The Awakened

by Julian Cheek

  All three monks were chanting in time and cadence with Fastana. Suddenly, it appeared as if the flames from the candles were starting to bend towards the walls they faced. They bent and started to grow in length away from the wick of the candles. Grow until they touched the reflective walled surface within the individual monks chambers. Then, incredibly, the flames continued growing through the walls, appearing instead in the chamber that Ngaire and her people occupied. Three strands of flame punctured out in three different places from out of the solid rock and started to stretch towards the centre of the chamber, heading for Fastana.

  Those nearest to these beams of flame stood back from them in fear, not understanding what was happening. Slowly, the flames continued to extend, all three growing longer and longer as they grew into the chamber. Getting closer and closer to each other, and to Fastana who still stood in the centre of the space, staff in hand, eyes closed and chanting as before.

  And then, the flames merged! Fastana became a torch of brightest intensity within the centre of the space. The chamber lit with the reflective glow that had become Fastana, who now appeared to be burning up and yet, looking closely, still standing, his cloak unburnt, his skin not burning off him. Those around him moved away in terror. None of them had witnessed such magiks before, and the mood of the crowd started to change to one of wanting to flee. But only for a moment.

  From within the torch that was Fastana came his reassuring voice. “Now you can perhaps understand how this priceless treasure has been protected and nurtured over the generations. Each monk is located in citadels like this all over Maunga-Atua. All can be summoned, just like we can summon our Padme regardless of distance. Should any one monk be forced to lose connection, as you see here, another is ready, in a different location, to take their place. And so, whilst I stand, this link to other places, this World Swap, is possible through me. For I am the last of the monks of the Anahim. The last of the original bearers of the flame. The last who is able to wield the flame, allowing passage beyond the here. Fear not. Draw closer and see that I do not burn.”

  Some of the crowd did indeed move forward, reaching out to touch Fastana tentatively, then retract their hands quickly with surprise. Their hands not singed, their clothing still the same as before. Others in turn, gathered around these braver individuals, looking at the clothing and hands with astonishment, then turning and approaching Fastana to see and experience for themselves. Even Ngaire and Tensa, the oldest of the group, found themselves hobbling forward to see for themselves.

  Fastana then announced the time of departure. “Five of you have already been chosen,” he proclaimed. “Have faith and approach. Walk towards me as if I were a door, for indeed, that is what I am. A door to another place. Have faith and walk. We will not see you again but your Padme will be able to communicate to us and you, in turn, will be able to communicate with them. Go with blessing. Go with faith. Find Sam and show him that his world is infinitely bigger than anything he can ever recall.”

  Within the crowd, there was a slight movement as five individuals turned to their comrades, hugging them tightly, then bending down to hold and caress their Padme. Communication not just through thought, but through their bodies and actions. Years of living together, now quickly coming to an end as they prepared to enter into an unknown place and time, prepared only to do all in their power to bring Sam to his senses one last time.

  The five finally approached Ngaire, Tensa and Hauka. There were no words that could bring justice to the feelings coursing through everybody. Tears were free to flow as the group of five stood ready to depart. All three gathered the five to themselves and the eight held each other tightly for a moment, before the five extracted themselves from their leaders, turned, and walked towards Fastana with grim determination.

  There were no words, no loud noises, no crashes of thunder as they approached him. One minute they were there, the next, they had simply disappeared.

  Paris, around 10am

  The Boulevard Périphérique (E15) is the busiest road in Paris. The motorway surrounding the city is some thirty-five kilometres long and takes up to twenty-five percent of all Paris traffic on its wide, at times, up to eight lane black top route. Despite the sheer numbers that it carries, there are no hard shoulders generally which means that accidents can cause considerable disruption, as emergency vehicles have no open route to get to an emergency situation easily.

  The E15 crosses the famous river Seine in two places, one at Porte de Saint-Cloud, the other at Porte de Bercy. And it is here, that the motorway not only crosses the Seine, but also two of the busiest rail network lines from Paris, feeding most of the south of France.

  Pierre de Fontaine and his family, wife, Chantel and two daughters, Monique and Isobel, were travelling counter-clockwise on the outer ring approaching Porte de Bercy in their new Citroen. After a busy few days in the office, Pierre was more than ready to take the family for a well-earned break to Euro Disney. They had left early from their home in the 14th arrondissement, hoping to beat the traffic, but it appeared that a great many people had a similar idea. Joining the E15 at Porte d’Italie, they already saw that today would be a slow one. Ahead, a wide line of vehicles were coming and going along the eight lane stretch, leading to the Porte de Bercy and the north.

  Monique was bored and they had only just left.

  “Do we have to go to Euro Disney?” she asked for the tenth time. “It’s so lame! Jean-Claude and Martine said they could look after me whilst you are gone. It’s for kids like Isobel.” Monique was a fifteen year old, “yearning-for-freedom” girl. She looked across at her ten year old sister, angry at her for no reason other than she must be to blame for this mini break.

  “Monique, dear,” said her mother, “this is something we all discussed last month. We are going and that’s that. We shall soon be turning off the Périph to head away from Paris. If you are so bored, why don’t you film the journey with your phone and post it on Facebook for all your friends to see?”

  Monique just raised her eyes to the heavens. Like that would really happen! she thought to herself. But she got her phone out nonetheless, and started to bury herself in messaging her friends, complaining at the injustice of being an eldest child.

  On the opposite, inner ring side, travelling clockwise, north of the Porte de Bercy crossing, Luigi Andretti was battling tiredness in his articulated lorry. Behind him, case loads of tomatoes were stacked in their refrigerated compartments in his container all heading slowly south and down towards Lyon. He should have pulled off at one of the many “Aires de service” rest stations dotted around the E15 by now, but he wanted to leave this Paris collar before the traffic coming into Paris centre added to the congestion, snarling up the road yet further and adding at least another hour to this tedious journey. From his elevated vantage point, he could see the tracks ahead of him and off to his right heading up to the Gare de Lyon, one of the busiest rail stations in Paris. Off to his left, the tracks snaked under the overpass and disappeared off down towards where he was heading, Lyon, about 460 kilometres to the south. Being a seasoned trucker Luigi was doing most things automatically, not really noticing the road movements and their ebb and flow. Nothing ever happened to Luigi when he was driving. He was, after all, an accomplished Italian driver and knew this route like the back of his hand.

  He looked down towards the old radio in his cab and started to search for a decent channel playing Italian music.

  The ‘de Fontaine’ family came at last to the turn off on the Porte de Bercy and dropped down onto the A4 heading east away from the daily grind of the Périph and towards their destination. The route ahead cleared and Pierre started to relax into the remaining thirty minutes of the journey.

  It was a bright hazy day for this time of year, for once. Cirrus clouds were painted in the azure blue sky, as if blown by a street artist. A few contrails could be seen winging their way high above the crowded streets of Paris. Visibility was good. Traffic was flowing, which for
this hour, was a blessing at least.

  A huge, reverberating thunder clap exploded around the Porte de Bercy and surrounded the area with unimaginable light and noise. Instinctively, many drivers in their cars, fearing that a terrorist event was occurring, cowered down in fright or swung their steering wheels to one side in defensive reactions. Cars rear-ended other cars, spewing metal carnage around and over the bridge in short order. This only added to the natural course of action that was to follow on that fateful day.

  Luigi was still concentrating on the radio when the light ahead shot into his cab, blinding him momentarily. He looked up in shock to see what was happening, all senses rapidly trying to catch up with events. His last few moments of life were to look on in terror as a lone man suddenly seemed to appear from out of nowhere, standing in the middle of the motorway some ten metres away and directly in front of him.

  There was nowhere for Luigi to go.

  Luigi felt rather than saw his heavily laden truck crash into the individual and bounce sickeningly over him. His world went into overdrive as he slammed on the brakes, whilst at the same time, yanking the steering wheel off to the right.

  Momentum took over.

  With the cab now heading straight for the barriers to the side and the rest of the lorry under heavy braking, the rear started to lose traction and skid sideways into the traffic adjacent to it. Luigi only registered one thing. The cab, pushing easily with its own heavy weight, crashed through the side protective barriers as if it was made of paper. The tomato-laden container tipped off its bearings and slammed into the nearby cars, motorcyclists and trucks, spilling its load in its fall. The rest of the articulated lorry disappeared over the edge and for a few seconds, Luigi saw the rapidly approaching tracks of the main rail network approaching him, before the cab slammed into the ground at speed, crushing him instantly.

  The 10:30 TGV train from Gare de Lyon heading to Marseille had already reached 120 kph by the time it reached the Porte de Bercy and impacted on the wreckage. The train driver and co-pilot were killed instantly and, without a brakesman, the remaining 15 carriages concertinaed into one another, slewing off the rails and spilling one of the busiest business commuter trains over a 200m area. The full tanks of diesel were ignited by the sparks from the sharp edges of broken carriages and the live electricity coursing through the tracks. A fireball erupted and enveloped carriages 1-4 in a flash fire before billowing up and over the bridge, crammed with commuters in their vehicles.

  On the western side of the Porte de Bercy, on the outer ring, another family were travelling off on their holidays, caravan in tow. For them, a holiday to look forward to rapidly turned into their worst nightmare as they saw the lightning flash across the skies before impacting on the bridge, and looked on in horror as cars, trucks and smaller objects all seemed to disappear in an explosive fireball. Hilda de Bryn, the driver, screamed out to her husband who was dozing in the passenger seat, but for them, it too was to late.

  The windshield of their car erupted inwards and a human form travelling at a collective speed of 85kph smashed headlong into the screaming face of Hilda. Driverless, the car and caravan hurtled into the side barrier, taking out yet more cars before it mounted the central reservation and crashed head first into the on-coming traffic.

  Chaos quickly escalated as panic, bad driving and a lack of knowledge all combined to create an expanding, tangled mess of broken cars, vehicles and bodies. More explosions occurred as another truck on the inner ring bounced off the top of the destroyed caravan and flew over the crash barriers immediately after the Seine, this time plummeting onto the tracks leading from Gare d’Austerlitz.

  Within a few minutes, the busiest road in Paris and two of the busiest rail systems were brought to a stand still. Not one call had been made to emergency services, so sudden was the catastrophe.

  To the north of the bridge, two objects were seen impacting into the river itself.

  Miriam, one of the five chosen to enter through the maelstrom first, was completely unprepared for what happened to her on walking into Fastana. She gritted her teeth expecting some pain to occur, but all that happened was that the light became incredibly bright, and then suddenly she was smashing into a big river. She was pushed deep under water and she almost gasped out in shock, but her sixth sense kicked in and she clawed her way to the surface and peered out at a world gone mad, and one most definitely not Maunga-Atua. Treading water, she looked on with horror as a huge, obviously man-made structure behind her seemed to explode with fire. Strange objects were falling off its sides, some in flames. She looked on in horror as the unmistakeable shapes of people could also be seen jumping off the structure, some in flames, others screaming in terror, to land with dull splashes into the river she was in, there to disappear from view.

  With her sensory perceptions in tatters, she had enough sense to swim to the western bank, which was closest to her, and claw herself out of the smelly, dirty river before it swept her away into the flaming holocaust ahead. A number of people were looking down at her, grief stricken or in blind panic. They were shouting at each other and at her in a strange language she had never heard before. Some held small objects to their ears and seemed to be screaming into them.

  Her feelings of being in an uncontrolled situation rapidly escalated into those of pure terror as one of the passers-by reached down to try to grab her hand and pull her out of the river. As she watched, his hand made contact with hers and, as if being rubbed out, first his fingers, then his hand, then his arm started to disintegrate. The man’s pain receptors had no time to register what was going on, but his mind enabled him to witness his own horror unfolding before him. As he watched, his entire body started to melt and he fell down to the cobbled floor trying to scream from a mouth which no longer had form.

  The sight of seeing someone disappear like this was too much for one gendarme, who had been happily strolling along the banks of the Seine. On seeing what had transpired, and observing the lady now climbing out of the water apparently unfazed as to what had happened, he pulled out his gun concealed in the safety holster and shot the woman in the head. He briefly saw her lifeless body topple back into the dark waters and the surrounding chaos that had exploded onto his senses before he reached up to point the gun at himself, and pull the trigger.

  Pierre could not believe what he was witnessing in his rearview mirror as the bridge behind them disappeared in a chaotic explosion. His mind went into overload and his scream broke everyone’s sense of calm, bringing them all to look at Pierre to see what was going on. Chantel screamed out another warning. “Pierre, watch out!” And pointing forward, she could not believe what greeted her eyes. A second ago she was day-dreaming, looking out through the windscreen, longing for at least a few days’ break from the daily chores of life. The next thing, a man wearing the strangest outfit she had ever seen suddenly appeared in front of them from a bolt of lightning. Her mind tried to register that although what she had seen could not possibly have happened, nevertheless, there he stood and unless they stopped and stopped immediately, he would hit their car. Pierre slammed on the brakes and managed to stop within 2m of the man’s legs.

  Monique, who had been deep in text conversation with her friend, looked up to see what was happening. Like her mother, she saw the man appear before them as if by magic and heard the cry of terror from her mother and her father, even though he was looking behind him. She brought her phone up, opened the camera app and quickly pressed the video button, live streaming the ghastly image to her social network page.

  “Stay in the car!” her father ordered, as he unbuckled his seat belt and climbed out of the car. “Pierre. Be careful, please,” cried Chantel. It was the last thing she ever said to her husband of eighteen years.

  For Monique and Isobel, what happened next haunted them for the rest of their lives. Pierre approached the apparition before him, calmly asking him if he was OK. The man looked blankly back at him, speaking in a strange form of English. “Sorry,�
� Pierre replied in his best pigeon-English, “I am not good at speaking English.” He offered his hand out to the man who was gazing at him as if he came from the planet “Gog”. The man reached out his hand, and Pierre’s world ended!

  Like the person who had tried to assist Miriam, Pierre could not believe what was happening to him as first his fingers seemed to melt before his terror-stricken eyes, and then his arm and torso quickly disintegrated. His brain was still registering this horror and not being able to assimilate that Pierre was indeed dying right in front of himself as he collapsed to the floor and melted into the asphalt road without a sound being uttered.

  The stranger, with one look behind him, ran off in terror, the very ground around him seeming to burn up in protest at his passing. He clambered up the steep embankment and disappeared from view.

  Monique had unknowingly captured the entire event on her live-streamed video phone. Within thirty minutes, her video had gone viral!

  Within ten minutes, snippets of information started to filter through to Radio France, CNN International and France 24. Their helicopters quickly took to the skies thereafter, shooting off towards Porte de Bercy to capture what was undoubtedly sounding more like a terrorist attack with every passing second.

  The police constable on duty that day at the Préfecture de Police in the 13th arrondissement, the closest precinct to the incident, was looking forward to going home at the end of a very stressful shift. He heard the dull explosion and wondered vaguely what had caused it. It did not sound like any explosion he had ever come across. More, if anything, like the noise a plane would make as it went through the sound barrier. Something had happened, of that he was sure. Little did he know that his day was about to get a whole lot worse! As soon as news started to filter into his office that calamity was occurring in his patch, he ordered his captain to switch their monitoring system on that focussed on the bridge that appeared to be in question. The office staff all looked on in horror as they saw a terror situation unlike anything ever witnessed by them before.