He turned to the others, giddy with an excitement he had not felt since he was a child, leaving a movie theater, dreaming of the adventures he would have as an archaeologist.
“We have to find the lost Ark.”
ARK
TWENTY-NINE
They couldn’t stay. That much was obvious.
Five minutes had passed since the last burst of light, and there had been no more shooting. Pierce was pretty sure the gunmen were either dead — flash-cooked — or blinded to the point of incapacitation. Either way, they were a secondary concern. Priority One was getting out of the cave and off the mountain, while attracting as little attention as possible.
Fiona presented an additional compelling reason for a hasty exit. “I think the cows—”
“Shekinah,” Pierce said.
“Whatevs. I think they’re attracted to the orb. I mean like a magnetic attraction. I tried to use it to shoo them away, but as long as we’re here, they’re going to stick around.”
“And if we leave?” Gallo asked. “Will they follow us to the ends of the Earth, or just keep wandering around killing anyone who looks at them cross-eyed?”
Fiona returned a helpless shrug.
“If they are what I think they are,” Pierce said. “They’ll return to a dormant state as soon as we’re out of here.”
“Shekinah,” Gallo murmured. “The glory of God. According to kabbalists, it’s the feminine expression of God’s divinity. And cows are female.”
“Well, yes, but that’s not what I mean. Fiona is right. The creatures are some kind of mobile energy storage vessels for the Originators. When they left…or died out…the creatures went into sleep mode, until Moses showed up and found some kind of control device left behind by the Originators. Probably something made out of memory metal like the orb. Maybe it’s what inspired the legend of the sun chariot. While Moses held onto it, he could control the shekinahs. Use them to do stuff that must have seemed like the power of God.”
“The Plagues,” Gallo supplied. “And parting the Red Sea. That’s more than a little blasphemous. And it doesn’t consider the possibility that maybe the Originators didn’t create any of this. Maybe they simply found it first.”
“Unlikely.”
“How’s the saying go? God works in mysterious ways.” She smiled, knowing the statement would irk him, and then added. “Is anything about all this likely?”
Pierce conceded the point with a subtle nod. “But I’m going to run with my theory until proven wrong. Now, the ninth plague was three days — seventy-two straight hours — of total darkness, which the Egyptians would have seen as a direct attack against Ra, the sun god.”
“Three days of darkness. A solar event?”
“I think so. If our assumptions about the Black Knight are correct, he must have used it to redirect sunlight away from that part of the Earth.”
“Wouldn’t that have caused earthquakes like it did today?” Fiona asked.
“It very well may have. Or worse. Some scholars have theorized that the true cause of the Plagues was a coincidental eruption of the Thera volcano, but what if it’s the other way around? What if that solar event triggered the volcano?”
“Which in turn caused the parting of the Red Sea.”
Pierce spread his hands. “It all fits. After the Exodus, Moses came back here where he had the Ark made, a golden chest topped with cherubs—”
“We’ve all seen the movie with you, George,” Gallo said with a wry smile. “Many times.”
Pierce grinned. After seeing that movie the first time, he had become obsessed with Ark lore, researching all the stories of what it was and what became of it, searching for it, if only in his daydreams. “Well you know the power that was released at the end of the movie to melt Nazi faces? That was a real thing, and they called it shekinah. The Ark was so dangerous that it had to be kept in a special tent, the Tabernacle of Meeting. It was made of heavy fabric woven with gold fibers. The lid with the angels was called the Mercy Seat, and when it was in the Tabernacle, it radiated light — shekinah. No one but the high priest was allowed to see the Ark, and even then, only once a year. They had to tie a rope to his foot so that if he died, they could drag his body out. When moving the Ark, they kept it covered at all times, with a blanket made out of the same fabric. No one was ever permitted to touch it. Several centuries later, during the reign of King David, the Ark was being moved by wagon. One of David’s men inadvertently touched it and died. Some fringe archaeologists have speculated that it might have been a sort of primitive battery, but I think it was a lot more than that.”
Fiona’s eyes widened in understanding. “Moses put one of the cows in it.”
“No…I mean, yes, he did that, but there’s more to it. I think he put the Originator artifact in it. He created the Ark to be the master control device for the entire Originator power system.”
Gallo raised an eyebrow. “How did you arrive at that conclusion?”
“Forty years after the Exodus, when Moses’s successor Yeshua ben Nun — Joshua — led the Israelite army into Palestine, the priests carried the Ark ahead of the army. When they walked into the Jordan River, the waters parted, just like at the Red Sea — and maybe just like Fi did at Arkaim — so that the army could ford the river. In the first battle, the power in the Ark leveled the city walls of Jericho. Later, during the battle of Gideon, the Bible says that God hurled stones from heaven to slay the enemy — some kind of gravitational anomaly maybe — and when the enemy forces tried to escape, Joshua commanded the sun to stand still in the sky, which it did for a full twenty-four hours.”
“So Joshua did the same thing Fallon did. Another solar event.”
“Possibly the same one that inspired the Phaethon legend and Fiona’s story of Raven stealing the sun. There’s one more solar event mentioned in the Bible. A minor one. During the reign of King Hezekiah, the prophet Isaiah caused the shadow on a sundial to turn backward ten degrees.”
Gallo folded her arms across her chest. “So the Ark and the Plagues and everything else… All miracles of the Bible… The foundation of the religious beliefs of half the world’s population… It’s all hogwash? An alien artifact pretending to be God?”
“Well…” Pierce shrugged.
“Bullshit,” Gallo said. “You’re a smart guy, but your narrow worldview tends to skew your perspective. You look for explanations without considering that the supernatural might be real. You’re willing to believe in the most outlandish theories I’ve ever heard, unless believing means changing the way you live your life. Everything that you’ve said fits, but there’s no evidence to suggest that the ‘Originators’ were from another planet, dimension, or time.”
“You think the Originators were supernatural?” Fiona asked. “Like angels?”
“Or demons,” Gallo said. “We know the Originators were viewed as giants. We know they played with genetics. We know they crossbred with humanity. All of these elements fit with the Biblical story of—”
“The Nephilim,” George said.
“The Nephi-what now?” Fiona asked.
“Nephilim,” George repeated. “The product of demons mating with human women. They’re recorded in the Bible, and other texts around the world, as ‘men of renown.’ Giants. Like demi-gods, far more advanced than mankind at the time.”
“Many scholars who believe the Nephilim story,” Gallo started, “also believe the inhabitants of Jericho were Nephilim. Joshua’s scouts reported that they were as grasshoppers in the sight of the people who lived there. So if the technology used to destroy the city was the same as Moses used to part the sea and rain down plagues on Egypt, perhaps its origin is more supernatural than alien. The fight between science and religion, and the hostility some people have toward religion—” She cleared her throat while looking at George. “—has never made sense to me. How could a God who created the universe and the scientific laws that allow it to function, not use science to carry out his plans?”