by Ric Nero
“Yes, I did,” he replied. “C’mon, you know what I’m getting at.” He sighs and moves his hands to his front and folds them. “As you said seeing is believing, so I will show you exactly what I mean tonight,” he said.
“Tonight?” I said with confusion as to why not now.
“Yes, tonight!” he said abruptly. “In the darkness the beast shows its true natures. You want to know the truths of this world so I will show you all, you’ve been in service for years, what’s a few more hours?” he asked me.
“Okay, I got it, I got,” I said.
“You’re familiar with West FT. Hood, right?” he asked me.
“Yeah, I used to live in the barracks over that way before I was deployed.”
“Great! We’ll meet at the Clark Gate come nightfall. Be sure to dress in dark clothing and nothing baggy please, in case flight is necessary. Oh, and you may want to familiarize yourself with God in prayer, we may all need it,” he instructs me. He turns and walks away.
I watch him trying to analyze him and keep coming to the question, “How does he know so much and why?” But the more I think about it, it’s probably a tragic story that drives him to know and want to expose it no different than what I felt with the military.
Suddenly, Auron Stops and look at the tall blue and red Chevron gas station that towers over him. Then turns to look at me for a split second and continues to walk away.
I look at the sign and think about what the real John Todd said about gas stations and certain combination of colors.
I walk back to the Dodge Nitro in the parking lot behind the bar. Shane leans against it with his head down and arms folded. He stares at the ground and I look into the sky trying my best to avoid eye contact as I walk over closing the gap between us.
“So, what did he say?” Shane asked me still looking at the ground. It’s clear he wanted to avoid eye contact just as much as me at this point.
I lean beside him against the Nitro. “He wants to show us tonight,” I replied.
“Show us?” Shane yelled out as if he was surprised. Looking me in my eyes now I see his jaw drop. “Do you believe this secret society crap?” he asked me.
“C’mon look at what we’ve done here together for so long. You want to believe it as much as I do,” I said.
He leans back against the Nitro and looks up at the sky. “Truth seekers, right?” he says under a chuckle.
I looked at him. His expression was a peculiar one and a smirk now decorates his face. “He wants us to meet him at Clark gate as soon as night hits to show us,” I tell him.
“Wait, he wants to show us how really jacked up the world is here on our base? Ha ha, can it get any worse?” he asks rhetorically.
“Hey, be careful, you remember what happened last time you asked that question?” I asked him. “We were stuck on U.S. Tampa for an hour just sitting there because First Sergeant was afraid the camel sitting in the middle of the road was carrying an I.E.D.” He scuffs.
“Yeah, until it got up and walked away.” Shane gets up and walks to the back of the truck opening the rear door and digs around. “Don’t suppose it’s beer and M.R.E’s you got back there,” I said jokingly.
Thump. I hear the rear door slam.
“Cote’s,” Shane said walking to the corner of the building.
“Cote’s?” I said curiously.
He stops and turns around. “The way I see it, we got the day off, seeing as how I’m supposedly taking you to Darnell hospital and all,” Shane says in a weird country way. His Texan accent unveiled itself at times.
“So we rest up for the night, huh?” I asked him.
“Yep, yep,” he answered and turns back around and disappears at the corner of the building.
I follow him around the front and inside where we slept for the day until late in the afternoon. I find myself standing in a white area. Everything is white, the ground the spaced out walls around me. And there was a bright light, and from it I heard a gentle familiar voice call out to me.
“Thomas.” It was Green. “Thomas,” she called out again.
“Green!” I yelled out, but it came out so muffled. Something about this place was just giving me pure overwhelming emotions, I almost feel out of place.
“Thomas, do you hear me?” the voice asked.
“I hear you!”
Another muffled yell came out again. “It wasn’t your fault,” the voice said. “It wasn’t your fault. It wasn’t your fault, Thomas… Thomas… Thomas,” the voice said, starting to change from a gentle tone to a disruptive one. Almost mannish like the place starts to shake and it’s hard to keep my balance, things begin to get dark.
“Thomas!” the voice shouts out. “Thomas! Can you hear me?” Things finally become pitch black. “Thomas!” I hear my name called once more. I half open my eyes and see Shane’s face stand over me repeating what I heard in my dream. “Thomas, can you hear me? Wake up.”
I sit up slowly and swing my legs over the side of the green cot, sticking out my chest and raising my arms while I yawned.
“Wake up, it’s time. I grabbed some black sweats from the Post Exchange while you were asleep,” Shane said putting on a skull cap completing his all black attire from head to toe. I got dressed and we headed out to West Fort Hood.
We go down the long stretch of a road surrounded by nothing but fields on both sides and a high barbed fence on our right side. We ride quite a ways down the fence. Riding down far enough, we finally make it to the Clark street gate. We stop at the guard shack and Shane lowers his window sticking out his identification.
“Hey, what’s going on, man,” Shane says acknowledging the guard.
“Sergeant, this gate is closed for the night,” the guard says. “Three Corp orders, Sergeant.” He continues on. We hear the back doors open up. I almost snap my neck to see what’s going on. It’s Auron getting in on the driver side and Bazz the other.
“There you guys are,” Bazz says loudly in his native accent. “Thanks for coming to grab us, took you long enough.” Bazz continues on with the charade to throw the guard off so he won’t report this little incident in case it come back to bite us in the ass.
Shane goes along with it, “No problem. Let’s get out of here. Thanks, soldier,” Shane tells the guard.
“Think nothing of it, Sergeant,” the guard replies.
We reverse back far enough to where Shane can put the SUV in drive and turns right back to main post.
“Head down a half mile and turn off the lights,” Auron tells us.
Shane, following his instruction, did as Auron told him. Once we parked on the far side of the road. Auron gets out and Shane and I follow.
Bazz hands me a red pair of bolt cutters. “You’ll need this,” he says.
I grab them and ask, “You’re staying here?”
“Yeah, somebody has to move the suspicious vehicle, right? Besides, I already know what’s going on.”
Auron waves and beckons for me as the stand across the street by the fence. I run across the street as Bazz pulls off into the night. “Clip here,” Auron tells me.
I clip from the height of my head straight down. Shane bends the fence and lets Auron and me in first then, he followed. We walked up and sown a few hills for a quarter mile covered in the stealth of the night. “Right over this hill,” Auron says, pointing to this high and broad almost mountain-like hill.
“I know that hill, isn’t that the one mechanized infantry uses for target practice in tanks?” I asked Shane.
“Maybe so?” he answered half fatigued.
I smirked at him being almost out of breath, but it quickly went away after I had realized I was just as tired. Auron, on the other hand, looked focused. I mean, yeah, he had a little sweat on his cheeks, but he pushed on relentlessly. I stopped to look back at Shane who was pulling up the rear and whispered, “Are we just going to sit here and let this old guy kick our butts, or what?”
“I heard that,” Auron said, pushing his way past
dirt and weeds up the hill. I look at Shane again and shrug, then forced our bodies up the incredibly steep hill. We all finally made it to the top and Auron pulls this string from around his neck. I didn’t notice it before but there’s a bulge in his shirt.
He continues to pull the string and the bulge moves closer to the top of his shirt. “Binoculars,” he says, dawning a pair of large old school military issued bino’s from under his shirt. He lays down and puts the bino’s up to his eyes and peers down over the side of the hill. He slowly hands them to me and says, “Here, you have a look.” Auron looked me in my eyes making me almost reluctant to take the bino’s from his extended hand.
I put them up to my eyes and was stunned to see what took place on the downside of the hill. There was this large crater like area obviously the after effect from artillery rounds from M-1 Abram tanks blasting this entire area maybe. But there are herds of people in robes standing in the parameters of four well-lit torches. In front of them stands a man on a podium.
“What the…!! There must be at least two hundred people down there,” I say to the others.
“Let me see,” Shane says to me.
I hand the bino’s to Shane.
“Three hundred seems more like it,” Auron says to me. “Keep looking, you might see something that really catches your attention.”
“God!” Shane says in a quiet yell.
“Shane, what’s happening?” I ask.
“The torches…It looks like they changed colors…they’re blue now.”
“Shane, let me see.” I tell him.
“Hold on! Oh my God,” Shane says with a dropped jaw.
“What?” I ask him.
“He’s naked!” Shane says.
“Naked?” I ask.
“Yeah,” Shane answered. Thinking about what Shane just said, I reconsidered wanting the bino’s knowing now there’s a naked man down range.
“Never mind, you keep’em,”I told Shane. “No, it’s Sergeant Pummel,” he says handing me the bino’s.
I look through the bino’s and focus on the upper portion of Sergeant Pummel’s naked body. He was the one I saw in the robe earlier standing in front of the multitude of others. I see his lips move as he recites something, but from trying to make it out, it doesn’t seem like English.
“What is all this?” I asked Auron.
“Initiare’,” Auron says. “It’s Latin for initiation into illuminati ranks. Isn’t he a part of your unit?”
“Yeah,” Shane answered as I watched Sergeant Pummel take a dagger and cut into the palm of his hand. “He was now chosen to be a part of the problem of the world. They invoke devil magic and political influence in all powerful leading areas of this world just to tear it down. Afterwards, Sergeant Pummel kneels down.” The seemingly knowledgeable priest explains to me. “What’s happening now, Thomas?” Auron asks me.
“He’s kneeling down now.”
“This must be the part where another comes and stands behind him with a needle raised high into the air. The others gathered together start to rock from side to side and the flames grow raging fiercely. And the needle is finally inserted into his neck, am I right?” He was right. Step by step, his way totally right. “The man you knew was never a friend I hope.”
“No, he was actually a pain in the neck, but this… I never saw this coming. I’ve seen enough.” I stood up, hand the binoculars to Shane and walked slowly down the steep hill.
“Thomas!” Auron calls out running to me. I had enough of this conspiracy and lie’s game. Too much has been revealed to me about war, the military, the nine eleven incident, the whole entire world. “Hey, you said you wanted to know, all I did was provide the proof you said you needed.”
Shane catches up and says, “It was a little more than we expected.”
“Well did you have in mind loose files and papers here and there speaking about what I already told you?” Auron shakes his head. “No, you needed to see the actual events take place.”
“You knew all along, didn’t you?” I asked Auron as we walked through the field and hills.
“You knew Sergeant Pummel was getting initiated didn’t you? Always calculating and putting plans in place, huh?” I was growing tired of his methodical games, but he gave me what I wanted. The truth.
“What was the shot for?” Shane asks Auron.
Auron sighs. “The adult human brain uses between ten to twenty percent of their brain. At least that’s the Reserve Energy theory a few Harvard psychologists from the 1800s came up with in their studies. The shot they gave him was what they give to all the others, it’s a boost to use forty percent more of your brain’s cerebral cortex. Make you smarter if you will.”
“So, my platoon sergeant is a member of a secret society, now?” I ask Shane as we make it to the opening in the fence.
“Thomas, we can all think of something to--”
I interrupt him. “To do what? To do what, Shane? We can’t do anything about this! We can’t just go on as good soldiers in the day and at night put together a paper believing we’re exposing conspiracy theories and think we’ll hurt their actions. This is too big.
I bend the fence and crawl through. “Look, Shane, nothing changed from earlier, I still want to switch squads. It’s too much to think about right now, I just want to get out the Army.”
I walked away all the way back to the barracks; I didn’t even wait for Bazz to come get us. And the next day, before I arrived at the motor pool, I had a new squad leader. Well, I wasn’t really new to his squad seeing as how I was cycled through all five squads. I was considered a good soldier and a hard worker, so I pretty much could go to any squad I wanted, but Sergeant Birden picked me up. He was a couple of years older than me. A white guy with freckles and skinny as a toothpick and not much taller than me. We called him Bird Man since Iraq; only soldiers that went overseas with him could call him that. We were close, almost as close as me and Shane were. I remained in his line for my last five months until I E.T.S’d out. We passed one another and he looked like he had something to say. Or maybe I should’ve, but it just felt awkward between the both of us. All the while I acted as though I never even met Shane. I heard him and Bazz settled differences and were friends again. Bazz kept in touch and kept me in the loop about what they’d find the more they looked into what Auron said. Last I heard from Auron he was in some place called the Shinar Plains. I did more research on my own about The Conspirators, but it was hard and I always seemed to come up with close to nothing. But what I did learn was what Auron said was true about being devil worshippers, but it consisted of disciples who practice sorcery and those who handle politics. I realized if they wanted to totally rule the world they needed to conquer six aspects of everyday life i.e. social, education, economy, military, politics and lastly, religion. I began to realize in the past they made test runs in each area. Social life they control it with what the Bible calls sorcery, liquor and illegal drugs. Reality is it was the so-called, “Man,” who introduced drugs into poverty stricken communities. Not to mention the casinos and lottery. The repeated cash of the stock market tested reactions of the people, it just goes on and on in dozens of ways.
May 13th 2014
Chicago, IL
3:12 a.m.
It’s cold, my body shivers and shakes as I try to remain asleep. But it’s cold, too cold. I try to keep my eyes closed and continue to sleep, but it’s just too cold. To my surprise, I wake up lying on the pavement of a sidewalk outside. I stand up finding myself in a world where everything around me was in turmoil. I stood in the middle of a pedestrian congested sidewalk in a major city that feels so familiar. It seemed as though it was just the middle of the afternoon with the sun still shining, but now darkness covers the sky. I glance at my watch to validate what time it was now to and make sense of the dark cloudy night sky. I looked at my watch twice and tapped the glass that covers the hour, minute, and second hands that all ironically stop at the same number. The number six. The constant patter
of footsteps is all that echoes through the quiet air. No horns blowing along with the heavy downtown traffic. There is no clatter of construction equipment, nor do I hear the voices of others as they walk by me engaged in conversations. There’s nothing but an apparent absence of the usual things I’d expect in a city business district. I become overwhelmed as an eerie chill crawls up my spine. I look at everything around me; the skyscrapers are all broken at the tops and only seem to reach halfway high as they should, everything here seems so dull in color and the people here are alive but just barely. The people all seem so dim and lifeless. Not like zombies who’re driven by specific thirst of flesh. No, zombies at least had drive to feast on human flesh; these people had no drive at all as if they all seemed drained. Just going through motions. But it’s more like they’re drones being controlled by others, accomplishing the goals and tasks of someone else. It’s like a mute white and black movie and I can’t understand it.
I wipe my face with my hands in a state confusion trying to see what I was witnessing. Feeling uneasy about the world around me, I take a closer look at the people, grabbing them, I try to shake them out of whatever trance they’re in. And it’s as though I’m not even there to them; no response or attention even acknowledging I was there. Then I grab another person by their jacket, this time out of anger and frustration, and smoke appears in the middle of his chest. I look at it in amazement, but seeing it makes my heart drop even more. I let him go and analyze the countless others that pass me in various directions. On each individual, I see a ghastly fog, small on some, larger on others, every and anywhere on the person. The chest, head, shoulders, or spine. The shoulder or even the crotch area. I begin to back away from all of them putting my back against a brick wall of a building. I slide down bending my knees. I wonder am I going mad, but I raise my head and look again to the dark sky. In that instance, I see exactly what is attached to the people. The ghastly fog on each body is bearing a set of eyes of various colors – red, blue, green and black, with an iron chain-like link on them. I begin to track the chains with my eyes towards the sky. The moonlight exposes where a figure sits on a throne of serpents. An unnatural human like abomination, his body was masculine and scarred all over and the color of red, he dawns a hood covering his face with ten horns protruding out of the hood. In his left hand he held a bloodied staff that all the chains tracked back to. As abominable and defiled as he was, he conducts those below him with terror, and they shriek at the slightest movement of his staff. Then the clouds begin to cover the sky once again and I no longer see the monster.
