2013: Beyond Armageddon (35 page)

“I will try to,” Price said. “I just hope it’s not too late.”

In the feeble light from the moon and stars, they began the nearly mile-long trek from the water’s edge to their headquarters. Unger tried mightily to remain upbeat, but the conversation they’d just had wouldn’t let him. It had made him realize how badly damaged and flawed they both were. Price much more so, but still…

The secrets they’d just revealed had rekindled a spark in the ashes of a fire Unger had long ago extinguished, a fire fueled by his worst fear: the possibility that Satan could win.

Their body language as they walked fanned the spark. They both looked less confident to him, demoralized. The shuffling of his sandals across the barren landscape sounded like despair.

As they approached the building, Unger tried to brighten his spirits by thinking of all the people inside, laughing, dancing, having a good time. But after conditioning himself for so long to consider everything in relation to the end of the world, the famous lines he often remembered from
The Second Coming
came into his mind instead:

Zeke lay in bed alone, unable to sleep. Leah had been enjoying herself at the party, so she’d stayed downstairs. “Time to see if you’ve got any booty-shaking left in you,” she’d said to Mordecai. Zeke had left them on the dance floor.

Now he wished she were here. In the darkness, a waking dream had been tormenting him.

He clicked on the small lamp on his nightstand and tried to remember his dream.

Faces. Dozens of them. No one he knew, just faces, floating in a kaleidoscope of despair. He struggled to snare some elusive wisp of dream as it bobbed and floated away on a formless sea of memory. Too awake and restless to lay still, he got up and began to pace.

Faces. He’d read something disturbing that had to do with faces. What?

He grunted in frustration and threw up his hands. A dream he couldn’t remember—so what? A disturbing dream, to be sure, but why did it seem so important?

He sat in an armchair and closed his eyes, trying to pull the vision back from its descent into the psychic deep of forgotten dreams. Gradually the memory resurfaced…

He opened his eyes. Now he remembered.

William Lynch’s 1848 exploration of the Dead Sea. Lynch was a respected naval officer, and his expedition was considered the first truly scientific evaluation of the unusual body of water. Zeke had found a copy of his “narrative” report on-line when he’d begun his research. He’d been so fascinated by it—one passage in particular—that he’d printed it out and brought it with him. He got it from his briefcase and sat on the bed, scanning the highlighted sections.

Throughout, Lynch used words like wondrous, somber, unnatural, to describe the sea. Zeke came to the passage that had so intrigued him. Lynch wrote of a fiercely hot day during his exploration, when he and a handful of his men were sailing in a small boat:

“In the awful aspect which this sea presented…I seemed to read the inscription over the gates of Dante’s Inferno:—‘Ye who enter here, leave hope behind.’”

Before long Lynch was the only one left awake; the others had all fallen into a stuporous sleep. As he glided slowly and silently through the water, looking at his unnaturally dozing men, “…there was something fearful in the expression of their inflamed and swollen visages. The fierce angel of disease seemed hovering over them, and I read the forerunner of his presence in their flushed and feverish sleep…some, upon whose faces shone the reflected light from the water, looked ghastly…”

Feeling almost as though he were in the boat with him, Zeke felt an unsettling thrill when Lynch finally wrote:

“The solitude, the scene, my own thoughts, were too much; I felt, as I sat thus, steering the drowsily-moving boat, as if I were a Charon, ferrying not the souls, but the bodies, of the departed and the damned, over some infernal lake…”

At the bottom of the page, Zeke had written an explanatory footnote for himself: Charon was the aged boatman who ferried the souls of the dead across the River Styx to the gates of Hades.

He laid the paper aside, still dissatisfied. There had been more to his dream than Lynch’s hallucination. Something else to do with faces, something troubling…Slipping on shorts and a T-shirt, he went onto the balcony.

A gentle breeze caressed him as he leaned against the railing and stared out at the Dead Sea in the distance. The crescent moon and an explosion of stars cast a soft glow on its gently undulating surface, making it appear as though the sea itself were breathing. Zeke thought of going for a swim to tire himself out, but remembered that the water wasn’t really pleasant; all the salt and chemicals gave it a filmy, almost oily feel. Still, he was wide awake.

Maybe the long walk to the shore and back would help him sleep. He could certainly use the exercise. Anticipating the battle he might be in for, he’d been spending as much time as he could in the weight room. He’d been running, too, but with the possibility of finding
the
tunnel tomorrow, it was time to intensify his training. A hike down what might be an extremely long tunnel with a forty-pound backpack would be strenuous enough, but the return trip would be worse. All uphill. He needed to start working the steeper hills into his running. He was in great shape, but he needed to get into Delta shape.

He went inside, pulled sweatpants over his shorts, put on socks and running shoes, and went to the lounge to tell Leah where he was going.

It was only nine-thirty, but the party was over when he got there. Leah and Hassan were the only ones left. They sat at one of the smaller tables, chatting and having a beer.

Zeke gently caressed Leah’s shoulder. “Looks like everybody but you two party animals gave it up early.”

She stood and hugged him. “Hi, sweetie. Yeah, they couldn’t hang with the big dogs. Some left real early. I think everybody was just tired. Grab a beer and join us. We’re having a nightcap.”

“Normally I’d love to, but I’m too wound up to sit still. I’m going to go for a walk, get some exercise, see if it’ll tire me out.”

“Where are you going?”

“Down to the water and back.”

“Aren’t you and Mordecai and Hassan going out early in the morning?”

“I won’t be long.”

“You want me to go with you?”

“Not tonight. I need to think, clear my head. I’m not good company right now.” He saw her look of concern and began to have doubts about leaving her alone.

Hassan must have sensed it. “Don’t worry, Zeke. I’ll make sure she gets home safely. Don’t forget, Mordecai and myself are right across the hall from you two. A Jew and a Muslim watching for trouble with the eyes of a falcon.”

“Well,” Zeke said, “when you put it like that…”

Hassan flashed a rare smile. “She is our heartbeat, Zeke. We will guard her with our life.”

Heartbeat. He remembered staring at hers on the monitor in her hospital room. Remembered it stopping.

Leah’s kiss on the cheek brought him back from that precipice. “Go do what you gotta do,” she said. “I’ll keep your spot warm.”

He squeezed her hand and left. Outside, heavy darkness settled over him as he began the long trek to the Dead Sea. He hadn’t been walking long when his dream of faces floated into his mind, followed closely by Michael Price’s warning about cracks in the earth being openings for the dead.

Zeke made his way across the strange terrain that had once been sea bottom. The water glowed faintly in the distance under the light from the heavens. In the void between the hotel and the Dead Sea, however, far from any outposts of humanity, he was enveloped in a shroud of darkness. Barely able to see his feet, he wished he’d brought a flashlight. The thick gloom and otherworldly silence made him feel like the first human, walking through some primordial landscape before the planet had even fully formed.

He came to a fairly flat strip of craggy rock at the water’s edge. The light from the night sky was better here, where the ledge sloped downward a few feet and disappeared into the water. He found a reasonably smooth patch of ground and sat, legs dangling over the edge. Compared to the impenetrable darkness he’d just left, the visibility here was good. The crescent moon created a faint silvery path that illuminated the rise and fall of the water for at least half a mile. Tiny wavelets whispered against the rocks, but the smell of the sulfur-tinged salt air was a sensory intrusion into their soothing rhythm. Beyond this faint murmur and celestial glow, all was silence and shadow.

Again Zeke imagined himself as the only soul in the world. Not the first soul this time, but the last, drifting through the infinite void of space on a voyage of eternal darkness, save for the pinpoint lights of distant stars. Lulled by the hypnotic breathing of the sea, he fell into deep contemplation of his surroundings and his potentially pivotal role in human events.

Was he at the edge of the abyss Enoch referred to in his scroll, the threshold that believers in the 2012 predictions believed the human race was coming to? The point where we must finally choose good over evil or be hopelessly doomed? If so, according to Enoch, “one righteous soul” must blaze the trail for the final confrontation between the Messiah and Lucifer.

One righteous soul. Meaning me. Zeke. Ezekiel.

Lost in consideration of the divine visitations he’d had telling him he was the one, his trance was broken when, at the farthest edge of his vision, he thought he saw something moving in the water.

The way the light twinkled and flickered on the waves made it easy to believe it was an optical illusion. His eyes followed the movement for several minutes, until there could be no doubt.

Something on the horizon was moving. He squinted to make it out.

A dark silhouette—formless, shapeless, like a wisp of smoke—floated slowly closer. Evaporation? Steam rising from the water? No. He’d often seen an evaporation haze over the sea, but it tended to float more uniformly across the entire surface. And in the morning. Not on a clear night like this.

He stared harder. Whatever it was, there seemed to be several separate and distinct clumps or puffs of it that he hadn’t noticed before. Still too far away and indistinct to identify, they continued drifting toward him across the surface of the sea.

Suddenly something rose up from the water directly in front of him.

Glowing droplets slid off a roundish form as it leaned closer. When it was no more than five feet away he could finally make it out.

A ghostly face. Light partially shone through the opaque, smokelike head. Its features were vaguely human, but without substance. It was a spirit, a ghost.

A soul.

As it hung suspended in air, Zeke saw only black holes where eyes might be, and yet those vacant shadows seemed to be staring at him. The ethereal face was etched with deep furrows of pain and suffering.

It inched closer, only a foot away now, until Zeke saw its lips moving, mouthing something. Finally he made it out.

“Help us.”

At the word “us” he noticed with alarm that the other shapes he’d seen earlier had drifted up to join this one. There were dozens of them, disembodied spirits, hovering just above the surface of the water, faces frozen in nightmarish expressions of eternal horror. The growing congregation crowded together, lips moving, all mouthing “help us, help us, help us”—a silent shriek of despair from beyond this world.

Spiders of ice scurried across Zeke’s back and scalp as though running to hide. More than fear, he felt a crushing sense of grief. These things weren’t threatening him. They were begging for help. Still, he instinctively scrambled to his feet and backed away.

They followed to the water’s edge. Worse, much worse, they began to emit sound. At first he wasn’t sure he heard it, but gradually it got louder and louder until there was no mistaking it.

They were moaning. Hideous, shuddering, pitiful wails of agony. The demonic sounds that had tormented him for weeks had been horrible, but this was worse. Demons could be dismissed as irredeemable evil. But t
hese
…In their vestiges of tortured humanity were souls that might yet be saved.

An ululating crescendo rose as from one voice, as if unfair cruelties inflicted on the living had left the dead only this last recourse, to bay for all eternity at an unjust God.

Zeke had to get away from there before his mind snapped. The mournful cries of the faces tore at him, but there was nothing he could do to help…ghosts. He turned and began to walk away.

Behind him the wailing faded, only to be replaced by the mournful cries he’d heard before: “help us, help us, help usss…”

I’m trying to, he wanted to tell them. By finding and defeating Satan, if I can.

He sensed movement to his left.
Were the soul-things following him?

He looked toward the movement and thought he saw a dark shape the size of a man, standing partly concealed in a cove created by boulders. He stared intently into the shadowy darkness for at least a minute, but nothing moved. He took a couple steps as if to walk away, then stopped suddenly and looked back at the cove.

For a fraction of a second he thought he saw light glinting off a human face. In the next instant it disappeared below the rocks. He sprinted to the spot where the shape had been.

No one was there. He circled the large crescent formation of rocks.

Nothing. The ground was rock as well, so there were no footprints.

No longer sure what was real and what was unreal, Zeke looked back toward the water. The faces were gone. As he trudged grimly back to the room, their cries still reverberated inside his skull. The sound conjured an image of forlorn monks, their mournful Gregorian chant echoing hollowly off the walls of some monastery long abandoned by God.

A hymn of the damned, sung by a chorus of lost souls.

Exactly at midnight, in the vacant room directly above Zeke’s, a small black votive candle cast a sinister light on a figure shrouded in black. On the middle finger of his left hand was his talisman: a ring containing a rare black mineral he had dubbed Luciferite, into which was perfectly carved the head of a goat framed by a pentagram. It was the symbol of Baphomet—the Judas Goat—and combined the Powers of Darkness with the fertility of the goat. The pentagram was inverted, so that its two upward points could receive the horns of the goat, while its three downward points proclaimed denial of the Holy Trinity. A very fitting talisman for bringing out his true self that he’d spent so long denying.