by J A Bouma
Latching the stall door that mercifully fell with a privacy wall to the floor, they quickly opened their cases and assessed their equipment. All seemed in order. Was a cramped space, with their gear and the toilet, but it would do.
Rebekah helped Alexander with the black cap, the familiar tentacles attaching to his head and world going dim before returning to normal—the transmitter attaching the signal to his neural core momentarily affecting his eyes and ears. Then he helped her with her belt, securing it around her waist and turning it on.
It hummed to life, the screen showing the familiar green Cyrillic characters.
Alexander smiled, giving Rebekah a thumbs up. She returned the glance, taking a breath and smiling herself. “Showtime, I suppose.”
“I suppose so.”
He went to ready his device when the sound of a purr-purr-pring from a mobile device sliced through the silence of the restroom—the echoey shrill sending his pulse lurching forward at the sudden turn, his worry ratcheting up to match.
He caught his breath and huffed a frustrated sigh, then dove for the black case that had stowed his time travel belt—and his mobile. Mumbling a curse, he snatched the device as another round of purr-purr-prings started up.
Silencing it, he glanced at Rebekah and held his breath—waiting for a platoon of Enforcers and Purifiers to come busting into the restroom to haul their butts to a reprogramming camp.
The seconds ticked by as the mobile device continued dancing for attention in Alexander’s clenched fist.
Rebekah nodded toward it, saying lowly, “Perhaps you should answer it. It might be serious.”
He nodded and glanced at the device’s face, a furrowed-brow Father Jim greeting him.
Looked serious enough.
Alexander knelt to the floor and answered the call, putting it on speaker between him and Rebekah who joined him on a knee and turning the volume down low.
“Hey, Padre. We were just about to make the jump back in time. Is everything all—”
“It’s happened. Again!” Father Jim said in a worried rush, voice strained and faltering, face white and crestfallen.
Alexander glanced at Rebekah, who seemed to match the cardinal’s own fright.
“What’s happened again?” he asked, though he pretty well knew it could be one of two answers.
Either the Republic was on the move again against Ichthus.
Or the Lord Almighty himself was moving against Solterra—again.
Either answer didn’t bode well.
“The second angel has blown his bloody, bloomin’ trumpet,” Father Jim exclaimed. “That’s what’s happened!”
Again, the strained, faltering voice, and the whitening, falling face.
Alexander’s breath caught in his chest, his stomach sinking and veins freezing with icy flight-or-fight adrenaline, sending his pulse galloping forward again.
“The second angel, Cardinal?” Rebekah said, shaking her head. “What are you going on about?”
“‘The second angel sounded his trumpet,’” Alexander intoned, knowing exactly what Padre was playing at, “‘and something like a huge mountain, all ablaze, was thrown into the sea. A third of the sea turned into blood.’”
She looked up at him from the mobile device. “You’re quoting Scripture.”
He nodded, saying nothing.
“The Book of Revelation.”
Another nod. “Chapter 8, verse 8. About the unfolding of the next phase of the apocalypse.”
Father Jim nodded from the device. “That’s right. We are firmly inside the Great Tribulation now.”
“How? What happened?” Rebekah asked.
The cardinal told them, relaying all that had happened in the last few hours according to the eyewitness accounts of Ford, Nia, Sasha, and Lucy that the Ministerium agents had relayed through a panicked call into the deep submergence station back in the Mediterranean.
“Dark times ahead, I’m afraid,” Father Jim went on. “Not only for the Republic, but for Ichthus as well. Though not directly, the unfolding of these judgments will affect many of our brothers and sisters, with family and friends and colleagues experiencing the wrath themselves—dying even.”
Alexander ran a worried hand through his thickened hair. No escaping it now. Solterra Republic was coming under the full weight of God’s judgment.
“Which makes the urgency of your travel back through time to the Council of Nicaea that the more urgent! The Church will need the retrieved memory of one of the most consequential gathering of Christian leaders in history to stay the course, to run with perseverance the race marked out for us, fixing our eyes on Jesus, the pioneer and perfecter of faith.”
Rebekah grabbed his hand, tears brimming her eyes and mouth curling into a trembling grin, clearly trying to keep it together while bearing the weight of their mission.
Alexander smiled back, squeezing her hand with a grin of his own and trying to hold steady, to hold it together—for both their sakes.
“This memory will also serve as the torch we bear as witnesses to this faith, casting the light of Christ in the fast-darkening corners of the Republic. After all, the purpose of these wrathful trumpets is to bring the world to repentance—to embrace the gospel by believing in Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of sins and salvation of the soul. I pray you are successful in your journey, you two.”
Alexander took a breath and nodded. “You and us both.”
The cardinal said a quick prayer of safety for their journey, then signed off.
Stowing the device back in the black case and closing the lid, Alexander stood, offering a hand to Rebekah and bringing her back to her feet.
“You ready for this?” he asked.
Rebekah wiped her eyes and swallowed hard, then nodded. “Ready as I’ll every be.”
“For Ichthus,” he nodded back.
“And the Republic.”
Indeed…
Time to make the jump back to the past.
It was the fifth time now, and he had to admit: As much as he had pitched a fit to Father Jim for his return jump, especially after their run in with the drunkard from the past over a year ago, and coming up against the limits of future technology, and nearly being marooned in the past—in spite of the memory of that fraught experience and all the inconveniences and smells of the past and frightening things-get-worse present, he was beginning to sort of love the adventure of it all.
Loved the full-on sensory experience, loved the high he got from jumping across phases. A far greater high than his narcowafers ever gave him—from the humming vibrations along every fiber of his being in the familiar long, undulating waves to the thunderstorm static-charge smell; from the blinding luminescence to the soundless void.
He just hoped his head didn’t explode, or implode, or sizzle from the frequency of visits. Because the way it felt after the last jump, with the instant pain launching back and forth from his temples—he prayed to the good Lord to shield him from any deleterious effects of the time travel.
Alexander fastened the time transport belt around his waist, then engaged the screen situated on the front while Rebekah did the same. A little screen on each of their devices displayed the Cyrillic words идти in green. The word Go, indicating all was ready to jump phases.
His heart leaped, a shot of adrenaline shooting through his veins at the memory of what he had experienced the last time he’d jumped phases to the past—and what they would experience again. He started breathing heavier as his pulse started picking up pace, realizing this was it.
The moment of truth. Again.
Alexander grabbed Rebekah’s hand, nodding at her with a reassuring smile before the two punched their blinking green buttons.
Jumping them hundreds of phases back to Nicaea, circa AD 325.
Arguably the birthplace of Ichthus’s faith.
For the sake of the Church’s faith—and his own.
During the rising apocalypse, no less.
Continue Reading S
eason 2
You’ve just finished episode 1 in the religious sci-fi apocalyptic thriller Ichthus Chronicles Season 2, the first book in the four-episode series, Apocalypse Rising.
Think of it like your favorite Netflix, HBO, or Hulu show, where the story unfolds in installments. Each book can be read as a complete story with a beginning, middle, and end—but it ends on a cliffhanger that naturally flows into the next episode, fitting within a larger four-part tale.
Continue binge-reading the adventure by diving into the next episode now! Read a sneak-preview chapter of episode 2 on the next page. Buy on Amazon today:
APOCALYPSE RISING • Season 2
Episode 1 (June 2021)
Episode 2 (July 2021)
Episode 3 (Aug 2021)
Episode 4 (Sept 2021)
Full Season (Sept 2021)
Apocalypse Rising • Episode 2
Chapter 1 Preview
Chapter 1
Nicaea, AD 325.
Here we go…
The time travel belt strapped to Alexander’s waist started humming with purpose after he punched the green ‘Go’ button on the indicator panel. It had hit him that the four other times he had jumped phases back in time he had closed his eyes. Squeezed them so tight he thought he would burst his eyeballs!
Made sense, since he was holding on for dear life and given the reality he was praying to the good Lord above that he sought fit by his grace and mercy to preserve his life! He also knew what was coming, with the blinding luminescence of it all.
This time, for some reason, he kept his eyes open. Whether from familiarity now with making the jump or from curiosity at how it all happened, from start to finish, he wasn’t sure. And what he expected to see, he wasn’t sure.
But what he saw was magical.
The four donut-like rings positioned at the three, six, nine, and twelve o’clock positions began to pulse with a static charge that quickly jumped from ring to ring to ring to ring—a hole opening up within seconds in response.
It was like one of his linen shirts had snagged on a sharp edge and tore open a fraying split in the fabric, reality’s textile itself tearing with a heartrending breach as the electromagnetic device opened up a breach that surrounded the couple with a spinning whirlwind that eventually swallowed them whole. The wormhole Sasha had mentioned a few jumps back that opened a portal in the time-space continuum—or rather, the space-time continuum, as his good professor friend would have surely corrected him.
And there he was, catching a glimpse of the split-second moments that led to the folding of time, like an accordioned piece of paper with a pencil punched through the center, bending the timeline of history in one phantasmic bunch so that he and Rebekah could jump through the looking glass down into history.
Alice Pleasance Liddell had nothing on them two!
Now Alexander clenched his eyes closed as it all began…
The familiar sensations of jumping phases of time came flooding back, his body vibrating the entire length of the jump back to the past in long, undulating waves. Joining the full-body sensation was the familiar warm and fluid hot tub-like simmer—like being dunked into the churning hot waters just as a live wire was thrust inside. An all at once delightful and maddening experience, to be sure!
Every one of his molecules tingled as he jumped back to the fourth century with static discharge, like walking across carpet in wool socks. He hoped Rebekah was faring better this time around, considering she had retched the first time from the topsy-turvy travel through time. He also wondered if she was experiencing what he was: every one of his molecules firing on all cylinders!
Every fiber of his being was set on edge by the electromagnetic force field that had opened up a wormhole to the phase beyond. And all five senses were on cloud nine, a high greater than the narcowafers that had controlled him for the past few years. An ecstatic Nirvana, for sure!
There was the smell that reminded him of a midsummer Tripolitanian storm, when the Mediterranean air was charged by spiderwebby streaks of lightning, with an added sweet yet odd mixture of salt and spice in his mouth.
It was also bright, as if a nuclear explosion had detonated around him. Except there wasn’t any heat to it all. Just a steady temperature that seemed perfectly tuned to his body’s thirty-seven degrees Celsius. He squeezed his eyes as he vibrated and tingled from the present to the past, still fearing that he would go blind from time’s movement.
Then there was the sound of it all. Which was zero, as if he were encased in a vacuum sealed off from reality. There was no indication that a world full of the bassy and trebley ranges of ultramodern life still existed on the outside. No hum, no tuning-fork ting. There was also the familiar pressure within his inner head. He feared it would explode or implode, and that the pain from the last jump would return. He chanced swallowing and moving his jaw, trying to get his ears to pop, but it was no use. Thankfully, no pain yet, but he was preemptively praying against it anyway.
He tried sensing Rebekah as he rode the waves of time alongside her, but it was as before: He was utterly alone in his experience. His own personal capsule of soundless, blinding, tingly, sweet-and-salty Nirvana that smelled of electrified rain, jumping farther and farther along the phases of time, the sensory overload sending him to greater euphoric heights.
Time flashed by in rapid succession, not in a blurry motion of multi-colored luminescence but rather a blinding smudge of all images from time past combining into one panoramic experience—
Until it all stopped. Just as suddenly as it had begun. At least that’s how it felt, knowing hours had ticked by retracing the backward revolutions around the sun.
The soundlessness was replaced by rushing waves and laughing children and the deep baritones of men shouting orders. Then with a sudden fade-in zap, the dim world they had left inside that sodding park restroom along the banks of that dried-out lake was dried out no longer!
Snapping his eyes open, Alexander saw a world full of blues and browns, tans and greens, a brightness blooming into view that was blinding yet reassuring.
They’d made it. Again! Jumping back phases of time clear through to AD 325—eighteen hundred years in the past.
And blessedly not so much as a toe at the water’s edge!
Alexander heaved a breath, then another, a sharp pain at the center of his head sharpening his focus into the moment.
Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, not again…
The pain lanced across his skull, like a jolt of electricity across a wire, the acute spasm rocketing across his synapses until it disappeared with a dull ache. Perhaps an answer to his prayer or a remaining faded echo of what time travel was doing to his brain—only to come back again after not having traveled in a year.
Either way, a dread began growing in the pit of Alexander’s stomach at what it meant. He would have to talk with Sasha about it this time—if he made it back to the future alive.
A retching sound yanked his attention from his own problems to that of his partner.
Alexander looked toward the sound to find Rebekah doubled over. He frowned. Poor thing. Looked like she was still feeling the effects from the last go around of her own time travel experiences.
He thought of putting a hand on her back as she continued dry heaving, but thought against it. Too intimate, and probably not something he would appreciate either whilst he was letting loose his own guts out onto the past’s ground.
Which was actually quite a nice little alcove along the lakeshore. They’d jumped back into a small patch of gnarled, unkempt trees and overgrown bushes three or four meters from the water’s edge. A few sodden, rotting logs and other detritus were piled around, but it was quite a nice little beachhead for jumping back to the past.
Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, thank you for your providential care—for jumping us back safely and for doing so on dry ground!
Alexander looked out across the lake, a cool breeze carrying along the twin scents of baking bread and boiling
lentils a welcomed relief from the sun rising at their backs. Not as hot a day as the future, but his already sticking shirt promised the temperatures would climb as the day wore on. But no need to worry about that now. The view of the past was all that mattered.
Across the calm lake dappled in the burnt orange brilliance of the rising sun, a smattering of long, low-slung wooden fishing boats with nets cast overboard bobbed gently farther out—blessedly outside of any immediate viewing. What a sight it would have been to find two landlubbers zapping into their reality! Laughter from those kids he had heard earlier floated his way again, joined now by the reprimanding calls of their mother.
Alexander chuckled and turned back to Rebekah. She was wiping her mouth with one hand, the other arm clenching her stomach.
“You doing alright?” he asked
She groaned but nodded. “It appears time travel doesn’t so much agree with my stomach. Probably should have eaten something before we left. Was always one to succumb to the ills of motion sickness.”
“We’ll try to find some berries or nuts along the way. Perhaps someone has a roll or piece of salted meat to spare. Let’s find a place to stow our time travel devices. Last thing we need is to be caught—”
A rustling from the shrubbery behind Rebekah sent his pulse soaring and stomach dropping to the sun-hardened dirt ground.
He crouched on instinct, Rebekah doing the same, their backs to the water’s edge and something coming toward them with purpose. Loud and quick. A pair of them even, breaking branches without care and throwing up cries of laughter and chase.
Just great!
Could be anyone. That mother bolting after her wayward child. Star-crossed lovers rushing to catch the sunrise at lover’s beach. The praetorian guard even, giving chase to a thief.
Any second now…
He jammed the release buckle to his phase-jumping belt; Rebekah followed suit. Nowhere to stow them but among a pile of washed-up logs and sticks. He hoped they offered enough camouflage for whatever was continuing to barrel toward them.