“Right,” she said, “This is Deputy Emily Holland of the Hawk Claw Sheriff’s Department, it’s… 7:13 a.m. on Monday—” Just then the door opened, and a couple of nurses came in. They were bantering and slamming locker doors and didn’t pay us any mind at all.
“Maybe we should go somewhere else,” I said.
“I think you should come to the station,” she said.
“I just worked the overnight shift,” I said, “How about breakfast?”
Downtown Hawk Claw consists of a cluster of approximately ten buildings. These include two grocery stores, three bars, four restaurants, and a couple of gift shops. The population of Hawk Claw is small but it’s the only real town in all of Hawk Claw county. The town is situated at 8,200 feet and the thin, dry mountain air is perfect for staying cool in the summer. The Hungry Clogger is the diner in the middle of Hawk Claw, making it the main hang out in town up until noon at which point people start to migrate to the Thirsty Clogger, the pub across the street. “Clogger” is a play on words. Someone from Hawk Claw is a “Clawger”… get it?
So, Deputy Holland and I went to get some eggs and bacon. We sat in the back away from eavesdroppers and I drank coffee even though I was planning to go to sleep in an hour. She put her electronic recorder on the table in front of me and I talked through mouthfuls of eggs benedict and told the whole story in the same way I’ve written it above. It took half an hour because she was constantly interrupting me, and I had to explain some of the medical jargon. By the time I was done, a wave of fatigue washed over me and I felt a little dizzy and I knew that all the coffee in the world would not keep me awake much longer. I hate working the overnight shift but it’s a necessary evil in my line of work. She had been up all night, too, but she didn’t look tired at all.
“Deputy,” I said, “I’ve got to go home now, or else you’re going to be scraping me off the pavement when I fall asleep at the wheel of my truck.”
“I understand,” she said, “But I’ll need you to come down to the station to sign a statement later.”
“Sure,” I said, “Should I have a lawyer or something?”
“I don’t think so,” she said, “As long as everything you’ve said is 100% truthful, I can’t see how you would be in legal jeopardy.”
“It just seems like that would be the next thing they would ask if this was an episode of Law and Order. And I’m really, really tired. Aren’t you tired? You look wide awake.”
“Well,” she said, “Your part in this is over, now, Dr. O’Neill, and you can go home and get some sleep. But my investigation is just starting. And I think it’s safe to say that the Hawk Claw County Sheriff’s Office has never seen anything quite like this before.”
Chapter 3
Of course, she was right, and if I hadn’t been incredibly sleep-deprived as well as dehydrated and jittery from my seventh cup of coffee, I would have realized that whatever was going on was going to be major news. I would have maybe had some insight into how it was going to change the world forever. But I think you will find, reader, that I am not the insightful type. I tend to operate in a reactionary mode. My motto is Ready? Fire! Aim?
I joke, but I didn’t really think too much about what had happened to that poor girl. I think I just assumed it was the work of some loner wacko, probably it was an insane ex-lover who had latched onto Christianity in all the wrong ways for all the wrong reasons. I just thought, someone out there is extremely mentally ill, and I hope I don’t run across them in a dark alley. Because at the time I couldn’t imagine a scenario whereby the story I’m writing now would become famous throughout the world.
I managed to navigate my pickup home without dozing off. Luckily, it’s a short drive. That’s the nice thing about living in rural Colorado. I had a gorgeous natural timber A-frame perched on a ridge with breathtaking views of the mountains poking up through the clouds, but I could still walk to town in twenty minutes. If I had stayed in the city, I would have had a tiny brownstone apartment with an asthmatic view of the expressway through the clouds of exhaust fumes.
I woke up in early afternoon, jumped out of bed, showered, and brewed more coffee. I went out onto my deck with a bowl of rice crispies and took out my phone to scroll through the news when I noticed that I had missed several phone calls, all from the Sheriff’s Office. I listened to a voice mail from Deputy Holland and called her back. She picked up right away.
“Are you still awake?” I asked.
“Yes, Doctor O’Neill. I’ve been a bit busy since we talked this morning.”
“That doesn’t seem healthy,” I remarked, “I mean, you need to sleep.”
“I was about to go home but I can stay a bit longer if you can come down to the station and sign the statement I’ve prepared? Because I’d like to go through a couple points with you to make sure we’re on the same page.”
I drove my grey F-150 to the station. I had never been there before, but I finally found it after winding down a dirt road two miles into the wilderness to discover it set into the trees. It was a sprawling post-and-beam with a metal roof. So, ten minutes later I was shaking Deputy Holland’s hand again. My brain woke up from the fog it was in when I saw her face. Did I mention I found her appealing? I meant to say something.
She had a small office in the back of the station, and we went there to go over my statement. She introduced me to her boss, Sheriff Edwards. He was a short dark-haired man with a pale face and a closely cropped mustache. He was meticulously groomed and looked more like an accountant than a law man, but he didn’t talk much. He appeared to be there mainly as an observer. Someone had transcribed the recording from the diner, and I shuddered at how stupid I sounded when my words were put on paper. We went over a few minor points to clarify what I had been trying to say in my embarrassing ‘bro’ vernacular. Things like… “I guess I was pretty freaked out, but I was concentrating on saving her life.”
I often find that my words are embarrassing to me, which makes you wonder why I decided to put it all down in the form of.. well, whatever this is—but while I know many other people are going to write about it, I’m one of the few who saw it develop from a small-town mystery into the story that it eventually became. To that end, I’m going to tell some of it from the point of view of Deputy Holland, based on her account as she relayed it to me. In fact, I’ve filled in a lot of gaps, but I don’t think I’ve overreached; I may not have always been present, but I’m pretty sure this is how it happened.
So, let’s back up again. Earlier that day, right after taking my statement in the Hungry Clogger Diner, Deputy Holland had driven an hour to make a visit with one Reverend Marcus Thompson. She had only stayed a half hour or so, and then she had come back into town to get my signature on my statement. I had really thought that would be the end of it. What a fool I was.
The Reverend Marcus Thompson was a bigwig—officially he was known as an elder—in The Messianic Cathedral of Penance, or MCP. When I first heard their full name, I almost laughed. I thought it was a joke. It sounded less like a religious sect and more like a comic book villain. But, as I would later learn, it wasn’t a joke.
Depending on who you talked to, the MCP was either a major branch of Christianity, or an unsanctioned cult. Either way, they had a large collection of buildings in the middle of rural Colorado, with Hawk Claw being the nearest town. It was something I had been vaguely aware of but had never really researched and certainly had never seen up close. They kept a low profile and didn’t want publicity. I later learned that there were nearly twenty thousand people living out there, in a densely populated cluster of buildings that effectively made up a small, isolated city.
Deputy Emily Holland arrived at the MCP compound at about 10:30 a.m. She was running on adrenaline after working the overnight shift and then interviewing a devastatingly handsome Emergency doctor, an ICU doctor, two nurses and a respiratory therapist. She had told the whole story to her Chief who had looked at her like she had three heads. They had not identi
fied the victim yet. Emily knew that, according to both of the doctors she had interviewed, the young woman was unlikely to live much longer, and then this would be a murder case.
Deputy Emily Holland was familiar with The Messianic Cathedral of Penance’s compound because she had been there before. It was, after all, a major population center for the county of Hawk Claw, Colorado, and there had been a few issues in the past—a theft of some farm equipment and a handful of injuries which had to be investigated—but very few incidents, relative to the size of their population, over the years. She knew that they preferred to handle things in their own way and they really eschewed the ways of the outside world. But she also knew that most if not all of the woman dressed in plain, old-fashioned garb very similar to the clothes she had collected from the unidentified woman who was on a ventilator in the ICU at Hawk Claw Medical Center.
Chief Edwards had gotten an appointment for her to meet with Reverend Thompson, and she had spent twenty minutes preparing for the interview. She had Googled the MCP and learned that there were Messianic branches of Judaism and Christianity that focused on the Messiah—or the savior of the world. She got a bit lost reading about the differences between the sects which believed in redemption by the Messiah, which apparently meant different things to different people. Eventually she realized that she was reading about all sorts of religions except for the one that she was meant to investigate—because somehow there was very little about the MCP online. It seemed hard to believe that 20,000 people living an hour away from her could have such a small internet presence, but there it was. She was able to see the compound on Google Earth and could see the massive wall and the buildings that were arranged around a central spot which roughly resembled a circle with eight lines through it. This would be similar to a circle with two ‘X’s in the middle of it, offset at 45 degrees to one another—or like a ‘plus sign’ and an ‘X’ superimposed on one another. In this manner the circle was divided into eight equal sections by eight lines that all converged in the center. She could see several large warehouses and smaller building complexes. She just couldn’t tell exactly what they were, because it was a poor-quality picture. She tried to find more detailed pictures of the compound, and instead of high-resolution photographs, she saw reprints of the same fuzzy picture taken from Google Earth satellites. She found an article explaining that the MCP was unable to prevent Google satellites from taking overhead pictures of the compound—only federal installations could do that, and even then, in rare circumstances. However, they had limited any other pictures—including no street views or close-ups inside the wall, and overall, she hadn’t found much to look at.
There were a few links and pictures of people praying and farming, as well as an extensive detour on their website into the coming of the Messiah. This was not anything specific but appeared to be various interpretations of the Bible which described the second coming of Christ. She didn’t find anything too unusual about it because it was not extreme. Yet she suspected that there was something under the surface—something that they weren’t posting on their website. So, she brought that suspicious mindset with her when she went west to the MCP compound and arrived at the security gate.
The entire compound entered and exited through one gate. This, in and of itself, was a remarkable fact. That 20,000 people could only come and go through one small spot was a feat of both social and mechanical engineering. She knew that there were probably other ways to get in and out of the place, but it was impossible to ignore the imposing wall that separated the MCP from the rest of the world. She gazed at it while she waited for the security guards to assign her a parking space in the guest lot of the MCP.
The wall itself was approximately fifteen feet high. In the immediate area surrounding the security gate, the wall was made of a tasteful white wooden fence with integrated lighting. But a hundred yards away it appeared to change from elegant wood to industrial concrete. She wondered about having such jail-style décor within view of the entrance. She didn’t know if it was an oversight or if it was done on purpose.
The guard house looked more like a suburban family home than a security installation. Two guards in standard blue uniforms carrying firearms came out to greet her. They were very courteous. One of them carried an iPad and appeared to check her name off of a list. They gave her two ‘visitor’ badges—one to pin to her lapel and another for her vehicle dashboard—and directed her to the guest parking lot. She waited for a minute or so and then the massive wrought iron gate opened, and she drove her Subaru through. Within a few hundred feet she was turning into the visitor parking lot. She stepped out and looked around her, taking it all in.
The initial impression Emily had was that she was back in college. She had gone to the University of Colorado at Boulder as an undergraduate. The MCP compound had clusters of beautiful stone buildings, manicured green lawns, and even a clump of buildings enclosing an area that resembled a ‘quad’. All that was missing were the frisbee-throwing students. It was a strange contrast. She saw almost no people. Those that she did see appeared to be travelling from point A to point B without so much as glancing around. She remembered thinking that the grounds may have resembled a college campus, but it still felt like she was visiting a prison.
There were some mountains not far from the ‘campus’ where she could see snowcapped peaks. It was a gorgeous view. Nearby, she could see a church steeple that loomed above all the other buildings. It seemed to be in the center of the compound, with all the other buildings surrounding it like worshippers kneeling before an altar. She could see that there was symmetry to the layout that was evident even from where she stood. She knew what it looked like from the overhead views on Google Earth, but she had to admit that it was impressive firsthand.
Right then, she heard a sound overhead that she had not been expecting—and she looked up to see a small jet aircraft circling the compound. She watched it for a bit and saw—incredibly—that it was coming in for a landing. She was amazed. She had seen the paved area on the overhead picture from Google, but she hadn’t recognized it as a landing strip. She had assumed it was a road incorporated into the strange design of the compound. The plane disappeared behind some buildings as it landed inside the walls. She walked up the stone steps.
The MCP Welcome Center also resembled a college building—she felt like she was here to interview with the Dean of Admissions. She opened the double glass doors and approached the receptionist. A middle-aged woman sat behind a desk with a computer on it. She wore a business suit and rose to greet Emily.
“Deputy Holland,” she said, “It’s very nice to meet you. Welcome to the Messianic Cathedral of Penance.” She wasted no time bringing Emily back into the office of Reverend Thompson. She knocked twice and they entered. The Reverend got up from his desk and came around to greet Emily warmly.
“Deputy Holland,” he said, “It’s so nice of you to come visit us. I apologize that you had to come all the way up here to see me. Next time—should it ever be needed—I would be glad to come to Hawk Claw.”
“Thank you, Reverend, I appreciate that.” She declined coffee and he motioned her to a seat as the receptionist stepped out.
“On the phone, you mentioned a young woman in the hospital… can you tell me more? Surely she can’t be one of our flock.”
“Well, that’s what I was wondering,” she replied. “Do you recognize her?” She held up the picture on her phone that she had taken of the young woman’s face. She had a breathing tube in her mouth but otherwise looked peaceful, with her eyes closed.
“No, I cannot say that I do,” he said, “But there are over twenty thousand people living here, as I’m sure you know. What makes you think she is a child of the Messianic Cathedral of Penance?”
“The clothes she was wearing appeared to resemble those of the MCP, Reverend. She had a grey shawl, and brown leggings, and a white blouse. It immediately made me think of the MCP.”
“I see,” he said, “That is most distr
essing. What exactly happened to this unfortunate young woman?”
“She was beaten… tortured, really. She’s on a ventilator, as you can see, in the ICU at Hawk Claw Medical Center. The doctors there think she won’t survive.” At this the reverend paused, closed his eyes, and murmured a prayer.
Then he asked, “What is her name, Deputy?”
“I don’t know, Reverend. She had no identification on her.”
“Did she have any… identifying marks? Perhaps a tattoo or a birthmark?”
“No, sir, not that I am aware of.”
“I see. Well, I’m not sure how I can help you. I would like to help, though. I would like to see her, and pray for her, if I may. I realize that that might not be possible, if you haven’t identified her. But my heart goes out to this young woman, and I fear that she may be one of our… lost sheep.”
“Sir?”
“From time to time, Deputy, we have men and women in the MCP who… fall out of grace. It doesn’t happen very often, but we’ve seen it before. Not everyone is up to the tasks put before them by God, you see. And so, occasionally, someone will drift away from here, and usually they end up in Hawk Claw, and frequently there are drugs and alcohol involved which are, of course, substitutes for God’s love. I’m afraid we’ve had one or two who have resorted to prostitution as well as other crimes. I would assume that, as a deputy, you’ve seen this kind of thing.”
“Yes, sir, but I can’t say I’ve ever seen anyone associated with the MCP involved in anything like that.”
“Well, no, of course not, but I’m guessing you may have run into some former members of our church, without even knowing it.”
“Has anyone… fallen out with the church recently? Are you aware of any people who have left the MCP within the past year?”
The Armageddon Prophecy Page 2
