Infinity's Reach (24 page)

“Still trying to rescue the world, I see,” another woman said from the other side. She was dressed in an old T-shirt and shorts. She looked vaguely familiar, but the ton of makeup she had on made it hard for me to see who it was.

“Don’t you recognize me, Finn?” she said. A rueful smile crept across her face.

“Ellie?” I said, not believing it.

“Two years is a long time out here,” she said. “You don’t look the same either. You look like some kind of mountain woman.” Her eyes tracked up and down on my tanned, weathered face and my leather and khaki hodgepodge of clothes, my utility belt and my bandolier.

“Yeah, well you look like some kind of…” My voice trailed off as I stared at my friend who looked closer to 30 than to 20.

“I look like what I am,” she said. “A whore. Like I said, two years is a long time. I did what I had to do to survive. Looks like you did too. Still looking for your father?”

I nodded. “He’s out there, closer than ever before.”

Ellie frowned. “That may be a problem. General Despair is calling all of his troops together for one final assault on Camp Zion. They say that this is the end. Now that he’s captured the infamous Infinity Richards.”

A third woman now spoke up, and I realized she was dressed in military fatigues. “You’re Infinity Richards?” I nodded. “I have a message for you.” She reached into her pocket and pulled out a familiar slip of paper. She opened it up for me to see: 2-27-22-12. I marveled at my Father’s amazing and pervasive messenger system.

I didn’t need my Bible to know what the message was. Two years of carrying a Bible had given me lots of time to become familiar with it. It was one of my favorite verses and a promise from my Father. It was from Revelation 22: “Look, I am coming soon! My reward is with me, and I will give to each person according to what they have done.”

I thought about the words. I thought about what I had experienced in the past four years, about what everyone had experienced. And I thought about what kind of reward my Father would bring to General Despair.

The truck ride took about two hours. We left Vanity Fair and hit flat, empty desert. When the highway started down an incline into a broad valley—what others had referred to as the Vale of Megiddo—I started to see that I was surrounded by an encampment. I looked out the side window and saw enemy soldiers, trucks, tanks, and tents that stretched to the horizon. Ahead of us, the mountains stood as if a barrier—and a promise—of what was to come. But the valley I was in was full of the Army of the Coalition.

The trucks drove through the encampment for quite a while. I had considered jumping out the back of the truck after we lost the soldier in the back. But at first I doubted my ability to survive in the hot desert with my hands strapped behind me. Now I realized that even if I escaped from my confinement here, I’d still be surrounded by an enormous camp of hostile soldiers.

We stopped in an area that featured two round-topped metal huts. Soldiers came to the back of the truck and helped us get out. The women and girls who were with me were led away to one of the metal huts. Hopeful followed Reba and Ellie; I was led in the other direction.

They took me into the other hut. From the outside, it looked like just another storage shed. But the inside was another story. One end was furnished to look similar to the casinos in Vanity Fair, and was apparently the living quarters of General Despair. A massive four-poster bed served as the centerpiece of the living area.

The other end of it was obviously a planning area. Computer terminals with flatscreen monitors lined one wall, and the other wall featured a massive flatscreen TV that was at least ten feet across. As I watched, it showed aerial photos of the mountains directly to the west of us.

General Despair stood talking with several officers in some Asian language, who gestured at the images they saw on the big TV screen. I could see soldiers look in the image, scurrying and clambering across mountain paths, as if they were ants protecting their nest.

“Behold Camp Zion,” General Despair said to me, raising his arm to point at the screen. “We have been looking for it for quite some time. Your father—the Secretary—is elusive. But I suspect he senses how close you are, and how close we are.

“Camp Zion is apparently a series of tunnels that have been dug into the mountains,” he continued. “That’s why we haven’t been able to find the camp by satellite. But now we have it.” He chuckled to himself, rubbing his hands together. “At last! The end is in sight.”

“If you know where Camp Zion is, why do you need me?” I asked.

“Your father has a very strong affinity for you,” he said. “He could run, but he won’t. He feels a strong need to rescue you. But before he has a chance, I will crush him.”

“My superiors in Asia have never understood my strategy. But I always knew that your father—the former Secretary of State for the United States of America, and the last vestige of the former government—was the key to ending it all. And you were the key to your father.”

He inhaled through his nose, and smiled broadly at me.

“Look around you. We have a million men here, all armed with the latest technology. What does your father have? A few thousand at most. Even if that train you were so eager to get to him had arrived with its guns and ammunition, it would not have made a difference. Now he doesn’t have even that.”

“It is the end,” he said. “Tomorrow we will launch an all-out attack on Camp Zion.” He gestured to the big soldier who stood behind me, and he grabbed me by the arm and pushed me out of the room.

How are you going to get out of this one?
I asked myself as we walked back to the other shed. Evangelist was gone, probably dead. Mack Hawley was definitely dead. The two women I came to rescue were prisoners, just as I was. I was surrounded by enemy soldiers, and tomorrow they would attack and destroy Camp Zion.

“Hello Sweetheart,” I heard the soldier behind me rasp into my ear as we walked. I turned to see who it was, but he held me so tight that I couldn’t look. It took me a second, but then I recognized the voice.

“I told you not to call me Sweetheart, Madrigal,” I whispered back to him.

He chuckled. “Well, I’m too old to change my ways. Ready to take a little helicopter ride?”

I smiled. “Absolutely. Mind if I bring a few friends?”

“You wouldn’t be the same girl I knew in St. Louis if you weren’t trying to rescue some other hard-luck case. The more the merrier.”

We walked to the other Quonset hut where the women were being held and past two guards standing by the doorway. They nodded to Madrigal as we entered. When we got inside, I got the opportunity to turn and look at him. He looked pretty much the same as how I knew him in St. Louis, but with a Coalition uniform. He produced a small knife, and cut my hands free.

The women were sitting on crates and boxes that were stacked in one corner. In addition to the five who had accompanied me, another three were there. Hopeful barked once when he saw me. We shushed him, and I spoke quietly.

“We’re getting out of here,” I said. “You can stay if you want or you can come with us.”

“Are you kidding?” one of the ones who had been there before said. “If you’re planning on going to Camp Zion, you may as well shoot me now. They are going to destroy that camp tomorrow.”

“Well, that’s your choice if you want to stay here,” I said. “But I suspect that my Father has a few surprises for the General come tomorrow.”

“I’m in,” said the girl who had brought the message to me.

“Me too,” said Ellie. “The biggest mistake I ever made in my life was leaving you.” She stood and came to hug me. 

“What about you, Reba?” I asked. “All Mack ever wanted was for you to be safe.”

She frowned and stared at the wall before speaking slowly.

“I never treated him the way he treated me,” she said, a tear in her voice. “I didn’t deserve him. He loved me even when I treated him like crap.”

“Choosing to live would be a good start to paying him back,” I said. She turned slowly and looked at me, then nodded.

“Then it’s settled,” I said. “Madrigal will take the four of us to Camp Zion.”

Hopeful barked again.

“Excuse me, the
five
of us.”  
Back to ToC

30
. THE SECOND COMING

INFINITY: DAY 1590: CAMP MEGIDDO

Apparently Madrigal had been in the Coalition camp for quite a while. He’d learned that every evening at 9 p.m., half a dozen helicopters left the base to resupply troops that were stationed in the foothills surrounding the valley. When darkness came, he brought back four Coalition uniforms for us to put on. He also gave me a 9mm pistol. While we put the uniforms on, he took out his K-Bar knife and cut an opening into the back of the Quonset hut large enough for us to scurry through.

We crept between the tents and trucks, following him about 100 yards to the helicopter pad. The three others waited in the shadows with Hopeful as he and I crept up to a large helicopter with blades that were just beginning to turn. He climbed in behind the pilot and hit him over the head, tossing him out on the pad outside. In the meantime, I looked in the back to make sure we didn’t have any other riders, then motioned for the others to join us.

The three of them strapped themselves in their seats in the back. I climbed over the seats and dropped myself into the copilot’s seat.

“You know how to fly this thing?” I asked him as he put on his headphones and began turning switches.

“I know this chopper like I know my ex-girlfriend’s backside,” he said, grinning. He stopped. “Just don’t getting any ideas about throwing cushions out to people in need.”

I shook my head. “The only people in need I know are the ones on board. Let’s get out of here.”

He grinned again. “You took the words right out of my mouth.”

A minute later, six helicopters began rising from the ground. Five of them headed toward Coalition forces surrounding the camp. The sixth—ours—headed straight west.

“SC, SC, this is Madrigal,” he said into his radio. “The bird has flown. Repeat, the bird has flown.”

“Roger,” I heard in my headphone. Then there was silence.

I watched the countryside pass by in the darkness, knowing that when we landed, my four-year journey would be over and I would be with my father. Just as the wake up in the camp in Tennessee had been hard to believe, now I was having trouble believing that the life I had lived for four years was coming to an end.

The helicopter rose higher and higher, leaving the desert behind us and rising over the Sierra Nevada Mountains that we had seen in the distance. When we continued over the mountains for several hours, I turned to Madrigal.

“How far away is the camp? Shouldn’t we be getting there by now?”

He grinned again. “It’s farther away than you—or General Despair—would ever guess. And yet it’s closer too.”

I stared at him as he chuckled. “OK, keep your secrets,” I said.

We kept flying west. About an hour later, Madrigal began to laugh. He turned a switch and I heard a very angry Asian voice over my headphones shouting at us.

“General Despair is a little slow on the uptake,” Madrigal said. “He’s telling us to turn around.” He turned another switch and began talking.

“Sorry General, we got lost,” he said into his microphone. “We were headed for Vegas. Is that west, or east?”

“This is your last warning,” the voice said. “Turn around or you will be shot down.”

As if in response, two jets flashed by us, one on either side coming from behind and flying close.

“Not to worry, sweetheart,” Madrigal said to me. “We got angels on our side.”

In response, I saw more dark objects flying toward us in the pre-dawn darkness. The two jets that had swooshed by us turned and bolted back toward the east.

“Jets!” I said. “Are those our jets?”

“Yes ma’am,” Madrigal said. “And that’s just the start.”

The sun was about to come up in the east, behind us, but suddenly the light grew brilliant. About a minute later, I heard a low boom.

“That’s not a nuke, but I’d bet it’s pretty close to one,” Madrigal said. “Fuel bomb. Makes the atmosphere explode. Goodbye Camp Megiddo.”

“But how?” I said.

“I would imagine it was one of our stealth bombers. Flew right past their radar. Don’t worry; that won’t be the last of it. They didn’t want to use another nuke on American soil, but there won’t be any more Coalition troops when they’re done with them.”

“So Camp Zion was just a ruse?”

“Oh it was real enough,” he said. “Your Father had the job of holding things together while our Forces overseas took care of the countries that attacked us. Now headquarters is just a little bit farther west. We’ve all been waiting for General Despair to put all of his bad eggs in one basket. It’s been a long time coming, but today is Judgment Day.”

Stunned, I thought about what Madrigal had said as I watched wave after wave of fighters, bombers and attack helicopters fly east toward what was left of Camp Megiddo.