Savior
by Anthony Caplan
Praise for Anthony Caplan’s Savior
“In the literary world, a gem comes along that deserves to be recognized and read. Grab your sunglasses because Savior by Anthony Caplan shines it’s brilliance up there with the rarest of rare finds! Part mystery, part adventure, part psychological thriller, part coming of age, 100% amazing, a non-offensive read for any age!”
–Dianne Bylo, Tome Tender
“Set in a dystopian near-future, Savior is genre-breaking reading at its best . . . a fascinating combination of high adventure and interpersonal relationships that keep Savior an exciting, unpredictable read right up to its emotionally charged (and satisfying) conclusion.”
–Diane Donovan, Midwest Book Review
“The story opened strong and it kept that level throughout…This is definitely a story of love and sacrifice.”
—Highway-YA
“This is a great edge-of-your-seat dystopian novel. I was drawn in immediately and could not put it down…a wonderful story of faith and courage. Even if you don’t read dystopian novels, this book takes you on an amazing cross-country adventure you’re sure to enjoy.”
—Simone Lilly-Egerter, Bookwork Babblings
“The author did a superb job on creating the characters, going deep into the psycho analysis of their behavior. The plot is very well constructed….The plot is very intense and it is guaranteed that you will be hooked from the first page on this incredible adventure, showing that a love between father and son has no limits. I recommend this book to the permanent library of all readers that enjoy a very well written novel and want to be entertained.”
—Roberto Mattos, Books and Movies Reviews
“The use of language is intelligent, and unexpected in today’s thriller/dystopian genres, with turns of phrase that startle with their elegance without ripping the reader away from the plot or descriptions . . . It is exemplary in its stellar use of language, its complex plot and characterizations, its ability to derive truths and fallacies and the thin veil separating them.”
—Diane Nelson, Sand in My Shoes Reviews
“I enjoyed the characters very much and the development of the plot line kept me interested to the end. The Canadian connection made it even more exciting.”
—J.C., Rockwood, Ontario
SAVIOR
By
Anthony Caplan
Copyright © 2015 Anthony Caplan
Cover photo: © Petteri Sulonen, The VR warehouses on fire on May 5th 2006, Helsinki, Finland, The National Museum of Finland in the distance.
None of the material contained herein may be reproduced or stored without permission of the author under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions.
Published in the United States by Harvard Square Editions
Harvard Square Editions web address: www.harvardsquareeditions.org
Acknowledgements
Thanks to all Indiegogo supporters, especially Nicole, Meredith, Danielle and Andy.
You helped make it happen.
One—The Hole
The morning that Mary died, the television broadcast F5 tornado warnings in the mid-Atlantic, a man shot up a hospital in Fort Wayne, Dittohead Larry's car dealership promised amazing deals in Kissimmee, and a crack opened in the sky that was getting bigger every day. Nobody noticed the crack, and nobody noticed that Mary and I had our two hands intertwined, as they had been for better or worse for seventeen years. Her face just held a remnant of the youthful girl I'd once known. The lines of intelligence around her eyes and the compassion that had burned brightly in them were fading before me.
She whispered something that I had to lean down to hear.
I pity you.
They were her final words. She was sure she was moving on, to a place beyond our comprehension and ability to touch. I have a hard time thinking about what I felt for her in the hospital. I wanted to turn off the television. There's something so awful about a television in a hospital room. Now I would welcome the banality of it, the familiar numbing sensation and otherworldliness of it, especially the commercials. Yet, when I think about all the time I wasted watching television, I get angry with myself. We spend so much of our lives killing off any opportunity for wonder and grace; and then when it comes, we don't recognize it until too late. But Mary, even in her dying, was teaching me a lesson about how to live. I'm not sure about where she is, perhaps that place beyond our comprehension. Maybe it's there for Mary. I can almost hear her voice. It's the train that rips overhead like it would tear the roof off a house. I drop off the bunk and roll in a self-defense reflex. It disappears, leaving not even a Doppler, not even an echo of its passage.
I'm in a hole. I put my ear to the floor and can almost hear the ground water gurgling and working away at the stone. Blackness and the sound of the wind, not any real wind, are all I've got besides the resource of my senses. There's almost nothing to feed on. Slowly the senses will atrophy and without them I will lose my mind. Not my soul. But a soul without a mind must be a tortured thing. Some would say they are the same, but I have proof of the contrary. His name is Samael Chagnon, and where he walks is a ruined place.
Two, three steps and I come to the wall, the cold, wet, rough-plastered wall. Turn around 180 degrees and six steps back the other way. There is no sound, no light, no smell, nothing. But out of this nothing can come everything. Twice a day a vent opens in the wall. Somebody—I can hear the steps going away, the loud ringing of boot heels fading away as a corner is rounded—has slipped in a tray of cold rice and mush. The smell makes my head shake. Once in a while there's a piece of grisly chicken in it. It's almost as good as sex. Then sometimes there are the beams of light shooting through the air over my head. It's a grey light, not daylight, some kind of fluorescence, but it hits my eyes like the glory of God's kingdom and lifts me to some other plane of existence. For a second it's enough to keep me sane.
It is a living hell. The devils that have imprisoned me here, the foot soldiers of Samael's army, they call themselves Los Santos Muertos, expect me to roll over and forget who I am and die. But of course I have the resource, my memories to sustain me. I have to dole them out wisely though, because I don't know how long I will be here. No, it's a mistake to think that. That kind of thought lets in doubt, the pain of desiring light, touch, and mercy. The Dead Saints, Los Santos Muertos, make it a point not to feel any human emotions. They train themselves to seek out pain in themselves and force it on their prisoners. There is no mercy in this underground. No light. Only my sacred soul, but he will come to try and steal even that.
What are the numbers that he seeks? Pi out to the fifteenth decimal silences him momentarily. It's something I learned in college. A party trick. And then I hear his outraged screams of anger. There is the momentary joy of hearing his genuine pain, until the minions, black, twisted, cannibalized or burned-off faces, grimacing masks, are strapping me to the board. I can hear the clanking of it into place above the vat. The water's cold snaps me to attention. This is real, and if I breathe I will die.
I can't die. Ricky needs me. Somewhere above ground in the world of light, oxygen, reason—reality, sweet reality—in the three holy dimensions of Earth lit through by the sun, there is a boy. His mother is dead. I'm all he has. I hold my breath until I am blue. I say that and laugh because there are no colors in this world, only blackness and his voice ordering the men. Something to my ears like a howling, guttural curse, and they swing the board upright.
Once, in a far away, not-too-distant past there were the three of us, and our struggles were the common lot of American families in those days: how to make the mortgage payment; how to avoid the despair of not-bright-enough teeth, not-green-enough grass—the under-pixilated reality of early
twenty-first-century Florida, not Miami, not Jacksonville, somewhere in between, in the palisades of retirement communities and trailer parks of central Florida, the very real beach town where we made our lives, pushing the stone uphill. And we were happy before Mary's death. The cancer cut her down and stole away our life. Could it have been Samael's first assault? He is after all, the leader of the Santos Muertos, the living dead, self-styled though it may be as a title. I can almost believe, if I let myself slide, that there is a basis to his irreality. His formidable will for evil has taken him to the heights of madness after all, which are just a hair removed from the world of genuine power. He seeks the old Mephistophelian bargain of dominance and immortality; and if I help him, he promises I will enjoy the same. But I would have to forget my old life. Everything that I am and ever was. He miscalculates with me, but I can't let on. It is keeping me alive, his unholy thirst for power.
I hear the guards talking. I have to curse him to his face because I. . .don't. . . know. I don't have the tablet. The fool thinks I've hidden the fucking thing, a souvenir, a trinket of our time, our innocent days in Guatemala. I have to laugh at the irony of it because even here I see the hand of God. He comes to try all men in the proper time. This is my trial and I welcome it. I will come through with flying colors, vanquishing blackness forever. In my day of triumph, even the night will be shot through with the prismatic effects that Mary glimpsed as she whispered to me. And I will never hear the false wind overhead. And I will be able to walk freely.
I walk sometimes, not when I am strapped down, but when I can I take a heavy one step, two and three. Reach out and touch the condensation on the corrugated iron sheathing. There is a joint up there in that corner. I believe it's the North in that direction. Something tells me it's the North. Here my senses fail me, and I put my trust in other things: intuitions, voices, the memory of ancestors and their curiosity in the night. When I face the North, I can remember. I can see Ricky and Mary. And we were happy. I can almost still remember happiness. It wasn't that long ago. The truth is I've lost count. No way to track time, the days and nights indistinguishable. I sleep whenever I can and my dreams are troubled, the vague rumblings of the train and hungry images of distant memories, another lifetime, another person. His name was Al Lyons.
That Al Lyons. Yes! He graduated Phi Delta from the Georgia Technical Institute. Worked for a time, about ten years, in the aviation industry, mostly buying and selling airplane parts all over the country while he worked on his book, his magnum, a history of flight, from Yuan Huangtou, the Chinese prince who used a kite to hoist himself skyward, to the Rutan Voyager, that stilted, sprawling spit into the wind. Couldn't find a publisher, but did meet his wife, Mary, working in the public library in the town of Plymouth Beach, Florida. Mary was everything he could ever imagine in a woman. She was smart, caring, with delicate features that inversely matched tenacity and patience. They settled there in Plymouth Beach, and when the airline industry took that nosedive sometime in the nineties, he took a job teaching history in the Shelby County Regional High School and never looked back. Coached the football team, too. Mary and he finally had a child after seven years of trying. The number seven was significant; there were seven steps on the Buddha’s path and seven continents and seven climates and seven dwarves and. . .
Absurd man, you do not exist. You are a mere speck and you answer when I call. You are just a figment of my reality, and I order you now to tell me what you know of the Chocomal and the Code of the Last Days.
You know more than me.
Have you forgotten everything? You know the tablet. What is the answer? Is it a sequence? Is it a table of calculations?
I've told you, Chagnon. Are you stupid? Everything I know about it. You cannot squeeze blood out of a bloody stone.
He's not happy. I can tell by the momentary silence. Then he says something; and the guard, the little one with the moustache, flips the switch and the ions flow, squeezing my body into a convulsion that blacks out even thought. When I come to my senses, it is strangely quiet, even quieter than usual. It takes a few minutes before I realize they have left. My arms are still strapped to the gurney, but they've loosened them enough to let the blood circulate. Circulation of the blood, pulmonary system of branches, and the eternal pumping of the heart at the core of our bodies that mimic larger systems, everything a reflection of the Idea, the Seed, that is everything and will become nothing in the long cycle, the deepest frequency. We have no way of anticipating. Not even Jesus knows the hertz measure of the final hour. So what could a number mean to these men?
They're done with me now. I survived again, lived to tell the tale. Memory, I breathe you. I could have died. I could have sucked the water down into my lungs and tasted the sweetness of that oblivion. It was a thought, a temptation. But I work my arms loose, a small triumph. Maybe he anticipated that. Maybe he knows everything about me. Maybe that's part of his method, to make me doubt even my small triumphs, throw me into some kind of long-term despair, until he's broken down the walls of my will. Then he will suck me dry of any knowledge I have, stuff I didn't even know I knew, throw it all into the computer that must link back to the underground complex buried deep in the jungle mountains of the Sierra Madre. I stand up and breathe, put my finger on my neck and feel the blood pumping. Take six steps and put my hand up on the cold, wet metal. This is how I will stay alive and beat him. As long as there is blood still pumping and there is a mind still seeking. If he kills me, I win. If I outlast him, I win. The odds are in my favor. His only weapon is pain. And I can deal with pain. Anything after Mary's death.
Two—Plymouth Beach
It is 1997 and they are sitting in the kitchen, the two of them, early on an August morning. Through the open window—a slider over the sink—comes the sound of mourning doves in the Virginia oaks across the street. Al has finished setting up the coffee maker at the island. Mary cuts up a grapefruit in a bowl. There is a news show on the television, but neither of them is paying any attention. There are no cars going by on the quiet residential street, two blocks from the town-owned stretch of sand that has resisted the encroachment of hotels and motels that block access to the water everywhere else along the Florida coast. Mary is talking about taking Ricky to the beach. He is sleeping at the moment but will soon wake. Al concurs with the plan. He can make lessons on the laptop. He has the old Dell laptop from his job with Myers Aviatrix. Some of the spreadsheets and contact lists have yet to be deleted. He's still surprised they let him walk away with the laptop in his car when he resigned two years previous. Such a lapse in security would be unthinkable nowadays, with the terrorist threat constantly looming and Clinton fighting to end a slow war in the Balkans, the first rumblings of the millennial clash Al believes is coming.
Why don't you return it, Al?
I don't think they miss it.
It's the principle, though.
You're right. I'll do that today. I can buy myself a new one. The newer models are lighter, more powerful. You can download from the Internet faster.
He knows better than to argue with Mary on a matter of principle. Her light sandy hair and plain features mask a pugnacity that knows no bounds when there is an issue of weighing right versus wrong, no matter how petty. The high road always wins.
Go do it now. I want you to come with us. Ricky loves playing with you. What is that game you play?
Tigers.
Where you pounce on him.
Yeah, I hide in the sand and he runs by and tries not to get pounced on. He's a great little guy.
Do you dream about him winning the state football championship some day?
Of course. He's going to be the next Staubach.
Roger Staubach. Isn't there a Florida equivalent?
There is, but for any boy growing up in the seventies, Roger Staubach was it. He’s going to be great.
That's funny. I don't care if he plays football or not. I want him to find his own interests. He'll be a birdwatcher.
Oh, that'll be fine, too. As long as he's he best birdwatcher out there.
What if he's just the best birdwatcher he can be, isn't that good enough?
Good enough. I suppose so, Mary.
Al stands and goes off to look for the laptop in the study. He finds it in the bottom drawer of the desk, the big one that takes the boxes of stationery and odds and ends of cables and old floppy discs that no longer have any use, that they hang onto just in case. He takes the laptop out and listens as Ricky makes a crying noise in his bedroom upstairs. Mary goes up the stairs and brings him down to the kitchen. When Al takes the old laptop back out, the boy is sitting in the high chair in a shaft of sunlight. On the news, Rush Limbaugh is making some inane argument about the welfare state, the numbers of illegal immigrants flooding the country and threatening Our Way of Life.
It is an in-between August day. Al is in his second year teaching. There are times he struggles with his newest career choice and wonders how things would have been different if he'd been a little hungrier starting out after college in the recession years of the mid-eighties. But Mary, with her sandy hair and no-nonsense spare features, is without a doubt reason enough to give thanks to God. And Ricky is the greatest little guy, a square-built, healthy little bundle of primal energy. Here in the house on the quiet street, Al says a little prayer before he passes into the kitchen, thanks for the good things in his life. He is thirty-seven years old, thirty-five years older than his son. When Ricky graduates from college, he will be fifty-six.
Ten thirty, halfway through the morning. Al divides the day into quadrants so that he can get the most out of his time here. The beach is ahead, across the parking lot. Mary and Ricky are on the path in the sand. He watches their slow progress and then jumps out of the car, grabs the canvas beach bag with snacks and towels, and starts after them. Mary picks a spot in the sand and applies sunscreen to them before turning attention to herself. In the water, some surfers are catching the little shore break, down by the pier. Al takes Ricky by the hand and leads him down to the water. The boy breaks free and runs ahead. Al chases him, his voice sounding like a freight train.
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