by Foy W Minson
“Sounds like a good idea.”
“Well, we’ll see how many laugh at it today, and how many are still laughing a week from now. If there aren’t fewer, I’ll just take it down and get rid of it.”
“No, give it more than a week. Who knows, maybe it’ll give us something to look up to.”
Charlie looked at his flag for a bit, then leaned over and kissed Emmie on the cheek. “Thanks.”
“You’re welcome, but for what?”
“For not laughing.”
CHAPTER 14
Raven waved Emmie over to join her beneath a large willow on the riverbank where they sat at a picnic table and bench set like the one The Judge used in the trial. Raven sat beside Woody with Dagar on the other side. Across the table sat Sherri and Sarah. Daryl rested quietly in his mother’s arms. Beside her was Dan Stegall with Raymond Madsen next to Dan. Dagar scooted over to make room for her on the end of the bench.
“Emmie,” Raven said, “I’d like you to—”
“Mommie, Mommie, Mommie!”
All heads at the table turned at the squealing cries. Leading an older boy at a dead run down the slope toward the table was a small child wearing a big grin and nothing else. He was darker than Woody but lighter than Raven. It was apparent that the older boy gaining on him was not going to catch him before the tot’s forward momentum outran his feet and sent him to a sliding and painful stop on the ground strewn with small stones.
“Jamal! Stop! Get back here!” The pursuing boy’s voice was a combination of anger and fear. “Slow down! You’re gonna —”
And he did. Between one tiny step and the next, his grin changed to wide eyed panic. His little body followed his outstretched arms in a dive that could have but one outcome; and that one being with many scrapes and much pain. But, just before impact, he stopped, hovering mere inches above the highest protruding stone.
His head rose slowly until he faced the table. Then, as quickly as his face had gone from joy to terror, it switched back. His grin was again straining to lead his flight to his mother’s arms.
However, he remained there, still ten feet from the table, until the older boy skidded to a stop behind him and scooped him into his arms.
“I’m sorry, Mom. I just turned to pick up the towel and he ran out the door. He’s getting fast.”
Raven stood and rested her hand for a moment on Woody’s forearm where it lay across the tabletop. “Good catch,” she muttered. “Yes, he is, Honey,” she said with a smile to the older boy as she approached him. “Maybe we need to start hog-tying him for his bath.”
After she took the squirming bundle from the boy, she turned to the table and said, “Sherri, Dan, and Raymond, this little terror is Jamal. He’s two. And the old man here that couldn’t catch him is Geo. He’s five. We have one other, Amy. She’s four…and, apparently, the only one of my off-spring that can let me tend to things without interruption.”
“But, Mom —”
“Just teasing, Honey. Go on, now, and dunk him back in the tub. He’s probably dirtier now than when you started.”
With that diversion heading back up the slope, Raven sat back at the table as Sherri and Dan were both closing their gaping mouths. Raymond wore a neutral smile.
Smiling, she said, “There are times when it comes in pretty handy.” Then, turning to Woody and Emmie, she asked, “Which one of you was it?”
Her husband and her friend exchanged looks, and grinning, both said, “Me.”
Back to Sherri and Dan, she said, “And no evil involved — just preventing some pretty painful scrapes on an innocent child. Now, Emmie, give me a hand with this. I’m going to tell our guests the truth as we know it about…well, everything — including Morgan.”
“Okay, but I don’t know what I can add. Compared to your knowledge, I’d just be guessing.”
“Just be handy to back me up.”
“Okay.”
Raven looked at her guests for a moment, then she said, “What Emmie is referring to is a store of knowledge that I came by in a manner that might be unique. I’ll tell you about it in a bit. But, first, why don’t you tell us how you came to be with Morgan and his bunch, and what you know about him.”
Before beginning, Sherri glanced around the table to gauge the nature of the session. There was nothing to indicate it was an interrogation, but she didn’t think it was just simple curiosity. “I didn’t know Prophet Morgan until he came to New Napa. It was just Napa before it all happened, and it was my home. It was several weeks after the demons came and were driven out.
“All of my family died in the great burning, so I was all alone, like most of the others in town, just picking through the ruins for whatever we could find to eat, sleeping wherever we happened to be when it got dark, living afraid of animals that weren’t afraid of us, afraid of men who had no fear of punishment for anything they did. Just living like animals.
“Then, one day, the Prophet and his twelve disciples came into town. He made us walk upright again and sleep indoors and eat from dishes, and to not fear the dark, and to worship the Lord. Some of the people didn’t like the way he changed things. Not that he did change things, but the way he did it. He was very strict and harsh. If they refused to follow his teachings, he beat them or drove them off. They were mostly men, but some women and children went, too.
“He rooted out the progeny of…” She glanced at Raven and, after a pause, continued, “…of Cain. There were seven. He said they were left behind by the demons to spy on us and to bedevil us. He had them slain. Some that were in town before he came protested, claiming he was wrong about the black ones spying for the demons.
“Those who were with him from the beginning, the twelve who came with him, have set down in writing how he was revealed as God’s chosen one. They described how, when ten demons smashed through the church doors in fire and smoke, slaying the congregation by the hundreds, he stood before them, bathed in a holy light that shone through the roof as though it were not there, and they cowered. When he ordered them, in the name of the Lord, to flee the house of the Lord and to be gone, as well, from the land, his voice came as from the trumpet of the archangel Gabriel, and the demons fell writhing on their bellies before him and fled, wriggling like snakes.
“We even heard it in Napa, his voice. The demons were there, too, hunting us among the ruins, when his mighty voice came. It thundered through the mountains to Old Napa, and even there, the demons fled in fear.
“But, in Petaluma, where he had dwelt among men as a man, with his staff flashing holy fire every time the demons slowed, he chased them through the streets, thrashing them if they tarried. Finally, they arrived at the portal through which they had entered this world and scurried into its blackness. Standing before them, The Prophet commanded that they depart from this, the favored land of the lord God, to return to Hell from whence they came. With a great flashing of fire and thunder, the vessel containing the portal blasted into eternity. And so, it is written.”
Raven glanced over at Emmie with raised eyebrows. Emmie returned her look with a silent shrug.
Raven said, “Wow! That is some story! Straight out of the bible, it sounds like. But that’s not quite the way it was. You see, I was there. Petaluma was my home, too. In fact, I was in that same church when it happened. I saw what happened and heard what was said and done with my own eyes and ears. Now, I will admit that I misunderstood what I saw and heard, but that was only because I didn’t have all the facts. But then, neither did Morgan or the others with him.” She paused with her eyes closed, but just for a moment. “What I’m about to tell you is the truth. Not something that someone else told me, but the truth as it happened in front of me.
“I got picked up — sort of adopted, I guess you could say — by Morgan’s wife. Her name was Ellie, and she was the sweetest, most compassionate person you could ever hope to meet. I have no idea how she came to be married to a man like Ned Morgan. Anyway, I was sixteen years old, alone in a world that had ju
st been incinerated, most of it, anyway, and I was very vulnerable. Probably not much different from you over in Napa. I’m not a lot older than you, am I? What are you, about twenty?”
“Twenty-one.” Sherri said.
“Pretty close, then. Anyway, it was on the fourth day after the invaders’ arrived. I had lost my family; I thought I had lost Woody; I had been chased by horrors from outer space to the point of exhaustion, and I think I was seriously considering suicide. That’s when Ellie tapped me on my shoulder and asked if she could help me. You have no idea — or maybe you do. I forget, sometimes, that I’m not the only one that went through it. Anyway, I went with Ellie and her group to their church. Ned was leading them. At first he wasn’t going to let me join them because I’m black. But he saw Ellie was prepared to stand there in the doorway and argue, and he didn’t want to remain exposed like that, so he let me in with her.
“It wasn’t long after that, while everyone was praying in whispers for deliverance from the demon horde, that two of them — two, not ten — opened the front door and came in. It wasn’t locked, so they didn’t smash it open. They just turned the knob and pushed it.
“They started shooting their death rays — lasers, I’ve learned since, if you remember what they were. Theirs were a lot more advanced than the puny ones we had here on Earth, though. Everyone was screaming and scrambling for cover there in the pews, but, of course, those wooden benches weren’t much protection. I don’t know how many died in those few seconds, but there weren’t all that many to begin with, couple of dozen, or so, certainly not hundreds. I wound up on the floor where Ellie pushed me, and with her lying on top of me, but I could still see Morgan standing up there at the pulpit, rantin’ and ravin and waving his arms about at the demons. He did keep on about ordering them to leave the house of the Lord, and to stop killing the lord’s flock, and I don’t know what all. And he did come right out and command them to return to the hell they came from. For some reason, they didn’t shoot him, although it looked like they were thinking about it. Mostly, they ignored him. Too bad they waited.
“Then there came this weird, wavering sound — sort of like a foghorn and siren mixed together. And, sure ‘nuff, I thought at the time that it must be Gabriel’s horn, too. And, it didn’t come from Morgan, either. He was still bellowing his stuff, but that wasn’t part of it, and he stopped. Just stood there, scared stiff like the rest of us. It just seemed to come from everywhere at the same time. And, sure enough, too, those demons — yeah, I thought they were demons, too, back then — but they immediately stopped shooting the people in the pews. There was no great flash of light or peals of thunder. They just turned and walked out of the church and headed on down the road back towards downtown.
“Now, don’t you know I truly believed I had witnessed a miracle. I struggled out from under Ellie, and that’s when I discovered she had been hit by one of the lasers. She was dead. When Morgan made the same discovery, he jumped on the idea that I had brought on her death and everyone else’s because I’m black and a descendent of Cain and a minion of the devil, and in cahoots with the demon invaders. I got out of the church just as the surviving members of the congregation starting throwing things at me — things like bibles and hymnals and such.
“I ran a couple of blocks from the church and found a place to hide in a collapsed building where I cried my eyes out. Maybe an hour Morgan and a few of the folks from the church came walking past and headin’ toward downtown. The demons from the church were long gong, so he wasn’t chasing anyone, just striding down the middle of the street, taking long, deliberate steps, and the others were coming along in his wake, some almost running to keep up, and they were all talking about how he was going to rid the Lord’s land of demons. About a block after passing my hiding place, he stepped on a nail and almost had to stop there. One of his followers found a piece of pipe and gave it to him for a crutch.
“I followed them to the parking lot downtown where the invaders’ ship was landed. It wasn’t a hellish portal from the underworld, just a landing craft or shuttle from one of the huge starships still hovering high up in the sky. One was right over San Francisco. It should have been visible from Napa, but maybe you couldn’t see it because of all the smoke.
“Now, he did walk right up to the little landing ship and hit it with his pipe-crutch, and he did yell out for them to get out, to leave. Well, by that time, I guess all the other kryls must have returned to their ship, ‘cause they simply — and silently — took off into the sky back to their mother ship, which then left a little bit later. I guess there were more landers that went to other places they had to wait for.
“For the next couple of weeks, I was pretty well occupied with finding enough food and water to survive, but I was pretty sure I had witnessed a miracle. It wasn’t until I joined up with Dagar and Emmie and their group that I learned the truth, a bit of it, anyway. Emmie, Dagar, why don’t one of you tell it from your side?”
With everyone’s eyes and ears focused on her, Emmie began, “I was with my dad down by the Golden Gate when they came. That first day, I mean. We wound up in Muir Beach over on the coast the next day, and that’s where we met Erin and Dagar, although, back then, Dagar’s name was just plain Nate.”
She smiled at the man sitting next to her and he returned it but said nothing.
“While we were there, we had a lot of problems with some people. Actually, they were Morgan’s two youngest sons and their friends. After a car chase us all the way to Petaluma, we lost them and joined up with a group there that included Charlie and his wife, The Judge, and a bunch more. Things sort of went nuts after a couple of days, and we all got split up with the invaders—the kryls—chasing us all over. But, all that’s just background, and I’m sure everyone has their own horror stories about those days.
“Anyway, we wound up capturing two of the kryls about the time we heard that weird sound Raven mentioned. It sounded sort of like it came from the walls, the ceiling and the floor. That was when the two we captured stepped out from where they were waiting to jump us and said that it was the signal for them to get back to the ship because the operation was over, and they had to leave. That’s right; they spoke to us in plain English. Although, I think their words came through some kind of thing that floated around their heads like a foggy halo. But they used English words, so their meanings were clear enough.
“One was large and one small. We didn’t know at the time what a gllurik was. We just thought they were different sizes of the same kinda thing. Anyway, the big one, the kryl, did all the talking. It said the ‘sound’ we had heard was the signal to us as well as them that the ‘cull’ was over. That’s what it called it, the ‘cull,’ which, from what else we were told, they meant as thinning the herd. Anyway, it said they all had to leave. But we held ‘em there at gunpoint and made ‘em tell us what it was all about.
“It said the kryls came to Earth only to destroy our civilization, not to conquer us or annihilate us. It claimed they had already conquered us a long time ago and had decided against annihilating us. You see, we are their favorite prey for sport hunting. And Earth isn’t the only world with humans; there are — or were — sixteen others. They come every few hundred or thousand years to cull us, to put us back into the Stone Age so we don’t become too difficult to harvest. Oh, and also so we don’t blow ourselves up in one of our ‘petty’ wars.
“Something, huh? But it also mentioned that humans have this annoying ability to use our minds in a way I guess we’ve come to think of as magic — you know, telekinesis, telepathy, fun stuff like that. Before we could get it to tell us more, it made a wild try to escape and wound up dead.
“Before we turned on the other one, the small one, it told us it was a gllurik, not a kryl, and that it was not a danger to us. It also explained a bit more about human abilities…magic, if you prefer. It said it’s a natural human trait, although not all humans may be able to use it. It said we tend to suppress it because people like Morgan
get in power and convince everyone that magic is evil. We sort of defeat ourselves. It’s like we crawl around on our hands and knees because those in power aren’t able to walk upright, so they convince everyone that walking upright is evil. Crazy, huh? We let the gllurik go because it said other glluriks would suffer if it didn’t return.”
Sherri shook her head and said, “But that doesn’t —”
“Hold on, there’s lots more.” Emmie said. “You heard me mention that Raven has a special store of knowledge? Well, let me tell you how that came to be.
“It was about a month after she had joined us. The kryls were gone and we were all living in The Judge’s big house and beginning to think we might actually survive. A few of us were doing some experimenting with our new abilities and finding them fun, at times, although nothing spectacular. We were pretty clumsy back then, like toddlers just learning they could stand on their feet, and even walk if they concentrated really hard.
“But, about that time, Morgan popped up again. This time, though, he had muscle behind him, and he was determined to rid the world of what he considered evil, which included blacks as well as magic workers, and anyone helping either one. We had a hell of a battle, but we won, sort of. A lot of good people died. Raven was almost one of them. She’d been badly wounded, and she was slowly dying, bleeding to death. But, another one who was dying right along beside her was a guy named Ronald Newman.”
Emmie paused for a moment at the sound of a quick intake of air, a muffled gasp from either Dan or Raymond.
“Lila was there, too. I had been conked pretty hard on the head and was still woozy, so Raven sent Lila after Vonnie, who was a nurse. She was the closest thing we had to a doctor. Nobody knew about Lila’s abilities, yet.