“I remember seeing the footage of the snow in Colorado and Utah,” Cheyenne said. “I was thirteen.”
The pothole-ridden and torn-up road they drove down took them past shells of buildings with broken windows and scattered rubble. They appeared to have been destroyed not by snow but by bombs.
“So is there a nice bed-and-breakfast around these parts?” she joked.
“You’re quite witty for three thirty in the morning,” he said.
“This is an ideal place to kill someone and leave their body behind.”
“Ah, don’t let my skin color and dreadlocks scare you.”
“I think having someone driving me is more unnerving than anything. Especially in an old car like this.”
“Hey, this Jeep Wrangler’s in great condition considering it’s twenty years old. I hate being driven around. Even if it’s in the big cities where they don’t allow you to drive yourself.”
“Well, you’re driving me somewhere in the wilderness. How far away is this place we’re going to?”
“Not far,” he said.
“And will I be seeing Jazz when I arrive?”
“Not sure about that. You’ll have to see.”
The roads they were driving on now had as much as half a foot of snow on them, yet they made steady progress.
“Four-wheel drive,” the man said. “Can’t beat it.”
The pine trees on each side of them were clustered for fifty yards. After that nothing but dark countryside could be seen. Soon they were traveling in a thick forest, the road weaving around like a maze, with some snowdrifts a foot tall.
“Are we going to be stranded here?”
“We’re all stranded in this world,” he said. “The key is how prepared you happen to be.”
The road seemed to fade away, yet the Jeep continued to drive into the woods and down the side of a mountain. Soon the forest thinned out, and she could see a small shack in the middle of a field.
“We’re here,” the driver said.
She couldn’t see anything else in the glow of the headlights.
“ ‘Here’? What’s that? Looks like an outpost from the eighteen hundreds or something.”
“Yeah,” he said as he stopped in front of the nondescript wood cabin. “Or something. Come on.”
5.
The cold early-morning air woke her up fully, and it didn’t get much warmer as they walked into the building. Inside it appeared to be a garage of sorts, containing a riding mower and a tractor, neither of which had apparently been used in years. A wooden table contained some tools, and there were empty boxes and pallets stored against one wall.
The tall stranger went to the center of the room and pulled back the gray floor mat, revealing the door to a hatch. He lifted the heavy door up.
“Follow me,” he told her as he began to walk down the stairs into the white light.
Instead of asking one more time where they were going, she simply continued to trail him. The steps were sturdy metal, and they were on them for quite a while before reaching a shut door. He touched the scanner on the side of the wall, then turned the knob. A large room opened up that made Cheyenne think of pictures of her father at his old company.
“Here we are.”
Cheyenne watched as the door shut behind them. The young man with the dreadlocks gave her another charming smile.
“In case you haven’t already surmised, I’m Jazz,” he said, offering his hand. “I’ll properly introduce myself now.”
She shook it while still taking in everything around her. “I’m Cheyenne.”
“Of course you are,” he said.
Ten monitors surrounded them, all connected to various computers, each screen on and displaying either a data page or an old-school screen saver like her father used to have on his ancient physical computer.
“Yeah, I know,” Jazz said. “Like seeing an old movie with someone using a cell phone the size of a shoe. Don’t let the hardware fool you. There are advanced things going on. It’s just that we gotta stay off the network. Some of the technology we’re using is very outdated, but it works.”
Cheyenne walked up to a nearby silver computer and touched the screen. “My father had one of these. I remember sitting on his lap taking pictures with him using it.”
She looked back at Jazz, who was checking another monitor and using a mouse to do so. “Is my father alive?” she asked without waiting any longer.
He paused what he was doing and looked up at her. “I don’t know. I swear. He’s gone silent, which is the reason you’re here now. The reason you were contacted. He set everything up in case something happened.”
“In case what happened?” she asked.
“We’ve been regularly in touch, and if he missed two different contacts, we were basically to set off the alarm. The letter you got. His instructions.”
“What about the voice in my head?” she asked.
Jazz looked at her without any indication of knowing what she was talking about.
“Someone was talking to me. Through my SYNAPSYS.”
“That’s impossible.”
“That wasn’t you?”
“No,” he said. “I don’t know a thing about it. Were they speaking crazy to you?”
“They were helping me. Guiding me.”
He only nodded, continuing to proceed with whatever he was doing on his computer. “I’ve seen crazier things happen, so I’m not ever gonna say that someone’s making something up.”
“What is all of this? This place?”
“I’ll explain everything in a minute,” he said. “Well, not everything, but enough. I’m checking to make sure we’re all good.”
A large print on the wall above a set of monitors showed the image of a brick building with red handwriting saying, “What we do in life echoes in eternity,” except the final word was being wiped away by a ghostly apparition of a street cleaner complete with a cloth and bucket.
“Like it?” Jazz asked her, noticing what she was examining.
“Sure. Something you did?”
“Yeah, right. It’s from a graffiti artist named Banksy.”
“Sure. I’ve heard about him.”
“Love his work. Jealous of it, to be honest. Computer code’s not as sexy as street graffiti.”
There were no personal belongings that she could spot, not a photo or an opened bag of potato chips. Other than the computers alive with activity, the room looked abandoned.
“Is anybody else here?” she asked.
“No. Only me. It looks like everything’s cool. Nothing negative. No word from anybody and no chatter, which is a good thing.”
He began to head to another door at the back of the room. “Want some coffee? Something else to drink or eat?”
“Coffee would be wonderful,” she said.
“Come on. I’ll give you a tour of my humble abode. I don’t ever get a chance to show it off. In fact, the last person who visited was your father.”
6.
As sparse and bare-bones as the computer room had appeared, the rest of this underground hideaway was the opposite. Jazz had made it very much his own space, and he showed the surprisingly large space off after getting her a mug of hot coffee.
“Was this a government bunker or something that you had remodeled?” she asked as they stood in the kitchen with white cabinets and stainless steel appliances and a long bar with stools in its center.
“No way. No, it was one of the many survival complexes that people started setting up like crazy after 9/11. After having presidents that scared everybody, and especially after President Garrison was shot, the billionaire techies went crazy with these. This particular one belonged to a guy from San Francisco. I guess this was his Colorado getaway, but he had them stashed away all over the world. So if things went t
o hell, he’d be close to one.”
“So he still owns it?” Cheyenne asked.
“Oh no. He swallowed a bullet when the market crashed. So this had been virtually abandoned. I guess you can’t escape the end of the world when it’s your bank account that’s blowing up.”
The coffee warmed her and tasted good. All of this was fascinating and made absolutely no sense since it had nothing to do with her father.
“I know you have a million questions,” Jazz said. “Let me show you the rest of the place while I try to explain some things.”
The shelter was four times as large as her apartment in Incen Tower. There was a main living area, complete with two long couches and a wall that substituted for a television and movie screen. A wet bar in the corner of the room had enough liquor in it for him to survive a couple of apocalypses.
“Good to know you’re prepared,” she said, pointing at the stash.
“Yeah, and the irony is I’m three years sober.”
“Seems as if it would be too tempting to have it around.”
“Or I can go to bed every day feeling victorious that I didn’t need to open any of those bottles.”
Along with more framed prints of artwork from Banksy, movie posters and album covers and family photos covered the walls.
“I’ve been down here for a couple of years now. Living and working here, that is.”
“Doing what?” she asked.
“Preparing for the end,” Jazz said. “Like all the preppers. Only our preparation is a bit different. But you’ll see. Here’s one guest bedroom, as I call it, and then there’s another. Each has a bathroom. Running water. Hot water.”
“It’s as big as my bedroom—my old bedroom. They even have queen mattresses. I don’t have one of those.”
“This is a fun room for all those times I have my buddies over, which is never,” Jazz said, showing her a space with a pool table and another loaded wet bar.
They reached the main bedroom, and above the doorway handwritten words were scrawled in black paint. She paused to look and read them out loud. “ ‘That terrible day of the LORD is near. Swiftly it comes—a day of bitter tears, a day when even strong men will cry out. Zephaniah 1:14.’ Wow. That’s a motivating verse.”
“It’s pronounced Zef, not Zep,” he said with a smile.
“I don’t think I could find that in a Bible.”
She glanced into his bedroom, which looked not only messy but also a bit alarming.
“Sorry. I didn’t have a chance to clean it,” he said as he picked up a pair of boxers near the entrance.
“Those sorta resemble a horror movie,” she said as she pointed at the walls beside and behind the bed.
“Yeah. I know. It makes me look a bit whacked out. I get it. Just hear me out. Okay?”
Cheyenne stepped closer to the painting, another print, but this one covered half the wall above his bed. The image looked like a mouth of fire and hell opening to consume a city in ancient times while a few terrified people in robes were running away. Looking closely, Cheyenne could see another figure nearer to the burning buildings, a woman staring back at them.
“This poster is a replica of a painting called The Destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah by John Martin,” Jazz said, “a painter who lived in what used to be England during the mid–eighteen hundreds. He liked painting end-of-the-world stuff like this.”
“Doesn’t this give you nightmares?” she said, staring at the flames spewing from the sky.
“I don’t sleep,” he said with a smile. “Do you know the story of Lot in the Bible?”
“No.”
Jazz shook his head. “You know a million different ways to sway people using your computer, but you don’t know one of the most common stories from the Old Testament?”
“My father used to take me to movies on Sundays, not church.”
“Lot was the nephew of Abraham. You’ve heard of him, right?”
“Yes,” she said, but she wouldn’t have been able to say exactly who he was.
“Abraham, the father of all Jews? Come on, girl. His nephew, Lot, was living in this really bad city of Sodom, and God decided to wipe it, along with Gomorrah, off the face of the earth using fire and brimstone. And this lady right here? The one down the hill from Lot and his daughters? It’s Lot’s wife. She disobeyed God and looked back and—boom—turned into a pillar of salt.”
“Were these the sort of bedtime stories you were told as a child?”
He turned to her, the smile no longer there, a look of urgency on his face.
“If it’s a fairy tale, then it’s a rather spooky one,” he said. “But if it really happened, then it’s terrifying.”
“That God can kill thousands of people just like that?” Cheyenne asked.
“No. It’s scary to wonder why He doesn’t do it more often.”
The steady and calm manner in which Jazz said this alarmed her. “And you believe this really happened?”
Jazz nodded as he picked up a backpack and stuffed a few items from his desk in it.
“I expected to see lots of things related to jazz here,” she said.
“That’s the irony of my nickname. I don’t even particularly like that type of music, though it’s grown on me. The name was given to me by Acrobat.”
“By who?”
For a moment he stopped and looked at her, and then he nodded to himself. “That’s right. You really don’t know anything, do you?”
“Obviously not.”
“He calls me Jazz. I call him Acrobat. He’s the reason I’m here in the first place. The guy who connected me with your father. He’s the one who’s about to make everything happen, to expose the head of the monster.”
No smile, no hint of humor, no sign of being even remotely sarcastic. Jazz opened and shut desk drawers as if he was checking to make sure he had everything.
“And what is this Acrobat going to do?” she asked.
“You’ll see soon enough.”
Jazz moved over to the painting and tapped on the red-and-orange flames pouring out from the heavens. “This. This is what’s going to happen. And, yeah, I believe it, and, yeah, I assume you’re gonna think I’m insane for thinking this. But there are signs. Numbers and figures and dates. All leading back to the hydra.”
“The what?”
“The leaders, the cabal, the heads of it all. The ones Acrobat and your father are going to expose. That’s why your father suddenly disappeared.”
“To hide?”
“No,” Jazz said, starting to walk out of the room. “To prepare. And to help warn others. Come on.”
7.
They went back to the first room they had entered, the one with all the computers. Jazz moved a chair and put it beside another chair in front of the largest monitor in the room, telling her to have a seat next to him. He maneuvered the mouse and typed out numbers and passwords to get through a variety of screens. Soon he had several browsers open from different websites.
“I’m not even sure how to start here, whether it’s with Acrobat or how I connected with your father or why he—and all of us, frankly—are in danger. All I know is that I had specific instructions that if a woman looking and sounding like you came asking for me, I was supposed to bring you to this bunker and get you up to speed. And to wait.”
“Wait for what?” she asked.
“Orders for what to do next,” he said as he continued looking at photos and files open on the computer screen. “Okay, look at this. It’s half a dozen, just to give you a tiny sample.”
The first image he pointed to was of a handsome businessman in a suit, perhaps in his thirties, standing on the sidewalk and holding out his hand as if to tell the photographer “No pictures, please.”
“This is Armand van Namen. A top guy at Hope Trust.”
“If he’s a top guy there, he’s very high,” she said.
“Yeah, especially when you’re the only health care provider out there. He disappeared four years ago. Vanished without a single trace. Didn’t have a wife or kids, and there were absolutely no leads. No hints at foul play, no personal issues. Nothing.”
Jazz went through several short reports on him.
“This was all the coverage he got, which as you can see was nothing,” he said. “That alone was interesting enough to make one wonder. A head of one of the biggest corporations on this planet—someone people said could maybe even be the CEO one day—suddenly vanished. So I started to investigate in my own way, through the networks and the webs.”
“Were you already here?”
“No, not yet. I was living in Park City in the basement of a run-down hotel. Long story for another day. Anyway, I’d already been collecting lots and lots of data. For what or for who, another long story. But this fit into my many files and findings. It turns out that Armand van Namen—this brilliant and talented young leader dedicated to his job who also was charismatic and so Aryan-looking that he would have made Hitler proud—just so happened to find God only months before disappearing.”
She felt her skin buzz as she continued looking at the face on the screen.
Finding God just before disappearing. Just like Daddy.
“Yeah, I can read your mind. I know exactly what you’re thinking,” Jazz said. “And yes.”
“So did this guy quit his job? Did he tell people about what happened?”
“I don’t know exactly what happened at Hope Trust. He didn’t come right out and say, ‘Yeah, I believe in Jesus Christ now.’ That would be publicly saying you believe in racism and hatred of nonbelievers. Armand wasn’t public, not in a big way, but there were some who knew. A few people shared things in various interviews or online. I even tracked down one woman who said she had seen a visible change in him. Then suddenly he was gone.”
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