by Stuart Slade
“Would you like to go to a room upstairs?” Maion asked softly. “To reverence Our Immortal Lord of course.” She held her breath, this was the key moment.
“Upstairs?” Lemuel tried to get his mind around the concept. “I would like that.”
Charmeine-lan seized her moment. Maion was doing well, now it was necessary to add the sealing touch. “There will be a charge of ten talents to take Maion upstairs, noble Ophanim. It will be twenty if you wish to beat her, thirty if you wish to hit her in the face.”
“Beat her?” Lemuel was furious. “What sort of people are you? Who do you think I am? You disgust me.”
Charmeine-lan dropped to her knees, her wings folded over her head in submission. “Forgive me noble Ophanim, but there are those who… I should never have thought you….”
Maion held her breath slightly. Now, in the script she and Charmeine had carefully rehearsed, this was the one critical point. “Charmeine, this is the noble Lemuel-lan-Michael who today saved us all from the plotting of those who sought to replace He Who Is Above Us All. I would wish to honor him properly for his valiant service. Surely for one such as he, there should be no charge? And if there is, then I would wish to pay it for him.”
“Most Holy Ophanim, I should have known. For your valor today, you are indeed welcome to enjoy all that we have. Maion is yours, by her request, without charge. Honor us by accepting her company.”
Maion took Lemuel by her hand and led him to the stairs that went to the rooms above. As soon as they were outside, Perpetiel and Charmeine exchanged high-fives. “Did it!” Perpetiel’s voice was almost a shout of triumph.
“Of course.” Charmeine sounded conceited. “Angels like that can’t resist a bird with broken wings.
DIMO(N) Test Facility, Camp Hendrick, Hell
“Are we all set to go kitten?” Colonel Warhol had the equipment set up and was ready to run. All he needed now was for kitten to get into the portal generator and find the desired contact. She was standing beside her boyfriend, waiting to do so. She glanced quickly at him, he nodded and she started to sit in the padded operator console. “Now, what I want you to do is something different from anything you’ve done before. I’d like you to start searching for a contact but its not human or nephalim. Look instead for a series of six numbers. 489735. Just think those numbers and wait for a response.”
“What are we doing?” kitten’s boyfriend Dani was curious. “kitten can’t make a contact without a nephelim the other end.”
“If this works, she can.” Warhol hesitated and then went on. “We’ve proved that the nephelim at the other end simply echoes the search signal back to its source to make the contact. So, what we have done is set up a series of beacons, in this case a hundred of them. If they pick up the right signal, they’ll echo it back and we’ll have our contact. So, kitten is looking for three beacons, number 48, number 97 and number 35. We think that thinking the number will key the appropriate beacon to respond. Now, once she has all three, she can more or less drop out and the generator will pump energy into the link and turn it into a proper portal, one whose Earth end is equidistant from all three beacons.”
Dani thought for a second. “That’ll make it just like a telephone number won’t it? You, we’ll be able to contact anywhere.” He paused again. “Why not just use cell phone towers as beacons? The infrastructure is already up, you could get the net set up in weeks.”
Warhol nodded. It slightly surprised him that somebody who led his girlfriend around on a leash had grasped the idea so quickly. Then, he reprimanded himself for the thought. Dani and kitten might be an unconventional couple but they’d sacrificed far more for the war effort than most and the way that had stood by and supported each other was an example a whole lot of other couples should follow.
“It’s no good. I can’t detect any of them.” kitten’s voice was apologetic.
Warhol bit his lip. “We measured your brain signature when you were thinking the numbers. You should be able to get through.”
“kitten, try thinking just the number 48.” Dani spoke quietly, reassuringly. Then he turned to Warhol, “three at once is probably too many.”
A few seconds later, kitten’s voice was triumphant. “Got it.”
“Right now, can you hold that one and look for 97?” kitten nodded and closed her eyes. Again it took a few seconds before her “got it” sounded soft and clear. The third beacon was located quickly. “I’ve got all three Colonel.”
Warhol nodded and the portal generator operators started to push power into the circuit. Kitten had been isolated now, with luck the days when opening a portal would be painful were gone. A few seconds later, the telephone built into the system rang. Warhol picked it up and listened carefully. “Dani, kitten, the portal the other end opened exactly where it was supposed to. This is a good day’s work people. Any plans for the rest of the day.”
Dani thought for a second. “I’m going to sell all our stock in airlines and bus companies.”
Chapter Forty Seven
Sapulpa, Oklahoma, USA
Some things are never forgotten. They may be a sudden, violent event that brands itself on the memory by the sheer unexpectedness of its horror. Or they may be the result of years of suffering that slowly grind the memory into the configuration that makes their grim truth indelible. For the Sampsons, both now over eighty years old, their memories of the dust bowl were moulded by the years they had endured the repeated storms. John Sampson remembered the choking clouds of dust that reduced visibility to a few feet and killed people by filling their lungs with dirt. His father had been a farmer until the great dust storms had literally blown his land away. His crops had gone, his cattle had starved. Only the government Drought Relief Service had saved them by buying the emaciated cattle at well over market price. The starved beasts were too wasted to slaughter for meat, instead, they had been shot and buried.
Ellen’s memories were of a different kind but no less vivid. She remembered the dust that seeped into the house no matter how carefully the doors were closed and sealed. Her mother had soaked strips of sheet in a mixture of flour and water before spreading them over the window and door frames. Every time she had hoped that this would be the storm when she got it right, when the dust wouldn’t fill her house. Every time, she had been heartbreakingly disappointed. The storm would strike their home, the dust would enter and the air inside turn hazy as it permeated every nook and cranny. Ellen Sampson remembered her baby brother choking to death on the dust before he reached his third month of life. Her mother had never recovered from the loss, she had spent days sitting in the one room of their home, listening to the wind howling outside. She’d done that until the day she’d taken the family shotgun and blown out her brains.
The government had done what it could, it had taught the farmers to use new techniques that conserved the soil and trapped water. They had paid the homesteaders a dollar an acre to use ideas such as crop rotation, strip farming, contour plowing and terracing. The payments took the grinding poverty out of the dustbowl but they didn’t solve the basic problem. It had taken the return of regular rain after a decade of drought to do that.
By then, John Sampson and his family had given up and left. They’d become ‘Okies’, migrant workers desperately seeking somewhere they could live and earn a regular wage. For years that had been a seemingly-impossible dream, but it was John Sampson that had achieved the family goal. He had managed, he wasn’t quite sure how, to land a job at the Lockheed aircraft factory. He’d started by sweeping the floor, trying to close his eyes to the dust that reminded him of their lost farm in Oklahoma. Then, he’d been promoted to the assembly line where he’d started to earn real money. By the time war had broken out, he had made it to foreman and the Sampson family lived comfortably. Then, he’d been transferred back to Oklahoma, to help set up a satellite production line in Lawton. That was where he’d met Ellen, one of thousands of young women recruited to help produce the aircraft America needed to
win the war. Their marriage had lasted for sixty years.
Some things are never forgotten. John Sampson had driven to the local plaza to collect the week’s groceries, using a significant fraction of his weekly gasoline ration to do it. In some ways, there was a strange comfort in that, the use of coupons and vouchers for their shopping took him back to the days of World War Two when his life had been in front of him. Despite the rationing, he and his wife lived comfortably. They both had good pensions, their children had long left to live their own lives and now only appeared when there was a holiday or a new grandchild to display. So, the weekly shopping trip was no very great imposition. Only, this time Sampson had noted how the wind was already increasing while the sun beat down with a steady leaden glare. Sampson knew that glare well, and as he drove he had watched the horizon upwind. He knew what he was looking for and every time he scanned the horizon he was afraid that he would see it.
“John, there’s something wrong isn’t there?” Ellen Sampson was staring at the horizon as well.
“I’ve got everything we had listed. You know, I really think things are getting a little easier now. I got us two nice steaks for our dinner tonight.” Yes, steak was back in the stores and the gasoline ration had been increased. Sampson felt a little sorry for the people who had bought diesel-engined cars and trucks. Diesel fuel was all taken up by the armed forces and what little they didn’t need was given to other armies that were running short. No diesel for civilians but there was a little gasoline for those who needed it. As senior citizens, the Sampsons had an extra ration allowance. After all, nobody could expect an eighty year old couple to walk five miles to the store.
“I didn’t mean the stores John. I remember weather like this from when I was a child. There’s a storm coming.” She meant a dust storm but her memories stopped her from using the words.
The couple went inside their home. Ellen started to cook the steaks her husband had brought while he went around the house, ensuring everything was closed down and sealed. He kept the thought to himself but running through his mind also were the memories of the dust bowl and the 1930s. He took comfort in the fact that houses now were very different from the shacks that had been built back then. The windows in their home didn’t have opening frames, they were fixed shut to let the air conditioning work more efficiently. The house had no chimney to let the dust in and the doors all had draft excluders. Perhaps this time it would be different.
By the time they had finished eating, the wind had picked up still further. They were washing the dishes together when Sampson glanced out of the window and saw the sight he had been fearing. The horizon had changed, what had once been an array of fields was now dominated by a reddish-black cloud, one that was sweeping towards them with frightening speed.
“Ellen, it’s a Black Lizard. They’ve come back.”
His wife looked out of the window and saw the cloud of dust approaching. “Oh no. Not again. Please, I don’t think I can stand it, not again.” Tears trickled out of the corners of her eyes as she watched the clouds that were now towering over them, the wind wailing and twisting the dust into strange, abstract patterns. Sampson hugged her as the dust storm hit their house.
The force of the impact shook the whole house, causing shudders to run through the structure. Their oven opened as the door fell down and the newly-washed plates in the sink started rattling with the vibration. What really changed things was the darkness. It was as if a switch had been flipped, the day went from early afternoon to blackest midnight without any warning or transition period. Ellen Sampson panicked as she fumbled for the light switch, then sighed with relief as the main room lights came on. Her husband had remembered how the Black Lizard shut out the light and had known exactly how to reach the switch in the pitch darkness. Outside the howling of the wind picked up as the main body of the storm reached them.
Sampson seated his wife, then pushed an odd-looking circular silver switch on the wall. With the main lights on, the effect wasn’t obvious but the emergency lighting system, battery-powered LED units, were on. A few minutes later, the simple act of foresight was rewarded. The main lights flickered and failed, the overhead power lines outside brought down by the wind and the weight of dust in the air. The couple both remembered when a power failure during a dust-storm had caused their families to sit in total darkness, They’d been forced to sit in the sticky blackness, the dust from the air coating the inside of their mouths and throats. Now, the light from the LED emergency system might not be much but it was enough. It showed where things were so the couple could move around their home and it also showed the air was still clean. So far, at least, the dust was being kept outside.
Sampson took an LED torch, quietly blessing the strange twists in his career that were now standing him in such good stead. After marrying Ellen, he had decided to stay back in Oklahoma and had continued to work in the Lockheed subsidiary. Towards the end of his career, he had taken on a project that most of his colleagues had thought rather ridiculous, trying to find domestic applications for the then-new LED lighting technology. The work had blossomed into a major money-earner and, more importantly, made him a lot of friends in companies marketing LED lighting. As a result, their house was full of systems given to him for “testing”. Some of them were a different patterns of flashlights and one of them allowed him to go safely into the kitchen and bring back a couple of bottles of water.
“Here you are, Ellie. We’ll be fine, we’ve got food, lots of bottled water and more batteries than we can shake a stick at. We’ll just ride the storm out.”
“Why did they have to come back? I thought they had gone for ever.” Ellen Sampson was still crying quietly, more from shock than anything else.
“I bet Yahweh’s got something to do with it.” John Sampson nearly snarled the words out. “This is his work, I’m sure of it. We’ll get him for this, you wait and see.”
News Studio, KOCO Television, Oklahoma City
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The advertisement faded away and the monitor screen switched back the news desks. Brandon Breyer looked up from the piles of paper accumulating on his desk. “Well, our latest sponsor is certainly offering an unexpected new service. Anita, do you have the latest on the dust storm?”
“I do Brandon, and its plural, dust storms, now. We have reports of other dust storms forming in China, Canada and Australia. Locally, the storm here is hitting most of the southern half of our state and things are pretty bad. Our reporter JiaoJiao Shen is out in the town of Sapulpa. I believe she is on the line now. JiaoJiao, what’s it like out there?”
The screen was blank, at first it appeared the video link wasn’t working but swirling patterns showed that the cameras were sending footage, it was just that the dust was blanking everything out. What did come through was the audio link. “Well, it’s really horrible Anita. The dust here is so thick that visibility is down to three or four feet. The crew, all of us, are holding on to each others belts to make sure we don’t get separated. Nobody dares take a chance on driving, just down the road from here, an ambulance tried to get to a car accident and drove straight into a utility pole. Took the power out to quite a few houses around here. The wind has slackened a little bit but we have to fight it all the time.”
“Are you all right JiaoJiao? Your voice sounds very muffled.”
“We’re lucky Ani
ta, we were all in Hell a couple of weeks ago and we brought our dust masks back from there. So we’ve got goggles and breathing filters. But, some of the local people got caught in the open and they’re in a bad way. The good news is, people inside seem to be all right, houses built these days are much more dust-proof than the ones back in the 1930s. We’ve telephoned a few local residents and the consensus is they’re doing OK, they’ll just ride the storm out. There’s one old couple just over the road from here who remember the original dustbowl and they’re determined to stick this one out.”
“Thank you JiaoJiao. Well, we’ve just had a release in from DIMO( N) Public Relations. Preliminary samples of the dust suggest that it’s a mixture of Earth and Hell Dust. To find out what that means, we’re going to Norman Baines, Director of Research at DIMO(N). Mr Baines, what is the significance of the mixed dust?”
“Hi Anita, good to talk to you again. Well, this proved that the dust storm is not a natural occurrence. We know that there was a windstorm brewing up today, I think your own weather forecast predicted that, and that somebody opened a portal from Hell and dumped a whole mass of helldust through that portal into the wind stream. That acted as a seed for the dust storm. The hell dust ground up against human soil and abraded it to much finer particles and that set the scene for the storms. It’s the same basic mechanism that was seen in the 1930s dustbowl but the actions taken after that tragedy have prevented similar dust-storms. So, somebody had to find another way to start one.”
“Somebody being Yahweh?”
“We have to recognize he is the most likely suspect, yes, Anita.”
“Well, Sir, that raises another question. Were the 1930s dustbowl his work as well?”
“It’s certainly a possibility although it is more likely that the 1930s storms were normal events and the similarity is pure coincidence. Of course, the 1930s dustbowl may have given him this idea.”