Carlos had lost much of his anger, but his mouth was still a tight thin line. He barely opened it to say, “Two weeks.”
“Did you have time to ask him if it was okay to save me?”
Carlos shook his head and stared hard at Blane for a moment. Then he did something unexpected and smiled. “But he’d always wanted to try and kill the Black Bishop. He hated our tiptoeing around, as he called it. He wanted to take the suicide bomber approach from the beginning once he understood what was going on, the true evil of the Black Bishop.”
“So did he attack him?”
“Stabbed him in the chest with a ceremonial knife.”
Blane grinned slightly as he imagined it. “And did it do anything?”
Carlos shrugged. “Dunno. I had to dump Ramone and close the driving window.”
“You dumped him?” Blane shuddered. The term referred to disembodying the consciousness and leaving him on the astral plane. Once there without the knowledge to travel he could never get back. But Blane understood why he did it. If the Black Bishop were to get a hold of Ramone’s consciousness then he’d not only know everything about the League, but Ramone would be a doorway for the Black Bishop to find them. “Did he have anyone he left behind?”
“We were sending money to his mother.”
“I’ll help however I can. His—”
“That doesn’t matter anymore. Nothing matters anymore,” said Sebastian.
They all turned and beheld his open eyes. “Water,” he said to his assistants. “I need water.”
They hurried to comply, providing large bottles of mineral water. Everyone waited for Sebastian to satiate himself. He drank a bottle and a half. The first one he chugged. The second one he drank a little more leisurely. Finally, when he was done, he stared at the crowd that had gathered around him.
“Are you okay, Sebastian?” Blane asked.
“That doesn’t matter either. Something is coming and we must prepare.”
Blane and Pippa exchanged a worried look. “What’s coming?”
“A change.”
Blane wondered why Sebastian was being so cryptic. It was so unlike the blood sorcerer.
“Listen to me closely,” Sebastian began. “I don’t want any of the drivers leaving. I need all of you, even those with the weakest blood sorcery to stay in the hotel. I can protect you here. I can’t protect you outside.” He paused, holding up a hand as he took another quick drink. “What’s coming will change everything. If you’re here and with me you’ll know, but if you’re outside or away from me this change will be your always reality. It will be everything you’ve ever known.”
“You can’t be serious,” Blaine said, shaking his head. “The Black Bishop isn’t that powerful.
“The Black Bishop is nothing. He’s merely one of the Chatranj. Something bigger is coming. Something I’ve only felt once or twice in my life. It’s like seeing the very tip of a leviathan and knowing that if it ever wakes, it might take everything with it.”
“Jesus, are you serious?” Pippa asked.
Sebastian looked at him. “That thing that chased you was Rook. It is one of the messengers of the entity behind all this. Rook is the one we must be wary of. Rook is the one we must be in fear of.” Then he noticed Carlos, and Sebastian’s beseeching face relaxed into something akin to a mother’s concern. “Carlos, do not worry about Ramone. I found him and I took him to a vessel. He will live, just not as himself.” Sebastian shook his head. “And soon, he won’t even know the difference. When the reality shifts, it will be as if he was himself forever.”
“It’s already beginning to shift,” Blane said, then described the beasts which chased him.
Sebastian nodded. “Chupacabra. They exist in many realities, but not this one, which is why they are so rare. Sometimes a creature or a being can accidently slip through from one reality to the other.”
“Chupacabra,” Carlos said in a stunned monotone.
“There will be more. Be wary of the fog and stay inside.” Sebastian turned to Pippa. “Get with Frezzie. We need supplies. We need to—”
“We already have teams gathering food and water. Gundy and the Jacoby brothers are leading the effort.”
Sebastian nodded. “Good. I’ll make a list of some other things we’ll need.” Then he turned to Blane and Carlos. “Go to all the drivers and tell them what I told you. Then tell them I want reports of anything out of the ordinary.”
Blane and Carlos nodded.
Sebastian clapped his catcher’s mitt sized hands. “Now. Do it. Hurry!”
Chapter Sixteen
Berdoo Canyon. Hide Site.
CODENAME: TRAVESTY
Flight Sequence 28537824m
CLASSIFIED TALENT KEYHOLE
UAV Narration: Sgt Frank Spann
UAV Mode: Combat Swarm
…13 fly 100 meters, overview of compound. As was before, single black adobe hut set back 300 meters from nearest buildings. Other buildings include three two story dormitories, a main meeting lodge with dining facility, gymnasium and motor pool. No substantive activity other than in Cathedral area.
…2 fly 40meters, circling black hut.
…1 fly 120 meters, above Interstate 10. Still completely shut down.
…1 fly 10 meters, above moving UI creature, winding through windmill farm. Body the size of a Great Dane, face of a monkey with fangs, four legs, and almost hairless, moving fast as it chases a pack of coyotes. Catches one coyote. Eats it. Moves after the others. Log as Cryptid 001.
So much crazy shit had happened that Frank wasn’t sure if he hadn’t landed squarely in the middle of one of those old black and white Twilight Zone episodes his father had liked to watch so much. Only this shit was real. The things he’d seen in the last twenty-four hours were almost too much to take in.
The only problem was that he wasn’t sure if his information was getting out. After the first avalanche of three thousand four hundred and seventeen emails, everything had trickled to virtually nothing. In fact, he hadn’t received or been carbon copied on a single email.
One thing was for sure—this wasn’t an isolated incident.
In Phoenix they reported alien spaceships.
In New Orleans they reported carnivorous mermaids.
The reports from New York were even more outrageous.
In Anchorage, Alaska a tribe of Yetis moved into the Diamond Center, using the nearby zoo as their personal pantry. Although civil rights groups were keeping the police and National Guard from doing anything about it, Sarah Palin called out on Radio Free Alaska inviting hunters from all over to come and take care of the problem.
‘Don’t let this crazy fear of another blinding scare you. This is a once in a lifetime opportunity. I mean, when’s the next chance you’re going to get to shoot down the Abominable Snowman? Unless we find the Island of Lost Toys, this is your only chance. So come on down and spend your tourist dollars in Anchorage then shoot the crap out of these monsters kept alive by the liberal rights mafia.’
Frank just assumed the rest of the SMU community was busy taking care of their business. Which was fine with him. His current problem was that the sudden appearance of fog was creating difficulties launching and landing aircraft at Twentynine Palms. He was down to seventeen UAVs and he had no expectation for that number to increase. In fact, some of the planes just disappeared. He’d traced one video feed on a Hunter that inexplicably went dark once it entered what he’d thought to be a random yet unmoving bank of fog.
And just as inexplicably, two Shadows had appeared from nowhere, responding to his transponder, but enigmatically, with idents not in his inventory. He’d taken control of them nonetheless, and had sent them to land, refuel and launch with the rest of his assigned airframes.
Contact with Twentynine Palms was becoming spotty. If he lost it, he’d be out of a mission unless they began automatically turning around everything that landed. Once he was out of aircraft, there wasn’t much he could do.
Excep
t maybe track his girl.
He grabbed a Diet Coke, noting that he was almost out, then popped the top, leaned back, and watched The Jenkies Show. He’d logged her entering mid-morning, but there’d been no sight of her since. He watched the silent black and white top-down feed for a while, imagining a life with her, one in which they were two heroes, saving the planet for a brighter future.
When he finished the Coke, he smashed the can and tossed it in the trash. He was about to get up for a smoke when two people left the home by the front door: her mother and father. They entered the vehicle in the driveway, backed out and headed up the street. This was the first time since the blinding event that he’d noted car movement. His guess was that they were making a run for supplies. Things were beginning to get back to normal, but fresh food was becoming more and more scarce. With no overland cargo movement, it was only a matter of time before rationing would have to go into effect. That would set people off and send them foraging, both legally and illegally.
Although he preferred real food, he had ten cases of Meals Ready to Eat or MREs stashed away, which could get him through anywhere between sixty to ninety days without food resupply. The biggest issue was water. The Salton Sea was undrinkable. The underground aquifer which had been almost completely depleted in 1960, had been nearly refilled using Colorado River runoff. The problem was that to get the water out of the ground meant electricity, and the three towns of Palm Desert, Palm Spring and Cathedral City were already experiencing brownouts, with three temporary blackouts and counting.
If Frank was to hazard a guess, he’d bet that power plants higher up the food chain were siphoning the power elsewhere. Places like Vegas and Los Angeles probably had the ability to seek out and take what they needed. A person could survive without food for days, even a week. But they couldn’t survive without water. Frank needed to stock up. When the van came, he was going to make sure it was full before he was dropped back off.
Movement on the feed caused him to lean forward. It was Jenkies, standing in the back yard, something in her hands, peering around the side of the house. He watched as she checked to see if anyone was watching, then ran to the neighbor’s house. She bent down, and shimmied into the crawl space.
“What are you doing?” he wondered aloud.
After the blinding, he’d watched as she’d dragged the body down the block and then stuffed it under this very same neighbor’s house. It was a temporary solution at best, but one that explained something about what was going on. Had she been the real Jenkies, there’d be no reason to hide her other version. Which meant that the Jenkies who had survived wasn’t from this reality.
He’d been contemplating that conclusion ever since he’d arrived at it. The disappearance of his own UAVs and the appearance of the two strange UAVs lent credence to his theory, but it didn’t make it any saner, it just made it Twilight Zone.
She backed out of the crawl space, brushed off her knees, then ran back to her backyard where she stopped and stared back at the neighbor’s house. Whatever she had carried was no longer in her possession.
About thirty seconds later, smoke began to billow out from beneath the house. When she saw it, she ran inside her own home.
“You little devil,” Frank said to the screen. “Getting rid of the evidence, aren’t you?”
He watched as the house began to more actively burn.
Jenkies came outside and began to hose down the side of her home closest to the flames.
Frank felt pride in her display of intelligence and ingenuity. He grabbed his cigarettes, opened the door and squinted into the brightness. Nothing waited for him outside, so he closed the door, sat down on the steps, lit a smoke, and inhaled deeply.
So if Jenkies was from a different reality that meant that there were different versions of her and different versions of him. This couldn’t be the only reality in which he had feelings for her. He wondered if there was a reality where he’d actually done something about it? Or a reality where she had feelings for him? Of course she’d have no way of knowing he existed unless he made himself known. After all, she wasn’t the one with overhead surveillance capability.
As he finished his cigarette, he heard rustling in the bushes. He stood hurriedly, searching for the source of the sound. He stared at the area where the sound had originated and could see nothing out of the ordinary. Except maybe he could make out the outlines of a face… a face like the one he’d seen chase down and eat the coyotes.
Cryptid 001.
When he opened the door to the trailer, it stepped onto the side of the road. It was larger than it had appeared on the feed. It looked meaner, too. What absolutely terrified him was that in addition to the monstrous animal visage it presented, there was a definite alien sort of intelligence living behind the eyes, an intelligence no mere animal was capable of possessing.
He let it appraise him for a brief moment, then slammed shut the door. He locked it for good measure.
“What the hell was that?” he asked aloud.
He went online to do a search, but discovered right away that the internet was down. Either there was a problem with his upload link, or it was more of a system-wide problem. To see if the problem originated with him meant going on the roof. He wasn’t about to open the door.
An image of the creature flashed through his mind.
In fact, he might never open the door again.
Chapter Seventeen
Palm Springs. It was a sad day for the Calhouns. Not only had they lost both of their cars in the event, but their house was in the process of tragically and mysteriously burning down. The firemen were busy elsewhere and were unable to get to it before it was fully engaged, so instead of putting it out when they finally arrived, they kept spraying the neighboring homes to keep them from burning.
Jenkies and her new mom and dad had watched Mr. and Mrs. Calhoun, along with their son Johnnie—in her universe Johnnie had been Joan—hug each other as the fire furiously ate everything they’d ever owned. She hoped that the body would also be destroyed, or at least rendered unidentifiable. The alternative would probably mean having to explain who she was or at least why there were two of them.
At four that afternoon, the fire had burned down enough that the fireman finally put it out. Great gouts of steam replaced the smoke from the settling embers of the roof and floor joists.
What Jenkies had initially taken for smoke in the area now seemed to be something else—something akin to fog, although Palm Springs and Cathedral City didn’t have enough moisture in the air for fog. She corrected herself. Hadn’t she slipped through a patch of fog—hadn’t that been what brought her to this new universe? Even though it had been in her sleep, she had no doubt that it had been the locus for her transition into this new life, not to mention an escape from the nightmares who were chasing her.
The fog hung here and there in trees, along a portion of sidewalk, and beneath an immense red bougainvillea. She watched as a bird flew into one but didn’t come out the other side. As she continued to watch, a person suddenly appeared from the one on the sidewalk. Wearing a trench coat and carrying an umbrella, he stopped, stunned, as he looked around at his new environs, wide-eyed. He spun around, saw the fog, and dashed back into it.
Jenkies looked around, wondering if anyone else had seen, but all eyes were still focused on the burned out house.
She reminded herself that not only was she new here, but others might be as well. She began to look at all the other people gathered on the sidewalk, wondering if they were hiding something just as she was.
Chapter Eighteen
Bombay Beach Motel. After six days of sheer chaos the world was finally beginning to calm itself. Blane wouldn’t use the term return to normal because that could never happen.
Normal was a universe in which 376,492 people hadn’t died in a single blinded moment.
Normal was a universe in which countries hadn’t permanently grounded their planes in favor of a less convenient but safer land-lo
cked transportation system.
Normal was a universe where a hunter in Northern California didn’t drive out of the Shasta-Trinity National Forest with a dead Sasquatch strapped to the hood of his Dodge pickup truck; where a cruise ship wasn’t pulled to the bottom of the Caribbean by a kraken; where giant birds controlled the skies above the South China Sea.
Calm was a far better term.
But as it turned out, it was the calm before the storm.
Sebastian believed that everyone was in shock and a little bit of denial about what had happened — stage one of the Kubler-Ross model for the Five Stages of Grief. As it turned out, he was right. The fourth day after what the news agencies are calling The Blinding everything was quiet. The fighting in Ukraine had ceased. There wasn’t a single explosion in the Middle East. The news channels which normally lathered against one half of the country were civil. In fact, there wasn’t a single reported death anywhere in the world, which was unheard of.
That night Sebastian ordered everyone to stay inside, for them to arm themselves, and to bar the doors. They didn’t know how he knew, but the next day the world exploded with violence as the global population unleashed their rage. Only they had no target. Nothing to point their finger at and say that it was his or her fault. Not a single event to separate from the rest to say it was because of that. They couldn’t accept the fact that The Blinding. Just. Happened.
So they lashed out at each other.
The League spent the day holed up inside their headquarters while the people of the Earth tried to hurt anyone they could get their hands on. The drivers concentrated on keeping their zombies safe, but they had their own concerns now that Rook had pointed out to the Black Bishop that someone was watching through the eyes of some of those in the Grotto. They’d lost two zombies mysteriously. One moment the driver was doing his job, the next he was kicked out and couldn’t find his way back no matter how much blood he self-harvested. Those remaining tried to keep their zombies moving along with the rest of the panic, although it was less inside the Grotto than outside.
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