The Apostasy

by Ted Minkinow

  "I need you to do me a favor tomorrow or whenever.”

  Mike realized he was holding his breath when the exhale came out louder than he expected. He also relaxed his grip on the receiver. How much trouble could Tom be in if he wanted a favor in the Pentagon.

  “Shoot,” said Mike.

  “If I give you the name of somebody who served in the Army around the Vietnam era, could you track down his records?"

  "Shouldn't be a problem. You know I'm not sure about Privacy Act stuff. We might have to keep this our secret, Torch."

  "No problem. The guy's name is Marlin Tilbury, and I think he served one tour in Vietnam as a draftee." Tom spelled the name and Mike Johnson copied it down.

  "I'll check it out in the morning. Probably aren’t too many Marlin Tilburys.” A pause while Jeremiah jotted a note for the morning. “I’ll call your cell with the dope.”

  "Perfect," Tom said.

  They paused for more than a few seconds. "Torch, is everything okay with you?"

  "Can't complain," Tom said and Mike thought the answer came too quickly.

  "You know if you ever need anything, buddy-"

  "I know, Jeremiah, I know. Thanks.”

  “Hey, kiss the wife for me. Then ask if it's as good as the ones I gave her when you went to Air Command and Staff College in Montgomery two years ago."

  That got a chuckle from Jeremiah.

  "She told me she’d rather eat rotten liver with cold onions. Besides, you only kissed her in your dreams."

  "Yea, well she must have dreamed the same dream."

  "Maybe so, my friend. Talk to you tomorrow."

  "Goodbye, Jeremiah." They hung up.

  "What did he want?" Celia Johnson asked as she lay on her back, eyes closed.

  "He wants me to do some detective work for him tomorrow in the Pentagon."

  "Why?"

  "I don't really know. But it doesn't matter."

  Marlin Tilbury. Mike repeated the name a couple of times in his mind. It sounded familiar to him but he supposed any name would at one in the morning and his brain not up to flight speed. All the same, the name hovered in the shallow end of his memory—just beyond recognition. That kept him awake another hour. "Marlin Tilbury" flashed through his brain the rest of the night and early in the morning as he rose and readied himself to depart for the Pentagon.

  Monday, July 16, 01:53 am, Brewton-Brunson House

  1

  Tom glanced at the clock; almost two. He sat at the edge of his bed and swore that the quiet would drive him crazy…and that sensation of being watched.

  A gush of loneliness swept over him and he reached for the phone but realized the late hour precluded more calls. Tom pushed back his covers, undressed and made his way to the bathroom. He warmed the shower. Perhaps that would chase away the chill.

  2

  The entity tracked Tom through and paced outside shower doors as Tom bathed, and it languished in the sweet aura of life.

  3

  Steaming water pounded Tom’s back…and provided no relief from a tingling that radiated on a line from the tip of one shoulder to the other. The thick steam seemed more claustrophobic than warm. Tom decided against lathering and he stopped the water. Still dripping and with a towel wrapped around his waist, he made his way downstairs to the kitchen and fired up the coffeemaker.

  The entity remained upstairs.

  Sleep finally overcame Tom downstairs as he watched the movie channel. The dream struck immediately.

  CHAPTER 41

  Monday, July 16, 03:32 am, Brewton-Brunson House

  1

  A barren land, desolate and uninviting…it could have been the moon that came into the dream but Tom understood the meaning of the amber tint. Laser-visor, he thought, meaning the flight helmet visor issued to fighter crews before the first gulf war. The Iraqis found a way to blind pilots with laser rangefinders, and those visors theoretically protected the eyes. They also distorted vision just a bit—cast the Arabian Desert in hues of orange—and tended to push Tom toward queasy.

  A glance to his left to check Photo 22’s position. Nothing. He scanned all quadrants but no wingman. “Where’s 2?” Tom asked through the interphone and twisted against the harness to look toward the back seat when Jeremiah did not answer. What the…? He whipped around forward and…

  An enemy missile hovered just to the other side of the windscreen…close enough to touch but for several inches of Plexiglas that separated the pressurized cockpit from the universe outside. The missile inched forward and Tom knew he must take action or the thing would explode on his chest. He reached for the D-handle between his legs and pulled.

  Nothing…no canopy jettisoned, no high-g rocket to flatten him to the seat as he rode up the ejection rails. Panic. He pulled again…this time with all his strength. Nothing. Tom caught movement above, heard a tapping noise, and glanced back up to the missile. Panic.

  An elderly gentleman sat straddling the missile and leaning toward the cockpit of the RF4-C Phantom jet…toward Tom. The man wore a planter’s coat and hat—the old kind like in pictures of Tom’s Mississippi ancestors—and tapped the windscreen with a walking stick. The other hand held an open ledger…an ancient and musty book that looked so wrong Tom swore he saw evil baking off the pages like heat bakes off tar roads after a summer shower.

  Tom released the stick and his hands slipped from the throttles. Now the airplane flew itself…something a fighter pilot like Tom Torch Brunson never allowed…even when he dreamed of flight. But the ledger…this man. What does it mean?

  Tom moved his eyes from the book...had to pull them away because if he did not, he thought it might catalogue his soul. And then? Off the page and up the man’s arm until his eyes settled on those belonging to the old man…and Tom knew he saw the face of death staring back.

  The man grinned with lips as sharp as the end of the missile and a malevolence that made Tom forget about the ejection seat activator that hung useless in his lap. The cane’s silver tip pointed to an entry the ledger: HATTIE JACKSON in jagged calligraphy the color of coagulated blood. To the right of the name: OVERDUE.

  Tom screamed and the oxygen mask muffled the sound…stifled lungs desperate for air. He clawed for the ejection seat actuator, found it, and pulled with all the strength his dream could muster.

  The world inside his dream exploded. Fire billowed on all sides and Tom rocketed through flames and into the air like a phoenix born of destruction. Mechanisms worked as designed and Tom floated clear of the seat. Desperate for air, he reached to his face to rip the oxygen mask free…and found no mask at all. He glanced down to the earth below and…No desert! That’s when everything went black.

  2

  A voice inside warned Leland Graves and he almost missed it. That sort of business—voices and such—represented self-doubt when you got down to it. And Leland Graves never spent a moment of his long existence laboring in doubt. But the voice came again—nothing physical…things in his universe rarely were—and it stopped him…robbed him of focus.

  He added Tom Brunson to his pipeline, felt like the right thing to do and…when had he ever felt wrong? This sortie to the heart of Vienna meshed with Leland Graves’s bloated schedule. Can’t be everywhere at once, now can I? And that bothered him. The other party to The Great Unsigned Contract actually did seem to be everywhere at once.

  Leland Graves vowed to fix that shortcoming—he’d figure all that out…just like everything else he did with no help from the masters—once he opened his own firm. But for now there were accounts to attend to, direct reports to manage. That thought made him smile.

  So why the warning? And from himself? Leland Graves looked back to the house…snaked his thoughts toward the sleeping Thomas Brunson within. Not there? But Thomas Brunson was there sleeping in medias res—in the middle of a vision orchestrated by Leland Graves. Now there was no touching Thomas Brunson.

  Just when things were getting good.

  When the urge to return t
hrough the portal came again, Leland Graves did not dally. He turned and walked—even felt like running, but how unseemly to run in view of the others. The door stood ajar, eyes peering out like red seeds in a black watermelon. They parted as Leland Graves neared. None wanted the heel of his ethereal boot.

  3

  The auditor moved aside with the others, all as pathetic as the briefings told him to expect. If age mattered, given not a single one of them became for millennia, he thought himself younger than all present. And a young mind is an impressionable thing…new clay for the potter’s hands. It’s why he relished this gig.

  Leland Graves held notoriety…pizzazz. Both famous and infamous at the same time and among the same crowd, Leland Graves represented an opportunity the firm seldom granted to a young auditor. Simple instructions: Watch and report. Take no action.

  “Watch a legend?” the auditor asked his master, and then before the old one could reconsider “Yes sir.” The auditor’s mind added something his voice did not: Watch him with relish, I will indeed.

  He expected a bit of hokey pokey…but this? The auditor had no idea what Leland Graves was up to. Even with the enhanced abilities—meaning extraordinary powers—granted him for the task. Here, there, around and back. Not according to the best practices that advised hounding one person and only one until a transaction closed.

  Best practices, his mind repeated…and it made him shiver not because of the words—heard them many times before—but because of who they came from this time. Authority. One of the old masters down…Or up?...to brief in person. A single name meant power in their hierarchy and Authority had to be one of the originals…just below Adversary on the organization chart.

  “Shear the sheep,” Authority said. “Those who consider themselves the intellectuals,” he added as if that bit more explained everything.

  And the auditor’s confusion must have shown because Authority explained.

  “Sheep are what we want…those who think alike, accept anything from fellow humans without challenge.”

  That did nothing to clear things up for the auditor.

  “Relativism, you git,” said Authority.

  The old master sighed and the auditor could see rage brewing beneath a thin veneer of control.

  “I’m OK, you’re OK…that’s our product…our enchantment.” Authority grinned at that and the auditor thought it made the old master look hungry.

  “Invincible ignorance, my boy…planted by us and fertilized with the best intentions of human organizations.” Now Authority smiled. “When group think ripens, transactions pour in.”

  The auditor said nothing lest he show his own invincible ignorance.

  “Some humans—somewhat unpredictably—possess vision…think for themselves.” The old master leaned closer and spoke in a clear voice, “Leave them alone.” Authority waggled a leprous finger for emphasis. “At best they represent transactions in ones and twos. Why bother?”

  And there lays the purpose behind a best practice, thought the auditor. It seemed to him that Leland Graves decided to stick it to Authority with his dabbling. This might be worse than dabbling, though. Threatening the enchantment was one thing, that could cost product; but touching a forbidden human? Audacious.

  The auditor thought that if Leland Graves could pull it off, then what? A new paradigm? A shakeup on the board of directors? Could there be a new contract? The auditor thought probably not. Perhaps he should just stick to the mission and leave that sort of confusion to those equipped to sort it. Still, he could not help but throw some amount of favor to the underdog. But why these people?

  And the house. What is it about the house? The auditor understood Leland Graves’s intrusive vision—gaped at the fine technique—so why back off? What stopped him? His first thought was the masters, and he took quick inventory of the others in case one of the grand old ones—Authority himself?—snuck in among them. Only the feebles, he thought and allowed himself a sigh of relief.

  The house. New-found power did not come with instructions and garnered only brief mention in the employee tablets. Something about the house. That’s what ran through the auditor’s mind as Leland Graves shut the portal.

  5

  The entity collapsed into itself, shrinking to a wispy ball of energy small enough to fit twice on a golf tee. But it turned away the threat and held its territory. Now it could turn attention to the sleeping man.

  6

  Black. Not dim and no fading to shades of gray. The world inside the dream disappeared in an instant. Must be dead, thought Tom inside is dream. Dead and in the void between.

  Lights in the dream world came back on as if someone flipped the switch in Turner Field at midnight…in the winter.

  Dark is to reset.

  The scene below confirmed Tom’s suspicion. Instead of parachuting into the desert, Tom saw himself in the forest. “Saw” was most accurate because he observed the scene from an overhead, God’s-eye view. A moment to muster his bearings and the viewpoint plummeted like a movie camera reentering the Earth’s atmosphere.

  In his bed, dreaming Tom tensed his muscles as the ground rushed up. Trees blurred into masses that appeared rendered on dark canvas by the combined hands of Monet, Van Gogh, and Picasso.

  He was certain he’d explode on impact. In the second before body and limbs popped in a thousand opposing directions, the downward trajectory halted.

  Now he sped horizontally, over the scrub and between fat and thin, towering and short pines. He weaved in and out of the trunks, dodged catastrophe by changing directions as if controlled by the perfect autopilot under the aegis of a supercomputer. Movement slowed, but only slightly, as the back of a running man resolved into focus.

  Tom’s vision flew straight and true toward the man, not varying a degree from a collision course. Though he thought it impossible, his muscles tensed even more when he impacted the runner at a speed greater than that of any fighter Captain Brunson ever mounted.

  There was no explosion, no crushed bones or rending of flesh.

  Now Tom ran along the swampland…inside the man. Tom became the man…possessed him like New Testament demons in charging swine. A name flashed but he could not make it out for sure…Mark something.

  It was night and winter because a mixture of slush and mist stung his toes and ears. He ignored the shivers. Other men came into focus around him, all sprinted through the dark in silence. They carried weapons, so did he; a muzzle-loading rifle of some sort and a revolver holstered at his hip.

  Muck mired Tom’s progress but he gave it no more thought than he did the biting cold. The topography looked familiar and Tom understood…Copper Gulch. He saw a man in the lead hopping brush like a jackrabbit, avoiding vines barely visible in the spotty moonlight.

  The leader glanced over his shoulder at Tom/Mark and locked eyes without breaking stride. The dream shifted. It moved from a breakneck velocity to slow motion as the leader continued to stare with eyes that pierced to the back of Tom’s skull.

  They reached a clearing and the leader rotated his head away from Tom and held up an arm. The group halted and moved to positions among the trees. They shouldered their weapons.

  Tom’s nerves raced. He saw combat, but never at ground level. Raising his own weapon, he focused through the clearing. His heart shifted into top gear as Tom/Mark awaited the command to fire.

  7

  Apprehension seeped from the sleeping man and drew the entity as light draws the moth. Though the encounter with the intruder diminished the entity to the edge of incognizance, instinct marshaled what power remained toward pulling the entity toward the man. It stopped in the space over Tom Brunson—between ceiling and bed—and reached out with a spiritual, formless hand to caress flesh.

  Frozen mist formed a finger that invaded human skin, an encounter that reverberated into Tom's dream. Hungry to sustain contact, the entity pushed deeper into the human, seeking life’s power…probing the essence of creation. Inhibitions fell like dominos; it n
eeded more.

  8

  “What the…?”

  Tom sat up in an instant, eyes open, pulse racing. He fought sleep-induced lethargy and reached the lamp. Light exploded off the walls to reveal…

  CHAPTER 42

  Monday, July 16, 06:13 am, Brewton-Brunson House

  1

  An empty room.

  2

  The entity retreated.

  3

  Tom pulled the comforter higher and shivered.

  Just a few deep clearing breaths, Tom thought. At least that’s what the Lamaze lady said. But the controlled breathing did no good. What I get for watching the Science Channel instead of just going to bed. The phone interrupted thoughts of breathing and the best way to get through labor.

  Six fifteen in the A. M.! And then, I'm going to be late picking up Cassie! He answered the phone.

  "Hello?"

  "Torch."

  "Jeremiah?” Tom yawned. “I didn't expect to hear from you already. Where are you?"

  "At work, dude. Come to think of it, you should be too."

  "This early?"

  "We're an hour later than you…I’m already two hours into the Pentagon shuffle.”

  “You mean the rear-smooching trot, don’t you pal?”

  “Of course,” said Jeremiah. And then, “Anyway, I've got an answer."

  Tom figured Jeremiah would find something—a line or two on a personnel roster—but did not expect a response in so short a time…so early in the morning.

  Jeremiah’s excited about something.

  "Hold on to your seat, pal,” Jeremiah said, “you're not going to believe this."

  Monday, July 16, 06:58 am, Grimes Hospital

  1

  "Have a seat in the waiting room sir; Doctor Walters is with a patient," Nurse Delaney spit instructions between bites of an oversized blueberry muffin.