Dark Light--Dawn

by Jon Land

  “Only NASA isn’t who’s paying a small fortune for your services,” Beekman said sternly. “And I’d also remind you about the confidentiality and exclusivity agreements you signed with Western Energy Technologies, specifically the penalty clauses, if anything is disclosed in any way, shape, or form.”

  Racine swallowed hard and stiffened behind the wheel, gaze fixed forward, when he suddenly jammed on the brakes.

  “Something’s not right.”

  Racine parked the Jeep there and climbed out, not waiting for Beekman before moving through the last of the trees, toward the camp they’d set up in the general area of the find. At first glance, there seemed to be no sign whatsoever of Racine’s team or their guards. Moving further into the clearing, though, Beekman saw the bodies lying askew amid the depression in the ground they’d cleared in order to dig down. The thick coppery stench of blood rose over the sooty oil stench riding the air like a cloud.

  Beekman felt his insides wobble, processing the scene the way he might upon just waking from a dream unsure of the line between what was real and what wasn’t. But the bodies were real and so was the blood. Everywhere, the awful carnage looking as if it had bubbled out of the barren landscape.

  He spotted the two armed security guards next, Mexican special ops veterans who’d freelanced for the drug cartels at one point. They were recognizable from their longer sleeves and tactical trousers lined with ammo-filled cargo pockets. But something looked utterly wrong about the assault rifles lying near their corpses. Drawing closer, Beekman saw the barrel had broken off one, and the barrel of the other was, literally, bent in half.

  I warned them, I goddamn warned them.…

  “One of them’s alive. Over there. Against that tree.”

  It was Racine’s voice, reaching Beekman like a flutter at the edge of his consciousness. He turned to follow Racine’s gaze toward the rotting stump of a long-dead tree where the figure of a woman sat slumped, shoulders sagging, positioned to the side so they couldn’t see her face.

  Beekman watched the pistol flash in Racine’s hand, a squat snub-nosed with a two-inch barrel. They approached the figure together slowly, side-by-side, the revolver poking the air ahead of them.

  “It’s Lindsay,” Beekman heard Racine say, in the moment he discerned the figure’s long hair, matted and tangled with blood.

  Swinging around to approach the young woman from the front, Beekman saw still more blood covered her face, obscuring her features except for a few blank smears where she’d swiped it from her skin. Her lips were trembling in an eerie rhythm that matched the quivering throes of her slumped frame.

  “Lindsay,” Racine said, stooping before her, the revolver forgotten in his hand. “What happened here, Lindsay?”

  The young woman’s eyes widened to marble-like spheres, seeming to extend forward out of her head. Her right hand was obscured by ground brush, the machete she was holding so darkened by blood, Beekman glimpsed only a dark blur snapping up and out. Heard the swish of it entering Racine’s belly and the plop of his insides spilling out as it withdrew.

  He fell over on his side, still clutching the gun. Beekman, breathless now, saw the agony and terror in his eyes. Lindsay’s shadow drenched him in darkness, as she rose with her back scraping the stump the whole way. Her eyes, empty spheres shining through the mottled blackness of dried blood, found Beekman.

  “He was here,” the woman named Lindsay said, confusion and fear painting her features.

  And the machete started upward in her grasp.

  “He was here.”

  Beekman backpedaled, stumbled over a nest of rocks and fell backward. Back crawling as Lindsay shuffled toward him. Beekman noticed her other hand was clenched into a fist that sprayed blood with every maddening pulse.

  “Las Tierra del Diablo,” Lindsay said, still coming. “The devil was here, he was here!”

  Beekman continued to claw backward, unable to get his feet under him to rise. The blood-soaked figure seemed to pick up speed before him, gliding or even floating now more than walking. She steadied the machete, blood still dripping from its blade, in line with him.

  Beekman closed his eyes, shutting out the world. Barely heard the three roars, more like blasts, that pierced the air, their echoes lingering.

  Beekman opened his eyes to find Lindsay staggering on, chunks of her skull missing, her face unrecognizable except for the lifeless, bulging eyes that stayed locked on him as her feet dragged across the ground.

  The still stirring Racine shot her two more times, then a third. The final bullet took her dead center in the head, blowing out the rest of her brains. She froze in mid-step, empty eyes still fixed on Beekman before she keeled over at his feet.

  Beekman watched the last of the life fade from Racine’s eyes behind her, the fat revolver smoking in his grasp, before he let it go. Beekman looked back toward Lindsay, her hand spasming open in death to reveal a perfectly spherical, blood-soaked rock that she’d been holding. It had embedded itself in her palm, pushing out the back of her hand through gristle and bone.

  So his warnings had gone unheeded and now, and now …

  And now what exactly?

  As the last strands of light darkened in the young woman’s eyes, the rock-thing popped free and plopped to the ground, just out of Beekman’s reach.

  “He’ll be coming back,” he heard Lindsay say, even though her lips never moved and she was still clearly dead.

  ELEVEN

  Atlantic Rainforest, Brazil

  “Well, Padre, is this what you expected?”

  Father Jimenez had no answer for Colonel Arocha now, any more than he’d had six hours before when their chopper had first crossed over the area he’d been sent to investigate.

  A huge swatch of the Guapiaçu Valley he had first viewed overhead from the chopper was … gone. Looked to have been ravaged by a mammoth fire capable of leaving nothing but scorched, barren earth dotted by dead trees in its wake. But there was no char scent carried on the air, no smoldering refuse of the kind known to linger for weeks or months after such a calamity.

  The helicopter had landed on a flat stretch of earth among six others that had arrived ahead of it. The makeshift command center was awash with assembled tents and prefabricated structures. Entering it alongside Arocha, Jimenez recognized a bevy of American personnel, uniformed and otherwise, whose ID badges identified them as NASA, the National Science Foundation, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and the CIA’s Directorate of Science and Technology. So many of them cluttered about that they could barely move, or position their various equipment, without bumping into each other or the complement of U.S. soldiers there to protect them.

  From what? Jimenez found himself wondering.

  To a man, and woman, their clothes were literally dripping with perspiration. He’d never felt anything like it, not in all his experience and travels. The air so thick it actually felt difficult to breathe.

  Arocha had led the priest through the chaos to the perimeter of what they’d viewed from the air, guarded by soldiers stationed at ten-yard intervals and set before hastily erected fencing. The guards waved Arocha through a break in the fencing blocked by a large armored vehicle. Jimenez had brought his forensics case along to take samples and conduct rudimentary field tests, but he began his investigation with observation.

  “Padre?” Arocha prodded, finally losing patience with the process.

  A pair of soldiers had accompanied him into the field from the command center. Neither had spoken a word, riding his shadow and tensing when any of the other personnel cleared to enter the area ventured too close. Jimenez took them to be Agência Brasileira de Inteligência personnel as well, junior officers in all likelihood who were part of whatever division to which Arocha was attached.

  “We’re running out of daylight,” the colonel persisted.

  Spoken as if he had no desire to be on these dead grounds after dark, and Jimenez didn’t blame him. In his role with the Vat
ican’s investigative branch, the so-called Miracle Commission, he had visited the sites of numerous blights and burns he was ultimately able to explain off as some form of natural disaster or phenomena, but nothing like this either in terms of scale or effect.

  Jimenez stooped and scooped up a handful of dirt in his gloved hand that felt like ground glass. Normally among nature’s most fertile, now dead for all intents and purposes. Drooping petrified tree branches looked like gnarled arthritic fingers knotted in the air. There was no brush, no flora, no foliage for as far as his gaze could stretch amid the valley’s parched, rolling land. Nor did he glimpse a single animal, bird, or insect.

  “When did this happen?” Jimenez heard himself ask Arocha, as if it were someone else posing the question.

  Arocha stood a few feet from the priest, hands clasped behind his back. “We can’t say. What we can say is that satellite views show everything normal as of seventy-two hours ago. Forty-eight hours ago, contact was lost with your Catholic mission nearby and a military team was sent to investigate.” He stopped to take a deep breath he quickly abandoned. “This is what they found. By then we were fielding calls from the department in the church responsible for the mission’s oversight. I imagine that explains why you were dispatched so quickly.”

  So did I initially, Jimenez thought, thinking back to his phone call with Cardinal Martenko. But now I realize I was dispatched for another reason as well, because I’ve investigated something similar before.…

  “Approximately two days ago, then,” he put forth. “Any way of narrowing the time frame down further?”

  Arocha took a deep breath, brought his hands from behind his back and let them dangle stiffly by his sides, his gaze sweeping about the various personnel busy inspecting the site and collecting samples. “As you can see for yourself, we’ve requested help from the top experts we could assemble and more are already en route. I’ve arranged for you to speak to some scientific personnel who’ve been examining the site, but so far they’re being very tight-lipped.”

  Jimenez crouched and sifted more dirt the color of ash through his hand. Its touch singed his palm through his plastic gloves with what first felt searing hot and, just as quickly, turned icy cold, the odd sensation seeming to spread up his arm until he dropped the ash back down and yanked the glove off, as if it were on fire. The stifling, airless heat claimed him again, except for his now exposed hand that remained numb and icy.

  Jimenez spotted a woman working with highly sophisticated equipment nearby. She wore black cargo pants with overstuffed pockets and a baseball cap with the initials NIS, for the National Institute of Science. Jimenez rose and approached her, Arocha clinging to his shadow the whole way.

  “Father Pascal Jimenez,” he said, without extending the numb hand now tucked into his pocket. “Vatican investigative branch.”

  “Professor Susan Baron,” she said, rising from the ground. “NASA investigative branch.”

  “I assume you’ve checked the area for radiation, Professor.”

  “Of course. Not a trace. Can I show you something, Father?” Baron said, and proceeded to lead Jimenez and Arocha to the nearest tree. “Touch it and tell me what you feel.”

  Jimenez obliged. “Cold and hard as concrete.”

  Baron nodded. “At first glance, this level of destruction appears to be the product of fire. But there’s no searing or scorch marks. If I had to speculate…”

  “Please do.”

  “… I’d say this is closer to the opposite. Exposure to temperatures approaching absolute zero.”

  “I don’t imagine you’ve experienced anything like that before, Professor.”

  “I don’t believe anyone ever has, Father.”

  “So do you have an explanation?”

  “Scientific or supernatural?”

  “Take your pick.”

  “None, on either count.”

  Arocha eased himself closer, as if to remind them he was there. “Isn’t blight normally a sign of God’s judgment?”

  “You know your Bible, Colonel,” Jimenez told him.

  “Only since yesterday, Padre.”

  Jimenez ran his hand over the tree bark again, realized it had fused to the texture of something like porcelain. “This wasn’t a blight,” he said, gaze tilting toward Baron who nodded in agreement.

  “Then what was it?”

  “Best guess, Colonel?”

  “That will have to do for now.”

  Jimenez gazed about, recalling his study of the geophysical characteristics of the area over the course of the long flight aboard the Vatican’s jet that had brought him here from Rome. “There’s no volcanic plane in the area or any fault lines suggesting a venting of superheated gases. That leaves something meteorological,” Jimenez said, sounding even more uncertain than he felt. “An unprecedented collision of pressure systems that created some kind of environmental vortex.”

  Baron nodded. “My thinking is proceeding along similar lines.”

  “And what effect would such a phenomenon have on human beings?” Arocha asked them both.

  “Well, it’s difficult to say,” Jimenez told him, touching the bark again to the realization that it felt colder in the areas reached by sunlight. “Depending on where they were in relation to the center of the vortex, petrified or mummified would be a possibility.”

  “To that point,” Baron added, “you’ll note again the absence of any remaining flora. And my preliminary field tests have detected refuse layered into the dried soil bed, indicative of severe erosion and blight consistent with the effects of a devastating drought. I’ve been dispatched to the sites of several such occurrences, but in each instance the process had unfolded over weeks, even months, as opposed to a single day. Again, the near-petrified condition of the soil on its own suggests the effects of some massive blast or burn, maybe both, but there remains no other evidence or indication to suggest anything of the kind, nor is there any evidence of rapid or instantaneous decomposition.”

  “How large is the total affected area, Professor?”

  “Approximately seven miles in all directions,” Arocha said skeptically.

  “A circle,” Jimenez heard himself mutter.

  “Is that important?”

  The priest remained silent and turned back toward the woman from NASA instead of responding. He eased his hand from his pocket. The warmth and feeling were returning, though not fast enough. Meanwhile, he realized suddenly that the sky was darkening, blackened clouds swirling about ominously in a pattern unlike anything Jimenez had ever seen. An illusion, or a trick of his imagination, he hoped.

  “Any preliminary analysis on the composition of the ash refuse?” he asked, as thunder rumbled and the ground seemed to tremble as if to echo that cadence.

  Baron shook her head. “Nothing definitive yet, though that might well provide the best indication of whatever it is we’re facing here.”

  More thunder rumbled and Jimenez felt the first dollops of rain strike him. It felt warm, almost hot, as if shed by the superheated moist air.

  “Interesting choice of words, Professor,” he noted to Baron.

  “What?”

  “Facing,” Jimenez followed, leaving it there.

  “I didn’t mean to imply or suggest anything by it.”

  “Too bad there are no witnesses to make our job easier,” the priest told her.

  Arocha eased Jimenez aside and lowered his voice to a whisper. “Actually, Padre, that’s not entirely true.…”

  TWELVE

  USS George H. W. Bush, the Mediterranean Sea

  “Right now, son, you’re staring down the barrel of a court-martial, I shit you not.”

  Admiral Keene Darby faced Max from the other side of his desk in the bowels of the aircraft carrier off which the mission to Sana’a, Yemen, had been staged.

  “I’m waiting for an explanation here, Commander.”

  Max remained standing at attention. “I don’t have one, sir.”

  Darby
jerked a phone receiver from its cradle. “Maybe you’d like to tell that to the families of the SEALs whose bodies you hauled back. Maybe you’d like to pay the medical bills for the ones who were wounded. Uncle Sam is generous with his dime, son, when his orders are followed. But he is one pissed off, angry relative when he’s ignored.”

  “I could say the transmission aborting the mission was garbled, sir.”

  “Is that what you’re saying?”

  “No, sir, it’s not, because that wouldn’t be the truth.”

  “And what is the truth, son?”

  “That I felt I had to do something and that we saved a lot of lives last night, sir.”

  “You taking the credit for that?”

  “No, sir!”

  “How about the blame for disregarding a direct order?”

  Max remained at attention. “Yes, sir!”

  “Personal initiative?”

  “Yes, sir!”

  “Bullshit. The United States Navy isn’t a democracy, son. I need to inform you and your team of that fact?”

  “No, sir, because the decision to proceed was mine and mine alone.”

  “Not reluctant to assume responsibility, are you, son?”

  “No, sir, I am not.”

  “Well, normally you could be looking at a court-martial, dishonorable discharge or something damn close, if Ambassador Clare Travis hadn’t intervened. Woman’s got powerful friends in Washington and says she’ll unleash the wrath of God if you’re punished the way you deserve to be for disobeying a direct order. Hell, she’s even threatening to nominate you for a Medal of Honor.” Darby leaned back in his chair, drawing a squeak as he reclined slightly. “Son, you’re good, but you’re also the luckiest goddamn son of a bitch I’ve ever seen.”

  Darby pulled a cigar from the top drawer of his desk and lit it lovingly.