Prologue
PRESENT DAY
The sky shimmers beautifully light green, completely enveloping the earth in an unnatural hue.
As the afternoon sun descends into the horizon of the autumn sky, the wind stirs and whips cold over the shores of the bay.
At the very top of the north suspension tower of the Golden Gate Bridge, upon the center of the highest crossbeam, a stolid dark figure stands facing the ocean. The man is clothed in black, wearing a thick, long hooded coat that reaches down past his waist. Its sleeves wrap heavy over his arms and give him a husky silhouette.
Gazing overhead, he sees, askew to the right of the sun, a silver metallic destroyer. He calmly waits, as it burrows down through the upper atmosphere and into the cold sky, burning the air with furious speed and energy.
With his face curtained under the shadow of the coat’s hood, the dark figure slowly focuses his eyes back over the ocean. For a moment, he ponders whether he should continue the designs he long ago set in motion. He has constructed his epic game of far-reaching scale, in which the powerful pieces believe they control him. However, the control is a facade, because he alone manipulates and directs them all.
Now caught in a crossroads, he quietly and solemnly says, “With what I have set forth, there will be much pain and turmoil, sorrow and destruction. The one who long ago stood with me will remember me and know me as treacherous. If there is some other way…please let me know.”
As if attempting to hear a response from something unseen, he waits.
With a long moment passing without an answer, he begins to question the honesty of his motives, “Is my heart pure, or is it once again deceitful? I can no longer say with certainty. I have been what I am for far too long and for time unknown.”
Again, he waits.
But, with nothing breaking the quiet of his thoughts, he whispers, “This purpose began long ago, but now, just before I enter the crucial end, I see I have hewn a path that leads many to an abyss of my creation. Do I allow it to continue, and be content with the misery of what is known - bearing agony, death, and desolation? Or correct it and take the path leading to uncertainty - promising dread, excitement, and apprehension?” Closing his eyes, he makes his quiet and earnest request, “Please help me, since my mind may no longer know what is right and just, because it is my heart that leads, and it lives for the moment.”
However, the wind carries no answer but silence.
Painfully, he realizes that there will be no return to his plea.
Then, almost dreading and unwilling to say his next words, but desiring to feel the suspense and exhilaration of their consequences, the man concludes in the whisper of his thoughts, Then this I must do.
With a slow and measured turn of his head, he gazes over his shoulder. His eyes follow a line of sight directly into a hotel in the distance, to a room on its seventh floor.
Inside the room is another man, a man whom the dark figure has expected to appear, a man whose actions the dark figure carefully maneuvers and strategically orchestrates.
Through the room’s two large windows, the back of that man can be seen. The fists of this longhaired goateed man are firmly clenched. Near him, he sees Paige lying unconscious on the floor. With her blonde hair reaching her jawline, its strands fall away from her face; and he sees a short gash on the side of her forehead. His blood begins to surge, hot with anger. In order to protect her, he steps in between her and the only other person in the room: a young man named Sik. As he solidly positions himself, he can feel the heart of his slim body pump with rage. Even though Sik’s muscular and flexed body is ready to pounce and crush him, the man affirms with a growl, “I’m gonna kick your sorry little can.”
Eye to eye, the two men stand.
With fiery resolve, the longhaired man says to himself, I’m not gonna let him hurt Paige like he did the other women. I’ll stop him here. I’ll stop him now. He continues in his anger and confidence, proclaiming to Sik, “No tricks from me, big boy. This is mano a mano.”
Below his cropped dusty-blond hair, Sik’s eyes glare with a cold burn from his strongly structured face. Self-assured and ready to take him on, he thinks, I hurt him bad before. I can hurt him again. While standing next to a large mirror that reflects the images of the sun and the Golden Gate Bridge, Sik taunts, “Tricks or no tricks, I’ll still throw you out that window.”
Just as Sik finishes his statement, his opponent launches the force of his whole body through the air and pounds his shoulder into Sik’s gut. Sik is emphatically flung against the wall. The mirror hanging from it rattles from its rest, and the sun it reflects dances a jittery green-hued trail upon the furniture and sides of the room.
The two men glance off the wall and drop to the floor, with Sik landing on his own back.
The rumbling and shaking stirs Paige back to consciousness. As her weakened arms move, they reveal a circular-like tattoo on the inside of each wrist. Slowly regaining her senses, she tries to figure out what is happening. Realizing she was drugged, she struggles to remember her last moments before passing out. He grabbed me, she thinks, referring to Sik. He grabbed me from behind just when I came in the room. In her daze, she blinks and sees the two men striking each other. Within moments, her mind begins to feel the pain from the cut on her forehead. Groggy, she closes her blue eyes and sees darkness once again. Paige can hear the men grapple and tussle with each other. Seconds later, she hears a crunch and a snap, as one man delivers a devastating blow to the other.
A moment later, Sik stands up, triumphant and confident. His heavy fist has just dealt a serious strike. His tense arms and clenched fists flare out at his sides, and his angered eyes stare down at his dazed opponent on the floor. With a small bead of sweat dripping down from the side of his forehead, he thinks with contempt, If this is all he’s got, then he’s more pathetic than I thought he was.
Finally, there is movement from the fallen longhaired man. His heart begins a stronger beat, and his lungs start to gulp in air. With his hair covering his face, he slowly lifts his head from the floor. Determined not to succumb, he declares to himself, I’m putting a lot of lives on the line by being here. So, there’s no way this punk is gonna beat me! As his will ignites his heart, his lungs drive courage and fury once again throughout his body. With the face of a fiery warrior, he grits his teeth, resolved to fight to the death in order to defeat his foe. Growling, he lunges into the air with outstretched arms, ready to grapple with his enemy once more.
Preparing for the impact, Sik clenches his teeth, positions a leg forward, and spreads out his arms. Confidently, he leans his solid body into the oncoming human projectile, ready to catch it.
The two men collide, pounding chest to chest.
Sik momentarily sways backward, but immediately regains his balance, and leans forward again. His arms lift his opponent up by the waist and squeeze him in tighter against his chest.
The longhaired man feels his feet rise up high.
In one fluid and powerful motion, Sik arches his back, and then whips his body forward. The momentum sends the two bodies, for a split second, into the air, on their way down to the floor.
With Sik’s full weight diving down on him, the longhaired man hears the sound of his crunching bones, as his back crashes on the floor. Then, he feels his head whip down, jarring his brain on impact.
Paige hears a tremendous thud, as the thunderous shock wave is felt many floors above and below them, shaking and rattling wall-mounted fixtures and loose objects in its wake. Remembering more, Paige says to herself, in almost disconnected thoughts, After he grabbed me, we fought. I hurt him. But then, he put something over my nose and mouth…something with chemicals,
making me pass out.
Below them, on the fifth floor, those searching for Sik are jolted and immediately take notice.
As soon as the shock wave passes, the rattling stops. Then, there is a silence.
Slowly, Sik raises himself and stands back to glare at his fallen enemy. The triumphant sound of his rapidly expanding and collapsing lungs begins to fill the air. In disdain, he snarls at the longhaired man, “If I had my way, you’d be dead already.”
Then, stirred and perplexed voices begin to come through the ceiling, from down the floors, and from the hallway. Frenzied movement follows. People from the fifth floor begin to converge on the source of the tremendous thud.
Groaning himself back to consciousness, the longhaired man slowly lifts a hand to feel the back of his head. He moans. He moans again, as he raises his head from the floor, and then gingerly leans his body to prop himself up on a weakened arm.
Sik takes a step toward Paige, ready to take her away.
Close to defeat, the man on the floor stretches out his left hand. It reveals a symbol on the inside of his wrist, having a form like a circle within a circle, similar to those on Paige. Meekly, he calls out, “Ok…ok…you win.” He pauses briefly, and then, with anguish in his spirit and great reluctance in his voice, he states, “I suck…ok. Hold on…wait.”
Paige opens her eyes. Her vision is blurred, but she recognizes the familiar face of the man on the floor. I know him, she thinks, I know him. I think he’s trying to help me…trying to save me. She is relieved and made hopeful that he is there, but the chemicals in her body prevent her from showing any reaction.
The movement outside the room takes the attention of the longhaired man. With his head partly tilted toward the door, he focuses on the sounds and thinks, It’s gotta be them, heading here. They’re looking for Sik, but I can’t let them find me here.
One team of people is coming up the elevator, and another is rushing up the stairs. Others are already on the seventh floor, beginning their door-to-door search of adjacent rooms.
From within the elevator, FBI Special Agent Katrina Etelson glances up to see the count of approaching floors. In earnest, she radios her partner running up the stairs, along with a handful of men from the SWAT team, “Rye, men, let’s do this smart. We don’t want a victim five. Let’s not have this guy somehow disappear on us again.”
In between his rhythmic deep breaths, Special Agent Riley Stevens relays the message to the men bounding with him up the concrete flights of stairs, “You heard that, boys!”
Within the seventh-floor room, Sik burns his eyes into his opponent’s face, as he allows him to speak.
The longhaired man turns his attention from outside the door, and then focuses it completely on Sik. After taking one last deep breath, he stretches out his left arm further and extends the fingers of his hand. With his voice turning calm and stern, he warns Sik, “Ok…so, now I gotta cheat.”
Paige opens her eyes, but her vision is still blurred. She sees Sik’s prominent figure standing a few steps on her side, and on the other side, is the man on the ground with an outstretched arm. As she tries to focus her weary eyes back on Sik, she sees something happening. Paige witnesses Sik’s body shudder in its stance, and then shudder again.
Slowly, Sik pulls his hands up to his eyes. Then, his face turns from its steely, unshaken look to a look of surprise and utter horror. His mouth opens agape, his eyes widen, and his face screams in silence.
In dull consciousness, Paige isn’t quite sure what she’s seeing, but what is certain is Sik’s horror. With her vision focusing in and out, the images of Sik’s hands seem to distort and change shape. Suddenly, Sik appears to quickly sink down to the floor, without bending his knees.
Then, from the corner of her eye, Paige sees the longhaired man seize the opportunity. He leaps up from the floor, quickly lunges at Sik, and then knocks him down on his back to straddle over his chest.
Still in shock and terror, Sik is unable to react.
The longhaired man raises his fist into the air, and then fiercely pounds it down on Sik’s jaw. He growls, “That’s for hurting the nice young lady!”
His other fist cocks back, then lands on the other side of Sik’s jaw. With another growl, he exclaims, “That’s for making me chase you all over the country!”
Sik’s brain convulses in his skull, and his eyes roll up, as he begins to lose consciousness.
The longhaired man rocks back his left fist, and then swings it with all his weight to pound down his last blow. With the crack of a solid fist-to-jaw connection, he growls one last time, “And that’s for making me admit I suck!”
Sik is completely knocked out.
For a long while, nothing moves.
Then, finally, still sitting on Sik’s chest, the man starts to breathe in deep gulps of air in order to release his anger and tension. After a moment, he staggers to his feet, and with his back hunched forward and head bent down, he glares at his foe. Remembering Paige, he turns and rushes towards her. Reaching her, the man bends to his knees, slowly cradles her head in his hands, and then rests it over his lap. “Paige,” he says, and then watches for a response from her thinly shaped lips.
Paige begins to feel the ache in her forehead, as blood pulses out of the gash once again. Drowsy, she struggles to speak and asks in sighing breaths, “How did you know? How did you find me?” Abruptly, she closes her eyes and loses consciousness once again.
Then, the longhaired man hears excitement in the hallway outside the room. There are sounds of loud knocking, doors opening, then people hurriedly speaking, and then doors quickly closing shut. Almost accepting the inevitable, he says, “They’re about to reach the other side of the door.”
Outside, Agent Etelson rushes to the door of Paige’s room. Allowing the SWAT team to position tightly in front, she stands at an angle from the door and thinks in apprehension, He better be in here. He’s gotta be in here.
Agent Stevens readies himself behind them.
With the master key in hand, Agent Etelson raises it just before inserting it into the door’s card reader. She sees the men shift and ready their weapons against their shoulders, as thin red laser beams trace jittery random shapes upon the white solid door.
For a brief moment, the only sound the longhaired man hears is Paige’s soft and slow breathing.
Etelson cautiously slides the key down.
The LED light of the reader flashes green.
Immediately, the door flings open and crashes onto the adjacent wall, revealing the longhaired man holding Paige in his arms. His hair blusters back to unveil his face.
The SWAT team floods in, but before they can shout a command, an ear-shattering sound, like a fast low-flying jet, slices through the air.
Still cradling Paige in his arms, the man raises his head to look at the mirror from across the room that reflects the world outside. Terror grips his heart.
A metallic flash blazes from west to east, cutting over the center of the Golden Gate Bridge. There is a dark figure in the distance, at the very top of the north suspension tower of the bridge, but it’s too far away for the longhaired man to notice. For an instant, the figure is there, but then immediately, it mysteriously vanishes, escaping what is soon to occur.
In horror, the longhaired man whispers, “…no, no,” but his words have little time to complete.
The missile’s exposed warhead bores a precise tunnel through the air. With the great velocity of its approach, the deafening sound it generates isn’t completely heard until its brilliant image long disappears from the man’s vision. An instant later, a short distance further inland, the nuclear warhead ignites just above the earth, allowing maximum destructive effect.
The explosion’s intense energy splits billions of atoms at ground zero, triggering a chain reaction that cascades into an uncontrollable atomic destruction.
With a blinding flash of light, a tremendous fireball bursts and begins to consume the entire city, vaporizing th
e buildings in its wake.
In an instant, the hotel room, those within it, and those outside vanish, as a blazing, fiery wall of plasma engulfs them. The ensuing blast-wave travels at several times the speed of sound, creating winds at phenomenal velocity. In seconds, the wave expands to tear through all of the San Francisco Bay Area and leaves it in utter devastation.
Away from its epicenter, what the powerful explosion doesn’t disintegrate, it crumbles, melts, and disfigures beyond recognition.
Chapter 1
SEVEN WEEKS AGO
In no way did the longhaired goateed man know that there were forces beginning to direct his life, and that his world would soon be abruptly changed and drastically shaken. He had trapped himself in a world of solitude, surrounded by a self-made cage of indifference that kept him in and pushed others away.
The cascade started years ago, and this night marked the fifth year since the beginning, the fifth anniversary of the passing of his wife and son.
It was a painful night he spent in drunken solitude.
While the hours passed uncounted, the gusting winds made the rain incessantly lash at the one and only window of his apartment, and the sounds of thunder rattled its glass. No lights were on. Only the distant flash of lightning and the faint sprinkles of colors that emanated from the pixels of his tiny television screen gave light to the living room of his less-than-modest apartment.
In between the two cushions of a couch, his figure sat hunched forward with his elbows on his knees and his head cupped in his hands. In front of him, sitting on top of a small, dark, wooden coffee table were two empty bottles of cheap wine, both fallen over on their sides. There was no glass, because he had drunk straight from them.
As his nearly shoulder-length hair draped down to shroud the rest of his face, his mind played over and over the memory of an accident that occurred on a drive over a narrow mountain road, taking the lives of his wife and little boy. The tragic end had incessantly haunted him throughout the past five years.
With no comfort for the pain of that memory, he began to slowly rock forward and back, as he silently wept. What added to the ache was that he couldn’t remember how it happened, as if the memory of it had been wiped from his mind. He could only remember the devastating end. Succumbing to the hopelessness of ever recovering the memory, he thought, Then, I don’t ever want to know.
RB 01 Through Flesh & Bone Page 1