by Weston Ochse
Preacher’s Daughter glanced at him. “What do you think we’re doing?”
“You ran him through the ringer and I don’t think he even realized it.”
“If he doesn’t now, he will once he thinks back on it,” Boy Scout said. “The FBI might be officious and prone to following the rules, but they’re not stupid.”
“What do you think is going to happen now?” McQueen asked.
“I think we’re going to be able to see what was in that box.” Boy Scout turned to Preacher’s Daughter. “But that’s for later. Right now, I need your help.”
“With what?” she asked.
“Some religious stuff. Specifically, what do you know about the members of the Lost Tribe of Aad?”
Her face went still. “Why do you want to know about them?”
“Because I think I have one inside me.”
She sat down hard, speechless.
But she was never speechless, which immediately made Boy Scout more worried than he had been. In fact, he hadn’t been worried at all. But now…
Now he was flat on scared.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Camp Pendleton Command Center
MCQUEEN WENT TO work out and Poe said he had to check in, whatever that meant, leaving Boy Scout and Preacher’s Daughter alone in the room. She sat and listened as Boy Scout told her about his conversation with the dervish, as well as the brief but powerful connection he’d had with the entity inside of him and how he’d seen giants in the vision. He explained his astral travel with Sister Renee and how he’d almost died because he neither had been prepared, nor had he paid attention.
When he was finally done, he sat, out of breath and just dead tired. Before she could speak, he added, “The worst of it is that I’m terrified of the thing inside of me. I feel like it could take me over at any moment. It’s like I’m walking around constantly ducking because I know it’s going to happen at any moment. We’ve all had our share of PTSD, but this is probably the worst I’ve ever felt—worse than dying, because this thing would become me.”
“Loss of self is always worse than loss of life. When you told me what Sister Renee went through, I couldn’t help wonder how horrible it must have been to have someone in control of your own body, with you just as passenger. When it took control of you before, I couldn’t even tell it wasn’t you.”
“And I didn’t even know it.” He laughed soberly. “It’s like I need a safe word.”
“Rumpelstiltskin.”
“Right. Like that would even work.” She gave him a half smile.
“So,” he said, the word long and breathless. “What about that lost tribe?”
“Have you ever heard of Iram of the Pillars?” she asked.
He shook his head. “Not before this.”
“What about Sodom and Gomorrah?”
“I’ve heard of that.”
“I figured. So, we have the Old Testament Christian Bible and we have the Qur’an. They are more similar than most people know. For instance, did you know that Jesus is mentioned more in the Qur’an than Mohammed? And Mary is mentioned more times in the Qur’an than in the New Testament.”
Boy Scout shook his head.
“The Qur’an includes most of the prophets in the Bible—Adam, Enoch, Noah, Abraham, Lot, Ishmael, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, Job, David, Solomon, Elijah, Jonah, Aaron, Moses, Zechariah, and John the Baptist. Jesus is spoken of as a prophet of God and not the son of God. What I’m getting at is there are a lot of the same stories, but told differently. Such is the case with Iram of the Pillars and Sodom and Gomorrah. Both were cities with sinners who wouldn’t follow the word of God, and both places were smited—uh smoted, smitten, whatever—by an angry god.”
She held up a finger and took a deep draw from her drink.
“But that’s the Sunday school story. Palimpsested beneath these tales is an older one that many Biblical and Qur’anical scholars won’t touch. How good are you on your Bible teachings?”
“Uh, do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”
“The Golden Rule. Not bad. What about Genesis?”
“In the beginning there was light?”
“Nice try. In the beginning God created the Heaven and the Earth. This seems simple but is significant. We believe that God lives in Heaven. That’s why everyone looks forward to it when they die so that they can finally see God. So riddle me this, Batman: how did God create the place where He lived unless He came from somewhere else? He had to come from somewhere, and if He’d just finished creating Heaven, where was that somewhere?”
Boy Scout raised an eyebrow.
“But let’s say he created those. That’s Genesis 1:1. Let’s skip to Genesis 1:27, where it says So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them. This shows that we man and woman were created by God and in his image. But we are not the sons of God. He had his sons already around. We can prove that by skipping ahead to Genesis 6, verse 1-5.”
She closed her eyes and recited, “When man began to multiply on the face of the land and daughters were born to them, the sons of God saw that the daughters of man were attractive. And they took as their wives any they chose. Then the Lord said, ‘My Spirit shall not abide in man forever, for he is flesh: his days shall be 120 years.’ There were giants in the earth in those days; and also after that, when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they bare children to them, the same became mighty men which were of old, men of renown. The Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every intention of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.”
She held up a finger, “But wait, there’s more. This is the moment when God decided to trash everything. This is what leads up to Noah. And it repented the LORD that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him. And the LORD said, I will destroy man whom I have created from the face of the earth; both man, and beast, and the creeping thing, and the fowls of the air; for it repenteth me that I have made them. Why do you think that God, after all the trouble he went through to make everything, suddenly decided to kill everything?”
“Because the sons of God had children with the daughters of man?”
She touched her nose with a finger. “Bingo. Boy Scout gets the prize. Let’s unpack that. God created man and woman but there were already beings that were created by him before the start of the Bible. This means that they did come from another place.”
“Like aliens?”
“Shush that nonsense. We only know of four dimensions. Quantum scientists posit that there might be up to eleven. Topology mathematicians have a unifying theory that deals with the concepts of the shape of things. Bottom line is that we don’t know shit about our universe. What everyone overlooks in the Bible is the sensation of there being sons of God already there and that these sons of God were able to create giants through their mating with daughters of man.”
“What does that have to do with the Pillars of Iram and the Lost Tribe of Aad?”
“The Lost Tribe of Aad are the giants. The Pillars of Iram are where they were supposed to have lived until God got rid of them. Except the Bible never talks about it. If it did, it would highlight the fact that God came from somewhere else and brought his own sons with him. So they did a whole bunch of hand waving and had the animals came two by two nonsense and then Noah and the entire Earth was covered in water, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. I’m afraid you can’t have it both ways.”
“How come this isn’t public knowledge?” he asked.
“Oh, it is. But no one really cares. They say it’s all conspiracy theories. There are plenty of sub-Reddits about this. 4Chan has rooms where people get together, but no one dares talk about it in public. I knew a guy once who wanted to publish an academic paper about this while he was in seminary and all but got kicked out for even trying. In the end, he threw away all of his work, but not before I read it.” She laughed. “I mean, it’s so ridiculous. People thi
nk it’s okay to believe the Earth was created in six days by a supreme being, but it’s not okay to ask where that supreme being came from before he created the Heaven and Earth.”
“And all this time I thought you were Christian.”
She placed a hand to her chest as her eyes widened. “I am Christian. I believe in Jesus. But I also believe in giants and other things in the Bible that mainstream Christians would have you ignore.” She took another drink as she shook her head, a few strands of hair falling free of her pony tail. “Now there are those who claim to have found the Iram in modern Yemen, but the jury is still out on that. I’ll get behind it when I see better evidence than I’ve seen on the web.”
“So then who do you posit are the sons of God?” he asked.
She nodded. “That’s the million-dollar question, isn’t it? Do you remember what the daeva told you?”
Boy Scout remembered it very well. For a reason he still couldn’t understand, he’d reached out and cupped the daeva’scheek, the same way he used to do with McQueen, and had been immediately transferred to a street in Saigon where a monk had just set himself on fire. Boy Scout smelled the burning skin mixed with car exhaust, a man’s body odor, and a curry dish being made on the street in an immense metal wok. The fire sparked, whipped, and roared in a voice of its own. A car honked. A woman screamed. Flashes from cameras lit the scene. The monk burned before him, stoic and unmoving, staring at Boy Scout with all the volition of an angry god. But he had been only the mechanism. It was the daeva who was speaking.
“Why is it you kill us?” it asked.
“Why is it you kill us?” Boy Scout asked in turn.
“You are with the others. You use us—torture us with your dreams. Like this thing. How could you do this to yourselves?”
“It’s my understanding that he did it in protest… something political.”
The burning monk grinned. “He did this and you don’t even know the reason why.”
“This was not from my time. This was from before.”
“And still you fail to learn from history.”
“What are you really?” Boy Scout asked. “What made you?”
“The better question is who made you. We looked away, then looked back, and there you were… shadows upon this world bathed in the light of creation. And like shadows, you bring darkness wherever you go.”
“Shadows upon this world bathed in the light of creation,” he muttered, giving voice to the memory.
“What if the daevas were the sons of God?” Preacher’s Daughter asked. “This makes a certain sense. Both Islam and Christianity take many of their stories from Zoroastrian religion, which is thought to be one of the oldest organized religion. These daeva are creatures of Zoroaster, according to Faood.”
Boy Scout said, “I saw him, you know. At the mall. He was with the dervishes who came for me.”
“Faood was there? What did he say?”
“He said he was there to help me. It’s funny, there was a part of me that wanted to believe him.”
“What you have inside of you is dangerous. Maybe he wants to take it.”
“But is that the best decision? Will they weaponize it? What will they do with it? I feel like this decision is the most important I’ve ever made and I don’t want to fuck it up.”
“I’m with you. I’m just worried about you.”
“Me as well. So, what to do? If what we’re speculating is correct, I have the consciousness of one of the giants—a son of God—inside of me and he wants it back.”
She twisted her mouth and cradled her chin with her hands. “Has anyone considered what the entity wants?”
“It’s not as if I can just go and ask it.”
She tilted her head. “Why not?”
Chapter Twenty-Three
Camp Pendleton Command Center
WHEN POE CAME back later, Boy Scout pulled him aside. They found a room with a desk and two chairs. Boy Scout gestured for Poe to take the place behind the desk. Boy Scout sat in front of it.
Poe wore an eager, amused expression. He still wore his uniform with starched creases that looked like they could cut.
Boy Scout had always associated a starched uniform with FOBBITs, those who never left the forward operating base. It was the sort of gear admin folks would wear, rather than the grunged-up, digicamed ACU. But with Poe, he wasn’t sure. The man kept everything very close to his chest. He hoped that was about to change.
“I wanted to thank you for all the help you’ve provided,” Boy Scout said.
“We have similar interests, you and I,” Poe said.
“I gotta wonder, though, how much of your assistance is really oversight?” Boy Scout asked, laying out the question most on his mind.
Poe sat back and smiled. “A lot of it. I had to submit a report with recommendations before I could even begin to help you.”
“Who’d the report go to?”
Poe hesitated, then said, “An office inside the Pentagon that reports to a subcommittee of the House Armed Services Committee. That’s about all I can say.”
“So an elected congressman or woman who was selling real estate last year has access to information about supernatural events?” Boy Scout asked. “That doesn’t seem like good OPSEC.”
Poe shrugged. “The military has civilian oversight. You know that. It’s how it works. Still, from what I hear after asking the same question, those selected for this subcommittee have additional vetting and the Pentagon put triggers in place that would ensure the information not be disclosed in the event of a leak or someone trying to monetize the information.”
“Triggers. I can imagine what they could be.”
“Yep. And the members of the subcommittee are fully aware of them.”
Boy Scout paused before he asked his next question. “How much support are you able to provide?”
“We’ve already provided a lot. More than you know. Your glasses, for instance. We gave McQueen the idea on Reddit. We planted enough Boolean search words to ensure that he was destined to run across it.”
“I won’t tell him that. He was proud of the discovery and thought it might be his own idea. What else?”
“A lot of more subtle things. That’s really our specialty. Subtlety.”
“No direct confrontation?” Boy Scout asked.
“Not if we can help it. That’s why I could provide a military unit as backup or as a distraction, but not for direct action against an objective.”
Boy Scout scratched his chin, realizing he needed to shave. “You’re not just a lieutenant, are you?”
Poe kept his mouth set, but his eyes smiled. “I am what I need to be. No one tends to bother a lieutenant. After all, lieutenants don’t know anything and can’t really do anything.”
“Hiding in plain sight.”
Poe just stared back, the answer as obvious between them as a five-hundred-pound gorilla. If Boy Scout had to guess by his age, if Poe was truly in the military, he was at least a major—if not a full-blown colonel. His respect for the man soared, and he couldn’t help realize it had been muffled for the very reasons Poe had stated.
“Are you really in the army?”
“Yes.”
“Well, there is that, at least.” Then he asked, “What do you think about Special Agent Ripple?”
“I think it’s an opportunity,” Poe admitted. “If you let the FBI take the lead, your part of the mission would be invisible.”
“Sounds like oversight.”
“You asked me the question. I gave you the answer.”
“We could use them as direct action just so we could get inside and see if there’s really a daeva in the box.”
Poe shook his head slightly. “It’s a touchy thing. All consulates are considered sacrosanct and off limits. The last thing we want happening is for that to change. After all, what we do to them, they could do to us. I mean, I still think it’s possible. We just have to have a locked tight mission plan.”
“How
do you imagine his plan taking shape?” Boy Scout asked.
“That’s a tough one. Fast, in and out, under cover of night. Or if not directly, then perhaps a ruse such as a biochem spill or a terrorist threat where it necessitates the FBI or the CDC entering and providing them support.” When Poe had said CDC, he’d made air quotes. “But let me ask you this: if it turns out to be a daeva, it’s not like you can just walk out with it. What’s your plan when you find it?”
Boy Scout realized he’d been leaning forward in his seat, and now he sat back heavily. “That’s the million-dollar question, isn’t it? I have this thing inside of me that appears scared of the daeva. I’m not sure what it will do if I go near a daeva. Will it take control? Will it do something to me? I don’t know. I just remember that the daeva was the key to getting into The White, and it’s the only way I know to get there.”
“Didn’t it take a long time to get into it? Six months, during which you thought you were actually living in Los Angeles?”
Boy Scout sighed. “Yes. That is an issue. But when I went back into the fugue, I was able to re-enter The White easily.”
“But not always. Remember the car chase when Narco shot Sufi Sam and took off?”
Boy Scout eyed Poe suspiciously.
“Preacher’s Daughter told me. I’d asked for some details.”
“Yes. That was when I thought I was shot and dying.”
“But it never happened. You were in a fugue state.”
The sound of a bleating sheep cracked through his mind. He blinked as a memory enveloped him.
By the look of the bodies, Narco hadn’t even slowed down. He’d plowed right through a herd of sheep that had been blocking the narrow track to the cistern. At first, there were just dead bodies, but soon they could see sheep with wounded legs. One looked as if its spine had been crushed, but it was still alive, bleating weakly.
If the complete disregard for the animals were indicative of the inhuman creature that had its talons in Narco, then they were truly up against a being that lacked any shred of human empathy. For as much as Boy Scout wanted to get to Narco and save him, he wouldn’t disregard the sanctity of life unless the lives of his team were at risk. So Boy Scout had to slow the Land Cruiser to a crawl at times, just so they could weave their way through the minefield of dead and dying animals.