“Tell me about the atomic tests.”
Caleb rubbed his temples. “Why? You already know it all, I’m sure. Do you just like hearing me talk?”
Boris snapped his gum. “Yeah, you have a nice voice. Puts me to sleep, almost.” He let out a long yawn, then abruptly jumped to his feet. “Actually screw that. Look, this is fun but taking too long. “Time to show you what you need to see.”
He snapped his fingers.
And the visions came crashing at him like a freight train, every car full of bright, painful sights and sounds.
13
In the second pew, Victoria Bederus raised her head off her interlocked fingers and looked up at the cross. Framed against the backdrop of breathtakingly simple stained glass artwork and the glow from the rising sun filtering through in along shafts of dust-heavy light, the silhouette of the cross, high above the raised altar, cast its shadow directly over her.
She felt the weight of her own responsibility pushing on her shoulders, ever so gently, but heavy enough that she could barely rise.
Get up, girl. Get up and get down to the basement where they were waiting. Hopefully doing more than waiting. Hurry. Phoebe depended on her. So did Caleb Crowe and the whole team and, heck maybe even the fate of the world rested on what she could do down there..
Something big was happening, maybe not Revelation-sized, but pretty damn close by her guess. The media tried to downplay all this psychic stuff, turning it into just overblown technological spying, but the underlying fact remained. Someone with power — more power than she or her friends — had flipped the tables, tipped the apple cart and set fire to reason and goodness.
Something bad was coming, real bad, and with it a whole mess of tragedy and sadness. Far worse than the floods and the devastation she had foreseen before Katrina hit her home and washed it away, along with her grandma, along with her brother Shane — who had the gift even stronger than her. Granma saw it coming too, but no one believed her, locked in that home, trapped in a wheelchair and sayin’ things all day that the orderlies and doctors — and even her own children — thought was just plain silly old age. Always on about the End Times, a coming flood to ‘put Noah’s little thing to shame’.
Victoria, only sixteen, believed her, and so did Shane. They saw things too, but when they told their Ma, all they got was a smacking and no more visits to Granma. Not until after the flood and hurricane, after Katrina had done her business and run off. During the cleanup, they were allowed back, to walk through the ruins of the old age home, where they found the sewage-covered wheelchair.
Victoria bit her lip until it bled, and the rusty taste forced her to move. Back to the present, to the shadow of the cross passing her vision. Responsibility was there, but she wasn’t alone.
Not alone, but also, she was in charge. She was it. They had no one else, no one to stand before the coming juggernaut of fate, the rough beast slouching toward everyone and everything.
Get down there girl.
Lead.
The basement, normally home to religious instruction, nightly support groups and a monthly potluck dinner for the faithful congregants, now served as the home for what was left of the Morpheus Initiative: namely their very green recruits. Some of these people, Victoria had come to know in just a few short hours, were — to put it nicely — rejects. They hadn’t made the initial cut, which didn’t necessarily mean that Curt Overslaugh here or Marla Harris over there had no talent; on the contrary, each of them had shown some promise or else they wouldn’t have been on the initial invite list, but they just couldn’t perform at the level Morpheus team required to be an active contributor quickly.
Seventeen such ‘rejects’ were down here, having arrived any time from last night to just an hour ago, with the dawn. Victoria thought the hardest part would have been tracking down these people. She had been worried that the records Phoebe had provided her may have been the same ones the FBI or NSA had just gained access to as well, and she had been more than a little surprised these ones hadn’t been either rounded up or under surveillance. Still expecting a raid at any minute, fearing that her meager attempts at being sneaky picking up these recruits and taking circuitous routes to the church hadn’t been remotely effective.
“How’d the prayers go?” Curt asked, looking up from a paper plate and a half-eaten slice of pizza. Four boxes had been delivered, and that was another fear Victoria had to sweat through — going to the door with Pastor Frank, both praying that the delivery man was just a delivery man, and not the lead scout of a SWAT team.
“Any more recruits?” Someone else voiced from the back.
“Or any sign of the hunters?” Marla asked. She was pale and older than most here, maybe in her sixties, but seemingly full of rosy health and vigor.
“Hunters no,” Victoria answered after closing the door and looking at them all. Pastor Frank had been down earlier, to pray with anyone who wanted it; and all of them did, regardless of religion. In fact, there were among this group three atheists, one Muslim and the rest varying degrees of belief from relapsed Catholics to hardcore Baptists. At this moment however, the gravity of the situation bonded them all to a larger cause, a higher promise and feeling of mutual dependency.
Regardless of the fact that they hadn’t been initially chosen, it was clear they were next on the food chain for the hunted. They didn’t have long. Their names were catalogued, and if that wasn’t enough, the fear that soon in this climate, neighbors and friends would be turning on those who were different. Full of mistrust and fear, angry perhaps at the realization now that they may have had their most intimate secrets exposed unwillingly by…well, freaks, as most would call them, it was only a matter of time.
Again Victoria felt the heavy weight of the moment. The responsibility of all these souls — their families, their very lives even — in her hands.
“We’re all here,” she said. “Safe for now. Don’t think of anything else. Don’t fear these hunters, don’t fear anything. Just concentrate on what needs to be done.”
“And what is that?” Marla spoke up, her voice cracking a little when the others looked her way. “Some of us have been at it for hours, drawing and drawing. Trying to see, I don’t know what?”
Victoria stepped in closer, smelling the peppers and onions, the cheese and the pepperoni. “Good. Okay, maybe this is a fine point to pause and take stock of what you’ve sensed. What you’ve seen.”
“I haven’t seen shit,” said another. Jack something, she recalled. Twenty-something hipster with a wool hat and plaid shirt. He looked scared, and maybe a little high. Victoria didn’t blame him if had snuck out, even here on sacred ground, for a little nip or smoke, but she had to reign him in.
“You just need focus. You all do, and…” She moved closer, now smelling coffee and sweat, the staleness of the ventilation. “We should take a break, and…these drawings are interesting.”
“Collected them all as we’ve been at it,” Curt said. “Just like you said we should. We do our thing, then if one of us gets something, draw it and put it here with the others.”
Victoria nodded, bending slightly over the table and resting her hands palm down on the corners. She slowly scanned the rest of the pictures after looking at more details of the first that had caught her eye.
“Marla, you drew this one?” She held it up before the group, meeting the woman’s eyes as she stirred her cup of tea.