2013: Beyond Armageddon

by Robert Ryan

  “There is your Christ. Beaten again, just like I beat him at Golgotha. Remember his dying words, savior? ‘Eli, Eli, Lama sabachthani? Lord, why hast thou forsaken me?’ Come see me, Chosen One, and you will get to say them. And that will be the end of the Second Coming. Déjà vu, mon ami. Perhaps the third time will be the charm. When I am coming. To reign over all.”

  Demonic cackling faded and the television clicked off. Leah scrabbled backwards to get away from the screen.

  The tongue on the floor ignited like a fuse and started burning a black, serpentine path into the room. Bubbling and sizzling, it emitted a stench like all rotting things combined. Zeke covered his nose and bent to check on Leah. With fresh horror he saw that the fast-approaching fiery tongue was still wrapped around her ankles. In a few seconds the fire would begin coiling around her flesh.

  Quelling his nausea, he grabbed the tongue and yanked. It clung stubbornly, then came free just before the burning trail made it that far. He cast the repugnant tentacle aside and watched its fire die out.

  He gathered Leah into his arms. Her face was ghostly white.

  “Are you okay?”

  She made a feeble nod.

  Mordecai came over, holding a molten lump that had been Zeke’s crucifix.

  The voice from the other side of the black television screen sounded hollow, as if coming from a bottomless void.

  “Your Christ will not save you, savior. You will die forsaken. Just like He was on the cross.”

  CHAPTER 40

  Zeke pulled Leah to her feet and steadied her. Still not sure it was over, his gaze darted from the others, to the television, to the burned remnant on the floor, then back to Leah. All eyes were taking the same nervous inventory. Zeke asked if everyone was okay.

  “Define okay,” Hassan said.

  “As okay as we can be, I’m sure,” Mordecai said. “Considering we just had a visitation from the Devil himself, threatening to destroy us all.”

  Hassan spoke with a fatalistic calm. “I didn’t really believe before. I believe now.”

  “They must have heard this upstairs,” Zeke said. “I’ll have to tell them the truth. I didn’t before because I didn’t want to sound like some crazy cult leader, talking about something I couldn’t really prove. I can’t worry about that now.” His eyes burned when he looked at Leah. “Lives are at stake. People have to know the risks if they stay.”

  “I don’t think you need to tell them,” Mordecai said. “In fact I don’t think you should. Not yet.”

  “What? Why not?”

  “This sounded to me like a one-time warning, like he would be content now to wait and see if we can find him. We may have found Sodom and Gomorrah, but it’s a long way from there to finding the entrance to Hell. When we find that, then tell the others. Give them the option to leave then. Telling them now would worry them unnecessarily, about something that might not happen for a long time. If ever.”

  “I agree,” Hassan said. “It is too soon to tell of this. If we scare everyone away, this dig will not get done. It needs many people. I say let’s wait. We may have seen the last of this. If he—it—appears again, we—you—can decide then what to do, based on the situation.”

  “So you want to stay,” Zeke said.

  Hassan stared, unblinking. “This is what we signed up for. I do not run at the first sign of trouble.”

  “This is big trouble, Hassan.”

  “In a search for Satan, did we expect little trouble?”

  “Point well taken.”

  “I have been spending every spare minute in the water, Zeke, training to help you confront this…thing. When you need me, I will be there.”

  Zeke’s warm flush of admiration was cut short by the sound of footsteps. Joe Dayagi was coming toward them.

  “A bunch of us heard a loud noise. It sounded like a monster movie turned all the way up, but I told the others I would check just to be sure. Is everything all right?”

  Mordecai made a sheepish face. “Everything is fine. I was fooling with the television and the volume button got stuck. Tell everyone to get some sleep. We’ve got an early day tomorrow.”

  “What’s that smell?”

  Mordecai nodded toward the burn mark on the floor. “I was trying to run an old wire from the television to see if I could add a speaker, but I shorted something out. Now that I think of it, one of your specialties is wireless communications. I should have left it to you.”

  Dayagi stared at him for a moment, then looked at Hassan, whose face showed nothing. He looked back at Mordecai and pretended to buy the lame story. “I’ll check out the speaker after work tomorrow. I’ll tell the others everything here is okay.”

  Zeke waited until he had gone, then said, “So. We’re keeping this between us for now.”

  Nods all around.

  “Then let’s clean this up and get some sleep.”

  Upstairs in their room, Leah sat in a chair rubbing her ankles. They showed no signs of damage. Zeke was more concerned about the resolve hardening on her face. He sat and put his arm around her shoulder.

  “I want you to go home. I couldn’t live with myself if anything happened to you.”

  She shook her head. “And I couldn’t live with myself if I just left you here to deal with this alone. You’re in just as much danger as I was. We all are. Who knows how this thing could come after us? If it can do that, and what it did on the plane, it can do whatever it wants. I wouldn’t be any safer at home. Zeke, it’s all or nothing for us now. Don’t you know I would walk into Hell for you?”

  A swell of emotion coursed from his heart through his throat to his eyes. He took both her hands. “God, I love you.”

  “Backatcha.”

  He released her hands. “It’s time for me to contact that ex-colleague of Dr. Connolly’s. The one who supposedly has a world-class collection of sacred relics. After what just happened, it’s time to see what he’s got, and if it has any power to ward off evil.”

  “How would we know?”

  “We wouldn’t for sure, I guess. But if we didn’t get any more visitations, or hear any more voices, I’d take that. Obviously that still wouldn’t prove a connection, but it would help me sleep better. What else can you do against demons coming at you from clouds and the television?”

  “Pray.”

  “In effect that’s what you’re doing with the relics. Praying to God through them to protect you.” Zeke shrugged. “I’ll call him and see what he has to say.”

  “It couldn’t hurt. I’m going to take a shower while you do that.”

  Zeke dialed the number Dr. Connolly had given him for Anthony Unger, not sure what to expect. Dr. Connolly had said the man had become a zealot, always preparing for Judgment Day. He had been getting especially worked up about the year 2012. Something about retreating to a hidden lair and sounding like a modern John the Baptist…

  “Hello.”

  Zeke introduced himself, mentioning his relationship to Dr. Connolly. Unger immediately warmed up.

  “I was saddened to learn of his death,” he said.

  “Me too,” Zeke said. “Mr. Unger, I have a rather unusual reason for calling.”

  He gave a brief account of how he had gotten the scrolls, and Dr. Connolly’s interpretation of their contents. Knowing of Unger’s seemingly fanatical interest in eschatology, he ended with Enoch’s prediction that the day of reckoning was at hand.

  There was a long silence. “Exactly as the Maya predicted,” Unger finally said. “On the winter solstice.”

  “On or about,” Zeke said.

  “What you’re telling me would normally be beyond belief. Almost laughable. Except that Jim Connolly was a genius in the field of paleography. When he talks, we must listen.”

  “I agree.”

  “Mr. Sloan, you have called the right man. What are you proposing?”

  Zeke wasn’t sure how far he wanted to open this door. He wasn’t ready to tell a stranger about his dig for Hell, and if Ung
er was living in a “hidden lair” he obviously had secrets of his own. He chose his words carefully. “I promised Dr. Connolly when I took the scrolls that I would look into what he was telling me—the possibility that Satan exists—and if so, how to defeat him. Dr. Connolly mentioned that you have a world-class collection of relics, so I thought it might be beneficial for us to meet. In my search for the ultimate evil, I’m hoping to find things—talismans, if you will—to protect me against it.”

  “An interesting proposition,” Unger said. “You are right about my collection. They are much more than talismans. I have the greatest collection of first-class relics in the world. Which means relics directly connected to Jesus or the saints. In my case, Jesus. I say that not to boast, simply to let you know that you have indeed called the right man.”

  “I believe you. I’d like to discuss the possibility of borrowing some of what you have.”

  “The items I have are priceless, Mr. Sloan.”

  “You wouldn’t have to give them to me. A loan would do. When I am through with them I would give them back.”

  “The collection is simply too valuable, too irreplaceable for me to let it out of my possession.”

  Silence dragged on as Zeke tried to think of an alternative arrangement. If his theory about the power of relics was true, Unger definitely sounded like the man to see. And he didn’t blame him for not wanting to let whatever he had out of his sight. “I understand your concern. I was hoping we could meet, maybe work something out—”

  “Maybe we can. I agree. We should meet.”

  “How does tomorrow morning sound?”

  “December 21 is less than a month away. The sooner the better.”

  “Tomorrow morning, then. Early. I’ll need directions.”

  Several seconds of silence went by. “I must ask you to agree to one condition,” Unger said.

  “What’s that?”

  “I cannot reveal where I live. It is rather…unorthodox. We can meet nearby, but you must agree to be blindfolded before I take you to my home. Nothing personal against you. The few visitors I have must agree to this.”

  Paranoid scenarios tried to form, but Zeke dismissed them. Unger couldn’t possibly have some sinister plan for dealing with an unexpected call from a stranger. On the incredibly remote chance that he did, Zeke wasn’t worried. He could defend himself. “No problem,” he said.

  “Good.”

  Zeke copied the directions and hung up just as Leah sat down beside him in her robe.

  “I’m meeting him at six in the morning,” he said. “He’s a couple hours away, so I’ll have to leave real early. Just tell everyone I’ll see them in the evening sometime.”

  “So he sounds like the real deal?”

  “We’ll see.”

  Her fresh, clean smell, the way she looked in her robe, almost made him forget the horror of what had just happened in the lounge. Almost. “You didn’t get a chance to say anything about my idea of inviting Michael Price,” he said. “What do you think?”

  “Call him. You’re right about forgiveness. It seem to me like this is the time to look everything right in the face. Empty out all the closets. And you’ve got a major support group if he starts to get on your nerves. If it gets too bad, you can just send him packing.”

  Zeke glanced at the digital clock on the nightstand. Almost ten. “It’s seven hours earlier in the States. I’ll call him now, before I change my mind.”

  Sitting in his nineteenth-floor lower Manhattan apartment, gazing out at the grey slash of the Hudson River, Michael Price answered on the second ring. He recognized the voice instantly. It was the call he’d both hoped for and dreaded. “I thought I’d be hearing from you.”

  “What made you think that?”

  “The last time we talked you said you might want a copy of my interview with the man who killed your family. But there’s more to it than that, isn’t there?”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s been almost twenty years since the jungle, Zeke, but I know how your mind works. As you do mine. Twice now we’ve been drawn into the very heart of evil. Evil done supposedly at the behest of Satan. I don’t know about that, but this much I do know: The bullets in Nam and that restaurant didn’t just kill two families. They left shrapnel in your soul and mine. Gaping wounds that will fester until we die, unless we can come up with some reason that makes sense. We need answers, even though we both know there may not be any. That’s what this is about, isn’t it?”

  “Yes. I have a proposition. It may get us as close to an answer—to closure—as we’re ever going to get.”

  “Let’s hear it.”

  Zeke swore him to secrecy, then told him of the dig for Hell and the role he could play. “A chance to put everything you’ve learned about Satan to the test. And maybe—just maybe—a chance to close some of those gaping wounds you mentioned.”

  Maybe, Price thought. Maybe one last chance to redeem himself. If he wasn’t already too far gone. Certainly he needed to get out of this apartment to have any chance at all. Without being aware of it, he’d let his home become a repository of bad karma.

  On one of the bookshelves was the Ouija board and Tarot deck he and Randy Stokes had used in their hokey teenaged attempts to contact “the other side.” Next to them was Randy’s battered Satanic Bible. He never should have accepted it, much less brought it into the apartment. An entire collection of dark literature lined the shelf.

  The Necronomicon. Biographies of key figures in Satanism like Aleister Crowley. Books with titles like Lucifer’s Will Be Done and The Second Coming of the Antichrist.

  Other things were strewn among the shelves.

  A rabbit’s foot he and Randy had cut from a rabbit while it was still alive; an autographed Black Sabbath poster from their first apartment after high school; a bust of Vlad the Impaler. Maybe these things didn’t have any direct power, but having them constantly around had to have some influence.

  And he’d been regressing again since his meeting with Zeke at the Wall. Going to sleazy clubs, bringing home sleazy women, playing kinky games. Now Zeke was offering the chance he’d known was coming, the chance to finally find out what side he was on. Were the atrocities locked in the dungeon of his soul the products of temporary insanity, or had he been doomed from birth to be an instrument of Satan?

  “Price?”

  “Sorry. I got distracted for a minute. But I heard what you said. And your timing is perfect. This is exactly what I need right now. Sounds like you need it too. I can clear my schedule and be there in a day or two.”

  Zeke gave him directions to their headquarters. “Just come whenever you’re ready, no need to call ahead. We’ll be here.” He hesitated, then added, “I hope this works out for the best, Price. Whatever that is.”

  “It will. Whatever that is. I’ll make sure of it.”

  CHAPTER 41

  Kidron Valley

  The sun had barely risen above the Mount of Olives when Anthony Unger finished his climb from the valley to meet Zeke Sloan. They’d agreed to meet in front of the closest landmark to his sanctuary, the Church of All Nations. This early in the morning no one would be around.

  Across the road that ran in front of the church, Unger saw a man standing by the stone wall that marked the edge of the Kidron Valley. There was no one else in sight. Unger waited in the shadows for a lone car to go by, some early bird on the way to work, then went to greet him. “Good morning.”

  “Anthony Unger?”

  “Yes. And you are Zeke Sloan?”

  “I am.”

  “It is a pleasure to meet you. Any friend of Jim Connolly’s is a friend of mine.”

  They shook hands, and Unger gave him a moment to adjust to his appearance. In his brown cowl held fast by a knotted cord, he knew that he resembled a Franciscan. “I am not a monk,” he said, “although I certainly live like one. I’ve left the trappings of modern society behind, Mr. Sloan, to become who I am. Who I was meant to be.”

  “
Nothing wrong with that. Most of us go through life never figuring out who we were meant to be.”

  “Too true.”

  “So. Ezekiel. A prophet come unto the land of prophets.”

  “Hardly.”

  “Do you mind if I call you Ezekiel? For our purposes it seems more fitting.”

  “No, that’s fine.”

  “You said you studied under Dr. Connolly.”

  “Yes. I studied Theology and Philosophy, among other things. I took all his courses. We became friends.”

  “He was an excellent teacher.”

  “And a good man.”

  “Indeed. We had many lively discussions. My field was eschatology. Are you familiar with it?”

  “Somewhat. It’s a study of the end times. The Messiah, the Second Coming, Judgment Day, and so forth.”

  “For an eschatologist like me, this is the perfect place to be. All three Abrahamic religions believe that this is where the final judgment will take place. The epicenter of the Apocalypse.” He gestured at the grave-studded hill that rose behind the Church of All Nations. “That is the Mount of Olives. Home to the oldest and holiest Jewish cemetery in the world. Some of the people buried there walked during the Old Testament. Now they wait for the sound of the shofar—the ram’s horn announcing their Messiah’s arrival, calling them forth to join Him.”

  Traffic was starting to pick up as Jerusalem began to go about its business. Church personnel would be showing up soon. “Come,” Unger said, “we must move along. It will take time for you to fully appreciate what I have to show you.”

  He led them to the same footpath he had used to come up from the valley, which was also strewn with graves. “Many Muslims are buried here, awaiting their Messiah. And of course many of Christianity’s holiest sites are near here. Places associated with the First Coming of their Messiah: the Garden of Gethsemane, the Judas Cave, the Rock of the Agony. The graves of Mary and Joseph. Kidron Valley translates into Valley of the Dark One. This particular section is the Valley of Jehoshophat—a name that means God will judge. So you see I am in the center of things. Studying the past to prepare for the future. For the First—or Second—Coming, depending on what you believe. Are you a believer, Mr. Sloan?”