The Thrones of Eden 3 (Eden) (20 page)

Demir cried out. It was futile, he knew. But it was simply a reaction to losing another soldier under his command.

The wall was coming closer.

Now there were only two left on the line. Demir and one other.

They moved ahead, slowly, their heads on a swivel, looking.

John cried out. “The wall!” he yelled. “It’s almost here!”

Demir turned.

The wall was moving faster and would soon run at them with the force of a train.

Demir ordered his second unit to advance, and quickly. Time was becoming critical.

They stepped onto the magnificent flooring and maintained a line.

Savage looked behind him, as did Alyssa and Hillary and the two ministers, their hearts rising to their throats as the floor advanced with all the promise to force them upon the tiles to initiate triggers.  

Javelins would fly.

Lives would be lost.

But Mintaka left them with no other choice.

The rush of the wall was building and getting closer, the energy behind it advancing with malicious intent.   

“We have to move,” said Savage.

Hillary whined and whimpered, the man becoming the fulcrum between reaction and indecision, vacillating between taking the leap or not.

John reached for Alyssa’s hand, grabbed it.

The wall was now racing.

Demir had no choice. And neither did anyone else.

The closing wall had forced their hand. All caution now had to be cast to the wind.

“Run!”

Everyone advanced with legs striving, then running, their footfalls falling upon loose tiles and initiated triggers.

A volley of javelins shot from the left and from the right, the spring mechanisms powerful enough to launch weapons so quickly that they were nothing but blurs in space.

Most of the lances missed their marks, caroming off the opposite wall and shattering into pieces that skated across the floor. Others, however, performed the task they were meant to do by tearing through body and tissue with the ease of going through something soft and gelatinous.

One javelin struck a minister and tore through him about six steps before his brain finally registered the fact that he was dead, the man eventually falling to the floor with his eyes at half mast.

Two of Demir’s soldiers in the second line took fatal wounds as well, one through the neck and the other through the temple, both men dying the moment of penetration as they fell to the floor with their bodies skating a few feet until they finally came to rest.   

Projectiles continued to fly.

. .
. whip . . .

. . . whip . . .

. . . whip
. . .

And people continued to run.

. .
. whip . . .

. . . whip . . .

. . . whip
. . .

John and Alyssa held their palms up as if they would shield them against harm, a natural response of self-preservation as they ran for the foreground.

. .
. whip . . .

. . . whip . . .

. . . whip
. . .

Lances grazed their clothing, tearing and ripping at the fabric.

But Demir made it to the other side as did the soldier, both diving onto a floor that had no tiles or triggers, but to a floor that was solid and cool and secure.

. .
. whip . . .

. . . whip . . .

. . . whip
. . .

The remaining minister, as well as John, Alyssa and Hillary and the remaining soldiers made it across, all diving for the security of the floor beneath the archway.

Everyone looked back and felt for the bodies that lay in the path of the moving wall.

But the wall pressed on with incredible speed, striking the corpses like the blade of the plow and pushed them towards the archway.

“Move!” cried Savage. “MOVE!”

The wall was almost upon them, the dead bodies now congregating and rolling at its base, lifeless forms that appeared flimsy and jellylike—forms that were simply pushed along.

Everyone quickly got to their feet, some slipping against the floor until they found traction, each running for the sanction of the doorway. Then the wall slammed hard against the wall of the archway, the dead bodies becoming a pasty mortar between them.

But those who made it now stood inside the Chamber of the One.

They had made it.

Now to look upon the face of God.

CHAPTER FORTY

Smoke drifted lazily through cracks and crevasses, wending its way through every tunnel, through every chamber, filling Mintaka with a haze that was thickening by the seconds.

The tendrils had reached the Hall of Anu, the smoke building, the hallway becoming black and gray with the imbued scent of oil.

It had reached the wall pressing against the archway, a solid closure where not even a hairline crack or micro-fissure existed. But as smoke does it blindly seeks new avenues of exploration, finding them at the seams surrounding the tiles of the hallway, the smoke then drifting between the joints and filtering down beneath the floor that extended underneath the Chamber of the One.

The space between the ceiling of the lower chamber and the floor of the upper chamber was slim. But it was large enough to harbor something deadly and wicked within, something that had laid in slumber with the smoke now awakening this sleeping giant.

The haze was thin and minimal, but it was enough to galvanize this mass into motion. Coils and strands of life shifted in the darkness, the bodies undulating and, as life does, quickly recognized the hazard of smoke and began to meander away from a threat far greater than itself.

In Mintaka, they sought for salvation by seeking the Chamber of Anu.

PART II

BEHOLD THE EMPEROR OF EDEN

CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

It appeared as a giant seal on the wall, a magnificent circle of polished gold that was approximately thirty feet in diameter, or ten meters across, that bore the explicit details of what appeared to be prognostication through pictographs, ancient script and archaic characters in Sumerian lettering.

Lights from numerous shoulder lamps spotlighted the many patterns as everyone got to their feet, the gold seal casting a dazzling sheen that reflected back at them as amber light, the area brightening.

Alyssa took a few steps forward. Her eyes were wide and studious. “It’s wonderful,” she managed.

Hillary cocked his head. Then to Savage, he asked, “Do you recognize it, John?”

Savage did recognize it. It was the same emblem that opened up on the floor in the chamber beneath them, the floor coming alive, which allowed Savage and a few others to slide through to a tunnel hidden beneath the hall. “Yeah, I recognize it,” he said dryly. “It’s the same calendar we found below.”

“Yes,” said Hillary, sustaining the ‘
s
’ long enough so that the word sounded like a hiss.

Alyssa took closer examination as her eyes shifted from side to side. “You’re right,” she said. “It is a calendar.” Her eyes narrowed as they studied the images carefully. “It begins where the Mayan calendar ended,” she finally said. “On December 21, 2012.”

“Precisely. Where this new calendar ended, however, neither John nor I could determine that.”

She took a step forward until she could almost reach out and touch the seal. Her eyes appeared to dance over the descriptions and over the characters. Savage could see the wheels of her mind working.

She then took a few steps back as if to admire a painting in its whole, and then shook her head disapprovingly. “This can’t be right,” she finally said.

“What?”

She pointed to the Mintaka calendar. “This.”

Hillary seemed perplexed, as did John. This was not a good sign.

“This calendar begins during the autumnal equinox with a given date of December 21, 2012, which is amazing since the people of Eden apparently had the foresight to see that the Mayan calendar was a tool marking the celestial rotation of stars over a period of thousands of years. People thought the end of the Mayan calendar also marked the end of times. But the Mayan calendar was really a device to track the natural cycle and rotation of the star systems in the universe. All the map did was to tell us that the first cycle was closing on December 21
^st
, and that the stars were
realigning
themselves for a second cycle. It’s like the hands of a clock,” she continued. “At midnight, when the day ends and a new day is about to begin, all the hands on the clock are at twelve. But when the second hand begins to move, it also starts the new cycle for the new day until the hands are no longer aligned, like the stars. The Mayan calendar did the same thing by tracking the path of planets and stars over millenniums, with the stars and planets serving as the hands of a clock. It was more than just a calendar,” she told them. “It was also a celestial timekeeper.”

“So what’s not right about this?” asked John.

“This calendar actually shows an end date of 2021, sometime between the vernal and autumnal equinoxes, with no exact day given.”

“Are you sure?” asked Hillary.

She nodded. “There doesn’t seem to be a disruption within the rotation of the planets. There’s just a disturbing finality about it without any given explanation as to how or why.”

“Perhaps there is,” said Demir. He was standing to the right of the seal with his hand pressed against the wall. “There’s script etched into the wall here,” he told her.

Not only did John, Hillary and Alyssa make haste, so did the minister and the rest of Demir’s team, the minister already grabbing his camera and notebook to photograph and chart the writings.

Alyssa had not seen these characters since she had read the walls within Eden, old and very ancient, letters she had seen before inside the vessel they explored beneath the Yucatan Peninsula.

There were three stanzas: