The Prophet Box-Set: Books 1-4

by David Beers

  “She was beautiful. The world talks about her as a killer, and maybe she was, but she was also one of the most beautiful women to ever live. I was almost stunned by it … I opened my mouth to call David’s name, and that’s when she spoke to me.”

  Rebecca had stood with her mouth open, her tongue flexed against the roof of her mouth to form the word David, and then Veritros spoke.

  No.

  A single word that didn’t venture from a mouth, but rather landed in Rebecca’s mind like a raindrop. A single one, bringing with it a freeze that all the winters in the history of the world couldn’t match.

  Rebecca stopped, uttered not a single word, but only stood staring at the transport.

  Veritros stepped off, just behind the crowd of people now meeting David and everyone else. Rebecca was alone, having not ventured forward at all.

  Veritros shook her head, and Rebecca somehow knew what it meant. Don’t speak of me. Don’t say a word. Not now, nor ever. Just know that I’m here.

  And then Veritros walked forward, around the crowd. She was heading into the compound and Rebecca’s head turned as she passed by, Veritros giving her no grin, no acknowledgement at all. She simply moved across the platform.

  Rebecca turned completely and watched as the woman entered the door, disappearing as it closed behind her. Rebecca stood there, unable to move nor believe what she’d just seen. It wasn’t possible, yet there she was, turned around with her back to the arriving group, wondering what had just happened.

  She nearly turned around and said something, but the word came back to her.

  No.

  It was spoken like David himself had said it, with no possibility of questioning or not obeying. It was spoken as if from the mouth of a Prophet.

  Rebecca did turn around, but she said nothing. She moved to the group and went through the motions, barely managing smiles and not remembering a single thing she heard or said.

  Eventually she went back into the compound, her head swiveling left and right, looking for some sign of the ghost she’d just seen.

  Ghost.

  The word sat in her mind, a word she hadn’t thought in years and years—not since she and David were children. It was a word she didn’t believe in, nor would any other rational adults.

  Then what else was it? What else did you see out there?

  A hallucination.

  Days passed and Rebecca saw nothing. She met with David, with Rhett, with Christine. She went through her routine as usual, the planning and execution a constant day-in/day-out thing. The preparation for what was to come. Yet, she couldn’t fully focus, because she couldn’t shake what she’d seen in the transport. And even if she’d been able to, just dismiss it as a hallucination or some trick of light or her being tired—she couldn’t deny the word.

  No.

  Unmovable and unbreakable.

  At dusk on the third day, Rachel Veritros came to Rebecca Hollowborne again.

  Rebecca had ventured out to the platform on her floor, walking to the edge. She was alone, at least on this platform, though she knew people were above and below her. She was trying to put what she’d seen behind her, wanting to quit thinking about it and to focus on the tasks given her.

  I’m going to tell David, she thought, hoping that if she got it out in the open, the whole thing would disappear. She’d be mocked a bit, but then realize how stupid her entire thinking was on the subject.

  The voice spoke again, the exact same word. No.

  Rebecca didn’t move, only stared out over the platform, looking at the SkyLight in the distance slowly growing darker, preparing for night.

  You’re not real, she thought, not knowing if she was conversing with herself or an actual other being.

  You know me, the voice said. The words—their phrasing—were short, as if conserving energy.

  Rebecca shook her head, thinking, This isn’t possible. I’m losing my mind. I’m going insane, right here on this platform.

  No, it said again, with more force, silencing Rebecca in a way that only David had done before.

  Rebecca stood silently, not thinking nor moving. She stared, because it felt like the voice was struggling to communicate with her. Despite the strength the words delivered, nothing about this felt easy. Rebecca didn’t know what to do, but she knew the voice wasn’t hers—or if it was, then it was some separate part of her mind, blocked off to her, and she truly had gone insane.

  Listen, it said finally.

  And Rebecca did.

  “At first,” Rebecca said, “it hadn’t been about stopping David at all. It wasn’t traitorous in any way, listening to that voice. It was reverential.”

  She looked across the transport to Brinson, trying to see if she understood. Brinson nodded a couple of times.

  Of course she gets it. If anyone in this crazy world understands anything, it’s reverence for myths.

  “Over time, though, she told me her truth.”

  “But not the truth?” Brinson asked.

  “Only hers, but like all truth, some of it was right.”

  A few seconds passed and Rebecca thought she knew the question Brinson wanted to ask, but also that she was afraid to.

  “You want to know what she said, right? What could make me turn on the Blood flowing through my veins? What could make me believe my brother must die?”

  Brinson looked away, out the front window. “I do, and I don’t. I’m … I’m struggling even to believe it happened. You were right about that. How? How could someone dead 1,000 years contact you?”

  “I don’t know for sure. The communication with her is never … thorough. But, I don’t think the Prophets die like you and I do. I think their connection with the Unformed brings them back to It. I think David will go there eventually, too.”

  “Okay,” Brinson said, still looking forward. “Tell me what she said.”

  “That’s the let down. She told me the same thing everyone is already scared of. The Unformed doesn’t care about us, about the human species. It doesn’t truly care about Earth or this universe, only that its own habitat is about to be pushed out of existence. This is only survival for It, and when the Union happens, we’ll be discarded. In all honesty, I’m not sure anything in this universe will survive the Union. I don’t understand the physics. Perhaps It simply replaces our universe, and everything in it. I don’t know.”

  She paused, thinking.

  “The point is that It doesn’t care about us. That we’re being used. That in all likelihood, It looks at us like insects, because that’s what we are in comparison. Unthinking creatures that react on instinct and habit. Like I said, this isn’t revolutionary. It’s something any thinking person would ask—what is this creature going to do when It gets here. What are we bringing here?”

  Rebecca’s eyes narrowed as the crux of the whole thing came to her.

  “David won’t stop. No one beneath him will either. Rhett wants me dead, and I was closer to him than I was even to David. When Veritros laid it out for me, why she lost, I didn’t have a choice. That’s what the Ministries don’t teach, what they might not even know. Veritros lost because she realized all of this at the last moment. She recognized that this thing we worship would only destroy us. At best, it might simply absorb us like it did her.

  “She was special, though. If David were to realize all of this right now, I still don’t think he’d stop. She saw it and ended the Union. She chose death and that humanity—that the universe—kept going. David wouldn’t. He’s obsessed. He’d kill everything for his union.”

  She looked at Brinson, eyes still narrowed.

  “And don’t you judge him for it. Because that’s the whole damned point. Every one of us, myself included, were ready to give our lives and the lives of everyone we knew for something we didn’t understand, something we hadn’t met. All because It did what? Gave David some powers? Showed him some things he hadn’t seen before? Is it any different with you, though?”

  Brinson said nothin
g, looking uncomfortable at the anger running through Rebecca.

  “It’s not,” she continued. “It’s not different with any of you. Your God makes you feel peaceful, that someone loves you; that there is something waiting for you when you die. When you go to service, and you send those little coins into the air and your nanotech amplifies the group think? Is that so different? The only real difference is that there’s no evidence of Corinth, or the Old World’s God for that matter. Yet, all of you give everything to it, the same as we did. And until days ago, you were the same. So don’t you judge David. Don’t you dare.”

  Rebecca looked forward.

  “We’re all just pack animals, looking for someone to serve. Something that loves us.”

  She quit talking, having had no idea that she would go on for so long. She felt exhausted and realized that she had never said all of that to someone. Never laid it out in such a fashion, and truthfully never thought she would.

  She didn’t look over, not having the energy to meet the woman’s eyes again. Rebecca didn’t care if she was being judged, what did something that simple matter anymore? The world was about to end, and Rebecca was flying a transport to a woman who might be dead, and even if she wasn’t, Rebecca didn’t have the first clue how to find her.

  “He’s still going to try the Union?” Brinson asked. “That’s still his plan?”

  “As long as there is breath in David, he’ll keep going. He knows no other way.”

  Both were quiet for a few seconds, and then Brinson said, “I might be able to find out where she was. It depends on if the True Faith has locked me out. If the world is burning like you say, I’m probably an afterthought. Give me a minute.”

  Rebecca saw her eyes turn green as her nanotech connected. Rebecca leaned back in her own chair and closed her eyes. She wanted to sleep forever, didn’t truly know why she was even continuing on.

  Maybe it was because of Veritros. It would be easy to quit, just sit it out and let fate have its say. Earth had managed to win the previous two times, perhaps they would now as well.

  But Veritros. She hadn’t quit. She had nearly destroyed the world, and then went to a hell Rebecca wouldn’t want to imagine, an isolation that lasted for eternity. Yet, she kept going—she was the reason Rebecca had been able to break out of the Unformed’s cult.

  And maybe Veritros was still trying, somewhere. Somehow.

  Not maybe. The same as David will create this Union if blood flows through his heart, Veritros will try to stop it. If she still exists, she’s still trying.

  “I’ve got a last known location,” Brinson said. Rebecca opened her eyes and looked over. She looked troubled. “It’s … there’s more happening than I can understand. Even while we were escaping, something was happening.” Her eyes lit green as she continued talking. “I’m inputting the coordinates, and then I’m going to see how much more I can find out.”

  “Okay,” Rebecca said, leaning back in her chair. The transport would take them to the location; she didn’t know what was happening in the world around her, but she doubted it could be worse than what she already knew.

  Rebecca Hollowborne would find out shortly how very wrong she was.

  Sixty-Seven

  Perhaps the only person on the planet that held Rachel Veritros in the esteem she deserved was Rebecca Hollowborne. It mattered not to Veritros, though. She was without ego, and perhaps at such a point, one ceases being a part of the human species. Maybe it is our ego that makes us human, but Veritros was past the point of caring about that either.

  Yet, Veritros still cared deeply for humanity, and as she watched Nicki walking around that black lawn with a woman that should not be there—that should not even exist—her rage grew. Rage not driven by ego, which is an almost impossible thing for a person to understand, but rather by the impending doom rushing toward all of humanity.

  All of Earth.

  All of the universe.

  Veritros screamed at the world Nicki Sesam inhabited, berated it with all her force of will—knowing that by doing so, she was possibly alerting the Unformed.

  There was no other choice. The time of waiting was gone, the time of action here … and quickly running out.

  Locked outside, for the first time in her life, Rachel Veritros found herself unable to do something. Even when waiting inside the Unformed, she had been able to hide and plan.

  Here, she raged, but it came to nothing.

  Nicki Sesam walked along the edge of the glass made lawn and she spoke words Rachel couldn’t hear, but words that surely meant death for everyone.

  “Why can’t we leave the yard?” Nicki asked.

  “I don’t understand why, I only know those are the rules.”

  The two women were walking slowly, but they weren’t leaving the property. They walked the edge of it, and when they came to a corner, they simply turned and continued the outline of her yard.

  “What’s your name?” Nicki said.

  “Laurel. Yours?”

  “Nicki.”

  “You don’t seem very worried about getting out of here, Nicki,” Laurel said.

  Nicki watched her feet roll over the black grass. “Neither do you.”

  “I don’t know if I’ll ever leave, but I belong here. You don’t.”

  Nicki nodded, understanding completely. She should have been terrified at what was happening around her, but this was the most peace she’d had in a month. She smiled at the thought. “I’m not sure I belong anywhere, anymore.”

  “You’re from the Old World?”

  Nicki nodded. “How did you know?”

  “We know our own,” Laurel said. “If I were you, though, I would seriously consider how you got here, and how you can get out. This isn’t some place you want to be.”

  “Why?”

  Now the woman chuckled. “Look around. That house I just came out of? I’m going to stay in it until something decides I can leave, and if that doesn’t happen, I’m going to stay in it forever.” She pointed at the yard across the street. “Someone lives in there, but I’ll never be able to talk to them. Someone lives in each of the houses lining this street, but I’ll never speak to any of them.”

  “Why?” Nicki asked again. “I just saw them come out of their house. Even if you can’t leave the yard, can’t you shout to them?”

  Laurel shook her head. “I can shout, but no words will make their way across the street. There is no communication in this place; we can see each other, but we’re kept separate. I doubt what they see even resembles what I see.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I think this place is just a warped reflection of my mind. What I used to know. These houses? The street? That’s all things I know from the Old World. Sure, the black glass and neon lights are different. I’m not sure where they come from, but I doubt that everyone here grew up in the Old World. I imagine some people are seeing this as huge towers descending from the Earth’s surface.”

  Nicki nodded, looking around, but not fully understanding. It wasn’t the concepts that were hard, just the possibility of any of this. “You haven’t … I don’t know … lost your mind? Being alone in a place like this?”

  “Who can really say? I don’t think I have, and I’ve thought on it for a while. I think whatever created this, whatever put me here, it keeps the occupants from losing their minds. The people I see across the street sometimes, they don’t look crazy either. We’re in a very controlled environment, and I think that control extends to our minds as well.”

  “What is it? What is this place, then?”

  Laurel smiled and looked at the ground. “It’s the greatest irony of my life … Are you Catholic, Nicki?”

  “I was. I don’t know anymore.”

  “I grew up hating the Catholic Church. I grew up hating all four Ministries, to be honest. I didn’t believe in any of them, or what they said, all the way up to my death. Yet, the longer I live in here, and the more I think about it, the more I think I’m sitting
in purgatory.”

  Nicki stopped walking. The woman took another step or two, and then stopped as well. “You don’t like that answer?”

  Nicki hadn’t been sure about God up until this moment. She’d grown to hate Catholicism, but that didn’t automatically lead to God not existing. Yet, now …

  “There isn’t a God, and so that means there isn’t purgatory.”

  “You seem pretty confident in that,” Laurel said.

  “Outside of here, back on Earth, there are things happening that no God would allow. Things the Bible never spoke about. There are things more powerful than God.”

  Laurel turned around and looked at the young lady. “You know people have been saying those same ideas since long before I was born, right? That things happen on Earth that God would never allow, and if he did allow them, then he wasn’t God. Those aren’t new arguments.”

  “You don’t understand. This isn’t like a hurricane killing a thousand people. It’s the Black. It’s returned, and so has Its weapon.”

  The woman’s face grew concerned and she looked out across the street. She stared for a few seconds, and then she relaxed again. She smiled, still not turning back to Nicki. “For a second there, that really bothered me. You always hear about the Black, but almost no one ever experiences it. I think this would only be the third time, yet the Ministries build it up to be some huge, all encompassing evil—”

  “It is,” Nicki interrupted. “It is evil.”

  “Maybe, but I don’t think that disproves God.”

  “God wouldn’t allow something like that to exist. Millions were killed. I ….” Nicki paused, having no idea where to begin to tell her story. “No. Just no. There isn’t a God and this place isn’t purgatory.”

  Laurel nodded. “I never believed in God until I got here. This street, this house … they have a funny way of making you think differently, though.”

  “If it is purgatory, how are you here? You didn’t believe.”

  “That’s true,” Laurel said, keeping her eyes across the street. “I wouldn’t even have called myself an atheist, because that was too much belief for me. I rejected all labels. But, I’m not sure that’s the worst thing a person can do. I know what the Church teaches, probably what most other Ministries teach, too, but I don’t believe it anymore. Because I’m here, and something brought me here. I’ve been waiting, and waiting, and now you’re here.”