Monica scoffs, “Stand guard? You say that like it is a living creature.”
Sebastian hovers his pen over the sheet on Orion. “Think of Orion as the protector from the bull that is charging us, sent by Andromeda, aka the black hole from hell.”
He looks up from the sheet to both of us. “Now let’s relate this scene to our world shall we. Malicious beings
, soul-like entities, from within the black hole of Andromeda are invading us. Orion is the defender of our world, our side of the celestial equator. How? Through those born with the abilities to guard our world, guardians. Do you see the logic of the ancient Indians of the mounds now? The black hole within Orion holds our salvation. Jesca, she divined it. I have not. She has the answers within her. She is the keeper of the path we must take on this journey.”
It can’t be only Jesca. We are all guardians willing to fight.
Sebastian draws three raised mounds on the earth. Between the mounds he draws the same band of dots, mimicking the position of Orion’s belt. “Orion’s Constellation Theory, Ezra. You have heard of it. Giza pyramids, the Hopi Mesas in Arizona. Why not the Etowah Mounds. The ancient Indian mound builders, my ancestors, Jesca’s ancestors intended to build the mounds in relation to the lines of Orion’s belt. Why? I can only fathom that they were contacted by benign beings willing to protect them.”
Monica cuts in,
“Benign beings?”
Ezra approaches her que
stion with caution of rejection, “Where there is dark, there must be light. Where there is bad, there is good. Andromeda’s black hole holds lost souled beings pursuing our destruction. Orion’s black hole might hold beings wanting to aid in our salvation. The ancient Indians trusted them, that is significant. Jesca’s premonitions, my premonitions, Anna had them too, she told me how she feared for Jesca, for you.”
His
speaking about Anna telling him something she withheld from me raises my temper instantly. I look away from Sebastian, down at the empty glass I am holding. I didn’t want to hear what she had chosen to tell him, but withheld from me. I shake my head. “Don’t, just don’t!”
Sebastian rests his hand on my back. “She withheld her premonitions to protect you, just like I had.”
I set my glass on the table to my right and lay back on the pillow of the stiff makeshift bed. I close my eyes and try once more to reach her. Anna.
Nothing.
A knot lodges in my throat. Keeping my eyes shut, I speak around the lump. “Since passing back through the veil, I haven’t been able to reach her.”
Sebastian doesn’t offer any words of hope or wisdom, yet his silence holds comfort.
My mind drifts to Jes and how she is holding up with the added pressure being placed on her shoulders. She is strong, but she isn’t unbreakable. None of us are. If I was her and I was handed the ancestral bomb Sebastian just dropped on me, I would have caved right then and there as a twenty something young adult. I open my eyes halfway and look at Sebastian hovering over the bed now. “Have you told her everything you just told us?”
Sebastian pushes his hands in his front pant pockets and shakes his head. “No, I waited to tell you first.”
I steady my gaze on him, unable to read him mentally, but understanding why he told me first. “You want me to tell her.”
Sebastian says nothing, just nods.
I slowly sit up and rise from the bed. My legs, my body, feel stronger than they did moments ago. The vertigo is almost completely gone. I look at Monica. “We need to brief everyone.”
Monica throws a set of clothes at me and heads for the door. “I will gather everyone. We will be in the conference room in ten minutes.”
“Hey, Monica?”
She angles her h
ead toward me, hand on the open door knob.
“Thank you.”
Monica nods once and disappears out the door.
Sebastian turns to leave as well. I pull the white robe from my body and pull the shirt over my head. “Sebastian.”
I don’t turn to look at him, but he calls back from behind me, “Yes?”
“Have you tried to reach her? Dobria?”
Sebastian’s voice is so low it is almost inaudible. “Yes. I cannot hear her though, not since passing back through the wormhole.”
I continue dressing. “Do you think we will hear them again?”
Sebastian replies, “Yes, we will hear them again, somewhere, sometime, some place.”
I hear the door open,
and then close. I dress quickly to find Jesca before meeting the others.
Jesca
I storm through the hallways, lights flickering above. My ears catch voices, an audio recording, coming from an open door ahead on the right. I approach the unsealed door slowly and survey inside. It’s the room I found before leaving our world to ascend the veil. The room where I saw how the Sondian fellowship took control of the chaos in our world within a matter of days. It has been a year now. Panic rises just thinking of what implications that bears. Drawn to the images streaming through the three computer screens, I enter the room and sit in the vacant swivel chair among them. I focus on the screen to my left first. The scrolling feed at the bottom of the screen is dated, but it doesn’t matter. I have no idea what today is, a year later from when I left.
The images...men and women being taken by force by soldiers, military soldiers. I take the mouse and scroll over the volume control. Sounds of multiple people yelling is the background noise for the newscaster. “One month after the intersection, the U.S. government is still taking down a group of radicals, known as the Dobrian fellowship. New cells are developing as quickly as they are being disbanded.”
The screen switches to another scene, people dressed in civilian clothes fighting against armed soldiers. This is somewhere else, not the U.S. The fatigues the soldiers are wearing are charcoal grey with a red stripe along the length of their arms. They are throwing tear gas among the civilians. The civilians, they must be us, the so-called radicals.
The newscaster continues, “This is a world-wide revolution in an attempt to diminish our resolve that we are safe and do not foresee any future attack on our world. The so-called invasion claims, put forth by the Dobrian fellowship have been proven false.”
A picture of Adam Claiborne fills the screen. His face has withered, dark circles encompass his eyes, and his clothes look disheveled in the image. I wonder where he is, where they have him.
“Adam Claiborne, one of the leading radicals captured just over a year ago, was found dead early last night in an undisclosed confinement cell. The cause of his death is still unknown.”
A flash on the screen to my right, draws my attention away from Adam’s image.
An explosion.
I slide myself over to the next computer, turn up the volume so it drowns out the first computer. The words or unintelligible; another language, so I mute it. I look at the date, four months after the date-stamp on the first computer screen.
A flash.
Another explosion.
Confusion.
People running through the streets. A woman getting trampled. They are running from something. The amateur footage being shot by a bystander pans out, to the masses filling the streets running from something. As the footage remains focused, I watch waiting to see what is causing the panic. Then, I see them peppered among the civilians. The shifting faces give them away: grotesque, sunken, sallow. Black orbs with no whites. The faces I saw in the files back in Florida. The faces I saw beyond the Andromeda galaxy, beyond the veil; the occupiers. They were here, just a Michael said they would be. The entire time we were beyond the veil, access to our world had been open and they came. They hid in plain site until this moment on the screen. Why?
The person taking the footage screams and yells. I can’t understand him, but his tone sounds like he is trying to tell the people to move faster in his panicked state. Then, one of the beings takes hold of a woman and man by their waists, fragments, and disappears. I have seen that before, I have done that before. That thing jumped with them; astral projected. Where though? The screen freezes, rewinds, stops before the first image of the shifting beings appears and plays back on its own. This must have been one of the first sightings of the invaders.
W
ere the people running from the beings or something else?
I look at the mass of people again. Many of them are being helped along by other civilians. One is being carried. Their faces are filled with terror, but many of them look ill, sick. As the video loops again, I wonder if this was also the beginning of a major shift in the elements of our world.
Is that why the beings saw fit to invade, when we were at our weakest?
The video loop stops and starts over again. I can’t look at it anymore. I turn to the third screen. Nothing is looping. I look at the desktop more closely and see folders labeled by month. With my hand on the mouse, I hover over the folder with the oldest date. February 2012, that must have been after we left. I open the folder and see file after file of videos. The team must have saved these as they documented the progression. The folder contains about six video files. Each are labeled: “Element Levels Increasing.
Correlation with Human Casualties”, “Human Death Toll by Country”, “Andromeda Beings Taking Over”, “More Dobrian Cells Taken Down”, “Sondian’s Pose No Solution”, “Gabriel Griffin Found Dead”, “Dobrian Copula Implantation Schedule Locations”.
One by one, I go through each folder for each month we were gone. All video documentation of what has happened around our world. I don’t watch the videos, I can’t. Just the titles build a story of what has happened while we have been gone. The elements in
our world shifted due to the intersection, just as Adam Claiborne had told us. It made humans sick, but it wasn’t an illness that would heal. I don’t want to imagine the slow death of suffocation the deceased suffered. I remember the feeling of suffocating too well. The beings from beyond our universe, beyond the veil, came out of hiding and began the takeover. And, they did not stop with those that were not Sondians apparently. They did not discriminate when choosing vessels to occupy, something I’m sure Gabriel Griffin and the other Sondians were not expecting per Michael Sanderson’s naive promises.
I think of Michael, here in our world now.
How will he learn of the diabolical souled beings that perforated the Andromeda galaxy rescinding their promise to him? To keep his fellowship safe during the takeover of our world? The rapture of our world? If they are the Hell coming to our world, will the Heaven come too?
The small scrape of the door against the concrete tile floor has me spinning in an about face. Ezra stands in the open doorway taking in the enormity of what I am watching on the computer screens. As his eyes move from screen to screen, I observe a gamut of emotions pass over his face. I look away from him and down at my clasped hands; searching for stable ground.
Ezra moves further into the small room and closes the door behind him. The sounds from the two video feeds melding together are roaring through the computer speakers now. I guess I didn’t realize I had them both turned up so loud. I spin back around in my chair to face the computers and fumble to mute the sound on both of them. When the sounds of chaos have been silenced, I turn back around. Ezra is sitting in a chair opposite me poised to talk. Talk about the legacy that has been kept from us for our protection. The funny thing is the legacy will wind up being our path to salvation, the only true protection we have left.
Jesca
It doesn’t take long to pack. I place my few items of clothing into the duffle bag. The only thing remaining is the ant farm. I flop down on the bed next to the duffle bag and lift the limited world in my hands, peering at the onyx creatures stumbling around through tunnels and crevices. They aren’t moving as quickly as they had when Xander brought them into this very room over a year ago, before we ascended the veil of our universe into a bona fide hell.
Ezra told me everything Sebastian did not while we were beyond the veil. Ezra must have thought it would have thrown me over the edge to learn all of the added details about my lineage and this ancestral legacy I am part of. It didn’t. After seeing what I saw beyond the veil, it is hard to believe that the Onoch legacy could be any worse of a sentence.
As I look closer, I see some of the ants curled up around themselves, lifeless. Others are crippled, pulling themselves along the cavernous tunnels with two, sometimes one working appendage. One particular still body has the gel-like nourishment cocooning its form. I look above the body and notice that the tunnel above had collapsed atop, trapping the ant.
During the team debriefing, everyone was present. When Ezra and I entered the room, I could feel Nate’s and Xander’s eyes on me. I didn’t make eye contact with anyone. I sat and waited for all of them to learn the turn of events in our reality yet again and where we must go now. I did speak up when the phrase “our entire team” came up. I reminded them that Angela wouldn’t be with us. Monica took this as her queue to tell those of us that hadn’t witnessed her death, what had happened. Angela, Nick, Luke, and Elisha were on a supply run about two miles out from the facility. Dobrian guardian cells were being picked off left and right, so it was risky going out any further than a couple of miles from safety. The contact cell was going to have the supplies ready for them to load, should have been an in and out, really easy. The cell had been breached and it was a trap. Leaving the supplies, Angela, Nick, Luke and Elisha made a run for it. Once they were out of the building, Angela stopped in her tracks. Nick tried to pull her along, but she slipped through his hands and ran back into the building. Nick, Luke, and Elisha started back for her, but within seconds there was an explosion, leveling the entire warehouse. They knew that she would not have walked out of there, no one would have.