3zekiel (First Contact)

by Peter Cawdron

  Garcia says, “What’s the plan, boss?”

  Jana and I assume he’s talking to Pretzel, but the elderly Indian scientist is pale. It took everything he had to climb the cliff. For now, he’s not going anywhere.

  “What can you see, Josh?”

  Although I appreciate what Petty Officer Garcia is trying to do, I don’t agree. He wants us to stay on the move, to keep looking for new direction. If we’re in motion, we’re doing something. Anything seems to be the plan, but I don’t think that’s wise. We’re running on empty.

  “Nothing.”

  “Nothing?” he asks.

  I shake my head, not that Garcia would know it, hoping my silence speaks for me.

  We sit there in the dirt, waiting for the shadows to grow long. The heat of the day saps not only our strength but our will. Sweat betrays our bodies, drawing water from us, leaving us dehydrated. I know the signs. Lethargy. Aching joints. Headache. What I’d give for a glass of water.

  “Is anyone going to talk about what just happened?” Garcia asks, not content to let us rest. I’m not sure which part of ‘what just happened?’ he’s referring to. The Russian fighter that disintegrated in midair? Russian soldiers in the Congo? Mordecai dying so we could escape? The realization that we—humans—bombed the jungle beneath a descending alien spacecraft, potentially triggering an interstellar war?

  Pretzel decides he knows. “I’m not a religious man... but I understand what Mordecai did and why—No greater love hath any man than that he lay down his life for his friends.”

  I’m pretty sure that’s from the New Testament, which is appropriate for Brother Mordecai as he loved the words of Christ. I wonder if that’s what he was thinking in those last few seconds when he diverted the soldiers’ attention, confusing them with his babble about Ezekiel. He wanted them to think he was mad, but I don’t think he was ever any more lucid and sane than he was in that moment.

  Jana nods and the conversation comes to an end.

  As the sun begins its slow descent toward the horizon, a cool wind blows, teasing us with the prospect of relief. Clouds billow in the distance, promising rain but tormenting us. We watch the clouds, longing for their approach, but they pass to the south, drifting behind the mountains.

  Looking out over the plateau, I can see for miles. To the west, the sky is clear. Contrails wind their way through the azure blue, following tortured paths that twist and turn before being blown away. I don’t think I’ve ever seen contrails over Africa before. We used to get them all the time in Boston, especially in winter, and I wonder how high those fighter jets are. I can’t see them, just the faint lines they’ve left in the sky—graffiti written in anger.

  From our vantage point on the edge of the cliff, we can see to the north, out beyond the jungle. Dark smoke rises from the farmlands surrounding Kisangani, dotted on the horizon like ink blots. A war is being fought out there. To us, it unfolds in silence. I feel numb. Russian, Chinese, American, Tanzanian or Congolese? Makes no difference who’s flying those planes or shooting those tanks. People are dying. For what? I should probably say something to Garcia as he’d be interested in this but can’t see it, but what could I say that would make any difference? Oh, look, more otherwise intelligent people are killing each other over there. Do the aliens think we’re dumb? Or are they as petty and self-centered as we are? God, I hope not.

  Out of nowhere, Jana says, “I am not a rock.”

  Pretzel’s eyes were closed. He wasn’t asleep, though, as her words immediately grab his attention. He sits up. Dirt crumbles around him, falling from the sides of the empty root ball.

  “I’m not,” Jana says, reiterating her point, fighting back tears.

  I know precisely what she means. The destruction of the village, the loss of her parents, seeing the death of Dr. O’Brien and then Brother Mordecai. It’s too much. It has left her reeling with a sense of loss.

  Pretzel starts to speak. He’s about to explain something he thinks is important, but I cut him off, as I don’t think he understands what she means.

  “It’s a game.”

  Doesn’t sound like one, I know, but it is. Jana’s bottom lip quivers as I explain.

  “We play this in the village all the time. I am not a rock, so what am I? Do you have wings? Do you have claws? Fur? Do you swing from trees? Stuff like that. You’re supposed to guess what I am within five tries.”

  Pretzel nods. He gets it. Jana’s expressing herself the only way she can. For her, that silly little game has become all too real. Garcia leans his head back on one of the upturned roots. If he could, he’d be staring at the clear blue sky, and I imagine that’s what he’s thinking, feeling the sun on his face and the wind in his hair.

  “We’re all just rocks, aren’t we?” Jana asks, picking up a muddy stone and turning it in her hand, cleaning off the dirt.

  Pretzel’s lips tighten. “Brother Mordecai would say, dust. I’d say, stardust, but yes, we’re all just rocks.”

  I don’t think that’s quite what Jana wanted to hear. Sometimes lies provide more solace than truth.

  “What’s the point of all this?” Jana has tears in her eyes, welling up in the corners and threatening to roll down her cheeks. Her voice rises in alarm as she speaks. She’s hurt. “If this is all there is, why go on?”

  Pretzel lowers his head but doesn’t reply. Garcia’s quiet. Given his gung-ho attitude, I guess he normally ignores a little introspection, as my dad would call it. Too easy to chase bad guys and stuff. Abseiling from helicopters is a great distraction.

  “What does it all mean?” I ask.

  For my father, there’s meaning in each breath. He finds purpose in serving the Lord. He gives unthinkingly, but perhaps that’s his distraction.

  Is it wrong to doubt? To have questions? Pretzel’s got his test tubes and telescopes. Garcia has his guns and muscles. Dad’s got the Scriptures. Jana and I are still trying to find our way in this crazy world and now it looks like our lives will be over before they’ve begun. Russians? Aliens? Does it really matter?

  I’m not sure if I’m more afraid of dying or death itself. One’s painful, the others permanent. As for finding meaning in life, all I know is holding onto something gives me purpose. If I lost Jana, I’d fall apart. Funny, but I guess I’m more afraid of her dying than myself.

  Pretzel’s face contorts, betraying the turbulent mix of thoughts and emotions rushing through his mind. His eyes narrow. His cheeks rise a little. His lips are clenched in anguish, but they shift slightly to one side as he ponders his next few words. I don’t think he’s got any answers, not really. Jana’s right. We’re rocks.

  “We want miracles,” Pretzel says in barely a whisper. “We look for meaning in life, but we’re asking the wrong questions. There’s nothing out there that will give meaning to our lives. On the contrary, it’s our lives that give meaning to the universe.

  “Don’t go looking for miracles. You are the miracle. Every day, your body creates roughly three hundred billion new blood cells. That’s more than all the stars in the galaxy. Imagine that. All of them. As big and as vast as they are, you’re more amazing. You.”

  His eyes glance briefly at the sun and then back to us. He points. “For billions of years that’s kinda where we were. The atoms in our bodies were superheated and scattered throughout a plasma that hit temperatures of tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, perhaps even hundreds of millions of degrees in the heart of some now long dead star. Seething and boiling and glowing with raw, unbridled energy.” He gestures with his hands, opening them out before us as though he were offering a present. “And here you are.”

  Pretzel looks around at the decimated forest. Splintered trees dot the landscape. The smell of smoke seeps through the broken branches. We’re nestled in a hollow. Thick, gnarly upturned roots and clods of dirt surround us.

  “Life itself is a miracle.”

  In the midst of the devastation, with blood seeping from Pretzel’s leg and the hideous bur
ns on Garcia’s arms and neck, those few words seem incongruous—perhaps spoken in denial. But for Pretzel, the heartache and helplessness we feel is temporary—fading. He holds his hand out, turning it slowly, looking at his wrinkled, brown skin, fleeting grey hairs, his own chipped fingernails, and then speaks softly of a deeper truth.

  “You, me, Josh, Garcia—our lives are more than eighty years and a hole in the ground. We think of our lives as being just this moment, but that’s not true. Your life is more than just here and now.”

  He pauses before asking, “How old are you?”

  “Sixteen.”

  “Sixteen? I was sixteen once. Hard to believe, huh? We think we’re sixteen or, in my case, seventy six, but we’re not. You and I are part of an unbroken chain of life reaching back at least 3.8 billion years!”

  Jana’s eyes go wide.

  “Yeah, it makes me feel much older too,” he says.

  Pretzel reaches out to her, offering her his empty hand, not that there’s anything he can give her. Not physically.

  “You. Your parents. Your grandparents. You’re part of something bigger, something far grander than any one family or even any one species. The DNA that formed your body first sprung to life billions of years ago while the planet was still cooling. Oh, atoms have swapped in and out, DNA sequences have evolved, but the essence of the life you carry was born in that moment and is shared by every living thing on this planet. You—are—a—miracle.”

  Gently, he takes the rock from her fingers, examining it closely, looking at the patches of dirt still clinging to its surface, staining the fractured granite a ruddy brown.

  “You’re not a rock.”

  Pretzel laughs softly to himself, not saying anything more.

  “What’s so funny?” Jana sniffs, wiping away tears. To my surprise, she’s on the verge of laughing as well, but not because she found anything humorous in his words, perhaps more so as part of some social pact that says the people we admire are the funniest of all. I too am intrigued. Pretzel rubs some of the grit off the stone, rolling it beneath his fingers.

  I think I know what he’s thinking, so I say, “We’re the dirt, right? Not the rock. That’s what you were going to say.”

  “Something like that. You know, there are more microbes in this ditch than there are humans on Earth. Life really is far more amazing than we give it credit for.”

  “That’s why they came,” Jana says, making the connection. Pretzel nods.

  Them.

  I haven’t thought about them in hours. I’m so exhausted mentally, I haven’t bothered looking for the space elevator. I’m not even sure which way I’m facing. I guess I’m looking east as the battle is to my left. I could figure it out for sure by checking the position of the sun, but why bother? Pretzel, though, sees something other than death and ruin around us.

  “Think about something beautiful. Like a sunset. We look at a planet like Saturn and see beauty. For hundreds of millions of years those magnificent rings have been there, stretching out around a gas giant that’s seven hundred and fifty times larger than Earth, but it’s only now they’re beautiful, only now when we look at them through a telescope or through the eyes of a robotic probe. Don’t you see, without us, they’re meaningless. We make them beautiful.

  “Flowers are beautiful, but not to ants or bees, only to us.

  “Sunsets are beautiful, but not to cats or dogs, only us.

  “Corals are beautiful, but not to sharks and dolphins, only to us.”

  Jana squeezes my hand as Pretzel continues.

  “I can’t lie to you. I don’t know what’s going to happen to us, but right now, we’re alive and that’s a privilege beyond compare.”

  Jana doesn’t hesitate to clarify her thinking. “I guess, I’m afraid.”

  The matter of fact way in which she speaks, takes me by surprise. There’s no reluctance, no emotion. She could be describing the color of the sky as she doesn’t sound fearful.

  Pretzel looks at his boots. “I know. Me too.”

  From behind blood-soaked bandages, Garcia says, “Yeah, me too.” From him, it’s a startling confession—sobering. I feel as though I should say something, but I don’t. This isn’t about me. This is her heart laid bare. I respect that so I simply nod in agreement.

  Pretzel sighs. For a moment, he seems genuinely lost for words. After a few seconds, he says, “My parents are dead.” He raises his hands as if in surprise, shrugging his shoulders as though that point is outlandish, something too incredulous for words. “I know. I mean, look at me. You’d never guess it, right?”

  Jana laughs. Her parents were just killed and yet hearing a septuagenarian talk about his parents dying seems laughable. No one ever thinks about elderly people having parents, but everyone does—or did. Seems everyone’s lost someone. The difference is mere timing.

  “When I visit the graves of my parents, do you know what I see? Words scratched in stone. Clumps of dirt. Tall grass. Is that all they are? Is life just a short reprieve from death? We look on those that have died as though they’re unlucky, thinking we’re the lucky ones, we’ve cheated death. But we haven’t cheated anything. Death is no fool. We differ only in time. In a hundred years—a thousand—a million—it makes no difference—we’ll all be dead.

  “So what is this death we fear? It’s our natural state. We may not like it, but it’s true.

  “Don’t feel sorry for the dead. Pity those that think they’ll never die, because they’re the real fools. You see, they live for everything other than life itself. But you. You know the secret. You understand the meaning you bring to this world.”

  He holds the stone between his thumb and forefinger, pinching it lightly between two points and flicking it slowly with his other hand so it turns around. Somewhat lost in thought, he adds, “You’re alive on this tiny rock spinning in the depths of space, and that makes you special, incredibly unique.”

  Pretzel drops the stone and reaches out, taking our hands in his. With eyes as dark as coal, he smiles. Wisps of grey hair and wrinkled skin around his face betray his age. Frail fingers squeeze our hands. Mere words inspire strength within us.

  “Don’t let anyone ever tell you different.”

  Death

  There are voices. At first, that causes my heart to race, thinking we’re being rescued, but then I peer over the scattered branches, looking out at the crushed remains of the jungle and catch sight of Russian soldiers searching through the fallen trees. Their camouflage uniforms differ from the Americans, being more granular. In the jungle, they’d be effective, but not up here on the scorched plateau.

  “Там! Я вижу их там.”

  They’ve seen us. Thick black boots bound across the broken trunks, leaping from fallen tree to tree. A burst of machine-gun fire rattles my bones. I know the bullets never actually hit me, but the sheer violence seems to pass clear through me as though I was paper thin.

  “Покажи мне свои руки! Оставайтесь на месте!”

  No translation is needed. The bullets whizzing by overhead and the shouting of the soldiers makes their intent clear—Do anything stupid and you’re dead.

  We’re dead anyway. Why the pretense? I get the feeling Sergei isn’t finished with Pretzel. The bitterness between them is probably all that’s keeping us alive.

  I raise my hands over the edge of the ditch, moving slowly, making sure they’re open wide in surrender. Garcia remains where he is. There’s no bravado from a blind man. Not this time. He places his hands on his head, knitting his fingers together. Jana stands beside me, mimicking my motion with her arms held wide and high, trying to allay their nervous fingers already squeezing thin metal triggers. Pretzel attempts to get to his feet, but his muscles are sore and stiff, and he struggles, grabbing at the branches behind him, working his way up.

  Four soldiers approach, but not from the same direction. They converge from different angles. Two of them are out in front of us, easily twenty feet
apart. The other two are quite wide, coming in from the periphery on our right and left. We have our backs to the cliff. There’s nowhere to run to this time.

  Three of the soldiers hang back, covering us with their weapons while the leader approaches wearily. One of them is holding a large machine gun with a thick magazine slung beneath it. Rather than the distinct curved of the AK-47 magazines I’m so used to seeing here in Africa, this magazine is box-shaped and wide, and probably holds hundreds of rounds.

  “Из, из!”

  No prizes for guessing that means either up or out. Either way, the gesture with the barrel of the gun makes it clear. Jana climbs out first, simply because she’s on the higher side of the empty root ball and can clamber over the branches.

  “Пушка? Gun?”

  Garcia is still in the dirt bowl, but he’s on his feet. He turns slowly, keeping his hands on his head, allowing the Russian to see the Glock pistol tucked into the small of his back.

  “You. Throw gun.”

  He’s talking to me. Gingerly, I pull the gun from Garcia’s belt, pinching the pistol grip between my thumb and forefinger rather than grabbing it, making sure the soldier can see my every move, keeping my fingers well clear of the trigger. I hold the gun at arm’s length, offering it to the soldier, but he has no intention of taking it from me. With the barrel of his AK-47, he signals.

  “There.”

  I place the pistol on one of the upturned roots. Smoke drifts across the jungle floor, sitting low to the ground like fog. The silence is ominous. It’s as though a storm is about to break. There’s something out there, something dark, something moving through the haze behind the Russians, but it ain’t human. It’s too big. The soldiers, though, are facing us, so they don’t catch the faint motion.

  “Out.”

  Pretzel and Garcia clamber out of the ditch from the other end, well away from the handgun. I join them, climbing up next to Jana, who has her hands high in the air.

  Another soldier closes in, shouldering his AK-47, and grabs her hands, twisting them down behind her back. He slips a plastic zip-tie over her wrists, locking her arms together as effectively as with handcuffs.