Ian makes a move to cripple her knees.
“Wait!” I yell. Ian stops. “I know her,” I mumble.
She continues trying to get me. Her mouth opens, no teeth, and she screams. I bolt as fast as I can, only looking back once. A dark feeling slides down my spine and fills my veins, like a corrupt server spewing malware throughout the net. I can’t stop it. I’ve got no control. I run harder. Even though I’ve never run this much in my life, I fly. I can’t feel my feet anymore and my lungs suck in the warm wet air. I don’t want to die.
There’s my house. I slow down and stop. Our car is still in the driveway. Ma drove this crappy white Honda she had since she was pregnant with me. Her first baby, she’d called it. I like my house. It’s narrow but tall. The roof is really pointy. The walls are white and the window trim is a dark brown. I’d painted them that color a few summers ago. Our house had four floors: a single attic room, two top floors, and a basement.
I run up the steps to the front door. I still have my house keys in my pocket and my backpack on. It’s like I’m just coming home from school. I’m afraid of what I’ll find in the house.
I open the door slowly. The house is dark, cold. “Ma!” I yell out. Nothing. “Kat!” Nothing. I run upstairs. My parents’ room is at the end of the hall. I open the door. No one’s there. The bed isn’t made, which isn’t like Ma. Her cell and car keys are still on the bedside table. I sit in the doorway and start crying. I sob harder than I ever have.
Hana hugs me. I hug her hard.
“Guys!” Ian yells from downstairs. “We have to go!”
Hana helps me up. “Your mother would want you to stay alive.”
She gives me toilet paper for the snot river that runs down my face. I feel embarrassed crying in front of Hana.
“Everyone I know is dead. My friends. My parents,” I whine.
“Maybe they got out. Maybe they are on their way to a safe zone, just like us. Gotta keep going.”
I kinda snap out of it and run to my room. I grab my broadsword off the wall. It was a Christmas gift a while back, an authentic recreation of a middle age broadsword from a blacksmith in West Pennsylvania. It isn’t very sharp, but it’s the only weapon I have besides my twenty-two cal. rifle.
Hana laughs, “You’re planning on chopping them up, huh?” I swing the sword around. It’s too heavy. “I guess not.” I don’t wanna mess with my rifle. Those puppet things need a flamethrower not a peashooter. I snap my fingers then pull my camping box from my closet. Inside the box are my hatchet and flashlight. I also grab my poncho, rain pants, and my first aid kit. I pour half the bottle of fish food into the tank, pause, and say bye to Birdy.
“One more thing.” I pull a photo of my Ma and Dad from a picture frame and put it in my pack. “I’ll betcha she got out. Maybe she’s holding up somewhere.” I run back downstairs. Ian’s still in the entry, watching the street through the front door window. “We need to go out the back,” Ian says. “They’ve followed us here.”
“How the hell can they do that?” I complain, feeling pissed. “We ran out of their sight!” I peek through the window. “They’re like hound dogs or something.”
“Yeah, it is strange,” Hana replies. I run to the back door. “We can go out back and hop some fences.” Hana and Ian meet me at the back door. Hana raises her hands. “I need a weapon. I’m way too vulnerable.”
I nod and run out the back door to the side shed. Inside are a variety of sharp and useful yard tools. Hana grabs a stiff metal rake. I look at my tiny hatchet and decide it is too small for a primary weapon. I’ll keep it for backup. Its case clips to my belt conveniently. I reach in the shed and grab a shovel with a pointy tip. Too weird. I pick up a short pitchfork that my Ma had used to spread straw over the back yard.
Ian pulls off a drop cloth that’s covering my mountain bike. He smiles. “This might just be our way out.” My bike, red with black swooshes, is a Razorback. Next to that are my Ma and Dad’s bikes, older models, dust covered, and entwined with spider webs.
Chapter 1.22
Markus:
It’s another balmy night in Tunisia. Tonight is our escape and it’s too soon. I want one more night to prepare, to pray. Mitchell and I dress in our stolen robes. He helps me tie a turban around my head so I look like a local. I have no idea how long he’s been in the CIA, but he’s good at this, very good. We wait for the people to start heading to the stadium to hear their great scholar speak. I’m nervous but excited at the same time. I feel like a different man. This purpose I’d found gives me so much strength. The last thing I want is to go home to the life I lived, a failing preacher in an ungrateful and harsh world.
As I imagine the danger that lies ahead I say to Mitchell, “I think God would have me carry a gun.”
“God’s Will, right?” Mitchell replies as he peeks out the front doorway, which is covered by the stolen tapestry.
“God would want his humble servant armed to the teeth,” I say. Oh, if only my wife could see me now. I laugh at bit. She’d slap me upside my head. Mitchell hands me a small revolver he keeps in his boot. “You’re right. You need this. These guys aren’t hippies. They believe in killing for what they want.”
Mitchell smirks, so I feel the need to tell him what I’ve had to deal with. “I had a run in with a gang that extorted money for the Genovese Family of New York, or what was left of it anyway.”
“These guys are ideologues, not thugs,” Mitchell clarifies.
“Not sure I understand the difference.” I continue, with or without Mitchell’s attention. We are waiting, and it calms my nerves to speak. Must be why I make a good preacher, or used to, anyway. “I moved to New York to fill the shoes of a dear friend who died of colon cancer. His shoes were tough to fill. I’d come from the South, had a small congregation. His church held up a community I never knew existed in New York. I took over after-school programs and political functions. I ran a weekend daycare and a Bingo night every Thursday. I had services three times on Sunday and three times during the week. I also had over fifty kids studying under me in the ministry course and the Christian studies group.
“Anyhow, I stumbled upon a devious scheme plaguing my new parishioners. One afternoon my high school kids were collecting trash and trimming trees around the neighborhood. They’d been doing this once a month for years and it happened to be my second time out with them. I rolled a large black cart up and down the streets while the young kids ran around picking up trash, and the older ones trimmed trees and raked leaves. I was three streets from the church when I noticed a trend. All the cars had little envelopes on the windows. They were about half the size of a business card. No one knew or wanted to discuss what they were until I spoke with little Becka. She was reluctant, but she confessed. If her mother didn’t put twenty dollars in one of those envelopes something bad would happen to her car.
“I gathered a group of neighbors together and confronted them. At first no one said a word. Then the truth came spillin’ out. Gang bribes. They’d pay off the gang so their cars wouldn’t get keyed, stolen, or smashed up in the night. I was horrified. I told the police, and four men were arrested that next month while collecting the money.
“Then my house was broken in to. I was sleeping like the dead and judged, when two men burst into my room. Jesus, they scared me and my wife to death.
“They wore masks, of course, and brandished knifes, big blades of the devil. They bound my hands behind me and took me to meet their boss. I was forced to kneel, blindfolded. The man I saw stayed in the shadows. He’d lost over five thousand dollars because of me. A yearly salary of sixty thousand. He told me he was going to kill me. I believed him, so I pleaded with him. They let me go with a warning to stay out of their business, and I did.
“The next month I saw the little envelopes on all the cars again. I lost some parishioners. They were probably scared to come to church. But, even worse, I’d lost their trust and respect because I caved in. Eventually, we didn’t have enough peopl
e to run the mid-week services.”
“Sounds like the Mafia to me,” Mitchell says. “They were scared of you though. You were in America. We’re not in America anymore.”
“I know that now.” I clear my throat.
“So, what’s your point?” Mitchell asks.
“I’m not a coward anymore. My wife would call it bullheaded stupidity.”
There’s noise, but it dies down quickly. Mitchell peeks through the tapestry. Suddenly, the mosque horns start blurting out a song. It’s different than the call to prayer, although just as hypnotic and peaceful. People start heading to the stadium. It takes twenty minutes or so for the streets to clear. I pace in the dirt of the mud hut. Of course, not everyone goes to the stadium. There are still pockets of people here and there, and a few European cars driving around. But the majority of people have gone to the stadium.
Mitchell pokes his head out of the doorway again. He shushes me, then waves for me to follow. He runs, half crouched. My heart seems to stop. The setting sun turns the sky bright orange and pink. The temperature is cool. I see everything, every God-given detail of every wall, street, tree, and car. I blink as my eyes start to water. The first stop is next to a similar mud hut like ours. It’s empty. We slowly move from hut to shack to house to housing complex until we are out of the slums. I’m out of breath, but able to keep going.
Mitchell stops at a shopping area near the Ali Ben Abid Mosque. The shopping plaza is in one of the nicer parts of Medinine. The square is paved with sandy pavers and around the center are newer brick shops and wagons. They’re all closed up. Their tarps and tents are lowered and tied up. Ornamental light poles are lined throughout the shopping area. Smack in the middle of the square is a rather curious piece of artwork. It’s a rusted pail that pours water into another much smaller pail and then into two even smaller pails. At the bottom is one word inscribed on a plaque. Translated by Mitchell, it reads rebirth.
We run around to the shadow of the large pail where there is another plaque that reads, From the heavens came the sword. I reflect on the sign for a moment.
It’s strange that both the Bible and the Quran preached the end of the world. In the Quran, Allah will wash the Earth clean of all the sinners or nonbelievers, and restart a new society of love and peace. In my faith there will be four horsemen. They will arrive and begin the cleansing wars. In Islam, a road of destruction will be torn across the world, preparing for the coming of the twelfth Imam who will cleanse the world.
Mitchell takes off toward the mosque. We run through an ancient Medinine neighborhood. The mud huts aren’t square. They’re small dome shapes built right next to each other and right on top of one another. Some of the hut stacks are three stories tall. Narrow stairs snake up and over doorways, leading to the different huts and down into the alleyways. If I wasn’t scared for my life I would want to explore, maybe take a photo. Not this trip.
We pass an outdoor vegetable market. Colorful tapestries are draped over the plastic bins and the windows. The dates, pomegranates, oranges — all as bright as the sun — are lying in the open.
We turn a corner, still in the ancient neighborhood with the small dome-like huts. These huts are even nicer than the others. Cobblestone roads are under my feet. Plants in pots on doorsteps and lampposts jut out of the top huts. It’s such a contrasting view from the modern world. The ancient vista is ruined by an ugly western-style apartment building on the horizon.
I’m so tired. I don’t know how I’ve run so long. God must be working miracles on my cardiovascular system.
We make it to the Ali Ben Abid Mosque. Its tan brick tower rises majestically into the sky over eight stories tall in a classic octagonal shape. Ornamental arches decorate the bottom portion of the tower. My eyes move up the tower, noticing the small windows on each level. At the eighth floor there is a walkway that extends out from the frame of the tower and encircles it. At its apex, the tower is topped with a pointed roof and four loud speakers.
Mitchell tells me to wait by a small grey car. He runs out of sight toward the mosque’s side entrance. A moment later he pokes his head around a corner and waves me over. Mitchell is standing at the back door, holding a gadget up to the lock. He’s trying to break in using the codes he spoke of. At his feet are three guards lying on the ground, dead or out cold. They all have big machine guns, so I’m glad they aren’t moving. Their uniforms are black, with green berets, thick waist belts filled with bullets, grenades, and who knows what else. Mitchell strips some gear from them and takes a machine gun.
Finally, the door pops open. We slip inside and close it after Mitchell pulls the soldiers in. The room is dark. Mitchell tells me to wait, then disappears. My adrenaline peaks. All I can hear is my beating heart. I shut my eyes and pray. Oh, God, why have I chosen to take such a path? I should be at home with my parishioners and my wife, spreading Your Word, not decoding history’s obscurities.
The lights flick on. The entire room is a vault, with metal walls and not a single window. It’s about the size of my living room back home. Every corner of every wall is filled with papers, notes and diagrams. I walk to the most colorful diagram. The writing is in Arabic, but I recognize a detailed map of Western Europe during the middle ages. I think back to my history lessons. Was this the time of the Black Plague? I move to the next wall. It’s a map of Caesarea. The opposite wall has a map of Tunis and Medinine. On the last wall is a map of the world. It’s dated 1918 with red marks all over it.
Mitchell reads the paper over my shoulder, scaring the Holy Ghost out of me. “Influenza outbreak in 1918 killed more than forty million people. More fatalities than WWI.”
“You don’t say,” I mumble. Both of us moved to the map on the opposite wall. “What does this say?”
Mitchell interprets the writing. “A dysentery plague in Tunis in 1943 and here in Medinine in 1985.”
“King Louis died of dysentery,” I say, recognizing the pattern of this recurring disease.
“Yeah, so there are a few cases of dysentery. The bug’s been in the historical record since the 1200’s.” Mitchell moves to another wall. He reads, “1818. Dysentery again. This time it was in Chicago.”
“When did King Louis die?” I ask Mitchell.
“1270,” he answers.
Other sites of dysentery are highlighted on the world map and cluster around the sub-tropical latitudes. The final poster I see is an illustration of a constellation and orbital pattern circling the solar system.
Mitchell studies the diagram. “Looks like these guys think there’s a connection between meteor showers and viral outbreaks on Earth. But the dates don’t line up. If dysentery came from a meteor shower there would be a regular orbital pattern. The outbreaks would happen on a predictable schedule.”
“Meteors can carry viruses?” I ask. “Doesn’t it get too hot burning through the atmosphere?”
“Somebody should tell these guys that.” Mitchell reads some more. “Here we go. There’s a centurial orbit plotted here that intersects not with Earth but with the asteroid belt. They think the resulting collisions pushed some of these infected meteors to Earth.” Mitchell moves to the large safe in the far corner and takes out his gadget again.
I continue to look around until Mitchell returns, carrying something large. He’s holding the Stone of Allah.
“You got it!”
Mitchell snickers like a boy. We admire the black and gold lace cloth that covers it. “This is the million-dollar secret.” He pulls off the cloth slowly.
The stone looks like a diamond. The edges aren’t precisely cut but they are smooth like polished stone. There are lots of little cracks throughout the clear stone and a fungus-like growth in the center.
I admire it, but I won’t touch it. “This is the stone that killed John the Mighty, might have adorned the Holy Crown of Jesus Christ, and maybe even killed King Louis IX and countless others.”
“And it has been a secret for six-hundred years,” Mitchell says. He rewraps t
he stone in the cloth. “We have to go now, Father.”
“I’m not a Father. Just a preacher.”
“Whatever you say.” He stuffs the stone in his backpack.
I’m inspired by God at that moment. The Holy Spirit enters me. I rip down the papers on the wall and collect them. Then I notice a red envelope on the desk. I take that too and run back to Mitchell. He smiles and nods at me. A look of childish mischief crosses his face as he grabs my hand. “When we leave this room, you cover your eyes and barely peek at your feet. We’re gonna run as fast as we can. Got it?”
I don’t argue. Something bad is about to happen. Instead, I pray. Mitchell flings the door open and runs. We run right into a group of very angry Tunisian army men. They’ve found us! I cover my eyes and look at my feet, just as Mitchell had ordered.
Chapter 1.23
Isabella:
This was supposed to be easy. Not anymore. I lead Markus and Doof — sorry, Josh, with his white medical mask, down the path that leads from the kiddy dock to the nearest road. Tanis, Hana, and Ian have taken off ahead of us. They move much faster because they have a longer way to go.
We’re looking for a market so we can stock up on food and water. We pass a grove of trees and bushes, then follow a ramp that connects to Cross Bay Boulevard. It’s pretty quiet. No puppets are here, yet.
We move fast. I have my Beater Stick and my M-16A. Josh has his small electric chainsaw, oddly enough not killed by the EMP, and Markus has his bat. We’re ready for a fight, although avoiding one is our priority. To clarify, I wouldn’t mind beating down a few hundred puppets, but I’m tired and sore. I’ll get this done and then I’m out of commission for a while. I’d like to crash for a day or two.
6th Horseman, Extremist Edge Series: Part 1 Page 19