and such a town and spend a year there, doing business and making money.” Yet you do not even know what tomorrow will bring. What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes. Instead you ought to say, “If the Lord wishes, we will live and do this or that.” As it is, you boast in your arrogance; all such boasting is evil.

  Elijah had learned early on that boasting about tomorrow was as fruitless as spitting into an Atlantic Ocean wind. Such boastings were liable to come back and smack you in the face, leaving you with nothing but a slimy, goopy mess to clean up. He preferred to leave his options open. Probably far too open, but open, nonetheless.

  Now he was planted behind a lumbering Ford Taurus from last century sounding like it smoked a pack a day, racing to start his new life.

  Should have bypassed downtown DC to Constitution Avenue edging along the National Mall. Would’ve been way out of the way, but traffic was better and so was the view. The Mall trifecta got him every time—with Honest Abe perched on his throne peering down the green past the Washington Monument on to the U.S. Capitol Building, its dome shimmering in the daylight.

  Forget this…

  He revved his BMW motorcycle past the Taurus, zig-zagging between cars until he was making headway toward destiny.

  And boy, did he love revving. With all of the potential power in those handlebars, and the 91 horsepower at 4,750 revolutions per minute propelling him forward, giving him all the control he needed to go wherever and whenever—and as fast as ever—he wanted.

  Power and control.

  The two things in his life he’d never had. Not over his life, certainly not over where it went. Not even his own body, his emotions and brain and body triggered by stimulus and circumstances outside of his control, and leading to less-than-ideal reactions he had little power over.

  The self-defeating thought triggered his stimming trick, or tried to anyway. Except his gloved hand gripping the throttle wouldn’t allow for it. No way for his thumb to press against his index finger, then his middle, and to his ring finger and pinkie. So, he’d have to settle for the next best thing.

  Whistling “Amazing Grace.”

  Was especially effective inside his helmet, the high pitch music to his ears along with the vibration of his lips a balm to his rising anxiety. Stimming or stimulating for autistic people was like drinking water. Couldn’t not do it when the thirst came.

  Wasn’t sure exactly where it was coming from, this sudden wave thirsting for emotional release. Some of it was the cars and noise and general urban furniture pressing in against him. But his helmet mostly took care of that, the feeling of being removed from it all with the darkened visor and near soundlessness one reason why he’d taken to motorcycling.

  He had a hunch, though. And it was called—

  “Sweet mother of Melchizedek!” he shouted.

  Right before he clutched the handbrake and slammed on the foot brake. And went skidding across the city pavement, searching for a means to a stopping end.

  Throwing up a honking complaint from the Taurus, joined by the angry bellow of some city bus.

  Didn’t matter in the slight
est. All that did was the eastern gray squirrel scampering across the road and freezing smack dab in the middle of his lane with sheer frozen fright!

  The BMW R18 slid to a halt a few yards from the poor urban critter. Had he kept going, by Elijah’s calculation he would’ve pancaked the little fella in no time flat. With guts and fur and popping eyeballs spread across the road.

  Couldn’t let that happen. Not on his watch.

  The horns flared up again, joined by some choice words that would make his mama blush. But he paid them no mind.

  All that mattered was the eastern gray squirrel’s safety.

  “There you go, little fella. Go eat an acorn for me.”

  And he did, the urban critter finally snapping out of his squirrel-in-headlights stupor and scampering off the road and up a cherry tree showing the first signs of spring.

  Elijah took in a relieved breath, the sweet scent of those cherry flowers dizzying. Another one of God’s creatures safe for another day. That is, until some bozo driving a Taurus throws their humanity out the window!

  Revving his motorcycle, he let the tires rip, sailing through a yellow-turning-red light on squealing tires and getting back to business.

  Where was he?

  Oh yes. The new gig, sparking a rise in his anxiety, his gloved fingers searching for relief but his lips doing the stimming heavy lifting instead.