by Aiden James
“Squeeze out the liquid contained inside the moss and drip it over the wounds’ entry points,” Tampara advised. “It will slow the bleeding down enough for the healing in my hands to be effective. I will start with Cedric, since his injuries are the most serious.”
“Hang on, Cedric!” I urged him, kneeling next to Alistair while Amy gently stroked his temples. He looked like he might lose consciousness at any moment. “Tampara has something that will help heal you!”
“I don’t think so, buddy,” he said, drawing in a painful breath while Tampara lifted his blood soaked shirt. Our Yitari companion grimaced upon confirming Roderick’s assessment of the damage wrought by Kaslow’s hollow point. Cedric tried unsuccessfully to tilt his head so he could see the torn tissues along his right side for himself. “It looks like this is finally it, Willie Boy. I’ve got mainly you to thank.”
“No, there’s still time!”
I wasn’t about to let him die without a fight. As much as our dysfunctional friendship had often irked me during the past three decades, the thought of losing him this suddenly—without time to prepare for it as I had done for my wife and son’s departure from this life—filled me with terrible despair.
“No, William…you’ve been a great friend…usually,” he said, chuckling while he tried to sit up straight and draw nearer to me. Such a stubborn son of a bitch to the very end! “I want to thank you for giving me something to look forward to each and every day, these past few years.” He laughed harder, until it made him cough. “After Darlene died, fourteen years ago, I didn’t think I could go on…. Then, when Candice blamed me for her mother’s death, due to my unwavering dedication to serving our country as I’ve done, I had nothing left to look forward to. Except for you…you and those goddamned excuses you’d come up with to visit the Bum-Fuck Egypts of the world!”
“How is Rafael?” Tampara quietly asked Francisco, while pulling back his bloody hands from Cedric’s side. The lime-colored ‘sap’ had been administered as best as it could be.
“The bleeding is slowing down, and it appears the wound is…it’s closing!” said Francisco, astonished.
“That is good,” said Tampara.
He smiled weakly and returned his attention to Cedric, whose eyelids were fluttering. If he was going into shock, as it appeared, then the carnac moss didn’t have anywhere near the affect it had on Rafael.
“Cedric, hold on,” I said again, gentler this time.
Tampara placed his hand over Cedric’s heart while murmuring some kind of Yitaric prayer, or so I assumed. When he finished, Cedric’s spasms had subsided.
“I have something very important to ask you, Cedric, and I will need your answer right now,” said Tampara. He brought his face close enough to Cedric’s, until the two of them were eye to eye. “You are going to die. I can’t save you here, and neither can anyone else. Your injuries are beyond what I can heal, and the present healing abilities of your so called ‘modern age medicine’ will be useless, as well. Are you following me so far?”
“Yes,” he whispered. His near-ageless ebony skin had become deathly pale.
“Do you want to live forever?” Tampara asked.
“Huh? Ah…yeah, sure. Who wouldn’t want that? I don’t want to die…at least not today.”
“That’s good to hear, my friend. I can make your desire happen. But we must return to Paititi very soon, or it will be too late.” Tampara’s lowered voice sounded especially ominous. “If you come with me, you will lack for nothing. You will become one of our citizens. And, this is an honor almost never offered to anyone outside our realm…. But there is one stipulation in order to make this happen. You can never leave our kingdom. Our home must be yours forever.”
Cedric nodded thoughtfully, and as he did, his countenance steadily brightened. Considerably.
“William, Alistair, and Amy?” he said, chuckling again, as a thin line of blood blanketed his teeth. “Tell the folks back home—especially Michael—they can all officially kiss my ass goodbye!”
This time when he laughed, Cedric coughed up blood. Enough blood for us all to realize he’d be gone very soon unless he could cash in quickly on Tampara’s offer. I worried there wasn’t adequate time for him to reach Paititi—especially when he lost consciousness a moment later. But, armed with Cedric’s consent, Tampara immediately checked on Rafael and then urged the rest of us to get strapped in with our leather restraints again.
He ran to the front of the vessel, and a moment later we flew faster through the air than we had up until then. We were headed for a predetermined drop-off point I overheard Francisco tell Rafael was less than a mile from the archdiocese in La Paz. At the moment, however, the landing spot was just a clearing in the forest of giant carnac trees.
“Until we meet again, Roderick, may you be well and prosper, my friend,” said Tampara, after first delivering his goodbyes to the rest of us. He had lingered the longest with Francisco and the nearly healed Rafael. Francisco stated his intent to eventually return to the castle, and Tampara assured him and Rafael that he would be ready to assist them when they did.
When Tampara hugged Alistair and Amy, they looked like mere children next to this giant human being. His brief parting words for me followed the forearm shake he had previously shared with Roderick. I felt honored by this, and I have repeatedly considered his bittersweet message from the very moment it passed through his lips.
“Judas, be diligent in fulfilling your oath to the Almighty,” he advised. “Let there be no distractions in that quest, and you shall be blessed.”
The trouble with most immortals is they are always ready to impart some grand insight to one another. However, in this case, the words struck a familiar chord inside my soul. Not to mention, I’ve always held a fondness for statements such as his, since it was like the proverbial double-headed sword. Follow the advisement and all will be well…but if you want to end up in a world of shit, then carry on your merry way down the opposite path.
I fully understood what Tampara intended to convey, and it came as a stern warning behind his lingering smile. Regardless of the prospects for my wife and kid getting younger, I couldn’t afford to take my eye off the prize of collecting my final six coins expediently. The consequences for such folly would likely be severe.
“I would’ve liked to see Paititi one more time, Pops. How about you?” said Alistair.
We were watching Tampara’s ship became smaller and smaller in the distance. Even so, his powerful roar reached us. I could picture him throwing back his head as he shouted toward the sky above. Good thing, too, as the clicking noises that had precluded yesterday’s dinosaur attack had just commenced from the deeper woods to our right. Another world immediately began to push its way through the ancient one.
“It would just be a maddening taunt about a world I’d love to see, but dare not,” I said, drawing matching looks of disdain from him and his lovely girl. They were already married in my mind…they sure acted like it. “What? You wouldn’t be tempted to say adios to your life back in the States?”
“No, actually I would not,” he said, perturbed. “Neither would you, since that’s not where Mom is.”
Bingo on that one, kiddo. Paititi might look like ‘heaven on earth’, but it would be a perpetual hell for me apart from Beatrice.
“But, Amy and I just wanted to have another look from afar,” my son continued. “Especially, since I doubt your coin search will call you back here. Don’t you agree?”
La Paz’s skyline had appeared behind us, and a run down food market materialized before a raptor-looking creature completed its emergence from the woods. It vanished into the store’s pot-hole ridden parking lot.
“Yes, I would imagine not.”
I smiled. And not just in response to the looks of surprise on Amy’s and Alistair’s faces that had so swiftly and wonderfully erased their scorned expressions from a moment ago. I was just as fascinated with how cleverly the layers of dimensional existence were plac
ed upon one another. Here, all this time, any of us could be going about our daily tasks, and unaware a creature from Jurassic Park was killing its next meal somewhere close by, or that fresh lava from a volcano field bubbled just inches below our feet.
If we only knew how thin the membranes were from one level to the next on our amazing planet, we might treat it with more kindness and respect.
It provided the main topic of conversation amongst us all as we traveled by foot to the archdiocese. By then, we were in range for Roderick’s and Alistair’s cell phones to pick up the current time. It was 5:16 p.m. Sunday. Our entire, exhausting adventure—from the moment Cedric Tomlinson hijacked our party yesterday afternoon and until we stepped into the cathedral’s parking lot—had taken all of 47 minutes in our modern world to complete.
“Thank you, Roderick, Alistair, Amy, and…William,” said Francisco, pausing to look around at the heavy police detail patrolling the premises. A few paused to look at us, wearing perplexed expressions and perhaps trying to reconcile our change of clothes and haggard appearance from when we were first in their presence that Sunday afternoon. Thankfully, we had picked up cheap sunglasses and a touristy fedora for Roderick at a convenience store on the way to the archdiocese. Otherwise, we likely would’ve been accosted, since his MAC foundation had been smeared away to reveal his garishly white complexion.
“What?! I do believe we have brought misfortune to you and your group, and I can speak for all of us in saying we are all so very sorry for it,” said Alistair.
“It is Elohim’s will, and it was foreseen,” said Francisco, turning his attention to my son. “We are not ready to leave our home yet. But, Moroni has prophesied the time is coming for us to move on.” He smiled sadly and nodded to Rafael. “You remind me, Alistair, of someone we are quite fond of—a kindred American soul, if you will. I doubt you know him…but certainly you have heard his name before. Jack Kenney?”
Alistair shook his head while searching his memory for this name.
“The killer of the FBI agents?” said Roderick, sounding surprised. Indeed, this revelation raised my eyebrows, too.
“That was a few years ago, wasn’t it?” said Amy, already dialing up a Google search from her phone. I greatly admire her ability to put unpleasant experiences behind her, although I worry that pushing such events too far from her awareness could bring an avalanche of unsorted emotions down the road. “Yes, I’ve got a list of hits here about him from three years ago.”
Like her, I had no such trouble remembering this young man’s name, since an intensive Washington probe into how he and his brother had easily eluded capture eventually uncovered a bevy of embarrassing ‘practices’ that our brother agency indulged in. A few very big heads were guillotined over that one.
“I heard he and Jeremy, his brother, were on the lam,” I said, “and some say they’re innocent of the murders.”
“Only one murder isn’t theirs, but the others were in self defense, I assure you,” said Francisco, eyeing me curiously. I think it surprised him that I’ve taken an active interest in other things outside the scope of my main obsession. “Someday we’ll all be hearing from them again…in the time of perdition.”
“What? So you guys still hold to apocalyptic prophesies?” I couldn’t help a small jest here, since that’s what the Essenes of my day were mostly known for. Their hands were far from clean when it came to instigations of messianic fervor. “And, here I thought you all had become progressive since the first century.”
“No more than you…Yehuda,” said Rafael, referring to my Greek name.
Touché. I guess it takes one first century obsessive to know another. His words gave me pause to make sure the coin was still inside my pants pocket, wrapped inside its waxy ancient cerecloth. It was. But seeing Rafael’s recovery proved uplifting to my spirit. He was full of life once again, as an impish glint danced in his eyes.
Francisco, Rafael, and I shared a good laugh for a moment. And even Roderick joined in, being mindful to keep his voice down to avoid the usual stares he gets when he slips up and speaks naturally in public. His unusual characteristics had never bothered our Bolivian hosts, and surely the familiarity with his legend from previous Bolivian visits and the Essenes’ frequent angelic visitors had something to do with that. Amy chuckled, too, but was mindful to not leave my boy in the dark, who seemed to still be trying to picture who in the hell Jack Kenney is.
The local police types had begun to eye us more. Rather than loiter on the Cathedral’s front steps, we Americans soon parted ways with our new Bolivian friends. Regardless of whether or not we would ever see Tampara and Cedric again in this life, I had a sneaking suspicion we would either meet up with Francisco and Rafael at some point again, or, we would at least hear about their future exploits with the fugitive brothers they had become fond of. Perhaps when the so-called ‘time of perdition’ was at hand.
I hailed a taxi to take the four of us back to our hotel. After another double-take—this time from the desk clerk who had given us directions to the archdiocese less than two hours earlier—we headed to our rooms to freshen up. Roderick advised the clerk we would be leaving La Paz that evening, having contacted our charter’s pilots with the news the original plans to leave later in the week had been scrapped. But it took his promise to triple their wages to get them to willingly oblige his request to take another long flight on the heels of the one they had made that morning.
I would’ve normally insisted on the highest standard of safety, and pursued a return home the next morning. Yet, without confirmation that Viktor Kaslow was truly dead and gone forever, it seemed wisest to leave nothing to chance. After all, being a cursed immortal who had died dozens of times only to be reborn elsewhere had taught me that nothing was as it seems. There would be profound regret if somehow my archenemy found a way to come back from certain death and then carry out his threats against my son and his fiancée.
It was time to get the hell out of Bolivia, and quickly.
Chapter 18
We flew home to Washington D.C. just after six o’clock that evening. Barring unforeseen weather, we were scheduled to arrive at Dulles Airport shortly after one in the morning, Monday. I anticipated much of the flight would be spent hashing out our latest misadventure with Roderick, since Alistair and Amy’s exhaustion likely meant they would soon fall asleep. By the time our chartered jet crossed into Colombia’s airspace, they were both out cold.
The restoration of their youth made them look so much like true kids—this sixty-two year old man and his soon-to-be thirty-year-old girlfriend. Twenty-one to twenty-five year olds at best, physically speaking. Opposition from natural laws bombarded their love affair from every direction, and yet it felt right…completely right.
“I think you’ll need a new home for this coin and the others,” said Roderick, pulling his attention from the window view of the setting sun behind us. “I have the perfect place in mind for them…if you’re interested in hearing about it.”
“You think Kaslow’s coming back yet again. Don’t you?” I said, unable to mask my disappointment. Yes, it was the same thing I had been volleying back and forth in my head for much of the past several hours. But, the assumption gained so much more validity when hearing my oldest immortal pal voice the same idea. “How in the hell would he ever survive being eaten alive?”
“The same way you would,” he said, nodding subtly. Roderick hadn’t smiled since we headed for the airport, as is his habit when sorting through a number of questions he hadn’t quite digested yet. The slightest tugs upon the edges of his lips appeared. There was irony here. “And, who’s to say those ugly bastards didn’t recognize a kindred spirit residing inside the flesh they craved? They could’ve decided to pass on him while hunting for something else to munch upon, and then held a damned bonfire in his honor.”
It was supposed to be funny, I know. But it made me shudder instead.
“Let me tell you about the hiding place I’m thinking of,�
� he continued, chuckling at my reaction to his jest. “While you were cavorting across the globe the past forty years like James Bond, I have been working on creating my own little utopia.”
“What? You’re not building a Tower of Babel out there in Abingdon, are you?” My turn to tease.
“Of course, not…oh, no, no,” he said, shaking his head playfully. “Do you mean to tell me that after so many centuries you still don’t understand what a recluse I am by nature?”
“That’s why I made my joke.”
“Ah, so you do realize if I was ever going to invest my millions in a place to ride out Armageddon, it wouldn’t be in some monument for everyone to see. That, unfortunately, would only attract unwanted visitors knocking on the door to get in, as if it was Noah’s ark.”
“As well as being an easy target for annihilation by those who have hunted us both for the better part of a millennium.”
“Oh, yes, it would certainly be most inconvenient if a certain Count discovered I never left America with you just before the onset of the French and Indian War,” said Roderick, smiling broadly. It was good to see his pale countenance aglow once more. “But let me cut to the chase on this, Judas…. I have been privileged to rub shoulders with some of the best geotechnical engineering firms at Washington’s disposal. Firms, I might add, that needed my influence to get the most lucrative government contracts available during three different administrations. It took almost thirty years to complete this haven I allude to, in order to avoid suspicions of what I was creating two hundred feet beneath my farm.”
“What in the hell are you talking about?”
This was not said scornfully, as one might picture. And, Roderick’s thoughtful nod proudly confirmed the underground refuge he had built was a far cry from the Essene bunker we had visited earlier.
