Pam and George had had the presence of mind to locate the tent close to the foot of a small hill, meaning that they were unlikely to take a direct hit from a tornado. But if a big one should sweep this clearing—well, then it was over for them.
Thunder snapped, the wind screamed, and Ward and Claire James drummed on their drums. Outriders chuckled and rasped nearby. Martin believed that they probably didn’t even want to attack the tent at this point. They wanted this little band of evolved humans right where they were, because as long as they were here, what problems could they cause?
He and Trevor had almost been drowned when the Hummer passed through the gateway and hit the flood on this side. But the other kids had anticipated what might happen, and were waiting with ropes in the slow water near shore. It had been a near thing, but the both of them had managed to ford the swollen, raging river.
Trevor slept with his head on his dad’s shoulder. Another kid had the other shoulder. Two little ones shared his lap.
And he thought, working in his mind with Pam and George and Mike. The kids were getting expert at this, their minds racing much, much faster than his. The change had affected children and adolescents because their minds were more supple and less informed with the weight of civilized knowledge.
There was a name for the state they were in—many names, in fact. It was called bhodi, satori, many things. But it was not as if the soul was lit from a higher power—enlightened. They weren’t enlightened, they simply were.
Man had left the forests of Eden an animal, but these kids had found their way back, bringing none of the debris of civilization, but all of its compassion, its consciousness of the value of the individual, its ability to balance personal and collective need. They had returned to Eden as true human beings. They understood how to be as lilies of the field. For them, it wasn’t impossible to live in the rain. They had each other. They had love.
But they were still just this tiny, little band in a great and frightened world.
It had been this way, before, he thought, in the lands of southern France and northern Spain thirty thousand years ago, when the spirit had been on the children, and adolescents had begun to paint the walls of caves with the magic animals of the mind.
Pam shook him. She frowned at him.
He’d allowed his mind to drift while they were reading his memories of Wylie’s book.
“See them?” Trevor asked suddenly. His voice was curiously flat, as if he was dreaming.
“Are you asleep, Son?”
“I’m out of my body, and if I keep having to talk, I’m going to be back in, so come out, I need to show you something.”
Pam nodded. They could read the information stored in his brain in peace if he wasn’t there, so he took a deep breath, let it out and with it let his soul out of his body. When he moved out of the tent, he found Trevor and some of the other kids together. The rain whipped through them, the outriders did not react to them. He saw them as their ordinary selves, but knew that this was only his mind filtering their essences into familiar forms. Their bodies were still inside the tent.
Trevor pointed, and he followed the direction. Moving slowly, he tried to clear himself of all expectation, to so empty his mind that the actual appearance of the world over which he was flying would come through.
It was hard, though, in this state, to see anything except what you expected to see, or wanted to. He saw cities brightly lit in the night, Wichita and Kansas City, and the smiling prairie farther on dotted here and there with the lights of smaller communities.
He saw, in other words, a safe world, and so one that was not real. So he told himself, You will close yourself to this. You will blank your mind. And when you look again, you will not see your memories or your hopes, you will see only what is part of the actual, physical world.
He saw Lindy. He was right in front of her and she was still walking, but she was so thin and tired, she looked like she had only a few more steps left in her. Her eyes were glazed as if dead, but still she walked, and not far ahead were lines of fourteen wheelers, Continental Van Lines, Murphy’s Stores, Gap Leaders, an ad-hoc assembly of vehicles. Other wanderers were getting into them and she was eager, he could see it, because it would mean no more walking on her blistered clumps of feet.
Soldiers, some of them in standard issue G.I. uniforms, others thin and sleek, seraph in gleaming black, their hands gloved in white, their heads hidden by visored helmets, were separating the arriving wanderers into two groups. Seraph and human soldiers worked together, and he knew that the human soldiers were themselves wanderers.
There was a crackle, and a group of wanderers who had just been moved into a small field blew apart, their legs, arms, and heads flying in every direction.
Sitting in the back of a nearby pickup was a soldier manning a peculiar, disk-shaped weapon, and he knew what that was, too, because back in the tent Trevor had the smaller one he’d taken from Wylie’s house.
As he watched, more wanderers approached the ruined bodies with knives and saws and began harvesting the meat. The ever-thrifty seraph must be feeding their captives to themselves. It made ugly sense. How could you find a cheaper way to keep them going than that?
He tried to scream at Lindy, but his voice could not be heard by her or anybody else. And look at her poor feet, surely she wouldn’t be set to work, surely they would select her. And his poor Winnie, God only knew what had become of her.
The sorrow was so great, the helplessness almost enough to drive him mad.
A warmth came over him, then, so kind, so surpassing in protective compassion that he allowed himself to hope that at last the deity he had been praying to constantly for all these days had come. But it was not God, it was another soul. He had a sense of a soldier’s heart, determined, disciplined, and a soldier’s face, tight with effort.
When he tried to open himself to this soul, though, the way you do when you are practiced in out-of-body travel—and he was getting somewhat okay at it—the other soul threw up a memory from its childhood, a boy riding a bicycle up a driveway on a summer’s night, a yellow porch light with moths flying around it, an elderly dog standing up on the porch, then coming down to greet the boy, his tail twirling.
Martin recognized it as an attempt to say, in the multilayered language in which soul speaks to soul, that this visitor who was trying to contact him now had been a boy beloved of an old dog. And with the high-speed insight that characterizes thought unencumbered by the electrochemical filters built into the brain, Martin saw that this meant that he had once been good and gentle, but it was a long time ago. But he had seen his error and now longed to return to his boyhood state.
He had done evil, this interloper, but he was trying to say that he was not, himself, evil.
Then Martin saw hieroglyphics. They were extremely vivid, but were they coming from the soul or were they in the physical world? Telling the difference took an expert, and he was no expert.
Trevor’s mental voice said, This is what I wanted you to see. Let General North continue to guide you.
Martin saw the face of their guide again, just the eyes. The eyes were pleading.
Martin could, of course, read hieroglyphics. But there were over two thousand hieroglyphic symbols, and translation could be an extraordinary challenge, and the farther back in time from the date of the creation of the Rosetta Stone, which was the basis of all hieroglyphic translation, the less accurate translation became. He saw immediately that these were Old Kingdom if not even older, and that they were a mix of words and numbers, with bits of quickly scribbled hieratic notes here and there along the edges.
These were the most complex hieroglyphics he had ever seen, but as with all complex texts, there were simpler words, and he thought to start with these. They were lovely glyphs, really well executed. He read ur, the swallow glyph, then udjat, the Eye of Horus that has become the familiar © of modern prescriptions. He read on, recognizing the name Narmur, the first pharaoh of the Old Kingdom.
Then a bit of the hieratic text became clear: the connection. This was followed by an unknown number that had been scribbled beside the hieroglyphic for copper.
Incredibly, this appeared to be a set of instructions about making electrical connections.
The souls of the kids were filling the chamber now. Pam had come, and was signaling an image of a long tunnel with some kind of a car in it. Then George showed a picture of the Rockies, then the entrance to the Cheyenne Mountain facility, easily recognizable by its huge steel doors.
This image agitated Al North. Martin could feel his sorrow. But why? They knew that somewhere the human souls were stored, and maybe what they were learning here was that it was under the Rockies.
A map was thrust into his mind as if into his hand, accompanied by a red flush of anger. It was a Google map centered just west of Holcomb.
A shock went through him. “Zoom,” he said. “Again.” The map now pointed to a particular crossroads.
And he at once understood why the seraph had scoured this part of Kansas the way they had. It wasn’t only because he was there and the gateway to the other human world was there, it was because the repository where the souls were hidden was there, at the geographic center of the continental United States, which was a few miles from the town of Lebanon, just over the county line from Holcomb, just at the crossroads he was looking down at right now.
This spot must be of enormous geomagnetic significance. But the men who had made the casual measurements that had located it, had been innocently playing around with a cardboard map.
But they hadn’t. They had been under seraph mind control and doing the work of seraph engineers.
He could feel Al North’s delight as a sense of dancing. Music came out of him, joyous chords. He had been working and working to communicate this. He had been struggling to be seen, to be heard, but until now nobody had noticed him.
Martin had not noticed that they’d gone down into the earth to find this place, but they had, they’d gone deep, and as they returned, traveling through so much stone was eerie, to feel yourself in the pull of it, to feel your sensitive electromagnetic body negotiating the smaller spaces in the dense matter—it was claustrophobic and they were deep, very deep.
Without warning, he burst up into the storms of the night and went rocketing into the sky. For an instant he saw the wide plains of Kansas whirling beneath him, then the clouds, then he was above the clouds and the second moon was high, its soft light making castles of the cloud tops from horizon to horizon.
He felt a pull upward, strong, and he saw laughing, singing children looking down from a tower above him, pleading with him to come. But he looked only for one face in the tower of song, and he did not see that face, he did not see his Winnie.
Above the tower were spreading mansions and roads in the high sky, great, flowing blue spaces, and the clouds were gone and the moons were gone and waves of pure pleasure were pouring through his body with such intensity that he could not believe that he had anything even approaching such a capacity for delight.
It was the pleasure of great love, mature and rich and filled with the resonance of long companionship, an exalted version of the love he had known with Lindy, but also there was somebody there who wanted him and to enter him and become him, too, and there was the laughter of children, and the perfect voice of a great choir.
Then something stung him. Hard. On the cheek.
“Dad! Dad!”
What was that? Well, it wasn’t heaven, so he wasn’t interested.
Another sting, harder. No, go away.
Another one, harder still. “Damn you!”
“Dad!”
Trevor was there. Physically there, because souls don’t have beads of sweat running along their upper lips. Trevor shut his eyes tight and whap, Martin saw stars.
“What the hell, you hit me!”
His son fell on him sobbing and laughing, hugging him. “Finally! Dad, you almost didn’t come back!”
He had never in his life felt as heavy as he did now. Returning to your body was putting on a lead overcoat.
“How long have I been…” He bowed his head. He could not bear to say it. He had been in heaven.
His son’s hand touched his shoulder. “I went there, too, Dad.”
Martin shook his head. He didn’t want to think, to talk, to listen to those damn drums anymore, to be here in this awful place, he wanted to be there, where flowers that bloomed forever never stopped surprising you. Eternity was not living in the same old world forever, it was discovering the world anew forever.
“Where’s the monument,” Trevor asked. “Who knows where it is?”
A few hands went up. “It’s off the roadside, near Smith Center,” Tim Grant said. “There’s a chapel there that can seat, like, twenty people. It’s all sort of nothing, actually.”
“Except for the millions of souls that are trapped under there.”
“According to Wylie’s book, it’s where General Al North was taken,” Trevor said. “It might be under Kansas, but the entrance is in Colorado, at that base.”
Martin felt that Cheyenne Mountain didn’t matter. It was just another seraph trick, a diversion.
No, the chapel would be the key. If they went there, they would find the vulnerability that the seraph were trying to hide. “Thing is, the way they’ve scoured this part of Kansas, how interested they are in us—and we’re just a quiet little corner of the world, after all—I’d say that if the monument is right above the center of their repository, then that’s where we need to go to reach it. That’s got to be their weak point.”
The atmosphere in the tent became electric. “It’s not very far,” a voice said.
“We have to go in the physical,” George added, “or we won’t be able to do anything in the physical.”
From outside came the chuckling clatter of the jaws of outriders. The drummers started drumming.
“I’m going with you,” Trevor said softly.
Martin did not reply, not verbally. There would be no way to keep Trevor here. He stood up, and so did Trevor and so did Pam. But the others did not stand. He could sense something among them, a kind of mutual agreement, but it wasn’t clear exactly what was in their minds.
Mike stood. His girl cried out, but stifled her cry. She came to her feet and threw her arms around him. They stood like this, the young couple, and Martin saw that their hearts were married.
She stayed behind, though, surrounded by the little ones.
The woods were quiet now, the outriders having gone off when they failed to smell fear here. To the west, lightning flickered. Would the storms never end? No, not as long as the seraph tortured this poor earth, Martin knew. All of that seafloor that had risen would be gushing with methane from hydrates and billions of tons of dead marine life, and hydrogen sul-fide and other gasses he couldn’t even name. In a matter of days, it would change the atmosphere, and the seraph would be able to breathe easily here, and all the humans and most of the animals and insects would die.
First moon now rode in the high sky, its light bright and bitter, and the night was so still that you could hear the whisper of grass when breezes touched it. It was a sound familiar in Kansas when the crops were high and the night wind ran in them, sighing and whispering.
“Stop,” Mike said softly.
Sensing trouble, Martin drew his prayer back into his mind.
Trevor pointed upward. For a moment, Martin saw only the sky. Then, against the moon, a flash of darkness, ugly and ribbed like the wing of a bat. Then he saw another and another, and as his eyes began to track the movement in the sky he understood that there was not one nighthawk circling up there, but dozens, no, hundreds, in a soaring column that seemed to go up forever.
Thousands in the moonlight.
Something slid into Trevor’s hand, and Martin knew what it was, that seraph gun, even more fearsome than Wylie and Nick’s arsenal.
“All right,” Mike said, “right now, you’re thi
nking away as usual, Doctor Winters, and the rest of us are absolutely not afraid. And the reason is, we’re doing what you keep thinking about doing. You have to use the prayer, Doctor Winters, you have to keep it in your head all the time—and now you’re about to think about the Valley of Death and comfort yourself with the psalm but please don’t even do that.”
He recalled Franny’s prayer, took it to his mind, and began repeating it. Of course, he was not even a believer. If anything, he was a Jeffersonian Christian, an admirer of the man but not a believer in the resurrection. And, in any case, Zooey had been right, had he not, that the prayer was itself a form of egotism?
He realized that Mike was looking at him. They were all looking at him.
—The fourteen parts of Osiris.
—The fourteen Stations of the Cross.
—The fourteen sacred sites.
—The fourteen black lenses.
“Do you understand now, Doctor Winters?”
He nodded, but he did not understand. The great magic number of the past was seven, the number of a completed octave and a completed life. So what was fourteen?
“The number of resurrection, the key to heaven,” Trevor said, “and it’s the resurrection energy that the seraph hate, because it’s what they can’t have. That’s why they steal souls, to find in their goodness a taste of heaven. That’s why they’re really here. It’s not for bodies and land, it’s for souls.”
They walked through the wrecked forest, past uprooted trees, through the yards of ruined houses, and he could see the white steeple of Third Street Methodist still standing. Also, they walked out from under the great column of nighthawks, which could not see them because they could not see any fear.
They reached Pam’s yard, and he saw that her house had been torn apart just as theirs had, by seraph who had not anticipated that some of their victims would gain power from the attack, and sought any crumb of information they might find about these dangerous little viral particles.
2012 The War for Souls Page 29
