No Geek Rapture for Me_I'm Old School

by Jonelle Renald

  Raising his sword in a challenge, Ethan stood in front of the monster, drawing the giant beast’s attack toward himself. Maru-Dannum stopped running and wheeled back around to gallop toward Ethan. Enoch shouted a command, and the horse turned to once again to gallop toward the lobby door. The jolt of his halt had brought Mia back to herself, and she started pulling on the reins as hard as she could. “Stop, Maru! Stop! Stop! Stop! We can’t leave! We can’t leave!”

  Maru had galloped most of the way back to the front door before she got his head turned back around. What she saw was a total disaster. Kit was laying outside on the pavement in front of the HQ, motionless. The giant had overpowered Ethan and knocked him to the floor. When the monster saw that Mia had turned around and was watching, he grabbed Ethan’s shoulder with his clawed foot, sword raised to strike.

  Talmai roared, “Mia! Are you going to do nothing while I kill this man? Get off that horse, and maybe I will spare his life.” He dug in his claws, and Ethan groaned.

  Her thoughts racing in a chaotic jumble, Mia was thrown into an overwhelming confusion. “Who will help Kit? What should I do now? Can I trust the giant to not kill Ethan if I dismount? Who should I help first? But what can I do to stop this? If I make the wrong choice, someone will get hurt! How can I let any of this go on any longer! Maybe I should dismount! I don’t have a lance. What’s the right thing to do? What’s the right thing to do? What’s happened to Kit? If I dismount, will I be captured? Again?! Talmai is about to kill Ethan! Where’s Enoch? Who can I trust?” Her thoughts tumbled over one another in no logical order.

  As he ran toward giant, Enoch shouted at her, “Mia! Go to your post! Now!” She stared at him, and he said, “We’ll all join you shortly.”

  Deciding that the best thing was to do what she’d promised (obey Enoch’s commands), she turned Maru’s head around, dug her heels into his sides and guided him out through both sets of lobby doors, then turned left onto the sidewalk and galloped toward Noonan Hall, bawling and swearing as she rode away from the ongoing disaster behind her.

  39 | Join

  Standing in the living room of her mostly empty house in Barrow Heights back on Earth, Mia took a look around. The only things left to take out were three packed suitcases, a couple of boxes, and the statue of Jesus with the little lamb that originally had stood in the atrium outside Edgestow Hall. They were sitting near the front door, ready to be loaded into the car for the trip to the gateway near the Mississippi River in McLeod. Many of the people from Ismarsettehka had been at her house this morning, helping move her furniture and most of her belongings into storage. Thirty minutes ago, the group had left to go back through the gateway to help with the arrangements for this evening for a dinner and party celebrating Mia’s decision to join the group seeking permanent refuge at Enoch’s home.

  Fingering through the books and the framed photos in one of the boxes that she was taking with her, she pulled out the framed diploma commemorating her doctoral degree. She was proud of earning her PhD, happy with her accomplishments as a professor, but she didn’t want to teach classes or be part of a faculty any longer. Not after what had happened to her. After putting the diploma back, she picked up The Inferno, first volume of Dante’s Divine Comedy. Leafing through the pages, a passage jumped out at her, which she read out loud.

  “Hmm. ‘The Vestibule of Hell is the abode of the weather-cock mind, the weak and vague tolerance which will neither approve nor condemn, the cautious cowardice for which no decision is ever final.’ I wonder. If I had not chosen God’s side, maybe this could have been my destiny.”

  Tongues mixed and mingled, horrible execration,

  Shrill shrieks, hoarse groans, fierce yells, and hideous blether

  And clapping of hands thereto, without cessation

  Made tumult through the timeless night, that hither

  And thither drives in dizzying circles sped,

  As whirlwind whips the spinning sands together.

  Whereat, with horror flapping round my head:

  “Master, what’s this I hear? Who can they be?

  These people so distraught with grief,” I said.

  And he replied, “The dismal company are wretched spirits...

  Who against God rebelled not, nor to Him

  Were faithful, but to self alone were true;

  Heaven cast them forth — their presence there would dim

  The light. Deep Hell rejects so base a herd,

  Lest sin should boast itself because of them.

  At the beginning of the year, Mia had wished for more epiphanies in her life, and her wish had most certainly been granted. Her world had been torn apart at the seams due to the revelations she had received and the new perspectives they brought. Transcendent, life-altering insights had broken through into her normal, everyday life, changing forever how she viewed the universe. She had seen the interior of Hell with her own two eyes, seen a black monster of a devil drag one of the mallum xul down to a permanent and fiery end in the abyss. That experience alone would forever change how she would have to teach this book titled The Inferno. But how confusing would it be for students to hint — or even worse, state outright — that she knew Dante’s writing were describing real localities in the Unseen Realm, that she had been an eyewitness to the reality of those supernatural places?

  She thought, “Who knows? Maybe Dante, an Italian man from the 1300s, maybe he knew they were real places too.” But who would believe it if she tried to teach that Dante himself had actually walked through Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven in fact and not as an exercise in fiction? Who would understand it? She knew she would quickly gain a reputation as a crank, marginalized and excluded from publishing in the most respected publications, blacklisted by English departments at every accredited college. And keeping quiet wasn’t an option for her. She couldn’t pretend she didn’t know what she knew, hadn’t seen what she had seen with her own eyes. God had given her a chance to participate in a small way in turning back an attack on the future and destiny of the human race by secret forces of evil. Not an attack by criminal, political, or human conspirators — an attack by fallen angels and monstrous giants.

  Devils? Angels? Giants? That would be crazy talk to the majority of people in the world. But those supernatural beings and the evil they planned to do was real. They planned to buy and sell human souls by reducing people’s minds, personalities, and talents to bits and bytes, saleable computer code. If slavery, physical bodies treated as a commodity was evil, then the Geek Rapture was evil compounded exponentially, human souls deconstructed and sold as merchandise, auctioned off for profit. And what rescue was possible after a person’s soul was separated from their body and spirit? Mia had experienced just the beginning of that horror, and the thought of it all made her sick to her stomach. She said another quick “Thank you!” to God for rescuing her.

  The last five days had been particularly epic, in every sense of the word. The raid on iCon had been completely successful, even though there had been a time in the middle of it when she wouldn’t have believed surviving it would be possible. Confronting what she thought at the time was her worst nightmare — dueling a thirteen foot tall velociraptor that was trying to kill her while riding a horse down an invisible staircase, unable to distinguish what was thin air and what was solid — she had faced the terror and helped Maru to defeat Cezary. Then not thirty minutes later, an even more appalling nightmare. Her son Kit lying on the pavement, not moving after being thrown through a plate glass window by the evil giant, and Ethan on the floor of the lobby with Talmai’s claws in his shoulder. And at that worst possible moment, when the outcome had looked absolutely hopeless, Enoch had ordered her to leave everything in utter ruin and gallop away.

  As it turned out, obeying and leaving them all to face the wrath of the giant without her — that was what proved to be the worst nightmare, the most difficult thing she had ever done in he
r life. What happened during the battle with Cezary had been merely terrifying. Obeying Enoch in that situation, keeping her promise to obey him had been a nightmare wrenching to her heart. Her dilemma, felt at the very core of her being, was whether or not she would act on what her loyalties were. Choose to obey because she wasn’t in charge of her life or instead, do what she thought was best. Her decision had been, “I will resist temptation.”

  The temptation had been to take matters into her own hands, do something to fix the situation in the lobby herself. Every instinct, every voice in her head at that minute had been screaming, “Don’t listen to Enoch. You have to take care of this yourself. Everything will turn out hopelessly wrong if you do what he says. You can’t leave now!” But deep down, she knew it wasn’t her decision to make. She wasn’t in charge. She couldn’t even rescue herself, let alone anyone else. She had dropped her lance, and she could hardly move because Chase’s command word still had a hold on her, even if she could resist in some small degree. If she didn’t obey Enoch and leave, she would get in the way, make things worse by having to be rescued herself. It was true what Enoch had said. She didn’t have a side of her own. There were only two sides — siding with Enoch, which was God’s side, or siding with evil. There was nothing for her to do except to do what she had promised, obey Enoch’s command. She said to herself, “I allow someone else to be in charge over what happens to me. I choose to obey Enoch.” And then she had to follow through with the decision to stand down and leave, an action taken under the pressure of an emotionally intense situation with lives in peril. Even so, in obedience, she had left Enoch, Ethan, and Kit behind, their fate still unresolved and uncertain.

  After she had left, what she didn’t know, what had happened behind her while she galloped toward the back door of Noonan Hall, was that the Sarrabu Guardian appeared in front of the iCon HQ, looming over Cezary’s body, preparing to take him down to Tartarus. But when the immense black devil saw Enoch and Talmai dueling in the lobby, it had rushed through the broken windows of the lobby, coming straight for the giant, bellowing, “You have failed to protect your master, Talmai! You failed to protect our corporate enterprise as well. Did you imagine you would escape punishment after such a massive breach of trust?” And without allowing him to say a word, the Sarrabu had picked up Talmai up in its huge clawed hand (still morphed to appear as a giant half-bull, half-man monster) and dragged him with Cezary down to the eternal fires in the Itimah Kittsum below, both to be held in chains in that place of darkness and chaotic pain until Judgment Day.

  After Talmai’s capture and the Sarrabu Guardian’s departure, Enoch had helped Ethan to his feet, who was able to walk under his own power to the portal in Noonan Hall in spite of his injuries. Tossed out the plate glass wall of iCon lobby’s, Kit had suffered severe cuts on his head and arm along with a concussion. After he stopped the bleeding, Enoch had carried him to the portal in Noonan Hall. Back at Ismarsettehka, Mother Tallis had stitched up the cuts and watched over Kit while he spent a day in bed recovering. Ethan’s wounds were deep and painful but straightforward. Other than a sling he had to wear while his shoulder healed, he would recover quickly and completely.

  After these eye-opening and life-changing experiences, a return to the life of a college professor with the daily tasks of lecturing on great works of literature, communicating with department chairs, and helping students to arrange their schedules didn’t seem as attractive as it once had. Her mind was made up. Her world was different now. What mattered was whose side she was on, not finding a sanctuary in the ivory towers of academia, lecturing about literary stories and their authors. She was no longer the same Dr. Marwitz she had been before, no longer the same person whose mission in life had been the teaching of Dante, Chaucer, and the Venerable Bede. The many supernatural events had altered who she was. She had been offered a home (on a pristine copy of Earth) by her greatest grandfather (who was also Noah’s great-grandfather). She had survived being carted off to Hell and back. A demon had tried to possess her soul when she had been forced inside a transhumanist experiment. Later, she had met her never-born son in the suburbs of Heaven, had been helped up off the ground by the archangel who inhabits our sun, had ridden a tall red horse, worn armor, and done battle against fallen angels and giants. And in spite of all the danger had lived to tell the tale! Was it any wonder that all those experiences had totally altered her perspective. She was no longer the same person. Something as enjoyable as having lunch with dear friends from now on would be challenging. It wasn’t that her feelings for them had changed or that they couldn’t be trusted — it was that her perspectives, loyalties, and priorities had changed.

  Sunlight illuminated the interior of her Victorian style house, the empty rooms of her home looking both familiar and unfamiliar, at the same time bigger and smaller than how she remembered them. Feeling wistful and nostalgic, she sat down on one of the packed suitcases in the living room, antique saber in its scabbard on the floor next to her.

  Right arm in a sling, Ethan opened the door. “Everything from the house’s been stowed in the storage locker, and your car’s being prepped for storage. It’ll be ready this afternoon. Here, catch.” He tossed keys to her with his left hand. “To your storage locker. Ready to go?”

  “Mostly. But now that I’m back in a so-called normal place, I am asking myself, ‘What has happened to you, Mia? What kind of person have you become?’ I know I’m not the same person as I used to be. Just not entirely sure I know who I am now. I know I can’t go back to what I was before, even though it had been a pretty good life for me here. Over there — the place where I ate breakfast and watched the birds that visited the feeder every morning. My computer was in the room over there. This is the place where my television sat. And that was my bookcase with my favorite books. I loved living that life. It was good, and for a time, this house was my comfortable sanctuary.”

  She sighed. “But any safety I felt here was just an illusion. I didn’t know about gateways and portals to other places, other dimensions. Or that there were giants, beasts, and gargoyles who can assume the appearance of humans and spy on you in your house. Or that a person can have their mind hijacked without her knowledge.”

  Ethan took her hand. “The problem wasn’t with this house. Or with you. Evil came in and violated the boundaries of your home, your privacy.” He turned to look at the rest of the house. “And speaking of privacy, we found all of the surveillance equipment iCon had installed and removed them all. There’s no more bugs in your house. So to speak. Of any kind.”

  “Oh, I’m glad to hear that!” She thought for a moment, then nodded. “You’re right. These walls weren’t substantial enough to keep out the big bad wolf. At the start of this year, I was so blind to what was going on around me, inside me. My ideas about what was normal, the reality of the supernatural, what was going on in my own heart — all based on false assumptions. I didn’t have a clue.” Mia smiled at Ethan. “I kinda miss the days when I didn’t realize how angry I was about what happened in my past, how much I wanted to hide, how broken I really was inside. Exposing that break was very painful. But overall, the pieces of my life have been patched up pretty good, with new and better additions. Kit, Enoch, you, everyone else there at my new and better home.” She paused for a moment. “Most of all, I’m glad that I chose God’s side.”

  Ethan said, “As a blacksmith, I know that the weld that joins two pieces of metal together can be stronger than the original pieces had been by themselves. It may be you’ll find that to be true for you too.”

  “Thanks. I hope so,” she said.

  Smiling, he said, “No turning back now. You have been inducted as an official member of Enoch’s army, baptized in fire and cordite. You may not have a uniform, but you have been outfitted with the equipment and armor of a cavalry officer, complete with noble steed, hauberk, helmet, lance, and a sturdy saber with good lines and balance. You truly are a valiant w
arrior, Dr. Mia Marwitz.” He snapped to attention and saluted her.

  Mia saluted back. “Aye, aye, Captain Hargadain! Let’s take these last few things out to the car. I’m ready to go.”

  Ethan said, “It’s gonna take two, maybe three trips, what with my arm in a sling. Let’s take the statue of Jesus out first. We can manage it together.”

  40 | Wrap

  Their lunch finished but not their conversation, Mia, Dina, and Jan were still seated at their table inside The Midnight Airship. Dina said, “It’s been so nice to have lunch with you both again! Even if it is a good-bye lunch for you, Mia.”

  “Feels like a lifetime ago since the last time I was here,” Mia said. “So much has changed since then. And now I’m leaving Barrow Heights. It’s very challenging to wrap my head around it all.”

  “After all this time, we’re just glad to know you’re safe, Mia. We were very worried about you!” Jan said. “You vanished without a word. Without a trace!”

  Dina said, “It’s hard to believe everything you told us. Being kidnapped by iCon so they could experiment on you! And then rescued by that squad of anonymous cyberwarriors!”

  Shaking her head, Mia put her hand on Dina’s arm. She looked around to see if anyone was listening, but fortunately, the three women had been talking for a long time, and the lunch crowd had already cleared out. “I didn’t say that, Dina! I just said I was rescued and couldn’t tell you who it was.”