Midnight Rider on a Graveyard Run

by Gary Koz Mraz

  “The Seer is a gift,” Astara advises. “Always know that The Seer is your gift.”

  Did the Terracotta Army provoke my dream about my book of mirrors, Kali and replicating Liz?

  The next morning I tell Liz of my strange dream, about Astara and the book of the Seer.

  After a long pause, in a serious tone “I would like to meet you Dakini.” She mused.

  Two weeks into our Silk Road travel, I’ve planned a motorcycle trek to an abandoned oasis in the Gobi desert that was a critical stop for Marco Polo in the 13th century. Me, Liz, Voodoomama and Cleaning lady separate from the convoy and plan to meet up again the next evening. Riding the Triumph Trophies, we travel 120 miles to the abandoned oasis and set up camp. Once there, I start metal-detecting, looking for coins or other objects.

  Around three in the morning, two shadows steal into camp outfitted with night vision and modern stealth technology. As Cleaning Lady snores, an intruder enters his tent and puts a drop of liquid in his mouth. It's a powerful drug that will keep him unconscious. Slipping into my tent, they repeat the process. Entering Voodoomama's tent, they chloroform and secure her. Finally, in Liz's tent, one of the intruders holds Liz like a vice as the other tapes her mouth, hands, and feet. They pull off their masks, revealing they are identical twin sisters, and they look identical to Liz Duran. They pull the tape off her mouth.

  “Who the hell are you? Why do you look like me, and where is my team?” Liz demands.

  “Get the other woman,” the intruder commands.

  The other woman returns with Voodoomama and plops her down on the floor next to Liz. Smelling salts revive Voodoomama, and she sits up staring at the three identical women before her. An intruder rips the tape from her mouth.

  “We saw you on the news. Who are we?” The intruder points to Liz.

  “I… I have no clue. Mama?” Liz stares harshly at Voodoomama. “What’s happening here?” she demands.

  “I… I don’t know… I don’t know anything about them!”

  “For Christ’s sake, Mama, look at them! Stop your bullshit. Who the hell are these women?”

  Voodoomama slumps down like a pile of old laundry. There is a painful pause. “They are your sisters, Liz. You are all clones. I had been working with the CIA/NSA for decades, part of a clandestine government project called Unity formed in 1984 and disavowed in 1992. I was the lead biochemist of sequential coding. It was five years of complete and utter failure until an unbelievably robust DNA sequence was cloned. The real objectives of Unity were to design super resilient human organs: human parts, hearts, lungs, and eyes. It literally mutated before our eye, implanted into a human zygote, and within 48 hours supercells began to grow. We, of course, assumed the fetus would die but were astounded at your resilience. At nine months old, the entire project was scrubbed. You were just babies. They washed Unity clean, completely sanitized it end to end, and the project never happened. I was put in custody of you, Liz.”

  “We’re clones…we are clones of you, Mama.”

  Voodoomama stares aphasic at the three identical triplets. Her room full of mirrors stares silently back. A house has just fallen on their mother, and she's lost her ruby slippers.

  “I took custody of you Liz but had no clue where the other baby clones went. The program was reactivated in 2001 with the events of 9/11 and became what's now Operation Goldlance.”

  The desert dunes whisper a silent breath.

  “Now, you shall know who we are,” the intruder demands. “We are assassins, trained since the age of seven and considered the deadliest in all of China. They named us Yin and Yang. Our current assignment is to dispatch your entire convoy,” Yang states.

  “We have no problem doing that,” Yin adds, “but killing our mother and our sister, that we must deliberate.”

  Voodoomama tells the twins everything: Goldlance, Toxoplasmosis, Operation Thundertaker. It’s as if she knows only the truth will save the team. The twins cut them loose and leave the tent. They chatter rapid-fire Mandarin and return.

  “We knew some of this, but some we did not.” Yin reveals. “We are leaving, so do as you wish. Abort your plans, tell the convoy of our mission, and tell your superiors everything we've told you. It matters not to us because the fate of the convoy is sealed; they are all doomed. What matters is if you continue to Xing Xing with the convoy, you too will all die. You must break away. Take these GPS coordinates and on the date and time written, go camp there for the night. The decision is completely yours. A wise person does not need advice… a fool won't take it.” The twins disappear into the darkness.

  The next day, the rest of the team awakes without any knowledge of previous evening events. Voodomama and Liz keep their silence.

  Liz corners me just before we leave to catch up with the convoy.

  The next two days of travel in the motorhome are filled with secrecy and hushed meetings from which I am excluded. We pull into Xing Xing and are slated for another two day stop in the middle of the Gobi desert. Liz pulls me aside. “Zac, we are taking the Triumphs on another expedition, just like the last one,” she commands. “Don't ask me any questions and do exactly as I say, understand?” She's off.

  Liz tracks down the convoy commander. “We are taking the motorcycles to another excavation site. Zac found some evidence at the last site that points here, and it’s just 50 miles away,” Liz explains.

  “This is rather sudden. Why didn’t you discuss this earlier? You know we are moving closer to the target.”

  “Let's keep up the charade, and it's just one night. I'll bring the entire team and keep them out of your way.” Within an hour, we are packed and ready to ride. Voodomama leads the group, and three hours into the depths of the desert, we stop and set up camp.

  We are in the middle of nowhere. The team is quiet and obviously on edge, and we’re all settled for the night. At three in the morning, someone has started a campfire. Voodoomama, Liz, Cleaning Lady, Sandman, Fifi and I come out to investigate. We find Yang and Yin sitting cross-legged meditating by the campfire. I stare in astonishment as the firelight flickers an incandescing blush that illuminates the faces of two identical Liz Durans. Liz joins them in meditation. We are all speechless.

  “You came, and we are glad,” Yang states. “We have given this much thought. We gave our lives for our country, but now we want to find our own destiny. We will help you if you help us. Will you accept this?”

  Voodoomama is in tears and goes to her new daughters. They hug reluctantly; these stone-cold killers are trained to be emotionless murderers.

  Yin explains, “You must also understand that from now on, we can no longer exist. We must die as must you. You must also trust us completely, without judgment, without fear. This is a blood oath; we are of the same blood.”

  Yang pulls out a handheld device and they both nod. She taps it, and the horizon ignites bright white for a moment then goes dark. We all stand and look out at the glow of a developing mushroom cloud in the moonlight.

  “We just detonated a two kiloton micro-nuclear bomb; it has vaporized the convoy and everything within a 300-yard radius. Your convoy is gone, and our mission is complete. It will seem as though we too died in the explosion. We are now on your mission.”

  “You must return to your tents immediately,” Yang orders. They turn and run into the darkness.

  We stand in complete astonishment. In the distance, we hear a tornado-like sound, then what looks like a hundred-foot sand cloud approaches. Realizing that the wind blast from the thermonuclear detonation is approaching, we dive into our tents. A thunderous wave of sand and wind hits before dying into complete silence. “Oh my god, what have we done?” Liz gasps.

  The team hardly sleeps that night as we discuss possible scenarios and stand around like Night of the Living Dead zombies in the morning’s rising sun.

  Yang and Yin appear and tell us that the Operation Thundertaker Convoy was completely deceived about their target. The real objective is Dead City, as the C
hinese call it. It is two hundred miles south in one of the world's largest deserts, the Takla Makan, which translates in Turkic to “you go in, and you don't come out.” They will take us there; evidently, it is ground zero for the Chinese development, manufacture, and implementation of the T-gondii parasite attack.

  The twins have a Land Rover, and they instruct Liz and Voodoomama to ride with them. We siphon the gas and bury their two motorcycles in the sand and follow the Rover for the next eight hours. We are completely alone. The entire Operation Thundertaker convoy of over twenty people is gone, incinerated in a single instant, and we now follow their killers to Dead City. Like rats to the Pied Piper, this can't come to a good end. A shadow of impending doom looms, but we're committed, and there's no place to hide. We ride into the Dragon's Den.

  Chapter 13 - Dead City

  Voodoomama, Liz, Yang and Yin ride together in the Land Rover towards Dead City. The twins reveal that they were adopted by a Chinese woman named Mai. Voodoomama recalls the Chinese woman. She was another scientist assigned to the Unity project, and they worked together. Mai married a wealthy Indonesian shipping magnate and they moved to Jakarta. The girls lived in a large estate and were home-schooled. Raised with maids, house staff, and security guards, they had minimal contact with the outside world. Mai spent much of her time in a laboratory inside the estate. The girls knew the entire periodic table of elements at age six. They spoke five languages and were studying university-level courses at the age of 16.

  On May 15, 1998, a bizarre madness gripped Jakarta and more than 1,000 people were killed. Chinese Indonesians were targeted in this mass murder. The twin’s home was invaded by locals gone mad, wielding machetes and axes. Their family was murdered. Both girls were dragged to Jalan Berilan River near their home to be drowned. When Yin was drowned, she went into a catatonic state. All of her organs ceased functioning. She was assumed dead but then revived. They tried to drown her time after time. When several men tried to drown Yang, her body surged with electro-chemicals altering her neurology and physiology. She was possessed by incredible strength and killed the men attempting to drown her.

  “I broke their wrists, snapped their necks, and then came to my sister's rescue,” Yang confides. “To this day, my bones are like steel, and my muscles have enormous strength. I can jump a fifteen-foot wall. I had no extraordinary physical prowess before that day. We hid, and when a Chinese army caravan came through we joined them.”

  Taken in by the Chinese government, the twins were put under intense study and became one of the most extensive human research programs of the Chinese Secret Service.

  “We had nothing to live for,” Yin adds. “We showed them our special talents. They were kind to us, studied us, trained us, and when we were twenty-one years old, they recruited us into Unit 834: the Chinese Secret Service elite. We became their deadliest assassins. I can completely shut my biology down. It's hibernation of a sort, but with no heart activity, no brainwaves nor infrared heat signature whatsoever, then revive instantly. I can go into stasis hidden within a target's home for a week, revive, and dispatch the entire household.”

  Voodoomama divulges everything she knows about Unity, explaining how the genetics mutated, and how suddenly the Unity project was abandoned. She was assigned as Liz's caretaker, teaching her self-reliance and intentionally not becoming a traditional mothering parent. She watched Liz develop, knowing Liz would be different but not how it would manifest. The Central Security Service also employed Liz, partially to keep their eyes on her. Although she's brilliant, Liz does not seem to possess the extraordinary attributes the twins have.

  “Liz has a tracking device,” Voodoomama continues. “It was implanted when she was six months old. It’s behind the lobe of her left ear. It was deactivated after she became CSS for security reasons. You both also may be tracked.”

  “We have personal tracker implants, just between us,” Yin reveals. “I always know where Yang is, and she does me.” Liz is silent. This is the first she’d heard any of this.

  We arrive at a bluff overlooking Dead City. Cradled at the base of a mountain range, the city looks like a lotus flower from a distance. We set up base camp inside a cave while Yang and Yin penetrate the city in a reconnaissance mission. Liz is cold and quiet. I want to know about the twins and what she’s learned, but something has changed within Liz. She is darker. Her magnetic aura has dimmed. She holds my hand like a frightened child.

  The twins return that evening with a plan to hide within Dead City and gather information. They bring what looks like shabby prison clothing, stating we will become invisible to the inhabitants and cameras if we wear them over our clothes. The next night we venture in, wearing night vision goggles and high-tech communications. We follow the twin killers into Dead City.

  Dead City smells atrocious, like death. It's comprised of massive square concrete buildings the size of football stadiums with a singular central structure 10 stories tall. The primary structure is protected by a two-story circular wall with machinegun turrets. With no windows and few entrances, we enter one of the enormous concrete structures through a ventilation shaft and set up base in a machine room. Donning the drab clothing and hats, Yang and Yin direct us to follow them and mimic their every move. We are inside the belly of the beast, ground zero of this insidious Toxoplasmosis plot. Nothing implies that half a million humans work in this windowless building. No family pictures rest on desks; there are no desks or chairs, for that matter, just endless cold concrete hallways and rooms.

  The humans here have all been toxified as test subjects and programmed as worker drones. Immense lines of these Toxo-zombies shuffle blindly by; completely oblivious to our presence. Fifty-thousand workers inhabit each of the massive structures. They work 12-hour shifts and for the remaining 12 hours, sleep. There is no interaction whatsoever in these modern-day concentration camps. The workers are like soulless robots performing their tasks. This city is research and development for T-Gondii zombie Toxo

  -domination of planet earth.

  As we move through the complex, we see dead bodies everywhere—lying on the floor, slumped in corners and in decaying piles ten feet high against walls. In the expansive open central section, thousands of people are seated on endless rows of what look like stationary bicycles, all methodically pedaling the same mechanical rhythm. A voice suddenly blares over a PA system echoing throughout the massive structure, then a loud buzzer sounds. The entire population stops, and with precise organization, tens of thousands file out as another group files in to take their place and pedal.

  Every room we pass has the number 666 above the doorway. We follow the group into sleeping quarters where beds are stacked 10 high as far as we can see. They simply climb in, close their eyes, and silently shut down; not a word is spoken. We retrace our path back to our hideout.

  “What’s happening here? What are they doing?” Liz questions.

  “They power this city,” Yang replies. “All the electricity for lights, machines, labs, water pumps and drainage are all human powered. They are fuel for the fire.”

  “Who are these people?” Cleaning Lady asks. “I don’t even see that many Chinese here.”

  “Over a million people go missing globally every year,” responds Yang. “They needed test subjects. The Chinese and most Asians in general are not susceptible to the T-Gondii parasite. Unless directly injected with the virus, they are immune.”

  “What’s up with the number 666 over all of the doorways?” Cleaning Lady queries.

  “It’s a lucky number in Chinese. It sounds like the phrase ‘Things Going Smoothly' in Mandarin.”

  Yang tells us that any hope of finding real Intel here lies within the structure at the center of the city. It's the command center. Breaking into groups, Cleaning Lady, Fifi, and Yin and I remain back at the hideout. Sandman sets up outside as a lookout while Yang, Voodoomama, and Liz cautiously head into the central structure. We all have radio communications.

  Avoiding cameras
and passing through an unguarded entrance, the three women easily breach the central structure. The towers are unmanned. They see two Chinese guards playing mahjong in a hallway. Yang approaches, grabs one guard’s head and snaps his neck, then grabs the other in a choke hold.