Authors: David Sakmyster
Tags: #Science Fiction & Fantasy, #Fantasy, #Paranormal & Urban
Final Solstice (17 page)
Chapter 22
At the five-thousand foot elevation mark, in a clearing overlooking the city far in the distance, Gabriel set down his staff and leaned against the ancient rock. A standing stone, chiseled by the Mojave Indians and decorated with petroglyphs, it more than served its purpose. He pulled back his hood and breathed in the fresh zingy scent of ozone lingering in the wake of the storm.
He watched his work, proudly observing the devastating thing of beauty as it sat and spun and lingered, beset by polarizing atmospheric air masses, like shepherd dogs keeping it penned up for just a bit longer.
Six others emerged from behind their hoods and around the stones, leaning on their staves, breathing heavily, but full of smiles. All except for Annabelle, who gave him a dark, sour look. “Was that necessary? Your father …”
Gabriel held up a hand and closed his eyes, re-establishing the connection to the distant speck trailing the storm.
A hawk. Magnificent creature, it soared high, wings spread to the extreme and beating fiercely to maintain position. It sent its perfect vision down to the main street in front of the bank, where Mason, drenched, was helping the cameraman to his feet and surveying the near-monsoon blanketing Lawton City.
Gabriel blinked and returned to his own eyes. “He’s fine.”
“But that was too close!” She snapped, and her voice held something darker, more accusatory.
Did she know?
The motel, the girl? Gabriel shrugged. Possibly, but it wasn’t her right to speak, or to accuse. He was the master here, and he made the decisions, including selecting and preparing the sacrifice. And as for his father …
“My dad … Mason … he can handle himself. As we just saw.”
“It was close, brother,” said another. “Solomon does not want him dead. Not yet.”
Gabriel shrugged again. “Like I said, I knew he could handle himself. He should have run like everyone else. That’s what I figured, but instead …” A touch of bitterness seeped into his voice. “Well, he’ll look like a hero again.”
“Maybe after,” said Annabelle, “he gets over looking like an idiot for missing the forecast.”
Smiling even broader, Gabriel twirled his staff like a vaudeville showman. “And that will be a sight to see. Let’s get back and watch it all unfold. All the same, I wouldn’t like to be him right now.”
Chapter 23
Four hours later, the last sprinkles departed and the clouds shook loose their hold over the city just in time to reveal a beautiful full sky rainbow. The cooler air ushered in the scent of potpourri, stirred up vegetation from the storm’s aftermath. Kids played with rejuvenated joy, jumping in puddles and splashing each other; and adults took to the streets in celebration of the refreshing breeze as plants, crops and trees were all dripping in the midday glare.
Mason, however, saw none of this. He was twenty-eight miles north of Lawton, at a highway rest stop with Wi-Fi, sipping hot coffee and glad for the respite from the media circus back there where he was the butt of all jokes. He had done his best to spin what had happened the only way he could. He brought up, without any of the typical confidence or tenacity in his voice, the precarious personality of Nature and the irony of how weather sometimes turns on a dime and provides miraculous relief as often as it does bitter agony.
That was all prelude though, to the main event, which Mason knew was coming. Knew without a doubt even before he could finish the first round of questions from the makeshift newsroom in the bank vault. Away from the pounding thunder and blasting lightning strikes, where the generators fueled the cameras and lights and sent the broadcasts out to the major networks to be cast out in a wider net, he knew it was coming.
The news, of course, offered by Avery Solomon himself: that Solstice had indeed predicted this massive storm. Predicted it over two weeks earlier. Nailed it down to the day, the hour, and almost the exact minute of its actual appearance.
The mayor himself had a sealed delivery from that date, one he had disregarded as nonsense from a likely speculator. Their forecast had been ignored like those prognostications from snake oil charlatans or rain dancers of old. But now, after this—he had sent his aide to fetch the package, and to get a Solstice representative on the phone (little realizing Mason’s new career location).
The news stations caught wind of it, and that was that.
Focus shifted immediately away from Lawton, much to the mayor’s dismay having lost his fifteen minutes of fame. From that point on, all anyone cared about or saw, all that was on every station, was Solomon’s stoically confident expression as he greeted the media frenzy head-on. It was as if he’d been waiting his whole life for this chance to show off his special toys.
Still stinging from the onslaught of shame and his near-death experience at the foot of an F3 Class tornado that had somehow—and he still couldn’t understand it—collapsed just as it should have geared up for more violence, Mason took the chance and got the hell out of Lawton.
He knew he should have just holed up in a dark tavern somewhere and waited for his plane, or he should have just caught another one and charged it back to Solstice, but right now all he wanted was to put as much distance between himself and the fiasco back at Lawton.
He rented a car and drove north, and it wasn’t until he saw signs for the Kansas border that he hit upon an idea. A way to clear his head, to focus and to change gears. He could sit around wallowing in his mistakes and debating why he had been so used and what it was all for, or he could take control and go in a direction no one would expect.
Kansas.
His discovery from yesterday. The location at the epicenter of those four tornadoes back in 1980. That location … southeast Kansas. Couldn’t be too far.
So in the truck stop, he decided it was time for some more research, time to dig his teeth into the mystery. Especially because he had the sense that he was treading into forbidden territory. Forbidden by the very man who had just made him look like a first class fool. He didn’t like being played, and that’s what Solomon had done. First on the Solstice rooftop, then again today.
There was Shelby’s cure however, and Mason couldn’t shake that miracle. Nor could he forget the methods behind it: kidnapping her, threatening him.
You don’t get something for nothing
. Wasn’t that the saying? Mason got the cure he’d always dreamed about, got his daughter whole again, but at what cost? What did they want from him?
I’m going to find out,
he thought. One step at a time,
and the first step’s in Kansas.
O O O
He stared at the laptop screen over a half-eaten Reuben sandwich, focusing on that Google Map in one corner, highlighting the lone farmhouse, and on the other window … records of ownership, deeds, property tax information. Anything and everything he could find from public records.
Which wasn’t much.
Mason leaned back, tapping his fingers together. What seemed like great real estate basically had been unoccupied and tenant-free for thirty-five years. Bought out by the government in a foreclosure, as near as he could determine, then left to itself ever since.
One name on the deeds prior to 1980, but it didn’t help him any. One name, and when he searched on it, found that this individual—or at least someone with the same name, had made his fortune in corn and soybean futures, sold out to the government for a huge fee, and then left for Hollywood. He left behind one hundred acres of land that curiously, and probably much to the government’s confusion, never yielded anything again.
This man, the former owner, invested his fortune in movies and made an even larger fortune bankrolling several major hits and studios. As of last week he was the head of three production companies and producer of countless films and documentaries, a media empire magnate.
Mason could follow the trail there, but doubted the answers could be found with an eighty year old man, who by latest reports, hadn’t been seen for the past few days and rumors were flying about his whereabouts—and his condition.
No, despite Annabelle’s suggestion to contact the previous owner, Mason knew the answer was in the past, not the present. The answer was in Kansas.
He would have to go there. There wasn’t time, but he didn’t care. This was more important, and he had no desire to show up back at Solstice without any cards in his hand, just an empty deck and a bottle of resentment.
He’d be going back with something, one way or another. Something that he was sure was just over the border, waiting for him in a deserted farmhouse that held a thirty-year-old secret.
He finished his coffee as he stared again at the screen, looking from the blurry satellite photo to the government records. But still, that previous owner.
One name.
Palavar.
Chapter 24
“Where is he going?” Victor leaned in over the acolyte’s shoulder to see the monitor, watching the GPS signal as it crossed over into Kansas.
“Should we tell Solomon?”
Victor stood up, crossing his arms. “Not yet, let’s see where he winds up. Although I think I have an idea.”
“Shouldn’t we call a team and arrange his retrieval?”
“No,” Victor said, grim-faced. “If he’s headed where I think he is, we’re not welcome there.”
Chapter 25
Mason turned up the lonely entrance road finally after four attempts to find it had come up empty. There was still an hour of daylight left.
That is
, he thought ruefully,
if my forecast still holds and the world hasn’t shifted somehow on its axis.
Nothing was out of the realm of possibility at this point.
Past sickly cornstalks on either side, their brittle arms bent and languishing in the dying sunlight, he drove up a dusty, rock-strewn road, around a corner and then stopped at a chain fence. He got out, stretched and looked out over the land. The farmhouse rose up out of the cornfield a short distance away. The glinting sunset made the windows look like deep, melancholy eyes observing his progress. The very air was brittle and dry as dust, and what little wind there was moved through the corn, making a desolate sound like a ghost crying for the loss of its body. Weeds choked the earth around the stalks and encroached the chain fence that Mason stepped over.
He paused at a sign, rusted and hanging crooked on a post missing one of the screws.
NO TRESPASSING, ORDER #3440255
U.S. DEPT. of AGRICULTURE
Mason took out his cell phone and snapped a picture of the sign. Thought about it for a moment, then Googled the order number and the Department of Agriculture. It came back promptly with a generic link to a governmental webpage that said: UNDER CONSTRUCTION, CHECK BACK LATER.
Shrugging, Mason kept walking. Around the bend, the cornfield ended and gave way to a field of brown crabgrass and other weeds. A few sickly shrubs persisted and Mason wondered if they might have once formed an elegant boundary line, along with an old fence of stones and bricks, collapsed now in places. Further ahead, near the house, rose two aged willow trees.
Weeping willows, Mason thought, would be an accurate description. Weeping and old, having seen sights that surely drove them to grief. A little farther, nearing the trees now and the farmhouse framed between them, Mason turned. He imagined the sight thirty years earlier. Imagined the four tornadoes bearing down on the house, and then pausing, just as that one had done in Lawton.
Was it the same thing, just on a larger scale? Did they just stop, as if hitting a magical dome? Or was it something else? He closed his eyes, and for a second he was there, seeing the monstrous cyclone. Except this time it brought its friends, and it wasn’t going to be denied. He could see their wrath. Nowhere to run, no protection. Nowhere to go …
He opened his eyes and looked back to the farmhouse.
Nowhere. But inside.
O O O
He climbed the porch steps gingerly, afraid the rotting wood might give way, but it was sturdier than it initially looked. Same for the walls and the windows, and even the roof. Missing shingles, paint peeling, glass cracked, but it was all surprisingly held together well for being in such a long period of disuse. Mason wondered if there had been other unofficial tenants. Squatters or maybe just neighboring kids.
Before trying the door, he looked to his right. There were deep grooves in the deck, as if made by a rocking chair that had seen quite a bit of action. With a rustle of feathers, a scrawny black crow alighted on the ledge beside him and turned its beak so it could fix one pure black eye on him.
It cawed and shook its head. Then it reared up and flew off, back to the willow tree, disappearing behind the leafy canopy.
Mason shrugged. “Nice to meet you too.” He tried the door—locked of course. Then went to the nearest window, which was either likewise locked or just sealed up tight. Cupped his hands against the glare filtering now through the willow branches and between the trees. Inside, it was a mess from what he could tell. Dust, furniture covered with tarps, and what looked like a grand piano, likewise covered.
He circled around the house, trying other windows, peering inside, then around the back, where there stood a rusty shed, door padlocked, and a barn farther back that had collapsed on its side. Mason wondered if it had been a casualty of one of the tornado assaults. The fields stretched out in the dying light here, as far as he could see, and the land was pockmarked in places as if massive boulders had dropped from great heights and rolled, flattening whole sections of the land. A weather vane creaked slowly on the roof, bent at an angle, and cast a long shadow of a wolf, snout raised, upon the overrun brown lawn.
Mason tried the back door, which of course was also locked. He looked around and saw some large bricks and decided, why not? But when he descended the stairs to the back lawn and was about to pick up a brick, he noticed a set of rusty doors at an angle rising from the ground.
Basement access.
He brought the brick. Just another rusted lock securing a latch between the doors. Better than breaking a window, he thought as he hefted the brick. On the third try, the brittle clasp separated and split open, and he was in.
O O O
Have to move fast
, he thought. No lights, no power and only waning daylight through dirt-caked basement windows to light the way. He took the steps quickly, and once in the dank cellar he intended to find the stairs leading up the house, but paused first at the stores of boxes and surprisingly, the collection of toys.
An old yellow tricycle with a silver bell stood in one corner, surrounded by crates full of basketballs, old wooden tennis racquets and baseballs, an old net, horseshoes and a skateboard. He walked around a rocking horse and gently laid a hand on its head, starting its motion. For some reason he lingered, caressing the wooden horse’s frazzled mane and looking into its soulful eyes and feeling a sense of familiarity. Just below its head and under the handles, Mason saw something that caught his eye.
Something scrawled there.
With just enough light, he could make it out if he knelt and looked carefully.
The horse kept rocking, and he followed its motion, making out the scrawled letters in a little child’s handwriting.
AVERY SOLOMON
Christmas 1979