The Watchers

by Mark Andrew Olsen

  It was the baby.

  I looked down at the tiny face framed in blankets. He was chubby and perfect and a beautiful baby, for sure, only there wasn’t anything so special about his features themselves. It was how looking at him made me feel. It was the emotional fireworks show going off as I got closer to him—so strong now that I wasn’t sure I could keep standing.

  I stood and held out my arms. My fingers shook a little because part of me couldn’t believe my own audacity at thinking I could actually hold this child in my very own hands.

  There was a pause until the mom moved again, and it seemed to stretch out into a whole year. I heard the tiniest sounds all around me. I heard my heart thump out of control. I heard the child make this tiny little whimper. I heard feet hit the dirt somewhere behind us.

  Then I saw the little body come closer to me, being held out. My hands reached him. My fingertips touched his blanket, felt his weight, and I pulled him to my breast. I remember for a split second how tiny and light he seemed. I can’t really describe what happened next. But since this is my blog, I’ll try.

  I felt like I was holding the center of the universe—like someone had sucked the core of one of those supernovas and laid it in my arms. My whole body tingled and throbbed, starting from my chest outward. And it seemed that light was pouring from his little face, like he was the brightest shopping-mall spotlight you’ve ever seen, aimed right at me, yet I was the only one who could see it.

  And that was just the outside of me. Somewhere deep down in my heart, or maybe my soul, was just . . . the only way to describe it is like when an opera singer belts out some high note that just lasts forever and ever. Only this note was all about pure joy. The sound itself wasn’t actually sound but this incredible happiness just pouring out from the deepest part of me.

  And the next thing I knew, it got to be almost too much. The worst thing in the world was happening—with this precious one still in my arms I was starting to sway, the whole world just moving sideways. It was more than I could stand—literally. But thank God, people had jumped to my side and were holding me up.

  My voice was making those words again, only I was so weak that I could only whisper them.

  “Messiah. He has come at last.”

  And the part of me that was Abby Sherman started to cry, because I knew somehow that the baby was Jesus, and I was totally there in Jerusalem, two thousand years ago, and I was actually holding Him in my arms. Don’t ask me how I know—but if you put a gun to my head and swore to shoot me if I was wrong, I’d still tell you I’ve been there.

  And how can I say it?—every nerve in my body screamed out that He was divine, that He really was the Son of God. Both the old woman part of me and the Abby Sherman part of me knew the same thing, in a way beyond doubt or question.

  Five minutes later I was awake in my usual bed at midnight, back in California, my body still shaking and my mind just spinning like a top. And my fingers still tingled from knowing I had held Him. I don’t know why, or how, or what it all meant, but I had held the most important person in the history of the world. That moment had really happened, exactly the way I had lived it.

  Then I closed my eyes and started to cry real quiet, not wanting to wake anyone up. I don’t know if I was just punch-drunk from the whole trip, or truly feeling nostalgic, but I swear I couldn’t stop crying for wanting to go back there, to be back in that time and place and in that old woman’s body all over again. The thought of having to stay in this dull, dead world just broke my heart.

  So, visitor, you tell me. If you’ve ever had a dream remotely like this, would you e-mail me and let me know? Because I’m convinced it isn’t some random occurrence. It was too intense not to have meaning beyond some product of a spicy dinner or a lumpy pillow. I’m serious—I’m waiting to hear from you.

  Abby Sherman

  CHAPTER

  _ 5

  PACIFIC PALISADES —TEN MINUTES PAST MID NIGHT

  The first kill order came only six minutes later.

  The assassin had barely tolerated the wait. He stood rigidly with his heart throbbing inside his chest. He had only managed to calm his thoughts by reminding himself that his superiors were duty-bound to pore over every word.

  The first order’s arrival caused his display backlighting to switch on its eerie blue glow. Take her. Elder one.

  He breathed out through pursed lips. “All right . . .”

  Malibu blinked in. I concur. Two.

  Amsterdam came, as usual, last and most verbose. Target is definitely awakening. She is indeed the one we have feared. Harvest at once. Three.

  Seeing again the word harvest triggered an inward smile, for it reminded him of the privilege headed his way. Indeed, the assignment before him not only reflected great risk but the opportunity of a lifetime. True, the pleasure of harvesting someone this coveted might prove the sensation of a lifetime, but far more important, this go-ahead reflected enormous trust in his skill and ruthlessness. When he succeeded at the kill, he would single-handedly leapfrog whole ranks of his fellow Scythians and forgo years of ordinary, unremarkable slaughter. Surely that would vault him high into the Scythe’s upper echelons, obscure and secret as they might be.

  Reassured, he breathed in again and forced his sluggish thoughts to plod through the steps ahead. Despite the honor of the moment, he could hardly afford to get a single thing wrong. The triumvirate had spoken. The order had been issued. Completion now had to be a mere formality.

  Sedate with three pumps of the mist bottle. Then remove the needle, expose forearm, and inject. . . .

  ST. LOUIS, MISSOURI —THAT MOMENT

  In near-total darkness, long fingers lowered and tightened around the faded photograph of a smiling, luminous little girl. With the economy of a long-familiar motion, they slowly, meticulously traced the creases in its paper and folded their sides together.

  Finally the picture was restored to a tightly folded square. The fingers clasped the paper to a bony, thinly clad breast. A woman’s torso began to rock forward, ever so gradually, then backward again. And again.

  A faint mumble broke the silence of the tiny room, echoed through the gloom, across the antiseptic tiles, the bare white walls, the thick locked door.

  “Dear Jesus, I beg you to protect my precious one. . . .”

  Patient 64 launched into her familiar ritual. The one she performed several hundred times a day and every night before succumbing to sleep, for over thirty-five hundred evenings to date.

  This night, her prayers did not end until dawn.

  PACIFIC PALISADES —THAT MOMENT

  The assassin’s hand moved toward the syringe in his breast pocket, but in the millisecond that followed, something in the air before him slowed his motion. It was a force he could hardly distinguish from a tangible, physical resistance. Nothing large and unmovable, like furniture, but more like a body, a strong one, unseen yet pushing resolutely against his hands and face.

  He gritted his teeth and flexed through the motion. His eyebrows furrowed. Was fear clogging up his brain? Nervous tension short-circuiting his muscles?

  He fought for control and began to sense an almost palpable opposition against every twitch of his body. He scowled. He hadn’t been warned of this. He served the ultimate power in the universe— surely at such a time as this it would come to his aid. What was happening?

  Panic screamed through his thoughts. He had never encountered anything like this. Several times before he had felt twinges of something odd, but never outright force. He could almost sense a personality in the space just ahead of him, invisibly grappling with him.

  His left arm was now trapped in the vise of an invisible hand. His right wrist felt paralyzed; the syringe quivered in his fingers as though an iron grip was trying to wrest it from him. A thousand panicked thoughts hammered his mind. He pushed them away to concentrate on the struggle. He was now being pushed physically back by a force so powerful he wondered if he could stay afoot.

  H
e grunted audibly, for now even his will was beginning to falter. Usually unwavering, his resolve began to flicker like a tungsten filament losing contact with its current. A voice inside him cried, Quit! Run now while you still can. This one’s off-limits. Keep trying to harm her and you will pay!

  His mind quailed at the renewed warning that he could pay for failure with his life. Desperation seared his senses. He strained forward with every ounce of his strength, straining to push the needle closer to her arm. Forget the sedation at this point. . . .

  Then he remembered his briefing data. If the poison even touched one of her membranes, it might do the job. Her mouth lay open, her eyelids fluttering at the nearby commotion. Perhaps if he could send a stream of the liquid in the right place . . .

  He pressed his thumb on the plunger. Again the resistance came. He only managed a feeble spray, which arched through the air and landed on her wrist. Toxic stuff, to be sure.

  But was it enough?

  Suddenly his mind shattered like a branch snapped over an upraised knee, and his determination fell apart—simply fled into a void so deep that his unmoored soul could not follow. He broke from the task, turned away and began to run. He ran from the room, past the housekeeper’s body that now lay pitched forward on the living room carpet, out the door and into a cold rain lofted by a midnight sea breeze. He felt his feet labor like pistons beneath him, hardly making contact with the ground. He sensed the house and that hateful presence retreating while the night engulfed his long, furious strides.

  They had told him he served the greatest power in existence. Yet they had never warned him of this. He could not factor this, could not contemplate a power greater than the bloodlust of Mother Earth. And now having encountered it, he no longer wanted to go on, for its implications were too horrific to think about.

  He reached his van in just over a minute, panting now like a marathoner. In a flurry of motion he would soon forget completely, he climbed inside and sped away.

  The summons blinked over his pager before he had reached the end of the block. Congratulations, young Brother. Your honor awaits you.

  He read it once, then twice, and furrowed his eyebrows. Surely they had no idea. How could they possibly know already what had taken place? Not without his telling . . .

  THE HOUSE —FIFTEEN MINUTES LATER

  Abigail awoke to a flurry of sensations: her father’s arms, chilly with the scent of car exhaust and the outdoors, clamped tight around her neck, his face pressed against hers, his voice broken and weeping. Only once before had she heard his voice that high-pitched, seen him that unhinged. Now commotion reigned all about her. Blue and red lights sweeping across her still-darkened ceiling. The screeching of police radios. A woman wailing in the next room.

  They all swept her up at once, and all she could think of were words from her childhood.

  “Oh, Daddy! Make it go away!”

  “Darling, darling. Oh, baby. I’m so sorry I left. I wish I could—”

  “What happened, Daddy?” She heard her voice, soft and plaintive like that of a six-year-old, but tonight it did not bother her. At that moment, being adult and independent didn’t matter in the least.

  Then the memory started to return. A presence in her sleep. A dark and menacing terror just beyond her slumber. Danger as real and palpable as the air in her lungs.

  “There was a man,” she panted. “In here. He wanted to kill me— I know it wasn’t a dream. It wasn’t, was it? I sensed it.”

  Her father drew back and nodded at her, his face streaked with tears.

  “It was so horrible, Daddy. I didn’t wake up. Not quite. But I knew. It was like a darkness. A personality. It was like . . . craving my death. I know that sounds bizarre, but I felt it. It was . . . I don’t know, all specific, like an actual person. It was that real. That close. And there was a struggle. I don’t understand, maybe someone else was here, maybe a lot of someones, but there was a fight. And he left. He did leave, didn’t he?”

  Her father nodded again, and the quiver in his lip told her that something worse was true, that an even darker thing had happened.

  “Narbeli? What about Narbeli?”

  Her father’s features disintegrated then, dissolved into an incoherent mask of twitching facial muscles, flowing tears, and uncontrolled sobs.

  Then she heard screaming, as wild as that of an animal, and realized it came from her own throat.

  MALIBU, CALIFORNIA, THE COLONY —ONE HOUR LATER

  The ornate glass door uttered a faint mechanical click and swayed open nearly a foot, seeming to anticipate his approach. The killer froze. He took a silent, shallow breath and cemented his decision to face whatever lay ahead.

  After all, he asked himself for the fifth time, what was the point of evasion? The Elder knew he had arrived. If they wanted to kill him, he was already as good as dead. As a frequent purveyor of their carnage, he knew that fact as well as anyone. Someone like him, an invisible and unstoppable assassin, would come and harvest him.

  Either way, defying them was out of the question. No, he told himself while trying to ignore a chill like ice water cascading through his veins, he would ride this night to its fated conclusion. And one way or the other, he would end the evening with some explanation of the bizarre force which had opposed him.

  He strained to keep his body from shifting into its customary tactical mode. Forcing it to stand still before the door and see what the moment held in store, he willed himself to stop breathing. To not move even an inch. He would bear it like a man.

  Ten seconds later he had felt nothing. No bullets piercing his body. No wisps of gas rising to his nostrils. No blackout. His reflection still stood askew in the open door, staring back at him.

  And why should they kill me now? he reassured himself. They had no way of knowing he’d failed. Or did they? True, their ability to know impossible things had never ceased to amaze him, but yet . . .

  He pushed the slab open with a nudge of an outstretched hand, glancing down at his palm-held computer to verify the address. Yes, he’d gotten it right. Besides, he told himself, front doors did not simply open of their own accord to strangers. Not in beachfront Malibu.

  Please walk straight through and meet me on the veranda was the text message’s final words. Without moving his head, he trailed his gaze across the surrounding walls. Although the house was unlit, he could still make out the high vaulted ceiling, the open contemporary architecture. There was lots of blown glass as well as squares of dark color to his left and right—framed patches of modern art. He smirked. Probably overpriced and totally incoherent.

  White seemed to be the room’s dominant palette, though it now stood dimmed in the gray of early morning. He noted that most of the scant light glowed from a large two-story window. Through it his eyes made out a band of deep blue floating over one of even deeper cobalt, both halves swimming in the luminescence of a full moon.

  The Pacific. The only neighbor to be trusted with an easy view.

  He finally allowed himself to breathe out and in again. Tried to pound into his brain the notion he had succeeded, that this was a happy occasion. Surely he would look back, ten minutes from now, and kick himself for having stolen his joy of anticipation—

  A dull noise.

  His heart stopped; his trained reflexes threw him to the floor. The blow of cold marble against his body shocked him, and he stiffened and shook his head. Suddenly his mind was awash in dread, his mouth sour with the taste of gunmetal. A thin, screaming sound stabbed his ears. He forced his awareness outward to inventory his body for injuries, for he knew that in this current state of adrenaline overload, he could be mortally wounded and hardly even know it.

  But no, his senses reported: his body was intact.

  He glanced in the direction of the sound and saw, just beyond the window, a dark shape lounging in an Adirondack chair. The round back of a silver-haired head turned as if anticipating his approach. He stood, walked to the door, opened it and forced himself
to ignore the soothing kiss of cool, salt-scented air. The person, now to his left, remained still, his gaze seemingly fixed somewhere out on the dim ocean horizon.

  “Welcome, my Brother,” came a low and confident voice. The purr of an older man quite at ease. “I hope I didn’t give you a scare.”

  The assassin stood dumb for a moment, unable to formulate a coherent reply.

  “No—thank you, my Elder,” he finally answered. He tried not to stare directly at the man’s face, yet his peripheral vision brought him a rough outline of craggy features topped by well-coiffed gray hair. Legs crossed casually in elegantly draped white slacks. It was nobody he recognized—probably one of those highest-echelon Elders he had only heard whispered about.

  “Please. Have a seat.” The phrasing was smooth and cultured. “I apologize, by the way, for not greeting you at the door. But I am mesmerized by the sea tonight. Is she not captivating?”

  “Ah, she is. Certainly.” Elaboration seemed beyond his capacity just then.

  “Besides, I wanted you to see for yourself that I bear you no ill intentions. You are truly here to reap the reward of a most pivotal mission.”

  With those words the killer sat down in a deep-cushioned patio chair. He was quickly surrounded by the sour taste of thick cigar smoke. Breathing it in, he allowed himself to laugh nervously at his host’s reassurance.

  “That is most thoughtful of you, my Elder.”

  “Think nothing of it.” There was a pause while the two men stared out at the sea. The older man chuckled as the crying of seafowl drifted to their ears and a flight of birds churned upward in a damp gust of wind. “Actually, it’s not really the ocean that has me so entranced. It’s the gulls. They fascinate me tonight. Think of it: almost three o’clock in the morning and there they are just as frantic, still straining the air and sky for food. Their appetite is insatiable. Don’t you find their drive relentless?”

  “Yes,” the killer replied. He thought for a moment, then added, “I admire determination.”