Some things, you didn’t profane.
Austerlitz had apparently read the childish distress on his face.
“Do you know why your Moses remained behind on Mount Nebo as the Israelites crossed over Jordan into the Promised Land?”
Boaz glared at Austerlitz, and his tongue went to the false tooth again.
“The popular belief,” said Austerlitz, watching the monsters close on the golden dome, “is that it was because he disobeyed God at the waters of Meribah, attributing power to himself. Nonsense. Would God deny His chief servant the greatest ambition of his life over a minor misunderstanding with a rock? No, Moses had seen the fickleness of his people first hand, their willingness to return to the idol worship they had learned from the Egyptians. He knew that if he was buried in Canaan, the Israelites would forever sanctify his resting place, and it would become a place of contention, so he chose to die alone. Now look at your Temple Mount and your Holy Land and all the bickering and bloodshed that has resulted from it. Today humanity will get an abject lesson in the first commandment.”
The first hyena man sniffed the air and inclined its head to the northeast, growling.
An aerial view of the northeast desert showed something huge moving out from Anatot military facility and kicking up a cloud of dust as it raced toward the city. It was the color of the surrounding sand, nearly indiscernible, but in a moment, even Boaz’s jaded heart leapt at the sight, for he knew what it was.
The Magen.
Even with his clearance, Boaz didn’t know exactly what the Magen was. Like everybody else, he knew it had first walked out of the Judean Desert in full view of a bunch of tourists at the old Massada fortress in the summer of ‘67. Nobody knew if it was the result of some kind of scientific experiment or had been specifically harnessed or created in secret and then unveiled in that dramatic way for maximum effect, but its appearance on the side of Israel effectively ended the Six Day War, and later proved instrumental in swinging the Yom Kippur War in ’73.
It’s appearance was hailed by clerics as a sign from God, a stamp of approval on the nation of Israel. IDF capitalized on this by holding a full on, televised dress ceremony of thanks to it after the liberation of the Mount. Boaz had been there, lined up with the rest, saluting the great thing. Uzi Narkiss (with the help of a crane) had hung a giant Star of David pendant on it, suspended by a thick steel chain around its neck. This led to it being dubbed The Magen (or ‘shield’) by the popular Israeli press. The thing became a cultural phenomenon. Toys, t-shirts, animated shows, the works. When support for the administration flagged or a terrorist attack had the country feeling low, they marched out the Magen.
Boaz didn’t even know if it could be called a creature, or if it was technically even alive. People said it was a golem created by the rabbis to defend Israel. Others said it was like America’s giant monster Johnson, with sandstone in place of hair. It looked like a giant walking statute, weathered by desert wind so that it was mostly featureless. Boaz thought that this lack of a defined face lent it an everyman quality somehow. People projected onto it their own personalities. It had the form of a muscular male (they’d hung a huge glittering skirt of interlinked metal scale mail about its waist early on for modesty’s sake), and didn’t seem to have a mouth, though it had a nose and big stony ears. Its eyes were black as the al-Ḥajar al-Aswad at Mecca, and set deep into its simple, kindly face. It had displayed some kind of rudimentary intelligence because it didn’t need to be goaded into action like some countries’ creatures. But how it was controlled or where it came from, Boaz had no idea. That was Mega-Affairs stuff.
But he found himself silently thrilling at its appearance, buying into the propaganda. Here it was again, at the time of Israel’s greatest need.
“Another of your idols,” Austerlitz said, clapping his hands together and smiling. “Watch it fall.”
The first hyena creature clambered up the Mount of Olives, smashing the graves and bones of thousands of Jews. When it reached the top, it spied the Magen racing into the eastern city limits. It gave another shrill, strange roar and the hair striped mane that ran the length of its back bristled erect like the neck of a rooster.
The Magen inclined its head, and altered its course, pumping its huge oversized fists and pistoning its lumbering stone legs.
When it reached the foot of the Mount, the hyena thing’s weird golden eyes erupted with a pair of brilliant solar rays that sliced across the ground, creating twin wakes of fire. The rays raked the Magen’s legs and sent it tumbling face first into the massive cemetery with a thunderous impact that sent granite monuments scattering.
The hyena thing leapt down and gripped the Magen by its stony ears, dragging it to its feet. The Magen came up with a crushing double uppercut that sent the hyena reeling back down the other side, crashing into the tree covered hills.
It scrambled quickly to its feet, whining, and sent another volley of golden rays up the Mount, carving a smoking furrow in the Magen’s left shoulder.
The Magen responded by reaching down and breaking off two spires off the Church of Mary Magdalene that had nestled on the slope sine the 19th century. They were tall thin towers capped with gilded onion domes, each tipped with a golden cross. The Magen leapt down the Mount, wielding the spires like a pair of daggers, drove the crosses into the hyena’s eyes.
The hyena let out an ear splitting canine yelp that echoed through the city. It stumbled backwards, the spires still protruding from its face, and fell to all fours, crashing in a blind, mad rush to the west, tearing through the city, rebounding clumsily off the buildings. Energy spilled from its ruined eyes like tears of fire, spattering the buildings it passed like napalm.
The Magen lumbered after it in dogged pursuit.
“Very interesting,” Austerlitz said dryly, watching the news with a deep frown on thin lips.
Outside, Boaz could hear the Iraqis chattering excitedly. A single set of footsteps went off down the corridor.
God what a mess. The church, the Mount of Olives, if the Iraqis came forward as having engineered this, or if the PLO were blamed, the Western World would go insane. If the devastation reached the Mount, the situation might not even be recoverable. Christians and Jews would unite in their hunger for Muslim blood. Somebody had to learn the Dissemblers were behind this. Even with Iraqi backing, the only way to salvage this diplomatically was to put the blame on their shoulders.
But that meant Boaz had to survive to tell somebody.
He heard the far off pounding of artillery. He was too long a soldier to mistake it for thunder. They were definitely somewhere in the city. If he could escape, he could find his way to friendlies. He knew the city.
The Mukhbarat who had left. Had he gone for orders, or just to report in? Were they aware of what was happening?
He slid the tooth open and felt the poison capsule drop onto his tongue. He worked it beneath his tongue, into the pit behind his bottom teeth. He need a weapon, and felt around for something. Maybe a loose bed rail. He found the bedpan.
* * * *
The second hyena creature heard the yowling of its wounded fellow, and broke the Church of All Nations down, bounding straight for the Temple Mount. Perhaps it had retained some sense of camaraderie. Perhaps its scavenger’s instincts sensed impending death. It toppled the Tower of David, romped slavering through Christ Church, and alighted upon the Western Wall, the last remnant of the ancient Temple, promptly crushing it flat beneath its weight.
On the eastern end of the Mount, its blinded fellow tripped over the old city wall and fell sprawling, sliding. It burst through neighborhoods and buildings until it reached the al’Aqsa Mosque, two of the four minarets crumbling and toppling down on top of it.
The Magen plodded in its smoldering wake, its thunderous footsteps resounding like steady avalanches, cresting the hill. Behind it, east Jerusalem was alive with fire.
The blinded hyena rolled out of the debris of the mosque and scrabbled up the golden Dom
e of the Rock, leaning on it for support, growling and shaking its head furiously. One of the onion domes dislodged from its left eye socket and went smashing off into the Jewish Quarter.
The second hyena bristled and unleashed a prolonged blast of radiation from its eyes, striking the Magen full in the chest.
The Magen stumbled forward, like a thing walking in the face of a hard, blowing wind. Its chest began to glow red, and finally white. The Star of David medallion melted away, and the heavy chain slid from its neck, but it opened its hand and caught the end of it.
When the second hyena finally expended its energy, it fell forward on its knuckles, exhausted.
The blind hyena sniffed the air, turning its head to angle its ears toward the Magen.
In the center of the Magen’s chest, the stone was entirely gone, and what looked like blackened flesh smoked and dripped blood beneath.
The Magen began to slowly whirl the thick chain, big as a ship’s anchor chain, over its head.
The news helicopters and gunships drew back out of the thing’s long arc, launching rockets at the hyenas that exploded harmlessly against their thick hides.
The second hyena took a deep breath, its boiling golden eyes flaring again.
The Magen reacted swiftly, lashing out with the chain, striking it on the muzzle, driving it headfirst into the ground.
The blind hyena heard the movement and sprang off the dome, snapping.
The Magen brought the chain up taut so its jaws closed on it.
Then it turned and pulled back on the chain with both hands, jerking back the thing’s thick neck. They fell together to the ground, the Magen kneeling on its back, pulling back with all its strength on the chain.
* * * *
At the sight of the burned flesh on the Magen’s chest, Austerlitz had risen from his chair.
“There! There, you see? It is not indestructible. It is flesh beneath! It can be killed! I knew it!”
Boaz began to cough and wheeze.
Austerlitz leaned forward.
“What’s wrong?” he whispered.
Boaz swung the bedpan up, bashing it with a hollow sound against the side of the ex-Nazi’s head and splashing them both with urine.
Austerlitz groaned and fell to one knee.
Boaz rolled out of the bed, using all his weight to bring the older man crashing down flat on his belly. He slipped his stiff arm out of his sling and exercised it by raising the bedpan and bringing it down on the back of the old man’s skull. Once. Twice. Three times. When the blood and teeth splashed on the concrete floor, the door opened.
The Mukhbarat with the sunglasses stepped in, cursed, and ripped at the pistol under his arm, the cigarette dropping from his lips.
Boaz flung the bedpan at his face.
It struck the man in the nose.
Boaz wriggled quickly across the floor like a worm and, gripping the end of his plastered leg, swung it at the man’s ankle.
The Iraqi fell forward and Boaz tried to climb on top of him.
The younger man flung an elbow into his stomach and threw him off, but Boaz struck his gun hand and sent the pistol skidding off into the corner.
The Iraqi threw his hands around Boaz’s throat. Boaz pinched his hands with his chin, keeping his questing fingers from his trachea and slapped his own hands around his opponent’s, driving his thumbs into his Adam’s apple. When the Iraqi’s mouth opened for a gasp of breath, Boaz spit the poison capsule right into the other man’s mouth and jammed his jaw shut with his fingers, shoving his face to the floor. He heard the crack, felt the man under him fight with renewed, desperate vigor, strained to stay on top of him.
Any moment now the man’s partner would be back.
* * * *
The blind hyena sagged to the ground, dead, and the Magen let the chain fall. It ran toward the other one just as it raised its head and sprayed the Magen’s midsection with yellow rays.
The blast checked the Magen’s charge and sent it crashing against the already damaged golden dome. It fell to one knee, its elbow and arm punched through the structure. The stone covering its belly was burned away, and a ghastly, pulsing open wound was exposed.
The hyena rose to its feet triumphantly and stood over the Magen. It brought up its clawed hands and began to batter the back of the Magen’s head, leaping in savage glee, each thunderous blow rocking the statue’s skull on its shoulders.
Cracks began to appear all across the back of the Magen’s head.
The hyena paused then, exhausted from the sheer effort of battering the stone man down. It decided to fall back on its eye beams, and the two yellow eyes began to boil golden energy.
Then the Magen raised its head to stare up at the wild looking beast. Its right hand broke free of the glorious golden dome and it rose to its feet. In its hand was the very Foundation Stone, revered for millennia, a massive chunk of ancient boulder, hidden from the sunlight by worshippers for thousands of years, now ripped free of its antediluvian bed.
The stone collided with the side of the hyena’s head with such force the skull was obliterated in a burst of blood, bone, and golden energy.
When the flash of the explosion subsided, the hyena’s body stood on wavering haunches, smoke rising from the stump of its curved neck.
It tottered backwards like a slow falling timber and collapsed.
The Magen rose, the Foundation Stone in hand, bright red blood streaming down its mail skirt and splashing its stony feet.
It too fell in a heap upon its foe.
* * * *
A door banged open somewhere, and footsteps came galloping down the corridor.
The door to the room was kicked off its hinges and the second Mukhbarat agent entered, his cheeks shining with tears, eyes wild, lips frothing.
He raised the submachinegun and was firing before his eyes even registered the empty bed.
“Allahua Akbar! Allahua Akbar!” he screamed over and over, emptying his clip, perforating the bed, blowing up the television, riddling the walls and the two corpses lying in the room.
He stepped weeping into the room, blinking at the gun smoke and the echo of the tinkling brass.
Boaz, his back to the door, sitting in the man’s shadow, raised his captured Iraqi pistol and fired twice to be sure.
He dragged himself out of the kill room, heavy with the stink of death and gunfire, and pulled himself like a worm down the corridor, toward an outer door that hung open.
Outside people rushed back and forth, screaming, shrieking, crying, and smoke and ash hung over the ruined city. Buildings were aflame and people struggled to drag their loved ones from the rubble.
An old man was yelling over and over;
“God! Where is God?”
Boaz recognized Bab al-Jadid Road. He was in the northwest corner of the Christian Quarter, and could see the destroyed Dome of The Rock over the rooftops, and the great mound of smoking stone that marked the Magen’s body. Was it alive? He didn’t know. He recalled Austerlitz’s giddiness at its wounding, and remembered all his talk about a Coming. What the hell had Austerlitz been trying to do here? The Dissemblers weren’t just about wreaking havoc. There had been a definite purpose, a definite target here. And when he gazed on the body of the Magen, he thought he knew what it was.
How many times had he passed up and down this street, out to roust some dissident? He remembered snatching a guy coming out of the mosque on Christian Quarter Road, throwing a bag over his head and pulling him into the back of a car, pushing a pistol in his belly while an agent rushed him through the narrow lanes and breakneck speed, honking at the peddlers and tourists to get them clear. He had watched the black bag over the man’s head huffing in and out, heard him reciting the Koran, until they squealed to a stop at a nondescript house a few blocks away and a guy in a panama shirt opened the door and took him away.
He wondered briefly what had happened to that man, then he wriggled down the street, yelling frantically at an IDF soldier he spied on the
corner.
Being then God's offspring, we ought not to think that the divine being is like gold or silver or stone, an image formed by the art and imagination of man. Acts 17:29
The idea for this one came right from my then-seven year old daughter, Magnolia, who a year later had her own story published in an all woman anthology called Mistresses of The Macabre. Now she wants to be a film director.
We were sitting in a tent in her room telling scary stories to each other around Halloween. She topped anything I’d come up with, and I told her straight off I was gonna steal her idea and give her half the money.
Sometimes you lend somebody else your rod and reel and they wind up pulling up something better than you would have, even though you’ve been sitting there all day watching the bobber float.
The Better To See You
The girl watched her mother pack the last of the sandwiches into the pink picnic basket. She slipped the Cincinnati baseball cap her father had given her (because it was her favorite color; she had no interest whatsoever in baseball) onto her head and snatched up the wicker handle just as her mother closed the lid.
Her mother’s hand slapped down over her’s.
The girl looked into her mother’s eyes.
Her mother held up one finger.
“You know Grandma’s not well these days.”
The girl nodded, bouncing lightly on the balls of her feet in her eight year old impatience.
“Sometimes she forgets things. Or she’ll do weird things like maybe....I don’t know, put her hairbrush in the microwave.”
The girl giggled.
“I’m serious. So if you have any trouble with her, you call home on the cellphone. OK?”
“OK.”
“Remember how?”
“Press the green button. Then the one that says Mom and Dad.”
“Straight to Grandma’s.”
“Yessss,” the girl whined.
A second finger went up.
“No talking to strangers.”
“I know....”
Her mother pointed to her own cheek.
Angler In Darkness Page 25