Dawn of Revelation

by A N Sandra

  Bud rolled down the window of his truck and the warm summer air blew into the cab. He almost felt like a teenager sneaking away to a kegger in the middle of the night rather than a man in his mid-forties about to take on the most dangerous thing he had done in his life. Twilight and Ben’s faces were both unreadable in the glow of the dashboard. The seriousness of what they were about to do was not lost on them, but they were very willing. Bud had the random thought that he hadn’t asked them if they wanted to do this, he had told them and they had instantly agreed. It was unthinkable that he was bringing Twilight on this mad adventure. It was unthinkable to leave her out. She had responded to the boxes that he and Ben had brought into her life, and she was indispensable to this plan.

  In Blythe Bud turned down Joyce’s street to find it mostly dark. He turned off the lights of the Silverado, so no one would see him get the Jeep out of the workshop Joyce had been keeping it in. Ben walked around the truck and got into Bud’s seat and Bud turned the key that Twilight had located. The Jeep engine jumped and then purred, and Bud drove it out of town toward Redding with Ben and Twilight following in the Silverado. Bud parked the Silverado behind a bramble of berry vines. Then, with all the tools necessary for the caper, the three of them got in the Jeep and drove down the highway sipping coffee, quietly going over the plan and adding details.

  It was after midnight when they got to Redding. The heat coming off the city streets was a sharp contrast to the open country air they had just been enjoying. The urban sprawl that had enveloped Redding since Urban Relocation stopped the city from cooling down much in the evening. Bud drove the Jeep carefully, skirting the main part of the city, and headed for the industrial area that the intake center was located behind. The large hulking buildings—machine shops, a beer distributor, and other various businesses—rose up on their side of the road looking fierce in the moonlight, with long shadows and hints that people were working inside many of the buildings. They almost came to the front gate of the intake center, but with her phone, Twilight read Bud directions for heading all the way around it.

  BJ’s white truck was ahead in the moonlight, and four young men were in it, their faces covered with plenty of hunting paint just as Bud’s was. Everyone got out of their vehicles and met at the side of the road while Twilight went over what each of them was to do.

  “We’ve got everything you told us to get,” Michael told Twilight. “We’ve never made Molotov Cocktails before, so I hope these will work.”

  “If you did what I told you, they will work,” Twilight said confidently. “You got the Tasers.” It wasn’t really a question, she knew he had, and Michael nodded.

  Michael and Joshua squeezed into the Jeep and BJ and Bryan got in the white truck and drove away in the other direction. They had dirt bikes stashed in an abandoned warehouse and they were going to retrieve them, launching their assault with the flexibility that the bikes would give them.

  The Jeep inched along the dirt road behind the intake center. Just as it had appeared from Google Earth, thick shrubbery, manzanita and the like, were between the road and the fence so that the fence wasn’t even visible, but Bud knew it was there. Twilight had her computer open and was busy working. Her face was pure concentration in the light of the computer screen. Ben’s falcons, Bert and Ernie, were perched on top of the Jeep waiting for their signal.

  “Here!” Twilight whispered, even though there was no real chance of them being heard by anyone. Bud stopped the Jeep right in the road, not bothering to find a place to pull off. Ben hopped out and both birds lighted on his shoulders. He spoke to them quietly before they flew off. Bud took out the equipment he was going to use, and Michael and Joshua stood right by him. Twilight pressed a piece of paper into Bud’s hand. “This is Brock’s patient number. He isn’t Brock to them, he is L277.”

  “Got it.” Bud put the paper in his shirt pocket.

  “Here we go,” Twilight quoted Danica with eerie precision.

  After putting on his good work gloves, Bud and the boys fought their way through the bushes until they came to the fence. With a deep breath Bud began to use his welding torch to cut an entire section of the fence away.

  Between the fence and the building Brock was in there was a large grassy expanse. All three of them hurried across it, carrying the tools they would need to break into the parking garage. Just as Bud found the door Twilight wanted him to enter, he could hear a faint explosion in the distance. BJ must have started his work. With a crowbar and some other tools, Bud and Joshua pried the door off, and Michael put the mess in a tidy corner, so they wouldn’t trip on it running out.

  The parking garage was full of muggy oppressive diesel fumes and there were lights, but they were dim. It was easy to see the elevator and stairway in the center. The three of them ran for it, their feet making no noise as they moved. They were like a pack of wolves, carefully stalking their prey. The stairwell was clean and easy to navigate.

  “What the—” a man in his mid-twenties wearing light green scrubs exclaimed as the door burst open. He was standing in front of the stairwell as they opened the door to what Bud knew was the hall to the main medical station.

  With no hesitation at all Michael took his Taser and brought down the young man in a mint colored heap. Wordlessly, Joshua and Michael picked him up and moved him into the stairwell where he was out of sight. There were trays of medicine ready to be dispersed on a large rack with wheels. The young man had probably been on his way to give it out. Off to the side there was a doorway labeled Pharmacy. The door and the insulation must have been thick because there were people visible, working in the Pharmacy. Bud could see them behind the blinds covering the window in the door.

  Looking both ways, Bud, Michael, and Joshua headed right, the direction Twilight had thought they should take, and opened the door to hell. The stink. The smell of urine, feces, sweat, and puke, invaded their nostrils. Bud was sure that he would have been on the floor throwing up if he didn’t have the box in his pocket.

  The large dimly lit room was a warehouse of human misery. It defied anything Bud could have imagined. Even if Twilight had known to warn him, there was no way he could have been ready for the smell and the sounds of human suffering. Groans, faint cries, and sobbing that could only come from the heart emanated from the room. The sounds were muffled because the room was full of people stacked in beds like pallets, in rows. Hundreds of people, arranged in a beehive fashion. All the bedding and people were absorbing the sounds.

  For a split-second Bud despaired at trying to find Brock. He couldn’t see much in the dim light. To differentiate these people from each other seemed impossible, but he put his hand over the box in his pocket, holding the box closer to his heart, and took a deep breath. Joshua and Michael both pressed in close to him. Whether they consciously knew it or not they wanted to be closer to the box themselves.

  “Holy, shit,” Michael said.

  “We’ve got this,” Bud said quietly. They stepped all the way inside and pulled the rack with the medicine in behind them before Bud shut the door and closed them inside.

  “This is his number,” Bud showed Joshua and Michael the scrap of paper with the number Twilight had given him. “They are all labeled with numbers. Once we figure out the system we’ll find him.”

  Sure enough, every bed had a white sticker with a number and instructional codes on it. E142, Bud read to himself, and kept going down the line. Yes, those were all E’s.

  “Oh, God!” Joshua broke out, “Kaitlyn!”

  “Take me out of here,” a voice called. Other voices took up the cry for a savior.

  “Mom!”

  “Grandpa!”

  Most pathetically, “Jesus? Are you there? Jesus!”

  “Kaitlyn,” Joshua repeated. Bud could see Joshua lifting a young woman from her bed. He didn’t argue that they were only there for Brock. He remembered in a flash a trip to the pound as a child when he had wanted to take home every dog.

  “Q, N,” Michael
was saying out loud.

  “L!” Bud found the L section with the help of a ladder. The beds were stacked so tall that there were ladders with wheels at the bases, like at a research library, that the nurses used to get to the patients. There was a cherry picker machine over in the corner. Bud could imagine that they must use it to get patients in and out of bed as needed and the ladders were just for dispensing medicine. Bud was careful to look only at the tags, not the slightly restless individuals in each small bed, but from the corner of his eye he could see the hopeless captives in their tiny shelf beds. Scooting the ladder along, Bud finally came to L277.

  “Brock, Brock, we’re here,” Bud said. Brock was catatonic, his wide eyes staring straight at the bed above him. If Brock could hear Bud, he didn’t indicate it. They were about fourteen feet off the ground, too high for Bud to swing Brock over his shoulder and simply carry him down the ladder. It wouldn’t be safe.

  “Hand him down to us,” Joshua said. He was standing with Michael at the base of the ladder holding a naked woman over his shoulder. Bud tried to roll Brock out, but Brock was attached to an IV of some sort and had a catheter.

  “Shit,” Bud commented as he worked to remove a thick layer of tape from Brock’s forearm, so he could remove the IV at least. “How did you get that stuff off her?”

  “I’m covered with pee from her catheter,” Joshua said. “But I’ve got her.”

  “Here goes nothing,” Bud pulled the IV from Brock’s wrist and Brock didn’t even flinch. Trying not to worry, Bud reached toward Brock’s groin. The things I do for family. Brock did flinch, though, when Bud pulled out the catheter. The bag of urine spilled, but Bud didn’t care. The person below Brock probably did, although they only moaned when the urine quickly found its way downward.

  Mentally bracing himself, Bud lifted Brock as much as he could, prepared to turn him slightly so that his feet could be handed down to Michael. A bolt of light shot through the entire room, and Bud stumbled back, falling to the ground, leaving Brock halfway out of his bed shelf, his naked legs suspended in the suddenly super bright light.

  “Something’s really wrong!” a strange voice called into the room. “Oh! Fuhhh—!”

  With the same speed and force Michael had used as an offensive lineman he ripped across the enormous room and tackled the woman at the door. He pulled her inside and used his Taser on her for good measure. Bud got up from the floor, knowing that only because of the box in his pocket his coccyx wasn’t broken, and scrambled back up the ladder to finish getting Brock down. Joshua put down the naked girl and helped ease Brock down without dropping him.

  With Kaitlyn Jorgensen and Brock, naked, slung over their shoulders, Bud and Joshua headed for the door while Michael went in front of them. Before they could get to the stairs, two security guards came out the stairwell door.

  Michael advanced toward them and Tasered one, grappling with the other before he gave in, but the commotion had caused several people to come out of the pharmacy. Bud put Brock down and slugged a man older than himself in the face. The frustration of only taking two people out of the hellhole didn’t abate, it increased. The man crumpled, blood spewing from his nose, and Bud viciously kicked him in the groin, in the gut, and ground the heel of his work boot into the man’s face for good measure.

  Bud wasn’t the only one in the group who was feeling furiously destructive after seeing the human misery in the intake center. Michael dashed into the pharmacy through the open door. Several women stood in absolute shock, as if they were playing a game of freeze tag, while Michael began to destroy the first thing he could inside the pharmacy. The computer system. He ripped power cords from the back indiscriminately before kicking it against the wall and kicking it and kicking it again.

  “How do you like me now!” Michael yelled at the workers who stared at the tangled mess of cords and computer components lying on the floor. Bud and Joshua began ransacking the pharmacy as much as possible. They swept items off shelves, pushed over carts, and stomped through the mess. The women in the hall were still absolutely frozen. Somehow Bud knew they needed to leave right then.

  “Let’s go!” he commanded. He took one more well aimed kick at the grey-haired head of the man on the floor before picking Brock back up. Joshua picked up Kaitlyn and Michael opened the door. All of them ran back down to the parking garage as quickly as they could.

  “Let me help,” Michael told Bud as they exited the parking garage into the warm night air. Bud shrugged Brock off of him like a stole onto Michael’s shoulders and the three men with their naked cousin and equally naked acquaintance sprinted across the dark field before finding the hole in the fence.

  At the hole in the fence Bud took Brock back.

  “Ohhh!” Kaitlyn moaned. The manzanita and other shrubs cut into her tender skin as the group squirmed through on their way to the Jeep.

  “Shit!” Michael cussed as he tried to move bushes aside to clear the way for Bud and Joshua. “God. Damn. It.”

  “Don’t take the Lord’s name in vain,” Bud said. The Jeep was in sight, Ben was in the driver’s seat with the engine running, Twilight was in the passenger seat, looking shocked at the extra person with them, shocked at the naked state of the rescued people, and totally pleased with herself. Bud could tell that whatever she had done on the computer had gone well. Bud dumped Kaitlyn into her lap. “Hold her!”

  The seconds it took for all four men to fit in the back of the Jeep seemed like an eternity.

  “Let’s roll!” Bud commanded when all of them had the important parts tucked inside.

  Once the Jeep was moving, Twilight turned her head around as much as she could with a huge grin.

  “I crashed them! I crashed them! I had no idea I could do it, but once I was hacked in I just had this idea and I went with it and… Oh! I did it! Their whole network is trashed!”

  “I’m really proud of you, baby!” Bud said. He wasn’t sure what that meant, but he was sure that crashing them had been a good thing. It sounded like something bad people did, trashing networks, but nothing was too bad to do to the people in the intake center. The horror of the place was far beyond anything Bud could have imagined.

  Lurching and bobbing over the dirt road, Bud, Joshua, and Michael balanced Brock across their laps. Even though Brock had never been loquacious on his best days, Bud worried because Brock hadn’t made a single sound at all. At least the night was warm enough that Brock wasn’t cold without clothes.

  “There they are,” Michael said, relieved. BJ and Bryan were in their truck with the lights off patiently waiting at the rendezvous spot. The two of them pulled out after the Jeep to form a mini convoy to get back to the highway and leave Redding.

  No one answered Michael. Ben drove as fast as he could, and Bud remembered why people are supposed to wear seatbelts. The weakest part of the plan always had been that BJ and Bryan would be acting alone. They were practiced delinquents in their own way. Mischievous and clever, but they were operating without a box, and that had worried Bud. Now that BJ and Bryan were behind them, all they had to do was get on the highway and get back to Blythe.

  A helicopter began to sound in the distance, a large spotlight shone down from it.

  “Here we go,” Twilight said. Both vehicles drove with their lights off as fast as they could, away from the helicopter, through the industrial area. Suddenly Ben stopped the Jeep in front of a barrier.

  “That road shouldn’t be blocked off,” Twilight looked at the GPS she was using to guide Ben.

  Bud and his sons hopped out of the Jeep, leaving Brock in a naked heap. Like professional construction workers, they moved the white and red roadblocks. Ben drove cautiously through, the Jeep immediately dipping into the previously barricaded area where the pavement had been stripped, and BJ followed. When both of them were through the barrier, Michael and Joshua replaced it and Bud went ahead of the Jeep to check out the road ahead. The pavement had been stripped away just inside the barrier, but there was no reason n
ot to drive to the end of the block. Ben drove very slowly because he didn’t have his headlights on, and BJ followed right behind in the white truck.

  “Stop!” Bud yelled. Ben stopped short and BJ almost hit the Jeep, but they were both stopped.

  The helicopter sounded like it was getting closer and Bud could see the spotlight was coming toward them. A large pile of construction debris was covered with a tan tarp and Bud ran to get it. He untied it with reflexes he hadn’t known he still had and threw it over the Jeep, ducking under it, just before the chopper shone the light down over the deserted street. Under the tarp no one spoke. It wouldn’t have mattered if they did, the sound from the helicopter was so deafening. In mere seconds the light was no longer focused on the deserted street and Bud waited just a minute before getting out of the tarp and quickly folding it up to take with them in case it was needed again.

  “I used up all my adrenaline for the rest of my life,” BJ said before Ben started the Jeep and they all drove slowly to the end of the block, replacing the barriers at the other end and altering their planned course slightly to avoid the helicopter.

  Once on the highway back to Blythe, Bud managed to cut the tarp in half and use it to cover Kaitlyn and Brock, who were still groggy and uncommunicative. The Jeep made too much noise to talk to Ben and Twilight in the front seat.

  “You are so bad ass!” Michael told Bud delightedly once he settled down from the drive back to Blythe, leaving the lights of Redding in the distance.

  “We couldn’t let them take Brock,” Bud said. “But I never had any idea what that place would be like.”

  “It was like those World War Two concentration camps, but a lot worse,” Joshua said in an awed voice. “I didn’t even know places like that existed in the modern world.”

  Bud noted that Joshua was the least interested in questioning the Global Alliance, the Hollister Foundation, or Urban Relocation. Even though Bud had been skeptical of Urban Relocation, and the addiction and mental health services provided by the Hollister foundation, he had been glad to see his community cleaned up. Look! The creek isn’t polluted by those horrible homeless people anymore. Who knows where they went, but who cares? The water is clear! No more needles to pick up from the Maxi Mart parking lot! The druggies are all gone! Whoo hoo! Like it or not, Bud knew he was part of the problem. The problem of taking care of those who did not want to be taken care of had been taken over and no one was questioning how.