Ghost of the Gods - 02 (25 page)

Escaping the barrage coming from behind them was not going to be easy. Mark already had the Humvee floored and the pickup trucks were now right on their tail. He could see them surging forward and falling back. Their attackers clearly had far more speed than he did.

A white hot explosion came from behind. A bullet ripped through the rear defenses of the Humvee and punched a hole in the dashboard. Mark was stunned. He started swerving evasively, which cost them speed.

“What the hell was that?” he shouted.

A memory capsule followed an instant later. Sarah was sure they were in trouble. She was positive that was a .50-caliber armor-piercing bullet, most likely a tungsten penetrator. The bullets were not coming fast enough to be a machine gun, so it had to be a sniper rifle—which was the good news. Sarah commanded Ralph onto the floor. Another bullet came through the rear of the Humvee and ricocheted around inside. Pieces of stuffing from a backseat landed all over. A third bullet ripped through the Humvee too soon after the last. Mark took a hard right at a corner and lost control. When they stopped spinning, he was facing straight ahead with blinding headlights bearing down on them through the windshield. They were trapped from both directions. Mark could not believe what was happening, then the oncoming headlights swerved around them. He spotted Peacekeeper insignias on the sides of several Stryker fighting vehicles as they whipped past. He heard a crash and a huge firefight erupting behind them. He’d never thought he’d be happy to see those storm troopers. They were going to show no mercy, exterminating what they found. Mark hit the accelerator. He saw an Apache with a spotlight on flying low, then streak past. The rotor wash shook the Humvee. The explosions and lightning flashes behind them tripled in intensity. Mark was amped up. It looked like the Peacekeepers had decided he and Sarah were innocent victims. God knows they wouldn’t need their testimony in an Outland court to sentence a bunch of dead outlaws.

Mark sped toward a highway that would take them away from this killing ground. He kept glancing in the side mirror, half expecting to see an Apache bird of prey coming for them. Sarah had not uttered a word. He glanced over, then realized he was no longer sensing anything from her.

“Sarah!” he shouted.

There was no answer. He heard Ralph howling as if in pain. The mournful sound pierced straight through Mark’s heart. He cut the wheel, pulling at a dangerous speed into an abandoned multistory packing structure. At a toll booth he snapped off what was left of a yellow-striped entry barricade and scraped the side of the Humvee. He jammed on the brakes, then pulled the parking brake. With the engine still running, he jumped out, ran to Sarah’s side, and opened the door.

He saw what was wrong and his breath hitched. One of the armor-piercing rounds had punched through the right side of her lower chest. Ralph continued howling. A schematic overlaid from a medical assist showed no pulse, no respiration, and no involuntary nerve response. Her skin temperature was dropping. Sarah was lifeless. There was some residual brain activity but the glowing embers of a once brilliant mental fire were almost dark.

The assist showed the bullet had somehow missed her organs but torn an artery open and shattered bones, which had then done even more damage than the bullet. Mark heard wailing and for a moment had no idea the sound was coming from him. His face was covered in tears. Indecision paralyzed him. He had no idea what to do. He hugged her and begged her to live, again… and again… and again.

“Don’t give up. Please don’t give up. I love you!”

A single word appeared in his paralyzed brain. Hospital… It was their only hope. Sobbing, he let go of her and climbed back into the driver’s seat. He punched up
hospitals
on the GPS and got three hits. Which one? Which ones were running and which ones were shuttered? Paralyzed again! He mentally picked one, then a different one, then back to the first. He thought,
phone, call, make sure—

He heard a very soft moan.

He stared at Sarah as her eyes snapped open, releasing a mental onslaught that consumed him in an instant. He was overwhelmed by a tidal wave of memories of dying and then letting go as the death experience lifted him up from the Humvee. He knew the flow of memories was coming from Sarah and could do nothing to stop it. The powerful memories were threatening to tear his mind apart. He was floating up above the city as her awareness grew in clarity. The events of her life unspooled before them. The experience was like a hyper-real lucid dream. There were people she knew waiting to help her, people who had died. They surrounded her with love. She was told anything she could visualize to comfort her would immediately materialize. As she drifted higher into the air, the roofs of buildings grew smaller and smaller. It was as if floating away was the most natural thing. The building directly below was the parking garage where her body lay. Mark heard his voice crying as if at the end of a long tunnel.

“Don’t give up. Please don’t give up. I love you!”

The experience abruptly ended. Mark found himself looking at Sarah. An assist had a medical schematic up that showed a weak heartbeat and respiration. His eyes started tearing even worse. She was alive. He was filled with hope but could also see from the assist that she was in danger and needed immediate medical attention. Her blood pressure was dangerously low from loss of blood. She needed transfusions.

Sarah could scarcely move, but as Mark released the parking brake he felt her hand grip his arm.

“Top…” she whispered. “Go top.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Roof… top… go… now.”

“The top floor of this garage?”

“Yes…”

“You need medical help.”

“Roof… now… medical… next.”

Mark had no choice but to do as she wanted. The stray thoughts coming from her were very clear. She would get out and walk, and only hurt herself more if he didn’t take her. In frustration he drove to the top of the garage and stopped. He hoped this insanity would be over quickly so he could get her to a hospital. The rain was still coming down. He turned off the headlights but left the Humvee idling.

“Water,” said Sarah.

“Rain?”

“Drink.”

Mark clambered into the back and returned with a gallon jug of water. He put it down to look for a cup. Sarah picked up the jug with shaky arms and began drinking and drinking. Mark watched her in confused, worried silence. In a short time the jug was empty. He saw her blood pressure was still low but had gone up a little. Her digestive tract must have been working at an accelerated rate, pushing that water through her intestines and into her bloodstream.

Sarah opened the door and carefully started to slide out of the Humvee. Mark got out fast and came around to help her. The rain was pouring down. A steady flow of water was running by his feet. He supported Sarah and let her lead him. She walked to the center of the garage and looked down. He felt her legs give out a little. He looked down and his legs dangerously weakened too. Mark immediately recognized what they were standing on. They were inside a ten-foot circle of red reflective paint with marked compass points. In the center of the circle was a number in white reflective paint:
7051.
Mark had to tell himself to continue breathing. He had a clear memory of this circle and that number from their shared experience of floating away into lucid dreams as Sarah died. The rain increased and with it the water flowing by his feet. An almost invisible loose piece of tar paper was lifted and carried off, exposing an additional digit at the end of the number transmuting
7051
into
70518
. Mark was gripped by a powerful sense of déjà vu. Up until this night he’d had no idea what to believe about life after death. He was confused by what was clearly verification of Sarah’s near-death experience.

“There has to be some logical explanation,” he said.

Sarah looked into his eyes and said only one word as she let him support her full weight.

“Love…”

Mark Freedman – Waterville, Maine – February 15, 0002 A.P.

Sarah had insisted that they drive for hours to a small forty-eight-bed hospital in Waterville, Maine. Mark had called several hospitals to find which ones were operating. Much to his frustration Sarah had selected one that was the smallest and most isolated. According to Google, Waterville’s population was ten thousand at the last census after the plague. Mark hated the idea of taking so long to get her to a hospital, but he knew she was right. They needed to attract the least attention possible. Sarah pulled up her shirt. She winced as she felt around the wound in the front and then her back. Mark knew she was examining herself with the aid of an assist.

“The entry and exit wounds are sealed.” Sarah’s voice was weak. “The damaged artery and veins have knit back together but things are still leaking. My cavities are all swollen with fluid but I have to keep drinking.”

As the Humvee rocketed along the small two-lane country highway, Sarah drank from a second gallon of water. Most of it was gone. Mark was disappointed. His assist reported less of an increase in blood pressure than from the prior gallon, but he would take every bit of good news he could get.

The GPS finally showed the last turn before the hospital. Mark knew the bullet wound looked recent but not hours old. Sarah passed out as he carried her into the emergency room. He told the nurse and then the doctor they had been ambushed and it had taken them days to get here. The doctor was a young woman with a serious air about her. Mark sensed no-nonsense competence. After a few minutes, the doctor looked up from the examining table.

“The entry and exit wounds in your wife’s torso are hot to the touch. She’s running a hundred-and-three fever. I am not going to sugarcoat anything. This is a dangerous infection. I don’t know why the infection sites are not red and swollen, and that worries me too. I don’t like what I can’t explain.”

Mark didn’t want this doctor looking for answers to an infection that was not showing normal symptoms and in fact not an infection at all. He knew the nanotech was working hard to rebuild Sarah’s damaged body. The heat was from swarming COBIC seeds weaving her insides back together. He decided to play as dumb as possible.

“Please just help her, doc,” he said. “Maybe the fever is from being outside in the cold?”

“No sir, it’s the wounds. Right now I need to get her blood pressure up, culture the infection, and get her on the right antibiotics.”

Mark was relieved when the doctor ordered both IV fluids and a blood transfusion of three bags. He didn’t like it when she ordered a regime of expensive, hard to get antibiotics to use until the infection was identified. He didn’t like that they would be wasted, but what else could he do? The wrong move might invite an army of Peacekeepers.

“You are going to have to leave the room,” announced the doctor. “We need to put in some drains.”

“I’m staying with her,” said Mark.

“Hospital regulations require—”

“I’m staying!”

The doctor’s face was scrunched up in some kind of turmoil. She looked at the door to the examining room, then back at him.

“Does the sight of blood bother you?”

Mark looked down at his shirt covered in Sarah’s blood, then back at the doctor.

“Fine, but I need you to stand at the back of the room. If you interfere in any way you have to leave or I will call security to remove you.”

Sarah woke six hours later with the sun. Mark had not slept. He could tell from the hospital monitor that her blood pressure was normal. He smiled at her. She lazily smiled back.

“I’m okay,” she said.

“I know, but you scared the hell out of me.”

“You know what happened,” said Sarah. “Right?”

“You were shot and almost died.”

“No, that’s not what I mean. Don’t mess with me. You know I died and came back.”

“I don’t know any such thing,” he said. “You experienced some kind of hallucination from loss of blood and our little nanotech friends kept you alive.”

“What about the markings on the garage roof?”

“What about them? I figured it out. The numbering was the street address of the building. You could have seen the address as we pulled into the garage or maybe an assist gave you the address?”

“That’s bullshit!” snapped Sarah. “All right, smartass, how did I see that specific number in a red circle at the exact spot on the roof where we found it, and the number we saw during my near-death experience didn’t match the address thanks to that piece of loose tar paper?”

Mark remained silent. There had to be a rational explanation. Sarah held out her arms. Mark hugged her and felt her breath on the side of his face. She kissed his cheek. He was so relieved she was alive.

“P.S. I love you too,” she whispered.

Communes

Mark Freedman – New Hampshire – February 16, 0002 A.P.

It was a very bright day with sunlight glinting off the snow. Mark was driving at a slower pace. He was relaxing now that they had crossed out of Maine and into New Hampshire. The doctor had been furious with them leaving less than a day later. The blood cultures were not even back yet. She was beside herself that they had refused to take any antibiotics with them. Most of all, she was frantic to run tests to explain how Sarah was asymptomatic in an impossibly short period of time. There was, however, nothing she could do to stop a healthy patient from checking herself out.

Mark looked over at Sarah sleeping with a blanket wrapped around her. He smiled to himself. He felt they were now better prepared. In the trunk of the Humvee, inside the twelve-volt cooler they used for food, were six bags of IV saline. In their first aid pack were sterile IV infusion kits. The supplies had cost him some gold coins and a promise by the hospital pharmacist to tell no one. Now if either of them lost a life-threatening amount of blood, they had a way of keeping their pressure up until COBIC repaired enough of the damage.

Mark glanced over at Sarah again and recalled in perfect detail those terrible moments in the deserted parking structure when he thought she was dead. He remembered saying he loved her. Over the decades his love life had caused him so much heartache, but there was no denying these feelings. He did love her and these feelings worried him even more than losing her. Sarah opened her eyes and smiled lazily at him.

“You look a little pale,” she said.

“I don’t feel pale.”

“So how does pale feel?”

Mark didn’t know what to say.

“I’m sorry, baby. I’m just teasing,” she said. “Let’s stop somewhere and I’ll figure out how to put some color into your cheeks.”

Against all his willpower, Mark began fantasizing about what she might do to put some color into his cheeks. Heartache and lust were opposite sides of the same coin for him and he knew it.

“I’ve never felt this alive,” announced Sarah as she carefully stretched and repositioned herself in the seat. He saw a wince of pain as she settled in.

“Dying and coming back has changed everything. I now know an amazing life is waiting after this one. I also know in this life we’re going do something extremely important, something we were born to do. That’s why I was sent back. I didn’t have to come back, you know. Souls can live between incarnations in the realm of lucid dreams forever.”

“I don’t know, Sarah. I know what you think happened, but something about it all seems really false. There’s no proof, no way to measure it. I don’t believe your nanotech brain ever died, which means you never died. Maybe the god-machine simulated that near-death experience to manipulate us in some way. It could have used prerecorded material of the roof from its archives. You know how it affects our dreams and memories, why not this?”

“Remember when I said I wanted to put some color into your cheeks?” Sarah’s tone was no longer teasing.

“Yes.”

“Well, forget it! The high priest of science needs to remember that scientific dogma fails at the event horizon of world-changing discoveries. You told me that yourself. Remember? It’s intuition that picks up that fumbled ball and makes the discovery. So you’re pigheaded to say something doesn’t exist just because you don’t have the instruments to measure it.”

“I’m a Jew. I can’t be a high priest.”

“See what I mean—pigheaded.”

Sarah Mayfair – New York State – February 17, 0002 A.P.

Sarah squinted as the sun came into her eyes. Even with the nerve endings in her torso partially dulled, the entry and exit wounds felt like she was impaled on a long nail that had been run completely through her. She did not fully block the pain because that would have made it too easy to accidently tear open the wounds by moving the wrong way. A day had gone by and she still felt irritated with Mark for being so closed-minded to new discoveries. She glanced at the 5.56mm Sig Sauer pistol hanging from a shoulder sling on his side and a Springfield Armory subcompact .45 on his hip. The Sig Sauer was nothing less than a miniaturized assault rifle that could punch through flak jackets with ease. She was relieved he’d finally come to his senses at least about one thing. She could tell from his emotions the motive for the higher powered weapons was to protect her, not him. She wasn’t sure what to think of that yet, but was grateful for any reason that got him to carry something that could do some real damage instead of the 9mm he’d been carrying.

They were two hours from a dead drop where they would hide a piece of the relic for Karla Hunt to pick up once they told her the location. After their close brush at the Lake Erie cabin neither of them were in any hurry for a repeat of that adventure. Like Mark, Sarah trusted Karla but thought her office had leaks.

“You were smart to buy insurance for us with those sentry detectors inside the cabin,” said Sarah. “Karla and everyone she knows would be thrown into prison if that video went public.”

“I hope that’s one policy we never have to file a claim on.”

Sarah was preparing to cut a piece off of the relic for Karla. Mark had offered to pull over, but she was fine doing it while they were on the highway. She was using the metal lid from a mess kit as a work surface. The plan was to bury Karla’s piece at the dead drop in a sealed jar. A pair of heavy wire cutters made easy work of nipping a corner off the relic. The metal was soft like lead, if it was even metal. Sarah looked back into the mess kit lid just as the smaller piece of the relic fell through a round hole that had not been there a moment ago. What the hell was this? Confused, she pushed herself back in the seat and caught sight of it eating through the seat cushion! She flung the metal lid to the floor, realizing the bigger piece was also chewing its way through the lid.

“Pull over!” she shouted. “Pull over!”

“What?...”

“It’s eating through the goddamn seat!”

There was no smoke or smell, just material withering away as if decomposing. It was worse than acid. It was alive.

Sarah’s heart had finally slowed. The bullet wounds felt raw. She knew she’d reopened them a little. Mark had found the smaller piece of the relic in the dirt beneath the Humvee. It had eaten its way clear through after they’d stopped and had been sitting in a small crater of its own making. It seemed to have satisfied its hunger. It was now a tiny black cube. Sarah had watched Mark use a spoon to scoop up dirt along with the relic and place the whole mess inside an empty Smucker’s jar. She was eyeing that jar sitting on the floor next to her feet as Mark pulled onto the highway. The bigger piece had found enough raw material in the mess kit lid and floor to repair itself. A shallow divot in the mental flooring marked the spot where it had mined the last of the raw materials it had needed. The full-sized relic was now whole and stowed in the back of the Humvee.

Mark Freedman – Newton, Massachusetts – February 19, 0002 A.P.

A heavy storm was predicted for later in the day. They’d been holed up for the past two days in a suburb of Boston. The neighborhood was filled with older single-family homes. There were not many people around. Oddly, it had been far colder here than in Maine. It was one more freakish piece of weather, courtesy of an unstable polar jet stream.

Mark was outside finishing up his work on the Humvee. All the bullet holes in the rear hatch were visible reminders of something unthinkable that had almost happened. Since the early morning he’d been hard at work to make sure the unthinkable did not happen again. This up-armored Humvee model had a thick slab of vertical steel armor between the trunk and passenger compartment. That armor had been easily defeated by the .50 caliber tungsten penetrator that had almost killed Sarah.

Mark finished pouring a steel-mesh reinforced concrete barrier as thick as weight would allow inside the trunk up against the rear armor. Inside the concrete, he’d layered sheets of polycarbonate that he found at a nearby Home Depot. It would take a lot more than a .50 caliber armor piercing bullet to get through these new defenses. As a bonus, the added weight would give them better traction in snow. He knew he was guilty of fighting the last battle, but what other choice did he have?

Mark sat down on the open tail of the Humvee and took a sip of water from a plastic jug. Sarah and Ralph came out of the house and headed off for a walk. Mark watched Sarah’s retreating form. She was more important to him than any person had been in his entire life. He tried to suppress the emotions welling up in his chest. Too late, he knew Sarah had felt them already. She turned and smiled at him. She missed very little. Experiencing unease, he picked up his tablet and checked his e-mail for what must have been the hundredth time that day. The e-mail from Karla that he’d been waiting for was finally in his box. It was an average length e-mail addressed to several college friends. It contained personal news and light banter. The message for Mark was steganographically encrypted into the attached photos. The information that emerged was fascinating.

Hi Love,

This nanotech relic has a structure nothing like nanotech seeds. It may as well have been created in another universe. Unlike seeds, it does not self-destruct when manipulated. In fact, it’s the exact opposite, it almost fights back. There seems to be no easy way to destroy it other than extremely intense heat, around eight to nine thousand degrees centigrade. We vaporized some of it inside a mass spectrometer, hoping to get detailed data on its composition, but came up with nothing useful. It’s mostly carbon with some hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, and the same trace elements as seeds. So it looks organic but we know it’s not. We’re able to mechanically study it far more easily than seeds, but for now we have more questions than insights. It does, however, talk via radio waves to the n-web, so there is that obvious link between it and seeds. Surprisingly, the relic communicates with much higher signal strength than seeds. Our tests show it has an effective range of several miles and can transmit on all radio frequencies. The relic also gave us a nasty surprise by successfully hacking into our Wi-Fi and cell phone networks! No one knows what to make of that self-initiated invasive behavior. No one knows how it cracked our 256bit AES encryption. We’re calling it a promiscuous communicator. There was no decipherable message in the data this device sent out over our networks. It seems to simply take apart the data it receives from our networks and then repackages it for transmission back onto our networks. It’s kind of like a child playing the copycat game, and there’s no way to know the age of this child. As you know there’s no way to accurately date something that is self-healing. We took an unscientific poll of the brain trust working on this project. We asked, Does this technology predate seeds or did it come after seeds? The unanimous response was that this is a more advanced material and so it came after seeds. When asked for an estimate of age, this fired up a debate. No one believed we could make this technology today, and no one could accept it’s millions of years old, as you believe. So it’s a white crow.

Cheers,

K.

Mark remained unshaken in the accuracy of his original dating and frustrated by the scientific dogma he kept butting his head against. He saw this relic as proof that high civilizations existed before the current rise of humankind. Who and what those civilizations were remained a question. He believed these civilizations came and went in cycles of growth and destruction for millions of years, back into the graying mists of time. Humans were only the most recent species featured in these cycles. What kind of tool making species came before us? Scientifically, he told himself, we have little historical evidence for what a human civilization could have been like a hundred thousand years ago, let alone some other species millions of years prior. We were blind men examining an elephant’s trunk and declaring it a tree. In extremely recent geological times, much of the Earth had been scraped clean by glaciers and then flooded by rising oceans. What great achievements, including whole cities, might have been plowed under by glaciers or drowned in the coastal waters of our oceans? In seven thousand years of recorded history, humans went from stone tools, to metal tools, to the atom, and to the moon. Anatomically, modern Homo sapiens have walked the earth for at least 200,000 years and more likely 400,000 years. In all those millennia there was plenty of time for us to have reached the moon and fallen back into ruin more than once. It was illogical to believe humans remained at the same level as a smart monkey for almost 400,000 years and then only in the last 10,000 years figured out how to do something more than bang two stones together. It was the height of modern civilization’s ego driven arrogance to believe we were the center of everything and the shining apex of human achievement.

Mark’s thoughts drifted back to over two years ago when he’d cracked open a fossil of COBIC mat and found preserved seeds that reanimated. His recall was eerily photographic, as if watching a movie of himself. That fossil had been over a hundred million years old. His discovery did not prove that some high civilization existed back then, but it did raise one of two possible scenarios. Either the seeds literally fell to Earth from space, or high civilizations did exist on Earth over a hundred million years ago and created the god-machine.

A gust of wind stung Mark’s face. He rubbed the thick stubble that would soon be a beard. The wind was carrying ice crystals that had been whipped up from the snow crusted ground. Bare tree branches vibrated in the wind like great string instruments. He looked up into a clear patch of sky surrounded by storm clouds and wondered to what heights had we truly reached in our 400,000 years. As his thoughts quieted, Mark could feel the subtle pulls of nearby communes as if in answer to his question.

Both he and Sarah were certain the nearest commune was located somewhere around Buffalo. There were also communes in the vicinity of Detroit, Knoxville, Trenton, and Charleston as well as others farther away. Each ripple in the n-web was like a soft call urging him home. He was anxious to find the next commune. They had to get there well before the betrayer if they were to have any hope of discovering what was going on. Mark was far from convinced that communes were the only hope for the future and that this betrayer named Noah was systematically murdering the future of the world. However, for possibly the first time in his life, Mark was going by intuition and his intuition matched Sarah’s on this one point. Their best chance at discovering the truth one way or the other was communes, so they had to try to help stop this killing from going any farther. Noah had left them a calling card in the form of a relic with his name programmed into it. Mark had no hope of understanding the motives behind that strange introduction. Why had the hybrid risked his life to save them from arrest in a subway? Why the horrifying mass murders of entire communes? Maybe Noah was not trying to use them as scapegoats but instead trying to protect them from communes. The question was, Protect them from what? Mental contamination, brainwashing, physical violence—or maybe, just maybe, protect them from the truth?