A Warrior's Return

by Guy Stanton III

  I paused for a moment and then said, “Here I am today a whore.”

  After a moment I looked up curious to see what he thought of my story and I gasped slightly. In the dim light of the window I saw a brighter reflection of a shiny streak of moisture coming down his cheek.

  No one had ever cried for me before. I knew in that moment that I loved this man, who was still virtually a stranger to me. He stood up pulling me up along with him. He held me. He didn’t say anything he just held me and that said over a thousand words by just doing that.

  He drew back eventually, “We need to get you to bed. Its been a long day.”

  I let him push me to my bed, but I stopped and turned around and slowly stepped toward him. His hand flat against my upper chest stopped me.

  “You’re emotional and you’ve been through a lot today.” He said softly.

  “I want to repay you for everything you’ve done for us, but the only thing I have to give is my body. Won’t you let me at least please you? I want to!” I said imploringly.

  “Evangelina everything I’ve given you or done for you was a gift and does not need to be repaid.”

  There was a pause and I pressed harder against his hand, but he didn’t budge.

  Sounding stressed he said, “I very much want what you’re offering, but not like this. Good night Evangelina.”

  Clark turned and left the room shutting the door. He went to the countertop and gripped its edge regretting and proud of his decision all at the same time.

  Meanwhile a little boy closed his eyes after having seen words put into actions. For the first time in his life he’d found a man worth emulating in every way.

  I sat eating breakfast trying not to make eye contact with Clark. My emotions of the previous evening, my offer, and the feelings I was beginning to feel for this man had all left me feeling rather exposed.

  He stood up and came to stand near me, but I kept my eyes glued to my plate and the process of eating even though I wasn’t hungry.

  “I’m going to be gone for several days.”

  His words hit me like a bomb and I felt something contract painfully inside of me. He reached out and placed something in front of me. It was money.

  It was more money than I could make in a good year or maybe even two years. I looked up at him shocked.

  “In case I don’t make it back.” He said simply.

  I swallowed hard, “When are you going?”

  “Now.” He touched my shoulder briefly before heading for the door.

  I got up quickly and nervously brushed the hair back out of my face, “Is it dangerous? Where you’re going I mean?”

  He stopped and looked back, “Yes, I believe it will be.”

  He opened the door.

  “Clark!”

  “What?”

  “Please be safe!”

  He nodded and closed the door. I looked from the closed door to the pile of money on the table and then back to the door. I wanted him more than the pursuit of money I had lost all my self-respect for, but was such a thing possible?

  Chapter Five

  Drowned Ambitions

  Clark went down the stairs and out into the humid air of the city. Within an hour he reached the parking garage in a more influential area of the city. Minutes later he drove a Range Rover out and into the busy streets.

  In another two hours he was driving eighty miles an hour along the dirt roads gripping the steering wheel hard and wondering how life could get so complicated and at the same time grateful that it had.

  He drove all night and all the next day only stopping to refill the SUV out of the gas cans in the back. The third day the muddy dirt roads turned to goat paths.

  Finding a safe looking spot he pulled the SUV off the road into a shallow wooded depression and covered it with a camo net. To complete the camouflage he broke off several native vegetation branches and placed them artfully on the netting. Satisfied he grabbed up his pack and started into the thick vegetation of the jungle.

  His abilities, as a natural woodsman came out and the affectations of a city person quickly faded away. He glided swiftly over the uneven terrain swinging in and around the trees and obstacles of the forest.

  He made barely a sound, as he slipped through the wilderness, clearly in his natural element. His long strides ate up distance that would have tested the endurance of the greatest of athletes and yet his passage forward was paved in quietness.

  It paid to be quiet in the jungle, because there were still native people roaming the shadowed understory, who hunted their prey with the poisoned blow dart and they didn’t really care what they ate just so long as they ate.

  Clark waded through several small streams running high with floodwater. His progress through the jungle was mostly uneventful, once a bushmaster snake had made a strike at him, only to find its head swiped off mid strike by the machete Clark held.

  A jaguar gave up following the narrow game trail Clark traveled. He skirted around to the side giving space to a bigger predator than even he was. He rumbled bad naturedly, as Clark passed by, not happy with his self imposed subservience, but he wasn’t willing to press the issue either.

  Nightfall fell and Clark confident that he was alone made a fire. He laid out his bedroll after dinner and starred into the small fire. Something he never did as it took night vision away temporarily. He wasn’t really staring at the fire in his mind’s eye though. He was seeing Evangelina’s black flashing eyes, her sensually long hair and tawny brown skin.

  The memory of her wonderfully curvaceous body was a living torment. He groaned and turned over onto his back. Daydreaming like that wasn’t going to get him any rest. Still if he had to be kept awake he wouldn’t want it to be for any other reason.

  Life had gotten complicated and he had bigger more important things to be thinking of, but all he could think of was the girl he’d left behind. He had never seen her smile. He wanted to see her smile and be the one that had made her full lips curl in happiness. He hoped she was safe and that she would use the money wisely.

  Above all he prayed that she didn’t do anything intimate with any other man other than him for the rest of her life. He registered how far his thinking towards her had gone, but he didn’t question it. His mother would never approve of such a girl, but she was the one he wanted.

  When he had seen her at the night club he’d been entranced by her like every other man in the place initially, but delving deeper he had determined her performance was entirely faked and it had intrigued him all the more. Over the last week he had unveiled another whole side to her.

  He wished that she didn’t have the background material that she did, but he could wish the same concerning himself for that matter in all fairness. Troubled he slipped a book out of a pocket in the pack he carried. When he was in search of an answer sometimes opening the Bible helped find an answer to the problem at hand.

  It was surprising how often he found an answer with this method. He opened it and began to read. He completed one segment of a story from the Old Testament, but there was nothing conclusive in terms of an answer to his question. He tried it again and landed in the New Testament and read. He almost missed it. Re-reading it he shook his head at the item of knowledge he had not picked up on before.

  Closing God’s Word he stared up at the canopy above that blocked off the light of the stars and said, “Point taken.”

  He went to sleep fully assured of the rightness of his actions and thoughts.

  The terrain was more rugged and rocky the next day with less vegetation to slow him down. Clark had gained several thousand feet in elevation. He was getting close.

  It was midday of the next day that he saw the tell tale remnants of the ruins that he was in search of. The dense growth of the forest disguised them well. There were no standing structures, just piles of hand worked stone here and there. These ruins dated back farther than any Inca ruins in the area.

  In the humid air of the ancient place, overgrown by
the forest, Clark took his pack off and pulled something out of an inner pocket of the pack. It looked as if he held a flat stone in his hands. It was three inches by five inches and two inches in depth.

  One side of the object was covered in a scrollwork of tiny symbols intricately carved into the stone in a seemingly random pattern. The tablet was not made of stone; in fact nobody knew what it was made of. It was an element not on the periodic table charts. Even more odd was that it emitted a low level frequency of power.

  The strange symbols on its front were also unrecognizable to any ancient symbols previously recorded. The device had been discovered over a year ago quite by accident. It was found of all places in a coal strip mine.

  A pit loader operator had been inspecting his loader for hydraulic oil leaks when he happened to look down and see the tablet sticking out of the stony matrix of black rock on top of the coal seam. Yanking it free he realized something of the enormity of the find and reported it to his foreman. The company had an archaeologist come to examine it and he made the first discovery of the artifacts uniqueness, in that it emitted a power wave of some kind. Electrical or battery operated equipment malfunctioned, when in close proximity to the artifact, was another discovery made.

  The local media got wind of the ‘alien’ device and soon it became a national news release. The scientific community stepped in and by the use of specially tuned sensors they searched for more of the unique power radiation let off by the artifact. Two more devices were found in close proximity to the first one. The government seized the devices declaring the situation and occurrence of the ‘alien’ devices to be too serious of a matter to be handled and studied by the private sector alone.

  Amid a worldwide outcry the government, after a lengthy series of concession talks and agreements, agreed to release the artifacts to the broader scientific community with an agreement that any discoveries that were made were to be shared by all remaining world powers. One device went to the Northern European Coalition, another device went to the Asian Alliance and the last one went to the Southern Alliance of South America, based in Brazil.

  During the initial testing of the one sent to Asia something triggered a reaction within the device to cause a subatomic explosion that not only destroyed the underground facility it was housed in, but sent shockwaves outward that measured a nine point five on the Richter scale and caused widespread destruction in the heavily populated area on the surface.

  There were over seventy thousand casualties from the incident, with another two hundred thousand wounded. The city was almost virtually destroyed.

  Work was temporarily halted on studying the remaining two devices, at least in the Southern Alliance it was. It was agreed that the artifact should be sent to a more remote area for testing. Which is when a group of underworld businessmen that headed up several multinational dummy corporations hatched a plan to steal the device from the Southern Alliance.

  The device had already proven its ability for destructive capabilities, which alone was a marketable commodity. They could become insanely wealthy men if they could unlock the secrets of the device for their own benefit. The one problem that stood in their way to acquiring it was the heavy transport security, which is when Victor Uchenko came into the picture. Russian secret police ex-patriot now turned drug runner, arms dealer, human trafficker and general all around bad guy.

  For an exorbitant fee he masterminded the hijack of the device and the slaughter of over three hundred security personnel. Realizing what he had he reneged on his agreed-upon fee and demanded a king’s ransom for the device.

  The businessman balked at the sum of money and Victor put it up for sale on the black market. He’d gotten a buyer for it, only Clark tipped by off by some of his contacts, as to the devices whereabouts and armed with Evangelina’s knowledge of Victor’s mansion had stolen it first.

  One test result the Asian lab had found before the accident was that the element of the tablet, while of primary mineral makeup, also had biological attributes.

  There was a slight depression in one corner of the tablet and Clark was pretty sure that was the key to the device. Years before Clark had been in this area of the forest on a covert mission. He’d spent some time with a tribe of forest dwellers, who had nursed him back to health from an injury he had suffered during the mission. In particular the headman of the tribe and Clark had formed a close friendship.

  The native people’s lack of written work was more than made up for by their oral history lessons passed down from father to son through the years. There oral traditions went all the way back to when their people had first come to these hot humid jungles.

  They had not been the first to discover the land. There were bare traces left over of a people who had been here before them. It may have been traces of this earlier people’s advanced reasoning found in scattered ruins and on stones that had led to the early progression of the native peoples in the arts of math and science, as evidenced by the Mayans and the Incas.

  Perhaps they had also learned their penchant for grisly sacrifice and blood offerings from the old ruins to. Clark had asked, if the people from before, had a name and the old man had been hesitant to say anything further, but after more pressing by Clark the old man had confessed that there had been a name, Orleanaki; or more properly translated as Orlandian.

  The name had several meanings, but the most relevant was, ‘worshipers of the luminous star’. The natives knew them simply as the ‘bloody people’. Pulling his knife out Clark cut the pad of his thumb slightly and with blood welling out of the cut he pressed it to the shallow depression on the device.

  The tablet scrollwork glowed green and the tablet began to thin out and increase in width and length. A screen formed as the intricate scrollwork stretched out to more recognizable configurations.

  It was a language read by astronomy. Star constellations, whose vectored shapes formed a language, were lit up across the screen. It was Greek to Clark, but the language was partially understandable, because of the universal use of the common symbols used. Pulling and touching symbols on the screen suddenly revealed a matrix of colored lines, as several constellations lined up with each other and formed a three dimensional triangle in the shape of a pyramid.

  Clark knew a moment of profound success. He had unlocked the device, without any expensive state of the art lab or army of scientists peering over his shoulder.

  Clark watched as the entire jungle scene around him was illuminated by the multiplying rays of color that emanated out of the device. The out tracing laser lines of color began to reassemble the framework of buildings and structures that no longer existed in physical form. It was incredible!

  No doubt in time an entire city framework would be revealed, but that was not what Clark was interested in. He looked at the screen before him as the shapes taking place around him were represented on the tablet as well.

  Something different came up on the screen. Most of the lines were just green highlighted lines, but an area off to one side was showing up in solid green, an intact structure?

  Clark with one finger turned the rendering 3D image on the screen from a top view to a crosscut view. The solid green parts of the emerging city grid were underground.

  He double tapped on the area of solid green and there was a creaking of stone and a dark passageway opened up thirty feet away out of the ground. Clark let go of the tablet, which continued to float in space and approached the dark entrance.

  Stairs led down into the darkness. He stepped onto them and rows of green panel lights came on illuminating the dissent into an eerie green hued darkness. After a momentary hesitation Clark descended into the darkened corridor.

  Down he went into the ground in search of an answer that he almost hoped that he didn’t find, because if he did then somebody else might too and he couldn’t afford for that to happen.

  The steps were slippery underfoot and he made his way down them carefully. In places the green lights flickered like they had
a short of some kind in their wiring. This place had to be incredibly old and yet it was still functioning!

  The stairs ended at a door. The door, with a creaky hiss, slid open and a room beyond was revealed. Clark stepped into it and the room came alive with lights and flashing icons. There was a fine layer of dust over everything and the evidence of the presence of water at some point.