The Gift of Sky and Soil (Father Sky Book 1)

by Gillian Zane

  “A tall cement building?”

  “Earthquake,” he replied. This time I got a frown.

  “One-story cement building?” I looked at him when I put the vehicle in gear and did another dick check, which had me physically wincing. At this point, he probably thought there was something wrong with me.

  “Workable,” he smirked this time. “But really, I was talking about once I get my bike. I have to run a test on both of us. I have to see if we are producing antibodies from all the pollen, or something else. We could do a lot of harm inconsequentially. We could be killing each other right now, hell, that cop.”

  “Do you have that capability? To test us? And I thought you said it didn't matter, in the woods. You said that.”

  “I was trying to get you to not follow me. You didn’t take the bait.”

  “So that cop?”

  “Could possibly be infected now.”

  “You can test us?”

  “Yes, I’ll just need a sterile environment for the first round of tests. If I want to go any deeper, I’ll need stuff from my lab in Baton Rouge,” I pulled onto the highway and headed West, deeper into the nature reserve.

  “Well, I guess you can come back to my place, it’ll be dark in an hour, you won’t be able to make it back to Baton Rouge before curfew,” I glanced at the time, it was almost seven. I had set out for this trail at eight in the morning. Almost twelve hours. There was definitely some missing time. I tried to correlate the hours with the events. Twenty after eight, I was jogging. I usually ran a fifteen-minute mile on rough terrain, so that would have put it at ten at the latest when I hit that puddle which got me stuck. But hadn’t I calculated I was hitting 9-minutes? I shook my head; from the moment I had first smelled that sickly sweet aroma things became fuzzy. Eleven at the latest when we found the clearing. That meant seven hours were spent in the grips of the goddess. Or laying passed out in that parking lot. I didn’t have a sunburn, though, and if I had spent a lot of time exposed like that, I would definitely be a lot worse for wear.

  “I’ll get a motel, that shouldn’t be that hard to book. They’re probably all empty. We can do the tests there. I’ll spend the night and head back in the morning. If you aren’t doing anything this week, you can come up to my lab and we can do some deeper testing. No contact with anyone, though. No one.”

  “Nonsense. You can stay with me.” He turned in his seat quickly, and I kicked myself as I guessed how desperate that sounded. He probably thought I was some sex-starved female desperate for a man. “My place is a motel, that’s why. Well, not a motel, but an Airbnb.”

  I caught the look on his face from the corner of my eye. He was gauging me. Probably trying to figure out what form of lunatic I was.

  “I have a large property. It has a few small cottages on the land, and I rent those out as vacation rentals to pay my bills. You’ll have an entire cottage to yourself; I won’t even know you’re there. Plenty of space to set up testing as well.”

  “Well, that’s convenient.” He put his phone down and relaxed into his seat.

  “Yeah, it is.”

  After a mile or so, there was a sign for parking lot #3, and Ezekiel pointed and guided me in next to a big, hulking bike. I wasn’t familiar with bike types or anything, but it looked like one a biker would ride, not a guy that had gadgets in his backpack that measure pollen count. I had expected a crotch rocket or a Moped.

  “If we get separated, you want my number?” Again, the inner wince because of how desperate I sounded.

  “Sure.” He handed me his unlocked phone, and I typed in my contact information.

  “Miley,” I said. “I know we weren’t formally introduced.”

  “Zeke.” He held out his hand in a fist and I bumped it with my own, the new handshake. My knuckles tingled when he drew his back. For the first time, I wished for an actual handshake. I wondered what it would feel like with his palm wrapped around my own.

  “I was calling you Ezekiel in my head because of that…”

  “Goddess. It’s weird to say it.” He made no attempt to get out of my vehicle.

  “It is, weird I mean. Zeke, short for Ezekiel, did she have it right?”

  “Yeah, full name is Ezekiel Maram Salvesen.” Still no attempt to get out of the SUV. Like he was stalling.

  “That’s a mouth full. I’m Amaline Carlotta Lopez, not that much better,” I shrugged.

  “Alright, I’ll follow you to your house, Amaline,” he said my name, and it made me shiver slightly.

  Ezekiel got out of the car, and I watched him as he prowled over to his bike, threw his long leg over the machine, and started it up. From this angle, you couldn’t see the nerd with the weird gadgets at all. My stomach did a weird flip flop and my mouth literally pooled with saliva like he was something to eat. I cursed in my head as I put the SUV in drive.

  11

  The Homestead, or what me and all my ancestors liked to call Bayou Silence, was located on the outskirts of Mandeville, a city not too far from New Orleans. It was located on the opposite side of Lake Pontchartrain from the Crescent City and couldn’t be any more different from the decadent city. The mostly liberal and laid back Big Easy was in stark contrast to the small town I lived in, which was predominantly wealthy and super conservative. It was the only way you could get a lot of land and still be within fifty miles of the city though, and I had a lot of land—well, at least, in comparison to the more congested areas. As the city filled up and its residents looked for more land, the North shore was getting a little more progressive, but it had a ways to go.

  The home was once a plantation, now converted into a modern house. I had often been accused on social media, as an influencer, about the former plantation and its contribution to slavery, but from family history and historical records, it was well-known as being one of the more progressive plantations since it was first built. It only employed people to work the fields, and never once did it procure slaves. It had become so well-known for its anti-slavery stance that it was even torched on a least two occasions by groups that didn’t agree with their practices. Before men dressed in hoods and burned crosses, they learned to torch things they didn't believe in way before that.

  I knew most of the history of the house since the property had been in my family since its origination. When it came into my possession, I made sure I did the research to confirm that the stories weren’t just my family’s way of brushing off any bad history. The reports were true. There were even newspaper articles about one of the arsons.

  It was refreshing to find out the family stories were true, and it gave me hope to hang on to when it would normally be a dark time. Not all of our history was a blight. I was sixteen when the property became mine after both of my parents died. They were island hopping in the Caribbean when their small prop plane went down in the ocean. They lived a lavish lifestyle, off the remnants of trust funds set up by their parents and what my father brought in as a somewhat sought after plastic surgeon.

  There had been a little bit of an upheaval in my life when it first happened, mainly because I was only sixteen and couldn’t technically own property. The death of my parents didn’t really hit me as hard as I thought it should, but they had not been a constant in my life. Boarding schools, nannies, and friends’ parents had more of an influence on me than the people that spawned me. They were good in their own way, the made sure I was looked after, they made sure they had a rock-solid will. The house and all of their estate went to me, held in trust until I was eighteen. A cousin of mine, the daughter of my mother’s brother, had been appointed as my guardian, and she had tried to wrestle the property from me, using my naïveté and age as her ticket to snatch it away. The day I turned eighteen, I had her removed by the police from the property. Family.

  Ten thousand dollars of family heirlooms disappeared during her stay here at Silence. Along with an older guy I was dating. She was very competitive. The police asked if I wanted to press charges, but it would have been hard to
prove and the place was mine. All mine now. I figured karma. It was hopefully stalking her. I hoped Karma had some good plans for her.

  She would have had to kill me to get her hands on Silence. This was my home. My legacy. It would always be mine and if I made some little humans, it would pass to them. They wouldn't hurt for revenue as long as Silence stood.

  Between the money I made renting out the small cottages, the houses where people that worked the land once lived, and my trust fund, I didn’t have to hold a nine-to-five job, something I always was grateful to my parents for and would make sure passed down the line. Irony of the trust fund was that I made enough money as a Social Media Influencer to live, rather nicely. I used that money to pay all the bills and buy all my toys, so my trust fund just kind of sat there, growing. I had nothing to complain about. There were people that hadn’t worked in almost a year when you added the time up we had been forced to shelter in place—but they were still looking at social media, so I was bringing in those ad dollars.

  “This is it,” I said to Ezekiel. He had pulled up next to me on his motorcycle, and we sat in front of the iron gates of my property. “Just follow me in.” I punched in the six-digit code that made the gate swing open and led the way inside. The path to the main house was lined with the stereotypical oaks that were a staple to any plantation in the South.

  I slowly made my way down the stone pathway and clicked the remote to raise the garage door. The garage was added during my grandmother’s time, it was originally the outdoor kitchen that partially burnt down in the early 1900s, a gift from those aforementioned men in hoods. I parked my SUV next to the 1967 Chevrolet Corvette L88 that I inherited from my dad. I couldn’t even drive it because it needed a special gas to run, but I kept it around anyway. It reminded me of him.

  “This is something.” Zeke had pulled his motorcycle into the garage; there was still plenty of room. He walked out onto the front lawn and looked around intrigued.

  “Silence,” I said.

  “Silence?”

  “It’s the name of the house. It's called the Bayou Silence because my family is rather dramatic. My great-great-great-great-grandfather built this house to achieve silence, so that is what he named it. It wasn’t appreciated in his time, but he didn’t care, he did things differently.”

  “Are you saying this plantation has been in your family since its construction?”

  “Yup, we didn’t even lose it in the Civil War, they were focused on New Orleans. C’mon, let’s do this test thing.” I urged him to follow me into the house. There was an entrance from the garage that led directly into the modern kitchen that had also been an addition, but this one was added during my parent’s ownership and I had renovated it when I turned eighteen.

  Ezekiel placed his bag that he had luckily recovered on the counter and began pulling out a bunch of vials and plastic bags.

  “So, how did you get into all of this plant stuff, Ezekiel?” I asked.

  “Zeke.”

  “What?”

  “No one calls me Ezekiel. I told you that, right? It sounds like a pastor or some apocalyptical traveling hit man. Call me Zeke, please,” he smiled as he began placing little bags on the counter.

  “That's right, sorry, Zeke, yeah, you told me that. I just got Ezekiel stuck as your name and it might be hard to break it.” I sat on a bar stool at the kitchen island and placed my elbows on the counter, my palms up. He reached for my hand, flipped my hand over and traced the exposed skin of my palm with his finger. It was where it had been stabbed with the sharp part of a branch. I had been terrified I would end up going septic, since swamps weren’t exactly known to be nice and bacteria free. He rubbed a circle in my palm a look of wonder on his face, and I shivered visibly.

  Grabbing his kit from the backpack he had placed on the counter, he pulled out a stylus, looked me in the eye and said, “just a prick,” before he placed it against my index finger and I felt a pinch. A bead of blood pooled, and he sopped it up with something that looked like a tiny spatula. Then he placed the spatula in a black box which he then plugged into his computer with a USB plug. It seemed all very complex as things hummed and worked and graphs and numbers started showing up on the screen.

  “Oh man,” he said, pressing keys on his laptop and hovering over his computer.

  “What?” I leaned in and looked at the graphs but I couldn’t make sense out of it. I don’t think he expected me to.

  “I don’t know, this is…” He pulled out his kit and pricked his own finger and repeated the steps that he had done with my sample. When the graphs and numbers appeared, he sat back with a sigh. “It’s the same.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Full of that stuff, aren’t you two?”

  “We are, but we are not producing antibodies, she probably is one of the 3% that doesn't have the protein, has to be…” Zeke answered the man who stood behind him peering over his shoulder.

  “It’s why she chose you, why she lured you out there. Your bodies don’t process the antibodies to the pollen like other people. It allows it to infiltrate your systems and begin to change you, but your body doesn’t try to protect itself, it welcomes the change.”

  “Change me?” I turned to the man and blinked a few times feeling something was incredibly wrong with the air in the room. I didn’t know who this was. But it was okay. All was fine.

  “Yes, Miley, it’s changing you.” He turned to face me and brought his hand to my face. “It’s making you more powerful. Healing you.” He touched my palm, and I felt every particle in my being become charged and refreshed. I felt like I had slept a week and had a spa treatment.

  “What do you mean more powerful?” I asked the man.

  “The regeneration of the greener life forms on this planet, for one.”

  12

  The man looked away from Miley and pointed a finger at the screen.

  “It’s quite ingenious. She has always been an intelligent one. It took me too long to figure out how she did it. The pollen infiltrates the system, latches onto the DNA, or tries to, gets it right about half the time. It behaves like an allergen and forces the body to produce antibodies which it changes and converts to a virus, and has a ridiculously high kill rate once the body becomes infected. It’s not a natural creation. It would not have been created in a natural process, so to speak. I was willing to give her a pass on that, we are allowed some ingenuity now and again. That would have been fine, really, she’s allowed a bit of freedom in how she runs the Earth, until I noticed you two.”

  “Noticed?” I repeated his words stupidly. I looked at Miley, she had a glazed look about her. There was a niggling at the back of my awareness. This wasn’t normal. I didn’t know this man. Then pieces started to click, formulations started to play out. Oh no, not again.

  “Who are you?”

  “You shook that off quicker than I expected, Ezekiel.” He touched my shoulder, and I took a deep breath, my eyes clearing. I saw Miley blink rapidly from the corner of my eye and she gasped, her hand pulling away from his.

  “Well, I’m like her,” he shrugged. “If that explains things.”

  “You mean, a god set on the destruction of mankind?” Miley chimed in, and I couldn’t help it, I smiled. The man chuckled as if amused as well.

  “Not quite in that way.” He sat on one of the barstools and opened a bag of chips that were in a bowl in the center of the island. He popped one into his mouth and munched on it thoughtfully.

  “What is it like then?” Miley asked.

  “She is the Earth. I am the Sky.” He gestured his hands around in a random way. “She is my mate, for Sky mates with Earth and living creatures are birthed. This is the only planet that can sustain life in this solar system, at present because of us. She has a very elevated position, but she is now choosing one life over another. She is being a selfish mother. Selfish and jealous.”

  “Jealous, how?” I tried not to be impatient with him, but these gods spoke in half-truths a
nd metaphors.

  “Humans are my favored species because they think, they feel, they have conflict which is entertaining, and she often tries to take them away from me to punish me. Now she has gone too far, but I am very happy with the progress you have been making lately.”

  “Happy?” Miley looked at the man quizzically.

  “Yes, why should I not be happy?”

  “I don’t know—nuclear weapons, global warming, Jeffrey Epstein…” Miley replied.

  “The thing about children, you have to let them sort out their own problems. I have the utmost confidence you’ll figure these things out eventually. If I were to intervene, I would be no better than her.” He popped another chip in his mouth.

  “What about the pollen?” I interjected to get him back on track. I shot Miley a look that she hopefully interpreted as “quiet, please.” Not because she wasn’t making sense, but only because there were things that needed to be learned, and I had a feeling keeping on track would be hard with distractions.

  “What about the pollen?” he answered my question with a question.

  “What is it doing to us? You said it’s making us stronger, changing us. It’s killing others.”

  “The basic function of the pollen is duplication. It cannot replicate like a virus, so it changes things that can replicate to produce more pollen. It converts plant-life the easiest, animal life is harder as it needs almost a perfect line-up of circumstances. It’s why it usually just converts the antibodies, like a Plan B. My mate thought this one through diligently. Nothing like that Black Death episode — couple of episodes,” he looked sheepish.

  “And you’re saying we have a perfect line-up of circumstances? What is that exactly?” I asked.

  “The way your insides match your outsides, and your designer genes, those sorts of things. And yes, yours are perfectly lined up for the pollen to rearrange you into new kinds of humans. You should already be feeling the effects.” He pointed at Miley’s hand, and she flipped it over to reveal the unblemished skin.