by Jon Land
A dark light, Ben thought.
Suddenly, he felt a pleasant soothing warmth surging through him that made everything seem just fine in spite of his plight. He jerked the rock toward him from its resting place, just clearing the chamber the tumbling rocks had revealed, when a sensation that was blistering hot and icy cold at the same time seared his palm through his glove. His fingers jerked open involuntarily and before he could close them again, the rock was falling, that strange dark light emanating from its very core swallowed by the darkness.
Ben felt a rumbling in the pit of his stomach, realized it was everywhere around him, the entire cave rattling as if ready to break apart, hard enough to threaten his grip on the feed line. His fingertips felt warm, then felt like nothing at all. He was struck by the illusion that he was holding nothing at all, just hanging free in the air. Falling.
Am I dying?
He must have landed on another ledge, but was afraid to feel for the edge. The eerie dark light of the rock that had fallen with him carved fissures through the darkness, and Ben stretched a hand out for it, when something brushed past it. Then he felt the same sensation against his face, the back of his head, felt it all around him.
Bats, Ben realized, waves and waves of bats …
They were everywhere, a vast black curtain closing over his world, wings passing close enough to hear their flutter. In their panicked rage, some of the bats flew right into him, seeming to bounce off before they could snare on his equipment. Ben made himself as small as he could, turned one way and then another with no effect.
His light-headedness remained when the bats flew en masse upward and disappeared into the blackness above him. And then Ben was struck by the odd sensation that he was falling again, when he really wasn’t. Flailing for something to grasp, when there was nothing but darkness to claim him.
* * *
Back on the surface, Dale Denton felt the rumbling too. The ground, the brush and trees that bordered the field all seemed to be shaking, accompanied by a scorching hot blast of air that singed the hairs on the forearms beneath his rolled-up sleeves. Everything, the entire world, seemed to be shaking. Something like static electricity raised gooseflesh to his arms and set the hairs on the back of his neck standing on edge. He realized the surviving, still-shrieking monkeys were fleeing now, scampering away in all directions and leaving their dead behind.
Then a black wave burst out of the hole down which Ben Younger had vanished. It made Denton think of an oil slick, until he discerned flapping wings and realized it was bats, unleashed from their underground lair with relentless ferocity. Their path taking them over the fleeing hordes of monkeys, whipping the animals into a renewed frenzy, with the sky’s light suddenly stolen from them.
The air grew even more prickly, as if an electrical storm had seized the area without a cloud in sight. Denton had the sense something impossible was happening, the world coming apart from its very core like a frigid window cracking when exposed to a sudden blast of heat. The bats seeming to dive bomb the fleeing monkeys, swarming and swallowing them in an endless black blanket of rage, as a second wave attacked the workers who swatted at them desperately with bare hands or whatever tools they could find. A few brave ones raced to help their fellow workers whose faces were being ravaged by the concentrated attack, the bats fleeing with bloody pieces of flesh still stuck to their teeth.
The world seemed to bob and weave in rhythm with the crazed gyrations of the bats, as if they were dragging the planet behind them. Gazing off into the distance, Denton saw ribbons of darkness seeming to soak the air, the screeching of the monkeys ebbing now to a mere flutter before dissipating altogether.
“Oh God, oh God, oh God,” Beekman mumbled, before sinking to his knees in terror.
Denton couldn’t chase all the screaming and wailing from his ears, until another sound drowned them out. The familiar whoosh-whoosh of the drills driving downward, slicing through earth, shale, and limestone for the oil that had drawn him here. Working again, even though the generators powering them had exploded.
Moments later, the ground ruptured in all the places well lines had been run, ruptured to allow torrents of tarry oil sands to burst out of the ground in fountains of black. They burst from all the drills at once, tearing the big derricks from their moorings and opening uncapped holes in the earth from which the fountains were free to flow in constant geysers that climbed for the sky. Denton was able to reason quite coherently that too much feed pressure had blown each and every one of those lines. But no rational explanation existed for how it could happen simultaneously with this degree of force. Just as rational thought couldn’t explain how oil rigs lacking a power source could have switched themselves back on.
The windblown gushers of black ooze seemed to mesh higher in the sky, a curtain of darkness raining downward to coat Dale Denton with the means to secure his future.
* * *
Ben Younger awakened to the feeling he was glued to the ground, groggy and light-headed with no clue where he was or how he’d gotten there. He looked up to see he was partially submerged in an oozing swamp of mud and muck. He sat up, realizing his clothes and skin were sticky with a black sheen of unrefined oil, tar black and thick as oatmeal in patches. He tried to get his bearings, push his memory for how he’d gotten wherever he was exactly, but there was nothing after the darkness had seemed to claim him down in the cave.
I must’ve passed out, Ben reasoned.
And, somehow, he’d managed to climb out a different shaft of the underground cave that had left him here.
Unless I’m dead.
But the soak and smell of the crude oil with which he was covered told him he wasn’t. They must’ve been on the verge of hitting, when the feed line was snared. Bypassing the snare was all it took to unearth reserves so vast, the initial flow came too fast to get the well caps in place.
In other words, he and Dale Denton had done it.
In the distance, an ink blotch seemed to have leaked over a world turned rich and black with oil hurdling into the air, the blowout preventers woefully ill-equipped to handle such pressure. Ben pictured the secondary capping procedures being put into effect, imagined Dale Denton supervising the process, drenched in oil that flew off him like sweat and spittle as he raced about.
Ben literally pinched himself to make sure he was awake, to make sure this wasn’t some near-death vision to soothe his entry into the afterlife. Satisfied he was very much alive, he tried to push himself up from the swamp, but his hands slipped from the muck coating them. He dipped them in the nearby pooling water and wiped them off as best he could, enough to get the leverage he needed. He realized one of his gloves had been shredded by what looked like scorch marks, and tugged it off to reveal what he first took to be a burn. Then Ben realized it was more like an unfinished tattoo carved into his palm.
The same palm that had tightened around the glowing rock down in the cave he’d somehow managed to escape.
* * *
“Señor,” his Mexican foreman called out, pointing into the distance, “you must see this.”
At first, Dale Denton didn’t think the figure in the distance was real, more a trick of the eye or illusion he somehow shared with his foreman. He grabbed a pair of binoculars from a nearby kit and pressed them against his eyes, getting a closer view of a black-soaked specter wobbling its way straight for him.
His mind was still racked by losing Ben Younger in the ancient cave, the terrible feeling in the pit of his stomach that had followed the rope being jerked from the ground with Ben nowhere to be found. Maybe it was the pain of that moment making him think the approaching figure was his business partner and oldest friend, wanting something to be true so much that his mind conjured the sight for him.
As the figure drew closer, though, Denton realized it wasn’t a conjuring or an illusion at all.
It was Ben Younger.
* * *
Next thing Ben knew, he was walking, pushing himself in the genera
l direction of the oil field that was still gushing black ooze into the air. Only then did Ben remember how he’d shattered his leg in the fall. Yet, somehow, that leg didn’t hurt anymore, just a dull ache left where agony from what felt like a fractured bone had dominated after his fall inside the cave.
He didn’t know how far he walked through the oil-rich haze, or how long it took him to reach the outskirts of the field in which they’d drilled a dozen wells. By the look of things in the narrowing distance, all twelve had sprouted oil in a manner unseen since the early heyday of the wildcatters, the well caps not yet in place.
He spotted Dale Denton standing in the center of it all, lowering his binoculars in shock over Ben’s reappearance. It was still day, but the black-tinted air made it feel like night. Ben continued on, staggering stiff-legged up to Denton.
“What’s the matter, old buddy?” Ben said, managing a bright smile that cut through his grime-infested face. “You look like you just saw a ghost?”
And then he collapsed in Denton’s arms.
PART 2
THE DEAD ZONE
The Present
The battle line between good and evil
runs through the heart of every man.
—Alexander Solzhenitsyn
FOUR
Atlantic Rainforest, Brazil
“The private jet is coming into Rio de Janeiro now, Your Eminence,” Father Pascal Jimenez told Cardinal Martenko over the satellite phone aboard the Falcon 50, emblazoned with the Vatican crest.
“I’m glad you decided to put off your retirement for this final assignment, Father. There was simply no one more qualified or better equipped to deal with such a situation. Hence, my intervention in areas no longer in my purview.”
Cardinal Josef Martenko was now head of the Vatican Bank. But for years prior to ascending to that lofty position, he’d served the Curia as the head of its so-called Miracle Commission, devoted to investigating phenomena not explicable through traditional means. Jimenez’s background as a scientist, together with his own unique experience, provided just the credentials to join the commission’s ranks. And he’d served as one of the commission’s investigators for more than a decade before announcing his sudden retirement without providing an explanation.
“It feels good to be able to do a favor for a man who has done so much for me, Your Eminence,” Jimenez lied, wishing he’d never answered Martenko’s call.
“Still, I must apologize, especially in view of what happened in the course of your last assignment.”
Jimenez shuddered. “How is the boy?”
“Improving every day, and with no memory of what transpired.”
“I wish I could say the same.”
“He was suffering from a serious psychosis, Father.”
“You weren’t there, Your Eminence. And this was no psychosis.”
“I read your report, Father,” Martenko said, after a pause. “You were sent to disprove possession, not involve yourself in an exorcism.”
“My report only detailed what I witnessed.”
“I pray that you encounter nothing similar in Brazil.”
The flight path into Rio de Janeiro had taken the Falcon 50 over the massive statue of Christ the Redeemer, Cristo Redentor in Portuguese, at the summit of Mount Corcovado. From that angle, the statue seemed ready to take flight, its massive arms looking like wings. And Jimenez imagined the statue’s blank eyes trailing him as he passed over it, the sun’s angle casting shadows that made it appear tears were rolling down its soapstone-tiled cheeks.
Jimenez imagined those tears were for him, the Lord expressing His disappointment over his decision to leave the church. So many years, so many investigations … People wanted to believe so badly, needed to believe in something, just as he had ever since the day that had changed his life. Jimenez desperately wanted to give it to them, but never could. Not once, save for the recent apparent exorcism, had his investigations yielded anything other than a scientific explanation for the apparent miracle that had occurred. That was, after all, what the Vatican wanted every time the Curia dispatched him to the site of a potential miracle. For his part, though, Jimenez had wanted to unlock the mysterious link between God and man, to find His message and His word in phenomena that suggested a divine hand. But he’d failed in that task for a decade and saw no reason to believe anything was going to change.
“I’d appreciate you keeping me in the loop on this investigation,” Cardinal Martenko told him. “Even though our paths have veered in different directions, what’s happened in Brazil may take us both back to where we started.”
“Given the circumstances,” Jimenez started, resting his elbows atop the reports from the scene he’d read during the long flight from Rome, “do you believe there’s some connection to Nigeria, Your Eminence?”
“I believe, Pascal, that’s what you’re going to find out.”
* * *
“You don’t belong here, Padre.”
“But I am here, Colonel,” Father Pascal Jimenez told the man wearing the Brazilian military uniform, who’d met him on the airport tarmac minutes before. “And we both need to make the best of that.”
Colonel Rene Arocha cocked his gaze toward Jimenez in the Humvee’s backseat. “My concern lies over why a man of your reputation would be dispatched over a matter involving a Catholic mission.”
“You mean the fact that everyone in that mission somehow vanished from the face of the Earth?”
The vehicle thumped over the uneven, unpaved road, further worsened by the sudden torrents that poured from the sky during the rainy season. Those torrents both widened the ruts and turned them into miniature black-bottom lakes, threatening to swallow the Humvee’s huge tires at every turn. Right now the day was gray but dry, the clouds above spiraling and darkening to near black with the portent of a coming deluge later. Somewhere in the distance, Jimenez thought he heard the rumble of thunder.
Next to him in the Humvee’s backseat, Arocha had stiffened visibly. “All the same, after my government alerted the church, we were not expecting a visit from the Vatican’s so-called Miracle Commission.”
Jimenez smiled ever so thinly. “And I was told I’d be met by someone from the Brazilian military,” he said, leaving things there and drawing a shrug from Arocha.
The colonel was a broad-shouldered man, his face pitted with acne scars and a complexion that seemed two-toned from the way the jungle canopy allowed light to filter into the Humvee’s cab. His eyes were steely and cold, focused with an intensity that unnerved Jimenez every time he met them. Certainly not the eyes of an officer from something as mundane as the Ministry of the Environment. More like Agência Brasileira de Inteligência, the Brazilian intelligence service and the kind of agency with which Jimenez had become all too familiar over the years.
Jimenez knew little of their ultimate location, other than it was a sprawling valley nearly a hundred kilometers from the airport that had, until very recently, been teaming with plant and animal species found nowhere else in the world.
“So, perhaps,” the priest picked up, “it lies in our mutual best interests to accept the fact that both of us are here because others wanted us to be.”
“In your case, Padre, that’s because the church wants an explanation for an event science can’t explain.”
“That remains to be seen, Colonel. And, speaking of which, your government was supposed to transmit pictures and on-scene reporting to me while I was in transit, but I’ve yet to receive either.”
“That is because my department never sent them,” Colonel Arocha said gravely. “We did not want to risk starting a panic or permitting fact to dissolve into rumor. The Internet is not a very good caretaker of secrets.”
Jimenez tried not to look as uneasy and suspicious as he felt. “What exactly is your role in the Brazilian military, Colonel?”
Arocha forced a shrug. “I’m kind of a jack of all trades, Padre. Today it’s the Ministry of the Environment, since they’re res
ponsible for oversight of the rainforest where the … incident occurred.”
“Incident?”
This time Arocha’s shrug was real. “We don’t know what else to call it.”
“That’s why I’m here, to help you in that process and determine the fates of those assigned to our mission.”
Arocha forced a grin. “If that was all your assignment was about, I very much doubt the Vatican would have arranged for a private jet.”
“Just as you would seem to have your own experience in such matters.”
“Miracles, Padre?”
“Secrets,” Jimenez said.
Much to his surprise, Arocha grinned broadly. “It would seem we’re kindred spirits of a sort, then.”
“I suppose we are,” the priest conceded.
The grin washed off Arocha’s face, his expression going blank and stopping just short of fear. “Then be warned, Padre: What you’re about to see is no miracle.”
* * *
The drive lapsed into silence, Jimenez left to study the scenery out the windows, until the Humvee was waved through one checkpoint and then another, just before the ground leveled out enough to allow for a command and control center. The post came complete with a bevy of armed soldiers, heavy armored vehicles, and several Brazilian military helicopters, one of which sat already warming on a makeshift pad.
“That’s our taxi the rest of the way, Padre,” Arocha explained, opening the door on his side of the backseat to let in a flood of humid air so thick with moisture that Jimenez thought he’d stepped into a steam room. “There are no decent roads where we’re going and we can’t afford to be stranded, believe me.”
Jimenez didn’t bother to ask why, just climbed out after the colonel and followed him to the helicopter, pinning the safari hat that was a souvenir from another assignment to his head. If his sense of direction hadn’t betrayed him, they were somewhere close to a massive nature preserve carved out of the Guapiaçu Valley that was home to all manner of plant and animal life known nowhere else on the planet, along with several indigenous tribes seldom exposed to the outside world.