“Bring me in to what?”
“To the Brotherhood, man. The Brotherhood of the Scythe.” It was the intruder’s turn now to drip with condescension. “Man, you don’t know nothing. You have no idea what you’re dealing with.”
“I’ve known Shadow Leader for twenty years. He was my CO in Grenada and Desert Storm.”
The man glanced up at Dylan and laughed, revealing a top row of blood-smeared teeth. “Like I said, you’re greener than grass. That Shadow Leader was harvested over a decade ago. Even I’m too young to have met that guy, although I’ve heard stories about him.”
“Harvested?” Dylan asked, wincing at the coldness of it.
“Yeah. You want me to draw you a picture?”
“No pictures necessary.” Dylan blew out heavily as the knowledge settled into his mind. “So tell me—what’s this Brotherhood?”
The man blinked, then fixed a suspicious stare on Dylan. “You don’t want to know.”
“Yes, I do.”
“Look, it doesn’t matter. I screwed up this assignment royally. These guys don’t tolerate screwing up. So just kill me now. Make it quick, okay?”
“I may not know much about this Brotherhood, but you don’t know a thing about me. I only kill bad guys.”
“Hey, I just gave this pansy over here a nasty concussion, a broken nose, maybe even a shattered spine. Doesn’t that qualify me?”
“I mean real bad guys—not just wet boys like you who mess up training ops. I mean dope dealers, dictators, and arms brokers. The kind out there ruining the world, killing innocents by the tens of thousands. That’s who I’ve always gone after. It’s one of the reasons your bosses kept me pure. At least until now.”
“Well, then you’re about to cross the line, dude. ’Cause, member or not, they’re intent on motivating you to take this heavy assignment you’ve been waffling about. And if you want to live, I wouldn’t think about telling them no.”
“What is so stinking important about some twenty-year-old chick?” Dylan said with irritation crackling in his voice. “How can she be worth all this trouble? I’m not in the business of sanctioning girls. I mean, girls. Think about it.”
“I wouldn’t tell you if I knew,” the man said, his voice rising. “But I do know that these are men who wouldn’t bat an eyelash at killing a child. In fact, they kill children by the hundreds, every day.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Man, you have no idea—”
A pistol shot shattered the air, punching a neat black hole dead center in the man’s forehead. He fell backward, his eyes wide in shock.
Dylan’s instincts flooded back into place. He snatched up a second revolver from his waist and whirled around.
The gunman was less than ten feet away. He wore a crisp, green military-type uniform. His weapon was not visible.
He smiled the smile of a reptile. “Dylan, I am Shadow Leader.”
Dylan moved forward and shoved his revolver into the man’s face. Shadow Leader did not flinch. “I don’t know you,” Dylan said. “You sound like the man I once knew as Shadow Leader, but no more than that. Why did you do that to my old friend?”
“I gave him a life beyond anything you could ever imagine,” the man said. Dylan almost retched. There went that smile again. . . .
“Yeah?” Dylan pointed to the intruder’s bleeding body. “Like you just gave him?”
“No, this idiot traded his soul far too cheaply. I’m talking about something far more glorious. Listen, don’t worry about him. The only thing he told you right is that he was merely a warm-up for you. And, if necessary, a warning.”
“About turning down your assignment? I never turned it down. I just said I needed to think about it.”
“Well, the time for thinking about it has ended. The girl has just agreed to go on the Mara McQueen show. Which, without briefing you ad nauseam, happens to be the worst possible news. Are you in or out?”
Dylan rubbed the bruised side of his face, then turned back to the man. “How did you get in here undetected, anyway?”
“Oh, you mean the floor sensors you installed? Nice touch, Dylan. But you will never be able to defend yourself against me or the people I represent. Remember that.”
Dylan breathed in deeply. This latest assignment had gone from being a gold mine attached to a dubious target to a desperate bid to save his own life. He wondered—could he use the seven-figure fee to escape this man forever?
“Tell me about this girl,” he said. “Why is she the target?”
“I don’t have time for a full explanation. But just think of it this way. What if you had a hundred-yard bead on a darling little four-year-old girl, who happened to be sitting there playing with the trigger to an atomic bomb? In fact, she’s two seconds away from detonating the biggest, baddest nuclear device ever conjured up by the black heart of man. Do you sit there and moralize about the right or wrong of taking out a little girl, and let millions of people get incinerated in the process? Or do you take the shot? See, even though she’s innocent, and sweet, and completely well-meaning, what this young woman threatens to unravel is incredibly dangerous. Dangerous to the whole world, in ways I could take days to explain to you. She cannot be allowed to continue, and she won’t. The question is, will we have Dylan Hatfield with us to perform the hit safely, in a sanitary fashion? Or will Dylan Hatfield miss out on fifteen million bucks and wind up in a dumpster somewhere?”
“I hear you. But you know what I hate?” Dylan said, anger stealing back into his voice. “You—or whoever was you, back then—used to value the fact that I had a moral backbone. That I went after real evil as someone with a righteous cause. Now you’re treating my principles like they were an afterthought.”
The man smiled patronizingly. “That’s not true, Dylan. I always warned you that the day would come when we’d have to consider a paradigm shift. When moral backbone would become much less simple, less cut-and-dry. Well, that day has come, and the clock’s ticking.” He held up a Glock 9 pistol. “So what’s it gonna be?”
“Don’t insult me,” Dylan growled. “Put down the gun and let’s go.”
CHAPTER
_ 15
MyCorner blog: Abby Sherman
I Just Returned From Heaven!
Dear Friends,
I had another dream. Actually, much more than that. Another experience, another journey to someplace else. I wasn’t looking for another one—you know, some sort of sequel. That first dream has revolutionized my life enough that I was quite comfortable marking it down as a once-in-a-lifetime event. In fact, even the strange “spiritual sight” which developed after that first dream seems to have subsided. I’m told it may come back at any time, but for now I’m grateful for a reprieve from the horrible things I was seeing all around me, even if they were balanced by the appearance of angels and plenty of beauty.
But as they say, God has a sense of humor all His own. See, if I wasn’t looking for a sequel, I definitely wasn’t expecting anything to top the first one. For one thing, I wouldn’t have thought it was possible. Not until now.
But friends, I’ve gotta be honest. This one rocked. It blew the first one out of the water. I guess I gave it all away in the blog title, but I couldn’t help myself.
And I realize I’m running the risk of falling into the oldest cliché of the chick-journal—the dandelion-doodled, hearts-overthe-I’s, estrogen-drenched tale of some buff savior whisking me off to Beulah Land.
But check this out, friends, because this dream wasn’t like that. If you think I’m deluding myself, I trust y’all to tell me. There’s enough bandwidth now for you guys to let me know.
My guess is, if I tell this right, you won’t. Here goes . . .
I was right here in the hospital bed, so exhausted from a day of tests that I hardly knew where I was. In fact, now that I think of it, I’m not exactly sure it was a dream at all. That’s the only ready word I can think of, but it doesn’t do it justice. True, it starte
d while I was in bed, and when I was exhausted beyond belief. Yet I wasn’t actually asleep. I was lying here when suddenly I felt this presence.
If you’ve lived awhile, you’ve probably had that weird sensation when someone walks up behind you, no matter how silently they approach. I know I have.
This was the same sensation, only jacked up a million times. This may not make sense, but at first it was like this “intensity” coming toward me, this concentrated pocket of importance. More of a force field or a power source than anything else. I remember whipping around in my bed, because the sensation was so powerful and so frightening.
And then I paused, and I took stock for a second.
Because now I recognized it.
This is going to sound weird, but it was the same personality I sensed pouring out of the baby in my last dream.
Then something inside me jumped for joy, because I realized who it was.
It was Him!
THE HOSPITAL —NEXT MORNING
Abby heard the familiar intro music swell and the familiar credits flash across the large monitor wedged in the corner. It was surreal— the woman featured in its quick-cutting, choppily edited montage stood only three feet away.
It struck Abby that, despite the strange context where she now stood, the woman beside her bed was probably the most familiar human figure in the modern world. Globally adored, self-made billionaire, spiritual seeker and shepherd to a large swath of the human population, star of the most lucrative daily television franchise in media history . . . the superlatives went on and on.
And now all those abstractions were distilled into one human face, one plump female body standing an arm’s reach away. She could hear her African-style bracelets jangle softly. Smell her exotic perfume. Feel the press of her unusually long fingers upon her own, lingering from their handshake just moments before.
Mara McQueen. The last name wasn’t necessary, of course. Both the show, her magazine, her television network, even her supermarket line of household goods bore the single first name. Mara. The two syllables seemed to quiver with the promise of wholeness and harmony.
Suddenly the music ended. A leather-clad man wedged in the room’s doorway turned from the monitor to the woman herself and pointed. Abby felt the camera lights turn on and the attention spark to life in a flash of heat.
“Friends, you can see I’m not in the studio today,” Mara began in her trademark friendly cadence. “No audience. No stage. I’m here in the presence of one of the most remarkable and unlikely media stories in recent history. Chances are, if you know anyone with a MyCorner site—and who doesn’t? I have one myself—then you’ve heard of Abby Sherman and the amazing dream she shared over the web. Friends, there have been Internet celebrities before. Private individuals thrust into an odd, Andy Warhol–like few minutes of notoriety by some media fluke. But most of them were seeking something. Something gainful, I mean. A career. Attention. Vindication. Even revenge. But all Abby Sherman wanted when she threw a desperate plea out into cyberspace was a wee bit of closure. A little knowledge in order to finally put something behind her.”
Finally, Mara turned toward her. It was hard to tell what felt more jarring—the gape of the camera’s large glass eyeball, or the glare of Mara’s own charisma directed at her.
“Abby didn’t really imagine anyone would answer her plea. But to date, over thirty-eight thousand young women have. And yes, all women. In fact—and here’s part of the mystery—all African-American women. They’ve all written in to reveal a remarkable kinship with someone, who on the surface has little in common with most of them. A self-admitted, rich California girl who likes surfing and church, in that order.”
Abby had never heard the paradoxes of her situation described that pithily before, and the sound of it made her chuckle. Instantly the camera panned over, seeming to take note of her reaction.
“And this morning, even as we met Abby for the first time, while preparing to bring you this broadcast from the hospital room where she lies dying of an unknown disease, this remarkable woman had another surprise in store for us. In case you haven’t watched the late-breaking news, or personally checked the most followed blog on the Internet, let me just read the title of Abby’s newest upload. Do you want to read it, Abby, or do you want me to?”
“You go ahead, Mara. It sounds better coming from you.”
Now the chuckle came from Mara. “All right, Abby. The title is ‘I just returned from heaven.’ Abby, is that a true statement, or just a fanciful description meant to attract more attention?”
“It’s the truth, Mara. As you know, I’m here because of a terminal diagnosis. So attention is the furthest thing from my mind.”
Mara flashed her trademark reassuring grin. “I know it is, honey. I just wanted to acknowledge that it’s a pretty incredible claim.”
“It is. But still, I can’t escape the fact that it’s completely true. I was . . . taken on a journey, a preview of sorts. To the real heaven.”
“By no less than Jesus Christ.”
Abby cocked her head in a rueful assessment of how to reply. Clearly it was a tall order. “Mara, I don’t expect anyone to believe what I’m saying. I just know what I experienced. Inside myself, I know it beyond the shadow of a doubt. But that’s personal. It’s based on a lot of perceptions that are completely real to me, including the first dream I wrote about.”
“Well, clearly, Abby, an awful lot of people have chosen to place their faith in what you’ve been experiencing. Do you think it’s because, as a person with a terminal illness, they find you easier to believe?”
“Maybe so,” Abby replied with the surprised look of someone who had not considered that angle. “I know that I’m not interested in wasting anybody’s time with idle fantasies, that’s for sure.”
“So, Abby, for the benefit of those last few people on earth who haven’t logged in as your friend and perused your blog, why don’t you tell us the story in your own words?”
CHAPTER
_ 16
MANHATTAN
The drawing room’s three windows, which rose to its ceiling height of twenty-one feet, usually looked out onto the green expanse of Central Park. Right now, however, their full-length mahogany blinds were drawn shut and the vast space darkened. In the near corner, a sixty-inch plasma screen glowed with the pale images of a hospital room. In it floated two faces. One was brown and exceedingly famous. The other was young, white and, until today, unknown to most people except the man standing in a silk track suit before the scene, clenching and unclenching one fist at his side, and in the other holding a silver-plated cell phone to his ear.
“I don’t care if it creates a firestorm! I want her silenced now, do you understand?”
He paused and turned away from the screen while the other party replied, seemingly unable to bear any more of the television program.
“I know it’s delicate, but isn’t that what we’re paying him for? Isn’t that why you’ve been hyping this guy to me all this time? His ability to pull off long-distance or high-difficulty harvests without being caught?”
The Elder turned back to the monitor, unable to contain his curiosity. It bore a close-up of Abby Sherman, luminous and, in the morning light, beautiful despite her prolonged hospital stay. She was speaking intensely.
“Hold on. I have to hear what this little snot is saying. It may be too late. . . .”
ABBY'S HOSPITAL ROOM —THAT MOMENT
“It was the same person, the same spirit living inside that little baby. That’s the only way I can say it. What I felt coming from that infant was so powerful that there’s no way I could mistake it. As He carried me out of this room, He was communicating to me somehow. I’d call it speech because it was very specific—He was comforting me, calming me, telling me how much He loved me—only I couldn’t say for sure whether the words were spoken or I even heard words at all. I just felt them register in my own spirit, and I knew exactly what He was saying and who was speaking.
“I know it all sounds airy-fairy, vague and New Agey, but the experience of it was very intense and real. He was telling me, ‘Do not be afraid, Abby. Let me show you what lies ahead, and you will not fear it any longer.’
“Because I wasn’t in my body anymore. We’d left it behind. I actually looked down on myself, lying trembling and wide-eyed on the bed. The rest of the hospital floated past under us. I saw panels and wires and darkness, followed by more floors, beds, and nurses walking, then more beds until finally we were shooting past the rooftop into the night air over Los Angeles.
“And you know what else is strange? As incredible as it might sound to float up high like that, it meant almost nothing to me. That is, nothing compared to the wonder of who was carrying me. I didn’t care about the sights near as much as the feeling pouring into my soul from the One guiding me.
“Man, I had no idea I could feel so much love. Of any kind. I remember my mother’s love from a long time ago, magnified the way we all distort old memories, and it was strong. Everything a mother’s love should be—except maybe for having been interrupted so soon.
“But while this love was in some ways similar, it was also a million times stronger. I felt like I was bathed in it, like I could swim around in this warm bath of pure love from this . . . yes, I’d call Him a parent. And if anyone on earth ever invented some lotion that soaked into your skin and healed every bruise, every cut, every abrasion you’d ever suffered, then in the spiritual sense this love was like that. I felt it soak into every pain, every inner wound I’ve ever endured. I could almost feel every tear I’ve ever shed dry up like it never happened— or the pain that had provoked it. Like time was moving in reverse and my life’s sorrows were being rolled up and tossed away.
“At the same time, I felt so close to Him. I remembered for a second the almost smothering feeling of kinship I’d felt with my best friend when I was six years old. Beth Vega. She came over for a sleep-over, and we stayed up long into the night telling each other all our stories, all our secrets, and when the sun finally started peeking through the shutters, I felt like she and I had become a single person.
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