Dawn of Revelation

by A N Sandra

  “Who took Brock?” Bud asked, trying to stay calm. A car got so close they almost traded paint and Bud focused his eyes on the road while he waited for Danica to catch her breath and talk.

  “The Hollister Mental Health people!” Danica was still sobbing. “Joyce called! She was getting ready to drive him to Stanford and they just came and took him!”

  “They can’t kidnap people,” Bud said. Can they?

  “They had the Sheriff’s Department with them! They had guns!”

  “Oh, God,” Bud said. “I’m half an hour from home. I’ll stop there before I go to Weed with the hay.”

  Danica kept sobbing.

  “Danica?”

  Sobbing.

  “Danica?”

  ‘What? Just come home!”

  “I’m coming. Don’t do anything till I get there. Okay?”

  Sobbing.

  “Okay?”

  Danica hung up and Bud cursed every bad word he allowed himself. They couldn’t take a young person on his way to Stanford. What would be the point? Brock was going to be a highly contributing member of society someday, if there was going to be a someday. The whole business of living day to day while the world might be ending was hard to understand. But it had to happen. The hay had to be moved, the bills had to be paid, and Brock had to be found and brought home.

  There wasn’t a good place to turn the loaded semi around at the end of the Henderson driveway, so Bud left it pulled over by the side of the road and made the long walk to the house, his boots grinding into the gravel, his box in his pocket. Both Joyce and Janice’s cars were parked out front when Bud knew that under ordinary circumstances they both had lots of other things to do. He sighed and put his hand over the box in his shirt pocket before opening the door.

  Joyce and Danica were standing on either side of Janice with their hands on her shoulders. The overpowering scent of smoke was in the air because they were allowing Janice to smoke right at the kitchen island. All three of the women looked like deranged heavy metal band members with their curly hair and eye makeup running down their cheeks.

  “What happened?” Bud asked, slipping his arm around Danica.

  The women all looked toward him, deciding who would speak, when Joyce broke out first.

  “The Hollister people came for Brock first thing this morning. They had the Sheriff’s Department with them. They said they had a report from Kenny that Brock was mentally unstable, suicidal, and needed to be separated from his mother—”

  “Bullshit!” Bud exploded in spite of the normally calming influence of the box. That piece of hypocrisy was too much to take. Janice had done nothing but sacrifice her life for her three sons since Kenny and the hairdresser had built a new life. She’d gotten Brock into Stanford, for God’s sake.

  “Kenny probably didn’t want to pay for Stanford, so this was his out,” Janice said weakly. “He used the Hollister Mental Illness people to do his dirty work. He kept putting off cutting the check, but he insisted he was going to. He must have been working this angle the whole time. That’s why he had Brock visit him. So he could set this up. I don’t even know where Brock is.”

  “I’ll fix this,” Bud promised. Right then he hated Kenny and the man’s adulting-avoidance with the heat of a science fiction death ray. “If it’s the last thing I do.”

  “Oh, honey,” Danica burst into fresh tears. “Joyce has called everybody and we’re waiting to hear from our congressman—”

  “No,” Bud returned. “No congressman is going to fix this. I’m going to deliver this hay to Weed right now. I’m going to find a way to get Brock home. This is not okay. We’re not going to roll over for this.”

  Danica kissed him on the cheek, affirming her love for his sentiment, even though her kiss did not have the electricity of a kiss that came from a believer.

  “I don’t care if you think I can do it!” Bud said hotly. “I’m going to save Brock.”

  Only Joyce seemed to understand the total depth of what Bud was saying. Her blue eyes, encased with the sort of wrinkles that came from love and caring for others, fixed themselves on Bud.

  “Remember your own kids,” Janice warned him with a shaky voice.

  “My own kids won’t have a good life if the Hollister Foundation can do this to Brock,” Bud shot back instantly.

  The three women held each other in the cloud of smoke in the previously immaculate kitchen and Bud walked back to his truck with a firm purpose. They would make a plan, he would follow it, and Brock would be home. Nothing else would suffice.

  As he walked out the door, instead of walking back to his truck he went to the chicken coop where Ben and Twilight were sitting thoughtfully, doing nothing at all. Not a normal stance for Twilight, although Ben sometimes seemed to be looking into space.

  “Take this,” Bud opened his shirt pocket and put the ivory box down on Twilight’s desk. “Hack the Hollisters and find out where Brock is. We’re going to get him tonight.”

  “Dad!” Twilight looked up, alarmed. “It’s flattering that you think I could do that, but it took me a long time to figure out how to get on the Dark Web… I can’t hack the Hollister network-”

  “I think you can today,” Bud told her firmly. There was no time to explain the extra help that would come from the box. Somehow, he knew that leaving her the box was going to help her figure it all out. “I’m going to deliver my load and act like everything’s normal but tonight, we’re getting Brock back.”

  “And just take him home?” Twilight looked aghast. “They won’t let him into Stanford if the Hollisters want him. Should we try to work through the system so he can go on with his life?”

  “Stanford isn’t going to be around in a few months anyway,” Bud said. “You’re going to take Brock to an old mining cabin in the middle of nowhere and keep him damn hidden.”

  “Dad!” Twilight looked even worse. “I’ll miss school! Classes start next week! I’ve already been doing two-a-days for volleyball.”

  “You were going to miss the rest of school anyway,” Bud told her grimly. “You can’t finish school when there is no school to finish. You’re the one who brought Natalie and Jase here to tell us the truth. Now we either believe them and act like it, or our family won’t be around in less than a year even if we don’t get sick.”

  “Your father is right,” Ben said. “We’ll get Brock and I’ll hide with you in the mountains. We don’t need much.”

  “But…” Twilight’s face was completely blank. “I’m not sure how I’ll even hack their system… I…”

  “You’re going to have extra help,” Bud said. He was putting faith in a box that was smaller than his fist, but he was also putting faith in his family, who never let him down. “We have to be there for each other. That includes Brock.”

  “Absolutely,” Twilight said. Her face was still not registering her thoughts or emotions, but she perked up some. “What’s in the box?”

  “A bear,” Bud told her, ignoring the puzzled look on her face. “I’m going, but I’ll be back tonight.”

  It felt a bit like walking down the drive naked without his box, but Bud knew he needed to let Twilight have it if she was going to have a chance of hacking into the Hollister system. Bud never had more than one beer before driving his truck. No matter how late he was he didn’t speed. He hadn’t smoked pot since he was a teenager. And now he was plotting a crime.

  It’s not a real crime. The Hollisters took Brock from a loving family for false reasons. They aren’t even a real government entity. They had no right to take Brock, or anyone else. It’s not a real crime to right such a terrible wrong. If we try to work through proper channels, we may never get Brock back.

  The countryside sped by as Bud delivered his load of hay, and he was freshly struck by how pristine the countryside had become. Large swatches of land were free of old buildings and dilapidated fencing removed by the Hollisters. There was almost no litter anywhere anymore, even on I-5. The Hollister Youth Corps had been
busy.

  It hadn’t seemed wrong when the Hollister Mental Health people had taken the mentally ill homeless people away. They had been a source of crime and despair for the locals. In fact, it had been a relief to think of them living in group homes with kind caretakers, getting their medicine given to them by loving health care workers, being fed nutritious food, sleeping in warm beds.

  When the Hollister Wellness Foundation began to combat drug use and had started collecting the addicted, Bud had been a little worried how it would work, but also relieved. Heroin had made its way to Blythe and the heartbreak it left in its wake devastated ordinary people who had a hard time understanding that their loved ones would never be the same people they used to be. It had been nice to think of the addicted getting help instead of going to prison.

  Now Bud tried to think of one person who had come back from a mental health care group home or a Hollister drug treatment program and he could not think of anyone he knew personally. As a teen he could remember people entering drug rehab and coming home, but he could not think of anyone who had returned to Blythe from a Hollister Group Home. Amy Bartell had threatened to kill her abusive grandmother and had been removed to a group home in Redding to finish high school. But Amy worked at Shascade Drug as a pharmacist now and Bud saw her whenever he filled a prescription. If he had thought about it he would have assumed that Urban Relocation would resettle people in Urban areas, but maybe they simply weren’t ever returning. The reading he’d done on Twilight’s computer suggested that the Hollister Foundation was not keeping everyone in the cozy group homes that the Hollister Foundation showed on their infomercials about getting help for mentally ill loved ones or addicted loved ones.

  The drive to Weed was less pleasant without his ivory box. Somehow, he didn’t feel one with his rig the way he did when the box was in his pocket. He hoped Twilight was making good use of her time with it. Clearly Ben’s box helped her get on the Dark Web, so with both hopefully she would be able to find out where Brock was.

  Brock is at the Hollister NorCal Mental Health Intake Center in Redding,” Twilight told Bud after he had showered and changed his clothes. “I can’t figure out how long they will keep him there. It looks like they have twenty-eight hundred people there and I can’t figure out how they decide when they are moved to group homes or rehabs. There are people who have been in the intake center for two years if the records are accurate.”

  “I want to get him tonight,” Bud insisted. “I don’t want him to slip away from us.”

  “There is a lot of security,” Twilight warned. “There are cameras, alarms on doors. Everyone who works there has to punch a code into a security gate, then they have to do a retinal scan at the door, and they log into their payroll by using a fingerprint.”

  “A retinal scan?” Bud was astonished. How was it that the Hollisters got employees to agree to this sort of stuff? It had been hard to get people to punch in for their shift correctly at the quarry by just entering the last four digits of their social security number into a simple IPad. What on earth was going on at the intake center? Nothing good. “We may need more than just the three of us—”

  “Already called Michael, Joshua, BJ, and Bryan to meet us in Redding.” Twilight looked cool and confident. It was impossible to believe she had just turned fifteen weeks before. “Ben and I made a plan and we think we can pull it off.”

  Bud listened as Twilight listed the steps to her plan to break Brock out of the intake center. The center was just past the edge of a large industrial area, built into the side of a hill. It covered more than ten acres although the building wasn’t much larger than a small-town hospital. The best area to remove Brock from would be in the back where the hill behind the intake center was planted densely with thorny shrubs. Bud would use his welding tools to cut a large hole in the fence while Bryan and BJ would make a distraction at the front gate, pulling as much attention of the security forces to the front gate as possible. Ben’s falcons would break the security cameras in the back once Bryan and BJ were causing trouble. Twilight would stay hacked into the intake center’s network and deliver chaos by switching patient information around. With the right tools Bud would break into the parking garage below the facility from the back of the property. Hopefully without security cameras he would not be seen. Michael and Joshua would go with him and the three of them would locate Brock and take him out the back way after thrashing about making trouble for the workers to deal with rather than following them. Hopefully no one would even notice Brock missing until the intake workers managed to unscramble who was who.

  “It’s five o’clock now,” Bud said. “I’ve been up since five-thirty and we’re going to be at this most of the night.”

  “Take a nap. Ben and I will gather up most of the things we need. We’re not leaving Blythe until ten-thirty, anyway.”

  No rational man leaves a fifteen-year-old girl and a very elderly man to plan and execute a break out from a seriously secure facility. Bud had indulged in science fiction and fantasy books since his early youth, but he had never been the sort of person to be anything less than rational and practical in his day-to-day life. He went to church, sometimes with his mother, sometimes with his wife, but he never believed in their theology the way he believed in science and nature. Those elements were in the box still sitting on Twilight’s desk, and Bud believed that if he didn’t help his nephew, his life wouldn’t be worth living. Somehow the evidence the box had produced convinced him that his pure-hearted family could use it for good to save Brock.

  Faith is the substance of things hoped for. The evidence of things not seen. Bud had always understood those words to mean that faith is not wishful thinking. A person acting in faith is acting on what they know deeply to be correct. He never believed that if he followed rules someone else designed, based on a book too big for him to understand, that he would go to heaven. The thought of death and afterlife had always been too abstract for Bud to come to a solid plan on attaining a wonderful afterlife. Now, he was risking the lives of his own children based on the idea that life was not worth living without taking care of others. Danica would never forgive him or love him again if one of their children were injured or captured by the police, so Bud and his children would protect Brock, if it cost everything.

  Something in the box had magnified a protective sense in Bud that had always been there. Bud had been a devoted father and provider and normally he would never have risked his children’s wellbeing in any way. Now his protective sense extended to Brock with more intensity than it previously had. Bud could not fathom leaving Brock lost in a sea of medication and institutional care. No matter how cozy the group homes looked in promotional brochures, Bud knew that Brock needed to read, to learn, to use the incredible mind he had been born with. Without his family Brock would be unloved, and unloving, he would be a shell of the person he was born to be.

  The cloud of smoke in the kitchen had faded a little, but Bud had the random thought that Joyce had probably smoked less than ten cigarettes there, and it would possibly never be the same again. Danica would wipe it down, every nook and cranny, but the lingering smell might always be there. Bud hoped it would always be there. He never wanted to forget the terrible betrayal by Kenny, the man who had been his companion and in-law for so long. A man who would leave his family for a woman he couldn’t have truly known was foolish enough, but a man who would sentence his own child to an institutional existence when that child could be studying at a major university was vile. Just to save some money. The anger inside Bud was like a raging bear, and he would have mauled Kenny mercilessly if he had been anywhere close.

  “There isn’t any dinner,” Danica said, poking her head in from the family room.

  “I’m too sick about this to eat,” Bud told her. “I’m tired. I’m going to bed now.”

  Danica nodded. It was a true sign of how bad the situation was that she didn’t try to give him a kiss or any comfort. There was no comfort to be had, and they both k
new it. Bud took a very quick shower and fell into bed, surprised that he could sleep. Somehow his body knew he needed to shut down his mind.

  There was no alarm, Bud had forgotten to set one, but somehow, he woke at nine o’clock and went to the kitchen dressed in his most comfortable work clothes. He sent a text to Brad Beasley, whose hay needed hauling in the morning, to say that Bud was sick and unable to pick up the load. Danica was passed out in the family room with the TV playing Molly Hollister’s horrible show. Bud could hear Sadie in the background talking to Doctor Justin. Danica liked Doctor Justin. She listened to his podcasts and quoted him sometimes. Health starts with your attitude.

  Bud made a pot of coffee and while he waited for it to brew he heated up some ribs from dinner the night before. He ate the ribs with some of Danica’s amazing potato salad (she always added a copious amount of pickle juice) and drank a mug of coffee, putting the rest in his thermos.

  “What can I do to get ready?” Bud put his head in at the chicken coop.

  “I’m going to paint your face with camo paint, so you don’t look like you,” Twilight told him. “We’re meeting Michael and Joshua in Redding. They already know to be painted and ready. We’ll take your Silverado to Blythe and trade it for Kenny’s old Jeep.”

  “That thing doesn’t run,” Bud scoffed.

  “Brock has been fixing it for Bryan,” Twilight said. “It runs great, and it hasn’t had plates for years. It’ll be hard to trace, and it’ll do good on the back roads.”

  Twilight painted Bud’s face so that it was unrecognizable and even slicked his hair with some kind of gel so that he didn’t look like himself in any way. Then they went over the list of tools Ben had packed for Bud to cut through the fence in the back of the property. According to Google Earth there was a road not far behind the fence, even though there was a fair amount of vegetation between the dirt road and the actual fence. Bud approved of everything Ben had chosen and got a few more things, and then all three of them piled in the Silverado without saying goodbye to Danica. Something Bud had almost never done in twenty-eight years of marriage.