The Nephilim Imperatives: Dark Sentences (The Second Coming Chronicles Book 2)

by Terry James

  “Yes, Grandpa. We’re only a few miles from where Nigel and Clark say we will find the ridge that overlooks the valley. Nigel is quite experienced at doing the geographical coordinate stuff.”

  “That flashlight. Is it true? Do you think it had something to do with fending off those Bigfoot-type things?”

  “Gramps, not only did it fend them off; the things vanished right in front of us every time the beam touched one of them.”

  “The others will never understand, David. These are very strange days. Prophetic days, I’m convinced. The Lord will not let the devil…these Benai Elohim use supernatural force against mortals without providing humans the ability to oppose them. He will meet force with force in the supernatural realm in these closing days. I’m convinced of it. Things that have happened to all of us over the past decades, especially in the last weeks, prove it.”

  “Yeah. You’re right, Nigel and Clark think there’s something weird about the flashlight. But, I don’t think they will see the spirituality in the battle.”

  “You must try to convince them, son. That old man, have you met him?”

  “No, sir. His cabin wasn’t there. Nigel was amazed. Said we stood on the very spot. Yet there was only snow, same thickness as the rest of the snowy ground. Didn’t look like anything was ever there.”

  “Whatever you do, David, keep that instrument closely guarded. It will be your ticket through all of this. I’m convinced of it.”

  “Sure, Gramps. They know it has… special properties. There’s no doubt about that. But, I think they attribute that to being a government experimental device of some sort. Despite the fact some old hermit gave it to Nigel.”

  “I’m convinced otherwise. You take care, son. We will be together soon,” Randall said.

  “Okay. Nigel wants to talk.”

  Momentarily, the Brit was on the cell.

  “Dr. Prouse, we are approaching our target area. I will have to cut the transmissions for some time, I’m afraid. My…people…are tracking me by satellite, of course. The technology is of the most advanced sort. They are standing by to move in, upon my signal.”

  “What about Christopher and me? You had mentioned our accompanying your…people…to the area beyond Xavier Pass, when you deem it necessary.”

  “I’m not certain at this point, sir. With due respect…your age would be quite a factor out here if –God forbid--anything should happen, and the means of bringing us home should be mechanically disabled.”

  Hans Sheivold accompanied Mark and the two black-uniformed men who escorted the captive.

  “A successful experiment today could mean a tremendous future for your nation, Mr. Lansing. You shall see.”

  The four men rode a small elevator to several floors below the laboratory’s level, Mark guessed. The conveyance was unlike anything he had seen. Everything in this strange place was unlike anything he had seen.

  Most everything--the walls, the floor of the elevator (if indeed it was an elevator), the fantastic array of equipment that seemed everywhere one looked--was of transparent, amber-colored material. One could investigate the sparking, flashing, rotating and revolving inner-workings of the machinery. All the things he saw seemed to combine not in a mechanical way, but in an organic way, somehow. It seemed to pulse with life, rather than grind, bump, and whir with mechanical inner-activity.

  “The procedure, for lack of a better term to explain to you, will be painless, Mr. Lansing, as it was for your wife,” the scientist said in German-accented English.

  “What about my wife and daughter?” Mark asked.

  “You will be reunited with them upon completion of the procedure.”

  A hatch in the gleaming chrome wall split when they approached, and they whisked the prisoner into a small corridor, then the guards held him, one by each arm, while the scientist stood in front of one wall and spoke.

  “Sevius Klorum Ceptir.”

  The wall rose from the floor, providing entrance into a perfectly round room. The enclosure was dark, except for a chain of various-colored lights running the 360 degrees of the walls. The light blinked in precise order, giving the gestalt sensation of movement while Mark watched them light and go out in rapid sequence.

  “And now, Mr. Lansing, if you will be seated, we can begin,” Sheivold said while the men forced him into a metallic chair that shimmered by the reflected points of light in the darkened chamber.

  Chapter 23

  Cassie limped behind the group and only Jeddy noticed, accompanying her while she fell further behind.

  David turned to look back when he heard the dog whine and let out a yelp.

  David hurried back to the girl.

  “Hey! You guys! Need some help, here.”

  The others trudged the several meters back to where Cassie now sat upon her backpack as it nestled in the foot-deep snow.

  “A problem?” Nigel Saxton said.

  “A problem,” Cassie affirmed, looking up at the Brit, then the others, pain etched in her pretty face.

  “Got a blister on my right big toe,” she said, unlacing her right boot.

  “We’ve got about another kilometer and a half, as I figure,” the Brit said. “Think you might make it?”

  “I…I don’t know, Nigel. It really hurts,” she said, pulling the cotton sock and then the heavy sweat sock from her foot.

  Everyone looked at the oozing red spot between her big toe and the next toe.

  “That’s nasty,” Kristi Flannigan said. “You poor little thing.” She knelt to hold the toes apart and examine the wound more carefully. “It’s a blister, all right,” she said. “It’s huge…the worst blister I’ve ever seen. How have you been able to walk at all? You got anything for this in that miracle bag of yours, Nigel?”

  “Only that magic flashlight,” he said with a laugh. “Guess a bandage won’t do, eh?”

  “I’ll carry her. It’s only a mile or so,” David Prouse said. “If you can help with the extra backpack, Clark.”

  “That will be a lot of weight, for you David,” Clark said.

  “Watch it, Mister,” Cassie said, looking sternly at Clark.

  “Well, not all that much weight,” he corrected himself, to the laughter of the others.

  It was unthinkable. The intruders could not still be free to move around without being tracked. The technologies available to his own forces were impossible to penetrate without detection. Yet his underlings continued to report the British operative, and now a bunch of…amateurs… had evaded his super-sophisticated security. Not just the technologies of human science. The Dimensional’s’ technologies as well. He would not be held totally responsible. They had equal culpability.

  The black ops chief heard in this memory the voices –the combined, cavernous voices—while he, dressed in a white, military jumpsuit, walked in quick strides, his face reddened in angry frustration.

  “For now, the ones of Abbadon are neutralized, George Jenkins. Forces of antiquity oppose Abbadon’s Imperatives. The Lansing group must be dealt with by your human efforts. You created the disruption. You will deal with the matter.”

  He had questioned them. Why did they not just work in their paranormal way? Why did they not just “know” where the enemies were?

  “If that was within our knowledge, we would not need pathetic human assistance,” the combined voice had imparted to his mind in warning. Their chilling message had not left him.

  Their response, in triplicate echo had been, as one, “Do not fail, George Jenkins. Do not fail.”

  His all-consuming drive now hurried him toward a personal frontline attack. He would lead the charge to find them, to see with his own eyes that they were stopped.

  Five people, including two women and a dog. What chance did they have? Still, the others had not been able to find them or to eliminate them.

  Why were the others–the Dimensional entities—so concerned with these five? The concern that the group could somehow affect the imperatives was ludicrous. But, th
e warning thundered in his head, and he knew the things always, without exception, meant what they, collectively, said.

  “Do not fail…”

  Jenkins spoke into the device while he walked toward the mostly white helicopter. “Rendezvous with me over the coordinates you’ve been given,” he said, snapping the device shut, then stepping onto the rungs leading to the chopper’s cockpit.

  The late afternoon sky made the snowfield an ever-darkening plain before them.

  “Maybe you should leave us here, Nigel,” David said. “She just can’t go on with the foot. We can’t keep up. I’m ashamed to say it, but I’m just not in shape for piggybacking, even her 115 pounds.”

  David Prouse let Cassie slide down his back and Clark moved to put David’s backpack in the snow, providing the fatigued Prouse a seat to rest.

  “We can’t leave you here, David. Neither of you would be able to find your way out. And, I don’t know when I might be in contact with my people to have them pick you up.”

  All among the party studied the situation. David finally spoke up.

  “Okay, I’ve been thinking about it. Might as well try it.”

  “Try what?” Cassie said, sitting on her own backpack beside David.

  “What Kristi and Nigel were talking about earlier, about the old man’s flashlight.”

  “What about it?” Kristi asked.

  “Its magic properties…as Nigel put it,” David said. “Give me the light, Nigel.”

  “The flashlight? For what purpose?” the Brit asked but dropped his backpack and rummaged through the carrier. He handed David the instrument after several seconds of searching.

  “Take off the boot, Cass,” David said.

  “Try to convince them,” David thought, remembering his grandfather’s words about witnessing to the power of God in dealing with His creation. Perhaps this was the time…the opportunity.

  Cassie dutifully removed the boot, with David’s help, then peeled off her socks.

  Kristi examined the ugly red broken blister between Cassie’s big toe and the long toe next to it.

  “Boy! That sure looks painful. You poor girl,” she said, holding the toes apart.

  “What’s with the flashlight, Dave?” Clark asked, agreeing silently that the blister was terrible.

  “Don’t know. Just testing Grandpa’s theory.” He held the flashlight lens near the toes. The beam’s brilliance made all, for the moment, lose sight of the foot. Kristi was the first to see the toes after the light’s initial burst had allowed her eyes to adjust.

  “Look at that!” Her declaration of amazement made the others check the toes closely.

  A chill ran up and down David’s spine. His grandfather had been right!

  Four prongs extending from a transparent tube clamped against Mark’s head at the forehead, the left temple, the back of the head, and the right temple. There was no pain, and, he noted, he was fully conscious.

  Hans Sheivold looked at him through the blackened lenses of the goggles. “The material is not physical that we extract,” the scientist said. “Rather, we are gathering electrical impulses, if you will. Data of a sort.”

  Mark felt a slight stimulus that made his face skin crawl with points of stinging. Then he experienced two more such feelings of shock.

  “The…data…programmed into your cerebral cortex –that part that is the confluence point of mind and soul—will transfer to the children. This is the remainder of what is needed to complete their… ascension to the apex of mankind’s capability.”

  Mark heard the scientist’s words, but he forced his thoughts toward Heaven, toward God. “Please dear God. Let your will be done. Stop this abomination.”

  “Your son contributed –before he…left us. Your daughter provided the egg for the one who is secondary to the other child,” Sheivold said, continuing to monitor the screens before him, then the face of the subject attached to the procedure’s gadgetry.

  “Your wife contributed cortex data as well as chromosomal addition to the girl’s chromosomes.”

  “Please, dear Lord,” Mark continued to pray in silence. “Stop this blasphemous act.”

  April Warmath entered the small chamber and stood beside Sheivold. She wore the dark-lensed goggles.

  “This, Mark, is the…if we are to keep this in human terms…the mother of your grandchild…the grandchild destined to unprecedented greatness.”

  Mark’s concentration on prayer broken, he looked to the girl’s pretty face. But, he knew the eyes that lurked behind the black lenses were not so lovely—they were hellish.

  “Her ovum and your son’s genetic materials combined with our miraculous process, thanks to the many years of dealing with our friends from other times and places, are the unifying keys to the conception. So, we have the highest man, and the next highest. These will work in concert to engineer a utopian earth. Your grandchildren, Mark

  Lansing. You must be very proud!”

  Susie walked just outside, behind the hotel, her hands thrust deeply into the pockets of the down-stuffed coat. The temperature had dropped below freezing, but she didn’t notice. She prayed while she paced. She didn’t hear her husband’s call from the balcony while he leaned on the railing on the heels of his hands.

  “Susie! You need to come in!”

  “Dear Lord, protect those young people,” she said, the harsh, stiff wind and the fur-lined parka pulled over her head preventing Christopher’s words from reaching her ears.

  “Whatever we can do to help them, please, dear Lord, give us the strength…the means to bring them, back to safety. I pray you will provide the way.”

  Christopher was getting frustrated over his ignored call to her. He fetched his own hooded parka from the closet, then returned to the balcony. His eyes widened at what he saw, and he screamed. “No! Leave her alone!”

  She was struggling with two large figures who forced her into the back of a dark SUV, one of the men getting in after her. The other hurried around to the driver’s side. The man looked up at Christopher, then got in the vehicle, which screeched away into the quickening nightfall.

  “I’m terribly sorry, Mr. Banyon,” the man with a slight French accent was saying to Christopher nine minutes later, when Randall Prouse hurried into the hotel lobby.

  “We are doing all that is possible to find the SUV, according to your description, sir.”

  The man, a constable who, before retirement from law enforcement for a Swiss ski resort city, looked at Randall, who put his arm around his friend.

  “This is most unusual. We have never had such a thing happen, sir. And, I pledge we will locate your wife.”

  Christopher, his eyes filled with concern, looked upward at the archaeologist.

  “Randy, they’ve got Susie. Why? What do they want with her?”

  “It’s okay, Chris. We’ll find her. They are just trying to frighten us. We’ll get her back real soon. You’ll see.”

  They had ratcheted up the intrigue yet another notch, Randall Prouse thought, not nearly as certain Susie could be retrieved as his words of assurance implied.

  George Jenkins turned up the volume of the satellite phone to hear above the whining thumps of the helicopter engines. He spoke after several seconds of listening to one of his lieutenants on the other end.

  “Take her to the valley tram. Get her to the remote lab as soon as possible. And, Philbee, there is no margin for error in these things. Got that?”

  He snapped the phone off and stowed it in a compartment.

  The woman was leverage against the others --her husband and the archaeologist--doing something to interfere. Their activities were impossible to control when they were helped by the enemy. The power they wielded was equal to his own, and he needed the leverage.

  He had her now. But until the snatching of the woman at the hotel, they had been thwarted from abduction of the three enemies. The prayers had made it impossible. But, what did it mean? They were finally able to grab her. He didn’t have time
to analyze…

  There was the business of the others, the younger ones to deal with, Jenkins thought, looking at the red and amber lights of the large scope to the left of his left knee.

  He turned to the pilot in the seat on the other side of the scope.

  “What are they telling you?”

  Jenkins shouted to be heard above the noisy engine sounds, frowning in concentration at the Terrain Recon-scope.

  “They’ve got them framed within a half-kilometer of the overlook, sir,” the pilot reported.

  “Good. Good…” the black ops chief said, but in volume too low for the pilot to hear.

  The early evening had been clear. But, now dark, heavy clouds smothered the last light of the day. Jeddy broke the trail several meters in front of Nigel Saxton, who held the beam of Zeke’s flashlight in the direction his compass told him the cusp of the overlook laid.

  He thought about the instrument’s brilliant light. It had not dimmed since the first moment he turned it on those days ago, when the old hermit gave it to him. Yet, he could find no place for batteries.

  If MI-7 had something like the amazing instrument, he had never seen it. And, he would have been among the first in the field to be issued such a light.

  Did it actually have the paranormal properties which the others –not he and Clark Lansing—attributed to it? Did the vanishing of the hideous creatures really happen because of the light? Was the girl’s toe really healed before their eyes? Or had the supposed miracles been the figment of the imaginations of those who were desperate for help from any quarter, even from the supernatural?

  White puffs of breath expelled into the light provided by Zeke’s flashlight beam. The temperature had dropped considerably, the Brit thought, thinking on whether it would be good to look for shelter until close to next daybreak.

  No. All seemed relatively fresh, and all were young. Most of all, they were all determined to find the girl and her parents. Best to press forward to the overlook and see what developed.