by Galili Black
He was being yanked forward, and he had a moment of clarity, “Damn it Hez, what happened?” Richard was yelling at him. Melton shoved him aside.
“Get him down below,” he snapped at some men. They dragged Hez to his feet.
“He’s too weak to walk, can’t you see that?” Richard was yelling at them.
“Carry him down,” Melton hissed. Hez was aware of hitting the shoulder of someone hard and then he passed out.
*
Samantha Ewing and Ted Griffin were sitting in Ted’s SUV beside the highway. Samantha was staring out the window at nothing, thinking about her kids. Ted was looking at the sky. He was waiting for the sign and when it came he jumped outside. Samantha followed. “What’s happening?” she asked.
“Look at those stars up there,” he said pointing straight above their heads. Someone approached them from the vehicle in front of them.
“Please get back in the car, Mr. Griffin,” the man said.
“I have to see this,” Ted said. The man spoke into a microphone of some sort. Ted kept staring up at the sky.
“Oh my God,” Samantha said. A laser like light was shooting out of the nebula in the center of Orion’s sword. The man turned to look. The other men in the other vehicles were getting out to look as well. The light pulsed for several moments and then disappeared. Suddenly a tremendous beam of light appeared out of the east with a great roaring sound.
“It must have hit over at the other site and now they’ve sent it over.” Ted explained to Samantha. They all were staring at the stream of light that now flowed gently like a river over their heads down towards the south. As it curved above them, they all seemed to let out a collective sigh, and their faces were lit with a soft glow of pink and gold. They raised their hands up instinctively, overwhelmed with a sense of good cheer and light heartedness. This continued for several minutes and then abruptly the glow disappeared.
“That shouldn’t have happened,” Ted said.
“What do you mean?” Samantha said.
“It shouldn’t just stop like that. Something must have gone wrong somewhere.”
“How could humans affect a thing like that?” she asked.
“It’s complicated. I need to get up the mountain right now; I’ve worked on this project a long time. Check with your supervisor,” he said to the man who was speaking into his microphone again.
“Get in your vehicle and I’ll see what I can find out,” the man said. Ted started to object but decided to go ahead and get back in the truck. Samantha followed.
“Do you think they’ll let you go back there?”
“They might as well. What just happened won’t come around again for another ten thousand years. We didn’t do what we needed to do. It’s a bloody shame.”
“What did they need to do?” she asked
“They needed to harness what you saw, that energy is not like any other. There are places on the earth that still carry the imprint of the last time it got here and you can still feel it. I mean if you climb those mountains, the sensation of divine light or first light as we call it is palpable. People back then were ready when it came so they captured it in some sacred mountains. I thought we would be able to do the same, but something went wrong.”
“Are you sure? It lasted for a few minutes; maybe it was long enough,”
“I doubt it. I think it needed to last for at least twenty minutes. In the one written source that I uncovered they claim their high priestess called it down for that long. Ours just got shut down somehow.”
“What kind of high priestess?”
“She may have played that role a long time ago, but she’s quite modern now, a dear friend of mine. I just hope she’s alright.”
Samantha nodded, then said, “You know maybe it’s best the thing got stopped. If the wrong people get power they always use it for bad ends.”
“Yes, but there was a lot of good we could have done with it,” Ted said and shook his head.
“Do you think they will let Richard go now that this whole thing is over?”
“Maybe. I don’t see why they wouldn’t.” They sat in silence for a few moments. Suddenly there was a rap on the window. Ted rolled down the window, “Can I go up now?”
“We’ll escort you up there.”
“Alright,” he said and turned to Samantha. “I’ll try to get some information about your husband as soon as I can.” She nodded. They followed the SUV in front of them and the other vehicles followed behind them. “I just wish I could’ve been there to help Ellie, so much of my life’s work down the drain now.”
“Maybe there’s something you will be able to salvage.”
“I don’t know what it would be.”
“Richard always says he can use anything that happens to him in his writing. Isn’t it the same for you?”
“When I was still young as your husband I thought so. This thing was more important than writing; it was something tangible to contribute to the world we live in.”
She touched his arm, “You’ve done a lot for the world already. Your books help people get along in their lives.”
“Trivial, but thank you for saying that.” He gave her a little smile and looked towards the mountain top. If only I could have been there, Ellie, he said to her in his mind. Inside the mountain, Ellie moaned in her sleep. She thought she heard someone calling her, but the voice was distant and faint. She seemed to be falling and falling through vast caverns, dimly lit by some faintly glowing stones or were they stars?
*
“You knew he was going to screw this up!” Melton was yelling at Richard. They were inside Richard’s room. Hez was passed out on the sofa. Erickson was staring dully at the floor.
“He’s a grown man. I had no idea what he was going to do. I gave him the instructions, we went over them.”
“Don’t patronize me. We know you were trying to sabotage the project.”
“If you thought we were going to do that, why did you go ahead with it?” Richard asked evenly.
“Because we had no choice,” Melton hissed. “That hayseed over there had the right mix of chemicals in his DNA to pull it off. They said it had to be him and his goddamn sister on the other side.”
“His sister?”
“Yes, she must have blocked it or sent him some signal to block it.”
“So it might not have had anything to do with Hez at all.”
Melton paced up and down. “I never wanted to work with the damned Americans. We could have done it all right here, and got it done right. Now we’ve got nothing, after a whole decade of setting it up and preparing the vessels.”
“I’ve told you before, I don’t think the energy would have worked the way you thought it would with those things.”
Melton glared at him, “And I’ve told you that we know that it would. In the whole sorry story of the human race, never had the real cream of humanity been gathered in their essence to get this energy augmentation. We had everybody’s genetic material gathered together here and now this hillbilly has wrecked the whole thing.”
“Your so called cream of humanity has only one thing that makes them stand out as far as I can tell and that’s money.”
“They’ve proved their high worth by having it, as any honest social scientist will tell you. Cream rises and in all cultures and at all times the accumulation of capital is the acid test of worth.”
Richard shook his head, “When can I go home to my family?”
“When you figure out a way to make right what your boyfriend here has messed up.”
“You said that energy burst comes around once every ten thousand years, so how in the hell are we supposed to fix it?”
“I don’t know. Maybe they caught enough of it on the other side so that we can energize the vessels. When sleeping beauty here wakes up tell him to get working on it, if you ever want to go home.”
“I did what you wanted. It’s not right to keep me here,” Richard yelled.
“If you’d do
ne it right, you’d be on your way home,” Melton said. “I’m coming back here in the morning. You tell him he needs to start thinking about how he’s going to get his little sister to help finish the project.”
“He didn’t even know she was involved. Maybe if you had been more forthcoming with us, the outcome would have been better for everybody.”
“We told you all you needed to know, and it was a wash. Next time we will make sure it gets done right or else.” With that, he stomped out of the room, Erickson trailing afterwards. Richard slammed the door after them. Hez made a sound and threw an arm off the sofa but did not wake up.
Several hours passed, while Richard diligently searched for some information on his laptop. Hez began to make some noise, and Richard came over and encouraged him to wake up. “I need you to come round, Hez,” he said urgently.
Hez opened his eyes and blinked at him, He managed to pull himself up on the couch. “What happened? I saw Ellie; she was standing on a platform like me. She told me to... shit, do you know what happened?”
“They managed to shut everything down when they saw you weren’t pulling the energy over. Now they’re pissed as hell. I’ve been going over some notes they gave me awhile back. Did they ever explain to you about the vessels?”
“Vessels… I don’t think so, what is that?”
“They got all these captains of industry to make genetic contributions which they had put in place to get the most intense part of the stellar blast when it came. That’s why they told you to bring it all the way down to the center of this mountain. That’s where it’s all been placed.”
“Yeh but Ellie told me to send it to her. I just fed her as much as I could.”
“She was supposed to loop it back to you, so the whole planet could get lit. Instead it just fed the Appalachians.”
“Genetic contributions, do you mean like a sperm bank or something?”
“It’s more advanced than that. One time Melton hinted to me that they’d created embryos from just guys.”
Hez started at him, dumbfounded, “You’re kidding.”
“No, they borrowed material from chimpanzee eggs or maybe it was from pigs, mixed genetic material from two men and voila supermen zygotes.” Hezekiah burst out laughing, Ewing frowned and went on “The thing is they thought if they could light up those genes they could produce their precious super race that they’ve been whacking off about ever since Darwin.”
“So now what?”
“They think they can infuse that crap with whatever Ellie managed to bring down over there.”
“I thought they were competing with the setup in New Hampshire.”
“I think it’s all just one big master project.”
“Why keep that a secret?”
“You got me. Maybe they thought if they compartmentalized it they could keep their ultimate goals a secret. I mean if it got out that they were planning to replace the current version of humanity with their tricked out version, that wouldn’t go over too well.”
“And guys like us wouldn’t cooperate.”
Richard grimaced, “Yeh, well they’ve kinda got me by the balls there you know?”
Hez nodded, “Yeh, but you’ve fought them when you could despite everything.”
“They said I had to get you to work with Ellie to get the thing done, you know the vessels bathed in the creation light or else.”
“That’s odd, seems like they could just go over and dump that shit into one of those mountains. Man they were lit all the way from Maine to Georgia. Ellie did a hell of a job; I wish you could have seen it.”
“There must be some reason they want her cooperation. Anyhow I figure why not give it to them? So they get their jazzed up genetic crap, I don’t think it’s going to give them what they think. And even if it does, it will take a generation for the things to grow up. By then, who knows what will be going on? And in the meantime, you and I can get the hell out of this pit.”
“Yeh maybe, but it’s risky. What if it does go according to plan and they just annihilate the whole human race to make room for their super freaks?”
“I don’t know, man, but I don’t know how much longer I can stand being in this place. I’m telling you,” Richard said running his hands through his hair. He threw himself down in a chair and added, “Geez, I know I need to keep an eye on the bigger picture, but I’m kind of feeling unglued.”
“I know, what you mean. Maybe I can get them to let us go over to New Hampshire; I’ll tell them I need you to help me get the thing done.”
“It’s worth a try, though old Melton would probably keep me here out of spite,”
Hez nodded. “Well I’m holding a few more cards, since they need Ellie’s help to get their project back on track. I imagine their sperm donors are going to be pretty ticked off when they find out they didn’t get what they paid for. If we can move it along for them, maybe something will turn up that will help us turn it all around.”
“You managed to throw a pretty good kink in the works tonight; maybe another opportunity will arise to do it again.”
“You can thank Ellie for that, but regardless, they’ll be more suspicious next time. We’ll just have to put up whatever resistance we can for as long as we can.”
“Without even knowing if any of it will make any difference in the long run.” They exchanged a grim, but determined look.
Hez stood up, and staggered a little, “I’m feeling a little woozy still. I think I’ll go over to my room and try to get some more sleep.”
“Yeh Melton said he’d be here in the morning to get started on phase two. I need to get some sleep too; it’s been a really long day.” Hez continued towards the door, making his way slowly. When he got to the door, he turned and gave him a wan smile, then disappeared. “Good night brother,” Richard said softly, wondering what the next few days would bring for them. If I could just get out of here, he said to himself and went off to get some sleep as well.
Chapter Fifteen
Ellie lay propped up on some pillows. Ted sat beside her bed, holding her hand. She gave him a wan smile. “You did really good Ellie,” Ted said and squeezed her hand.
“What about Hez? Do you know anything about how he’s doing?”
Ted shook his head. “We are trying to get information, but they’re in some kind of communication shut down.”
“What do you mean? Haven’t they always been?”
He sighed. “It’s complicated. But right now I don’t want you to worry about any of that. You need to get some rest.”
“I feel really tired, but I want to find out about Hez,” she said and closed her eyes. “Who was that woman who was with you when it happened?”
Ted looked at her in wonder, “How did you know I was with someone?”
“She has a connection to Hez.”
“I don’t see how that could be. I just met her; she’s married to Richard Ewing, the writer. He’s been missing for some time. She thought I could help her locate him.”
“You can. He’s over there with Hez. He was watching when Hez brought it down. They wouldn’t let him up on the platform but he was nearby.”
“Are you sure it was him?”
“Yes, I know who he is. I’ve read some of his books. I see why she came to you; he was telling her in her dreams to go seek you out. She didn’t listen for a long time, but finally, she remembered the message from the dreams and came to you.”
“That’s interesting. So this will certainly be helpful to Mrs. Ewing. She’s worried sick about her husband.”
“She should be. Those people are not planning to let him go. He’s seen too much of their set up. It’s the same with Hez. They plan to get rid of them, after …”
“After what?”
“After they get what they want. They’re going to come over here. They will ask for my help to finish their project. If we don’t help them they’ll kill Hez and Ewing. But I think they plan to kill them no matter what.” She began to cry silently. Ted squ
eezed her hand.
“Go to sleep, my dear. It will turn out alright.” She nodded and seemed to drift off momentarily. Ted sat with her a few more minutes and then gently released her hand. Samantha Ewing was waiting for him in the next room.
“How is she?” She asked when he appeared.
“Very weak. She may never fully recover. There’s not much that we know about the lasting effects. I thought because Ellie is such a strong person and experienced with some unusual occult practices it might not take such a toll, but it looks like I was wrong,” he said the last part nearly choking on the words.
Samantha came over and patted him on the back. “She will probably just need time to recover.”
Ted nodded and gave her a grateful smile, “She told me something that will be very interesting to you. It seems she sensed the presence of your husband with Hez during the ceremony.”
“Are you kidding?” Ted shook his head. “Was she sure?”
“She’s familiar with your husband’s writing and given the extraordinary power of seeing that is granted during the ceremony I think you can count on it.”
“Where are they? Does she know that from the vision?”
“We know where they are,” Aleister said coming into the room. The two of them turned to him. “They’ve just made contact. They want to talk to Ellie.”
“Ellie said they would,” Ted said slowly
Aleister looked a little surprised, “So she’s conscious.”
“Barely, she drifted back to sleep after speaking a few words to me.”
“You’re in contact with the people who kidnapped my husband?” Samantha asked incredulously.
“They’re sponsors of the project on the Kadistan side,” Aleister said in a matter of fact tone.
“Do you know what they do?” she asked acidly.
“We don’t approve of some of their methods, but we all have a common cause. At least, we thought we did until Ms. McCane found herself unable to connect to them at the crucial moment.”
“You told her to keep it on our side; I bet they’re not too happy about that.”