“Yes?” queried the priest leaning forward.
“There were five of them and Jesus,” she replied. “Peter, John, James, Mary Magdalene, and Mary, the mother of Jesus. According to the journal, they talked nearly every day about doctrine, policy, issues, all matters of importance. Elements requiring broader discussion were brought to all the Apostles. Of course, Jesus had the final say but he listened carefully.”
“Astounding,” said the cleric.
“And then there is the very sad part,” she said. “The death of Joseph, Jesus’s earthly father, devastated him. He was such a role model for Jesus.’’
“Jesus was as much man as God, so I’m not surprised,” replied Father Anton.
“The most important new pieces that I’m working on are still the passages detailing what seems to be a lengthy conversation or series of dialogues between Jesus and St. John. It’s very difficult because it’s so new and because…”
“Because?” asked the cleric in his direct manner.
Here it is, Cloe thought. He had skillfully led her to the core of it all.
“Well, if I could be sure, I would say it’s because it reads a little like the book of Revelation, which was also reputedly written by St. John,” replied Cloe. “You know how difficult Revelation is with all its vagaries and symbolism. To us, it seems to have been written in some sort of code. The section of the journal I’m studying talks about events that might signal the end of the world—floods, famine, disease, etcetera.”
“Could you be looking at something that might be the genesis of the book of Revelation?” asked the military priest.
“Tony, you are indeed amazing—you sound like Albert,” she replied, thinking of the monsignor’s incisive way. “In short, maybe. This section of the journal has the same end-of-times symbolism as Revelation. While there’s nothing on the ‘four horsemen’ per se, the journal talks about, I believe, the rise of evil. Could it have been a precursor to Revelation? I’ll have to think some more about that.”
“Well, if true, that would certainly ‘add some hot sauce to the gumbo,’ as I believe you people are fond of saying,” said the cleric with a smile.
Cloe chuckled and then, straightening up, said, “Still, you put your finger on why I called. I need to see the pope. I’ve come to some material in the journal he needs to be personally apprised of.”
“Cloe, surely you know what’s going on in the world today,” replied the priest. “The pope is so busy I’m not sure I could get an audience. Can you tell me what you’ve found?”
“Tony, I’m not certain yet—but I feel strongly he needs to know what I think I know.”
“But, Cloe, you have to help me. The monsignor can’t help. He’s gone. Tell me something that will assist me in convincing the pope to see you now,” said Father Tony.
“Fair enough, Tony. Call the pope and tell him I have reason to believe the end of times is beginning now,” she said.
Father Anton studied her, took a last swallow of his coffee with chicory, and asked, “Did you bring an overnight bag?”
CHAPTER
5
A few miles north of Memphis, the girl finally woke up and looked around the car.
“Where are we?” she asked, beginning to twirl her thick brown hair nervously around her finger.
“Not too far from Memphis—headed south,” replied Zack. “What’s your name?”
“My name is Melanie Washer, and I’ve been on an army airplane, in the air or on the ground, for about thirty hours since I left Guam headed for Saint Louis. My father, until last year, was in the military and was stationed there,” she blurted. “My friends call me Mel.”
She had a sweet smile.
“I’m Zachary—Zach Landry from Des Moines, Iowa. I was on my lunch break, and then I was here.”
Eyes on the road, he sensed her staring at him and then heard her suddenly gasp. In his peripheral vision, he saw her look at the card in his hand and then hold up an identical card. It shimmered faintly in the evening light.
Oh my God, he thought. How is that possible?
He swerved off the road onto the shoulder, stopped the car, faced her, and said, “I think we need to talk.”
“Yes. How did you get that card?” she asked. He liked how she got right to the point.
Zack filled her in on his walk to the restaurant and the giant. When she heard the description of the man, she looked shocked.
“It’s got to be the same guy,” she asserted. “I’m studying nursing at the army school, and I do part-time work as an EMT intern with our emergency medical services unit. The pay is pretty good, and I get a break on tuition. These days the army is about the only place to find any kind of job. The day before yesterday, I was on duty, and we got a call of a possible heart attack at the local mall.”
“Okay, but what does any of this have to do with the card?” asked Zack.
“You’ll see,” she continued. “We loaded the bus and rushed to the mall. We found a large man with a group of people around him. He was lying on his back with his eyes rolled up and hardly breathing. Right away we began CPR and a saline drip.”
Zack watched Mel as she talked, liking her pretty face and blue eyes. He thought she was probably in her mid-twenties.
“He began to respond pretty quickly,” she added. “As he did, I sat back a little and studied him more closely. Just as you described, the man was huge, with a really scarred face. He had on overalls and a flannel shirt and had longish white hair.”
“Sounds like my guy,” observed Zack. “But how could the same dude in the same clothes who gave me my card have been having a heart attack in Guam eight thousand miles away a little more than a day earlier?”
“Well, that’s the thing. I’m not sure he was even sick, much less having a heart attack,” she said. “As I looked at him, he rolled over, stood up, and reached into his pocket. Pretty much everybody backed away, as this guy was a monster. He pulled out this card, looked at it, and handed it to me. He acted like he was serving me Communion or something. Then he ripped the drip from his wrist and walked away, leaving all of us freaked out.”
“What did you do?”
“I didn’t have any choice,” she replied. “My partner and I ran after him and radioed the army squadron that now polices the mall. Calling in a false emergency is against martial law. We ran out the door he had left from, but he was gone. The soldiers couldn’t find any trace of him. He just vanished.”
“Let me guess,” said Zack. “The next thing you knew, you had this irresistible urge to get on an airplane and go to New Orleans.”
“It sounds dumb sitting here, but that’s it,” she replied.
Zack sat back, letting a tenth of his brain drive the car back onto the highway while the rest of it tried to absorb the story and figure out what it all could mean.
CHAPTER
6
Rome—St. Peter’s Basilica
It was after nine, but only now were the last of the winter tourists leaving. The old priest wearily thought about the tasks still to be done before the night was over. The church had to be tidied up for the new batch of worshipers coming the next day. Even though there were fewer tourists every day now, he still had to prepare. Then there would be late prayers and the nightly devotional. Finally, there would be a snack and a blessed glass of good Italian wine. By midnight he would tumble onto his cot to sleep for a few hours before the routine started again tomorrow.
A few of the young acolytes had entered the massive building to help him. These are the good youth, he thought. There had been so much unrest lately among the young people of the country that everyone was on edge. The newspapers still permitted to operate had trumpeted the violence, scaring the dickens out of the remaining people who bothered to read. For some unknown reason, the young people of the country were angry—and not just in Italy. Eve
r since the advent of Icar on the world’s stage, things had gone from bad to worse. Reports were coming in from all over the world, detailing random acts of extreme violence committed by seemingly normal adolescents. Well, he would have to think about all this later; there was work to be done.
The elderly cleric turned right and then left, wondering where he had misplaced his dusting cloth, when he saw people streaming into the church. No, he thought. It was now well past the hours for tourists to enter the church. How did they get in? Where did they come from? A few hours ago, there had been a few hundred people in St. Peter’s Square on one of the many pre-Lenten pilgrimages. It was a paltry crowd compared to only a year ago. These crashers must have hidden from the security guards. He observed the newcomers more closely. They were all young—late teens to early twenties. Uncertainty and a little fear began to roil in his gut.
He called out to them, “The church is closed. Please come back tomorrow.”
The priest heard the young people snicker en masse as if they had some unseen connection. Fear spiked in him for reasons he could not explain, even to himself. He was, however, as safe as anyone could be, here in God’s house.
The horde began to flow down the center aisle and both side aisles. So fluid was the movement it reminded the priest of water flowing downhill through numerous linked channels. On they came, as certain as death itself.
Finally, the throng arrived just in front of the main altar, pushing the priest and the young acolytes ahead of them. There, everyone paused as if awaiting further orders. In the hiatus, the old priest stood with shoulders back and confronted them.
“The church is closed,” he said firmly. “What do you want?”
“We have come for you, priest,” screeched the young man he took for the leader. Leather-garbed and tattooed, he leered at the old man. Carved images of angels and saints adorning the walls looked down on them with birdlike intensity.
“Be gone!” he screamed, knowing his words carried no weight.
“Be gone,” murmured the mob, softly taunting the old cleric.
The priest and the novices huddled together. They were completely surrounded.
Slowly, the group began to move to the right, clockwise. Their chanting, barely audible, was in a strange language. The hair was standing on the back of the old cleric’s neck. Then there was silence, and the mob stopped dead in its tracks. More rapidly this time, the young men began to circle counterclockwise and once again to chant, this time louder.
“Father, what are they doing?” cried one of the acolytes.
The old priest listened carefully and said, “God in heaven … they are calling upon the dark powers.”
The horde reversed again and continued their deafening chant, except this time when they stopped between directions, several of the young men from the rear of the circle ran forward and threw buckets of liquid onto the old priest and his charges.
“Father!” screamed several of the young priests-to-be. “It’s petrol!”
The old cleric took his rosary from his sash and knelt on the hard floor, “Our Father, who art in heaven …”
Now the mob was in a frenzy, screaming and whirling like dervishes around the priests. The old priest could smell something burning but kept his head to the ground. The chanting and the motion stopped.
“… forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us,” he continued.
The circle shrank away from the huddle of priests. The old priest was heartened by this response and once again said, “Be gone!”
“Be gone,” echoed the haunting reply, and with these words, each in the horde struck a match or lighter.
The priest stood up straight and faced the leader, “Be gone, Satan!”
The young man only snickered and said, “I am not Satan or fit to tie his bootlaces, but there is one coming who is.”
The priest watched in terror as the tossed matches and lighters arched across the transept near the altar where he and the acolytes had clustered together. Many landed in the petrol now covering the floor of the church, giving off a low whumpf as it ignited. The young acolytes screamed in horror and pain as the burning fuel consumed them. As the old priest’s clothing, hair, and flesh began to burn, he saw the knots of young men clustered around the load-bearing supports of the church’s dome.
With his final gasp of burning air, he joined his fellow martyrs in their terminal screams.
CHAPTER
7
As they drove south through Mississippi, the weirdness of the whole situation began to descend on Zack. Now that he and Mel had switched places and she was driving, he had more brainpower to think about things. He was having trouble figuring out what the hell he was doing.
“Why are we going to New Orleans?” he suddenly asked. “Who are you and why are we together?”
“I don’t know,” said Mel. “But we’re bonded together in some way. We’re stuck. We’ve been chosen for something. By whom? For what? I have no idea.”
“Chosen? Chosen for what? I’m a computer guy from the Midwest. I don’t have any business in New Orleans.”
“And you have no connection with the place? None?”
“No, I didn’t say that,” he responded. “My father was actually born there, but his family moved away when he was just two years old. I have no folks there at all. In fact, my parents are both gone, and I have no relatives whatsoever.”
Zack sat glumly as this reality once again hit him. He was alone—completely alone.
“My God,” said Mel. “I had only my father, but he was killed in a training accident last year. My mother died not too long after I was adopted by them.”
“Adopted? So you’re alone as well.”
The two grew quiet as Mel drove on into the descending dusk. Headlights began to appear in the oncoming traffic. Zack wondered about the similarity in their backgrounds. Mel had no known connection with New Orleans, and neither of them had any family. Could these be coincidences? They neared the exit for McComb, Mississippi, and his stomach began to rumble.
“Mel, let’s look for a place to pull off the interstate and stop for supper,” he said.
“Sure,” she replied. “We missed the McComb exits, but something will pop up soon.”
After a few miles, they came upon a sign that simply said “Smyth” with a symbol for a café beneath the name.
Mel pointed the car down the exit ramp and said, “If we can find gas, we should probably fill up while we’re off the highway.”
They followed the ramp in the gathering darkness to a stop sign on a two-lane blacktop road, perpendicular to the interstate. It was a little hard to see the signage, but there was a marker indicating Smyth was off to the right.
“Okay, here we go,” Mel said, taking the right-hand turn.
***
Zack looked out at the two-lane rural road. They had passed through a couple of small burgs, but neither had been Smyth, nor had they seen a café. “Do you have any idea where we are?” asked Mel.
“We’re in Mississippi” Zack smiled.
“Oh, you butt! I mean where in Mississippi?”
“Not too far from Smyth, I hope,” he said, sneaking a quick look at her. “Are you tired? I can drive.”
“I’m fine but let’s hope the café is close. I’m hungry,” she responded.
On they drove as it began to rain, lightly at first and then harder. Mel was having trouble driving and had slowed her speed.
Finally, they entered Smyth, a small village devoid of traffic lights but boasting a building in a decaying main street area with a flickering neon “Café” sign. The diner was a one-story, flat-roofed structure probably built in the fifties. A few pickups were parked outside in the gravel parking lot, and Zack could see dark figures moving inside through the grimy plate-glass windows. He shivered in spite of himself.
<
br /> “Finally!” said Mel. “Unless you think the place is full of ax murderers, let’s stop and eat.”
Zack considered telling her to turn around and get back on the interstate. After all that had happened earlier in the day, his threat assessment alarm was at least vibrating if not clanging. But they both were famished.
“Okay, pull in, and we’ll give it a try,” he sighed.
CHAPTER
8
“Cloe, I am very interested in what you can tell me about the translation. God knows, it is very important,” said Father Anton as they headed from the restaurant to Cloe’s car. The sun was in and out among the early afternoon clouds. “Maybe Albert will be able to discuss it with you later in detail, but right now I need to share with you my own news.”
“Well, what is it, Tony?” she asked.
“Something terrible has happened, which is probably on the news as we speak—or soon will be.”
“What is it?” she pressed him. “I have seen such a blizzard of bad news recently. What specifically are you referring to? In any event, where is Albert? This is a first for you to come here to meet with me.”
“Albert is in prison,” said the priest.
“What? What in the world are you saying? Albert in prison?” Cloe stopped in her tracks to face him.
“Albert has been imprisoned for his religious beliefs; in effect, he is a political prisoner,” said the cleric.
“St. Peter’s Basilica has been destroyed,” he added.
“My God! How?” she exclaimed, the seismic shocks piling on.
“The investigation is ongoing, but it appears that someone broke in last night afterhours, murdered the priests who were tidying up, and blew up the massive loadbearing columns in the church,” replied the priest. “The roof, the beautiful dome, imploded of its own weight.”
“What of the pope? Is he safe?”
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