“There’s more to this one than we thought,” Belgar said, echoing Angelica’s earlier observation. His tanned face and sun-drenched features exuded the scent of beaches and coconut breezes. “Who are you?”
“Just a weatherman,” Mason said. “Oh, and I recently learned I had spent some time with Solomon as a kid. I lived with …”
He paused, looking back to the shattered section of the conference table and the blast radius of scattered blood and remains.
“Palavar?” Angelica whispered the name. “It has to be.”
Mason nodded. “I believe so. My memory …”
She held up a hand. “Enough. We understand. And now we understand why you’re the sacrifice.”
“It can’t happen,” Belgar said.
Morris stepped forward, his eyes darkening, fists clenching. “No. We … we can end it now.”
Angelica held up a hand. “Don’t think that.”
“What are they talking about?” Mason asked, stepping back.
Morris cleared his throat, aiming his staff. “Sorry, but I’m talking about the greater good here. I’m sure you’re a nice enough fellow, but if you’re to be sacrificed and if by so doing, your death brings about the slaughter of billions on this planet, well …”
“I get it,” Mason said, nodding.
“Kill him now,” Belgar said, his voice cracking. “And Solomon’s plans go up in smoke.”
“I don’t know about that,” Angelica said. “He may have an alternative.”
“Maybe,” Mason said, “but also don’t forget, I’m not really here.”
“Ah, damn it.” Morris set down his staff. “I keep refusing to believe you can do that.”
“He’s right,” said Belgar reluctantly. “Kill this one, and the other will still live, maybe in shock for a bit, but that’s it.”
“No,” Morris agreed. “We’ll have to kill that one too.” He smiled as Angelica swatted him with a look.
“Stop it. We’re going to work together.”
“And only kill him,” Belgar said, “as a last resort.”
“Fine,” Mason said. “But now …”
“Yes, we have to get you back.” Angelica took a deep breath. “And to stop your voluntary completion of the sacrifice, I imagine we must remove the leverage Solomon has on you.”
Mason nodded.
“Your wife and child.” Belgar found his staff and fit it in a strap behind his back. “First order of business. Rescue mission.”
“Just my style,” Morris said. “Like the old days!”
“What old days?” Belgar fired back. “We’ve never done anything like this.”
“Well, not us, but you know—stuff we’ve read about. Back in the day. The Celts, the good old druids and the ancient battles …”
“Nostalgia later,” Angelica hissed. “Stay focused. But before we go, let’s give our new recruit here a little crash course.”
Mason trembled. “Uh …”
“No,” Angelica insisted. “You’ve got the basics and a good sense of things, but the memory wipe clearly went deeper than you realize. And I’m sure Palavar didn’t directly share any of the good stuff with you. How you picked up what you did, must have been from sheer proximity.”
“Or luck,” Mason said.
“Whichever. If we’re to go into battle, you have to be ready.”
“Oh, okay—” Mason started, but then the three of them converged on him, staves raised.
And his crash course began.
Chapter 7
Two hours later he was back in the circle at Solstice, waking as if from a long and grueling dream that had left him anything but rested. He woke to the stars and the shimmering galaxy, and the bright star Sirius edged toward the tip of the cornerstone, directly opposite where he had been trussed up and resting uncomfortably on his side.
Mason’s wrists burned and his ankles chafed above the socks where Victor had inelegantly fastened the plastic cuffs. Returning to this position, merging back with this version of himself, Mason was again surprised that he had managed the split, and that his dream self—or whatever that was—hadn’t felt this pain and itching and he hadn’t been wrenched from the dream.
He groaned and tried to sit up. Questioning that sort of phenomenon in light of all he had just seen, done and learned in the past two hours almost made him break out in a chuckle. What stopped him was the realization that he wasn’t alone.
None of his new friends could do what he could in this sense, so they were coming—but using more conventional modes of transportation. They would be a few hours, and he had been instructed to sit tight in the meantime and not make a move on the hospital or the warehouse until he got their signal. They had a plan, and a good one, but still, there was a lot of time until it could begin. A lot of time for something to go wrong.
Mason hoped he’d be left alone here until the sacrifice, or the ceremony, was to begin. Apparently that wasn’t the case. A figure stood in the shadows beside one of the stones, just outside the circle. Slender and thin, she spoke in a voice as distant as the stars, but much less cold.
“Where were you, Mr. Grier?”
Into the pale constellation’s light, she emerged, pulling back the grey hood from her face, letting the auburn curls drop below her shoulders. Her eyes were red and her expression pale.
Mason shifted, trying to use the rock for leverage and to sit up. “Annabelle?”
She put a finger to her lips. “I’m not supposed to be here. But I think it’s safe. Victor is with Gabriel somewhere out there.…” She waved a hand haphazardly toward the region of Orion in the night sky. “And Solomon is firing up the troops in an all-out gathering in the lobby. The ceremony … at dawn, it will be up there, you know. Not here.”
“What?” Mason looked around. “I thought this was it. It’s perfect. It’s—”
“Artificial. Too many layers of earth and substructures between us and the ground floor, the sky and the wind and the elements.” Annabelle shook her head, wistfully looking up at the stars. “It’s a beautiful representation, but it’s only in our minds. Not a worthy ceremonial site by any means. But upstairs, the grove there was converted directly from an old shrine, a burial site and sacred offering zone used by the natives for centuries. That’s where it has to be done.”
Mason cursed himself for shortsightedness. He had prepared for this to be it. But really, they could improvise. And upstairs made access for his friends a little easier. Maybe things were starting to go his way.
Only, the “army of employees” up there was unexpected. At most, he figured they’d have to face a dozen druids down here, not hundreds up there.
His spirits sunk again.
“Why are you here, Annabelle?”
She knelt near him. “It’s Gabriel. And Solomon, and …” Lowering her eyes as if feeling unworthy of the cosmic lights above, she shook her head again. “It’s not the dream I had, not the one I followed and believed in all my life.” She met his eyes reluctantly. “You know what they’re planning?”
Mason nodded. “Somewhat. It has to do with the satellites. Using them to transmit magic in the form of codes and data, transmitting energy and directing it against the earth. I’m not sure exactly how it will happen, or what they’re going to stir up.…”
“Stir up is a very apt phrase,” Annabelle said. “Do you know the prevailing theory on the Pre-Cambrian extinction, what they call—”
“The Great Dying?” Mason licked his dry lips. “Where ninety-eight percent of the world’s species were wiped out? It wasn’t asteroids?”
“Not that time, although scientists fought long and hard to find such evidence. That would have been vastly preferable to the alternative.”
“That something terrestrial—and repeatable—caused it?”
“Exactly.”
“It will be a global coordination of multiple factors to create an unstoppable greenhouse extinction event. Focusing on the Arctic ice shelf and the Siberian perm
afrost layers that have trapped gigatons of methane below the surface. Normally the methane is vented in slow processes of gradual erosion, taking centuries at least, and in that time the effects are minor.”
“But you’re going to speed it along?”
“Earthquakes and direct heat and convection directed at the highest concentrations of methane deposits, all designed to release just enough into the atmosphere.”
Mason shook his head slowly, even as he saw it materialize on the screens behind her. A shattering of glacial fields, plumes of gas venting through enormous cracks as the land beneath was rent and the deposits pulverized and released. “A methane pulse.” He reviewed what he knew about the gas. “Methane is seventy times more potent a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide.…”
“And methane has another benefit.”
Mason nodded. “It’s easily broken down in the atmosphere, only having an effective life of what—ten years?”
“Twelve maybe, but whichever, it’s perfect. Sure there will still be lingering effects and damage, and the higher than ideal temperatures, but our more powerful members can easily restore the balance in a short time. We’ll all emerge from the bunkers, our children grown, and we’ll inherit a world swept clean of filth and corruption. Tabula rasa, a world ready for us to restore, to tend and cultivate with new seeds and farms and forests …”
The screens all dissolved and images surfaced now of sprawling lands of greenery, enormous trees and verdant fields.
“Some of it has already begun,” Annabelle said. “Solomon’s people around the globe have been aggravating the weather, going wild as it were, given near free creative reign to cause chaos in whatever form they choose.”
News screens appeared in the sky behind her, materializing as if they’d been there all along and only just found power. Mason watched, trembling as the weather channels delivered on the wild global weather: snow storms in the southwest had traffic piled up for miles, and no-travel alerts existed in four states; blinding rain drenched London and Paris, where buses were swept away in flooded streets that looked more like Venice; monster winds ravaged buildings in Tokyo. On and on it went, with satellite maps of huge swirling storms battling it out in the skies, blotting out the oceans and devouring the land.
“Phase One is finished. Phase Two … after the ceremony, will release the methane, and very quickly the atmosphere will heat up exponentially.”
“Can they really do it?” Mason wondered.
“We can,” she whispered.
Over her shoulder, another satellite map of the world materialized, with red dots appearing over the arctic, then expanding out in pockets throughout the atmosphere, as the world was a snow globe filling with blood.
“And that’s not all of it,” Annabelle said. “You’re probably so terrestrially-minded that you don’t pay attention to the other important factor impacting our weather. Something that doesn’t easily figure into the models or if it does, it’s rarely understood correctly.”
The earth map vanished, replaced by a huge, seething ball of reddish-yellow. Our sun, spitting out coronas and swirling gasses.
“Solar radiation,” Mason said in a whisper.
“Yes, and tomorrow morning at six twenty-seven Eastern time, we are predicted to be caught in a massive geo-magnetic storm from a solar flare that occurred six and a half hours ago.” She took a deep breath. “We all knew about it, expected it and prepared for it.”
“How could you know about it?” Mason wondered. “Solar flares aren’t predictable in any sense other than relying on models that say we haven’t had one in three years and we usually average that many, so we’re due.”
“That’s right,” she said, “but we knew. Trust me, we knew.”
Mason swallowed hard at the implication. They caused it? Either that or they divined it, saw into the future. He’d go with that. The alternative was too much, even after everything else he had seen.
“So this solar flare—it’s an X20, intense enough to exaggerate the usual infrared radiation that passes through our atmosphere. It warms the land, then gets irradiated back, and now—absorbed by the cloud cover, the CO2, the water vapor and methane. All the greenhouse gasses stirred up in massive quantities. The radiation trapped and absorbed and …”
“Used to exponentially heat up the earth and the oceans, further accelerating the release and transmission of the methane into the atmosphere.” She sighed. “The air will turn to choking gas, crops will wither and in the oceans, plankton will die out. Starting with the bottom of the food chain on up, every species will be locked in a fight for survival. And as for us humans, millions will die in Phase One, but by the second week of Phase Two, when scorching temperatures, combined with the poisonous atmosphere and stifling drought and starvation take hold, billions are going to perish. And it won’t be fast or pleasant. We are entering another mass extinction phase. A Great Dying the likes of which the world hasn’t witnessed for two hundred and fifty million years.”
Mason cringed, closing his eyes. He didn’t want to see anything of the sort up on those virtual screens.
Annabelle wasn’t finished yet, however. “And one more thing, the solar flare will also knock out most satellites over the western hemisphere. So no cell phones, no GPS, no extensive communications arrays or low-earth orbit analysis. Relief efforts will be hindered, global coordination near impossible.”
“But wait, if it knocks out the satellites, won’t that disrupt the ceremony?”
Annabelle shook her head. “The satellites will have served their purpose before the flare’s impact is felt, before the solar wind strikes.”
Mason opened his mouth, then thought, his mind calculating. “How long before?”
She shrugged. “Not too long, twenty minutes maybe? Solomon has it all worked out to the minute, I’m sure.” She hugged her shoulders and started rocking. “It’s too much. I wanted to send a message, a strong and irresistible message. But I wanted ultimately to work within what we have, not destroy everything and start over.” Her eyes watered and lips trembled. “I like what we’ve done as a race. Sure, there have been huge mis-steps and sad eras in human history, but I like our culture. Music and arts, heck even TV. I love Mad Men, and that adorable Frozen movie.…”
She started to break down. Turned and leveled a hard look at Mason.
“And your son … he’s not what he claims to be.”
Mason nodded slowly. “I’m sorry.”
“He’s killed. Offered sacrifices without the victim’s consent.”
Mason’s mouth dried up and his blood ran cold.
“Cheated and lied. It’s all about power and control to him, nothing more. Not change, not …” She shook her head.
“Annabelle. Help me.”
She looked up. “I don’t know how, or if it would do any good.”
“You told me earlier that you had … competing offers?”
She frowned. “Yes, but those … dried up. No longer there even if I—we—wanted to reach out to them.”
Mason shook his head. “Not entirely true.” He motioned with his chin and she glanced up, at the blurry images overhead in the stars. Three faces moving in succession.
Annabelle’s mouth went wide. “Morris, Angelica …”
“And some righteous lord named Belgar. Former friends of yours?”
Annabelle swept her hand up overhead, and smeared the images away, dissolving it like an ephemeral mosaic. “They live?”
“Yes, and they need our help. Annabelle, before your colleagues move me upstairs and the ceremony begins, can you do something for me?”
Mason thought for a moment, going back to the initial plan—the plan that with this new information had been thrown into disarray. It was no longer enough to stop the ceremony. Billions might be ultimately saved, but millions and millions were still doomed, and for those that survived, earth would become a living nightmare.
It wasn’t going to work.
Chapter 8
&n
bsp; In the recovery ward at San Diego General Hospital, Mason appeared as before, stepping out of a dream. This time closer to Lauren’s room, but not too close. It was nearly 4:00 am, less than two hours away from dawn.
And the start of the end of the world.
He had to move fast, but first he had to hope the others were here. No time to tell them of what he had learned, but there was nothing else for it; this part of the plan had to stay the same. Lauren and Shelby needed to be freed. There was no way he was going to kick off an environmental apocalypse, but he couldn’t take a chance that anything could happen to Lauren or Shelby.
First things first.
He headed down the hall, into the main processing and waiting room, where a lone TV displayed more weather-related news. This one a local broadcast, his former Channel 7 News, with his stand-in, Rebecca Montross. She looked haggard and exhausted as she pointed to the map of the local counties, all swirled with high concentrations of clouds and precipitation. A flashing red ticker at the bottom proclaimed a storm watch for an unheard of four inches of snow, with icy road conditions and a city-wide state of emergency.
Mason passed in front of Lauren’s room quickly, looking only out of the corner of his eye, taking in the room in a glance.
No one there. At least not in the chair. The creepy old man could be around the corner or by the head of the bed, but Mason couldn’t tell. He glanced around and noted he wasn’t alone: three nurses and an assistant behind the counter, one who peered up in his direction, then looked away.
A commotion down the hall caught their collective attention.
Mason took a second to take it in. It must have looked to the nurses as if someone had opened all the windows in the wing. Papers and boxes were flying about, slapping against the walls and swirling around. Snowflakes rushed inside, along with a howling wind.
The diversion had begun.
O O O
Mason waited by the side of the door, pressed flat against the wall. Sure enough, with a flourish of his black trench coat, the old man—who Angelica had told him was named Niles Stanwick—rushed out in a near gallop unseemly for his age. Three bounds and he stopped in a crouch, staff extended lengthwise as he scanned the hallway, and sniffed the air.
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