The Million Day Forecast

by Darren Hunter

  One dreary morning the fog hung heavy and light green waves were pounding the shore. The entire group of Quittu started to chant in unison as the last moon faded behind the horizon along the green northern sea, “Om na vay sha vaya, om na vay sha vaya, om na vay sha vaya.”

  After about twenty minutes, Asphar addressed the attuned gathering which included Srenyi and Karooch, as well as many other younger members of the Quittu.

  “My friends, the planets and their inhabitants are networked in an expansive, evolutionary pattern and all of us are connected to the power that supports the universe. We are fortunate to have a safe vantage point from which we can review the progress of a most unfortunate cluster that’s headed for a faraway planet. Therefore, I ask you all to keep in your meditations a civilization of humanites on a planet within the Milky Way Galaxy called earth. There is at this moment an unfortunate struggle occurring there, and it’s with a heavy heart that I inform you that calamitous decisions are sadly being influenced by Eynak of the Allanze.”

  As the misty, green waters rolled over the large sea monoliths around them, the Quittu stood in a stunned yet meditative silence as Asphar continued. “As you have seen, the greatest expanse isn’t that of the light years of outer space, but instead it is that of the inner space that is deep within every life form. I implore you to reach into this great potential for good and send energies of peace to the seeing people of earth and their young leader.”

  After Asphar spoke, the Quittu that were gathered broke away from the group and proceeded to walk along the beach. They instinctively knew that the path to introspection is best walked alone. As they communicated without speaking, the energies they sent were visible through the heavy fog as deeply colored hues drifted out to sea and melded with the horizon. Their efforts were aimed at creating a spiritual connection with those many light years away. Srenyi and Karooch looked out at the energies drifting over the sea as they began their thirty minute meditative walk to group studies.

  “Srenyi, today I felt harmonious with the irresistible attraction of possibility.”

  “Indeed, Karooch. The subconscious mind is the link to the infinite expanse, the source, the truth. And at this very moment in time it’s imperative that the truth indeed be known to all that will be open to it.”

  Karooch was inquisitive, “What shall you do Srenyi?”

  “I shall do everything that I possibly can. Unfortunately many wanting minds of earth are already each a nucleus with disinformation flowing throughout their own neuron-like reeds. Much of this they think they can’t do without, yet it’s sadly quite destructive to them. Eynak’s garch is taking a most dubious advantage of this addiction and is working through the medium with evil intentions.”

  Karooch’s eye grew wide. “It’s your earth friend Srenyi. She’s in great danger isn’t she?”

  Srenyi pulled out his yote. “Karooch please step into this cove.”

  Srenyi began to demonstrate images culled from residue around the kuri at the reeds. There were visions of Emma going in and out of consciousness while in room 401B in the Baybrooke House basement. It had been days that she had been under heavy sedation, and her parents had not been permitted to see her.

  “The enlightened one is clearly not the passive spectator that the garchs assumed she’d be. On the contrary, she is feared by them to be an undaunted participant in this great drama and proxy war now rapidly unfolding.”

  “Ahh, I see Srenyi. Miss Emma is unyielding in her belief that a solution for continuity of the human race be explored and pursued with great diligence. And if I may be so bold, conversely the garchs have a vested interest in business remaining as usual.”

  “Karooch, I’m afraid you are precisely correct. A battle for the temporal mind is already being waged by the garchs, and they are unwittingly using illusions that are purposefully augmented by the Allanze in the process. However, I assure you that on this very night a cause whose intention is to reach those willing to do battle for the human heart shall be joined.”

  CHAPTER 16

  DR. SOREN

  Now that she was isolated in what effectively was a glorified basement storage chamber, Emma did her best to catch the now muffled sounds in the distance. Pacing her heavily secured room, she pondered the chaos outside of which she was clearly the axis. A damning realization had suddenly entered her mind. For an unexplained reason the people holding her surely intended to keep her censored… or maybe even worse.

  The evening started like most others with an occasional visit by the business-like Nurse Chamberlain. However, at the 9:00pm visit, the nurse was accompanied by one of the suited men. She left the room immediately and left them alone. “Hello Emma, how is our little VIP feeling tonight?” said the man.

  Emma was again clearly flabbergasted. “Why do you people keep saying I’m important?”

  The man referred to himself as Dr. Soren and chose his response carefully, as if from a prepared statement. “Emma you can choose to be a very rich young lady.”

  “Yeah well, I don’t feel very rich locked away like some crazy family secret in the basement.”

  Soren saw an opportunity to make some progress with her. “Emma with a simple signature, solidifying your opposition to any attempt at building a preposterous bridge, you’ll be able to not only leave here, but also enjoy a life of luxury. Imagine for a second being able to go to the mall and buy anything you wanted anytime at all.”

  “I detest the mall. I’m not signing anything! Now when do I get to see my friends and my parents?”

  Soren was clearly getting impatient. “Emma you’re a bright girl, and clearly you are a do-gooder.”

  “A do-gooder, Soren?”

  “That’s Dr. Soren to you. I’m talking about the fact that you’re just a kid who wants to try and help rabbits and seals and puppies.” Emma rolled her eyes and folded her arms.

  Soren continued, “So I’m sure you’d agree that it wouldn’t make sense for the good people of earth to just drop everything and sacrifice their lives work to pursue some absurd notion of being able to cross some non-existent quantum bridge 3,000 years from now?”

  Emma squinted intensely and her anger was hard to conceal. “Well for your information, it’s already been done! So you mean we’re all supposed to sit around and watch mindless crap like reality TV and pretend that giant clusters aren’t going to destroy our planet? Just so you people can keep all of your power and money? That is what you’re saying right?”

  Soren didn’t expect anywhere near this level of dissidence from the young upstart and was clearly growing even more frustrated. This was his chance to finally make a name for himself with Grayson and things with Emma weren’t going the way he had intended.

  “You’re far too immature to understand reality. You’ve also been under a ton of strain caused by your mental illness. I’m sure you’ll start to become more lucid in a few weeks.”

  Emma sat up with conviction and dramatically raised her voice, “Yeah, with a few more tons of your drugs you creepy bastard!”

  “Listen you spoiled little brat, I don’t give a rats ass what you or some dog faced midget on another planet says is going to happen a million years from now! Our job is to keep doing exactly what we’ve been in the business of doing!”

  “Get the hell out of here you creepy jerk!”

  “Soren’s smile was a sinister one, “Okay you crazy little bitch, have it your way.”

  Moments later a single phone call from Soren at Baybrooke to his superiors precipitated a new order. This time it wouldn’t be a white van, but instead 3 high-security SUV’s with darkened windows and bullet proof glass that would be on the way for her in the morning. Emma was now considered the consummate risk to the new coalition establishment, and recent events from the streets to the highest halls of power now required that she go away for a long time.

  CHAPTER 17

  THE BRIDGE

  After Soren’s visit, Emma lay in bed for hours and fought the new do
se of sedatives that had been administered by Nurse Chamberlain. Then suddenly at exactly 1:12am she principally believed she heard a sound quite unlike any of the usual cadence. Seconds later she again heard what sounded like banging. She deduced that it was coming from inside the wall – specifically directly through the air duct. The uneven banging was getting closer every minute.

  Emma fought through her sedation and forced herself to stand up. She instinctively did not ring for the nurse, and instead positioned herself along the far wall of her room facing the vent. She became certain that whatever was making the noises had thought it necessary to find a way around the fortification that was the public entrance to her imprisonment.

  The rumbling reached a fever pitch then all at once stopped. Emma could now clearly hear the sound of someone’s heavy breathing while they were making one final maneuvering. She tucked her hair behind her ears in familiar fashion and nervously waited against the wall.

  The small door leading to the air duct began to move from being unscrewed. Then finally it was pulled inside and placed behind whoever this was.

  “Emma Hayes?” asked a rough voiced, unshaven man who looked to be about 30.

  “Same.” Emma responded in one word without hesitation to the mysterious, handsome-faced man peering from the now opened door to the vent.

  Without pause the man quickly offered just three more words, “Time to move”.

  “Okay…but can I just ask who you are?”

  “Grab that chair and give me your hand or we’re both dead. That’s who I am.”

  “Well alrighty then – somehow I thought as much.” Emma tiptoed over to the lone wooden chair and placed it under the vent.

  “I’m like woozy. I think I have to puke.”

  “Let’s go. Talk later.”

  Within seconds of being up in the vent, Emma’s gown was covered in soot. She scraped through the narrow chamber behind the mysterious man, using an adrenaline that only a young person’s quest for survival could produce. They came to a sharp corner where voices could be heard below. It was a nurse’s station. The man put his finger to his lips and mimed an effect clearly meant for Emma to proceed in silent slow motion. After 20 minutes they came to what looked to be a much bigger vent door.

  “Where are we now?” asked Emma.

  “We’re at the end of the road – at least in this hellhole.” The two were presently in what looked to be a giant utility closet. There were controls with blinking lights and the sound of cooling systems. The man pointed to a window above that was still opened. “Okay Emma Hayes, one more little hill to climb.”

  He boosted her up to a small ledge on the window that he had propped open and disarmed earlier. She quickly surveyed the distance to the ground below. “Holy shit, now what?”

  “Now you figure out how to get yourself to the ground.”

  Emma took a few huge breaths and remembered messing around on the gymnastics beams at school. She pushed up the window as high as it could go. Then with every ounce of strength she could muster, she twisted her frame around and threw her legs out the window – barely holding on to the ledge with her hands.

  With wide eyes she waited for encouragement from the man who was still inside. “Okay perfect Ms. Hayes. But now its drop and roll time.”

  Emma fell through the air and her drop lasted a few seconds longer than she expected. She hit the ground and instinctively rolled through the warm wet grass. The man fell down immediately after and rolled next to her as the two looked upward. “Great job Ms. Hayes. But now the real fun starts.”

  He stood up and reached out his hand. “Here let me help up.” Emma reached for his dirty hand.

  “If you do exactly as I say we’ll make it through this.”

  Emma looked up at the stranger’s tattoos that were visible on his forearms. “Okay you’re the boss.”

  The man took a deep breath and looked to the lights in the city in the distance. The sound of a raucous crowd on the far side of the building could be heard and the man again spoke. “No actually you’re the boss Emma, I mean Ms. Hayes. But I’ll explain soon. Right now we need to run. Now follow me.”

  The night air was thick and hot and Emma immediately felt a stark contrast to the cool, dank basement. As the two made their way down a steep embankment an alarm went off which startled them. It was the kind that had two distinct sounds: a siren and short, repetitive bursts like a car alarm. Emma’s escape had been made, and a massive manhunt was on. The man and Emma feverishly dodged the beams from the helicopter searchlights that darted the landscape. Minutes later the two found cover at the bottom of the hill in a drainage ditch. Bright outdoor lights turned were on at the top of the hill and one by one illuminated the night around the campus.

  With a shock, Emma realized that she was only wearing her undergarments. The hospital gown had been long discarded during the escape. She immediately scanned for covering and the sound of the man could be heard behind her. “I’m not looking.” He turned his back to her. “Reach into my backpack.”

  Emma was embarrassed and still out of breath, unconditioned from weeks of sedatives and inactivity. The man turned his back to her. “Okay now reach in there and tell me you feel something that seems like clothes and hair?”

  “Um yeah I think.” The man had more orders even though he had said that she was the boss. “Pull it out and put it on.”

  Emma pulled out the wig first and cracked an out of breath smile. “Blonde? Really?”

  “Yup, and get moving.”

  Emma grabbed the clothes and rapidly threw on what looked to her to be stretch jeans from an infomercial and a glittered black Las Vegas T-shirt. The man had more directions. “There’s some kind of wrap around sandals in there too, put them on next.”

  Within seconds Emma was disguised. “I feel like its Halloween, even though I wouldn’t even wear this trampy getup then either.”

  The serious man laughed. “You look good. Now take a deep breath boss, because we need to move like lightening!”

  “Hmm...boss, I think I like the sound of that mister.”

  “Okay Emma in a second, I’ll need for you to start really booking through this row of trees.”

  “Did my mom sign me up for cross-country without me knowing or what?”

  “Just run straight through those trees Emma, I’ll be right behind you!”

  After 15 minutes of starts and stops perforated with gasps for air, Emma and her tattooed rescuer finally reached within a few hundred yards of the lights. They stopped under the bridge to rest and looked up at the throngs of people lining the river and up the hillside that lead to town. The typically quirky Tannerserville downtown area had in the last few days become one of the key places in the country for crowds to gather during the turmoil between the garchs and the M’s that Emma had missed.

  “We’ll be safe here for a few minutes,” said Somers.

  The two sat down on a large rock under the bridge. It looked to her to be a great fishing spot and she thought of fishing trips to Evansburg Park that she had taken with her father.

  Emma had some questions for the man. “In that crappy place there was this bastard named, Soren. I think he drugged me. Do you know why?”

  The man bit off piece of a protein bar and offered her the rest.

  “Ah Soren. Let’s just say he’s a garch puppet in the worst way. He and his merry band of elitists, led by a piece of crap named Grayson, fought every single request to have you released. It rolled right up to the president. Well the former president. A lot’s happened in the last few days, and hours Ms. Hayes.”

  Emma had a look of consternation. “Whose side is anyone on anyway?’

  Somers did his best to explain. “That’s a good question with no easy answer. The former enemies have now teamed up. It’s like they weren’t actually different after all. I think that deep inside, the real people weren’t happy with how divided we were and realized an elitist is an elitist – no matter which side they came from. All this
alien and end of the world stuff was just the spark that lit the fire. Now it’s just about right and wrong.”

  As Emma looked to the throngs of people along the opposing embankments, it became clear that changes in the world around them were happening in warped speed. And an underlying struggle had indeed now been sprung to life.

  “Well, who sent you for me?” asked Emma. The man looked her in the eye for a few seconds before answering. “The short answer would be your parents. They felt betrayed by the system and were stopping at nothing to get you out. But then all of a sudden they had millions of other people who wanted to help them. You’ll be filled in on the rest soon.”

  Emma smiled. “But if people are still after us, why are we going to where they all are?”

  The sound of a helicopter could still be heard from the skies about a hundred yards away and the man had to raise his voice.

  “First things first” he said. “You need some makeup to go along with those clothes so no one will recognize you. Do you usually wear makeup?”

  “Well not really – maybe just some eye liner and a little lip gloss.”

  The man reached into his backpack. “Here’s some water. I’m going to put a little makeup on your face. We need for you to look a little older.”

  “So a tough looking muscle dude like you can also do makeup? You should watch RuPaul’s Drag Race with my friend Ranger.”

  The man smiled. “Are you ready for the makeup or what?”

  Emma gave him a look that said she was game. “Just paint me.”

  The man laughed aloud then skimmed a thin stone over the water. He paused for a few introspective seconds before speaking again. “My name’s Somers. Lieutenant Colonel Sean Somers.” And things that are happening might be hard for you to understand right this second, but I can tell you that you’re a very, very important person.”