The Apostasy Read online

  Barti raised his luger. He fired. “For Uwe!” He fired. “For Helmut!” He fired. “For Joseph!” He fired. “For Horst!” Movement ceased. Barti’s heart silenced the enveloping clamor and cleared the fog of war from his brain just like Mutti cleaned the table back home with a hard wipe of her cloth The four dead enemy, helpless beings, commanded every shred of Barti’s focus. Their silence told Barti that no measure of contrition could earn absolution. He wanted to cry, and fell on his knees among the four corpses to beg forgiveness.

  “Vielen Dank!”

  Many thanks?

  Barti did not want to believe he heard those words…and from whom? He swung his Luger to the rear, and the sight made him sure his own sanity dribbled away with the blood of his victims below.

  An old man stood grinning, black hat in hand, stringy wisps of white hair standing up in defiance of the heavy green death floating in the trench. One of Barti’s last thoughts echoed incongruous amazement—how could white pants stay so clean in the mud?

  2

  Barti’s essence held light. Luckily for Leland Graves, sufficient tar speckled the orb to hold it low, to make it accessible. Nothing more profitable than a nice war to bolster sagging quotas.

  War acted as a catalyst for the phenomenon Leland Graves marked but did not understand—though he acted as if he did. A friend’s death almost always tainted an otherwise perfect orb as if people united in a common purpose depended on each other the same way their bodies relied on organs with different functions to survive.

  Cut out the liver, Leland Graves thought, and the heart loses its value.

  “Any advantage,” said Leland Graves as he stooped and gathered. He would lose no time in delivering this precious gem.

  Leland returned the blade to his walking stick. His powers made the steel unnecessary, but the dramatics served a purpose with the others.

  The pack of whining heal-biters.

  So Leland Graves used steel when rules allowed; on those he could touch. Guile, vassals, or combinations of the two took care of the others, so it all ended the same for him…most of the time. Leland almost forgot the second bit of self-serving drama.

  “Transaction completed.”

  CHAPTER 1

  Wednesday, November 21, 1990, On board an American jet fighter approaching Iraqi Airspace

  1

  "Photo lead, spike at ten o'clock!" Gorski's voice broke into their headsets.

  "You see anything, Jeremiah?" Tom said.

  "Negative, my scope is clear."

  Gorski's radio call meant his sensors detected hostile radar. “Spike” indicated target acquisition success by enemy radar linked to an anti-aircraft missile site. For the moment it appeared Photo 21, piloted by Tom “Torch” Brunson with Mike “Jeremiah” Johnson riding as Weapons Systems Officer in the back seat, was a target.

  Jeremiah engaged the jammer.

  "Two, what do you see?" Tom wanted more information from his wingman.

  "A couple hits from an SA-6 acquisition radar," Gorski, the back seat in the fighter flying wing, Photo 22, replied.

  "Let's see if we can get a photograph of the area...maybe capture a clear shot of the missile site," Tom said.

  "I don't like this Torch, let's bug out."

  "Just one second more and—"

  "Photo Two One! HARD LEFT...MISSILE, I say MISSILE at nine thirty low! Lead, you're engaged! HARD LEFT! Lead, HARD LEFT!" Gorski's screaming left no room to doubt. It meant a missile in the air.

  Tom jettisoned exterior fuel tanks, selected maximum afterburner, rolled, and pulled hard to the left. He decided to save swallowing his heart out of his throat for later.

  The jet fighter turned at seven and a half times the force of gravity into the oncoming missile’s flight path. The force pinned Jeremiah against his seat. Both pilot and back-seat—WSO—strained against their anti-g suits to maintain consciousness while scanning with every atom in their retinas for the incoming missile. Jeremiah saw it first.

  "Nine o'clock on the horizon, Torch! It's tracking us!"

  Tom shifted his gaze…A dot sitting stationary on his canopy, sure sign the missile tracked his aircraft. He pulled harder on the stick and aimed his head at the oncoming missile; hoping to force it to negotiate an impossible square turn. The fighter crew could do no more now than wait and observe the play.

  Tom's brain felt the kick of adrenaline and increase in efficiency. Events in the world around him slowed.

  Temporal distortion. He'd felt it a few times before, back in his days as a primary jet instructor pilot—with the bad students—truth be known, sometimes with himself at the controls.

  The brain kicks into hyper-drive and mere tenths of seconds seem to last minutes. The missile closed the distance to Tom, Jeremiah, and their fighter.

  Going to land in my lap. Tom tightened his thighs as he sat strapped to his ejection seat like a condemned man in the electric chair…and perceived something impossible behind the missile.

  The smoke trail caught his eye…a human shape holding the aft section, riding the death rocket like Slim Pickens on an atom bomb.

  Impossible. Tom blinked to clear his brain. He looked again, and the face behind the plume did not disappear…he saw it with more clarity. Old man…skinny…angry hair. Distance between missile and jet fighter evaporated in chunks with each blink. Angry hair, heck, thought Tom, just plain angry. The face snarled across the diminishing space…the arms pushed down on the missile.

  Face? Arms? Wake up! Don’t die crazy!

  “Show time,” he heard Jeremiah say, and that voice propelled Tom back into the land of reality, a place now deadlier than any dreamland Tom’s pressured mind could concoct. Time did not wait for Tom to celebrate his return to sanity.

  The missile seemed to enter the cockpit. Tom blanched.

  Where’s the pain? That was his first thought. We're still flying...It missed...It MISSED!

  But, the missile did not miss completely.

  Microseconds after it passed within feet of the Phantom, the warhead ignited. Soviet engineers adopted larger warheads to compensate for decreased accuracies when compared to NATO weapons. This philosophy killed Photo Two One.

  Expanding rings of shrapnel gored the jet’s exposed belly. Within moments, the emergency caution light panel lit up.

  "Left wing's gone!" Jeremiah screamed into the interphone. The aircraft tumbled like a barrel over Niagara Falls.

  "Gotta get out, Torch!"

  "BAILOUT! BAILOUT! BAILOUT!" Gorski's voice yelled over the radio. "Photo Two One, EJECT! EJECT!"

  Pain slashed through Tom’s left leg, followed by searing heat ripping through the flesh of his ribcage and into his chest. "Fire, Fire, Fire." He heard the calm woman's voice embedded in the microchips of the audible fire warning system.

  Jeremiah managed an obligatory "Whoaaaa!" into the interphone.

  Hours of tedious training made Jeremiah’s next actions involuntary, but correct. He reached for the handle between his legs...the ejection seat actuator. Jeremiah prayed he could get them both out before flames melted the parachutes located in the tops of their ejection seats. He pulled hard and felt cold air bombarding the exposed portions of his skin. The pain felt good; it meant life.

  Tom, flesh torn and burned, bones shattered by Russian metal, sat alone in the jet for one second; holding the stick of the mortally wounded fighter with all the strength his waning consciousness could muster.

  The ejection system’s automatic sequencing fired the rockets under Tom's seat, propelling his broken body out of the jet. The nine-g aircraft exit force extinguished the final, semi-coherent thoughts bouncing through Tom’s mind.

  Death extended a heartless, steel hand to Captain Tom Brunson, United States Air Force fighter pilot.

  2

  Leland Graves stepped out of the desert and back into his own universe. He obeyed the rules, leveraged the unexpected boon—fate smiled when the missile flew—and sprinted in order to participate.


  Cold feet? Never, though he would admit—if one worthy of his confession existed—an ever so slight, last-second influence on missile trajectory. Enough pressure to make the thing fly wide; as it would have had Leland Graves not stepped in.

  Whether or not the young man survived served Leland Grave’s purpose equally. Either outcome would nurture the seed planted years earlier. As the others crowded to him, he said in their language, “Transaction updated, account current.”

  More than a decade and a half later

  CHAPTER 2

  Tuesday, July 13, 6:43 pm, in the suburb south of Vienna, Alabama and in Copper Gulch

  1

  Plang! Plang! Thunk. Plang! Plang! Thunk. Hattie never expected the battle to resume right then—a sweet summer day—the kind when Mother Nature decides to show off a bit and exhibit dexterity in her capacity for diverse yet harmonious life. But evil seeks prey in serenity; Hattie learned as much decades before.

  Plang! Plang! Rhythm created by her great-grandnephew's basketball. Plang! One more bounce on the broken concrete across the street. Thunk! A perfect shot. Three points—if the hypnotic, sleep-inducing effect on Hattie counted in the scoring.

  The sound meant family and love, it soothed as much as the cool air brought on by a tickling breeze in the waning sunlight. Temperatures soared above hundred degrees by noon—dinner time—and the humidity…typical for mid-July in northern Alabama. Every living creature moved just a bit slower. Papa would say, “Saw a dog chasin' a cat and both was walking."

  The first rain in days fell like afternoon gemstones from heaven...a lonely summer shaft that spouted open and soaked everything. Steam rose from streets in a translucent fog as cooled drops impacted blistering tar.

  Plang! Plang! Thunk. Another basket—two more imaginary points for Demetrius Jackson. Hattie lounged in her porch swing, on the edge of consciousness, lightly dozing in and out. Pleasantly exhausted. Constant sweat summoned by earlier heat and humidity mottled her hair into sticky clots that coated her scalp. Hattie loved wet summers; she loved her family; and, about halfway through her ninety-fourth summer and at the heels of this perfect day, she loved life itself.

  Plang! Plang! Thunk. Music to her ears as she nudged herself back and forth in the freshly painted wooden swing. Her Demetrius, the one bouncing the ball across the street, sanded it and gave it three coats last week.

  A good boy.

  Plang! Plang! Constant straining of the half-rusted chains creaked unnoticed...blending into the day's beauty like woodwinds into an orchestra. It calmed her mind. Each breath satisfied Hattie with traces of wild honeysuckle and verbena. The plants huddled along the drainage, standing thin sentinel in gullies separating where peopled lived from the swamps below.

  Only the poor lived on Hattie’s parcel in prior decades. The turnaround came years after the first TVA dredges, when two California high-technology companies located plants outside Vienna, Alabama. The town grew south toward the gulch; so did a suburb arrayed along a freshly minted golf course. Nouveau riche technology barons with families and dogs needed to live somewhere. Alabama hosted influx once again, but this time the invaders rode Mercedes instead of wagons and possessed too much to fit in carpetbags.

  Descendents of former slaves owned much of the acreage surrounding Vienna; deeded in exchange for votes by members of the Reconstruction Government. As the technology industry expanded, the oldest poor became the newest rich. Some, as did Hattie, held on to choicer plots for home sites that moved them out of Copper Gulch.

  Plang! Plang! Thunk. The sound bites made their way past Hattie’s house and down to the edge of Copper Gulch before dissipating somewhere into dead sound infinity—the same spot where an ethereal portal ripped its way open.

  2

  In the swampland below, oblivious to outdoor hoops and ignorant to possibilities of orchestras in nature, a middle-aged transient sloshed through the mire. He did not care about basketball, family, or anything other than his reason for seeking the secluded, muddy land.

  Decay permeated Copper Gulch. Rotting plants, mild pollutants from the river, and lack of sunlight combined into pervasive mildew left unchecked by the bureaucratic eyes of old guard TVA engineers grown weary of watching as their efforts created wealth for African-Americans.

  The transient sought a perfect spot, sequestered from eyes that might wander off the road situated just a few hundred yards above. Squadrons of mosquitoes fed unmolested and twice he stopped to recover one of his shoes from muck; the third time proved a charm and he stumbled into the ideal den.

  Thick oaks and towering pines guarded a flattened area of about one hundred square feet. Briars and nondescript leafy bushes intertwined at the tree trunks to make approaches hidden or impassable. The transient squatted. Perfect.

  He stood and circled the perimeter. Vegetation blotted out light from just about head height to the ground. He could hide for months. He stepped through briars. Needle-thin thorns ripped through tattered clothing, clawing into scrawny thighs though a dulled brain ignored the pain.

  Brown puddles from the Tennessee River sat stranded and expectant, like disembodied fingers awaiting the command to reattach. He gave no notice…he needed a fix.

  The dank atmosphere should have made him uneasy, the same way it did everyone else who ventured into the Gulch. But addictions, exposures, and neglect over the years combined to block ordinary life from corroded senses. He existed in his own world and perceived nothing outside the tiny universe of personal stupor. It was all Al cared about, his tiny, mobile outpost on earth.

  Alcea Blocker. A name. His name. It sounded real. American. People got uneasy at bums with authentic names…not that Al cared about his name or people in general. He would trade first, middle, and last name for another sip or a handful of pills. If only he could. So careless was he that at times he almost forgot it himself. In death, he would shed the burden. The law would provide something less personal. John Doe, or more precisely, John Doe, unidentified remains. The sole monument to Al Blocker’s life would be the unsolved and soon forgotten police file.

  Al crouched on the soggy ground, peered left and then to the right. He reached into his pocket and freed the vial. Hot flashes radiated from shoulders to waist as he anticipated propelling the drug—heroin this time—into his veins.

  The vial cost eleven hours begging in the blistering sun…though time meant nothing; neither did food, for that matter. Nourishment came in a bottle, needle, or a pipe.

  Broken fingernails stained by traces of Copper Gulch groped the other pocket for the small bottle. Impatient for the fix, he shuddered. Another quick scan revealed nothing but trees.

  Al added water to the rocks then crushed them with an old ballpoint pen. He fired a disposable lighter and heated the mixture. As the concoction neared completion, burned out consciousness fought the mental fog.

  Apprehension rose. Unexpected. He was in no mind to share or maybe even lose the drugs. A mugging he could stand; beatings came often to the homeless. Those he survived. Loss of his fix created anguish of a different, more intolerable nature.

  Al squinted to focus his pupils. Nobody there. He reignited the lighter. Heat scorched cheap glass, blacking the lower half and stretching orange ribbons up the sides until his fingers burned. Soon. If Al could remember how to smile, he would have. Salivary glands raced.

  3

  Hidden just beyond the shadows and behind a portal braced ajar, other eyes observed.

  4

  Unsteady hands threatened upset as Al slid the contaminated needle into the vial. Insubordinate fingers retracted the injector and the mixture complied, sucking up the needle like a leech that fed on discarded hope, past dried blood, other body fluids, drug residue, and into the syringe. Al felt lightheaded, giddy, and unaware that the onset of darkness increased at a rate not natural. He did not perceive the foul odor as it crept toward him.

  5

  Leland Graves opted against shutting the portal and accepted risk of warning aff
orded by the reek. Raising the stink one level or even two would go unnoticed. In his first millennium in Copper Gulch, the time before his promotion and world-wide access, Leland Graves discovered quite by chance that this plot of earth existed as one of the rare, elastic boundaries between places that hungered for the spoil of the other side. Also, he wanted to provide the others an unobstructed view.

  Darkness shrouded the Gulch; it came in grays that graduated into a blackness that sped down on Al like a vulture onto dirt road carrion. Al slid the pitted needle under his tongue and into a vein so tiny that the accuracy spoke of vast experience. His brain never registered the prick because another blade many times more substantial than the hypodermic needle pierced Al.

  Shock percolated through a corroded mind. Al looked up to well-dressed man, a man generously past middle age yet thin, holding a cane in one hand—and the other—Al’s eyes focused lower.

  Blade…MY NECK! Al saw another form, a squat, burly man reaching for a rotting branch sitting nearby. Al opened his mouth to scream, but could not. The burly man thrust the stick into the soft, moist mass of Al's brain, grinding the speech sector into dysfunction. Coherency rode away atop his blood. Body fluids pooled, sinking into the thankful muck of Copper Gulch like an anti-baptism for commission—not remission—of sin.

  Any life served Leland Graves’s purpose—quotas to maintain, schedules to keep—so he considered any life worthy to take. But Al would provide minimal impact on quota. So Leland Graves did not worry himself to collect Al, banking instead on expected profits due to ripple effects.

  That beautiful orb.

  He smiled at the one that refused to rise yet rebuffed his grasp.

  Centuries spent in attempts on those perfect circles resulted in uniform failure. That one years before—It moved sideways!—necessitated greater effort than ever expended, more skill to capture than any untouchable. But yet again the rules oppressed genius.