I entered the building, which was deserted this time of night. The one bulb that remained lit in the hallway provided barely enough light. But I could see all I needed to. The door was ajar. My heart stopped. My right hand swung up to soothe a searing pain, rubbing it away. The light above the door flickered, yellow. I looked out to see the windmills turning frantically against the wind. The scene seemed apocalyptic. If Earl was loose in the base, we were in real trouble.
Chapter Forty Seven
Earl was gone. He’d been freed by one of the refugees. I explained this to the Sergeant, wrapped in a heavy blanket, my son at my side. “I’m certain of it.” I continued. “They’re missing one of the women from the hospital, a woman without a child. She’s likely so brainwashed that she’s gone and broken him out.”
“We’ve got the perimeter under full guard now, Sara. If he’s still inside the base, we’ll flush him out.” He walked to the window, staring out blankly. “This is our fault. We should have had a guard on him. And the refugees, they seemed so relieved to have been rescued.”
“Don’t blame yourself, Jeff,” I didn’t like seeing him like this. “Honestly, I’m afraid this is all my fault.”
“Your fault, how so?”
“He gave it up too easily. The information about their hideout. He also knew we would bring the women and children back. He knew we might kill off the rest of the men in a shootout, but the women and children… he knew we’d bring them back.”
“You think he gave up his camp just on the chance that one of them would free him?”
“Knowing Earl, yes.” My head dropped, and Leif gently rubbed my back. “He is very clever, and the fact that he has no conscience makes choices like that easy for him. He played the odds and he played me, and it looks as though he’s won.”
“He hasn’t won the war, Sara. He’s only won a battle.”
“Still, he’s loose now.” I looked at Leif, whose little forehead was wrinkled, his eyes big and sad.
*****
In our room I put Leif back to bed. It was very late, and he needed to sleep. I changed and got into my own cot. Turning on my side, my back to Leif, I started to cry. Why does this Blank Man not do something? What’s the purpose of a higher intelligence if all they’re capable of doing is guiding a person in the wrong direction? Why let someone like Earl continue to plague us? Part of the grand plan? Fuck the grand plan!
I felt a hand on my exposed shoulder and an arm wrap itself around me. “Don’t be sad, Mommy.” Leif crawled under my covers and settled behind me, hugging me. My hand reached up to touch his. “Everything will be okay.” I wondered if he actually knew that, or if he was just comforting me in the moment.
“Thank you, Leif. I love you.”
“I love you too. Please don’t be sad.” His logic, that I could stop being sad just because he wanted me to struck me as profound. I turned and lay on my back. He was right. There was nothing I could do except love my son, no matter what happened. I kissed his forehead. Leif adjusted and we fell asleep.
*****
I awoke with a start. My eyes flew to the clock over Leif’s bed. 3:33 am. I shifted, slowly sitting up so as not to wake Leif. I sat on the edge of the cot and rubbed my eyes. Whenever I woke up prematurely like this, there was not much chance I was going to get back to sleep. This was when my mind would relive the horrors of my past. Images I couldn’t escape ran over and over again in my head. The scenarios I’d lived through would haunt me, and tonight was no different. Feeling sick, I stood up, paced a moment and then lay down on Leif’s bed. I breathed in deeply for four seconds, held for seven, then released over eight and repeated. Sometimes this rhythmic breathing left me dizzy, but almost always left me feeling better.
I sat up and crossed my legs. Eyes still closed, I straightened my back and pushed my chest out, rolling my neck. Opening my eyes I was confronted once again by an image I had fought so hard against believing. Sitting not two feet in front of me, cross-legged as best as I could tell, was Blank Man. He was very dark, a silhouette. I froze.
A sound very weak rose in my head. Someone was speaking at a distance. It became clearer the longer I stared back at the Blank Man. It was him. He was trying to communicate with me. His head cocked to the left and suddenly the words became very clear.
“Ask your questions.” He was soft-spoken, and I had to strain to hear, but inherently I understood. I felt the hairs on my arms rise with goose bumps. This was my chance, I thought. This was the opportunity I’d been waiting for.
“Ask your questions,” he repeated. What were my questions? I drew a blank. Oh shit, I was going to blow this. He must have sensed my anxiety. He placed a hand on my knee. It felt like nothing. Not cold, not warm, not there. The act calmed me though, and I was able to remember the questions I had wanted to ask.
First I asked a question I’d wanted answered when Leif first brought up the Blank Man. “Are you Joel’s angel? Our angel?”
“Yes,” he answered. His voice was soft. I guessed I’d always known that, but was relieved to know I was right.
The next question was broader and I hoped I’d get a more detailed answer. This was something I wanted Joel to ask his angel for me but never got around to putting it to him. “Why us? Why now? How is it we are the generation that has to live through the end of the world?”
The Blank Man’s head cocked to the right. “We? You say that as though you are separating yourself from those that have come before you. We all come back. You have lived before, as your son has lived through Joel. You have lived through another, and another and another. You are experiencing this time as you experienced the Black Plague, the Second World War, the Inquisition. You have lived before as surely as you will live again to experience again and again. You are here now because you are an important means to this end. Leif is here now because he is that end.”
Reincarnation. He was talking about reincarnation. We all come back was what he’d told Leif when he explained to him that he was Joel, his father. “Why would Joel die and be replaced by Leif? Couldn’t Joel have done what Leif is destined to do?”
“Joel had lost what ability he had left in him to lead. His addiction had taken over.”
“Did Joel have anything to do with Connor’s death?” I realized I wasn’t speaking but rather only thinking my questions now. “No, don’t answer that,” I said out loud. I was better off not knowing, I’d decided.
“What is Leif destined to do?”
“This is yet unclear.”
“Unclear? How could it be unclear? Isn’t destiny clarity by definition?”
“This is why we have such an interest in Leif, and why we held such interest in Joel. Destiny is not absolute. It is driven by fate.”
“What’s the difference?”
“Consider fate as an outside entity acting through a person, while destiny is brought about by the person themself. Both march towards a predetermined end, but how they get there can affect that end.”
“Are you that outside entity?”
“I am only a guide.”
Questions started jumping into my head. I felt an urgency to ask them all before he disappeared. “Why allow Earl to escape? Why has he not yet been punished for all he’s done?”
“Earl too has a part to play, and fate has seen fit to allow this course to unveil itself in time.”
“I don’t understand. Who’s running this show?”
“Show?”
“Yes. Life. What is it all for?”
“Life is a lesson. When it is learned, only then will you understand what it was all for.”
“So, who’s right? Christians? Buddhists? Islam....”
“Religion is a beginning. It was meant to be the teacher.”
“But we messed that up didn’t we?”
“Religion became a means to rule rather than teach.”
“Why are you telling me all of this now?”
“Leif is a special boy. Protect him, keep him safe and I will guide him as best as I
can.”
“Better than you led Joel?”
“Joel had his own ideas. He fought me and he fought his destiny. I could not alter his path towards self destruction. He was filled with anger in the end, guilt, hate, frustration. It would be difficult to say whether he could have recovered enough to become leader in what must come to pass. With Leif, we start anew, and you can help. We can work together in this.”
With that, Blank Man disintegrated before my eyes, black spots dancing on my eyeballs. I lay back and covered my mouth with my hands, staring up at the ceiling. “Holy shit.”
Chapter Forty Eight
Earl and his woman friend were never found. During the days that followed his escape, the soldiers hunted the surrounding area and placed men at the Castle Rock in case he returned, but he was never seen again. The Sergeant and I questioned the refugees from Earl’s camp. Where might they have gone? What might they do next? They were all very forthcoming but for the most part none of them could answer our questions with any certainty. One interesting fact came from a conversation with the oldest of the women, Sybil, who had three young children from three different men. She said that Earl himself had not fathered any of the children.
“He blamed me, but when you force yourself on so many women and still, no children, you need to take a closer look at yourself.”
“He’s always thought of himself as the Alpha male.” I responded. I had a flashback to the time I stumbled upon his journal. He spoke of destroying the homosexuals, and those unable (or unwilling) to have children. He saw repopulating the planet as every person’s duty. Yet here he had proven he could not have children of his own.
The woman who had freed Earl had been young, and probably quite taken with her leader. Just seventeen, Mary blindly followed him in everything. Earl would have thought he’d have his best chance to conceive with the youngest of them, and so kept Mary in his own tent. His control over her had led to his escape, and so the most I could hope, is that we never saw him again.
*****
I took Leif to the greenhouse the day following my encounter with Blank Man. Leif had taken an interest in nature, and studied one plant in particular. He would go daily to watch this plant develop from a seedling to a towering tree. With each new development his amazement never ceased to amuse me. But on this day, I brought him there hoping we could talk. The greenhouse was humid inside, no matter what the season. The smell of pine permeated the place, washing away the distinctively chemical smell of the outdoors. Next to the barn animals, this place most inspired him. We walked through the aisles, pine needles and dried leaves from the fruit trees that lined the concrete floor pad crunching underfoot.
The army Chaplain, and our full time botanist, was a tall man of African descent. He wore army issue glasses, a buzz cut and always dressed with his collar exposed, making him readily recognizable as a man of the cloth. We’d shared a few brief conversations over the course of my occupancy at the base.
The saplings had taken off during the last six years, and upon entering the greenhouse one was reminded of the indigenous forests that once populated the local landscape. The man-made ponds that acted as fisheries bred trout, bass and also feeder fish like minnows. The idea was that the Chaplain and his team would tag the fish and place them in Elle Lake, which was a mere stone’s throw from the base. This process was repeated time and again in a netted area roughly ten thousand square feet along the lake’s southern shores. This area was under heavy guard to prevent poaching. The objective was to have the fish repopulate the lifeless lake. The experiment worked, as the fish adjusted quickly to the lake water, feeding off the abundant fly population that bred along the shores in the dead fish the Chaplain’s team had placed for that very reason.
We found the Chaplain at one of the fish ponds, where Leif snatched up a shell from the rock wall.
“What are these?” I asked, pulling it from Leif’s hand.
“Zebra mussels,” the Chaplain replied. “They multiply like rabbits and eat all the toxins out of a fresh water lake. They number in the thousands in Elle Lake now, feeding along the lake bed, scooping up all the nasty goo that has collected there, suffocating the soil.” He knelt down beside Leif as he explained the process, his palms clapping together as he demonstrated the mussels at work. Leif got a kick out of it.
“Sounds cool.” Leif was truly fascinated.
“I’m excited about it,” he agreed and stood up, patting Leif lightly on his head. “We’re also considering planting a few of the hardier pines next month beyond the family housing buildings and maybe even the apple trees.”
“Wow,” I mused. “You were really prepared for the worst weren’t you?” I shook my head in awe of the planning that would have gone into this place. Hundreds of indigenous seeds stored, hundreds of plants in seedling form, fish eggs, animals to breed, birds of a dozen different varieties, a bee hive. There wasn’t much they’d missed. This base was like Noah’s ark.
“It’s a testament to man’s understanding of his environment. Of course, if the earth rejects our efforts, it was all for not.”
“Are you nervous about the planting?”
“Yes, of course, but I am also very encouraged. I believe life will find its footing again.” He pointed down to where an ant hill had formed in a crack in the cement. “Look at that. Have you ever seen an ant, Leif?” he asked kneeling down again with my son for a closer look, careful not to disturb the colony.
“I’ve seen pictures,” Leif said, bright-eyed. “Look at them all, Mom. Look.”
I knelt down beside him. “Aren’t they amazing, Leif? Did you know they can lift 10 times their own body weight?”
“Ten times! Wow.” He was mesmerized by their movements. Each step taken with a clear purpose of survival.
“I’ve been feeding them since I first discovered the colony,” he admitted, smiling ear to ear. “This is just another example of life reclaiming what it had temporarily lost. God’s creatures. Resilient, aren’t we?”
I smiled tight-lipped up at him and stood. “You must have a pretty interesting opinion on what’s happened, Chaplain.”
“Must I?”
“Mustn’t you? Isn’t this the end time? Haven’t we been living through the Apocalypse these past nine years?”
“As a man of God, I can say with conviction that the end of the age was prophesized. And an ending of sorts did occur.”
“And what about Jesus?”
“What about Him?” He moved to the raised pond and shook a can of fish food over the water.
“Well, I guess what I mean is, where is He?”
“You’re referring to the Second Coming.” His tone became tighter, like he’d been asked the question a thousand times. I moved closer to him while Leif remained behind, fascinated by the six legged insects.
“That’s the big one, isn’t it? Where is He?” He placed the fish food down, picked up a towel, wiped his hands and turned to face me. “Why hasn’t He come to rebuild His kingdom? When will the thousand years of peace begin?”
“Exactly.”
“I’ll tell you what I’ve told those that attend my sermons. That I can only quote the Bible, Sara, I do not presume to understand God’s plan, only to have faith in His divine will.”
“No offence, Chaplain, but, isn’t that a bit of a cop-out?” I flicked at the water abruptly with my fingers, frightening the dozens of fish into the far corner.
“Faith is a paradoxical thing isn’t it, Sara? You suffer an experience, or a vision, or a miracle, however you’d like to categorize it, and you find faith. Look at me. I was a botanist for many years before I was called into the service of the Lord. I studied plants, right down to the atomic level, and do you know what I found?”
“No.”
“God, Sara. I found God in those perfect, intelligently designed life forms. And imagine, if I could find God in a plant, God must be everywhere, in everything. I was blessed with new vision, to see God in all things. But just because m
y faith was secured, doesn’t make it make sense to someone else. We all must experience our own epiphany.”
I shifted my weight from one leg to the other. “I understand faith. I do. But Revelations spoke of this time, did it not? Isn’t this the end?”
His bottom lip curled. “I guess not.” He walked past me toward the vegetable garden and I followed, warning Leif not to move from his current fixation.
“So why destroy the earth if you’re not going to start anew?”
“I’m not saying an ending didn’t occur. But as for Armageddon… well, how could it be? Jesus has not revealed Himself to us.” He turned again to address me. “According to Scripture, a great battle between good and evil must still take place. From what we know, evil struck the planet nine years ago. Perhaps in those nine years Satan has been recruiting his army while God has been preparing His.”
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