The Heaven Trilogy

by Ted Dekker

  Tears ran down her father’s face, past his parted lips. The chopper’s engines had retreated for a moment but now they drew near once again. They were returning.

  Behind Jonathan, Tanya’s mother scooted along the floor toward them, her face ashen white and streaked wet. Blood dripped to the floor from a large hole in her right arm.

  Tanya spun back to the trapdoor and thrust it to one side. A thought careened through her skull, suggesting that she had broken her nail while yanking on the trapdoor. Ripped it right off, maybe. Hurt bad enough. She swung her legs into the hole and dropped into darkness.

  The cellar was tiny, a box really—a crate large enough to hide a few chickens for a few hours. Tanya squeezed to one side, allowing room for her father or mother to drop in beside her. The guns were tearing at the roof again, like a gas-powered chain saw.

  “Father, hurry!” Tanya yelled, panic straining her throat.

  But Father did not hurry. Father dropped the lid back onto the crate, Clump, and pitch-blackness stabbed Tanya’s wide eyes.

  Above, the bullets were cutting the house up like firewood. Tanya sucked at the black air and threw her arms about to orient herself, suddenly terrified that she’d come down here alone. Above, she could hear her mother screaming and Tanya whimpered below the clamor.

  “Mother?”

  Her father’s muted voice came to her urgently, insisting something, but she could make out only her name.

  “Tanya! Ta . . . ugh!”

  A faint thud reached into the crate.

  Tanya cried out. “Father!”

  Her mother had fallen silent too. A numbing chill ripped through Tanya’s spine, like one of those chain guns blasting, only along her vertebrae.

  And then the hammering stopped. Echoes rang in her ears. Echoes of thumping bullets. Above her only silence. The attack had been from the air— no soldiers on the ground. Yet.

  “Fatherrrrr!” Tanya screamed it, a full-throated, raw scream that bounced back in her face and left her in silence again.

  She panted and heard only those echoes. Her chest felt as though it were rupturing, like a submarine hull fallen too deep.

  Tanya suddenly knew that she had to get out of this box. She stood from her crouch and her back collided with wood. She reached above her head and shoved upward. It refused to budge. The door had somehow been locked!

  Tanya fell back, gasping for air, stretching her eyes in the darkness. But she saw only black, as if it were thick tar instead of emptiness around her. Her right elbow pressed against a wooden slat, her left shoulder bumped a wall, and she began to tremble in the corner like a trapped rat. The musty smell of damp earth swarmed her nostrils.

  Tanya lost it then, as if an animal had risen up within her—the beast of panic. She growled and launched herself elbows first toward the space through which she’d descended. Her arms crashed abruptly into rigid wood and she dropped to her knees, barely feeling the deep gash midpoint between her wrist and elbow.

  Trembling, she swung her fists against the wood, dully aware of how little it hurt to smack her knuckles into the hard surface. Impulsively, as a course of reflex alone, she sprang every responding muscle and stood, willing her head to break from the grave.

  But her father had built the box from hardwood and she might as well have slammed her crown into a wall of cement. Stars blinded her night and she collapsed to the floor, dead to the world.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Shannon Richterson had watched Tanya down the path, fighting the urge to run after her and insist she stay. She’d glanced back with those bright blue eyes twice, nearly destroying him with each look, and then she’d disappeared from sight.

  She’d been gone for an hour when the distant fluttering caught his ears. He lowered the knife he’d been aimlessly whittling with and turned first one ear and then the other to the south, testing the sound carried among a thousand jungle noises. But that was just it; this beating didn’t come from the jungle. It was driven by an engine. A helicopter.

  Shannon rose to his feet, slipped the knife into the sheath at his waist, and jogged down the path toward the plantation, a mile south. He hadn’t noticed a chopper on today’s schedule, but that didn’t mean anything. His father had probably drummed up something special for Uncle Christian.

  Shannon covered the first half-mile at a fast run, taking time to judge his footing with each long stride. Another, harsher sound joined the beating blades and Shannon slid to a stop, a hairline chill nipping at his spine. The sound came again—a whine punctuated with a hundred blitzing detonations. Machine-gun fire!

  A chill erupted and blew down Shannon’s spine like an arctic wind. His heart froze and then launched him into overdrive. His legs carried him from standstill to a blind sprint in the space of three strides. He streaked over the path and covered the last quarter mile in well under a minute.

  Shannon burst from the jungle fifty yards from the two-story Victorian house his father had built fifteen years earlier when they’d first fled Denmark for this remote valley. Two images burned into his mind, like red-hot irons branding a hide.

  The first was the two adults who stood in the front lawn, their hands lifted to the clouds—his father and Uncle Christian. The image threw abstract details his way. His father wore khakis, as always, but his shirt was untucked. And he wore no shoes, which was also uncommon. They stood there like two children caught at play, facing west, wide-eyed.

  The second image stood in the sky to his right. An attack helicopter hovered fifty feet from the earth, a stone’s throw before his father, motionless except for the blur of blades on its crown. A round cannon jutted from its nose, stilled for the moment. The thing hung undecided, maybe searching the ground for a landing point, Shannon thought, immediately rejecting the notion. The whole lawn below was a landing pad.

  Warning klaxons blared in Shannon’s skull—the kind that go off an instant before impact, the kind that usually render muscles immobile. In Shannon’s case his tendons drew him into a crouch. He stood on the edge of the jungle, his arms spread at his hips.

  And then the helicopter fired.

  Its first burst shifted it to the rear a yard or two. The stream of bullets cut into his father’s abdomen, sawing him in two with that first volley. Shannon watched his father’s upper torso fold at the waist, before his legs crumpled below him.

  A high-pitched scream split the air, and Shannon realized it was a woman’s scream—his mother screaming from the house—but then everything was screaming around him. The engine hanging in the sky, screaming; that nose-mounted chain gun, screaming; the jungle to his rear, screaming; and above it all his own mind, screaming.

  His uncle whirled and ran for the house.

  The helicopter turned on its axis and spit a second burst. The slugs slammed into Uncle Christian’s back and threw him through the air, forcing his arms wide like a man being readied for the cross. He sailed though the air, propelled by the stream of lead—twenty feet at least—and landed in a heap, broken.

  The entire scene unfolded in a few impossible moments, as though stolen from a distant nightmare and replayed here, before Shannon in his own backyard. Only a small terrified wedge in his mind functioned now, and it was having difficulty keeping his heart going, much less properly processing cohesive thoughts.

  Shannon stood nailed to the earth, his tendons still frozen in that crouch. His breathing had stopped at some point, maybe when his father had folded. His heart galloped and sweat streamed into his bulging eyes.

  Some thoughts slurred through his mind. Mom? Where are you? Dad, are you gonna help Mom?

  No, Dad’s hurt.

  And then a hundred voices began to yell at him, screaming for him to move. The helicopter suddenly sank to the ground and he watched four men roll to the ground. They came to their feet, gripping rifles. One of them was dark, he saw that. Maybe Hispanic. The other was . . . white.

  The latter saw him and yelled. “The kid . . .”

  It was al
l Shannon heard. The kid. In an American accent.

  Something in Shannon’s skull snapped then, just as the khaki-clad American lifted his rifle. He stared into that man’s eyes and two simultaneous instincts flooded his mind. The first was to rush toward the bullet that AK-47 would hurl his way—speed its collision with his front teeth. He had no use for life now.

  Shannon blinked.

  The second instinct blasted down his spine in streams of molten fire, screaming for this man’s death before his own. Shannon’s muscles responded in the same instant he blinked.

  He jerked to his left, snatching his knife from his belt as he moved. He lunged forward in a crouch, snarling, muttering in barely audible gutturals.

  Shannon sidestepped midstride and felt the whip of slugs whirl past his right ear.

  The soldier dropped to a knee and shifted his sights. Shannon dove to his left and decided there, midair and parallel to the ground, with bullets buffeting the air to his right, that it would have to be now.

  At the last moment, he tucked his shoulder under, rolled topsy-turvy twice, and came to his feet with his knife already cocked. He slung the blade sidearm, carrying the momentum of his rise into the delivery.

  Everything fell to slow motion then. The man’s rifle still fired, following Shannon’s tumble, kicking up dust just behind and below, overcompensating for Shannon’s forward motion and undercompensating for his lateral movement. The knife spun, butt over blade, crossing the path of bullets, flashing once in the late sun, halfway to the man.

  Then the blade buried itself in the man’s chest. The soldier staggered back and struck the helicopter’s opened door. The gun fell from his hands and Shannon was rolling again.

  A second soldier lifted his weapon and Shannon bolted for the corner of the house—survival instincts were shouting above the other voices. He pelted full tilt, arms and legs pumping. Slugs tore into the siding an instant after he crossed into the house’s shadow. Without pausing, Shannon veered to his left and raced for the jungle, keeping the house between himself and the helicopter.

  Behind him a second airborne chopper began firing, its slugs tearing through the foliage ahead of him. He shifted course once, then twice, knowing that at any second one of those projectiles would smack into his back—like that, Smack!— and fill his spine with burning steel.

  A tree just ahead and to his left trembled and splintered under a barrage of lead. He dove to his right and rolled into the forest before the gunner corrected his aim. Then Shannon was under the heavy jungle canopy, his heart slamming in his chest, sweat running down his face, but out of their reach.

  Mom’s in the house.

  He spun back to the colonial beyond the trees. A figure inside suddenly ran past one of the rear windows, was gone for a moment, and then reappeared. It was his mother and she was wearing her favorite dress, the one with yellow daisies. Another obscure detail.

  His mother’s face was wrinkled with panic, lips down turned, eyes clenched. She was fumbling with the window latch.

  Shannon ran four steps toward the edge of the forest and pulled up. “Mom!” he screamed.

  His voice was lost in the helicopter’s whine overhead.

  Shannon bolted for the house.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  TANYA QUAKED in the corner of the box, her mind slowly crawling from a dark dream about chain saws chewing through a bed surrounded by all of her stuffed animals, scattering white cotton fibers as it sawed. But then her parents were among the animals leaking red.

  She was having difficulty knowing if her eyes were open or closed—either way she saw nothing but blackness. The memories fell into her mind, like Polaroids suspended by threads. Her glass of lemonade shattering in her hand; holes popping in the ceiling; her father crouched in the hall; her mother crawling behind on her belly; the trapdoor descending overhead.

  Then darkness.

  She was here, in the crate where her father had led her. He and Mother were—

  Tanya snapped upright and immediately regretted it. Pain throbbed over her crown. She ignored it for a moment and reached for the ceiling. She felt the trapdoor and she shoved, but it refused to budge. It had been bolted, or something very heavy held it in place.

  “Father?” she said, but the crate seemed to swallow the sound. She tried again, screaming this time. “Dad!” A breath. “Mom!”

  Nothing. Then she remembered the sounds out there, before she had torpedoed into the ceiling. Smacking bullets, her mother’s scream, her father’s grunt.

  Tanya slumped back, sucking at the stale air. “Oh, God!” she groaned. “Please, please, God.”

  She started breathing hard, sucking rapidly in and out like an accordion gone berserk. She clenched her eyes even tighter against the thoughts. Mucus ran from her nostrils—she could feel the trail. Tears mingled and fell on her folded forearms. Something else was wet there too, on her right arm.

  She began to whisper, repeating words that seemed to still the panic. “Get a grip, Tanya. Get a grip. Get a grip.”

  She suddenly shivered, from her head down through her spine. And then it became too much once again and she started screaming. She arched her neck and shoved the air from her lungs, past taut vocal cords. “Help! Help!”

  But nobody was listening up there because everybody was dead up there. She knew it. She groaned loudly, only it sounded more like a snort. She scrambled to her knees, gathered what strength she had, and launched herself toward the trapdoor again.

  Her muscles were already thickening and she slammed into the hard wood like a sack of rocks. Tanya collapsed onto her belly.

  Things went dark again.

  SHANNON CLEARED the tree line, headed pell-mell for his mother who had just smashed the glass with her elbow in a frenzied attempt to escape the house. She was a bloody mess.

  Shannon’s vision blurred and he groaned with panic. His foot caught something—a rock—and he sprawled on the edge of the lawn.

  The tree at the forest edge just behind him splintered with a hail of bullets. But it didn’t matter—he was down now and they could pick him off easily.

  He clambered to his knees and looked skyward. The helicopter’s cannon was lined up on him, ready to shoot.

  But it didn’t shoot. It hung there facing him.

  Shannon stood slowly, quaking. Fifty meters to his right, his mom had one leg out the window, but she had stopped dead and was staring at him.

  “Shannon!”

  Her voice sounded inhuman—half groan, half bawl—and the sound of it sent a chill down Shannon’s back. “Run, Shannon! Run!”

  “Mom?”

  The helicopter turned slowly in the air, like a spider on a string. Fire filled Shannon’s throat. He’d seen the thing do this trick with his father and uncle. His feet wouldn’t move.

  He had to save his mother—pull her from that window, but his feet wouldn’t move.

  A streak suddenly left the helicopter. The wall above Mom’s head imploded for a split second. And then the room behind his mother erupted in a thundering ball of flame.

  A wave of heat from the detonation struck Shannon broadside. He stared in the face of the blast, unbelieving. The window his mom had been in was gone. Half of the house was gone; the rest of it was on fire.

  Shannon whirled around and ran for the jungle, barely aware of his own movement. He ran into a tree and his world spun in lazy circles, but he managed to get back up and run on. This time he made it without a single shot. But this time he didn’t care.

  SHANNON RAN under the canopy, his mind numb, every sense tuned to raw instinct now. He leapt over fallen logs, dodging thorn-encrusted vines, planting each foot on the surest available footing despite his pace. He cut sharply to his right within a hundred meters. In his mind’s eye, Tanya called to him from the mission, her lips screaming, stricken and pale.

  Behind him, shouts rang through the trees. A sapling suddenly split in two and he jerked to the left, ducking. The staccato reports of automatic-weapon
fire echoed through the jungle and he ran forward, toward the south—toward Tanya.

  What if they had taken the mission out as well? How could Americans do that? CIA, DEA. His father’s words about America’s evils echoed through his mind. But Father was dead.

  To his right, beyond the jungle’s border, voices carried to him and he realized his pursuers were running along the edge of the forest, following him on even ground. They were yelling in Spanish.

  Whoever they were, they were well organized. Military or paramilitary. Guerrillas possibly. They’d come intent on killing everyone on the plantation. And now he had escaped. He should turn into the jungle and run for the black cliffs. From there he could get to the Orinoco River, which snaked to the Atlantic. But he couldn’t leave Tanya behind.

  Then the realization struck him again—his mother and father were dead!

  Tears leaked past his eyes. His vision swam and he drew a palm across his wet cheeks as he ran, barely missing a stump jutting from the forest floor. He shook his head and steeled himself against the tears.

  To his right, the voices fell away and then grew again. A shot snapped through the canopy and he realized that running parallel with them was stupid. He veered to his right, leapt over a large log, threw himself to the earth, and rolled into the log’s crease until his face was plastered with rotting wood and earth.

  Ten seconds later they rushed by, breathing heavily. These were jungle-trained soldiers, Shannon thought, swallowing. He stood to his feet and cut straight for the mission clearing. He ran to the jungle’s edge, knelt by a towering palm, and wiped his eyes again.

  The mission house lay a hundred yards directly ahead. Soldiers skirted the perimeter to his far left, yelling back and forth to the others who crashed through the underbrush. He rose, intent on running across the open field to the house when he saw them: soldiers hauling several bodies through the door.

  Shannon froze. He couldn’t see the faces of the victims dragged to the porch, but he knew their identities already.