Dark Light--Dawn

by Jon Land

  He spent that time holding Vicky’s head in his lap and softly rubbing her face and hair.

  “We’re quite the pair, aren’t we?” he asked her, at one point. “I look at you and all I can remember is that final night in the Adirondacks. Not because of your father and what I … did, but because it was the only time we ever slept together, the moment I could no longer deny how much I loved you. The friendship thing was bullshit, Vick. We were fooling ourselves all along—growing up like brother and sister can do that. And the truth is I was afraid to love you, to let you know I did, because I couldn’t live without you in my life in some, in any, capacity.

  “I’m going to confess something to you that I’m damn glad you can’t hear, because there hasn’t been a day since that night where I haven’t thought about you. Could never forget how much I loved you, no matter how hard I tried. I had no idea what you’d been doing over the years and I didn’t want to, because then I’d have to contact you. Tell you I was no longer Max Younger, that I was a Navy SEAL commander on perpetual rotation because I’ve got nothing to go back to, because I don’t have you. And thank God you’re not hearing this.”

  But then Vicky’s eyes opened, and she managed to flash a trace of a smile through lips cracked by the blowing sand. “I missed you too, Max.”

  George H. W. Bush

  “We can assume all the scientists from the CDC and WHO are dead too,” Red added. “Won’t know for sure, of course, until we can get a team on the ground, but it’s a safe bet, Admiral.”

  Darby looked back at the monitor, the incredible carnage pictured in what was now a live feed in the building sunlight. Carrion birds already picking at the mutilated remains of the New Islamic Front fighters, including a dozen who’d been impaled with their own assault rifles, the barrels driven straight through their torsos into the ground below, leaving only the butts and trigger guards showing. Only the intermittently blurred picture, thanks to interference and transmission issues, made the scene even remotely watchable.

  “He killed them, didn’t he?” the admiral asked suddenly. “Max Borgia. He killed them all.”

  “I believe he did,” Red affirmed. “Each and every one.”

  Western Iraq

  Vicky was able to walk, but not well. She refused Max’s overtures to carry her again, another village finally appearing as flickering lights in the distance just after night fell. The village was mostly abandoned, just a few stubborn stragglers left to cower behind locked doors and shuttered windows.

  Max found an old truck encased in dust between two burned-out buildings, and hot-wired it while Vicky fell off to sleep in the seat next to him. The truck was running on fumes within a few miles of setting off, its fuel finally drained just after reaching an extension of the Sinjār Mountains that cut across the western part of Iraq. The night had taken firm hold and brought a deep chill with it. But Max didn’t dare stop to light a fire for the attention it could draw to them.

  “Of course,” he managed to quip to Vicky, “there’s always body heat.”

  Max found a cave in which to hide out, shining the utility light from one of the cargo pockets of his fatigues toward the cave’s far wall, so they wouldn’t have to be in the dark. Then Max wrapped his arms around her and felt Vicky do the same to him.

  “World Health Organization,” he said softly.

  “Navy SEAL.”

  “I’m impressed.”

  “Likewise.”

  “But your last name,” Max started.

  “Remember the Lebanese nanny who raised me? It was hers. I took it to avoid any connection with my father.”

  “I don’t blame you there,” Max said, wondering how Vicky’s life might have been different, if she hadn’t stopped him from killing Dale Denton in the Adirondacks all those years ago. “Wait, I have something to show you,” he added, plucking the scratched, worn, and superglued mood ring she’d bought him at the rest stop from his pocket.

  “You’re kidding,” she said, recognizing it immediately.

  “You mean, you don’t have yours anymore?”

  She looked at him almost guiltily. “After you … left, it hurt too much to think about you, what we shared. I couldn’t bear to even look at it. I was engaged, you know,” Vicky added, after a pause.

  “No, I didn’t. What happened?”

  “He died.”

  “Oh.”

  “Just before our wedding. Car accident. It’s a miracle I survived. An off-duty cop happened to be just behind us when the accident happened. My fiancé had swerved to avoid a little girl nobody else saw.”

  Max tensed, eased Vicky slightly away from him. “Did you say a little girl?”

  “Yes. Why?”

  “Because I think I know her,” Max managed, his voice cracking.

  George H. W. Bush

  “You were right,” Admiral Darby reported to Red. “Response team found no trace of Max Borgia anywhere.”

  Red remained silent, waiting for Darby to continue.

  “And there’s something else. By all accounts, the woman from the World Health Organization, Dr. Victoria Tanoury, is unaccounted for as well. All members of the group dispatched by the CDC have already been positively identified. No survivors.”

  “What about al-Qadir himself?”

  “Checking what’s left of all those bodies is going to take some time, Admiral, but I wouldn’t get my hopes up. Now, it’s your turn,” Red continued, shifting gears. “What about the search for Borgia?”

  Darby shook his head. “Nothing from intel or recon. It’s a dangerous area for Search and Rescue teams to operate, but we’ve got them on the ground anyway. Screw precautions.”

  “Tell them they’re looking for two people, not one. Tell them Dr. Tanoury is with Borgia.”

  “You can’t know that.”

  “No, Admiral, I can’t, but tell them anyway.”

  Western Iraq

  Max told Vicky about his mother’s recalling her encounters with the little girl she called Lilith, both when he was a boy and then at Creedmoor, and the fact that Lilith had also been his imaginary childhood friend.

  “That’s ridiculous,” Vicky challenged. “How could it be the same little girl, if she’s imaginary?”

  “Because she isn’t. I don’t know what she is, exactly. Just like I don’t know what brought us together again, any more than I know what drove us apart. All I know is that what we’re experiencing can’t be explained, none of it.”

  The thought of doing anything more than talking hadn’t even entered his mind, any more than when he’d lain down on the bed next to her in that hunting cabin a decade before. But he felt the heart trying to burst out of his chest. Same rapid breathing, same stirring down low where the sun hadn’t shined since that very night. Because he’d felt nothing even approaching such a feeling since, as if that night had scared the ability to feel love out of him.

  That night …

  “You’re bleeding,” Vicky said, pulling out of his embrace, as she rubbed her fingers together.

  “It’s nothing.”

  “It needs to be stitched. Trust me—I’m a doctor, remember?”

  “Right, an epidemiologist, an infectious disease specialist.”

  “I know my way around a needle and thread.”

  Max fished his first-aid pack from a lower pocket of his tactical pants. “I can do it myself.”

  “Not a wound on your back, you can’t. Come on, it could get infected and I have no intention of losing you again. Give the kit to me. What have you got to lose?”

  “More blood,” Max said, handing the kit over, impressed by how quickly and confidently Vicky went to work.

  “Turn around,” she instructed, after she had everything ready.

  Moments later, she was wiping an alcohol swab across what were most likely bullet grazes, one considerably deeper than the other.

  “Ouch!”

  “Hold still.”

  “It hurts.”

  “Don’t be a bab
y.” Threading a stitching needle through his skin now. “Too bad this isn’t enough to make us even for you saving me yet again.”

  She continued work on the stitching, tying off both wounds.

  “There, good as new.”

  Max started to put his shirt back on, then stopped, turning back toward Vicky instead. “Prove it.”

  Max realized they were kissing, had to open his eyes to see if it was real, and not the product of another vision, because it felt so much like the one he’d experienced on the flight from Vancouver. He couldn’t say who had moved first, because they’d moved together, perfectly in sync; not just their minds linked, but also whatever it was they carried for souls.

  After all these years, it nonetheless felt like they were picking up just where they left off. The last ten years erased, their lives rewinding to the point just before Dale Denton crashed the party. Teenagers bumbling through the act of lovemaking itself that produced a level of pleasure adults could only dream of.

  Max wondered if he looked in the mirror, whether his teenage self would look back. Eyes still full of innocence and hope, at least in comparison to today’s version. And Vicky was as beautiful as ever; didn’t matter if she was eighteen or twenty-eight, she still looked the same to him. A sight he lived with every day of his life, knowing she’d never change in his view; knowing he loved her now as much as he always had, and maybe more.

  Once again, it seemed to go on forever, Max fearing the dawn more than anything, since that was the only thing that could end their reverie. Vicky’s moans told him she was close, and so was he. But that moment, when it arrived simultaneously for both of them, came with the colors of the rainbow bursting before his eyes like a Fourth of July fireworks show. A cascading explosion of beauty and perfection that left Vicky gasping beneath him and their embrace so tight their hearts hammered as one.

  Max forced himself to stay awake, afraid to squander the moment by awakening to find it gone. He kept his eyes opened, resisted all attempts of the lids to close even after Vicky’s rhythmic breathing told him she’d succumbed to slumber. He needed to protect her, be ready on the chance any New Islamic Front fighters tracked them here.

  Suddenly, as he was fighting to keep his eyes open, a hand shook his shoulder from behind him, while he stroked Vicky’s hair. Jarred, Max swung, sweeping his pistol around.

  To find his father crouched over him.

  “You don’t need that,” Ben Younger said. “You need to come with me.”

  SEVENTY-THREE

  Western Iraq

  I must have fallen asleep.

  Max felt the breath bottleneck in his throat and squeezed his eyes closed, trying to force himself to wake up. When he opened his eyes again, though, he was standing with his father in a valley watched over by the lowest stretches of the Sinjār Mountains. The night still held to a darkness unbroken by the moon, but somehow Max could see the world around him plain as day, as if he were wearing a pair of invisible night vision goggles. The effect was oddly like that, neither darkness nor light but some vague mixture of the two. A strange dark light that revealed his scuffed-up boots to be wrapped in a thick coat of gravel and grime that told Max he’d walked a long distance from the cave he could no longer spot anywhere in the area.

  “I’m not your father,” the form of Ben Younger told him.

  Max couldn’t tell if this was reality, a vision, or some strange hybrid of the two.

  “But your father’s with me, Max,” the form continued. “And he loves you very much. He doesn’t want you to be afraid.”

  “I’m not afraid.”

  “You have a choice, Max.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You can be anything you want, harness as much power as you need to do what your mind wills. Abilities you’ve glimpsed within yourself, but never gained clear sight of. This was all meant to be from the beginning, but that beginning is long done. We’re nearing the end now, but it doesn’t have to be. That’s up to you.”

  “What’s up to me?” Max asked the form of his father, realizing that even in the lack of any ambient light, the form seemed to be glowing.

  “The future, the direction in which the world will follow. Free will gives that choice to every man, but you alone have the ability to make the choice for all men, to determine the fate of all mankind.”

  “If you’re not my father, then who are you?” Max asked, fearing the answer as much as welcoming it.

  “I am your father, Max, because I’m everyone’s father. I came to you in this form so you’d know that, so there’d be no question.”

  “I’ve got plenty of questions.”

  “I can’t answer them. You need to find the answers on your own, by following the directions your heart lays out. That’s my point. Because I don’t know what you’re going to choose to do next more than anyone else does, including you. I’m here because you need to know that all choices remain yours. Free will remains both man’s greatest gift and the swiftest instrument of his demise. The rules were set billions of years ago, but the challenge continues. Man could never reject evil, if evil didn’t exist, and that choice is what defines the very existence of humanity. Nothing is set. The world is sand, Max, not brick. You are your own master, and the true deceivers are those who’d have you believe you exist to serve them, when, in truth, you serve only yourself.”

  “I’m a Navy SEAL. My job is to serve plenty more than that.”

  “Of course you do, but you must focus on what’s to come, not what has been. You can’t change what has been and you can’t control what’s to come. You can only choose which direction to take.”

  “Why did you kill yourself?” Max snapped abruptly, a teenage boy’s angst and frustration surging through him anew.

  “Your father didn’t kill himself.”

  “He jumped out a sixtieth-story window.”

  “Your father didn’t kill himself, Max. You’ll understand in time.”

  “Why have you come to me now?” Max asked, feeling like a boy again with all its accompanying uncertainty and flailing for answers.

  “The blood of the lamb. You must remember the blood of the lamb.”

  “Why is that important?”

  “You’ll see. And once you see, you’ll know what to do.” The form of his father flashed a smile different from any smile Max remembered of Ben Younger. “I have faith in you, Max.”

  “Faith,” Max repeated, feeling weak and stupid. He had so many more questions he wanted to ask, but couldn’t find the words to pose even one in that moment.

  “Between beginnings and ends, between then and now, between what has been and what will be, you alone can make the choice. And so long as you remember the blood of the lamb, you’ll be ready when the time comes.”

  “Ready for what?”

  “You’re being tested, Max,” the figure said, instead of responding. “Your entire life, from even before you were conceived, has been a test. A test that dates back to the beginning of time when everything we see was forged out of the nothingness. It’s all been building toward this moment, because that’s all it is in the great shape of things: a single moment that will determine the shape of all time to follow on Earth.”

  “Who are you? I need to know.”

  “You already do.”

  “I need to hear you say it.”

  The figure smiled, a placid, calming gesture, again entirely different from how Max’s father smiled. “You need to have faith, you need to believe. Listen to your heart. You need to go forth without certainty, because there must be doubt, and the decision must be yours and yours alone, culled from that faith. That’s why I came to you, Max, so you’d have it. So you’d know.”

  “I’m not even sure I believe in … God.”

  The form of his father flashed a smile that was happy and sad at the same time. “He believes in you, Max,” his father said, then smiled warmly. “And it’s okay not to believe in Him, so long as you believe that there is something greate
r, something more, both from the light and the dark. The decision as to which is yours, just as the decision whether to keep your eyes closed to darkness or open them to the light is yours. Everything has been building to this moment, nearly fourteen billion years all rising toward a singular instant in time. A darkness forged out of the light or a light forged out of the darkness. How to tell the difference. How to know which to choose. I’ve seen your heart and I know your soul. The blood of the lamb, Max, remember the blood of the lamb. You have a choice. You don’t have to heed his call.”

  “Whose call?”

  “He can take any form he chooses, forged from the darkness he inhabits, like the one he came to your mother in and also to you.”

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “Yes, you do. He’s been around you since you were a child, and has been watching you ever since, waiting for the same day I have. A day that is now before us. He wants you to do his bidding, wants you to serve him.”

  The form of his father suddenly stiffened and turned, Max following his gaze toward a short mound of rock and earth extending out from the Sinjār Mountains above them.

  Lilith stood there, staring down at Max through the night from the hill, sneering at him and seeming to hiss, coming up just short of a growl. Her bared teeth were brown and rotting, the residue of meat and gristle clinging to them. Her scar-riddled skin was flaky and dry as parchment, pieces of her face shed in the stiffening wind, revealing—

  Wake up! he heard his father, or whatever had taken the form of his father, tell him, Wake up, Max!

  * * *

  And Max did, recognizing where he was in the sunbaked shadow of the Sinjār Mountains well enough to rush back to the cave, no memory of when, or how, he’d left it. He ran for a solid mile, surging through the sunbaked morning air without struggling for breath, finally reaching the cave.

  Vicky was gone.

  He could see signs of a struggle, in the form of crisscrossing boot prints in the cave floor, his own steps pressed over their remnants.