by Steve Alten
When you were in solitary for so long—how were you able to keep from … you know, from going insane?
For a while, I thought I had gone insane. Then, during my eighth month, I drifted into a semilucid state, for all intents and purposes, an out-of-body experience.
I don’t understand?
Nor did I at the time. It was my Hunahpu DNA. The gene was somehow programming my mind to take a visual reconnaissance into humanity’s past. My first journey deposited my consciousness on a Mediterranean shoreline, somewhere in the Middle East. From out of the sea strode a large humanoid male, his appearance bordering on the bizarre. His skin was as dark as cocoa, in sharp contrast to his long silky hair and beard, which were snow-white. His eyes were a deep azure-blue, set within an almost inhumanly elongated skull.
I would learn his name was Osiris.
But this was all just a dream?
No, son, it was quite real. I was remote-viewing an actual event that had taken place ten thousand years in the past. In my transcendental state, my consciousness had tapped into a matrix of energy, similar to what you and I are experiencing. Because the events had taken place in the past, I was able to witness the events as if I were there, as if I were one of Osiris’s nomad followers. Osiris turned my people into a functioning society. He directed us to dam the Nile delta, forming an artificial lake. He taught us how to cut immense ten-ton stones from basalt quarries. I marveled as he used his scepter-like device to lift the blocks onto barges, transmitting strange sonic harmonics that seemed to reverse the effects of gravity. More than two million stones were moved in this manner, transported through the pre-flooded valley until they were placed into position, using the surface of the lake as a perfect plane of reference.
Osiris was engineering three of the largest structural foundations in the world—the bases of the Great Pyramids of Giza, and somehow I had become one of his laborers!
Viewing those experiences is ultimately what preserved my mind. For while my body was confined to that dark, decrepit cell, my consciousness was free to roam.
As the years drifted by, my mind accompanied more of the wise men on their journeys. In England, I was part of a sect that followed the teachings of an extraterrestrial who told us his name was Merlin. This ‘wizard’ used his own stafflike device to help us transport the great sarsens that were used to erect Stonehenge. In South America, another wise man—Virococha—used a similar device to carve immense patterns into the Nazca plateau—the very zoomorphs whose meaning had eluded my father and me for decades.
What I didn’t know at the time was that these wise men with their elongated skulls, majestic blue eyes, and white hair and beards were actually members of the Guardian. Attuned to their signal line through my own Hunahpu genetics, I was being prepared.
Prepared for what?
Four Ahau, three Kankin—the winter solstice of 2012—humanity’s day of doom, prophesied in the Mayan calendar. I realized that wallowing in my emotions was doing me no good. I had to focus. I had to stay strong. My life served a greater purpose. If a holocaust was truly coming, then I knew I had to stop it.
My cell became a war room. A regimen was established, combining rigorous exercise, meditation, and remote-viewing sessions. Pieces of an ancient puzzle began falling into place. There was a means to our salvation—I just had to find it.
But first, I had to escape.
Sometime during my last year in isolation, the state of Massachusetts determined that the antiquated facility I called Hell would close down. Pierre Borgia, by then U.S. secretary of state, immediately arranged for Dr. Foletta, my personal keeper, to transfer himself and me to an asylum in Miami.
It was the summer of 2012.
The rules at the Miami facility were different, each inmate assigned a team. No longer able to exert his autocratic rule, Dr. Foletta needed someone on the staff he could manipulate into signing off on my yearly evaluation. His pawn would arrive a week later in the guise of a graduate student.
My mother?
Yes. She was so beautiful, so enticing … consuming all my thoughts, disfocusing me from the mission at hand. I tried to quell my love for her, but as the doomsday drew nearer, our souls touched. Then, in her most difficult hour, your mother sacrificed everything she held dear and helped me escape.
Together we discovered the Balam, a starship buried long ago beneath the Kukulcán Pyramid. Within this vessel we found the remains of Kukulcán, the last survivor of a more advanced humanoid race called the Guardian. The Guardian had come to our planet long ago, fleeing the rise of evil that had enslaved their people, transforming their world into a hellish existence. The Guardian had avoided enslavement by taking refuge on one of their planet’s moons. But the evil ones were not satisfied with their conquest. Inhabiting their planet was an alien serpentine creature that could bridge the gap between dimensions of time and space. Trapping the creature aboard a transport ship, they sent it into space and through a wormhole. Members of the Guardian brotherhood chased after the transport in the Balam. Their vessel’s presence in the wormhole altered the wormhole’s trajectory … depositing both ships in our solar system, 65 million years into Earth’s past. This historic journey not only resulted in a cataclysm that wiped out the dinosaurs, it created a causal time loop in third-dimensional space.
Most of the transport was destroyed upon impact, but the life-support pod containing the creature remained intact.
Knowing a deep-space radio transmission could awaken the creature, the Guardian programmed the Balam to remain in orbit above Earth. The ship would deflect any incoming signals while the Guardian remained immersed in sleep pods. Sometime around 11,000 B.C., the Balam landed in the dense jungles of the Yucatán Peninsula, not far from where their enemy lay buried beneath the Gulf of Mexico.
It was about this time that the great flood caused by the last ice age thawed, and Homo sapiens became the dominant species on the planet.
The Guardian had a two-phased plan for humanity. Awakening in intervals, each member was assigned the task of erecting an electromagnetic relay station at key points around the globe. When completed, this astrogeodetic array would link with the Balam, creating an electromagnetic grid around the entire planet. The grid would prevent the creature from using its weapons to alter our planet’s atmosphere for its carbon-dioxide-breathing masters. Each Guardian had the challenge of camouflaging his relay station so that the array’s relay stations would remain undisturbed over thousands of years. Their solution was to bury the antennae beneath monolithic structures so magnificent in size and structure that they would forever remain undisturbed by modern man.
Great civilizations came into being, and with them rose the Pyramids of Giza and Stonehenge, the Pyramid of the Sun, and the Temples of Angkor Wat.
One of the last of the brotherhood to be revived was Kukulcán. Under his tutelage, the Mayans rose to power and the Kukulcán Pyramid was built—directly above the burial site of the Balam. All that was needed was someone to activate the device in the year 2012.
This was the second phase of the Guardian’s plan. Each member of the brotherhood would not only instruct his people, but spread his genetic seed using our women. By mixing the Guardian’s superior DNA with Homo sapiens DNA, our species genetically leapfrogged up the evolutionary ladder.
The Guardian’s DNA is the so-called missing link?
Yes. But the Guardian were capable of much more than simply siring a new subspecies, they could also manipulate their DNA so that genetic anomalies like them would reach maturation around the time of the predicted day of reckoning. They called these superior beings the Hunahpu.
I didn’t know it at the time, but I carried the Hunahpu gene, passed down to me from my maternal ancestors. By activating the Balam’s array, I not only prevented the creature from using its weapons, I also stopped an all-out nuclear war between the superpowers.
Days later, the alien creature ascended from the Gulf, intent on destroying the Balam’s electromagnetic
array. I was waiting in Chichén Itzá to meet it. Tapping into my newly discovered Hunaphu powers, I was able to access the Balam’s weapon, which deactivated the cybernetic beast.
But you entered the creature’s mouth? Why?
To prevent the Under Lords of Xibalba from arriving on Earth. The creature had succeeded in shunting the Balam’s array, opening a corridor of the nexus that bridged the gap between Earth and the Xibalban Underworld. Inside this corridor were two demons, disguised as my mother and Dominique. Having been warned about the deception by the Guardian, I killed both of those evil souls, completing my mission.
Or so I thought.
The Guardian offered me a choice. I could live out my days as Michael Gabriel or continue to evolve as One Hunahpu and journey to Xibalba to save the lost souls of the Nephilim.
Who are the Nephilim?
The Fallen Ones, human souls who were being tortured on Xibalba. I had remote-viewed their terror. Thousands of men, women, and children—all suffering at the hands of their oppressors. As Michael Gabriel, I could have ignored them, but as One Hunahpu, I realized I was their only hope.
With heavy heart I took one last look at your mother’s face, then climbed into the Guardian’s pod. Moments later, I found myself hurtling through space, leaving Earth forever … through a wormhole, racing to Xibalba—where the origin of mankind’s evil was waiting.
The origin of mankind’s evil? Father, I don’t understand.
Humanity is caught in a bubble of space-time, each successive journey through the wormhole looping history. What has happened before will happen again, unless the paradox can be broken. My presence on Xibalba somehow reinforces this paradox, yet it also serves to keep the door to humanity’s own salvation open. You see, Jacob, there are two crossroads that face humanity, one in 2012, one more in your own near future. I cannot tell you about this second holocaust, but if left unchecked, it will terminate life on Earth as surely as the events of 2012 nearly did.
What is it?
Again, I cannot say, but only a Hunahpu can prevent it.
Is it my destiny to stop it?
I don’t see how. According to the Popol Vuh, you and your brother will make the journey to Xibalba aboard the Balam soon after your twentieth birthday, long before the second event.
And if we don’t make the journey?
Then the second holocaust will wipe out humanity.
Father, is Manny Hunahpu? I know he shares our DNA, but the gene seems recessive.
Your brother’s powers may grow stronger in years to come or they may not appear at all. All I know is that …
Father?
Father, what’s wrong?
The Abomination. It senses our communication.
What should I do?
I should have known better. You’re too young, it’s too easy for the Abomination to use you. Even as we speak, it grows stronger in your energy field. You need to learn how to disguise it before we can communicate again.
Teach me how.
I can’t, it’s a strength that comes with age. Find me again when you’re older.
How old?
Wait at least another seven years. Your Hunahpu powers will strengthen as you get older.
Father, I can’t wait that long—
You have to. I’ll be all right. Time isn’t the same here as it is for you. Go now, quickly, before the Abomination pierces my defenses!
Father, I love you. Father?
Jacob awakens, staring into the teary eyes of his mother. ‘Jake? What happened?’
‘I spoke with—’ Don’t tell her, she’ll only worry. ‘It’s okay, Mother. I’m fine.’
Dominique turns to the president. ‘That’s it, Ennis. No more remote viewing, do you understand? No more training! No more tests!’ She looks at her son. ‘And no more talk about Mayan death gods and Xibalba. Somehow, some way, we’re going to find a way for you and Manny to live normal lives.’
12
OCTOBER 23, 2020: MABUS ESTATE, THE HAMPTONS, NEW YORK
8:37 p.m.
The delivery truck stops at the gated entrance of the Mabus Estate.
Mitchell Kurtz lowers his driver’s side window to speak with the security guard. ‘Hey, pal. Got a delivery for your boss. Three surf-and-turf specials, and a bottle of wine. Should I leave it with you or take it up to the house?’
The armed guard steps out of his booth. ‘Where’s Murphy?’
‘Out sick. Probably at the track.’
‘Put the food on Mabus’s tab and leave everything with me. I’ll take it up in the cart.’
‘Sure thing.’ Kurtz hands the guard a thermal delivery pouch. ‘Do me a favor and take the food tray inside, the pouch has to stay with me.’
The guard reaches inside the insulated pouch and grabs the metal tray—
—and is jolted into unconsciousness behind ten thousand volts of electricity.
Kurtz opens his door. He steps over the body and pulls off his jacket, exposing a brown-and-gray uniform identical to the guard’s. Hoisting the unconscious man over his shoulder, he carries him inside the guardhouse, then unceremoniously drops him to the floor.
Looking into the videocam, he dials into the main house.
Peter Mabus’s voice bellows over the intercom, Kurtz’s screen remaining scrambled for privacy. ‘What is it?’
‘You have a food delivery, sir. I’m bringing it up in the cart.’
‘About time, we called forty minutes ago.’
The line goes dead.
Kurtz tucks the metal food tray into its thermal pouch and resets the stunner, then taps at the tiny communication device hidden inside his left ear and speaks into his wristwatch. ‘I’m good. You in position?’
One hundred yards behind the beach house, Ryan Beck emerges from the dark Atlantic, dressed from head to toe in a black wet suit. Using his night-vision glasses, he verifies the beach is deserted, then makes his way past the sandy dunes and wild grass to the private boardwalk.
‘Stand by.’
Beck switches to a thermal scanner, focusing the invisible beam on the back of the Mabus mansion. ‘I’m detecting three people. Kid’s upstairs in a third-floor bedroom. Servant’s waiting for you at the door. Our target’s drinking out back on the screened-in porch.’
‘Roger that, I’m on my way.’ Kurtz starts the golf cart and drives it up a narrow walkway that leads to the front entrance of the mansion.
Belle Glade, Florida 8:45 p.m.
‘Been taking care of ya’ll for seven long years, your mama longer than that!’ Quenton Morehead stumbles into his granddaughter’s bedroom, the alcohol flowing through his bloodstream like poison. ‘Two of ya’ll took and took … drained me like a ’ho.’
Lilith Eve Robinson’s heart flutters like the wings of a dove.
‘Ya’ll owe me, you know that don’t cha? Seven years’ worth, uh-huh.’
Her adrenaline pumping, Lilith’s mind searches desperately for the white light as Quenton stumbles out of his trousers, falling sideways onto her sofa bed.
‘Okay, okay, don’t start yer slobberin’. Ya’ll been comin’ along nicely lately. Tonight it’s time to let you feel heaven for yourself.’
Lilith squeezes her eyes shut, her consciousness taking refuge inside the nexus.
Jacob?
I’m here, Lilith. But I can’t stay. My mother’s calling, I have to go.
Please don’t go yet, he’s doing it again! Her energy reaches out for him, entwining his mind like a vine.
Hey, let go, you’re … you’re too strong for me. Let me go—
Stay with me—please! I really need you tonight!
I’ll come back as soon as I can, I promise.
Jacob, he’s hurting me.
He’s always hurting you. Stop being a victim, Lilith. Call the cops. Run away. Do something!
It’s not that easy for me. I have no place else to go.
My mother’s coming, Lilith—
You don’t love me anymore, do you?
I do love you, I just can’t do this right now. I’ll be back as soon as I can.
Jacob—wait! Don’t go, please!
Lilith, do you trust me?
Yes.
Then here’s what I want you to do. Tell him that if he puts that thing near you again, you’ll tell everyone in his church.
He’s threatened to kill me if I ever told.
Then kill him. Wait until he passes out, then get a real sharp knife and cut his throat.
I … I can’t do that.
Then I can’t help you. I’m sorry, I have to go.