Chess Players: Atlantis and the Mockingbird

by DeVaughn, A. P.

  The place was small and quaint. There’s a busted jukebox in the corner, a few tables and chairs, one ceiling fan with two blades missing out of four, a wooden floor that hasn’t been polished since the place was built, and a flashing neon Open sign in the window that’s struggling to stay alight, and the ‘p’ was out.

  “Yes, I’ll have eggs and toast, please, and some grits if you got ‘em,” I say as I take a seat at the bar in front of her.

  “Okay, you got it,” she says as she heads back to the kitchen. “You’re new around here. What brings you to Golden Plains?” she asks, skillfully talking with that cigarette pinched in the side of her mouth with a long ash stuck to the burning end.

  “I came to see an old friend of the family. A fellow by the name of Isaac Herring. Do you know him?” I ask.

  “Well, I do know a guy named Isaac, but not by the last name you gave me. You two certainly don’t look related, especially with those eyes and ears ya got. Maybe you’re kin to some of those prairie dogs out there, but not old Isaac. He lives out past the hill a few miles. When was the last time you saw him?”

  “Well, I’ve never met him, actually.”

  “That will be a chore.” She laughs. “He don’t respond well to strangers. He just got here ‘bout a little over a year ago. Hadn’t come around much. Stays in his house and don’t speak to anyone.”

  “I might be able to handle it. Do you have a phone book? I’d like to call a cab.”

  “There are no cabs here in Golden Plains, mister. You’re in Amish country. There will be a carriage coming into town shortly that can take ya where you need to go. He doesn’t live too far from Old Isaac. He usually comes around two o’clock to get his ham n’ eggs special every Wednesday. And here’s your food, mister. Just give me a holler if ya need anything else, darling.”

  “Okay, thanks, ma’am.”

  It’s already one thirty, so it’s not too long of a wait. Reading the town paper while I eat my lunchtime breakfast reveals not much happens in this hick town. A baby is born, stolen chickens, crop circles, nothing unusual for an outdated and forgotten chunk of land. The grits aren’t bad, either.

  The bell hanging from the diner doorjamb jingles, and a medium built, average height, black-bearded man walks in with a wide-brimmed black hat, white shirt, and dusty overall denims. I look at the waitress, and she gives me a head nod. He sits and orders his predicted ham and eggs special.

  “This one’s on me, friend,” I say, sliding my money onto the table. “How are you doing this afternoon, sir?”

  “I’m fine,” he says, looking straight ahead, eyes shaded by the wide-brimmed hat. “We don’t get very many visitors here. If you’re a salesman, then you’re wasting your time. I don’t need any of your fancy doodads.”

  “Well, I’m no salesman. But I do have important business here. I have a family member that I need to see, and you may know him.”

  “And who might that be?” he says, still looking straight ahead.

  “A man by the name of Isaac.”

  “Old man Isaac, huh?” he says, finally looking in my direction, tilting the brim of his hat up. “He never spoke of having any kin. As a matter of fact, he never really speaks at all. No one ever visits Isaac, and I rarely see him.”

  “I’d be more than grateful if you could take me to where he lives.”

  “I guess I can be of service and take you. Help me load my wagon, and it’s a deal.”

  We head out and stock his wagon with essentials at the general store across the dirt road, and we hop into the wagon and head down the road toward the hills. He talked about farm animals and stolen chickens. I was also educated for twenty minutes on corn cropping. We arrived about a mile from where Isaac lived, and he told me it was about a thirty-minute walk down the road. I thanked him and he gave me a friendly tip of the hat with a “much obliged” courtesy attached to it and waved farewell.

  I arrived to a plot of land surrounded by a weathered, wooden fence. A squeaky, rooster weather vane fluttered around in the dusty breeze. Goats pranced about inside the fence. A few acres of withering corn and barley grew in the land beside the house. I stepped onto the rickety, creaking front porch and knocked on the door.

  “Hello?” There was no answer. “Hello!” Knocking harder as the dust fell from the screen on the door, I peeked through the dingy window beside the door. Then I heard the familiar cocking of a shotgun.

  “I smelled you when you were at my property line,” a man says from around the corner of the house. All I can see are the two holes of a double-barrel shotgun appearing around the edge of the wood siding. He steps out, slowly walking toward the edge of the house, peeking around the corner with the shotgun aimed at me.

  “Let me see those hands!” he shouts. “All of you smell the same. Whad’ya want?”

  “I’m Dwight Jones, sir. Are you Isaac?”

  “Yeah, that’s me. Why in the hell are you here?” he snarls.

  “Your friend Khol wants me to give you a message. He says that the bird has flown. Also, he says you knew a man named Magnus.”

  His eyes went from the look of a killer to a man in fear. He lowered his gun.

  “Were you followed?” he says, raising the shotgun back at me. Shaking my head no with my hands still raised above my head, he came from the corner of the house and waved his gun in the direction of the door, gesturing me to walk inside. Then he quickly ushered me into his home, with the shotgun wedged between my shoulder blades.

  “Have a seat right here and hands where I can see ’em,” he commands.

  “That’s impossible!” he says as he throws down his hat to the floor, still holding the shotgun at me with one hand. “They didn’t have the last piece. I made sure of that! I buried it. They should have never been able to obtain it!”

  Adjusting his oil lamp that was hanging from the ceiling, I finally got a glimpse of his face as the dim light from the lamp hit his bust. He sat in front of me on an old wooden bench with his finger still on the trigger of that double-barreled shotgun. His hair was fiery red and his face was creamy and peppered. He looked as old as Bill but moved like he was my age. Looking about the house, I saw unmarked boxes and what seemed to be used tea bags, just as I saw in Bill’s house and Father Mire’s church office. Nothing but old furniture, dusty boxes, and machinery with dials and gauges, whose function I couldn’t comprehend from sight alone.

  “Do you know what’s about to happen? You have no clue, do you? This is impossible!” he angrily said.

  “This is what I came here for,” I say. “To find out what your friend Khol didn’t want to tell me. He said you knew everything.”

  “The math and physics seemed impossible, but we did it. I couldn’t believe it when I saw it with my own eyes, but we did it. Einstein’s Unified Field Theory is what they sought to utilize to find their holy grail, their key that they’ve been searching for, for thousands of years.

  “It was 1943, the year after they harnessed the power of the atom and a few years before the war ended. We started an experiment for a stealth craft, a cloaking device that would make tanks, planes, ships, and even soldiers invisible to the naked eye and to radar. The project was code-named Rainbow. The first workable test craft had operational capability within months. Before the atom was harnessed, we couldn’t get a power source large enough to sustain the enormous amount of energy needed to make it work. But we figured it out and put the massive device on a frigate. On the day of the test, a half dozen poor souls were tricked into being on that frigate. A routine drill is what we told them they were doing. Poor souls. The test was conducted in a private section off the coast of Philadelphia. It was Dutch, Mire, Magnus, Khol, Barnes, and I who watched from a bunker window. Magnus was a lot younger than us and manned the radio during the experiment. They turned the power source on inside the frigate and something remarkable happened. The frigate did exactly as we calculated it would do—it disappeared. Surprisingly, something else happened that was not calculated th
at day. Not only did it disappear, it also jumped through time and space. The vessel was spotted a thousand miles south of where the experiment took place, twelve seconds before the actual experiment began, and then it reappeared right before our eyes. When we assessed the ship, two of the six men were completely missing without a trace. Another two bodies were found fused into the hull of the ship. Such a gruesome sight. But the two that survived were stir-crazy for weeks, until eventually one of them died, and the other was taken off to another location for experimentation and analysis.

  “The three technologies that were taken from that experiment were the cloaking device, a zero-gravity bubble, and, yes, time travel itself.

  “However, a few weeks later, after continuous tests on the two surviving subjects, the doctors noticed something, something that turned out to be the most important thing ever discovered in human history. One subject was a complete vegetable. However, his personality traits, memories, and even his voice were somehow implanted inside the other man and his personality and memories were completely wiped out. One man became the other. A transplant of a soul and the obliteration of another, you might say. It spawned a project that was code-named Mockingbird.”

  “Mockingbird!” I’ve heard of this.

  “Yes. It’s the complete transference of the soul from one person into another and the complete eradication of the soul of the surrogate body. And I, I was the scientist in charge of overseeing the entire project. The countless innocent people—men, women, children, babies—that I experimented on, that I tortured. What a monster I am.

  “You see, a soul is nothing but energy. Just as a computer can download and upload information, so can the human body. After thirty years of testing, with my help, they have perfected it. It’s what they’ve been searching for, for thousands of years—immortality. They are unstoppable, now that they’ve somehow located the last piece of the code for their plan. And to think I used to be one of them. I, I could have been a god.”

  “Plan? What is this plan? Who are they?”

  “These people are alchemists, worshiping the sciences instead of idols, angels, and gods. A very long time ago, they grew tired of the rules of their creators: being born, becoming old, getting sick, and then dying. They decided to take matters into their own hands, setting up civilizations around the world and propping up deities, brainwashing the masses for total control of their behavior. They were also known to be—supernatural. You may have heard myths about them. Fables told throughout the ages, about werewolves, vampires, witches, archeologists spending a lifetime searching for this place, which isn’t a place at all. The lost city, the Garden of Eden. Known to the esoteric people as Atlantis. They controlled the world a long time ago until someone stopped them and tore away their kingdom from beneath their feet.”

  “Atlantis?”

  “Yes. Atlantis. Their plan is to rebuild it, and they’ve been doing it systematically, decade upon decade for millennia. Black, Red, White and Pale. The Four Horsemen shall ride once again, and the stampede will be unstoppable. This plan is far more horrific than the earth has ever seen, and no one is safe. But now they have immortality and a weapon that will tear the world apart. The Trident is what the ruler will wield.”

  “Yes, the Trident,” I say. “My father spoke of this as well. What does it all mean? And the ruler? What is this ruler?”

  “Even though the Four Horsemen are powerful, they are not the head of the Chariot. They are the claws of the monster, the teeth. Horses have reins, and those reins are controlled by a godly hand, and in the other hand, the Trident.”

  “I’ve always felt something was wrong with the world, but nothing like this,” I say as the lantern flickers brightly into my face.

  “Wait,” he says, looking at me, squinting. “Those eyes, and, those ears—it’s, it’s—”

  “But, what plan? What’s this Trident about?”

  His eyes got as wide as saucers and his hands began to shake.

  “Unbelievable,” he said softly. “Those eyes.” Standing up and slowly backing away, he says, “It’s you!”

  Just as he starts to aim the shotgun at me, I jump on him, grabbing his wrists. We tussle and fight for control of the weapon. The shotgun goes off, sending a chrysanthemum of flames through the room. The lantern explodes, setting the room ablaze. The shotgun flies across the room after the explosion, splitting our tussle apart. Flames shoot up into my face, blinding me. Then I feel my throat being squeezed as I feel his arm clamp down on me from behind. My vision returns. We fall to the ground. His chokehold gets tighter.

  “We’ll die here together!” he shouts as I try to struggle from his grasp. “And your kingdom is done. I will not let you live! The first time it was by water, and now by fire! You have lost, Lucrea’us!” he says.

  The room fills with smoke as the fire starts creeping up the walls and engulfing the ceiling. I can feel the intense heat from the blaze smothering my body, and the wooden house begins to pop and crack.

  “No, I have not,” I say as I reach for the butterfly knife in my pocket and shove it into his side. He screams as his clamp loosens, and I break free in time to roll out of the way of falling timbers. The ceiling collapses on him, burying him in an inferno.

  “To hell with you! To hell with you aaaallll!” he shouts as he’s engulfed beneath the blazing wood.

  I repeatedly kick at the door, but it won’t budge. Intense flames block the windows, boxing me in, leaving me no way to escape.

  “Argh!” Wood and embers fly from the door as an intense explosion knocks me to my back.

  “This way!” I hear a voice through the smoke.

  I stagger to my feet, bolt through the door, and run from the house, falling down after a few steps in my panic, coughing and wheezing from the smoke. I open my eyes, and in my blurry vision, I look up to the blue sky and see a hand.

  “Thanks for saving me,” I say, still partially blinded.

  “It’s my pleasure to protect our savior. Now quickly, we must leave. They’re coming,” the man says.

  He helps me to my feet, and, to my amazement, it’s the Amish man I met at the diner.

  “Savior? Why? Who’s coming?” I say, coughing and dusting myself off, trying to regain my bearings.

  “You’ll see,” he says. “Can you ride a horse?”

  “No, but I’m a fast learner.”

  Chapter 26: The Resistance

  He looks back toward the grassy hills.

  “There they are. Yahh!” he says as he whips the reins and our horses run off. We dart straight for a sparsely wooded trail not too far from the burning house. I look back and I can see in the distance four men wearing black tactical gear and cowls running after us. We are a few hundred yards ahead of them, and, remarkably, they are keeping up pace.

  We zig and zag through the trails and trees, trying to lose our pursuers. We make our way into an abandoned town, bending around buildings at full speed as I try my best not to fall off the horse.

  “We’ll take refuge here,” the Amish man says as we approach a wooden building that’s falling apart. He opens a latch that is intricately hidden among the wood siding that lined the building. It reveals an electric control panel. He pushes a series of buttons and a large slab of concrete at the bottom of the building slides away from the foundation and reveals an underground tunnel. “Let’s go.” He enters the tunnel, horse and all, ducking under the entrance to fit into the space.

  “We’ll wait here for a few minutes so that they lose our scent.”

  “What man can keep up with a horse?” I whisper to him.

  “Men? No men,” he sternly says. Peering through a small porthole in the ceiling of the tunnel, he points to my wrist. “Pay attention to the device on your arm. When the needle stops jumping, that’s when we make our escape. Now quiet.”

  Hearing footsteps of the four so-called men rushing by us, I watch the needle on this watch-like device bounce up and down frantically. The needle slows to a few pulses every
other second and then falls still.

  “It stopped,” I whisper.

  “Let’s go,” he says as he pushes another button inside the tunnel. The huge slab of concrete slides away near the base of the building and we slowly creep back outside. “Keep your eye on that needle,” he commands as we carefully trot closer to the outside of the ghost town.

  “It’s moving again,” I say. The needle begins to pulse frantically as I hear a shriek from atop one of the buildings behind us. We turn toward the roof behind us and see the enemy standing and then leaping to the ground in pursuit.

  “They’ve found us! Hee-yaahh!” he shouts, spurring the horse and violently whipping the reins. We go full gallop toward the outside of the abandoned town, trying to reach a clearing.

  Three of the men are in pursuit behind us, and one of them leaps onto the side of a building, climbs it like a chimpanzee, and takes to the roof, leaping along the rooftops.

  “They’re trying to flank us!” he shouts. “Stay on this road! I’ll draw the other two off!”

  I strain the horse to its limits, almost being tossed off of its back in its violent sprint, hearing it gasp for its breath harder and harder, yet the men are closing in. The opening to the end of the abandoned town is in sight. I can see the man on the rooftop at the end of the abandoned town stop. As I approach the last building with the other one on my tail, the man on the rooftop leaps directly for me. “Get down!” shouts the Amish man as he appears from behind a building. I lay low in the saddle and I hear the boom from his shotgun. He knocks the creature from out of the air.

  We make it to the clearing and gallop away as the other three give up the chase.

  Miles away from the chaos, the horses can stand no more.

  “Okay, here is where we can stop,” he says, pointing to a shed in a cornfield.

  Inside the shed there is a large, dusty white tarp covering something that seems to be a prop plane. I can see what looks like a propeller sticking out of a hole in the tarp. He walks past the tarp and over to a few cabinets and drawers that he opens. He removes handguns, rifles, and ammunition.