“I don’t understand. How could the Israelites cross the Red Sea without God’s help?”
“The answer lies in the verse itself, Exodus verse 14, the most important passage in the entire Torah. By pulling letters in a specific order from lines 19 through 21, you are left with seventy-two three-letter words — the very triads that God had engraved on Moses’s staff.”
“What were they?” Paolo asks.
“The 72 names of God. Not names in the ordinary sense but a combination of Aramaic letters that can strengthen the soul’s connection to the spiritual realm and channel the unfiltered Light. Abraham used the 72 names in his youth to keep from being burned alive by Emperor Nimrod when he was tossed in an oven. Moses used the energy to control the physical universe.”
“Virgil, I’m sorry… but how can any of this help us now?”
“Paolo, if you truly believe God is all-knowing and all-seeing, then it’s insulting to think He needs to be reminded to help you. ‘Hey, God, I need you down here, and don't forget my soul mate, my money, my food.’ That's why God the Creator, God the Light said to Moses, ma titzach alai—why are you yelling to me? What God was saying was, ‘Moses, wake up, you have the technology, use it! It’s the concept of mind over matter.”
Shep paced, his eyes focused in the direction of the approaching engines. “Virgil, this really isn’t the time for a sermon.”
The old man grimaced. “Patrick, the connection fostered by the 72 names won't work when your thoughts and actions are impure. Moses doubted, so the sea didn’t part. But one man never wavered in his belief. One devout man took Moses’s staff, engraved with the 72 names, and walked straight into the Red Sea until the water was up to his chin… and that was when the waters parted. You see, Paolo, when it comes to faith, there can be no doubt, no ego, only certainty. There are twenty-two letters in the Hebrew alphabet. One key letter is missing from the 72 names of God — the gimel, which stands for ga'avah—the human ego. If you truly believe in God, there can be no room for doubt.”
Shep turned away from the conversation, his adrenaline pumping as he waited for the military vehicles to appear. Nowhere to run, nowhere to hide… slowed down by a crazy old man and a pregnant woman.
He looked out at the reservoir. So vast was the waterway that its borders stretched nearly from one end of the park to another, its ten-block horizon disappearing in a fog bank.
Fog?
“Paolo… we need to find a boat!”
The Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis Reservoir was a forty-foot-deep, 106-acre body of water encircled by a 1.58-mile jogging track and tall chain-link fence. The reservoir’s maintenance shed was located off the bridle path.
Shep kicked open the door. Paolo peered inside with his light. The yellow inflatable raft was hanging from the ceiling, secured to the wooden beams by two pulleys. Shep cut the lines with one swing of his prosthetic arm. Grabbing an oar, he helped Paolo drag the rubber craft outside.
“Over here.” Virgil and Francesca were waiting by the jogging track’s public bathrooms. The old man had pulled a section of fencing loose from where it attached to the edge of the brick facing, allowing them access to the water.
The building’s facade was covered in spray-painted graffiti, representing everything from gang insignias and messages of love to colorful artistic endeavors that would put Peter Max to shame. Appearing along the top of the wall, painted in black letters, was a prophetic message:
you are under surveillance.
Below that, represented in four-foot-high stylized white letters was a rock fan’s homage to his favorite band:
STYX
Shep stared at the stylized graffiti, a distant memory tugging at his brain.
“Patrick, we need you.” Virgil and Paolo had pulled back the loose section of fence, allowing Shep to maneuver the raft through the opening and into the water. Paolo climbed down into the boat first, then reached up to assist Francesca and Virgil.
Squeezing through the opening, Shep dragged the fencing back into place and lowered himself into a kneeling position in the stern next to Virgil. He gripped the middle of the oar in his right fist but could not secure the top with the mangled pincer of his prosthetic left arm.
“Allow me, my friend.” Paolo took the oar from Patrick and stroked, guiding the raft away from the reservoir’s northern wall. The water was dark and murky, though noticeably warmer than the frigid night air, the temperature differential the cause of the dense fog bank.
The shoreline gradually disappeared from view, along with the night sky.
Paolo continued paddling, quickly losing all sense of direction. “This isn’t good. I could be taking us in an endless circle.”
Virgil held up his hand. “Listen.”
They heard a crowd cheering somewhere in the distance.
“Head for the sound, Paolo. It will guide you to the southern end of the reservoir.”
Altering their course, he paddled, the sound of the water crisp in the December air, the fog thickening with each stroke.
The smell reached them first, the putrid scent similar to an open sewer.
The bow struck an unseen object. Then another.
Paolo abruptly withdrew the oar. Snatching the lantern from Francesca, he again attempted to light the wick, succeeding on his third try. He held the lamp out over the side, the fog-veiled glow revealing what lay upon the surface. “Mother of God.”
There were thousands of them, floating like human flotsam. Some drifted facedown, most were facing up, their red-rimmed eyes bulging in death, their mottled flesh bloated and pale, their necks festooned with grapefruit-sized purplish black buboes, swollen even more from their immersion in water. Men and women, old and young — the cold water having combined with the plague to disguise their ethnicity, their body compositions determining their ranking within the reservoir. The heaviest among them, being the most buoyant, occupied the surface of the man-made lake. The thin and muscled, unable to float, had been relegated to the mid and deeper waters, along with the infants and children.
Paolo cupped his hand over his wife’s mouth before she could scream. “Close your eyes, look away. Scream, and the soldiers will find us.”
Virgil wiped at cold tears. “Paolo, douse the light and work your oar… take us across this river of death.”
“River of death… Styx.” The words of the Divine Comedy cracked open another sealed chamber of Shep’s memory, Dante’s hellish prose laid out before him. The water was a dark purplish gray, and we, following its somber undulation, pursued a strange path down to where there lay a marsh at the slope's culmination—
— Styx was the name that swamp bore.
Shep’s eyes widened as the vaccine-created hallucination gripped his mind, the flock of floating corpses spinning in his vision—
— the dead suddenly animating!
Limbs gyrate. Waterlogged hands paw blindly at one another, stripping clothing from skin in the process. Growing steadily more restless, the awakening dead reach out to tug at their neighbors’ hair and gouge their eyes. Several of the more feisty corpses actually propel their ghastly heads from the frigid water, sinking their bared yellowed teeth into another plague victim’s rotting flesh as if they were zombies.
As Shep watches in horror, bizarre flashes of bluish white light ignite randomly from somewhere within the depths, each strobe-like burst revealing haunting glimpses of more plague victims — a submerged army of the dead fighting their way to the surface. Suddenly, Shep finds himself looking out onto a sea of faces — Iraqi faces — all staring at him in judgment, their silence deafening.