One-hundred more meters to go. Maddix looked at his watch. His run just eclipsed four-minutes and twenty-five seconds. He dug down deeper, ignored his gasping lungs and pushed his legs to their absolute limits.

He could see the ghost hunters’ GMC Yukon parked in front of the church. The black SUV’s back hatch hung open. Last night he followed around the paranormal investigators as they set up their motion sensors, digital voice recorders and digital cameras in different areas of the sanctuary and in various classrooms. He even helped them hang wind chimes from light fixtures. After setup, the ghost hunters left the church, promising to return after midnight to begin their investigation.

Maddix sprinted the last twenty yards into the church parking lot. He stopped and looked at his watch. He completed the run in four minutes and forty-two seconds. Not bad for a man with only one leg, he thought.

With hands on hips, he walked up to a cottonwood tree and sat down in the shaded grass. He looked at the church as he reined in his racing breath. I wonder what they found.

He didn’t have to wait long to find out. The front doors of the church suddenly burst open. The two ghost hunters, their arms laden with equipment, ran out of the church and up to their vehicle.

Maddix got up and hurried over to them. “Hey, what did you guys see in there? How many ghosts do we have?” he asked, trying his best to sound cheerful, as if pastors ask this sort of question all the time.

The ghost hunters ignored him and began dumping their equipment into the Yukon’s ample storage area.

Maddix touched the shoulder of the man closest to him. “So how did it go last night?”

The man turned to face him. His wild eyes bugged out from an ashen face. “Preacher, you don’t have ghosts in there,” he said as he jerked his thumb back towards the church.

“Then what do we have?”

The ghost hunter tossed an EMF meter onto the equipment pile and slammed shut the hatch. He ran around to the driver’s side door and hopped in. Maddix followed him. He rapped on the window until the driver put the window down.

“Can you please answer my question?” Maddix said firmly.

“Preacher, you and your congregation need to clear out of that building,” the man said, his voice quivering. “And you need to do it fast.”

“Why?”

“Because you don’t have ghosts in there, you have demons! And you have lots of them!” the driver hissed just before backing up out of his parking stall.

Slack-jawed, Maddix watched the ghost hunters speed away, tires squealing down the road. He watched the retreating vehicle until he could no longer see its taillights. He sighed and looked back at the church. Nestled among soaring cottonwoods and a babbling creek, the church complimented the bucolic setting, yet inside its walls it had become a haunt for demons. Maddix could hardly believe it. What have I gotten myself into? What in the name of Heaven do I do now?

Chapter 3

Zion National Park

Her legs feeling as if they were made up of curing concrete, Sara Kendall turned and looked down the steep gully filled with sun-tortured sand and withered brush. Her clients lagged behind again. They plodded through the parched bunchgrass and squawbush like overburdened pack mules.

Near the ridge of the gully, Sara stopped climbing and waited for the family of four to catch up. She removed an insulated water thermos from her backpack’s webbing and took several swigs.

A lethal combination of hot sunshine and exertion from scrambling up sandy terrain had worn down the city dwellers from Chicago. The Larson family hired her to guide them on a three-day backpacking trip through Parunweap Canyon.

As far as slot canyons go, Parunweap Canyon is rated 2CIV on the Canyon Rating System. Rappelling isn’t necessary, and a person in decent shape with good backpacking skills can easily walk the 18.5 mile route in two days.

The most difficult aspect of the canyon is that the trail isn’t marked very well and requires wading through chest-deep water for several miles.

Today marked the third and final day of the trip. Sara had pushed her clients hard this morning. She wanted them out of the canyon. Thunderheads building in the west promised to dump heavy rain later on in the day.

Flash floods in slot canyons have killed many unsuspecting hikers over the years. The shallow pools and tributaries of the Virgin River fill up quickly with rain and become lethal torrents in slot canyons.

Sara removed her backpack and set it on the ground. She rolled her bronzed shoulders several times. The fifty-pound backpack she wore chaffed her back muscles. She grinned as she watched the squabbling Larson kids maneuver the ascending trail. Nine-year-old Jacob Larson was having a ball, while his fifteen-year-old sister acted as if she were being tortured by Attila the Hun. Katy Larson had been acting like a spoiled prima donna since day one of the trip. She still seethed from the loss of her iPhone. She accidently dropped the phone in the river while trying to text, and now her young life lay in absolute ruin.

Two years ago Sara gave up her corporate accounting job to start her own guide service into the slot canyons of Zion National Park. The money wasn’t very good, but the perks were excellent.

Instead of stagnating in a tiny cubicle, staring bleary-eyed at a computer screen, she rappelled down 1000 foot palisades, past sandstone grottoes and hanging gardens wet from the mist of nearby waterfalls. Her descents into the giant earthen cracks took her into a whole new world. And exploring the canyons and guiding people through the mystery of their wind-and-rain-chiseled passageways exhilarated her.

But lately she found contentment hard to come by. Since a young age she felt like God sanctified her to do something spectacular. But now she was pushing thirty and still hadn’t figured out what grand thing God wanted her to accomplish.

There was a time not so long ago that she felt like she was on the cusp of achieving the spectacular. Ten years ago she competed at the U.S. Olympic Trials as a kayaker. Her event was the K-1 500 meter slalom. She was expected by many to make the team, but nerves unraveled her in the final heat and she finished fifth.

Four years later she continued her quest to make the Olympic squad. She easily finished in the top three of the various qualifiers leading up to the final selection heat. But once again nerves killed her chances. She missed a gate in her final heat.

Despite the boneheaded mistake, her run had been so fast that she missed making the team as an alternate by only one spot. But that was all behind her now. She no longer competed against world class kayakers. She eked out a living like everyone else now.

Maybe my biological clock is making me restless, she thought. The prime of her childbearing years had come and gone, and marriage was not even a blip on her radar. The selection of eligible men in Felicity was downright laughable, and she hadn’t been on a date in months.

There was only one man in Felicity she truly found intriguing. But after the last pastor at Zion Baptist Church ran off with the organist, creating a split in the church, she didn’t think it wise to pursue Andrew Maddix. Besides, Maddix had an intense way about him she found a little unsettling.

She supposed his time in the Special Forces brought about much of this intensity. Whatever the cause, Pastor Maddix seemed to have a single-minded focus about him that couldn’t be tamed by the likes of her.

The bickering Larson kids reached her first, followed soon after by their weary parents. “I want everyone to take a big drink of water,” Sara instructed them. “We have about four miles to go before we reach the trailhead, and we’ll be out in the sun the whole time. You’ll each need to drink about three liters in the next three hours to stay hydrated.”