by Jake Packard
The Silver Haired Man
Autumn, late 21st Century -
A man emerged from the forest, crossed the moist sand, and sat down on a large egg-shaped rock by the water’s edge.
Not a wisp of wind rustled the leaves in the moonless night.
The spectacle of stars twinkled on the surface of the lake.
A meteor streaked across the sky, reflecting off the still water a few feet from his muddy boots.
He tapped a button and the screen flicked on his device, casting a sterling blue glow on his silver hair. He took a deep breath and spoke into the microphone.
“My son, I am so proud of you and the man who you have become. You have learned from the so-called experts about the extraordinary events just before your birth and you explored all their opinions and theories. But now, on the eve of your departure, your mother and I feel it is time to share the truth with you, my first-hand account of that awe-inspiring time.
“To many it seems like centuries have passed, and nothing from back then matters anymore. But I believe the past is never over, it evolves into the present, bringing all its consequences.
“The story bounces back and forth between two centuries, so, please forgive me in advance if it is a bit confusing. It is still mind-blowing for me, and for your mother. But, so it goes with marvels and wonders, and with life and death.
“I have witnessed extraordinary evil. Some things that I must tell you will disgust you and horrify you. But you need to prepare yourself. You are destined to see much worse. Much, much worse.
“So, hear my words and try to understand. For when you get to the end of my story, I know you will agree. All of us were truly blessed during those four miraculous days.”
* * * * *
Part 1
The Winter Solstice
Salem
At midnight of the winter solstice, Salem Jones lay on the floor in the middle of his solitary cell in Riker’s Island, New York City’s main prison complex. Eyes closed, mind transcendent.
In the next room The Big Apple’s most savage criminals and terrorists lay on small cots arranged in orderly rows.
All the cell doors stood open.
No guards walked patrol.
Silence save for the breathing of sleeping men.
A door creaked open at one end of the hallway, cracking the hush. A black-hooded figure stepped in. Bony feet clicked on the tile floor in time to the beat of a distant netherdrum. Fledgling goblins fluttered behind, their sniggers morphing into the gutturals of hellish beasts, and crescendoed into the screaming of the eternally enraged preparing for ultimate combat.
The horde of fiends hobbled into Salem’s cell and surrounded his prostrate form. The hooded one raised his arm. The satanic din ceased. A bony finger extended from the dank filth of the black wraith’s sleeve and pointed at Salem’s face.
But then, from up high, a soft celestial vibrato wafted in. The music whirled around the room gaining momentum and volume, resonating, repeating mantra-like, yet never the same.
The monsters beneath cringed in agony. They grabbed their grotesque ears with their gnarled and deformed claws. Unable to keep the beautiful sound out of their heads they fled in anguished torment, bellowing with unholy rage.
Salem opened his eyes. The ghostly echoes of the phantasmic battle rebounded off the walls. For the last time, he scanned the blessed stillness of his barren cell, where he often witnessed the bounty of so many incoming glories.
The time had come.
* * * * *
Jamal
Shantypark.
Jamal’s teeth rattled.
He sat on a plastic tarp strewn on the ground inside the dimly lit tent his family called home for all the ten years of his life, trying to stay warm next to the city-issued kerosene heater. His mother bounced with vigor on a cot in the corner with a sleepy eyed stranger Jamal knew he had seen before. His baby sister screamed and cried in his grandmother’s arms as she lurched back and forth next to him on a scrap-wood rocking chair. Jamal could not stop shivering.
Grandmother shook him on the shoulder and whispered, “Your baby sister is hungry, boy. That’s why she’s crying. She’s sick, too. Maybe dying. What are we gonna do, boy, what are we gonna do?”
What can I do? Jamal thought. His grandmother knew his deal. Born into this depravity spawned by the Exchange and the ongoing eco-disasters, he lived all his life crammed into this space formerly known as Central Park in the previous life of New York City. It took all his daily strength just to survive in the lawless grime of this modern-day leper colony, treading water in the ocean of viruses that flooded this world. A place of no escape.
And this night, to his dismay, shiver-like shocks wracked his malnourished body with convulsions, threatening to tear him apart.
His mother moaned and rolled over on her stomach.
His Grandmother rocked liked the pendulum of a grandfather clock gone wild.
His baby sister shrieked with innocent pain.
Jamal’s heart pounded, his skin crawled, and his muscles convulsed. So, to keep himself from exploding, he jumped up and kicked the stranger in his ribs who was humping his mother from the rear.
Unaware of what hit him, the man fell off and landed with a thud on the frozen ground. Unfazed, he rolled onto his back, snorting off into a drug-induced stupor.
Jamal’s mother, noticing something missing, took off her headphones and looked around. She snickered, which turned into a nervous laugh, and then rose into a drugified cackle. The buzz she got from the new designer drug called smizz often took her to uncomfortably high places. The giggle signaled others around to prepare for anything. Jamal heard it before, and seen it turn from pure delight to paranoid terror.
At the height of her hysterics she saw her son standing over her and, lonely enough, she pulled Jamal down by the back of his neck, and tried to shove her insatiate tongue into his throat. Disgusted, he pushed her away, but she fell off the cot and onto her comatose partner. Startled once more, but seeing new opportunity, she groped the man trying to wake him for more noxious sex.
Horrified, Jamal turned to his grandmother. She said, “Oh, Jamal, honey, what are we going to do, your baby sister is sick; she is starving. She is gonna die if we don’t git some food, Jamal, what are we going to do?”
Food? What food? His grandmother knew the story. Everything anyone gets to eat in Shantypark comes from the city’s scheduled drop-offs everyday. But the gangs, armed with legions of automatic weapons, controlled it all.
Born at the end of the last gang war, Jamal heard the legends of the Shantypark marauders, how they stalked the city government through the tunnels, like colon cancer metastasizing in the city’s bowels, almost bringing New York to its knees. But the General bombed the park with the entire world watching on TV, and afterwards the Mayor forced a deal with the Gang Council. Now there is only one place to find food.
Jamal turned and faced the tent flap.
Grandmother pulled the baby close to the warmth of her bosom. “Oh, no, my child, you can’t go outside. You don’t know what’s out there. No kid goes out into Shantypark at night. It’s not safe for children. That’s the way it is, boy. You ain’t no good to me and your baby sister as some nightcrawler’s midnight snack.”
“Ma, shut up,” Jamal’s mother shouted from somewhere near the stoned man’s crotch.
“Put your damn headphones back on, you little slut, and stop butting in.” Grandma jerked to a stop and grabbed Jamal by the shoulder. She squeezed hard, staring at him with hollowed eyes, her voice turned from panicked to fierce and desperate. “Your baby sister got to make it one more night so she can see him. If she can get to see Salem, I think she’s gonna make it. I know he can m
ake her all right. Salem’s gonna make it all right for all of us. You too, Jamal. Now that’ll give you something to talk about, right boy?”
Jamal’s mother, out of breath from undulating uselessly on her torpid partner shouted out, “Ma! I said, ‘shut the fuck up.’ And you know Jamal don’t talk to nobody. And no fuckin’ New York goombah is gonna make him start now.”
“Are you crazy, girl? Guido, my ass. Nobody knows who Salem is. I heard Salem Jones just might be a brother.” Grandma growled at her wayward daughter groveling around on the floor between the drunk man’s legs and turned back to Jamal. “Your mother is crazy, boy, and those drugs have poisoned her mind. But Jamal, you can’t go out there, even though your baby sister just might die tonight if she don’t get a bite to eat. So, all we can do is just sit back and look at your momma disgust up the tent. She ain’t even worth a dime out in Reginald Square where some man with an extra buck would’ve paid for a fine fuck like she used to be. But now cause of that smizz, nobody would pay her nothing except a never-you-mind. Exception being that limp dick over there who brings her the devil drugs.”
As if by sick magic his mother’s berserk eyes, jaundiced by years of addiction, appeared at Grandma’s lap. She held a serrated pocketknife, the blade resting on her baby girl’s unprotected neck. One little flick and blood would pour.
“Ma,” she said, “it’s so cold outside, please shut the fuckin’ fuck up!” Then she giggled again, which turned into a paranoid cackle.
Appalled and melted down by the hopelessness of it all, Jamal’s body quaked at a critical mass. In a brief, impulsive instant he leaped through the door flap, out of the relative security of the family tent into the unfathomable evil of the Shantypark night.
Caught in the surrealism of that moment, the baby’s relentless and punishing screams paused, his mother’s histrionics halted, and Grandma’s distraught prayers came to a stop. The tent held its breath and time stopped for an icy instant.
Grandma, in tears, whispered, “Oh, please Salem Jones, don’t let anybody hurt my baby boy. Please, Salem, if you can hear me, please let no evil befall my little Jamal.”
The moment over, Jamal’s mother broke out into violent laughter. She took a long and sloppy swill from a half-empty bottle by her cot. “Screw fuckin’ this” she howled and slapped her friendly fellow hard in the face.
* * * * *
Ibrahim
The sudden surge of adrenaline faded fast. Jamal’s burst of speed slowed into hesitant steps. At first the frigid night air added exhilaration to the sudden change, but then vertigo advanced. Everything outside his tent flap looked so different in the dark of night, especially this time of year, with the light dusting of snow turning to mist, like so many wisps of lives gone by.
Within spitting distance from where earlier he had played during the light of day, he saw a heap of diseased invalids huddled together for whatever warmth the freshly dead in the pile could provide for the dying. Some convulsed in their death throes; others could only moan and shake. Those unable to move just lied there oddly perplexed, bearing blank witness to their inconsolable condition.
Rising out of the ragged pile of dying and deceased people, a hooded figure turned to watch him pass, and catching the little boy’s attention, it froze him with a dark invidious power. It extending a rotten sleeve and pointed a skinny finger in Jamal’s direction.
Beyond horrified, his overwhelming terror propelled his undernourished muscles to free himself from the dark stranger’s hypnotic gaze. Abandoning all caution, but unable to scream, he sprinted off into the night, farther and farther away from anything he had known before.
Within a minute, the fear-inspired energy in his skinny body burnt out again. Exhausted, he stopped at a junction between a corrugated shack and a patchwork tent made out of seat covers filched from cars in the dead zone, just far enough away from the blast that they did not melt.
Trying to catch his breath, Jamal heard chilling voices coming from the other side of the tent. He ducked behind a rusty garbage can.
“What you say? You don’t believe me? You make joke? You hear that, my mujahedin? I come half way around the world to be trapped in what was once America to hear such bullshit from a loser like this. I could cut his throat like rotten fruit.”
The dark man talking in the clearing ahead of Jamal turned to the vulture-like crew behind him. The man had that alarming type of accent that Jamal had heard so many times before. So cold it could blow out candles. A broken, razor-sharp English dialect evolved from the wave of Kyrgistanis, Uzbekistanis, Afghanistanis and all the other “stanis” that poured illegally into North America from the mountains and steppes of Central Asia after the Exchange, the global warming, and their ensuing continental drought.
The man wheezed out a giggle. “Funny shit, Boyos, am I right? His boys mumbled in agreement. “Well then, let’s look again.”
Jamal, though terrified, could not help peeking around the side of the corroded metal container that concealed him from the gang. In the gloomy dark he saw a man down on the ground, cringing on frozen mud, his tormentor stood in triumph over his body. Four stringy-looking men revolved in an orbit around them. One of them leaned over the victim, grinning like a gargoyle. He grabbed the victim’s arm and held it in the air.
The dark man pulled a small, flat electronic device out of his pocket. He pointed it at the supplicant’s hand. “I got this latest model biopod from one of my squirrel-killer amigos in exchange for a case of the finest Kentucky whiskey. We get better shit then those pukes. Now I can hook up to the city’s databanks just like those fucking Marines. They be just goat shit like us, only difference the uniforms. But you, you pathetic asshole, you know this biopod don’t lie. It’s our friend. It helps clean up this world you’re stinking up.”
He pressed a button on the palm-sized wireless device, and a thin red beam of light hit the beggar’s exposed wrist. In an instant he heard two small electronic beeps. Then the vulture dropped the arm and kicked the downed man hard in the face.
Within seconds three more beeps came from the biopod. The stani looked down on the tiny screen. He laughed and showed it to his prey.
“I have funny joke for you, too, my friend. Did you hear the one about the stupid asshole with fuckin’ shit for brains?” The stani, Ibrahim, kicked his downed quarry in the balls. The victim squealed in pain. Ibrahim kicked him again, harder, and again.
“You see what this biopod says. This says you are a fuckin’ loser. And this info comes straight from the city that condemned you here in the first place. Your blood is not only swimming with AIDS, it tells me you a fucking junkie with the clap.”
The addict’s body convulsed. “No, jeez, please, no. I promise. I’ll get you the money. I swear. I just can’t get it tonight, man, I’m sick, man. Can’t you see I’m sick? I’ll have it all tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow? So, tomorrow you won’t be sick? Is that right, loser?”
“You know, don’t you? He’s coming tomorrow. They say tomorrow is the day Salem will be freed. Then I won’t be sick anymore. Please man, just give me one more day.”
The junkie squirmed under Ibrahim’s foot. But then a slight flicker of realization flashed in his eyes, his contortions quit, like a doe on the savannah, when it resigns itself to the inevitable, as the beasts in the pride work their way in.
Ibrahim lit a cigarette and took a long pull, his raptor eyes never left the man. “That’s it, fuckface. It’s over. You did it, man. You got me sick with that bullshit miracle talk. Like somebody else is going to save you, when you did this to yourself.” He stomped on his kidney, and the man screamed. “Go ahead and make noise. Your life is over, scumbag. You a scumbag because you suck. And you suck because you an asshole.” He kicked him hard in the head. Behind him the ugly swarm snickered.
“Please, man, whaddaya saying? Don’t do this. I don’t want to die before Salem is free. Cause then we’ll all be set free. You too.”
Ibrahim stopped and qu
ieted. “Oh, no, no, no. Shh, shh,” he whispered to the junkie. “Don’t ruin this anymore with infidel fuckin’ bullshit talk about redemption.” Ibrahim bent down and sat next to him. He pulled the addict’s head to his thigh and stroked his hair. “It’ll be alright, I’m sure. Just think now a moment, before I kill you. Think. You brought this whole fucking thing down on yourself. And if there is a God, why would he want weaklings like you to possibly breed? Or, for that matter, how could he have let any of this shit happen to the world. But look, what the hell? Everybody has got to die someday, and usually sooner than later around here. But, let’s consider, before you die, what is death anyway? Can it really be any worse than living like you?”
A knife appeared in his hands and Ibrahim slit the junkie’s throat like a rotten cantaloupe, and blood oozed out of his throat like the seeds.
Jamal almost screamed, but managed to hold his breath.
One of the nervous gang members babbled out, “Hey, Ibrahim, what if this Salem Jones miracle guy everyone talks about really is coming here. That would be funny right. Maybe we shouldn’t have done that.”
Ibrahim dropped the body onto the frozen ground and glared at his worried henchman in bemused disbelief.
“You think? A miracle man headed here?” Ibrahim slowly stood up, “I better run home and write my Christmas list for my Auntie Fatima.”
“Yeah, that’s funny, boss, and Christmas is just in a couple of days, too, ain’t that right? So, let’s forget I said it now, chief, yes sir, waddaya say, all is good. Just a joke.” The gang member giggled a little.
Ibrahim’s hand launched like a rattlesnake. He grabbed the lackey by the throat. “Too many jokes for one night, Boyo,” he snarled.
The man fought for air to make his words, “I’m sorry boss, I don’t know what I’m talking about. There can’t be no miracle shit.”