The Occurrence

by Robert Desiderio

  “Nos es Unus. Nos es Unus.” Manuel blessed him with the sign of the cross and hastened out of the room.

  Vincente went to his daughter and sat by her side.

  He stared at the crucifix that hung over the bed. Since his wife’s death he had a conflicted relationship with the man on the cross.

  Vincente’s sister, Teresa, entered. Younger and not jaded by the world like her brother, she held the hope of religion’s promise.

  “What did you say to Father Manuel that had him rushing out of the room?”

  “I told him to get out.”

  “He’s not the simple man you want him to be, Vincente. He knows the power of God.”

  Unmoved by her plea, Vincente said, “What else did the doctor say about Jhana-Merise?”

  “They’re going to do some tests.”

  “What kinds of tests?”

  “He said it could be a type of juvenile diabetes.”

  “Diabetes?”

  “Yes.”

  “How is she in a coma, then?”

  “The doctor said it could happen.”

  Guilt darkened his eyes. He turned away.

  “This isn’t your fault, brother.”

  “She snuck out of the house again. What can I do? Lock her in her room?”

  He was in turmoil. And his sister’s empathy wasn’t enough. Nothing was.

  She’d comforted him when he’d lost his wife to cancer, and as hard as she’d tried, he refused to let her help him hold onto his faith. It had vanished with his wife’s death. Now his only child lay in bed, unconscious, and he had nothing but guilt and rage to cling to.

  Vincente had accepted Christ because his wife had demanded it for their daughter. But after her death he discarded what he called a “useless devotion.”

  “Thank you for coming, Teresa, but I want to be alone with my daughter. We’ll talk tomorrow.”

  Teresa gave her brother a hug before leaving.

  Vincente stifled the panic rising in him—keeping his tears, and his fury at God contained.

  3

  Eric Vickers didn’t like playing with others. He was the new Director of Science and Technology at the CIA, and knew he had a lot to prove. He wasn’t good at restraint at one a.m. It was morning in Mosul, but the middle of the night at CIA Headquarters in Langley, Virginia. He stared, restless, pondering the drawings on his desk. He had the responsibility to find Dominique and Julian, and didn’t appreciate being schooled in the psychic art of remote viewing by the solemn Dr. Adrien Kurt, who stood over him like a sentinel.

  “Why are you fighting me on this, Eric?” Kurt said, as Vickers focused on the sketches of a large warehouse and the well-executed drawings of three faces: Julian Ledge, Dominique Valen, and Abd al Hashim.

  “I trust you’re aware Catherine Book’s ‘psychic ability’ has given her a ton of blowback,” Vickers smirked.

  “I trust you haven’t forgotten about the shitstorm between her and the agency over the famous WMD incident that gave cause for the war on terror,” Kurt shot back.

  She’d reported seeing no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, but there were those who wanted to see it otherwise.

  Vickers didn’t want to get into any more of a pissing match. A match he knew he’d lose, because Kurt had the ear of the president and Vickers didn’t.

  “I’m not as naive as you may think, Doctor Kurt.”

  “But you don’t know what you don’t know, Eric.”

  “I know remote viewing was cultivated from a decades-old, multimillion-dollar US government research project.”

  He needed Kurt to know what he knew, and bullet-pointed that knowledge.

  “I know in 1972 we learned that the Czechs, Chinese, Soviets, Germans, Israelis, and British were involved in the study of various aspects of what you call paranormal. I call it paranoia.”

  “I didn’t mean to insult you, Eric.”

  “I know people like Book claim to see people, places, and things separate, and far from their immediate reality. And I know our backs are against a wall, and the fact you’re here proves someone higher up believes the truth is out there.”

  He picked up the remote view drawing of a battered Soviet Jeep, and the numbers on the side of it. It was the Jeep Catherine had seen the hostages in.

  Vickers had sent those numbers to the Intel guys with the hope of tracking the Jeep. Find the Jeep. Find the Americans. Find Hashim.

  Vickers shook his head and tossed the drawing back on the desk.

  “Visualizing something thousands of miles away is not my idea of good science.”

  “You’re lucky PSYOPs is still willing to work with you guys.”

  The phone on the desk rang, putting their conflict on hold.

  Vickers clicked on the speaker.

  “Yeah,” he answered.

  The agent on the other end spoke with urgency.

  “They found the warehouse, sir.”

  “And…”

  “The numbers on the Jeep brought us to a source in Baghdad. That source confirmed its destination. But I just talked to the Pentagon, and Hashim is about to kill Julian and the reporter. The Pentagon sent in a rescue team, but they won’t get there in time.”

  Vickers and Kurt stood there—powerless to prevent the coming slaughter.

  4

  The abandoned warehouse in the desert loomed large as the Soviet-made Jeep braked hard. Sand swirled.

  The insurgents yanked Julian and Dominique out of the vehicle.

  Hands and feet still bound, Dominique faltered and banged into the walls, close on each side, as she was shoved through the narrow passage. She heard Julian being dragged on the ground behind her.

  She heard the faint echo of Arabic being spoken, as they were brought into a large, empty space and slammed into metal chairs.

  This was the consequence of the choices she’d made. Knowing she walked a razor’s edge between life and death was one thing. Being about to die was a whole other reality. That reality inched closer when sandy footsteps shuffled over the ground and someone stood in front of her.

  They untied her hood, pulled it off, and ripped the tape from her mouth. It tore her skin, and cut her lip. She wanted to scream, but needed air more, and gulped it in.

  Her eyes adjusted to the dim light.

  A bearded man in white cleric’s robes stared down at her—his face sculpted and forged by atrocities and the desert sun.

  She recognized Abd al Hashim.

  The ISIS leader had serpent eyes, which gave off a fury that pulled her into them as much as they repelled her.

  She’d heard that one’s life flashed before their eyes at the moment of death. Hers didn’t. Instead, her mind flooded with the history she’d compiled of Hashim’s life. The paradox of it. He was a shy and courteous child, more courteous than the average. As opposed to bin Laden, Hashim grew up poor, and according to the few locals who had been willing to talk with her, poverty was central to fueling his passion for equality. And violence was the quickest way to be heard. That’s when she’d discovered rumors that maybe oil wasn’t all of what had attracted those who wanted to conquer Iraq, and what their leaders had been so fierce in protecting through jihad.

  She’d been told of artifacts Hashim was said to be hiding in the desert, protected by the Djinn—spirits who lived in places not inhabited by man. While many denied their existence, their origins could be traced to the written words in the Qur’an, and the spoken words of the Sunnah, a verbal record of the teachings passed down from the prophet Muhammad. No one knew where these artifacts were. And perhaps they were just lore. But they were said to contain sacred information. She’d not believed these fringe creeds, but had held onto enough of their possibilities that she left space in her mind to consider them at some point in the future. There was no longer that future. And so what once had occupied the edges of her mind crept closer, as the sacred replaced the reality of what was coming down.

  A teenage boy Hashim motioned to, slid in close
by his side. Hashim called him Nazir.

  Nazir was slim and strong, with luminous skin, like rich earth, and clear intelligent eyes. Dominique thought if jihad was attracting young men this sensitive, it meant there was much more to fear than anyone could imagine.

  She watched Hashim rip the hood off Julian’s head.

  His face was swollen and bloodied, but she could see he was calm, and she studied Julian as his eyes scoped the situation.

  Her eyes followed his, and landed on something in the middle of the blood-soaked, sandy floor: a camcorder on a tripod. Hashim ripped the tape off Julian’s mouth.

  “Hashim. Let her go. Make your point with me.”

  “My point is larger than you, Captain Ledge. It’s larger than your war.” The leader spoke with a slight British accent.

  Hashim stared at Julian, then nodded to the wiry insurgent close by who grabbed Dominique, dragged her to the middle of the room, and slammed her to her knees in the sand.

  She looked around, trembling.

  All the men stared at her.

  She stared back, but lingered on Nazir, who turned away from her penetrating gaze.

  “Hashim, listen to me—” Julian began.

  “No,” Hashim said with quiet rage. “No.”

  Dominique turned her head toward Hashim. He moved to her, and looked down into her eyes.

  He radiated a darkness of which the devil would be proud. It was one thing for her to hear about him, or see footage of his dispatches and accusations, but to be in his presence was to be faced with an abyss. Still, in the midst of her terror, she wanted to know what made him tick.

  “Why?” she asked.

  “I could ask the same of you, Miss Valen,”

  “This is madness, you must know that,” she said in a voice that belied her dread.

  “The world is mad, Miss Valen. And we must meet the world where it is.”

  “So, this will never end?”

  “Not so long as there is breath in us.”

  He sounded like a philosopher, not someone who drew tens of thousands to his barbarity. But it was that intelligence that had attracted so many to his cause. He’d made those who followed him feel like they belonged.

  “Do you not know love?” It was the last thing she ever expected she would say.

  “Do you, Miss Valen?” Hashim answered.

  “Not until now.”

  She’d caught him off-guard with this exchange.

  “It’s too late for this,” Hashim said.

  He commanded the wiry insurgent.

  The man grabbed her by the hair and put a handsaw to her neck.

  The metal gripped her skin, its razor-sharp points toyed with her mortality.

  She’d wished she’d known love before now. It was an ineffable experience to be flooded with that before she was about to die. And with that, she made her peace with death. Her life had run out of time.

  As the teeth of the blade were about to tear into her soft skin, and remove her head from her body, Julian broke free and hurled himself at Hashim.

  The insurgents swarmed like locusts.

  5

  The wall of televisions in the Command Room of the Pentagon blasted the internet feed Hashim had set up to broadcast the beheadings. The shocked Pentagon personnel stood transfixed at the screens in helpless disbelief. They were in a bunker, so no one could tell that the sun was rising outside.

  Senator Paul Ledge stared at one of the screens transmitting the live images. He watched his son, Julian, battered and dragged back by the insurgents from his attempt to save Dominique.

  The imperious Secretary of Defense, Charles Bruton, strode through the room to Ledge.

  “I’m sorry, senator. The information the CIA gave us about the location of the warehouse, we’ll never get there in time. We’ve got to turn our attention to the bigger picture.”

  The senator grabbed Bruton’s arm.

  “What about the drone? You warned Hashim we’d take out his village if he killed them.”

  “We’ve made good on that, senator, but it won’t save your son.”

  Senator Ledge turned back to the computer screen as the feed from the warehouse went dead.

  The senator closed his eyes and looked deep inside himself. For all the flesh, bone, and blood he was made of, he hadn’t felt much like a human being. The thought that seared into his crippled heart—he hadn’t told his son he loved him in a long time.

  The emergency phone rang. Bruton grabbed it.

  Something unfathomable had occurred. The one reason the soldier in charge of the drone on the other end of the phone could give was that it had malfunctioned. The drone was now heading toward the coordinates of the warehouse, and he’d lost control of it. He tried to have the drone detonated, but the destruct signal didn’t respond either, and locked him out from having any effect on destroying it midair.

  “Who the fuck has control of it?” he screamed to the soldier on the other end of the phone.

  Bruton was in shock that something this cataclysmic went wrong.

  The feed from the warehouse came back online.

  They all saw that Dominique and Julian were still alive. But they wouldn’t be for long.

  6

  An old man made his way through the winding streets of brick and mortar homes nestled into the hillside in an Iraqi village on the Tigris River.

  Hashim’s grandfather, Qadir, had lived his whole life in this village where his grandson was born. The serenity of the land made it look harmless, but this town had cultivated a murderer of global proportions.

  Qadir reached the town square when the sound broke through the air. He knew the eerie high-pitched hum, he’d been through it before. But there was something different about this sound.

  Villagers spilled out from their homes and scattered.

  Qadir remained calm and defiant, as he watched the speck against the purple sky grow close, daring it to kill him.

  But something strange happened.

  Qadir watched the drone make a long sweeping arc like a kite caught in a reverse wind, and he smiled. “The Djinn,” he said.

  And like the Elohim of The Bible, or “those who came from the sky,” the Djinn were the spirits in the land of Allah. Qadir had always felt protected by them, even in the face of the destruction his grandson had wrought as a result of his misreading of the holy text.

  Qadir felt sorrow at the road Hashim had taken, but there were more things at work than what he could know.

  He watched as the drone ricocheted away from their little village and disappeared into the sky.

  7

  Two of the insurgents dragged Julian’s broken body next to Dominique in the middle of the blood red, sandy floor, as Hashim resumed the televised execution.

  Dominique wanted to say something to Julian, but his swollen eyes were searching elsewhere.

  That’s when she heard the sound.

  They all froze at the metallic screech.

  The jihadists panicked. Hashim tried to calm them, but they ran for cover, leaving the Americans unguarded.

  Julian called to Dominique to follow him and move to a corner of the room. They scrambled as best they could.

  From beneath the sand, something jagged jumped into Dominique’s hand as she reached the wall and pressed close to Julian.

  She let the sand slip through her fingers, uncovering a sharp fragment of stone carved with symbols. It throbbed in her palm.

  The screech shattered the air.

  The drone plunged through the warehouse roof and sent a concussion through the building, rocking walls, and blasting out the remains of the already half-broken windows.

  Crouched in the corner of the room next to Julian, Dominique stared at the artifact in her hand.

  The air filled with dust like fire.

  Dominique remembered reading of the deaths of desert armies engulfed in simooms like blood rain. Sandstorms, which blotted out the horizon, and sheets of death that engulfed all living thing
s.

  She was unable to look away from a tornado of sunlight emerging from the dust and smoke.

  They were all unable to look away.

  A sound penetrated into her, and her heart pulsed in rhythm with the air.

  There was no space between her and the energy that had entered the warehouse.

  When the air cleared, Dominique saw all the insurgents were dead—all except for Hashim and Nazir. She also saw that she and Julian were no longer bound. She looked down at the fragment of stone in her hand. It was glowing.

  The ground beneath them began to cave.

  Hashim held on to Nazir and reached out his hand to Julian, who struggled to stand.

  Dominique saw Julian’s eyes fire with all the reasons to not reach back.

  In the flicker of Julian’s doubt Hashim reached out to Dominique.

  She grabbed Hashim’s hand, and the ground stopped opening. And in that instant she saw the same glowing symbols etched in the air that were carved into the stone in her hand. She saw Hashim see something, too. She watched him watch something invisible flying in the air, and saw him stare at his hand, as if that something had landed there.

  She saw Nazir stare out in terrified rapture. He was nodding, as if responding to a voice.

  She saw Julian’s bloodied eyes go white and sightless, as if what he saw had blinded him.

  Then, she saw that they were all holding hands.

  The sunlight disappeared as if vacuumed into the air.

  Darkness came and thunder erupted.

  An aftershock rumbled through the warehouse.

  The walls crumbled.

  Mustering all the strength he had, Julian yanked Dominique away from the falling mass of stone.

  She saw Hashim help a wounded Nazir through the ruins and out through a narrow hall.

  She watched Julian struggle to get his bearings.

  He reached back to her and guided her through a breach in the wall.

  8

  Vincente had fallen asleep in a chair in his daughter’s hospital room. A warm breeze blew in through the opened window as morning light slipped its way in through vanishing night. Beneath Vincente’s hard exterior was a wounded heart that hid against the demands of everyday life. He’d wanted to leave his home since a young boy, but his father needed him to remain and help build homes for others. He could never find a way to tell his father he wanted to leave, to strike out on his own and explore the world. And so Vincente’s dreams died. But he loved his wife, and when his daughter was born he’d found his life had been renewed. To lose her would destroy him. She was his joy.