by Jacob Whaler
The whole concept of time is strangely out of place.
As the galaxies thin out, his movement slows down, and a spiral form comes into view. Clouds of glowing light resolve into clusters of star-like blue as he enters an outer arm of the spiral. Slowing further, individual stars fly by until he stops in front of an immense dark cloud of dust floating against a backdrop of white pin pricks in the emptiness of space.
A vaguely round shape grows within the cloud. Matt hears a voice as the shape takes on a fiery glow in the midst of the dark cloud. He doesn’t understand the words, but the meaning is clear. It is the birth of a star. Other spheres resolve and form into planets within the cloud near the newborn star. The remaining dust dissipates until it is gone.
One fiery planet stands out against the blackness, its face cracked with fissures of light. It draws him in.
Dark forms harden and float across its surface as it cools. Gases flow out of the soft interior, the beginnings of an atmosphere. Steam turns to water, oceans form. Clouds swirl. Continents emerge and collide. His vision drops down closer, and he sees great land masses cut through with young mountain ranges and rivers.
He is skimming above the rocky surface. A palpable sense of joy rises up from the desolate landscape. Soft voices play in the darkness around him. Life fills the oceans and spills onto the land. The empty continents take on a green hue. There is an endless variety of grasses and flowers. The first trees appear. The oceans fill with microbes, invertebrates and fish. Insects, birds and animals roam the land. Life extends its reach to fill all empty spaces.
Last of all, Matt sees people like himself. Their faces appear and fade before his eyes. Billions upon billions.
It all happens in an instant, as if time no longer held any meaning. He sees it all and comprehends it all in his mind with effortless simplicity and clarity.
Then the planet and its galaxy, the entire universe around them, all recede to a spot within the white Stone in his own hand.
He looks up at the Woman standing in the air beside him.
“Who are you?” The words tumble from his lips without thought or effort. “What is your name?”
There is an audible voice from the Woman. Matt hears it, not through his ears, but with his entire body. It reminds him of the time that he and his mom and dad went to Niagara Falls the summer after third grade. He remembers standing on the observation deck at the base of the falls, closing his eyes and absorbing the incredible power of the falling water.
The words of the Woman are spoken with the same power.
“We are the Allehonen.”
CHAPTER 47
He is bathed in peace.
The sounds of singing birds and wailing cicadas hang in the air. Something bright and hot bores through Matt’s closed eyelids. They slide open, and he looks up, gazing in contemplation directly at the sun on a cloudless morning. Its outer skin is a collection of tiny explosions and flowing plasma. Seconds or minutes go by. It’s like staring at an orange. No need to squint or look away. Suddenly, Matt becomes conscious of what he is doing, and his hand shoots up to shade his eyes from the burning rays. And then, curious, he moves his hand slightly and looks again directly into the sun.
What the hell?
Eyes flip shut. No retinal afterimage.
He sits up and scans the clearing. Green leaves and white flowers of dokudami flutter delicately in a light breeze all around him on the ground. The needles of pine trees pierce the air with more vivid green than he remembers ever seeing. A ladybug floats by his nose, and he studies, mid-flight, the deep hues of the black dots on the orange back.
Struggling to stand on shaky legs, he raises his upper body and leans back on the side of the boulder, his chest moving in and out with the effort. His body is like a limp dishrag, drained of energy. The palm of his left hand runs along the smooth surface of the massive rock behind his head.
Strange. Hadn’t the boulder had a rough surface last night so that he could easily climb to the top?
The fingers of his other hand are wrapped tightly around the Stone.
Weakness overwhelms him, as if the strength in his muscles has been sucked out by an invisible hypodermic needle. Pangs of hunger pierce through his stomach. But even more than hunger, he has a deep thirst for water. His mind feels unusually clear, capable, it seems, of following two or three strains of thought simultaneously. He thinks of Jessica back in Colorado, Professor Yamamoto at the University, his dad on the road and the fiery Woman who came down from the sky during the night.
Her last and only words flood into his mind.
We are the Allehonen.
Against his own will, Matt must face the fact of what he saw during the night. And the change it forces upon his life and his belief system so long a part of who he is.
Maybe he’s no longer a perfect atheist. Not that he ever really was one. To be honest, he always longed to believe like Jessica, but just couldn’t make the leap of faith.
The obvious question comes to mind. Who is the Woman that came to him? Is she God? He can’t be sure, but recalls that she used the term we. Does that mean there is more than one? She made no mention of religion. Perhaps the Woman is an angel or a seraph from the Bible. Or a Buddhist bodhisattva. Or a malak in Islam. Or any number of otherworldly beings recognized by religions and non-religions around the world.
Maybe they are all the same thing.
Whoever or whatever she is, at least part of the message is clear. The Woman has the power to make stars and planets, and she does it with a Stone exactly like Matt’s.
The sound of a woodpecker in the clear morning air reminds him that he needs to get moving. Time to get back to the University. Time to get some water. Time to find out as much as he can about the Stone in his hand.
The Stone.
He uncurls the fingers of his right hand and looks into its purple surface. His eyes instinctively close as he begins to count backwards from ten.
An image opens in his mind. A small boy with a yellow cap and a bright red backpack runs slowly away. The boy glances back and smiles at Matt as he rushes into the street in front of a convenience store. It has a banner with white kanji characters on a blue background draped across its front. The letters float and shimmer, making it hard to read them. From the looks of it, it’s the 7 Eleven at the bottom of the mountain across the street from the park.
Somewhere behind him, a woman screams. At that instant, a black Mercedes Benz shoots silently in front of Matt, moving right to left, and slams into the child, sucking him under its front fender. The child disappears beneath the car. A group of teenage schoolgirls in their sailor uniforms stand in front of the convenience store, and they raise their hands to their mouths, screaming as they look at the little body lying crumpled on the street like a discarded rag.
The image fades.
Matt looks up from the Stone, blinks his eyes and shakes his head, trying to clear the picture from his mind.
Feeling the strength to stand, he finds his way through the brush and back to the deep path he came up just hours ago. He starts down the mountain and lets gravity pull him into a gentle jog. The gigantic appetite and thirst in his belly cry out for a quick breakfast, maybe a liter of water and three or four fresh onigiri rice balls wrapped in seaweed with a bright red pickled plumb at the center.
Thirty meters down, a dark blue suit jacket lies crumpled on the side of the path. Something about it is oddly familiar. There’s a necktie hanging in a zigzag fashion on a bush a few meters away.
Matt stops. Just off the trail, a ripped shirt is strewn on the ground. A line of broken branches and trampled weeds lead in the same direction through the underbrush. Matt follows the tracks off the trail. A white T-shirt hangs from a tree branch above him, as if it was torn off in haste and thrown there. He walks past pants, shoes and socks, all discarded haphazardly.
A flash of light in the weeds catches his attention. He picks up a thin silver tube shaped like a long straw. He knows he ha
s seen something like it before, and then he remembers. In his mind’s eye, he sees the Yakuza man in the airport tapping a similar tube against the palm of his hand.
What could it possibly be for?
There’s a mumbling sound in the weeds straight ahead.
Matt finds its source. A man lays in a fetal position on the ground, motionless, eyes open, staring straight ahead. He has nothing on but a traditional Japanese fundoshi loincloth. A dagger is strapped to his lower leg. Matt recalls reading something in a local newspaper about the comeback of the ancient loincloth, especially among the Yakuza and other gangs. The man’s skin has an unnatural red hue that almost hides the menagerie of dragon, carp and snake tattoos that crawl over his body like a collection from an exotic zoo. The skin color makes Matt think of a cadaver he once dissected in a college anatomy class. There’s something familiar about the man and his massive enhanced pec muscles.
He moves closer for a better look.
The eye twitches. Matt moves away too slowly as the man jumps to his feet and lunges at him, arms outstretched as if groping for a lifeline.
“It’s you, isn’t it?” The man speaks roughly as he snags Matt’s shirt in his fingers, gets a grip and pulls Matt down close to his face.
A long black ponytail runs down the man’s back. There’s a thin red scar stretching from chin to ear.
Silence passes as the man holds Matt’s shirt and tries to look into his face, opening and closing his eyes, squinting, struggling to see. Matt stands for a moment looking down at the gangster and the thin white film covering his eyes. The beat of his own heart jars him back to reality, and he thrusts the naked man away with a violent push of his palms, sending him tumbling down the hill, chest heaving.
Matt stumbles backwards against the trunk of a pine tree.
The man stops rolling and struggles to his feet. As he stares uphill, he seems to lose Matt’s direction and turns his body several times with outstretched arms, his eyes sweeping and scanning. When he stops, he’s looking off at an angle.
Matt freezes, afraid that the man might hear his heartbeat or breathing.
“I know it’s you.” The man looks into empty space. “I saw you last night, up on the mountain. I followed you there from the University.”
Matt crouches down, says nothing and pulls in shallow breaths.
“You climbed up on the rock. Flames poured down from the sky. I saw it swallow you, the rock, the trees, the flowers. The whole world was on fire.” He falls to his knees and runs his hands over his face and chest. “Eyes, skin, arms, legs. Everything hot. Everything burning.” His hand moves down his lower leg and slides one of the daggers from its sheath.
Matt remains motionless, barely breathing through his nose.
“Someone very important wants you. I heard it from the boss himself. I don’t know who you are or what you’ve done, but they’ll come to find you. Everything you have, everyone you love, they’ll take it all away. Layer by layer, like peeling an onion.” The man pauses, looks around, straining to listen.
“Who?” Matt opens his mouth and whispers the sound before realizing that he’s given himself away.
The naked man turns to Matt with a smile and flicks the dagger from his hand.
CHAPTER 48
Kent drives through mile after mile of cornfields, just as he remembers it as a small boy going cross-country with his dad in the old Ford Phantom. He’s taking his time, in no hurry to his final destination. It doesn’t make sense to get too tired on the trip. All his strength and wits need to be intact and ready to go when he arrives.
It’s difficult to keep Matt out of his thoughts as he moves down the endless interstate. He tries, but it’s like turning away a persistent unwanted guest that keeps coming back to knock on your door. At last, he grabs the jax out of its slot on the car-com and checks the MOM data-site again for the second time in fifteen minutes. Empty. Everything is fine. No need to worry.
Now that he’s in corn country, he doesn’t expect to run into any more freedom camps. But to his amazement, there’s one up ahead, marked by a line of cars and transports stopped on the freeway and pillars of black smoke rising above the green sea around him.
He wonders if he’ll get stopped and searched again, just like last time.
Several dozen youths, many the age of Matt, step out of the long cornrows onto the shoulder of the road. Others disappear back into the green mass of the field, their arms full of offerings.
Kent slows down behind the last car in line. Five young people, two of them teenage girls, walk toward his pickup. One of the girls approaches, a half smile on her face.
He rolls the window down and sticks out his elbow.
Her gaze sweeps past the beat-up pickup from end to end as if looking for certain identifying marks. Then she waves it on with a smile. No searches. No questions. No demands.
And then it all makes sense. She must have gotten the word from Little John. In spite of their display of hatred for technology, the freedom camps have a communication network.
Kent nods and pulls to the left out of the line and glides down the freeway past the cars and truck transports stopped on the right. Everyone stands back to let him go. All of them smile, some of them wave. He waves back.
It’s convenient, but eerie. A thought crosses his mind.
Is Little John tracing his journey?
Hard to say, but it makes sense if the freedom camps really do have a communication network, even a primitive one. Kent’s been careful to make sure no one is following him on the road, but maybe the freedom camps he’s passing on the way to New York City are accomplishing the same thing. Maybe Little John will find out that Kent’s true destination isn’t North Carolina. What will happen then?
Kent dismisses the thought. He’s not going to let that fat little man rattle his confidence.
As he travels, Kent’s been doing Mesh research on the origin and spread of the freedom camps. From what he’s learned, it all started with a mythic leader from decades ago, a man whose name was never mentioned, but that claimed to have seen visions of the future. A modern-day prophet. In spite of the common origin, the camps aren’t run under a single authority. It’s more like a loose alliance. Each camp has its own flavor. Some attract young people, like the one run by Little John. Others attract families with small children. Hundreds of them have sprung up spontaneously all over the world. Some of the members are highly educated. Former doctors, lawyers, engineers or businessmen. Most are just ordinary people that have grown weary of civilization.
One common thread runs through all the camps. A belief that Abomination, in the form of modern technology, will bring about the enslavement of the human race and must be avoided at all cost.
It’s the destiny of the camps to serve as a refuge from Abomination, to preserve islands of humanity where freedom and self-reliance are nurtured and from which leaders will emerge to guide the world through a time of great danger and suffering.
The more Kent thinks about it, the more it all sounds like a typical end-of-the-world cult, an escape for people who can’t handle reality. Rejects and outcasts.
Just like Kent.
CHAPTER 49
Alexa watches him in silence.
Ryzaard looks out the window of the corporate jet into the night covering the continent below. The lights of the great city of Los Angeles dot the California coast, and then all becomes dark as the jet plunges into blackness over the Pacific.
“Sure this is a good idea?” Alexa crosses her legs and looks at Ryzaard over a pair of red-stained wine glasses and a half-empty bottle of 1811 Chateau d’Yquem. “The shareholders won’t be happy when they hear we’ve suspended the trading program for technical maintenance. They’ve grown used to a steady stream of profits.” She reaches for the bottle and replenishes her glass. “Elsa’s not happy about this either.”
“It is unfortunate the trading algorithm cannot access the Stone from a distance, but that will come in time. Jerek assured me
he’s working on it.” Ryzaard turns back from the window and reaches for his own wine glass as Alexa fills it. Then he brings it close and takes a sip. “It is regrettable that I have to personally direct an operation like this, but the boy does have a Stone. He may have learned a thing or two about using it, which makes him dangerous until he’s safely dead. That shouldn’t take long.” He leans back in his chair and looks up at the ceiling, savoring the taste.
Alexa holds her glass with both hands. “What will you do with a second Stone?” There’s a sense of hopefulness in the tone of her voice.
“It will make the work much easier.”
“The work?”
“The task I have to perform for humankind. To free them from their chains.”
“Do we have to have this conversation again?” Alexa rolls her eyes and looks out the window at the black void.
“It’s important that you understand.”
“I doubt I ever will. Isn’t this enough?” Alexa motions around her at the plush interior of the jet. “You’re the CEO of the most profitable corporation in the world. You can have anything you want, go anywhere you want, do anything you want.” She points to the Stone lying on the table. “And if that weren’t enough, you have a magic Stone that makes you invincible. No one can touch you. Isn’t that enough?”
The second the words leave her lips, she visibly regrets it.
Ryzaard explodes.
“No, it’s not enough! It’s never enough!” He jumps up, grabs the Stone off the table and knocks over the wine bottle, spilling its contents in a long red tongue that licks its way toward Alexa. “Don’t you understand? After all we’ve been through, after all we’ve done, you still don’t understand?”
“I’m sorry.” In the two years they’ve worked together, Alexa has never seen Ryzaard react like this. He’s always so calm, so sure of himself. A sliver of fear shoots through her spine.