by J A Bouma
Apocalypse Rising
Ichthus Chronicles / Season 2 • Episode 1
J. A. Bouma
Copyright © 2021 by J. A. Bouma
All rights reserved.
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This book is a work of fiction. The characters, organizations, products, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and experience, and are not to be construed as real. Any reference to historical events, real organizations, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual products, organizations, events, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Scripture taken from the Holy Bible, NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION®, NIV® Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.® Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
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About the Author
Chapter 1
Southern Roma. AD 2125.
With a sudden, painful thud to his backside, Alexander Zarruq tumbled face-first into the hot, rocky sand along the Mediterranean, his mouth filling with the gritty beige soil of the sea and the taste of salted dead fish and rotting algae that had come to define his life the past year.
Bouts of laughter from vaguely familiar voices rose from behind as he struggled to upright himself in his half-sleepy, groggy state. He spit out the invasive sand from his mouth and blew it from his nostrils, but made little headway. Compounding the confusion was a wicked headache throbbing at his temples, his eyes aching from the light, and a chalky mouth from dehydration. Was he hung over?
For a second, he had forgotten where he was. But then it all came back. The lapping of wind-blown waves and the annoying cawing calls of those wretched seagulls overhead he had come to loathe suddenly snapped him back to reality.
He remembered stumbling back to his place of employ from a night on the town up the coast, a seaside town still stuck in the 21st century yet offering all of the pleasurable accommodations of the 22nd, particularly his pleasure of choice: the synthetic narcotics that went for a few Republic merca credits a pop that had been crudely nicknamed “hosts,” after the thin unleavened wafers that served as the memory marker of Christ’s Body, broken on the cross for the sins of the world. Narcowafers were what they were actually called on the street, going for less than the packet of gum they mimicked. Though illegal, Solterran streets were flooded with them, servicing a ready market for the relief they brought upon contact with saliva.
A market that included the former priest who had taken to them since his mother’s death at university. Anxiety had had a strong grip on his family, taking his mother away from him, and the feelings of helplessness and insecurity had strengthened its resolve, sending him to secretly self-medicate when he started his seminary graduate work at Oxford. Not often, but enough that he knew where to find it on the street when he needed to. Whether back home across the Great Sea in North Alkebulana or in his new abode on the run.
A packet of narcowafers and a bottle of Roma’s finest wine had been his companion the night before. Somehow he made it back to the wharf that had also become his home, where he must have passed out on the shore out front. Surprised he didn’t end up in the Mediterranean, given where he had spent the night drunk and high and everything in between, numbing away the pain and confusion, the hopelessness and helplessness that had become his reality.
A strong hand dragged him to his feet, proof positive of that reality.
Mateo, his boss from the fishing yard he had joined up with months ago, a tall, stocky brute made of solid muscle with leathery bronze skin and a wide flat face, and dreadlocks spun up into a hive above his head that meant business.
“Thought I might findchya here, Martin,” the man growled, spitting out Alexander’s fake name he had been using while on the run, his father’s, and spinning him around. The brute set him on unstable feet, then he got in his face: “Snoozing on the job—yet again!”
He swallowed hard, then regretted it, that blasted sand clawing at his throat now. Alexander spit to the side and wiped his mouth, then his face, Oscar and Elias and Kye, the brawny brutes he’d nicknamed the Three Amigos, throwing up another round of laughs. At his expense.
Running an embarrassed hand through his unwashed hair thickened by time, Alexander offered a weak, “Sorry, Mateo. Won’t happen again.”
“Sleeping off another late-night binge, were ya? A lass up the coast keepin’ ya busy all night, givin’ ya a workout that left ya plumb tuckered for another day of work, did she?”
Now he laughed. “Nothing like that. Just overtired is—”
One of Mateo’s hands at the end of an arm bulging with cords of muscle grabbed the front of Alexander’s dirty white shirt, twisting it into a knot and yanking him forward.
Alexander was met by the man’s hardened face, a flat nose flaring with indignation and menacing eyes, one shot through with the haunting milky center of blindness. A mouth of chapped lips and several missing teeth, the others stained yellow from neglect and tobacco, offered up a growl that signaled trouble.
“I don’t care what yer excuse is, mystik,” Mateo spat at him with revulsion, “you sanguinazi piece of marine trash deserving of nothing more than a Republic reprogramming camp, as far as I’m concerned!”
Alexander’s heart stopped at the twin words that had become curse words for followers of Jesus, for members of Ichthus, the remnant of the Church in the 22nd century.
Mateo leaned in, his breath hot and sour, whispering: “That’s right. Heard ya mumblin’ something about that dead god of yers in yer sleep. Jesus, this. Christ, that. Something about Father Jim and Thaddeus. But don’t worry, your secret’s safe with me, canis.”
Panic began welling within Alexander, his head growing faint at the massive slip of the tongue in his hungover state. Could get him killed for it, or worse: sent off to some Solterra reprogramming camp, given that Ichthus had been deemed a threat to the Republic. Deemed Unfits, even. Men and women who Solterra Republic deemed a burden or menace on society.
But those words…Mystik. Sanguinazi. Neither meant anything good, the epithets of hate and intolerance in a world increasingly hostile toward Ichthus. Mocking, contemptuous slurs for those who claimed the name of Christ as ‘blood-eaters’ who practiced superstitious ways and bigots who believed regressive ideologies harmful to the Repub
lic.
It was more than that, though. Because the pair of words were connected to a distant memory from a season of his life he’d soon forget.
Last time he heard those words he had been heading off to meet Father James Ferraro in modern-day Nicaea after his cathedral had been blown to bits by a pseudo-spiritual organization called Nous, a resurgent archnemesis of the Church that resurfaced to wage war against the faith. And this was a week after he had received a cryptic message requiring his presence at a clandestine conclave of Ministerium officials answering the threats of a new pseudo-religious entity that threatened the Christian faith itself. Which then led him on a wild goose chase through time collecting the testimony and memory of the once-for-all faith entrusted to God’s holy people with some contraption straight out of a bargain bin DiviNet sci-fi ebook. All of which eventually led him to being christened the Master of a lost religious order of the Church stretching back to one of Christ’s apostles, Jude Thaddeus—right before it all went to Hades on a hot breath of bad luck and devilish designs.
That was over a year ago. Since then, he had nearly gotten killed by said pseudo-spiritual ecclesiastical archenemy, got stuck in the past, then nearly got locked away in the time-space continuum—or rather, the space-time continuum as his good buddy and brilliant physicist who had discovered time travel to begin with, Sasha Pavlovich, would correct him.
But that wasn’t even touching on the worst of it, what had sent him spiraling back for those blasted synthetic narcotics: discovering his dead father, who he thought had committed suicide, was in fact in cahoots with the Republic to destroy Ichthus with the one world religious entity known as Panligo. It was no wonder he had been passed out on the beach in the middle of the day at the wharf where he had been hired to clean the undersides of the ultramodern hydrocraft fishing boats with all that had happened.
With all that he had been through and witnessed and endured.
A searing pain bloomed from inside his head from standing and the heat and light of the day, reminding him of an aftereffect of four rounds of time travel he worried meant more than he had cared to admit.
Suddenly, a headache was the least of his worries.
Mateo violently shoved Alexander in the chest. He stumbled backward and landed hard on his back in the wet sand, the Three Amigos striking up another round of laughs at his expense. He went to sit when the rush of an ebbing wave flowing back toward the shore overtook him.
Sea water flooded his eyes and mouth and nose, sending him into a choking fit that felt like he was going to drown.
Which instantly surfaced another memory from over a year now, far sweeter than sour—the time Rebekah had rescued him from the clutches of Poseidon after jumping phases from the early Church back to the future, landing them out along the shore of ultramodern Solterra and nearly sending him to Davy Jones’s locker and an early reunion with Saint Peter himself.
Alexander struggled to sit and climb out from the shore on the southern tip of Roma, what had been the boot of Italy but had washed away in the climate and political changes of the 22nd century. It was no use. The undertow was stronger than his hungover self, sucking him back into the sea and sending another wave crashing over his entire body now.
He couldn’t breathe. His mouth was filled with the twin tastes of salted dead fish and rotting algae again. His lungs burned with salt water, and he couldn’t see anything but the high-noon sun and clear blue sky refracted through a prism of watery eyes—which soon began to dim from being dragged below the surface of the water and being starved of oxygen.
Then the moment hit, when he stopped struggling, stopped trying, stopped grasping for life. Because let’s face it: there was nothing left of it. Why not just let the sea drag him down under? So he relaxed and set out his arms and stilled his legs, his body sinking even as it tumbled under the violence of Mother Nature.
Until another hand was yanking him back above the surface, and a string of Romish was being hurled at him, and another bout of laughter from the Three Amigos was pulling his consciousness back to the surface.
Alexander was thrown back to the hot sand, and a hand was slapping his back, then again. Soon, he was retching and coughing up that blasted sea water, its burn just as wicked coming up and out as when it went down and in.
He collapsed to the sand, heaving desperate breaths and wanting nothing more than to have left his godforsaken life that had turned sour.
Because surely God was nowhere in the hellhole that was known as Solterra Republic, including Alexander’s corner of it.
Another pair of strong hands pulled him to his feet, one of them giving his face a good slap. Mateo, again.
“Now back to work, ya mangy mutt!” Then the man got in his ear, whispering on a hot breath of sour beer and boiled cabbage: “Before I turn yer sorry ass in to the Republic. Might fetch a pretty penny for yer head, the way things are going. And I might, too, if the big boss wouldn’t have my hide.” Then he yelled again: “Back to work!” He gave Alexander a shove toward the sodding warehouse, a metaphor really for his lot in life.
A cold, dark, dank prison that amounted to little more than indentured servitude for what little he had left to live.
The others went their way as Alexander stumbled inside the vast warehouse where three large hydrocrafts of gleaming titanium were moored, along with a few other smaller personal submergence vehicles that had come to define part of 22nd-century living, the world having settled that vast underwater world that had gone unexplored for millennia. It stunk to high heaven, too, the dead fish compound by the suffocating heat, temperatures reaching into the mid 110s Fahrenheit, maybe into the 120s given the cloudless sky.
Alexander sauntered over to the larger vessel, its underside covered with barnacles from weeks of service on the open seas and waiting for him to do his job. A bucket sat next to it on the cracked concrete floor, filled with some concoction the owner of the fishing company had cooked up to clean away the pests that slowed down his operation. And it was his job to scrub them away.
He grabbed a steel brush and dipped it inside the bucket, then slapped it against the underside littered with the beige cone-like crustaceans—when something caught his eye at the mawing entrance.
A dark shadow, passing across the threshold, extending out across the sand and into the sea and dimming the light inside.
Figured it was a storm rolling in soon, the gathering clouds blotting out the sun that had been mercilessly beating down for weeks, bringing welcomed relief.
And me without my surfboard.
Alexander huffed in annoyance at not being able to jump on a new pastime, but relented and returned to the boat. A rusted tripod lamp with flaking yellow paint from last century was standing by. He flipped it on. He half expected it to lie dormant, given the shaky reliability of power in those parts. Solterra prided itself on ‘peace, prosperity, progress...For Humanity!’ its triple promises that usually fell far short. But the LED bulb flickered to life with a bright orange glow that offered him a better viewing of the bloody sea vessel and its barnacle-covered underside.
The rest of the warehouse filled with faint light as well, a two-story space of corrugated metal. The stench of oil and gasoline and dead fish mixed in a putrid mess that threatened to turn his stomach inside out again. It was so thick, his mouth filled with the sour taste, brought on by the suffocating heat pressing in against him now. It was probably heightened by the sleek metal hydrocraft orbs that hoovered up the sea, spitting seawater out the back while retaining their catch inside, their metal skin holding and magnifying the heat.
Alexander wiped his forehead with the back of his hand, a line of sweat beading at his hairline and dirty white linen shirt beginning to stick to him now. Still wore the clothes on his back when he ran off those many months ago on that beach in Lebanon after receiving the shocking news about his father, leaving Father Jim and John Mark Ford and Rebekah and Sasha in his wake.
“Best get to it,” he grumbled, stuffing t
he metal broom back into the bucket of cleaning agent and slapping it against the unsuspecting crustaceans. He pressed the brush back and forth, their poor little bodies throwing up a briny flair of protest as he scrubbed them away.
This is what his life had been reduced to, cleaning the underbelly of a fishing boat, on the run from the Republic and Ichthus. Running from life, really. His life, after discovering he’d been living a lie. One perpetuated by his father.
He kept at it, anger rising at what Martin Zarruq had put him through by faking his suicide on that bloomin’ bridge back home in Tripolitania. Leaving him all alone to tend to his church and minister to his flock, all while Ichthus reeled from menacing threats inside and outside the Church. And then to find out his father was orchestrating it all—from the rising apostasy to the threat of persecuting violence. It was all too much.
Alexander supposed he should just be thankful he had a job. He had tracked down the son of a man he had known from childhood who had left Tripolitania a decade ago to start the fishing business he was now working. It was all he could think to do to survive. After all, he needed to eat, needed a place to sleep. Took some doing, stowing away on a freighter from the coast of Izmir in Arabia-Persia, the ancient town of Smyrna that had been a central city to early Christianity, and making his way to southern Roma, old-century Italy. But he’d managed. The son of Tareq had wondered why the son of his father’s old priest had showed up at his doorstep, but he didn’t ask questions, offering him the entry-level job and a bunk at the on-site migrant housing.
That was over a year ago now. Seemed like a lifetime ago. He’d paid neither attention nor mind to anything going on outside the area, having ditched his DiviNet device in the sea and vowing to keep out of the politics of it all, including whatever Ichthus had gotten itself into. No, it was now a matter of self-preservation, of living his life on his terms. Sure, it was selfish. But what more could he do? If he couldn’t trust the truth of his dead father, trust the integrity of the man who raised him and made him the man he was, what could he rely on but himself?