American Omens

by Travis Thrasher

  Jackson Heyford is a leader of the elite, the men and women who rule the masses. They don’t simply want to control. They want to corrupt.

  Wake up, people.

  This isn’t a physical or mental war. It’s a spiritual one.

  Every human being must consider if there is a God and if He had a Son named Jesus Christ.

  Our country hasn’t forgotten the message of Jesus Christ. America has rejected it. The faith of our founders is now forbidden. The hope of God is now considered hostile as we strive for global harmony.

  The churches have been shut down. The Bible outlawed. And Christians everywhere have been systematically removed from our society. The videos, photos, and reports included with this message will show you proof of that.

  The world doesn’t want to listen. George Orwell said, “If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.”

  Hear these words, America.

  “For everyone has sinned; we all fall short of God’s glorious standard. Yet God, in his grace, freely makes us right in his sight. He did this through Christ Jesus when he freed us from the penalty for our sins. For God presented Jesus as the sacrifice for sin. People are made right with God when they believe that Jesus sacrificed his life, shedding his blood.” —Romans 3:23–25

  This is the truth from the Bible.

  George Orwell also said, “In a time of universal deceit—telling the truth is a revolutionary act.”

  There is only one truth that matters.

  The revolution must start now.

  —RECKONER

  After she finished reading, Cheyenne’s eyes stayed open for a long time, the words floating like flakes in a snowstorm or ashes in a fire, uncertain where to land, content to remain in the air as long as they needed to be.

  TWENTY-TWO

  In Sight of Land

  1.

  Amy’s call came ten minutes after the message about the evils of Heyford and Acatour had been sent out. Somehow and some way Hutchence had managed to break into every single SYNAPSYS in the country with a warning about the biggest corporation in the world. Yet Will still hadn’t heard a single word from him since sneaking him onto his father’s property the night before.

  Needless to say, Amy had some questions and concerns, especially since the message was all about Will’s father, the man he had visited less than twenty-four hours ago. She said one word to him, yet he knew it contained a dozen questions.

  “Will?”

  The afternoon sun spilled through the kitchen window as Amy called from her office in Chicago while the girls were still in school. Flip was nearby, chomping on one of Will’s socks.

  I have to tell her the truth.

  “Lots to discuss,” Will told her.

  She waited, but he didn’t proceed.

  “All the things it said…I just started to watch some of the videos. I can’t believe it.”

  “Believe it,” Will said.

  “Did you know? About any of this?”

  “We need to talk,” he repeated to her, obviously not wanting to do it via SYNAPSYS. “You should leave work now.”

  “Why?”

  “I have a feeling things are gonna get pretty dangerous downtown.”

  “Okay.”

  “Amy,” he said, thinking for a minute and realizing the obvious position he was in. That they were in. “Meet me somewhere before coming home.”

  “What do you mean? Why?”

  “For privacy.”

  “Okay,” she said.

  “Remember the first place we met?”

  “Sure. I forget the actual address, but I can look it up.”

  “Ask for directions,” Will said. “Meet me there as soon as you can get on the train. I’ll meet you by the station.”

  “Is everything okay? Are the girls all right?”

  “Yeah. Everything’s fine. I’ll ask Julia’s mom if Shaye and the twins can come over after school for a couple of hours.”

  “Will, are you sure—”

  “Everything’s fine. I’ll explain. Just get there as soon as possible.”

  After calling Mrs. Schoppe to make sure the girls could come over after school, something Shaye frequently did with her best friend, Will checked on Flip. The mutt was still chewing and tearing apart the sock.

  “Come on, buddy. Let’s take you out before you do any more damage.”

  After throwing away the mangled sock and letting Flip sniff around and do nothing outside for a few minutes, Will changed into a button-down shirt and then left. He didn’t need directions for their meeting place. Will knew it quite well.

  2.

  As Will backed out of his driveway, he heard a tapping at his window, causing him to jerk the SUV to a halt. All he could see was a figure in a black army jacket, and as the man bent down to look in the window, Will saw the buzz cut. He almost floored the pedal to get away from the stranger, but he held off when he heard his name.

  “Will, can I hitch a ride?”

  It was Hutchence. For a moment Will wasn’t sure whether to let him in or to get as far away from the guy as possible. But he just nodded and motioned for Hutchence to get in the seat next to him.

  “Did you miss me?” Hutchence asked after climbing in and then clamping his hand on Will’s shoulder.

  “I miss not getting spooked by strangers,” Will said as he backed out into the street and closed the garage door. “Did you go off and join the marines?”

  “Just trying to change my appearance,” Hutchence said, rubbing the stubby fuzz on his head. “We did it.”

  “What do you mean ‘we’? I didn’t do anything.”

  “Of course you did. You were the key to the whole plan.”

  “The whole plan,” Will said as he turned onto the avenue heading toward I-88, which would lead them east to Chicago. “I know the why part, but I don’t know any of the hows.”

  “I’ll tell you on your way to meet Amy.”

  Will looked at him, surprised and suspicious. “How do you know I’m meeting her? Were you listening through my SYNAPSYS?”

  “Nope. It’s far less technologically advanced. I put a bug on Flip.”

  Will slowed the car down in further disbelief. He remembered Hutchence coming out of the blue to meet him the first time only moments after Will had picked up the dog.

  “Did you drop off Flip in front of my bookstore?” he asked Hutchence.

  “Yes.”

  “To eavesdrop on me and my family?”

  “I needed to keep tabs on you. To see if there would be any contact with your father or anybody else.”

  Will shook his head, trying to remember any embarrassing or personal conversations or actions with Flip nearby. “You know, you and my father have something in common with your invasions of privacy.”

  “The only way we were able to connect with the SYNAPSYS database field I showed you was to access it on Jackson’s property. The tools are at PASK in the Incen Tower, but the addresses and information on the SYNAPSYSes are with Heyford.”

  “So what? You broke into his bedroom and hacked into his personal files?”

  “Not quite,” Hutchence said. “One of his wonderful Frank Lloyd Wright houses on the property serves as a set of offices housing lots of data. A man who used to work at Acatour named Malek was able to access the details on it. I simply needed to get inside.”

  “And you just picked a lock to get in?” Will asked.

  “There are people watching the walls and grounds on the Heyford property. But once you get to the houses, there’s only wonderful artificial intelligence guarding and securing the buildings. It’s still a lot easier to get past machines than human beings.”

  At the red light Will scanned the cars around him. He couldn’t
help feeling watched and followed.

  “So then what happened? Why didn’t you get out?”

  “There were too many people in the parking lot surrounding your car. I didn’t want to take a risk. I stayed overnight in a closet, then had to use the lake to actually get off the property.”

  “You swam to freedom?” Will asked, laughing.

  “It worked.”

  “Do they know what we did?”

  “Not yet. And considering the chaos in Heyford’s life right now, I think you’re going to be merely an afterthought.”

  “Don’t you think he’ll find the coincidence of my being there the night before all this happened just too unlikely?”

  Hutchence nodded. “That’s why you need to do everything you can to get out of here.”

  “To get out of where?”

  “To leave the house for a while. To get away from Chicago. I suggest you take a trip to see your in-laws. I wouldn’t be surprised if your wife’s office in the city shuts down for a while.”

  “Why?”

  “Anger is going to be rampant in the streets,” Hutchence said. “I don’t have to be a prophet to know that. Just you wait.”

  “And that’s what you wanted?”

  “I wanted to wake the world up, Will. So tell me. Don’t you feel fully alive?”

  He didn’t answer the Reckoner. Fully alive was far different from the storm settling inside him.

  I feel fear and alarm. And I wish I could just go back to sleep.

  3.

  Will wasn’t exactly sure even how to begin.

  After they arrived at the train station, Hutchence told him goodbye and said he would be in touch. Will didn’t ask when. He waited in the parking space watching the trains stop every fifteen minutes. After the fourth one arrived, he saw his wife walking down the steps looking out to the lot. He got out of the car and waved her over.

  “Is everything okay?” she asked again.

  As he leaned over and gave her a hug, Amy looked alarmed.

  “Will…”

  “The girls are at the Schoppes’, and they’re fine. And I’m fine.”

  “Have you heard about the rioting in Chicago?” she asked. “It’s a good thing I got out of there.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Why did you want to meet here?”

  Amy was logical and analytical, so he knew if he suddenly told her everything, from the first day of meeting Hutchence to helping with the message that had been sent out, it would probably feel like a tsunami hitting her.

  Before saying another word, he told her to turn off her SYNAPSYS to be on the safe side. “I wanted to let you know about my meeting with my father,” he said after she made sure the device was off. “When I explain, you’ll know why.”

  Amy looked at him and was about to say something until he put a finger up to his lips.

  “Just wait, okay?” he said.

  “You’re scaring me.”

  Just wait until you hear everything. “Don’t be scared. It’s only five minutes away. We can talk there.”

  Sure enough, they drove a few blocks down to Chicago Avenue, then they turned and pulled up to the house in the Oak Park neighborhood. Amy opened her window and looked out in disbelief.

  “What happened to Wright Books? When did it close?”

  “It’s been a while,” Will told her. “Come on. Let’s get out.”

  The temperature had hurdled over fifty degrees today, so the air and sunshine felt inviting. Once they were outside and stepping onto the sidewalk, Will scanned the street and sidewalks around them.

  “Why do you keep looking around?”

  “Even in the broad daylight, I feel like someone’s listening,” Will said.

  This made Amy look around, but when he didn’t say anything else, her focus went back to the structure that was once called the Robert Parker House.

  “Is every bookstore in the country going to close?” Amy asked.

  “Probably,” Will said. “I couldn’t bring myself to tell you when it closed a couple of years ago.”

  “It’s been two years?”

  “Yeah. I thought knowing that might make you more nervous about my store.” He stopped himself for a second, noting the use of “my.” He used to say “our” until the bookstore became more of a burden than a blessing.

  “When Wright Books closed, I saw the writing on the wall. And I was right. No pun intended.”

  The beautiful independent bookstore had been named after the famous man who designed this house, a modified Queen Anne style with two octagonal spires.

  “I think the reason I fell in love with this years ago was because Frank Lloyd Wright built it under another name,” Will said. “He couldn’t work outside of the architecture firm where he was employed. So it’s considered one of his bootleg homes.”

  Amy was looking at Will rather than the house. “Why’d you bring me to the place we met? To remind me?”

  “Yeah, to let you remember that very dark day,” Will said, actually making a rare joke around her.

  “It wasn’t a ‘dark’ day.”

  “I remember first seeing you in the side room with the spire roof. The one with all the windows. The sun lit up your hair in this dazzling sort of way.”

  “Oh yes,” she said, rolling her eyes. “I was this glowing angel that captivated you.”

  “You were,” Will said matter-of-factly.

  “Please. So you began to stalk me in a bookstore, huh?”

  “The irony is that you’re not even a reader, though our whole lives have been under the shadows of books and fictional tales.”

  “Another way we’re completely opposite,” Amy said, finally beginning to stare at the house again.

  “I didn’t bring that up to be negative, even though it’s hard for me not to be negative these days. I say that because…love happened. And love keeps us together. But it’s not this you-and-me, romance-in-the-Frank-Lloyd-Wright-bookstore, the-sun-seeping-in-on-a-perfect-day kind of love I’m talking about. It’s God loving me and knowing I needed you. Hopefully that we needed each other. And I say that because you have to trust me with everything I’m about to tell you. And I need to trust you to not tell anybody else.”

  Walking down a crumbling sidewalk, Will told Amy everything about Hutchence, about the first day they met and the subsequent meetings, trying to sum up a few of the things he’d said about the project he needed Will for and about how they’d been successful.

  “You were a part of that? The greatest hack of all time?” Amy laughed and not in a cynical way but truly amused.

  “You seem delighted,” Will said.

  “Have you lost your mind?”

  “I lost it about five years ago trying to keep a bookstore afloat.”

  She wiped tears out of her eyes, tears prompted by her laughter.

  “The fact that you helped do this to your father. That is priceless.”

  They continued to walk with Amy shaking her head, her ponytail swishing like a cheerleader’s pom-pom.

  “No wonder you’ve been walking around like someone half-possessed,” she said. “I’ve been so worried about you.”

  But you don’t seem worried now. I don’t get it.

  “I know I haven’t been easy to live with. Not just since losing the bookstore but for the last few years. And the moment I finally closed the door for the very last time, a guy named Hutchence showed up and started talking about religious persecution and secret societies and God’s judgment.”

  “But how did you get involved with breaking into people’s SYNAPSYSes?”

  “The only way to do it was to get onto my father’s property,” Will said.

  “So that’s why you contacted him.”

  “Yeah.”

  “And all those things tha
t were in that message? The stuff about Acatour? I only began to read some of the documents that came with it.”

  “It’s all true,” Will said, “based on everything I saw and all the things Hutchence showed me. At first I didn’t want to have anything to do with him, especially when I found out he knew who my father was.”

  “How’d he discover that?”

  “I have no idea. I don’t even know his background. Maybe he was in the FBI. Or worked for Acatour as a computer genius. But I got scared. I am scared. Amy, this shouldn’t be happening. None of this. We should be taking our girls to soccer games and making popcorn as we watch the hundredth Pixar movie. Right? I didn’t want to believe.”

  Will turned and motioned to start heading back down the sidewalk to where they’d started.

  “So you think our house is bugged and we’re being monitored?” Amy asked.

  “I don’t know about that. Hutchence hasn’t been discovered yet. I do know my father has been keeping tabs on me with his wonderful SYNAPSYS. I’m officially done with mine. For good.”

  A giggle spilled from her lips, and Will stopped. “What is so funny?”

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I know I shouldn’t be laughing. It’s just…”

  “It’s just what?”

  “I’m proud of you. For being brave and standing up to that monster who didn’t raise you. And for standing up for your faith. Something I’m not so good at, especially in my field.”

  They reached the Victorian house once again and could see its octagonal turret peeking through the trees in the front yard.

  “I realized something about my father today,” Will said, “something I think he doesn’t even know. There’s something about Wright Books I never told you, a reason I would shop there all the time. It’s because my mother worked there before my parents had kids, when they were starting out and she had to help support him.”

  She looked at him in surprise. “Why didn’t you tell me this?”

  “You know I don’t like talking about my parents. I hated thinking about her having this low-paying job to support that egomaniac. But it never dawned on me that he’s been trying to buy back my mother in some twisted and sick way.”