End in the Beginning (The God Tools Book 3)

by Gary Williams

  “He mentioned he was an archaeologist,” Curt said.

  “It’s true. Earlier I spoke to an assistant at Southern who worked with Nash on an exploratory dive of the Maple Leaf off Mandarin Point in the St. Johns River. Are you familiar with the shipwreck?”

  “Yes,” Curt said, scratching his cheek, “a Union vessel during the Civil War that carried freight and soldiers up river. The ship struck a confederate mine in the water and sunk in 1864. Most of the passengers survived, but the ship went down in about twenty feet of water and settled into the mud. Because it’s been covered by mud all these years, the goods on board are perfectly preserved.”

  “With your similar background and interest in history, I’m surprised you and Tolen don’t get along better,” Bar said.

  “Wait, what? He said we don’t get along?”

  “Um, it was a cursory remark he made to me after your first meeting. I’m sure you’re BFFs by now. Anyway, five years ago Nash and his assistant from Georgia Southern went to dive at the wreck site. Nash went under while the assistant remained topside. At one point, the assistant feared Nash had drowned. He had been down for over an hour and twenty minutes and only had a tank that held an hour’s worth of oxygen. Then Nash surfaced, climbed aboard, and informed the assistant that they were leaving the site. When the assistant questioned Nash, Nash became belligerent and condescending. Up until that time, the assistant said Nash had been very cordial and accommodating. It was as if someone had flipped a switch on his personality, and he was an entirely different person. It wasn’t until sometime later that the assistant realized he had transposed two numbers of the GPS coordinates before they dove.”

  “You mean they weren’t even on the wreck site?” Curt asked.

  “No, and Nash never said a word to the assistant about the mistake. From there, Nash’s archaeological career evaporated. He simply stopped showing up for work and was subsequently fired by the university. Nor did he try to find other work in the field. Suddenly, it was as if archaeology no longer mattered to him. He fell off the grid. He came from wealth, so he didn’t have to work. The next time he surfaced, he’s rumored to be leading a group called the Cult of the End. You know the rest.”

  “Yes, that he’s an asshole.”

  “Maybe so, but a brilliant asshole.”

  Curt thought. “Do you have any photos of Nash?”

  “A few.” Bar sat down in the pew beside her case. She pulled out a tablet. “Wait, they’re not here. They’re on my computer.” She returned the tablet and removed the laptop, booting it up. Curt and Fawn sat on either side of her.

  “Here,” Bar said. She opened an image. “This is the first of a dozen pictures of Carr Nash taken at the university six years ago—a year before the dive near the Maple Leaf.”

  The first showed Nash standing between some students. They were outdoors, probably at an archaeological site.

  “Next,” Curt said.

  Bar clicked, and a new image appeared. In this one, Nash was in a hole with a male student. They were wielding shovels and appeared hard at work.

  “Next,” Curt said.

  Bar clicked and another image appeared: an overhead picture of Nash as he sat at an outdoor table with various tools and utensils to the side. The professor appeared to be helping a female student clean a fossil.

  Curt leaned in. “Fawn, notice what’s missing?”

  Fawn stared at the picture in silence. “The Hebrew number seven. It’s not on his left forearm.”

  “What are you talking about?” Bar asked.

  Curt explained what they had seen on Nash’s arm underneath Fort Clinch.

  “I only found one picture of Nash since he explored the Maple Leaf four years ago.” She pulled up an image of the bald man standing on a street corner. “This was taken by a security camera in the town of Passau, Germany shortly before the murder of Meinhardt Schuster in his chalet.”

  Nash was accompanied by his behemoth friend, Jed Rassle.

  “Can you zoom in on his left forearm?” Curt asked.

  “I’ll lose some definition, but I’ll see what I can do.” She tapped in a series of commands, adjusted the position of the mouse, and isolated the area. The screen filled with the image of Nash’s forearm, clearer than Curt thought possible, and easy to see the Hebrew number seven.

  “Sometime between the dive five years ago and his nefarious activity with the antiquities dealer, Nash got a tattoo,” Bar said.

  “The problem is,” Curt began, “I don’t think it’s a tattoo.”

  CHAPTER 31

  Dr. Lila Falls made her way down the gradually sloping embankment. The sun was scorching the landscape. The air was clean and occasionally gave her relief from the stench of her mud-caked clothes. She paused to study the contour of the land.

  She still had no idea where she was or how she had come to be here, but as she negotiated her way through the grass and weed beds, images continued to flash through her mind as she slowly gained pieces of her memory. Again, she remembered being in the boat on the St. Johns River near Fort Caroline with the grad student. She recalled discovering the Egyptian Obelisk and the writing.

  The hieroglyphic writing. She suddenly remembered what it said. The description of the land led them down river to the Green Cove Springs area at Bayard Point. Now, new images raced through her mind. She and the graduate student—Kira Compton, her name was Kira Compton—had gone underground, down a long, angled shaft into the earth. There, something had stirred in the darkness; a massive creature with a single red eye.

  Lila involuntarily halted in her tracks. The recollection sent a shiver through her body.

  She remembered it all now. Images flew through her mind with terrifying speed and clarity. She and Kira had struggled to make their way out of the underground shaft and back to the surface. From there, raw fear had sent Lila on a harrowing dash through the swamp. She never saw Kira again. No matter how quickly Lila moved, the distorted clicks from the one-eyed creature gained on her. She remembered pulling out her cell phone as she ran. She had called the only person she could think of: her ex-husband, Curt Lohan. They had a hurried conversation. She remembered the increasing heat, being scooped up and watching two rows of razor-sharp teeth gnash before her, sealing out the daylight, leaving her in total darkness.

  She had been eaten by the creature. She shuddered at the thought.

  Then why was she here? And where was here? Had she died? Was this to be her afterlife?

  She examined her arms, then her legs. Everything was intact. She pinched the skin on her forearm. There was pain. She wasn’t dreaming and appeared to be alive.

  Lila felt compelled to look behind, beyond where she had just been. Not far away, past the swamp, the land rose up briefly to a tree-covered plateau. She peered in the distance to her left and her right. This swell of earth was the only aberration in the vicinity. Then it struck her.

  It can’t be!

  She wheeled to the left, searching the shallow gorge in the distance then turned back at a ninety-degree angle. The wide ravine ran in a dogleg pattern, and she was at the crux of the turn.

  Oh my God.

  Although the short plateau behind her was nowhere near as high as she remembered, there was no denying this was Bayard Point. She had been on the point when the creature caught her. “Where is the river?” she said aloud.

  She focused on the wide berth of the shallow gorge. Across, on the other side, there should be homes lining the river’s edge. She was standing in a channel that should be covered with flowing water.

  All the pieces of the puzzle melded in her mind at once. The bizarre snake and spider she had seen, the lack of manmade structures that should be across the way lining the gorge—not to mention, the missing Shands Bridge to the west. No, this was not an afterlife; nor was this some point in the distant future when humans had been abolished from Earth. This was an area in its primordial state. A time before the St. Johns River had formed.

  Dr. Lila Fa
lls had somehow traveled back into the distant past.

  With her head spinning, another horrific thought occurred to her: she was completely alone.

  CHAPTER 32

  Curt paced in the waiting room on the fourth floor of the hospital. Bar sat in a chair staring at the Scroll of Edict text on her laptop screen. Fawn had curled up at one end of the couch and was sleeping restlessly. At one point, Fawn called her husband’s name, Mike, in a concerned tone. It was gut wrenching. Curt felt for her, but he wondered again whether it really mattered. Unless Scott could somehow intercede in Eden, Nash was about to end life on Earth; if Scott hadn’t died from food poisoning, that is. It was still difficult to fathom they were awaiting the annihilation of mankind. A part of him wanted to argue against the possibility, yet he had witnessed too much evil, too much death, too many supernatural occurrences, to discount the Scroll of Edict text as anything but truth.

  Tolen remained sedated. Special Agent Johnsten and Officer Wilson stood guard at the doorway. Curt had advised Johnsten that Laval was killed in the Georgia Guidestones blast, but when Curt couldn’t verify seeing a body, Johnsten refused to let his guard down.

  Now, Curt didn’t know what to do. He felt so helpless. “I’m going for a walk,” he said in frustration.

  Bar nodded silently in response.

  Curt left the room. He noticed hospital staff in the hallway, visitors he passed, the patients through the open room doors. None of it mattered. They would all soon be dead. He would be dead. Sherri and his unborn child would be dead.

  Sherri. He needed to check on her. He went to her room and found her as he had left her last: unmoving and hooked to a myriad of tubes and IVs. She seemed frailer than ever. He grabbed her hand, bent down, and kissed it. A deep sadness and a renewed sense of determination comingled in his soul.

  “I don’t know how, Sherri, but as God is my witness, somehow I’m going to make everything right,” he whispered.

  “Mr. Lohan?” a nurse called from the open doorway. “Are you Curt Lohan?”

  “Yes,” Curt said.

  “A note came in for you.” She handed him a folded piece of paper, which he opened.

  Meet me at Mandarin Dock in Jacksonville

  The note was unsigned, but he had an idea who it was from. He nearly ran over Bar, who had come into the room.

  “Now where are you going?” she asked.

  “I got a message. I think it’s from Father N.”

  “The man who claims he’s—”

  “Yeah, him.”

  “What if it’s from the Cult of the End, and it’s a trap?”

  “I’ve got to take the chance.”

  “I’m going with you. At least I’ve got a gun.” Bar tapped her purse.

  Curt didn’t object. They briefly stopped by Tolen’s room to inform Johnsten, then they left the hospital in a hurry.

  ****

  Thirty minutes later, Curt steered down Mandarin Dock Road in south Jacksonville. They were only a few miles from Scott and Kay’s house.

  The narrow road came to a dead-end at the St. Johns River where a cement pier known as Mandarin Dock stretched into the distance. A narrow gap beside the structure and a fence to the adjacent park allowed for small boat launching. Parking was confined to the side of the road and could only accommodate a few launches. There were no other vehicles around on this weekday.

  It was afternoon and the sun was blazing down as Curt and Bar stepped from the Mustang.

  “Isn’t the Maple Leaf wreck nearby?” Bar asked.

  “Very close.”

  Bar surveyed the damage to the hood of his car. “Your insurance company may have questions about this.”

  Curt didn’t respond to her attempt at levity. He was too tired, too disillusioned. Instead he felt the need to keep the conversation serious. “You do realize the world’s about to end, right?”

  “I don’t know what to think, Dr. Lohan. While I’m inclined to believe you, I just don’t think that God would abandon us, leave our fate in the hands of some maniacal cult, and allow them to enter Eden to destroy the Tree of Life.”

  “You should, because that’s exactly what will happen if they get inside,” a voice said.

  Bar and Curt spun to the side.

  Father N neared. He seemed to materialize out of thin air. Wearing a beige smock, tied at the waist by a drawstring, the man seemed older than Curt remembered. Gone was his spry gait. Instead, he approached at a slow trudge.

  Bar reached into her purse, probably going for her gun.

  “It’s okay,” Curt said. “This is Father N.” He glared at the old man and spoke with an edge, “Nice of you to show up…now that we’re all doomed.”

  Father N seemed oblivious to Curt’s sarcasm. “Who is this?” he asked, pointing to Bar.

  “A trusted friend,” Curt said.

  “Is she aware—?”

  “Yes.”

  “Let’s move onto the dock,” Father N said. He did not wait for their agreement. He walked up the ramp with Curt and Bar following. Halfway to the end of the long pier, Father N stopped and faced west. “What did you mean ‘…now that we’re all doomed?’ Has something changed?”

  Curt spoke, “We found the rest of the Scroll of Edict text.”

  Father N’s eyes lit up. “So you know of the third Tool?”

  “The Sword of Michael.”

  “Michael’s Sword, of course. Do you know its location?”

  “We did. It was underneath Fort Clinch on Amelia Island, but when we got there, the Cult of the End—Carr Nash—showed up and took it from us.”

  “How could you allow that to happen?” Father N scolded. “That was our only hope.”

  “Actually, it wasn’t,” Bar interjected. “Dr. Lohan had a chance to stop them at the portal.”

  Father N waited for her to continue.

  Instead, Curt spoke after an audible exhale. “We learned that many monumental manmade structures throughout the ages have taken turns housing the portal to Eden—structures like Stonehenge, the Easter Island statues, the Giza Plateau pyramids. The latest structure was the Georgia Guidestones northeast of Atlanta.”

  Father N didn’t seem overly surprised. “I should have realized this. It makes sense that the portal entrance would be kept within some of man’s most enigmatic engineering feats.” Father N’s eyes narrowed in scrutiny. “She said you had a chance to stop them at the portal. You just said it was at the Georgia Guidestones. Both in the past tense.”

  Curt lowered his head, slumping his shoulders. “Nash passed through with Tina before we could stop him. As he did, he demolished the structure with explosives.”

  “The second seed is through? You failed?”

  “Yeah, no thanks to you.”

  “Do you have the scroll text?”

  Bar brought it up on her smartphone and handed the phone to Father N. He read in silence then directed his words at Curt. “Now do you believe me? This is destiny. The Scroll of Edict is the proof. It’s not proposing what can be. It’s declaring what is. Everything it speaks to references events occurring at this exact point in time. We can’t fight what is destined to be.”

  Curt shook his head. “I don’t buy it. Man has free will. I…” Curt poked himself in the chest adamantly, “I have free will.”

  “I used to think so too. It’s a mirage. You can’t change the master plan.”

  “The hell I can’t.”

  “I understand how you feel.”

  “Do you? Do you really?” Curt got in Father N’s face. “I refuse to be some lemming following a holier-than-thou preacher into the abyss.”

  “Have you ever stopped to think the seeds are in Eden because the threat is real?”

  “But the threat is also in Eden. Nash and his cronies will kill Tina, Cody, and Scott. A lot of good that does for God’s reseeding efforts.” Curt was livid.

  “They entered Eden at one end. The Tree of Life is a great distance away. They will have to journey at least twen
ty-four hours to reach it.”

  “How do you know this?” Curt asked.

  “The scroll text said, ‘It will be disabled upon passing through at the south wall.’ The south wall is a day’s journey to the north end. That’s where the Garden and the Tree of Life are said to be.”

  “Eight hours have already passed since they entered,” Bar remarked.

  Curt bit his lip to quell his anger. He gazed out over Mandarin Point. A curious thought struck him. “Why did you ask to meet us here…at this location?”

  Father N shrugged. “I had a dream. In it, we spoke here.”

  “Odd coincidence since Ms. Bar found some information about the cult leader, Nash, which relates to this area.”

  “Go on,” Father N said.

  “Nash explored a Civil War shipwreck in the St. Johns River five years ago. Well, he was supposed to explore the Maple Leaf, but he dove in the wrong place. After diving by himself, he returned to the boat with a dramatically different disposition, as if he were a different man. He was never the same after that.”

  Father N had a troubled look. “Anything else? What about his appearance? Any distinguishing tattoos, marks, or scars?”

  “Actually, yes. A birthmark, or maybe tattoo on his left arm. We examined photographs and, strangely, he didn’t have it until sometime around the period of the Maple Leaf dive.”

  “And you said he made the dive five years ago?”

  “Yes,” Bar said. “A year later, he and his men were suspected in an antiquities theft on the German/Austrian border. That may have been when he obtained the Scroll of Edict.”

  “Describe the mark.”

  “The Hebrew number for seven is raised on his left forearm.”

  Understanding shone in his wizened eyes. “It’s a brand.” Father N began pacing back and forth. “Dear merciful God…”

  “What?” Bar asked.

  “I don’t know why I didn’t consider this before.” Father N drew in a long inhale and slowly released it. “I’m sure you know the story of Adam and Eve; how Adam and Eve were expelled from the Garden of Eden, and Cain murdered Abel.”