A/N: See Chapter 1 for Disclaimer. I also want to say that I'm sorry I haven't updated in a while, but I felt led by the Lord to work on (and finally finish, lol!) another fanfic in another fandom here. Now, though, I'm back to work on Horizon and Lord willing, I'll have Horizon: The Last Battle completed within the next few weeks (I hope!). Thank you very much for stopping by. ((HUGS)) to anybody out there who needs one in these crazy times. God bless you all.
Chapter Summary: Louise prepares to face a dire threat.
Chapter 2: Preparing for Battle
The next few months were rather difficult for Louise. She really enjoyed all the wonderful vacations George took her on, of course, but it was still difficult for her to face the fact that she no longer had the strength to do all the things she used to do. After Angie graduated from high school and started attending college, Louise began working at the Help Center full-time, but ever since her heart attack, she'd had to go back to only working part-time, which was deeply frustrating for her. And even though George was only trying to be helpful, his continual overprotectiveness of her did drive her a little crazy sometimes. And of course, life certainly didn't get any easier for Louise or for anyone when the Twin Towers and Building Seven fell in New York City that September. Mercifully, George and Louise had been on vacation in Hawaii when it happened, and the Willises had been out of town visiting a family friend, and Florence and Mr. Bentley and Ralph and Charlie and all the other tenants had managed to evacuate Manhattan unscathed along with all of Tim's family. And Melissa, Angie, and Tim had been safe working at the hospital, helping to care for the influx of patients coming through their doors. Now that a month had passed and things seemed to be calming down a little, it would seem that Louise's life would be less stressful. However, nothing could be further from the truth.
Just before Louise was getting ready to leave the Help Center at noon on the first Friday of November that year, she found a very strange note that had been left on her desk while she'd been in the restroom. And after she read it, she knew exactly who it was from, and her heart began to race.
"Are you alright, Louise?" asked Helen as she came walking into the office a few moments later. "I don't mean to be hurtful, but honey, you look dreadful right now."
Louise then immediately shook it off and told Helen, "No, I'm alright. I'm just tired, and I'm really ready to get out of here and start my weekend." Louise knew now that pouring her heart out to Helen was in fact the worst thing she could possibly do. Even though the situation she was now facing was deeply disturbing, she knew it was something she had to handle on her own.
"I hear you. I'll see you later, Louise. Have a great weekend, girl."
"You too, Helen," Louise said pleasantly, and then she left.
As soon as Louise drove the new specialized blue van George had gotten her months earlier into the parking garage of her apartment building, she saw him standing there, waiting for her. After wheeling herself off the van's lift onto the ground of the parking garage, he approached her with a menacing grin. Although his brown hair had all but turned white, his icy-cold gray eyes had not changed. He was unkempt, and it was obvious he hadn't shaved for days. He was of average height, and he was actually much more muscular than he'd been before. But no matter how many changes there might have been in his physical appearance, Louise would have recognized him regardless.
"Louise, Louise," he said in the most taunting voice. "Long time, no see. How many years has it been? How you doin'?"
"I was doing quite nicely until I had to look at your sick face once again," Louise told him truthfully.
"Now, now, Louise…is that any way to speak to the father of your little girl? And I've seen Angie. A bright, compassionate nurse. Beautiful. Married. Sweet as chocolate. I've got to give you credit, Louise. You did an excellent job of raising our daughter."
"YOU STAY AWAY FROM HER!" Louise screamed at the top of her lungs as she began punching him with her fists and beating him with her purse. Unfortunately, he easily overpowered her, and he grabbed her arms with such force that she was no longer able to hold onto her purse, and she dropped it to the ground.
"Calm down, Louise. Calm down," he said in the same taunting voice. "I have no interest in Angela. And for that matter, I have no interest in Melissa or in George or in Lionel or in any of your grandchildren, so you can relax. No. The only person that still interests me after all these years…is you."
"Do with me what you want. Just leave them out of this."
"No worries, my dear. I won't touch a hair on any of their pretty heads. I give you my word."
"The 'word' of a murderer and a rapist doesn't exactly comfort me."
"It'll have to do."
"Why are you here? What do you want?"
"I already told you what I want. I want you."
"Well you've got me. I'm right here in front of you."
"No, no. I don't mean now. I'll meet you again, right here in the parking garage, exactly four weeks from today, on the last day of this month."
"Why the wait?" Louise asked.
He then shrugged and said, "I thought you might like to enjoy one last Thanksgiving with your family. I may appear to be hard and cruel on the surface, but underneath, I really can be an old softie at times. See you in four weeks, Louise."
In the next moments, he turned around and left, and Louise wheeled herself to the elevator and went upstairs to her apartment as quickly as she could. After taking her coat off and hanging it up, she was overwhelmed with nausea, and she went into the bathroom and vomited into the toilet. A couple of minutes later, she grabbed a washcloth and wetted it and washed her face. She then wheeled herself into the bedroom, took off her shoes, pushed herself out of her wheelchair into the bed, pulled up the covers over herself, and just allowed all the sobs she'd been holding back to come.
After crying her heart out, Louise slipped comfortably into sleep for the next couple of hours. When Florence got back home about fifteen minutes after Louise did, she heard Louise sobbing in the master bedroom, so naturally, she called George, and he left the office for the day and returned home. However, by the time he arrived, Louise had already fallen asleep. Understandably, George didn't want to wake her, so he just took his shoes off and quietly slipped into bed beside her. And when Louise opened her eyes at about three o'clock that afternoon and saw that George was there with her, she smiled, and he wrapped his arms around her and gave her a big kiss.
"Hey there, sexy," said George, and Louise laughed a bit.
"Hey," Louise whispered, and again, he kissed her. "What time is it?" she asked.
"It just turned three," George replied.
"What are you doing home so soon?"
"Florence heard you cryin' in here after you got home from the Help Center and she called me."
"You didn't have to come home from work early just because I had a bad day, but I won't lie. I'm so glad you did."
"So am I. What happened, sweetheart? Did you lose somebody today?" George asked as he stroked her cheek with his index finger. Even though Louise was almost always successful at talking people out of committing suicide on days when she worked at the Help Center's suicide hotline, there were rare times when she lost someone, and George knew better than anyone what a harsh toll it took on her inside whenever that happened.
"No, nothing like that. It was just a typical day at the Help Center. I'm just tired, that's all. I'm so tired," Louise told George, but she wasn't speaking of physical fatigue like George thought. She was so, so tired of that horrific beast.
"I think I know somebody who's gonna be takin' the next few weeks off from the Help Center," said George, and Louise nodded.
"You're right about that," Louise agreed, and again, George lovingly kissed her. "I love you so much, George. So much," she whispered while stubbornly fighting off a fresh onslaught of tears.
"I love you too, baby," George whispered. Then a minute or so later, he got out a nightgown for Louise and helped her change into it, and he stayed by her side while she fell asleep once again.
"I can't believe it," Leah said solemnly as Louise sat with her and Estelle at her kitchen table two days later. "I just can't believe it." Leah's previously blonde hair was now as white as snow, and her sparkling emerald eyes were as beautiful as ever as she anxiously drummed her fingers against the big white mug of tea she was holding. After arranging it with Leah, Louise left New York and came to Haven Lake for a visit with Leah and Estelle. She would be staying with them for the next two weeks, and then George would come so that he and Louise could celebrate Thanksgiving Day with Leah and Estelle, and then he would be taking her home. George was worried about Louise and it hadn't been easy for her to convince him to agree to her being in Haven Lake for that long without him by her side, but at the end of the day, she prevailed as she almost always did.
"Neither can I," said Estelle. "All these years go by, not a word from him. Not a sound. Nothing. And now this. Why now? Why come back all of the sudden like this?"
Leah shook her head and said, "If we sit here trying to figure out why that evil maniac does the things he does, we'll be stuck here scratching our heads for all eternity. Nothing he does will ever make any sense."
Louise nodded and said, "Leah's right. Right now, it doesn't matter why he's chosen to come back into my life at this particular time. It only matters how I choose to respond."
Estelle nodded then and told Louise, "You're right, honey. You are absolutely right."
"As much as I love George, there's no way I can be around him now, because if he were with me, I'd never be able to keep my emotions suppressed, and I'd never be able to think this thing through logically like I need to. I'd just be crying in his arms all the time. That's why I need to be here with you two in Haven Lake, away from George, so I can have a chance to catch my breath and really think," Louise explained.
"We understand, Louise," Leah said kindly. "We're always here for you when you need us. You know that."
"I know," said Louise.
"Do you have any ideas about what your next move might be?" Leah asked.
"I certainly thought about going to the cops, but at the end of the day, I decided not to."
"They probably wouldn't do much anyway," said Estelle.
"As much as I hate to say it, Estelle's probably right," Leah agreed.
"He knew things. He knew things about the family. About Angie. I know he's been secretly watching us. I just don't know for how long. And I'm afraid that he's probably still watching us, and I'm afraid that if I went to the cops, he would probably try to hurt my husband or one of my children in revenge. And we all know that if I went to George with this, he wouldn't hesitate to track him down and rip him apart with his bare hands, and the last thing I need is for my husband to end up doing life in prison. After all, nobody saw or heard our conversation that day, and the maintenance of our apartment building is a joke. The security cameras in the parking garage are almost always out of order, and I have no doubt they were that day."
"If it's so bad, why don't you and George move to a more secure place? He can easily afford it," Estelle pointed out.
"We've talked about it several times over the years and we just can't bear the thought of leaving. We love that apartment. We have so many memories there. We raised two of our children there."
"Anyway, Louise, you were talking about George and your conversation with that snake in the parking garage?" said Leah.
"Right. As I was saying, there's no way to prove what he said to me when he met with me the other day. And I was all shaken up and I wasn't thinking and I threw his note away in the waste basket of our bathroom as soon as I got home that day. So there's no way to prove that he's threatened our family."
"Did you have your cell phone on you while he was talking to you in the parking garage?" asked Leah.
"It was inside my van and it was turned off," Louise replied.
"Oh," said Leah.
"No, I know that if I were to tell George what was going on, he'd find him and break his neck without thinking twice about the consequences. He's told me countless times through the years how he fantasizes about killing him with his bare hands, and whenever he tells me that, I can see it in his eyes that he really means it. And if that were to happen, George actually could end up doing life in prison for committing an act of murder, despite the fact that that snake is a serial killer and a rapist. You see, I'm planning on meeting with him and shooting him and killing him in self-defense. As soon as he tries to make a move to harm me, I'll fire at him to protect myself. George, on the other hand, would just walk right up to him and start beating him up and killing him without thinking twice. He wouldn't strike back in self-defense. He wouldn't wait for him to make the first move before he started beating him to death. And if George did kill him in an act of premeditated murder and not self-defense, it could weigh heavily on his conscience every day for the rest of his life, not to mention ruining the rest of his life with him being stuck in a prison cell. And George is smaller than he is, too. It's possible that he could be too small to overpower him, and if he should get the upper hand over George in a physical confrontation, I can't bear to think what he would do to him. But because I'm so much weaker than he is physically, and because I'm in a wheelchair, there's not any risk of me being overpowered by him and getting my bones broken by him and getting raped by him in a physical confrontation because when I see that he's about to try to hurt me, I'll just pull out my gun and shoot him in self-defense."
"It sounds like you've been putting a lot of logical thought into this already, Louise," Leah observed.
"Yeah, I guess I have," said Louise.
"I'm a pretty old-fashioned kind of gal," said Estelle. "I've always believed that it's the man's place to be the protector of the home. But I've got to admit, Louise, that you do make some very good points. Even though I don't entirely agree with your decision to leave George out of this and handle it yourself, I do understand where you're coming from."
"Thank you, Estelle," Louise told her.
"Mark must be turning cartwheels in his grave right now at the thought of you facing that beast again all on your own," Estelle said.
"I don't doubt it," said Leah.
"I know that if that husband of yours were still alive, Leah, he would go after that beast, life in prison or not. None of us would be able to restrain him," Estelle told them.
"That's true," Leah agreed.
"Well now, Mark's with Jesus, and I'm not about to let George do anything stupid and get life in prison," Louise declared. "It's better if I do it because if I'm the one to fight against him in self-defense, the jury would be more likely to believe me, even if the security cameras in the parking garage aren't working. They'd probably feel sorry for me because I'm in a wheelchair, and I'd be more likely than George to escape a life sentence. So that means that, like it or not, dealing with this beast is up to me. I need your prayers, ladies. I need them now more than ever."
"You've always got our prayers, honey," Estelle told her while giving her hand a good squeeze. "Always. You know that."
"Always, Louise," Leah echoed while taking her other hand and squeezing it, and despite all her worries and fears, Louise looked at her dear friends and gave them a loving and confident smile.
The next day, Louise told Leah and Estelle that she was not going to go into this unprepared, and they both accompanied her to the same shooting range where Mark used to take her, and for the next two days, she practiced endlessly, and she was indeed a very good shot. Then Leah introduced her to a heavyset, muscular black man in his sixties named Eric Jones, the son of an old Army buddy of Mark's who was now deceased. After living in Maine for many years, he and his wife recently moved to Haven Lake. He was a former cop who now taught science at Haven Lake Junior High and coached their football team, and he and his wife were good friends with Leah and Estelle. And when Leah explained the situation to him, he was more than willing to lend a helping hand. Mark had told his father all about Louise, so he'd known of her for a long time before they actually met. And when they did meet for the first time, he let her know what an honor it was to finally meet her before he gave her refresher courses in various methods of self-defense over the next two weeks. And when Louise suggested that she actually wanted to do her self-defense training and practice her shooting in the hellhole of all places, Eric understood and backed her up while Leah and Estelle protested. Both of them were convinced that returning to the hellhole would be too traumatic for Louise, but Louise explained that if she purposely exposed herself to the hellhole multiple times before meeting up with him again, she would probably make herself completely numb to it, and thus, less afraid. And if she could numb herself to the fear of the hellhole, it might make it easier for her to numb herself to the fear of him when the time came for her to face him again. And although Leah and Estelle didn't like it, they did support Louise through it all. The first two days that Louise trained in the hellhole, she vomited several times, but after those first two days, she managed to bravely grit her way through it.
It was now two minutes past five on the evening of Wednesday, the twenty-first of November, which of course was the day before Thanksgiving that year. While Leah and Estelle were in the house, Louise was sitting out in the backyard in her wheelchair, watching the glorious pink, blue, and purple winter sunset in the sky above, when Eric went out to her.
"How you doing, Louise?" he asked.
"I'm basically scared out of my mind and trying to hide it and look all brave and courageous. How am I doing?"
"You're doing great. You are easily the most courageous person on this planet."
"It's very sweet of you to exaggerate like that."
"Oh no, Louise. I'm not exaggerating. I'm not exaggerating one bit," Eric assured her, and then he kissed her cheek. "You are the most courageous lady I ever met. That's the God's honest truth."
"Well despite me supposedly being so 'courageous,' I know that after George and I celebrate Thanksgiving tomorrow here with Leah and Estelle and he takes me back home, all my 'courage' is going to fly right out the window. Being with George again, knowing that this is could easily be the last week I spend with him, will make me so emotional. I'm scared that being with George during this next week will break down my defenses and make me crack. Maybe I should talk him into going back to Manhattan without me while I spend my last week here. What if I go home and give in to all the emotional pressure and tell George everything?"
"What if you spend what could be your last week here in Haven Lake, and all the pressure gets to you anyway and you just completely break down? I've been watching you over the past couple of days, Louise, and I can tell you're ready to snap. What if, in the middle of all your training and shooting practice, your nerves get so fried that you forget what you're fighting for before you go out onto that battlefield and face him for the last time? What if your nerves are so fried on the inside that when it's time to go to battle to protect the people you love the most, you can't? You've got to go home tomorrow night, Louise. You've got to go home with your husband and spend this week with him and with all your loved ones. You've got to remember why you're doing this."
After a long moment of thought, Louise nodded and said, "You're right, Eric. You're right. Even though it won't be easy, I do need to be with my husband and my children and my friends now. I should spend this last week with them before I go back to battle for what we all know will be the last time."
"Yes, you should. You absolutely should," Eric agreed.
"Thank you so much for all you've done to help me prepare for battle, Eric. I don't know what I would've done if you hadn't shown up. You've helped me so much. You've taught me so much."
"It was a privilege, my dear. An absolute privilege. And I want you to know that if I didn't have a wife and two children and five grandchildren and a bunch of junior high kids to think about, I'd gladly step out onto that battlefield with you, Louise. I would."
"I know you would," she assured him. "But we've talked about this before."
"I know."
"It means the world to me that you would even think of doing this with me. It really does. But you have a family to think about. You have students to think about. You have your own life. And you cannot and will not put it at risk just because of me. I won't have that. Besides, when I face him again next Friday, I know I won't be facing him alone. I know that I'll have Jesus, Himself by my side, and I know that nobody can hope for any better protection than that."
"That certainly is true," Eric agreed. Then, knowing that he wouldn't be able to come to Leah's house for Thanksgiving tomorrow, knowing that this was goodbye, he kissed her cheek again and told her, "Godspeed, Louise."
"Godspeed, Eric," Louise told him in a brave voice, and then with a nod, he walked away. And when George came the next day and he and Louise returned to their high-rise apartment in Manhattan after enjoying Thanksgiving with Leah and Estelle, Louise began preparing herself to start saying goodbye to the people she loved the most.