by Kaleb Nation
Confirmation of activity in Japan, now moved to March 16, earthquake. Keep away from the area for two days leading up and following the date.
Relocate all invested assets from Dreycorp a week preceding.
It was odd, until I recognized what they had been talking about. That was the earthquake that’d hit Japan days ago—the same that my teacher had shown us in class.
At the top of the page, a date marked when the email had been sent…four months ago.
I remembered suddenly what I’d read in the eyes of Dreycorp’s own CEO, that dramatic change that had overcome Harold Wolf some time before his death. Now it clicked into place: the fear of something that he was certain was coming to get him. He’d known all along, too. Maybe he’d been running from them, hiding in another country to escape the inevitable. It became painfully obvious to me that the earthquake—all that massive destruction, and all the lives that it had taken—had somehow been artificially created to kill this one man.
“How does Anon get this information?” I asked, looking up. “This is…this is almost unbelievable.”
And a treasure trove for me—a strange feeding of my addiction to truth. I didn’t give the monk a possibility of answering, digging further into the papers. There was a chart attached below the email, showing two graphs side-by-side. The one on the left showed a large circle with DREYCORP typed in the center, dated this year. There were uncountable smaller circles inside its bounds with even smaller names: food companies whose brands I saw all the time when we went grocery shopping.
The graph on the right also had DREYCORP, but it and its circles were now far smaller and beside two others, all three enveloped by another that simple said EXCELSOR. This chart was dated ten years into the future. A predicted merger, I guessed. Or rather, an inevitable one.
It was like crawling down into a hole only to find that just around the corner was another world, right under my feet the entire time. An email spoke of a nationwide banking chain that was going to fail, the deadline still two months away. It was brief and to the point: Pull your assets. Place them as investments in this other company. They were like instructions with no signature, no way of telling the author or the receiver. There were other attached pages detailing numbers and figures I didn’t understand, lines of text in some finance language. The email circle appeared to be a group of moguls and investment operators, sometimes posting emails that were forwarded to them by others. There were never any names: only the codes as identification.
Everything was a photocopy. Who was Anon to have access to all these things?
“That’s just some of the finance stuff,” Brother James said from beside me. “These are nothing. They’re far down the chain of power. We’ve only identified a few based on their anonymous handles. Have you ever read an email to a president before?”
“I didn’t even know the President had email,” I said in a quick breath, taking a paper that the monk slid in front of me. It was one page, dated for 2012 and addressed from 916-88 to 55-614, which only said:
Stay out of NY this October.
“You think you know what the world is?” Brother James said. “A lot of people think they do. But people are sheep. Humans are easily led when they don’t know they are following.”
“And Father Lonnie…” I said. “They killed him because he knows.”
“Because he knew,” Brother James corrected me like a machete slicing through the air. Past tense now; Father Lonnie was already gone.
“But he had proof,” I said. “He could have gone out and told someone. He could have used all of this to expose who they are!”
“You don’t understand,” the monk said. “It sounds so easy: take these documents and expose them. But to whom? The police? The FBI? Late night radio shows who’d broadcast us in the same segment they talk about alien space saucers?”
He scratched his arms. “They control everything, Michael. They command everything. Do you know how large the world is? Can you imagine how much power it would take to run the entire world, when few can even run an entire country?”
His voice had started to rise as he became more frantic. He yanked the papers out of my hands, tossing them across the desk into the pile.
“Some people believe in families that run the world,” he said. “Rich, powerful families who have been around since kings, still commanding countries in secret, causing wars at whim to build their wealth and releasing plagues as a part of procedure. But the families still report to these… to the Guardians.”
He shrugged. “But you probably think I’m crazy, still. You’re like everyone else. But the Guardians made it that way. They control the media and thus control the way people think: make anyone who believes in this to be a ‘conspiracy theorist’ or a ‘crazy old man talking about Illuminati’. But we’re not making it up. We’re right.”
I was becoming more and more alarmed as the monk’s voice sped up, his hands shaking as he grabbed papers from the desk and stacked them up, then shuffled them, only to reorganize them again.
“Look at Lonnie,” he said. “You don’t think this happens all the time? They want someone dead, so they make him dead. And not just his body: dead to anyone who’d loved him before. Tomorrow they’ll find meds in Lonnie’s room. Some prostitute will say his name in the news. They’ll find all these lies so that people will want to forget him, think his death was his own fault—a suicide by a drug-abusing, tithe-stealing, whoremonger of a priest. ‘Not Lonnie!’ they’ll say. But even his friends will believe it just because they’re told to.”
The monk hit the desk, making it rattle. “Anon didn’t do anything to save him. He just let him die. Where was Anon when Lonnie needed protection? Did he just let him die because it was for some greater good? To keep you safe?”
The monk pulled open one of the drawers and shuffled things around in it furiously. I glanced at the locked door. My heart had started to beat faster, afraid that the monk would soon faint into a shock. Which pocket had he put the keys in? Would I be able to drag him out to get the paramedics, who likely were still outside?
“I wish I was Lonnie,” he went on. “I wish I could be as brave as he was. But I’m not. This isn’t my war. And I’ve got a family: I’ve got brothers and sisters and both my parents.”
“Calm down, you’ll be alright,” I told him, holding my hands out.
“No it won’t be alright!” he exploded into a scream, and suddenly his hand whipped out from the drawer. In it was a pistol, aimed at me.
“Nothing will ever be alright now!” he shouted at me, his voice bouncing off the bricks and the metal furnace. I was frozen, hands extended, heart nearly stopping. The gun was a 9-millimeter: long and slender chassis, black and metal. It was so close I could see its front sight.
“What the hell are you doing?” I demanded. But the gun didn’t waver in his hands, even as the sweat that ran down his face and in his palms threatened to make it slip.
“I can’t be Lonnie!” he said through clenched teeth. “I can’t die that way.”
“I’ll leave then!” I told him, lifting my hands. “No one will ever know you had me here.” The monk was insane with terror.
“It’s too late for that,” the monk said. “I can’t let you go. Not if I want them to let me live. You’ve got to stay here until he comes back.”
Everything hit me at once, and I realized just how stupid and blind I had been. In my fright at seeing the corpse atop the church, I hadn’t taken a moment to dig for a Glimpse from Brother James, to even wonder if I should trust him at all. Now, across the room and deep in the eyes of this crazed man, I could see answers to all the question that had appeared. Threatened. Cornered.
Someone had gotten to Brother James before I arrived.
“Are they here?” I asked, knowing full well what was happening, why I’d been led back here. My mind raced for an escape.
“Soon,” he replied. “I—I told him you’d be back this morning after mass. I’m sorry, Michae
l. I just couldn’t do anything else when he…”
Then I saw why he’d kept his arms crossed all this time. His left hand was bent painfully forward and still didn’t move, scaling and red with the worst burns I’d seen. Parts of his skin were blackened even past his wrist, dried blood around white gauze he’d tried to wrap around it. When he saw I was looking, he hid his hand away again, still trembling.
“You don’t have to do this,” I said. “I’ll disappear. They’ll think you killed me.”
“They want you alive,” he whined. “They want to make sure. If I don’t keep you here, he’ll know. He’ll get me, just like Lonnie. You don’t think they can, and kill my whole family too?”
“But we’re on the same side,” I said, though I already knew the attempt was in vain. His mind was made up, strengthened like a barrier of fear he’d been building ever since the night before. I could imagine the horror he’d witnessed: the killing of his friend, the threat from a Guardian… who even now was likely on his way back here to collect me, and finish what Mr. Sharpe could not.
Never had such terror washed over me as I remembered the chase from nights before, and realized that I had fallen right into a trap. They wouldn’t make the same mistake twice. I had to get out of there.
Brother James’ gun hand had started to shake. I moved to the side, trying to get out of its way, but he stepped between me and the door again.
“I’m sorry,” he said, and even then I could tell that he meant it.
So I tried to run, knowing his conscience would make him hesitate to shoot. But he was fast, diving to the side, slamming into me and throwing me hard against the wall. I yelled, pushing him off of me, running again only to be knocked hard against my back, falling over and gasping for breath.
He was kneeling on top of me in a second. I grabbed the end of a fire poker that was next to the furnace, swinging it at him. I knocked his arm and he screamed, but he managed to grab it and wrestle it from me. I heard the reverberating metal fly to the other end of the room, smashing through a computer screen. All the while I continued to shout for help, my words bouncing uselessly off the walls.
I tried to roll over but he had me down, pushing my back with his knee, pressing a cloth against my face and blocking my mouth and nose. I gasped and got a whole lung-full of whatever chemical he was trying to get inside of me.
It hit suddenly, such a strong smell like alcohol and a doctor’s office. It only made me gasp more, dizziness racing through my head as I struggled to fight against it and the monk who held me down, no longer even needing the pistol to keep me there.
“Quiet down!” I heard him hiss at me. Something was banging above our heads, each sound like it was in an echo chamber. There was a crash. A pounding against the locked door.
Was it someone coming for me? Had they heard me?
But I wasn’t screaming anymore: why wasn’t I screaming?! I drifted on a magic carpet that hovered from the floor, room spinning, muscles still trying to lift me though nothing ever brought me up more than a few inches.
I could feel things happening inside me: strange sensations that felt like a dam threatening to explode and made me want to vomit at the same time. My finger throbbed where the silver ring was. It felt like it was tightening slowly, like the device that nurses put around my arm to check blood pressure. All of my skin felt like it was constricting, floating, plummeting…
The cloth remained pushed against my face, the room like I was looking at it through a fish tank before fading into black as my eyelids closed. I could still hear the sounds though. I heard a creaking of hinges, a crashing of wood being shredded. I heard two voices yelling, just before the pressure holding me down disappeared.
There was a shot.
Gentle arms lifted me.
Warm sunshine fell on my arms and legs.
Then I was going up…up…up into the air, until all I could hear was the wind and gentle echoes.
Sirens.
Birds.
Silence.
Cessation
I dreamt of flying.
One moment I was frozen in a chemical blackness, and the other I was surrounded by blue and white, soaring and free of the wooden, dirty smell that had enveloped the secret room. Warmth ran against my back, down my legs and arms as the wind flew in my face and up through my mouth into my lungs. The smell of salt water rushing up from below awakened me.
My eyes were already open but it took some time for anything I was looking at to sink in. I was soaring high above the coastline, the people below me little more than specks and the cars and houses like faraway models. Like a toy town. It was so peaceful, so silent besides the muted hiss of air as it pressed around my head like bees. My eyes were not bothered by the rushing: it was as if a glass cone was over my head like a helmet, keeping me safe, sealing me from the air and the sky. Gravity couldn’t keep its fingers on me. I floated free of the Earth. I was invincible, and I was silver.
It startled me only slightly. I had looked down and seen my hands firmly pressed to my sides and noticed something was different. Silver covered the outside of my hands from my knuckles to my wrist in overlapping, reflective scales like the skin of a snake. They moved when I clenched my fist, part of me as if it’d been under my skin all along and I’d only uncovered it. The scales gleamed like mirrors that echoed the sun into my face.
In the dream, this didn’t feel strange at all: the glow of the silver on my hands seemed no more unusual than that of the ring still on my finger. And the flying too. I simply willed myself to go higher and suddenly I was heading upward on my own accord, legs and arms pressed together like I was a long silver bullet. I was actually flying.
I wasn’t alone either. The girl from my dream suddenly appeared from over my shoulder, hands with scales just like mine pressed to her sides. The magnificent silver was even more vibrant in the sunlight. I grinned then leapt higher, as if trying to tempt her into racing against me. I heard her laugh from over my shoulder, a sound I’d never heard from this girl in any dream before. It was enough of a distraction for her to dart ahead.
On a plane, the quiet would have been drowned out by a jet engine and babbling passengers, a static of noise ripping through the skies. But here, where we were alone, the silence was omnipresent: a beautiful emptiness of yellow sun and perfect clouds that made all the vast cities and shining coasts and bustling cars below seem insignificant.
She stopped to float as I tried to catch up. Her feet dangled lightly in the air, arms crossed now. I could see every line between the scales on her hands, like miniature black creases dividing tiny mirrors.
I took a labored breath of air and let it out in contentment.
10
Rebirth
I awoke to a gentle rain drizzling down the sides of my face: the misty spray of a storm coming to its close. It smelled of rot and acid and all the hideous chemicals that permeated the city air, and tasted even worse when it dripped through the corners of my lips and down my dehydrated throat. I rolled over, groaning in pain. My torn clothes were already soaked through to my skin. They squished miserably against the wet rock beneath my body.
I was disoriented but managed to force my eyelids open. My forehead rested on my arms, elbows covered in gray rock chips. So I wasn’t going to die in my dream this time? How lucky I was.
Even then, the final dream was blemished by memories of something else…a priest on a steeple. A gun pointed at my face. Chemicals that had forced me to sleep. Arms picking me up, carrying me into the sky. I couldn’t put them all together at first. Had my entire morning been a part of a dream all along?
I barely registered that I was outdoors. The rain poured harmlessly on me, cool at first, then warming like sweat when it ran down my back and through tears in my white undershirt. Had I fallen asleep in the yard? I lifted my head.
I wasn’t in my yard at all. I was at the top of a canyon somewhere, tall rock all around me and my body lying in the middle of a thin, open path. I sat up
quickly, water falling from folds in my shirt. Everything was dark under the heavy clouds but even then I could tell I was far from home.
Something itched on my right hand. The ring was still there.
I was on my feet in an instant, the lethargic feeling dashed from my bones. I remembered! Brother James had handed me over to the Guardians. And now I was outside? Had something gone wrong, or had I escaped them somehow but couldn’t remember it? I’d already had enough experience with these Guardians to know I should get away while I could. I stumbled ahead in a stupor.
The opening in the rocks was not a path at all, but a sudden cliff drop-off that had been hidden in the mist. I came upon it too quickly to catch my balance and slipped as my shoes hit the wet rocks.
I fell over the edge.
For a moment I tumbled into nothing, unable to hold my balance, arms rushing in front of me to catch my fall. But then I wasn’t falling any longer. I found myself floating in midair, feet dangling inches away from the edge and an unfathomable distance from the rock-covered valley below. My hands were still frozen in front of me: hands now covered in silver scales.
The scales brushed against each other, feeling strangely natural. My hands simply trembled before me, some unfamiliar sensation coursing out of them that caused me to remain afloat. The energy came from the tops of my hands and burst invisibly through my skin and bones and out the other side with my palms. I was carried backwards to my feet again and dropped heavily to solid ground.
The moment I was safe again, the silver scales sudden drew back, hiding themselves beneath my skin as if they’d never been there at all. In seconds, I had once again returned to normal, except for my heart pounding louder than the rain. My hands were still out, frozen in the motion I’d have been found in if I’d tumbled to my death.
I shook. Was I still dreaming? I couldn’t be. I’d already awoken, and that sensation—that real, unmistakable feeling of something within me, fresh and powerful like the beating of a new heart.