The Creation: Axis Mundi (The Creation Series Book 1)

by The Behrg

  To Faye it was like watching a movie in slow motion – and just like a movie, she was but an observer, with no ability to impact what was happening around her, only destined to watch the mistakes and failures of those she would be rooting for.

  Grey raised his hands as Zephyr brought his heavy rifle to Grey’s head. “Anyone moves, they die,” he said.

  Unbelievably he sounded calm, unconcerned. Quite the opposite of Faye’s little group.

  The native carrying the Shaman stepped through the doorway, tapestry falling into place behind him. Zephyr held it open for Dugan who hesitated.

  “What was his name? Frederick? His last name?”

  “Why?” Grey asked.

  Behind her a gurgling sound emerged from the Englishman on the floor. Blood bubbled from his throat, his hands listlessly scraping against it.

  “His name!” Dugan yelled.

  “William,” Donavon said. “Sir Frederick William. The third, I think.”

  Dugan nodded. “Get out of this town. If you can.”

  He disappeared into the hall.

  “I should kill you all,” Zephyr said, his gun rotating around the room. “Follow us and I will.”

  He let loose a round of bullets just over their heads, spraying against the brick walls and ceiling. Faye found herself ducking her head where the Shaman had lain.

  By the time she looked up, the man was gone. Kenny was hiding behind crates, both Donavon and Remmy on the floor. Grey was the only one standing and, to Faye’s shock, he appeared not frightened but angry.

  Good, she thought, I’ll need someone else with me.

  “How could you?” he shouted, and Faye suddenly understood his anger was at her. “How many have to die so that you can get your way? How many?”

  Donavon looked at her with the same mistrusting eyes. Was she the only sane person in the room?

  Something swiped at Faye from behind and she let out a brief yelp. It was Sir William, his hand shaking uncontrollably.

  His throat was torn open, the wound anything but clean. She had never seen so much blood in all her life. With only a glance, it was obvious there was nothing they could do to save him.

  “Buh … ger,” he said, his eyes fixed on her. His head shook with the rest of him. “Sta … hii.”

  Stop him.

  Faye felt the power of his words course through her, giving her the strength to act once again. She rose, looking around at the miscreants all too afraid to move, to act, to do something that mattered.

  She tore a heavy wooden cross from beneath a box on the table, gripping it like an axe, then darted from the room. In her hurry, she missed Sir William’s final words.

  “Sha … ma …”

  Verse XXV.

  The rain outside had finally ceased, though the flooding in the streets would last at least until tomorrow. The clouds still hovered, heavy and vengeful, full of empty promise.

  Watching the frail and lifeless body of the Shaman bounce with Oso’s every step, Dugan couldn’t help but smile. He had bottled his own storm. Soon that bottle would be mass produced, a little streak of lightning, touch of divinity, spreading to every man and woman in the world.

  Or at least to those who could afford it.

  Dugan caught sight of Rojo and Cy bounding down a side street toward them. Rojo held a chain necklace high, small injector key dangling from it.

  “Found the pilot! Drunk as a skunk. Smelled like one too.”

  Zephyr snatched the key from him. “You must be related.”

  “Hey, did I tell you guys what Dugan named our new tepui after?”

  Oso tossed Rojo the Humvee keys in return.

  “Meet back at the Facility,” Dugan said. “And make sure no one follows.”

  “What, is this amateur night?” Rojo asked.

  “You want us to look for Kendall and Chupa?” Cy asked.

  “You decide,” Dugan said, following Zephyr and Oso, who had already continued past.

  As they approached the back of the Humvee they heard a loud crash – something striking the windshield. Zephyr swung wide, his Vektor an extension of his arm, raised without effort. Oso continued walking, undisturbed.

  The crash came again, sounding this time like the windshield had been penetrated.

  “Your call Doog,” Zephyr called back.

  Dugan’s daughter stood on top of the hood of the vehicle, pulling a heavy wooden cross out of the windshield. She brought it back down like a jackhammer, slamming it against the glass. The tip of the cross broke through, embedding into the windshield and sending out a ripple of cracks.

  Faye looked down at him, her face full of hatred. “You’re not going anywhere. Not with him.”

  “Shame the cameras aren’t rolling. Show the world your true side,” Dugan said.

  Rojo and Cy hesitated as they approached the vehicle. Oso had already moved past it with the Shaman.

  “It’s okay,” Dugan said.

  Zephyr lowered his rifle a fraction of an inch.

  “She’s definitely your daughter!” Rojo said, with a smile.

  Faye swept the hair out of her face, blood smeared across it. “What do you want with him?”

  “To save the world, what else? You and I, Faye, we’re not so different.”

  “I am nothing like you! That man in there was innocent. He didn’t deserve to die.”

  “None of us ever do. One day, you’ll understand.” Dugan tipped an imaginary hat in her direction as he rounded the front of the vehicle, following after Zephyr. “Thank your little green project for us, will you?”

  Faye’s response was lost behind the roar of the helicopter’s turbines coming to life.

  Verse XXVI.

  Faye shielded her eyes as wet straw and drops of mud splattered up from the helicopter’s rotating blades. How had she not seen what her father was doing?

  The Shaman, and the native who had carried him, were loaded into the back of the helicopter. Zephyr sat at the pilot’s seat. She wondered if the pilot that had brought them here was still alive.

  She leapt off the hood of the armored Humvee, prepared to race across the field toward the helicopter. But she was too late.

  She had failed.

  Again.

  Her father always got what he wanted.

  The helicopter’s blades became a seamless whir, black noise filling her mind. The wind whipped at her hair and she had to turn sideways to keep it from her eyes.

  The vehicle she had leapt from suddenly bucked, engine screaming. The cross she had left in the windshield came hurtling down, landing with a snap. One beam separated from the other. That was all it took to change a religious symbol into two ordinary planks of wood.

  She glanced up in time to see the soldier with the red beard salute her before slamming the door to the vehicle. Had he also winked? Mud spun from its tires, soaking her as it took off.

  “I hate you,” she screamed, barely able to hear her own words over the helicopter.

  It rose into the air, its front dipping down at first, then leveling five or six feet above the ground before beginning its ascent. Her father was leaving her behind.

  Not for the first time.

  Faye bent down to the ground, searching for a rock or something to throw. All she felt were grainy pebbles. Even this she couldn’t do right.

  Just as she gave up her search, a loud whoosh sounded from behind her, accelerating over the noise of the helicopter.

  She turned, surprised to find two military Jeeps stationed across from the town square. The alcalde stood in one, a grin across his grizzled face. The soldier standing next to him held an empty barrel on his shoulder, a trail of smoke blazing from it.

  No.

  “No!”

  She turned back to see the rocket soar through the air toward the metal hull, floating now thirty feet above the ground. It struck in a shrieking explosion of flame.

  The blast spun the helicopter around, its metal tail severing from the body and dropping from th
e sky. Its frontend tipped to the side. Flames fell from its hull like shooting stars.

  The soldiers shouted behind her as Faye began running toward the dying beast in the sky. The helicopter spun in a continuous circle, no rudder to direct its course, dropping lower toward the earth.

  No, no, no!

  Faye leapt over the fence, then saw two bodies leap from the helicopter’s open door.

  Her heart rose to her throat.

  Images of bodies falling from the Twin Towers flashed before her eyes.

  How high were they from the ground? She wasn’t sure, but high enough. High enough.

  The helicopter dipped in a nose dive it wouldn’t recover from. Faye braced herself for the inevitable impact. It came, dwarfing any previous noise as metal scrunched, the hull burying itself into the unforgiving earth, another explosion replacing the former blast.

  Faye screamed in spite of herself, heat pushing out like an invisible wave from where the copter had crashed. She ran, the jeeps leaping past her with the sudden sound of machine guns firing –

  Too late, she realized, she was entering a war.

  Verse XXVII.

  The world pulsed, coming in and out of focus. A strobe effect, one moment full of flames and smoke and noise, the next nothing.

  Darkness.

  The sound of gunfire. Rat-a-tatting. Ricocheting off metal. Twangs and deep hollow thuds.

  Then … Darkness.

  With effort Dugan kept his eyes open. Saw Zephyr rise and tackle a Venezuelan soldier. Disarm him, then turn the same gun on the man. Blood and brain matter blew out from the side of his head.

  Darkness.

  Zephyr spun, firing the rifle at men Dugan couldn’t see. Ghosts, maybe. Zephyr’s other arm hung in ribbons of flesh, swaying like a tetherball at the end of a game. He fainted. Collapsed.

  Darkness. Like coming home.

  A deep-seated cough ripped itself free from Dugan’s throat, the propulsion causing him to sit up. Pain exploded, flowing in constant currents from his head to his feet. The bile flying from his mouth looked the same as what had poured from the soldier’s head. He felt light-headed, like at any moment he might rise and float away.

  The fall had been farther than he had thought, muddy ground not cushioning the hard-packed dirt beneath. Suddenly he was back in the helicopter, landscape rotating as if he were on a tilt-a-wheel at a carnival. Ground looming. The Shaman’s inert body skidding against him on the helicopter’s floor. Without thinking, Dugan bent to pick him up then leapt backward, shielding the Shaman with his own body, air flurrying around them.

  Darkness.

  Dugan glanced around dizzily.

  Where was the Shaman?

  Another cough forced its way out, doubling him back to his side. He was dying. His breaths, coming in rasping gasps. How many did he have remaining?

  A bright flicker of flame brought him back from the Darkness, its depths growing, pulling at him like a wanton riptide.

  His journal was open in his hands.

  He couldn’t remember taking it out.

  Pages curled. He couldn’t read a single name. Each line was an entry into that Black Ink, an opening to the Night he might fall through. He felt himself slipping.

  Who will add my name?

  He had always imagined more books, entire libraries – cities of libraries – with shelves upon shelves of volumes, all filled with names. But not of victims. Not of those who had offered themselves as sacrifices.

  These books were filled with the names of survivors.

  People who had been cured; saved. Names of men and women who cheated death and disease all because of the names held within one small book, a sacred book, a book that would be in every drawer of every motel six; a book that mothers would read to their children at night, that preachers would praise from their pulpits; a book with a worn leather strap, carrying the names of those who had given their lives so that others might live, so that Darkness might no longer …

  Boots stomped past, causing Dugan to reopen his eyes.

  A soldier, kicking at wreckage, overturning debris.

  Looking for what? Him?

  I’m right here¸ Dugan thought, head spinning. But it wasn’t his head on rotation; it was the world around him.

  Something crashed beside him, a long scrap of titanium alloy being overturned.

  “Aqui!” the Soldier shouted, standing over Dugan. But no, he stood several feet away, pointing at another body on the ground, buried beneath refuse.

  The soldier pulled at the arms, raising the limp form up.

  It was the Shaman.

  Dugan checked his side, unsnapping the loop that had kept his Glock attached through the fall. His hand shook, so he lowered his aim from the soldier’s head to his torso. Two shots and the guard dropped to his knees. The Shaman slumped back to the ground, the soldier’s body following suit.

  Blood flew from Dugan’s mouth, so Dark, so Black, he knew it was now reaching from inside to pull him down.

  The gun fell from his hand.

  I’m sorry, he thought, not sure who he was apologizing to.

  There were so many.

  The Darkness grew. It had found him, as he always knew it would. No longer just at the edges, it hovered above him. Encompassing him.

  The Darkness moved, a snatch of light seeping past and Dugan realized it wasn’t Death but a shadow standing over him. The silhouette of a man who was not a man.

  The Shaman.

  Death finds the Shaman. Or finding the Shaman brings death.

  So it had been the latter.

  The Shaman gazed at him with uncomprehending eyes. The scars on his face and chest of patterned tattoos were smeared with blood.

  “I’m sorry,” the Shaman said, voicing the words Dugan was unable to.

  Yes.

  The choked spasms in his throat kept Dugan from speaking.

  The Shaman bent down toward him, his bony hands reaching out. Dugan closed his eyes and it was there to greet him –

  Darkness.

  He had never felt a need greater than he felt now for that emptiness of space and thought and feeling. It was fitting that his end would come from the man he had been chasing, the hunted becoming the hunter.

  The world would never change.

  He was no different than his daughter, believing in an idea that could never be, an ineffable hope that things could be different. Better. And that he, a mortal man, could make it that way. That his life was more than a name on a page, a page that would be forgotten.

  The Shaman reached out, grasping Dugan by the head.

  Searing white streaks flooded Dugan’s vision, his body arching from the sudden shock. Every muscle went taut at once, every cell inside him screaming in exultation and revulsion. It was like the world was bending, his mind re-stitching, clasps that had come unlinked suddenly snapping back together. He was being frozen and burned alive at the same time, created and destroyed, baptized and drowned. The physical world slipped from beneath him.

  The Darkness fled and Dugan’s eyes opened to a world swimming in arcs of light.

  Like streaks of lightning, they swirled in a hypnotic dance, darting then slowing, sinking and rising. They moved so quickly they appeared in streaks but Dugan knew, not knowing how he knew, that each streak was made up of millions of Glimmers, like a galaxy full of stars that from afar looked no bigger than a dot in the sky.

  Glimmers …

  Souls.

  Spirits.

  The fabric of creation.

  He was seeing a part of the world he was never meant to, passing through the physical shell to another sphere, another plane, a spiritual realm.

  “You see,” the Shaman said. “Not all can see.”

  Dugan recognized that Takushkansh’kan was speaking in his native language but the words were as easy to understand as if he had been speaking English.

  “He will destroy them. The Fabric. The Glimmers. I can no longer stop him, but you, Inktomi …”
<
br />   “The Spider,” Dugan said.

  “… Must play your role in the [Creation / Destruction].”

  The word the Shaman used split into two meanings. It was as if his words began to oscillate, both “Creation” and “Destruction” traveling opposite peaks of a sound wave that met back together for the rest of his sentence. One word, two meanings.

  They are the same, Oso had said.

  Or written.

  Glimmers leapt around the Shaman and Dugan realized the man was not old, but young. His skin smooth, unblemished. His strong cheekbones rose to eyes that showered sparks.

  “Do not let Him create Man,” the Shaman continued.

  “The Darkness,” Dugan said.

  “In His own image. He will [Destroy / Create] all.”

  Glimmers passed between the two men with every breath of air.

  “How can I stop what I don’t even understand?” Dugan asked. But his words were like a reflection, cast across a room so distant the Shaman no longer heard.

  “You must stop Him.” [Stop / Trick] Him.

  “Stop Him.” Stop [Him / Me].

  “Stop Him.” [Stop / Kill] Me.

  The flurry of Glimmers faded behind a light green haze which swelled around the Shaman and suddenly the aura slipped.

  Dugan gasped, breath flooding him with unfamiliarity. The Glimmers were gone, streaks of light lost to the world which now felt faded and colorless. The Shaman’s eyes had rolled up into his head. He lay on the ground, unconscious.

  Had he remained that way? Or had that conversation been real?

  A military jeep tunneled over wreckage, almost trampling the both of them. Dugan picked up his Glock and rose to his feet, unable to comprehend the clarity flowing through him. The first two soldiers stepping from the jeep he put down before they knew there was even a threat. The third man fell back into the vehicle, riddled with bullet holes. The chamber on his Glock popped open, his last shell spent.