Flight of Shadows: A Novel
Page 32
To him, breathing the stale air that he coughed out from his own lungs under the hood, seconds felt like minutes. And minutes like seconds. He passed the time by visualizing the Healer as she’d been described in the rumors. An angel’s shadow. In flight.
Then came the sound that thrilled him with hope. The distant greeting whinny of another horse. Ahead and to the right.
Moments later, he smelled the smoke of burning mesquite. A campfire.
Did it mean she was there? Or was it a camp empty except for other Protectors?
The horses stopped.
“It’s your time,” the lead Protector said.
His hood was pulled. Ignoring the rifles leveled at him, the stranger sucked in clear, fresh air and drew in the details of the scene in front of him.
Tethered horses. A large canvas tent. A fire with a pot sitting on a grill atop the embers.
A big, big man smiling at him. A kid, older than the stranger remembered, with big glasses and an equally big grin.
“They did it!” Theo shouted. “Razor and Pierce made good on the promise!”
“You know this man?” came the question from the lead Protector.
“He’s the one we were waiting for,” Billy said. “Jordan Brown.”
Billy stepped toward Jordan’s horse to help him down. “Welcome home.”
Words failed Jordan because a fit of coughing stole from him whatever he might have said.
As Billy took his elbow and guided him toward the tent, Jordan Brown looked around for Caitlyn. He was overwhelmed by emotion now, no longer calm, wondering if he could find the strength to overcome his cough and the discipline to speak without weeping with joy.
He rubbed his wrists absently, barely aware that the bonds had been cut away and the rifles lowered.
An image came to him from years ago, of kneeling beside his little girl, the one the other children had called ugly because of her hunched back and who had retreated alone into a corner of a church they’d visited in Appalachia. Of whispering the words that had taken away the tears from the little girl. “I love you as big and forever as the sky.”
As he relived that image, she stepped outside the tent, no longer his little girl, but a woman in jeans and a shirt, her belly tight and swollen.
Caitlyn. Arms opening wide as she began to rush toward him. That was the moment when she cried out a single word. The word that always filled him with joy.
“Papa!”
AUTHOR’S NOTE
As speculative fiction, like the prequel, Broken Angel, Flight of Shadows takes place in settings where I’ve wondered what society might be like at the extremes.
In Broken Angel, the religious theocracy of Appalachia is based on what could happen if religious extremists in America managed total political control over society. (Centuries ago, at its most successful and powerful, it was called the Inquisition.)
Flight of Shadows examines the world outside Appalachia. My speculation comes from a mishmash of ancient history and current events. My hope is that the novel’s fictional setting will remind you that the real America, with all its imperfections and infighting, is still a glorious democracy and a unique bastion of freedom, a legacy built by the women and men who have sacrificed for it over the last few centuries.
To those familiar with the sources I drew upon, it will be immediately obvious that the story is based on the city-states of ancient Greece and on the walled cities built for defense against primitive weaponry. The “Industrials” are intended to bring to mind a similar slave-based society and the correspondingly low value of life in cultures before Jesus Christ and the impact his teachings had on Western civilization.
It might seem far-fetched that in a few generations America could find itself in a city-state society like the one in Flight of Shadows, one of degraded freedoms and stability. Yet several factors indicate that the laws currently protecting human rights based on a Judeo-Christian value system are under attack. Without reform to the immigration system, we may not be far from the stratified societies so recently escaped in America and Europe. In less than fifty years, Europe’s social landscape has shifted tremendously and become increasingly polarized due to legal immigration intended to facilitate cheap labor. And in America, can illegal immigration not have far-reaching effects over the next few generations? These illegals live in secret and in fear in America, willing to trade cheap labor and their human rights for the chance at a better life for their children, while politicians accept the inconvenience and posture against such realities until jobs become scarce. I believe the religious right in America, as an organized political force, must lead the efforts to help these desperate immigrant families.
The social strata of Flight of Shadows is like that of many developing countries. A tiny percentage of extremely wealthy live as kings among the majority of extremely impoverished.
Yet even democracies can disintegrate, as in Germany, which radically changed under Nazi rule. A country once called Rhodesia, only one generation ago, was a prosperous country in the south of Africa. But political instability due to racial inequalities radically changed the way of life there. And under a dictator who slipped into power through a majority vote, Zimbabwe’s economy has now become tatters. By squandering the checks and balances of democracy that currently protect America, the Rhodesian farmers have seen their economy and average life span halved in less than twenty years. The skilled and educated have fled the country, and it is no coincidence that there, too, a small minority of the very wealthy live in comfort among the majority whose hopes of freedom are now withering in shanties. These tragedies were not far from my mind as I wrote.
Other existing conditions across the world influenced the novel. Palestinians travel for hours in darkness to wait outside checkpoints for just a chance to work inside Israel and spend hours in darkness traveling back at the end of the day to the poverty of the Gaza Strip. Like illegal immigrants in America, these men and women are driven by helplessness, working any way possible to feed their children, politically hampered by the extremists among them who turn to terrorism.
Water shortages could completely disfigure our governing system and our nation’s economy. Interstate squabbles over water rights have taken place in the southwest and southeast United States, and mass shortages are predicted over the next few decades. Wars have been fought for much less.
As for the decline of civil liberties during and after war, all we need do is examine the headlines about the many challenges to civil rights laws since the war in Iraq to see what can happen if citizens aren’t vigilant about the dangers of allowing power to be concentrated at the top.
Could we come to the point where genetic science is capable of what the novel presents? DNA manipulation has already produced insects growing legs out of their mouths and paleontologists modifying chicken embryos to hatch living dinosaurs.
As much as the novel is politically or scientifically speculative, however, my hope is that you might remember it most as a story of a father who loved his daughter, who, like each of us, was born to be free.
AS A BEST-SELLING AUTHOR, Sigmund Brouwer has written eighteen novels and also several series of children’s books. His novel The Last Disciple was featured in Time magazine and on ABC’s Good Morning America. His most recent novel is Broken Angel. A champion of literacy, he teaches writing workshops for students in schools from the Arctic Circle to inner-city Los Angeles. Sigmund is married to Christian recording artist Cindy Morgan and, with their two daughters, they divide their time between homes in Red Deer, Alberta, Canada, and Nashville, Tennessee. He can be found online at www.sigmundbrouwer.com.
FLIGHT OF SHADOWS
PUBLISHED BY WATERBROOK PRESS
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The characters and events in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to actual persons or events is coincidental.
Copyright © 2010 by Sigmund Brouwer
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Published in the United States by WaterBrook Multnomah, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House Inc., New York.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Brouwer, Sigmund, 1959–
Flight of shadows : a novel / Sigmund Brouwer.—1st ed.
p. cm.
Sequel to: Broken angel.
Summary: In a future world where the fundamentalist government distorts true Christianity, a winged girl named Caitlyn escapes to the Outside but soon finds herself on the run again from an organization seeking her body’s genetic information.
eISBN: 978-0-307-44636-7
[1. Science fiction. 2. Christian life—Fiction. 3. Genetic engineering—Fiction.
4. Survival—Fiction.] I. Title.
PZ7.B79984Fk 2010
[Fic]—dc22
2009048011
v3.0