Rise of the Nephilim

by Adam Rushing

  His intuition told him to look into this anomaly further. He hooked into the public surveillance network to see if he could spot anything of further interest. A high-definition traffic camera pointed down the street, happening to catch the entrance to the narrow alleyway leading to the structure. He tapped into the server containing footage stored over the last few hours.

  He began at the moment the fire engines and police cars arrived at the scene and rewound from there. Two SUVs appeared out of the top right corner and seemingly backed into the corridor. He let it play forward a bit in slow motion, but he couldn’t make out the occupants.

  Disappointed, he continued backward in hope of spotting anything of value. He stopped when he saw an unmarked van pull up in front of the passage and unload a group of figures dressed in urban combat gear. They brandished their weapons and disappeared out of his field of view.

  Excitement began to well up inside of him. Could this be related to the two fugitives they had been looking for so diligently? The squad of mercenaries had obviously never made it back out, unless they were in the SUVs. He kept going, hoping he would see the vehicles arrive.

  It took a few minutes to scroll back over the last few hours’ worth of footage, but his patience was well rewarded, as one of the SUVs appeared back out of the alleyway and out of view in the bottom left corner of the screen. The angle and resolution of the camera allowed him to read every letter and number on the automobile’s license plate.

  He stopped and furtively looked around the low-walled cubicle farm to make sure no one around him could see what he was doing. The last thing he wanted to do was share in any possible triumph. He was tired of being berated and bullied by his boss. Things had been especially hard the last few days, so he really needed a win.

  Assured that his work was currently unnoticed, he returned to his screen. He pulled up the New York Department of Motor Vehicles database and ran a quick query on the plate. His eyes widened as the results appeared. The car belonged to Leonardo Forzi! They had been at the mysterious sanctuary, but something had gone horribly wrong. It looked like their only option was to evacuate. He decided he had to tell his boss his findings. Maybe it would score him a little slack.

  Mike stood up and briskly covered the distance to his supervisor’s door. He could hear his boss once again clashing with the two G-men. Mike didn’t care about interrupting, not with the juicy intelligence he currently possessed. He firmly gripped the handle and twisted it downward, preparing to make a grand entrance, but stopped as he heard one of the men inside say “New York”. He put his ear to the door, worried they may have beat him to the punch.

  “… Can’t be trusted to finish a simple task,” he heard one of the suited men finish.

  “Just give me some more time,” his boss pleaded. “We didn’t know so many of those damned Aspides were still around.”

  “Sullivan’s escaped us again, Asmodeus,” the other man said threateningly. “We were lucky to find him again so fast, but now he is in contact with the Grigori. We will have to muster significantly more resources in order to find him again. Azazel must be notified.”

  “No!” his boss cried. “Give me a few more days. I’ll find him again.”

  “Fine,” his anonymous antagonist responded. “After that, though, Azazel will come himself. Our people in Congress are already pushing for a motion to cooperate fully in the manhunt for Mister Sullivan and his companions. The public is so frightened right now, that even a whisper of his presence will send them into a frenzy to hand over their freedoms in exchange for protection.”

  Mike gasped at the conversation he was hearing. He released the handle and backed away from the door. He placed his hand to his forehead and wiped away the cold film of sweat that had accumulated during his impromptu voyeur session. He knew something odd was happening, but he had no idea what half of that conversation meant. The only thing he knew was that this Azazel seemed poised to gain impunity to do whatever he pleased, while the United States government turned a blind eye. He would have no part in it.

  He tried to calmly walk back to his desk, wondering who else in the office might be privy to these secret plans. When he returned, he did a quick bit of research into Forzi’s SUV and hacked into its GPS signal. The signal itself was intermittent, but he was able to get approximate coordinates. He punched them into a map and found that the last estimated location was somewhere in the mountains in upstate New York.

  Mike deleted all data he could find on his computer regarding his farce of an investigation and uploaded a little present into the network. The computer virus had once begun as a harmless exercise to simulate an attack on the NSA network and detect any gaps in the system’s protective measures. As his career stalled and soured, he had diligently continued to work on it in secret. He had always meant for it to either become the project that skyrocketed him to the top or the righteous revenge he deserved for being passed over so many times.

  He now knew what he needed to do with it. He pulled out the small flash drive where he housed the sole copy of the program and inserted it into his computer. Once he executed the file, the countdown began on a virtual nuclear bomb.

  He got up and stretched and walked out into the hallway as if to use the restroom. He passed the armed guards and escaped into a parking lot awash with orange light from the sodium bulbs overhead. An hour later, the program had finished replicating itself into all of the other computers connected to the network, as well as the servers hosting the local intranet and redundant backup hard drives.

  Thirty minutes after that, the attack began. Monitors began to freeze, causing some mild irritation. What the analysts at their cubicles didn’t know was that the frozen screens were merely illusions. Internally, hard drives were fervently deleting and corrupting entire servers’ worth of files to render any recently gathered data useless. By the time anyone realized what was happening, the no recorded trace of Jude or any of his known accomplices over the past twenty four hours was recoverable. Unnoticed in the furor caused by the catastrophe, Mike Carpenter had disappeared from not only the building, but from all public government databases.

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Jude finally regained full control of his senses in the back seat of the Escalade. He peered out the window and saw they were still travelling down a lonely two-lane highway. The headlights of the vehicle cut through the inky darkness ahead, illuminating only the asphalt and nearby trees as they sped by. They turned into a curve, and the right shoulder of the road fell away, replaced by a metal guard rail. Jude looked out toward the distant horizon’s faint red-gold glow, heralding the approaching dawn. The waxing daylight was just enough to paint the valley below in a mottled mix of orange-browns and grays. The sudden realization of how high they were sent a wave of nausea rushing over him, and he let out a mournful groan.

  “Hang in there, man,” Eric said from the next row up. “It shouldn’t be too much longer.”

  “Where are we going?” Jude asked.

  “We’re heading into the heart of the Adirondack mountains,” Artemis answered, as she maintained her grip on the wheel. “We have an old fallout shelter there, where we can regroup and strengthen our position. It’s only a matter of time before they find us again, and we need to be ready.”

  “I always liked camping” Jude joked dryly.

  Artemis glanced back at Jude through the rear view mirror. Her mocha skin formed a rare set of laugh lines, as she smirked at him. “Just wait and see.”

  Now that he was almost fully awake again, he took note of the other passengers in the vehicle. A blonde woman in a business suit sat up front with Artemis. Eric was surrounded on either side by two male Grigori. Jude had been laid across the back by himself to sleep off the effects of the medication.

  “Hello again, Mister Sullivan,” the blonde said, as she turned around in her seat.

  “Hello again…,” he paused, trying to place a name to the face. He was fairly certain he’d never seen her before. />
  “…Iris,” she finished with a smile. “I told you I would find a better body.”

  “Ah yes,” he said. “Glad to see you again. How are you adapting?”

  “It’s everything I expected and more,” she admitted. “We were justified instituting rules against interdicting human consciousness. Your species should not be interfered with directly. It’s bad for everyone.”

  “I couldn’t agree more,” Eric replied. “Present company excluded, of course.” He winked at Artemis. He seemed to have taken a liking to her over the past day.

  They continued to chat for the next hour, as they wound up and down the foothills of the Adirondacks. They eventually veered off the main road onto a smaller one-lane path leading down the mountainside. The asphalt was cracked and broken from decades of apparent disrepair, and few scattered potholes jostled the passengers about on their descent to their destination.

  The way widened and terminated at a circular clearing partially hidden by the rock. The far edge of the cul-de-sac was a naturally recessed shallow cavern, the roof of which went about fifty feet back. The cover of the stone shelf allowed them ample room to store their transports without fear of being spotted from the air. Near the back of the area, Jude spied a heavy steel door spotted with an irregular reddish pattern of rust from years of guarding the facility inside from the elements.

  “Welcome to the silo,” Artemis announced with a verbal flourish, once she parked the automobile.

  “Wow, are you for real?” Eric exclaimed.

  “What is it?” asked Jude, as he stepped out to take a closer look at the place. “What am I missing here?”

  “It’s an abandoned Cold War-era missile silo” Eric lectured. “The military built them to house Atlas-class intercontinental ballistic missiles back in the fifties, but they were pretty much all decommissioned when the military switched to the Saturn series. I’ve heard of a few that were sold to the public and converted into housing, but it makes sense to turn one into a defensible base.”

  Artemis pointed upward through the rock. “The main silo doors are a little further up the mountain. It used to be just a small flat clearing in the woods, but the forest has since grown up around it. There isn’t any missile, anyway, so it just helps better camouflage the compound. We acquired this many years ago and stocked it with supplies in the event we ever needed it. ”

  Prometheus and his group were just wrapping up from unloading their belongings out of the other SUV at this point, and they walked over to rejoin the others. “Glad to see you feeling better, Jude,” Prometheus greeted him. “Hurry on inside, everyone.” The group huddled around the door, as Prometheus strained to turn the heavy metal wheel that locked it. Even with his amplified strength, he had to recruit one of the others to help him. The crunch of layers of rust giving way was followed by the screech of metal grinding against metal. Finally the hatch was sprung and slowly swung outward.

  Prometheus motioned everyone inside. Jude lingered and watched the small crowd go through. He spied Hephaestus tugging an oversized duffel bag from the car and walked over. “Would you like some help with that?”

  “Sure,” Hephaestus answered gladly, as Jude grabbed a side. “It’s not very heavy, but it’s pretty bulky.”

  “What is in here?” Jude questioned in disbelief at just how cumbersome the bag actually was.

  “I disassembled and packed as many of my projects as I could,” the fiery engineer answered. “If the Nephilim want to fight, then I have some work to do.”

  The two dragged the pieces of various electronic components inside the open doorway. They shuffled down a short, rock-lined passage and through a similar heavy door and into a circular staging area. The two set the equipment down on a nearby table. Jude stretched his back, as he looked around.

  This level of the base was nothing more than a sparsely furnished living area. A couple of plastic-covered couches were positioned around a large, dust-covered cathode-ray tube television next to an equally dusty mini-bar and book shelf. Metal racks and lockers lined the walls around the main entrance and contained an assortment of things from camping gear to hunting rifles.

  Jude sniffed the air and wrinkled his nose. “What is that smell?”

  “We haven’t been here in a few years,” Hephaestus answered, as he opened the bag and check the status of its contents. “The air will be stale until we get it cycling again. It should only take a few hours.”

  Jude wandered over to the rest of the group, where Prometheus was giving out orders. The primary chore, according to him, was cleaning up the bunker and making it livable again. A couple of the more technologically minded of the group were recruited to help Hephaestus perform a maintenance check on the base’s control systems.

  Jude was eager to explore the silo, so he volunteered for cleaning duty. He slowly made his way through the four floors of the structure’s crew quarters, picking up drop cloths and dusting away the years of disuse. Each floor was merely a cross-section of the giant concrete cylinder that had been shaped into the rock face. They were all connected by a central support pillar that had stairs that twisted downward around them to connect to the next floor. A thick hatch similar to the one at the entrance served as a gateway to each level, allowing the inhabitants to seal off any level if the need arose.

  Underneath the living area was a mess hall and kitchen. A journey to the other side of the floor revealed a recreation room with free weights and other gymnastic equipment. Further down, on the third level, Jude encountered a wheel of bunk rooms. Each of the spokes of the wheel was a hallway containing five small rooms to a side. It would be more than enough to house the current occupants, with room to grow. Cleaning this level didn’t take long, despite the increased surface area. Thankfully, it seemed as if the detritus was scarcer this far down. He was distracted for a few minutes, however, by another large metal door at the end of one of the spokes. He guessed this was the entrance hallway leading to the control center and the silo, as Eric had described.

  He tucked away any questions about it for the moment, as he journeyed to the bottom floor to finish his task, noting that the hatch door here was exceptionally thick. This was obviously a special area, so he stopped to take it in. It contained a small laboratory, medical facility, and server room, all of which were already virtually spotless. Jude was surprised to see that all of the equipment appeared to be on the cutting edge of current technology, even though Hephaestus had mentioned the place had been abandoned for years. It was a testament to his race’s technological prowess, even with limited resources.

  The auburn-haired man had already moved his miscellaneous parts to the lab and was focused on reassembling some of the larger pieces. One of the new members of the group, a man who a few hours ago had been a construction worker, was furiously scribbling notes on an old yellow legal pad and creating what seemed to a shopping list of items the engineer would need to further his research. Jude crept back upstairs, before he could be drafted into Hephaestus’ service also.

  He looked down at the curving central hallway with its rows of bunks and decided he should claim one for himself. He grabbed a compartment along the outer circumference and fell back on the slim mattress. It wasn’t the most comfortable he’d ever been, but his rapidly increasing exhaustion told him that even the concrete floor would suffice at the moment. Within minutes, he was snoring soundly.

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  The reports of the New York City bombing spread like wildfire. The wave of terrorism following in Jude Sullivan’s wake had created a mass panic in the American populace. Economic productivity dropped to record levels, as people refused to leave their homes for fear of an attack, not knowing where the next one would be. Washington D.C. was desperate to assuage their fears and get things back to normal, but the administration had nothing to show for its efforts. Some members of the House and Senate were pushing for martial law to be implemented in major cities to give the nation some semblance of order.

  It
wasn’t until the electronic attack on the NSA headquarters that any dissenting voices in Congress were silenced. Government agents were working at full capacity to keep the details out of the hands of ravenous news agencies, but inaction was certainly not an option. A bill mobilizing troops across the entire eastern seaboard was hastily constructed and passed by a landslide vote. The Senate majority leader suggested they contact the priest who had had so much success tracking down Jude’s conspirators in Europe and ask to borrow his expertise. This Antonio Gallo was the one who had warned them Jude was coming to America, after all. Outside help was desperately needed now that domestic intelligence networks had been compromised.

  Gallo arrived in New York City and took up residence near the United Nations headquarters building, a contingent of guards and sycophants never too far away. He began to flesh out an appointment calendar from all manner of heads of state and business leaders. The meetings he held were all behind closed doors, members only. Staffers at the complex whispered among themselves about how odd it was that this man with no worldwide political stature could attract so many callers, but no one dared to ask or even mention such in front of any member of Gallo’s entourage, however. Everyone agreed that menace somehow seemed to reside in the very air his followers breathed.

  In front of a camera, however, the man was able to wring charisma out of every word he spoke. Within twenty-four hours of arrival, he gave a press conference in front of the members of the UN and the world. He grieved over the lives lost in the bombing of what had now been officially identified as a homeless shelter, merely carrying out its Biblical mission. He commended the strength and perseverance of everyone affected not only by this event, but also the tragedy in Geneva. He lionized those who had died, lifting up people from all religions as saints in the cause of global peace and prosperity and bellowed in a righteous rage over the dangers of those people in the world afraid of global unity, who would do anything to disrupt it. He swore he would find Jude Sullivan and serve swift and complete justice upon such a heinous monster. Applause erupted, as he wrapped up his speech. It appeared he had the approval of almost all in attendance and with it, the impunity he needed to get the job done at all costs.