“No, not TJ. It’s been awhile, but I saved you, got you off a fence once when you were stuck, helped you make it on time to your fencing tourney.”
Mia looked at him closely and blinked. White hair, tangled eyebrows, salt and pepper beard with deep smile lines around his eyes and mouth. Maybe she did know who he was. “Enoch. Enoch saved me. You’re Enoch?” She sighed. “You are filled with joy. Why is that?” She began to relax, no longer struggling.
She looked at the tall younger man holding her legs down. She could see he had scars along the left side of his face. He flinched when he saw her face distort in a micro-expression of grief and empathy for the pain the scars represented, and he looked away, shaking his head. She reached out, brushed the hair out of his eyes, and placed her palm on the scars, for a moment, not speaking. Then she said, “You’re a kind man, aren’t you.”
“Ethan. My name is Ethan,” he said.
Enoch took her hand. “Can you stand, Mia? We don’t have much time.”
She struggled to one knee, then the two men pulled her the rest of the way to her feet and helped her walk out of the lab. They entered a hallway, one level lower than the basement level Mia had visited earlier. To the left, the hallway led to an elevator. To the right, the hallway led to a wall that looked like it had been carved into the sandstone and dolomite bedrock, with a flight of four wide stone steps leading up to a massive stone frame shaped like a capital H surrounding an alcove cut four feet deep into solid rock. Mia could hear the sounds of gunfire nearby. The smoke hanging in the air plus the smells of gunpowder and the white liquid that had spilled from the tank combined for an entirely new level of stink. They moved to the bottom of the steps at the end of the hallway.
Enoch said to Ethan, “The key to the portal, it’s gone! My shirt pocket was ripped in the struggle, and now the medallion is missing. We have to have it, can’t activate the portal without it. You should find it back in the lab, somewhere near the tank.” Ethan nodded and ran back inside.
While Enoch stood guard, Mia slumped back against the steps carved into the rock, her eyes no longer glowing. She said, “Oh, my hair stinks!” and looked down at herself. “And what am I wearing?” She was in a black body suit with wire leads dangling from various points. She started pulling the wires off like they were lint. “How did I get into this — this body suit? Where are my clothes? And my shoes? My phone? And my keys! Where is my purse? Oh. Wait. My purse’s back in the trunk of my car.”
Just then, at the opposite end of the hall, the elevator door slid open, and Chase Amunson stepped out. In Mia’s distorted perception, the auburn-haired black-eyed man appeared to fill the width and height of the hallway. Facing the menacing, hulking giant who seemed to be twenty feet or more tall, she felt like she was about to be stepped on and squashed like an ant on a sidewalk so she crawled behind Enoch for protection.
Enoch shouted over the commotion, “So, Talmai! Is this the Geek Rapture you wanted the Lord of Heaven to allow you to set up because you were going to stop interfering in people’s lives? Although I probably should call you by the name you are using now, shouldn’t I. Chase is a truer description of what you’re doing to these poor souls.”
The giant bellowed, “Chase, Talmai — call me whatever you want! I don’t care. Why blame me for the doom that the stupid clay-brained humans have chosen for themselves? Those greedy idiots can’t say we didn’t warn them ahead of time. If they were paying attention, they’d know the truth about the Geek Rapture. Rapio, Latin word meaning ‘to seize or snatch in removal from one place to another.’ Even the term rapture should have been a warning to them. Is it my fault they connect it more with thrilling raptures of the spirit than with raptor dinosaurs?”
“Yes! These deceptions are entirely your fault!”
“You dare to reprimand me?!” Chase roared.
“Yes!” Enoch shouted back. “I dare that and more! I have been given power to reprimand your angelic fathers The Watchers, so why would I hesitate to rebuke you? Those rebels abandoned their post in the third heaven, descended to Earth to pursue their own pleasures. And now, once again your deceptions are compounding the corruptions of the human race, leading them down the path to ruin with false promises. Nothing about you has changed, has it? Same as in the beginning, you lie. You said there was a place for humanity to live as gods in the world you are constructing, but you have made no room for any of them. You don’t plan to take any of them with you into your VR, do you. Instead, you are plotting to exploit people, treat them all like a commodity and steal their talents, skills, and powers for yourselves. The resulting nightmare of the Geek Rapture would be a thousand times worse than slavery, and no rescue would be possible for those who participate, ever.”
“So?!” Chase sneered, “Why should anyone care what we do? Of what value are people compared to angelic beings and their sons, the giants? Worthless uruku made of mud is all humanity is! You’re right. We don’t want them contaminating the bandwidth we could use for ourselves! So tell me — how is what we are doing any worse than the Hell they are already headed for? Because they have rejected everything that you have to offer, have turned their backs on all notions of loyalty to the Nameless Weakling. We have already won the war for humanity, yet you won’t admit it! Stinking duggahei! We tell them they can become a god. Who cares if the truth is that most of them will become inactive code, good for nothing but deleting. Dinnamu idiots! They deserve to have their operating system overwritten up by a stronger, more worthy program. Best for everyone if their files are totally corrupted, deleted, and forgotten.”
Walking down the hallway toward Chase, Enoch said, “Leaving God’s universe, let alone leaving his will, is the worst fate that could ever happen to a human being.”
“If you say so!” Chase snarked. “Resisting God’s will doesn’t sound like a bad idea to me, and the people interested in the Geek Rapture would agree with me. Not you. They’d laugh at you.”
“Only because they don’t know what you plan for them,” Enoch said. “And let me know if your opinion changes once you die yourself, when you are filled with shame, when darkness becomes your dwelling place, worms become your bed, and maggots cover your body. You have no hope of ever rising from that bed.”
Chase’s roar thundered out so loudly that Mia covered her ears. “NO! That will NOT happen to me! EVER! That fate can be avoided! The prophesy hangs by the thinnest of threads, and we will sever its hold over us. We will prevail over you because —”
Just then the door to the lab burst open, and five men shoved their way into the hall. Struggling in the center of four iCon security guards was Ethan, the tall man who had helped rescue Mia. He had a black bag over his head, his hands zip-tied behind him, but he was still fighting the guards, who had moved between Enoch and Mia. Everyone seemed to have forgotten she was seated on the bottom step near the portal at the end of the hallway.
One of the security guards approached Chase and handed him a round gold disc. The gigantic man snarled, “About time you showed up to put an end to this raid, Dunstan. Ah! I see you’ve snared the key for the portal for me. And one of Enoch’s men. Excellent! But your appearance offends me.” Then he barked out a command in a harsh language Mia had never heard before.
At the order from Chase, Dunstan and the other guards began to change the way they looked, morphing their human appearance into a reptilian body with greenish-gray skin, red eyes, clawed hands and feet, with a pair of leathery wings. They also grew in height, now seven feet tall, their bodies widening as well. Once the change was complete, even their weaponry was different, swords instead of guns and nightsticks by their side.
Still loopy from the anesthetic, Mia started giggling, then laughed loudly and shouted hysterically, pointing at the security guards as they morphed. “Oh my Lord! Look at that! Frack! They’re gargoyles! No, they’re security guard-goyles! Look at them! Wings! Swords
! Look at that!”
While everyone’s attention was focused on Mia, Enoch grabbed the gold disc out of Chase’s hand. He yelled, “Ethan!” who lowered his shoulder and knocked down the two guards closest to him. One dropped his sword, and it slid over near Mia. She picked it up and ran to Ethan, pulling off the black bag on his head and cutting the zip ties holding his hands with the edge of the blade. He said, “Unexpected but appreciated, Mia!” and held out his hand. For a moment they looked at each other, and then she handed him the sword, which he immediately used to attack the two guards still on their feet. Mia took several steps backward toward the stone stairway, then stopped, watching the fighting between the tall man and the reptilian guards.
Enoch threaded his way through the guards who were focusing their attention on Ethan and grabbed Mia by the arm. “Come with me! We must go now.”
She pulled her arm away from his grip. “No, I want to stay! Let me help! I can fight.”
“Mia —” Enoch made a frustrated sound. “You’re still in danger. There’s no time! Come with me — now.”
But she wouldn’t cooperate. Instead, she turned back to check on the battle with the guards and took a couple of steps toward the fighting. Enoch left her and ran up the stone steps, placed the gold disc edge-first into a cut out inside the alcove that fit it perfectly, then turned it and pressed firmly. The alcove pulsed with a green light, evidence that the portal was now activated.
“Mia, come with me!”
As Enoch turned back to get her, Ethan yelled, “Watch out!”
In the gap between Mia and Enoch, all four of the security guards who had turned into gargoyles suddenly rushed in, snaring her as they ran, putting the black bag on her head. Then they picked her up and carried her up the stone stair steps with them, vanishing into the alcove as they passed through the activated portal.
21 | Fire
“I’m so glad I watch sci-fi movies,” Mia thought. Because this way, even though she was completely blinded inside the black hood that had been placed over her head, she had some idea of what was happening. The portal had transported her and the four security guards turned reptilian monsters through a stable wormhole to a distant location, likely on the other side of the galaxy. While those movies told her about the mechanism of the portal, they totally failed to adequately represent the level of physical pain involved in this type of travel. So much more than a slight touch of a freezer burn represented by a light spray of frost in her hair. Instead, the experience of passing through the portal was physically excruciating at an atomic level. It felt like she was being ripped apart atom by atom, with an absolute zero plasma particle shock zapping her with every molecular separation, followed by an equally painful re-assembly, atom by atom, at the other end. Mercifully the process happened quickly and the pain was very brief, over almost as soon as the agony began. Almost, but not quite.
Inside the black bag over her head, the darkness continued for Mia, but she knew they had arrived — somewhere — when she got her senses of sound and feeling back. She thought she could smell a trace of the man who had worn the bag over his head before her, but mostly she smelled the stench of the chemicals in her hair and the reptilian stink of guard-goyles.
After running for ten minutes, the guards stopped to bind her hands and feet with zip ties, and then used a braided dynamic rope to tie her wrists to her ankles. They paid no attention to her complaint about the pain caused by the binding. The one tying her up (Dunstan?) yelled at her, “Shut up! Be glad your hands and feet are tied in front of you and not behind your back.”
And then she was picked up by the climbing rope and slung over the back of one of these giants, as if she was a sack of potatoes. And now she really was glad her hands and feet weren’t tied behind her back. Otherwise, her arms would have been yanked out of their sockets at the shoulders due to the strain of supporting her body weight. But even so, she was extremely uncomfortable. She could see absolutely nothing and wanted to pull the bag off her eyes, but her arms (and feet too) were tied up, pulled up near the gargoyle’s shoulder while her head dangled below, swinging up and down with every stride taken. Her neck soon began to ache and a sickening feeling of vertigo began to overwhelm her. But there was nothing she could do to improve or change her situation in any way.
They ran a long time, with several starts and stops, but with her head covered by the bag, she never saw any of the places they traveled to, forced to endure being bumped and bruised along while hanging nearly upside down. The back she was bumping up against was irregularly shaped with a rough and knobby surface made of scales and clawed wings. The guard-goyle smelled foul, some awful combination of gorilla body order and python musk. Like the other monsters, he was very, very, very large, taller and wider than the human bodies they had adopted earlier. She felt like a grasshopper in comparison, a fragile stomp-able grasshopper.
Where had the portal taken them? Was she even on Earth anymore? How would she ever get home? She had no answers to these questions and loathed not knowing — there were too many terrors that she could envision and imagine tragic and fatal endings for. Making things worse, the loud harsh voices all around her hurt her head, the volume too loud and the words incomprehensible. She couldn’t see where they were going, couldn’t understand the language the reptilian guards were using, didn’t know what the guards were planning to do next. The total lack of knowledge about her situation magnified her fear, making everything worse.
Still bothered by the drugs she’d been given in the Noonan Hall lab, she was having trouble remembering what had happened. But thinking back, she started to recall some events before the chemical milk bath. However, she had no idea why she had blacked out when she had encountered Chase at the door to the lobby. What had he done to her? And how had she ended up in the body suit and helmet and then submerged into the chemical milk bath? She had no memories of what had happened between seeing Chase at the hallway door and later being pulled out of the tank. She wondered how Enoch and Ethan had known where to find her. As far as she knew, only a few people from iCon could have known she had gone to Noonan Hall, even fewer that she would be in the basement.
Lingering confusion, muddled thinking, and a desperate failure to come up with even one strategy for making an escape from the danger she was in were all overwhelming her mind and tying her up mentally as thoroughly as the zip ties and rope bound her wrists and ankles. On top of the confusion was intense regret. If only she had listened to what Enoch had said to do! If she had done what he said, if she had immediately gone through the portal with him, she wouldn’t be here now. Why had she decided to stay when he said to go? This horrible situation was all her own doing. There was no one to blame but herself.
Normally, Mia wasn’t the sort of person who crumbled in stressful situations. Most of the time, she was able to step forward when confronting opposition, in life or in fencing. Or if she did retreat, it was because she had a strategy in mind. But now, as the effect of the drugs she had been given were wearing off and increasing awareness of the danger she was in dawned on her, she realized she had no options. She wanted to imagine that she could strategize her way out of this, but she knew that would be a lie — a HUGE lie. There was nothing, nothing at all, that she could do to help herself. She couldn’t see any action she could take, no way to change what was happening.
She thought, “How will I ever get myself out of this situation? Escape’s impossible! Who knows where to find me now? I don’t even know where I am, or how I could ever find my way back home again. Probably not even on Earth anymore.”
There was no one to help her, no one she could even imagine who could help her. Even if she had her cell phone, it wouldn’t work on a planet on the other side of the universe, if that’s where she was. And if rescue should arrive by some miracle, who would be capable of forcibly taking her away from this squad of demon reptiles? Panic started to set in, and she began tre
mbling uncontrollably. Had she been facing her captors, she would have tried to keep from showing any fear. Stubbornness would make her unwilling to give satisfaction to anyone seeking to crush her spirit, and that usually kept her from crying. But now — afraid and all alone in the dark, tears welled up and fell without hindrance inside the black bag covering her head.
But before she was totally overwhelmed by fear and despair, the image of the statue of Jesus holding the little lamb came to mind, and in response, she mentally repeated Psalm Twenty-Three, the prayer she had always said when she used to pass the statue in the atrium next to the Edgestow Hall. The significance of one line had never been greater — “Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for you are with me.”
Funny thing was, even though she didn’t feel less vulnerable, and even though she was still tied up and still being carried upside-down by gigantic reptiles to some unknown destination, she felt less alone now. In spite of all appearances and circumstances, at least one someone knew where she was and had promised to be with her. Someone who had already helped send rescue once today. And the panic that was threatening to drown her drained away, leaving her better able to think once more.
She listened to the sounds around her. This place was different. There was a stony echo to the sound of the footsteps, so she guessed they were now running through a cave or an underground tunnel. She tried imagining her surroundings, but instead, a series of pictures appeared in her mind’s eye. She saw herself riding a tall red horse. Not the orange-red of most red beasts in the animal kingdom, but red the primary color. She was riding a cherry red horse with a long flowing mane, galloping across rolling prairie hills toward a spreading, multi-story wooden house with towers and balconies that stood near a river at the edge of a forest, with a large stone archway spanning the road on top of the hill behind it. Next she saw the silhouette of a man with long hair standing guard on a treetop platform overlooking that same house, only now at a distance. After that she saw herself in a friendly saber duel with a tall young man with green eyes and black hair who was smiling and laughing at her while they exchanged cuts and parries. Last of all, she heard someone crying for help inside a building on fire, then felt a deep burning pain on half her face.
No Geek Rapture for Me_I'm Old School Page 28
