Dawn of Revelation

by A N Sandra

  “Umm,” Ursu stopped and Barden stopped also. They both listened, turning this way and that into the night breeze. Barden pretended that he was helping Ursu to sense the danger level. But in fact, he was too tired. He couldn’t guess how far they had traveled, but because they were already past the dam he knew they had fled through more territory in hours than they had covered in their leisure over the last two days.

  “I have won,” Barden said to himself and Ursu, and they slept beneath the constellations in a soft nest of grasses. For now.

  CHAPTER 6

  June 13th, Blythe, CA

  Here you go, sweetie.” Danica handed Bud his coffee at four-thirty in the morning as he entered the kitchen.

  Fresh from the shower in work clothes, with the ivory box already in his pocket because he had brought it inside the night before, Bud was ready to begin his workweek. He did a double-take as he saw Joshua sitting at the table with his own coffee, waiting for his toast and bacon and scrambled eggs.

  “I didn’t schedule you, today,” Bud told him. “I knew you had a late gig last night.”

  “I got three hours of sleep,” Joshua said breezily, as if just two years ago he hadn’t complained every weekday morning that he couldn’t possibly drag himself to school because he hadn’t gotten enough sleep. “I need the money, and I figured you could use me.”

  “We’re caught up so far,” Bud said. “But this time of year, we could always use someone. I think you’ll be beat by the end of the day.”

  Joshua shrugged. Bud could tell that the end of the day was too far away for Joshua to even care about.

  “The wedding went really good last night,” Joshua offered. “We got booked to play at Cinches next weekend.”

  “That bar in Redding?” Danica slid a plate of food in front of Joshua, clearly impressed. “That’s a big chain. If you do well… well, it’s a big deal!”

  “It is.” Joshua looked very pleased with himself for someone with only three hours of sleep. “We’re getting exposure. I’m going to have to cancel the Shasta Lake VFW, but they’ll live. I’ll make it up to them by playing a weeknight for free.”

  “Good for you,” Bud said. He took a big sip of coffee before diving into his eggs. “That was lucky.”

  “It was lucky,” Joshua admitted, “but we sounded great.”

  “I am really proud of you,” Danica said as she dropped to the table with her own plate.

  “Thanks, I couldn’t have done it without you,” Joshua said. “You guys always support me, and you feed us when we practice here.”

  Danica was touched by the unexpected humility of her handsome nineteen-year-old son, but Bud suspected that the success of the evening was owed in part to the great sound check, which was owed to the ivory box in his possession. Joshua had never wanted money enough to get up after only three hours of sleep and come to work at the quarry. Joshua wanted to be with the box, even if he didn’t know about its existence.

  For the first time, Bud was no longer amused or made intellectually restless by the possibility that the box was more than an artifact, but an actual relic with real power. He became a little worried.

  He thought of Danica’s great aunt who had spent several summers in Europe visiting churches with holy relics. Great Aunt Maureen had been searching for something she couldn’t articulate, but she was spending her own time and money and she had enjoyed her adventures very much. Bud didn’t want to think of himself as superstitious the way she was… but maybe that happened when you got older. Even if Bud didn’t feel older. His back wasn’t hurting, and he hadn’t minded getting out of bed to go to work for days.

  “I think we’re going to have a good day,” Bud said, helping himself to more eggs. “I can feel it.”

  Caleb called today,” Danica said as soon as grace was said, and Joshua, Twilight, and Bud were all eating. Danica liked to time big news so that everyone had a mouthful and she could talk with less interruptions.

  “Is he divorced yet?” Twilight asked hopefully.

  “No.” Danica frowned. “But Susan has a new job, that’s why she went to that convention last week. Susan is going to be very busy this summer. Caleb is still working at Fat Teddy’s Tires—”

  Bud tuned out for a moment. There was nothing wrong with installing tires for a living, but Caleb would have been a remarkable football coach and football was his real passion. Caleb was a great quarterback and he’d been second string at Cal, but his real talent was coaching. Susan didn’t like football and had convinced Caleb to drop out of Cal until he found a higher calling. Turned out Caleb’s higher calling had so far only been to become a junior supervisor of tire installers, making plenty of money to spend on Susan.

  “—managing Urban Relocation for the whole North State!”

  “What?” Bud shook his head. “Say that again?”

  “Susan is working for Global Urban Services in charge of Urban Relocation for the North State.”

  “She’s only twenty-nine!”

  “She’s ambitious,” Danica pointed out bitterly. She crunched a bite of salad and chewed hard to release her annoyance in general about Susan.

  “So, what does that mean?” Twilight wanted to know. “What is she really going to be doing?”

  “She’ll work with social workers and hospital administrators to prioritize who should be moving to the new housing first,” Danica explained. “She has a fancy office in Red Bluff.”

  “That evil woman!” Bud looked down at his beef stroganoff fiercely. Urban Relocation offended him deeply and he had no respect for Global Alliance’s accomplishments in any regard. Twilight looked a little worried about her father who was normally a get along guy, and not judgmental at all.

  “Urban Relocation is really ramping up.” Joshua shrugged. “She’s got a good job out of the deal. Maybe Caleb will go back to college if he doesn’t need to pay for all her maintenance.”

  “Not for anything he wants to do. Susan will never let that happen,” Twilight said. Both of her parents traded sharp looks but said nothing.

  Bud was pretty sure that Caleb had missed the momentum needed for a high-powered career like college coaching when he dropped out before finishing his senior year. But Caleb could still be an amazing high school coach with a big career in front of him if he simply finished college and got back to the game he loved. It was hard to imagine Caleb having an amazing life, tied to Susan as he was. She was controlling and rude, making her perfect for Global Urban Services, in Bud’s opinion.

  Global Urban Services controlled Urban Relocation and had an office in Red Bluff. They sent their workers in small cars mapping out areas of the North State the government had never cared about for very good reasons. They were nosier than the Census, by far, but the Global Urban Services provided by the Hollister Foundation were paid for by private money and no one complained. They interfered with the lives of everyone, but mostly they dealt with problems police and government social services would not. The mentally ill people who wandered the streets, for instance. Global Urban Services had the best program for getting the mentally ill into group homes and getting them to take medicine at no cost to taxpayers. Who didn’t love ducking into Starbucks without a schizophrenic with a sign panhandling for a heroin fix accosting them on their way inside?

  “There’s chocolate cream pie for dessert.” Danica changed the subject as quickly as she could.

  “Sounds wonderful,” Bud said as enthusiastically as he could. Susan could even ruin chocolate cream pie.

  “And Joyce called to tell me Brock has been accepted to a great program at Stanford,” Danica remembered much more cheerfully. “It’s going to be expensive, but she can probably make Kenny pay for most of it since he’s a minor!”

  “Aw.” Bud was easily able to flip from angry to happy for Joyce and Brock, who deserved anything good that happened to them. Suddenly his stroganoff tasted much better. “That sounds great.”

  “Brock gets to go to Stanford?” Torn between jealo
usy and happiness for her cousin, Twilight’s pale face radiated interest.

  “He can start this fall,” Danica said. “Joyce already called her lawyer to get Kenny to pay. Kenny agreed to all higher education expenses for Brock in the divorce. Brock is going to be part of a special new program for ASD students, it will be discounted, but even with a discount Stanford isn’t cheap.”

  “Brock is going to love Stanford,” Joshua said with no jealousy at all. Stanford was not his idea of a good time, but he understood that Brock would find a major university with multiple libraries and laboratories to be nirvana.

  “You could go to college,” Danica said in the voice she used when she was trying not to nag, but sound encouraging. Joshua did have a welding certificate, but Danica hoped for more.

  “I’m going to the college of life.” Joshua told her in a satisfied tone. “I’m going to be attending a long time.”

  Tuesday, as Bud pulled out of the Macdonald Building Materials quarry, he was surprised to see a small native American man walking up the long dusty driveway toward the quarry. Bud slowed to a stop, letting the cloud of dust settle around his truck before getting out to see why the man was trespassing in the early evening.

  “Can I help you at all?” Bud asked the man, who, upon closer inspection appeared possibly older than ninety. He didn’t want to tell the man he was going to have to leave, that the quarry was private property, and for too many good reasons to list a strict no-visitors policy was always enforced. The night mechanic, Jared, was also considered a security guard and relished breaking up his mechanical duties to roughhouse with intruders.

  “Yes,” the rather delicate-looking man said. He had clearly walked from a distance to get there, because Bud couldn’t see a car parked anywhere. He couldn’t be that fragile, even though he looked almost birdlike. “I came to see the bear.”

  “See what?” Bud asked, but he couldn’t stop himself from touching his pocket to protect the box. Intuitively he knew the box was what the man wanted to touch. This kind of thing happens whenever I try to be nice to a stranger.

  “The bear,” the Native American man told him. “The beast in the tiny box.”

  “I don’t have a bear in a box,” Bud said as kindly and firmly as he possibly could. Is that what’s in the box? Bud pictured a miniature dancing bear in the box for just a second before he dismissed the image.

  “You do,” the man insisted “I saw it in my dream.”

  “Dreams don’t really mean anything,” Bud said, wondering how he found himself in such a situation, wondering if he could make the old man see reason or not. Why do these things only happen to me?

  “My dreams do.” The old man looked at Bud with honest intensity radiating from his brown eyes, surrounded by deep folds of thin brown skin. Bud had seen sturdier looking paper sacks than the man who stood before him. “Come.”

  Helplessly, Bud followed the man back down the driveway to the Macdonald Building Materials quarry. It wouldn’t do to the let the poor old man have a run in with Jared. Bud wanted to think Jared would never hurt an elderly man… but Jared posted enough white supremacy things on social media to make him concerned. Danica was always raving about it. Bud would ask her to unfollow/unfriend white supremacists, but Danica would insist that she needed to know what they were up to.

  The old man wore small worn brown boots and his baggy jeans were folded many times at the cuffs but still dragged in the dust. Twilight was probably much bigger than this man. Bud had gone to school with plenty of Native Americans. There was a reservation close by, but they were close with each other and he was not currently friends with any of them. Nick Rainstorm had worked for Macdonald Road Materials for ten years and he and Bud had spent lots of time together, but Nick had died two years ago. Lots of Nick’s friends were dead before forty-five. They lived a private life on the reservation and sometimes they simply buried their own without a fuss. Suddenly Bud realized that he should have known this man if he had been living in the Blythe area, or at least known who he was. Bud had never bumped into him at the IGA, or Maxi mart, or any Pop Warner Games, or anywhere at all.

  “Where are you from?” Bud asked the man as they walked. Probably Modoc County somewhere.

  “Idaho.”

  “Idaho?” That was not the answer Bud had expected at all. “You drove here from Idaho to see a bear in a box?”

  “Clearwater, Idaho,” the old man stated. “I didn’t drive. The Urban Relocation people took my license when they took my farm and my horses. I walked.”

  Idaho isn’t so far, Bud reasoned with himself. He sometimes drove to Boise to purchase equipment or deliver it to Macdonald’s quarry there. Boise was an eight-hour drive from Blythe on a good day. But Clearwater County is up toward the panhandle.

  “You walked all the way?” Bud asked.

  “People offered me rides when I was by the roads,” the man said. “But I needed to walk. I was very angry.”

  “What do you mean Urban Relocation took your farm and your horses?” Bud suddenly realized what the old man previously said.

  “They took my farm and my horses. My sons tried to fight in court, but all that happened was we lost everything. Everything we worked for is gone.”

  “Urban Relocation isn’t supposed to include farming,” Bud said, and he felt his blood pressure rising.

  “We just had horses. I haven’t even had a garden since my wife passed.” The old man reconsidered slightly. “My son’s second wife grew pot where my wife’s garden was, but the Urban Relocation people said that is not a real farm.”

  Bud was incensed for the old man. He was also incensed that Urban Relocation taking a horse farm from an elderly man had not been a national news story. Maybe the man was not telling him everything.

  “You would think I would have seen that on the news,” Bud said out loud, hoping he didn’t sound disbelieving.

  “You would think,” the old man replied. The tone of his voice sent shivers down Bud’s spine.

  The old man walked faster than Bud would have thought possible and the two of them reached the caution tape that surrounded the streambed quickly. Without any hesitation the old man took a pocketknife out of his front shirt pocket and sliced it, and Bud was surprised that he didn’t feel like stopping him. They walked toward the streambed and when they came to it the old man advanced into it, jumping as lithely as a grasshopper over the ancient stones. Bud was not nearly so graceful in his chunky work boots, but he managed to follow without twisting an ankle.

  Bud recognized what must have been rapids in the stream, the place where Bud had broken ground and found a huge piece of fossilized wood from a variety of tree he couldn’t possibly recognize. As days had gone on bones of animals that were almost certainly extinct, and possibly dinosaurs had turned up. It had been exciting to think that the quarry workers were part of a discovery of an ancient site, but the thrill had turned sour quickly enough with missing paychecks and unemployment kicking in. It felt eerie to be in the same spot, after years had gone by.

  With the surprising strength that small people often have, the old man pushed rocks this way and that. Bud was torn between trying to help him and fleeing like a teen who sees red and blue lights flashing outside a party. It didn’t matter that no one was going to study the site, it still felt wrong to rifle through it. Setting aside the legalities, that it was reserved for archaeological study at some point, the very ground felt more sacred than church. The stones cry out...

  “Help,” the old man commanded Bud. With a sigh Bud helped him wrangle a large rock to its side. The old man produced a water bottle from his shirt pocket, took a swallow, and poured the rest over the dirt on the newly exposed part of the rock.

  A painting was revealed as the wrinkled brown hand used a pocket handkerchief to wipe the rock fairly clean. A painting of a large bear, more like a short-faced bear from the ice age than any modern bear, was revealed. The reason Bud could tell the bear was so large was that a person much smaller t
han the bear was there for scale. But unlike cave paintings Bud had seen in other quarries over the years, this was a sleekly executed painting. It did not look like ancient graffiti, it looked like expensive art. The stone underneath the painting had been carefully smoothed and probably primed, the paint must have lasted thousands of years in a supple condition. The actual paint used had been expertly mixed and applied to the rock. Even turning the rock the clumsy way that the two of them had and scraping it against other rocks and sand had not marred the painting.

  Bud could not help running his hand over the painting, even though it was sacrilege to touch such an amazing work of art. Then he looked at it again as he drew his hand away and noticed the double helix of a DNA symbol on the bear’s leg, it was delicately wrought, which was why it had taken him several seconds to comprehend what it was. Was the DNA of the creature in the painting what was inside the ivory box in his pocket? No sense. That box could contain anything.

  With a deep sigh Bud took the box out of his pocket and held it out toward the old man. He reached out for it, there in the streambed, and held it to his chest with two tears creeping down his face.

  “How did you know the painting was on the rock?” Bud wanted to know.

  “My dreams. When the Urban Relocation people came with their horse trailers and took my horses, I ran into the woods with my falcons and my thirty-eight.” The old man sighed.

  Bud was again struck by the appearance of vulnerability the man had, but he had been tough enough to walk to Northern California from Northern Idaho. He must be stronger than he looked.

  “I never drink alcohol, not a drop, not ever, but I had taken a bottle with me into the woods, I was going to drink and shoot myself and let my falcons pick me apart.”