The Lover's Parable Through A Seven World Journey (36 page)

Several women, upon seeing the Security vehicles heading towards the city, began forsaking their fieldwork, shouting out the alarm towards the other groups of women. Lifting their heads from their work, the women downrange turned towards the city, hollering out, alerting the next group in line. As the distress calls reached the edge of the city, the cries grew louder as nearly every woman, upon hearing the warning calls, lifted their voices in a chorus of admonition.

Floating upon the breeze through the window, the melodic monition fell upon Maryanne’s ears.

“They’re coming,” she said under her breath.

Moaning in agony, Sofia returned to the cot. With her arms shivering under the stress, Maryanne knew that the child was going to be born any minute and that the Security forces would not be far behind, perhaps even present for the birth itself.

The echoing shot taken at the Sergeant and Goldman had initiated from a rifle directly above the heads of John and Roberts. Three distinct voices, apparently muffled under their gas masks, were calling out targeting positions for the sniper. Moving further into the old, fragile apartment building, John and his partner were silent and focused. The voices could be heard falling down the plaster and concrete littered stairwell leading up to them.

Turning off their microphones, the two-man assassin team toe-stepped their way up the stairwell, taking extra precaution not to disturb any of the debris that lay at their feet. The light of the Savior was beginning to seep into the room as they reached the top of the staircase. Hidden behind a cloth-covered banister that blocked their view from the team of deserters, the two men placed their eyes against the holes punched into the cloth’s side and peered through the tattered railing.

The feeling of pushing was so overwhelming that Sofia could not stand to wait any longer. Screaming in pain, blood and liquid poured forth from her birthing area.

“He’s almost here, Sofia. Keep pushing,” Maryanne encouraged her, holding out her towel wrapped arms between Sofia’s legs.

The warning cries of the streets outside were at a deafening volume as the transporters pulled up to the curb of their abode. Maryanne looked back over her shoulders, anticipating their presence. She knew they would be kicking in the door any minute.

The beams of light entering through the wounds of the building were falling upon the three-man sniper team. With the deserter’s backs facing them, John and Roberts could see, to their surprise, set between two soldiers dressed in their military battle dress, the sniper lying prone on the floor, fully clothed in Sweeper attire.

As Roberts turned to look at John, his boot knocked a piece of concrete over the edge of the stairs, alerting their foes. John lifted the barrel of his rifle over the railing. Pulling the trigger, he opened fire, blindly emptying his magazine into the direction of the enemy. Roberts, throwing a flash-bang grenade over the railing ducked his head down, yelling, “Grenade!”

As the blinding explosion rocked the walls, raining down chunks of plaster and concrete into the room, John let his rifle fall back, swinging across his shoulder upon its sling, while he retrieved the handgun holstered upon his hip. With Roberts in tow, the two men moved into the room, saturated with the hot bars of light filtering through the heavy clouds of dust kicked up by the skirmish. With several shots to the head and torso, the Sweeper agent fell to his death. The eyes and ears of the two remaining soldiers were in a state of neural confusion. John and Roberts blocked the Savior’s light from their faces as they stepped in front of them. The men appeared to be willingly kneeling down, giving themselves into their captor’s hands.

As the child’s head began to crown, Maryanne heard the thumping of fists on the door behind her, followed by the demand to immediately open it. Through the thin strips of light falling from the ceiling, the dust pulsated off the walls with each knock of the agent outside. Sofia, too overwhelmed by the pain to hear the commotion, continued to push, feeling the movement of the child as he prepared to make his entrance into the
world.

With her baby’s head completely free and exposed, the Savior’s rise brought the needed heat and soft brightness to bear upon him. His shoulders were beginning to pass through her vaginal canal when the door burst open to the sounds of men yelling and boots pounding.

“Get on the floor, now,” The agents yelled with their guns drawn.

Ignoring their demands, Maryanne continued encouraging Sofia with the birth.

The two deserters did not plead for their lives. They did not even blink as they cast their eyes up to the Great Star above. At the moment that John and Roberts pulled their triggers, John was almost certain that he saw the men smile. As the bullets tore into their heads, their bodies folded in upon themselves to the floor like cloth, bleeding out their life’s worth. They had become like the city, empty shells, nothing more.

With her final push, Sofia heard the cry of her child for the first time. Seeing Maryanne at the end of the cot, her baby wrapped in the towel, she held her arms up to take hold of him.

Like bright vines of a forest of light, the Savior’s beams filled the room through the holes in the ceiling.

“Put the child down and get on the floor,” came the demand once again from behind Maryanne.

Maryanne could not obey his orders, and defying them, she began to present the newborn to his mother. As the bundled package was about to be delivered into Sofia’s hands, two electrified prongs veering towards Maryanne’s back followed by a puff of smoke from the barrel of the agent’s taser.

The barbed needles sailed through the air, whizzing through the shadows of the ceiling, inline with their target. Sofia could feel the warmth of the child through the thin cloth of the towel as he fell into her arms.

As the wired darts entered into the falling particles of light, they stopped mid-flight, tumbling to the floor. Maryanne turned around to look at the man that had just fired the weapon.

“This is not your child,” she said, falling to her knees and looking to the Savior above. “Please, don’t let them take him.”

Throwing down the taser, the commanding agent ordered his awaiting Security personnel to arrest the two women and to separate them from the child, taking extra care to be sure that they were not transported back to their headquarters together.

Sofia screamed out as the men began to approach them, “You’re not taking my baby!”

Closing in on Maryanne, the first agent entered into the light. Like a bubble bursting in the air, he exploded with a glorious mist of crimson spray of flesh and bone, painting the ceiling and walls, blowing holes through the cardboard, allowing more light to enter
in.

Staring in disbelief, Sofia’s face was splattered with the ruby dots of the Savior’s wrath, while the crying bundle in her arms was a speckled display of the things to come.

Pushing his way out the door in order to flee from the macabre incident, a light ray fell on the commanding agent, and in an instant, he was gone, coating the doorway and stairwell outside with the remnants of his lost being. As the Savior’s particles filtered in through their newly found portals, the annihilation followed down the stairwell like a chain of timed death: one explosion followed another until the living were no more, and the dripping enclosure was all that remained of them.

Waiting beside their transporters, witnesses to the destruction from within, the remaining agents attempted to rush through the crowds, pushing the women to the ground in their desperate attempts to escape. But they were met with the same fate as their comrades. As the burning sphere of the sky arose above the rooftops, their bodily structures polluted the women around them.