Eve of Destruction (c) 
Chapter Seven 
By Fiction Writer #13 
(nosex, sci-fi, paranormal)

Strobe lights flashed in rapid succession accompanied by a clarion call.  
The noise was deafening, the light blinding, and when the seal was 
finally broken, the sudden rush of escaping air nearly knocked Allen off 
of his feet.

The massive steel door, circular in design, first moved away from them 
and then rolled with a low rumble and hiss to the left.  Once its motion 
halted, the alarms and warning strobes ceased as well, leaving Allen 
blinking away purple dots and pulling his fingers from his ears.

"Was that really necessary?" he complained over the ringing in his head.

Mal motioned for them to continue on their way. "A little excessive, but 
you have to admit, no one is going to just sneak in here."

The pair stepped through the portal and entered a long cylindrical 
hallway.  The tube was large enough for the two of them to walk side by 
side.  Its interior surface was made of obsidian, highly polished and 
darker than the deepest caves.  At the far end a door of the exact same 
design as the one they had just breached gleamed in the darkness.

"Doc!  Hey, Doc!  Wait up!"

The sound of Jonathan's voice entered the hallway and seemed to 
bounce around in the space.  Its echo first dropped away in volume, then 
rose again even higher than it had originally been spoken before 
snapping off abruptly.  Both Mal and Allen ducked at the same time as 
one of the echoed words seemed to shout directly over their heads.

Mal laughed. "I'll never get use to that." Oddly, his own words were not 
affected by the same auditory anomaly.

A moment later, Jonathan entered the hall panting. "Damn, you're a hard 
man to find." He reached to Mal's side and flipped the switch of his 
communicator to it's 'on' position. "How many times do I have to remind 
you to turn this damn thing on after you've been in Eve's room?"

"Did you ever think that maybe I wanted to leave it off?" Mal swatted at 
Jon's retreating hand. "That maybe I wanted to be lost for a while?"

Jon raised his hand in mock surrender. "Sorry Mal, you don't get that 
option.  Not any more."

"Why?"

Mal eyed his friend.  He could see concern etched on his face. "What's 
happened now?"

Jon shook his head. "Not good, I can tell you that much."

"Spit it out, Jon," Mal grumbled.

Instead of using words, Jon simply pulled out his data pad and handed it 
over to Mal.  Within moments the eerie voice of the messenger filled the 
space in which the three of them stood.  After a stunned moment 
scanning the screen, Mal found his voice.

"So soon."

"Too soon, Mal." Jon reached out to retake his data pad. "None of our 
projections had these events occurring so close to one another."

"Worldwide?" Mal tilted his head back, his eyes fixed on some point on 
the smooth black surface of the tunnel. "This one was global?"

Jon tapped out something on his pad before offering it back to Mal. "Not 
only that, but you'll want to check this out."

Mal ran a hand through his thick black hair.  His face looked strained 
and pale as he once again took hold of the book sized but magazine thin 
device.

"You speak German, right?" Jon waited for Mal to nod. "Think in German 
and then listen to the broadcast."

Allen listened as the recording began to play again, and although he still 
heard it in English, the stunned look on Mal's face told him that he was 
hearing something else entirely.

"It's like that for any language, all of them." Jon tapped the screen as 
Mal held it. "I got this as I was looking for you.  Even the deaf can hear 
it."

Allen moved in closer to get a look at what they were talking about.  On 
the screen was a report detailing an event that had taken place at a 
small school for deaf children in Ohio.  Apparently, as their art teacher 
suddenly stopped painting and started speaking, the children, who had 
all been deaf since birth, not only heard everything that she had said but 
understood it as well.

"Amazing," Mal exhaled.

"If you think that's amazing..." Jon's finger turned the volume all the way 
down on the device before restarting the video clip from the talk show, 
"... check this out."

Once again Allen and Mal could hear the chants of 'He is coming', only 
now they heard it in their minds.

Jon switched off the video. "We have teams analyzing this as we speak."

Mal's head snapped up to look at Jon. "What about our pre-cogs?"

"They're okay.  A little confused, but okay.  So far the only lingering 
effects of being used as a messenger is a little discharge of blood from 
the eyes, nose, mouth, and ears.  Nothing serious, but we'll know more 
after Dr. Reed's team checks them out."

Allen turned to Mal. "I should head back to my lab and see what I can 
do."

"No," Mal responded flatly, "your team will be fine, right now I need you."

Jon smiled. "Taking him to see the zoo?"

"You know I don't like it when people refer to it like that," Mal grumbled. 
"But, yes, he needs to see it."

"So he's in, then?" Jon turned to eye up Allen.

Mal answered for him. "Yes, he's in."

"Welcome aboard." Jon put a hand on Allen's shoulder. "Remember, 
there's a reason for everything."

"Speaking of that," Mal broke the awkward moment between the two of 
them, "why did you come all the way down here?  You could have had 
security stop us."

"Ah that.  This event was big and messy.  It'll be nearly impossible to 
hide through normal measures.  I need Council approval to handle this, 
and since you are the only member here..." He left the thought hanging.

"What ever you need to do, just do it." Mal placed his thumb over the 
reader on Jon's data pad, a brief flash of red light spilled out around its 
edge before he handed the pad back to its owner. "Do I want to know?"

Jon took the pad back and checked to make sure the thumb print was 
properly scanned. "I doubt it," he said laughing. "This one isn't going to 
be pretty." Jon's face suddenly twisted into a grimace. "This isn't good."

"What?" Mal moved forward. "I'll just re-scan my thumb..."

"No," Jon cut him off. "I just got a message from our favorite Council 
member."

Mal literally snarled, "Broddick.  What does he want?"

Jon's eyes never left the screen, "Apparently... they opened the final 
seal at Ayers Rock." His eyes narrowed while reading the text. "You're 
not going to believe this, they found two civvies inside!  It says that they 
took refuge in the rocks during the dust storm, and that they have no 
idea how they ended up inside of the structure, nor do they have any 
concept of how long they were inside.  Strange."

"Have they located the artifact yet?" Mal jumped in.

"No, as a matter of fact... that's the reason Broddick wants me to head 
there ASAP." Jon looked up at Mal. "He wants me to head the recovery 
team."

"Sounds like a trap." Mal rubbed his eyes.

"No shit Doc, of course it's a trap, but not just for me.  If they are going to 
make a move on Eve..."

"They'll wait until you are out of the way first." Mal looked as if he might 
collapse under the weight of the situation. "There's not enough time."

"We do have some advantages.  They don't know that we know it's a 
trap, and if I do manage to find the artifact, I'm certainly not going to 
hand it over to them."

Mal shook his head. "I was talking about Eve.  She's not ready yet."

"Plan B?" Jon asked quietly.

"Plan B," replied Mal with no emotion.

Jon turned and began walking back towards the entrance of the tunnel. 
"I don't like that plan, Mal, never did."

"What choice do we have?" Mal called to him.

"I don't have a clue, but this one sucks."

"Instead of skulking away, why don't you come back here and help me 
think of something else, then?"

"Sorry Doc, but I can't." Jon stopped at the doorway and turned. "I have 
to arrange for a government coup to fill the headlines of the world and 
pack a bag for my trip to the land down under.  Besides... you need Allen 
more than me for plan B to work.  Good luck, Mal."

"Good luck Jon." Mal almost looked as if he was going to tear up as his 
friend nodded once and then exited the hall.

"Should you two have been talking so openly?" asked Allen as he 
watched Jonathan's back vanish from sight.

Mal started walking again and cleared his throat. "Doesn't matter in here.  
The walls absorb everything inside.  Light, sound, Ether... it gets pulled 
in and trapped."

"I have to tell you, Mal, I have no idea what you two were talking about." 
Allen turned away from the doorway and once again began to walk down 
the hall following Mal.

"Oh shit." Mal stopped and whipped around to face Allen. "I didn't think 
to ask.  You don't get motion sick, do you?"

"No, why?"

"You'll see soon enough, but if you do start to feel ill, just close your 
eyes and keep walking forward."

Allen was going to ask why, but he was cut off by the alarm sound 
ringing behind him.  They were almost halfway down the tunnel when 
the giant steel door rolled closed, plunging them in complete darkness 
and silence.

At first Allen could see nothing at all, but then strange shapes began to 
appear out of the surrounding darkness, symbols and designs of a 
nature Allen couldn't identify.  They were violet, glowing and flickering in 
the darkness all around him.  They swirled and flowed, adrift in a sea of 
nothingness.

Allen made the mistake of looking down; his feet invisible in the dark, but 
the symbols glowed and danced under him as well.  They seemed to be 
moving in three dimensions, not just along the surface of the tunnel.  
The effect left Allen feeling as if he were floating as well, even though he 
could still sense the ground under his shoes.

"Mal?" he called out into the swirling maelstrom all around him. "MAL!"

"Relax, Allen, I'm still here." Allen felt a hand touch his shoulder. "Just 
keep moving forward and this will be over before you know it."

"What the hell is this?" Allen lowered his voice to a more normal level 
once he was assured that he hadn't been left behind.

"Protection," Mal responded. "Protection against things getting in... or 
out.  Are you feeling okay?"

"Yeah, uh... just a little vertigo."

"Try to focus on something, keep your eyes closed and just keep 
walking," Mal chuckled. "Not too much further now."

Allen took his advice and shut his eyes to the moving shapes. "You and 
Jon keep talking about some prophesy, but you said that the future was 
too uncertain to predict.  Which is it?"

Another chuckle. "Going to focus on the holes in my story, are you?"

"It's taking my mind off of this thing." Allen stumbled on his own feet but 
regained his composure before falling. "So what gives?"

"One prophet, one prophesy.  A thousand prophets, a thousand 
prophesies.  Each one seemingly different than the last.  None are 
perfect, most are faking it, and the predictions that do come true are only 
proven after the fact.  The whole business of seeing what's to come is 
one of random chance and luck." Mal paused in his speech to take a 
deep breath. "At least that was the old way of thinking.  Turns out we 
were only partially correct.  Have you ever heard of Edgar Cayce?"

Allen thought for a moment. "Sounds familiar, but I can't place him.  Was 
he a serial killer?"

"No, no.  In fact, he could be seen as the opposite of one.  He was just 
your normal, average, everyday kind of guy... except that he could enter 
a clairvoyant trance whenever he wanted to.  He began to diagnose 
illnesses in people while talking in his sleep, even though he had 
absolutely no medical training.  At first everyone believed that he was 
faking his gift, but then his predictions started saving lives.

"After some time people began to ask him questions while he was in his 
trance, and he gave answers.  His predictions came true, and soon 
enough people began to take advantage of him.  He found that if his gift 
was used for not so good intentions he would become ill.  It got so bad 
that he finally decided that he would no longer allow anyone other than 
his wife to be present during his readings.

"This continued on for years.  Then one day, while in a trance, he began 
to talk about future events.  Events such as the discovery of Atlantis, 
which did come true in 1969 when the Bimini road, the only remnant of 
that once great city, was found.  His wife observed and asked questions 
while his secretary wrote everything down in shorthand.

"Just before he died in 1945, Cayce entered a trance for the last time.  
During this trance he recited a series of ones and zeros.  The woman, 
who had been told to record anything and everything that he spoke, 
dutifully copied each and every one down.  When he reached the end of 
his seemingly nonsensical list, he spoke four words. 'This is the key.'  He 
suffered a stroke after those words.  He died a few days later.

"He left behind a vast collection of predictions and observances.  Many 
of them ended up being printed in books for the whole world to see, but 
not this last one.  No one could make any sense out of it, so it was put 
into storage.  By then Project Phoenix was in full swing.  Copies of every 
document were made, studied, and then put into storage as well.  There 
it sat, undisturbed and unnoticed until 1981, but that's jumping ahead.  
There were three other prophets, aside from Cayce, who made the true 
prophesy possible."

Mal suddenly stopped walking and Allen walked right into him. "Sorry."

"We've made it; you can open your eyes again."

Allen blinked a few times and was surprised to find that not only had the 
shapes and symbols faded back into the black obsidian, but that the 
massive steel door had opened without a sound.

Mal answered his unasked question. "No need for alarms at this end."

They stepped out of the tube and entered a square room identical to the 
one at the far end of the tunnel.  The bright light bouncing off the white 
walls was such a contrast to the world that they had just left behind.  
Everything seemed crisper for some reason, more defined.  Even the air 
smelt better on this side of the tunnel.

Mal had moved over to the security station where a single guard stood 
duty.  He signed the both of them in and then swiped his security pass 
through the reader.  Allen pulled his own card out and did the same, 
watching as the little LED light blinked red twice before switching over to 
green.

For some reason he kept expecting that his new clearance level would 
be discovered as false, and that little red light would be the last thing that 
he saw before the security guards raised their weapons and fired.  
Seeing it once again turn green caused him to sigh in relief.

A new door opened on the opposite side of the room with a quiet hiss. 
"Let's go, not too much further now."

"Do you come here often?" Allen asked.

"Everyday now that we're all together under one roof.  Back when I was 
in the other facility, I tried to come out here at least once a month." Mal 
smiled. "Now, where was I?  Oh yeah... the other prophets."

The new area beyond the door was identical to the parts of the building 
that Allen was more familiar with only on this side the walls were 
adorned with symbols and shapes much like those from the tunnel.  
These, however, were in a much wider spectrum of colors, and seemed 
fixed in space rather than free to room around.

"The year was 1917, the place Fatima, Portugal.  Three young girls were 
out in the fields tending to their sheep when the Virgin Mary appeared 
before them.  The stunned girls listened to every word she spoke, and 
once she left, ran to tell the people of their village what she had said.  
Over the next year she appeared to them five more times, and on the 
final visit, she told them three secrets to share with the world.

"The girls did what they were told, and shared two of the three secrets.  
The third and final secret was written down before Lucia Dos Santos, the 
last of the three still living, passed away in 1944.  This secret was sealed 
and delivered to the Vatican, and has never been made public, but we 
were given a copy by Pope John Paul II.

"You see, Lucy had left instructions that the secret could only be opened 
on a specific date, and only by the Pope himself.  On May 13th, 1981, 
Pope John Paul II awoke and was immediately handed an envelope with 
the date handwritten on one side, and a papal wax seal on the other. He 
broke the seal and tore the envelope open to find three paragraphs 
written in his native language, Polish.

"The first paragraph was a warning. It told of three wounds he would 
receive at the hand of Fatima. The wounds would only be fatal if he 
refused to forgive the one who made them.

"The second paragraph detailed instructions on what to tell his followers 
regarding this final secret of Fatima, and warned of a catastrophe should 
he decide to reveal the truth of the final secret to anyone other than 
those he was instructed to.

"The final paragraph was the true secret of Fatima.  It read... 'Be they 
seer or saint.  Find the way so faint.  Use the key.  Unlock the path.  
Stop the long night, the dark one who waits.' This was followed by a 
series of nine numbers.  A telephone number.  Our telephone number."

"We have a telephone number?" Allen asked as they passed through 
another series of metal detectors.

"Don't get smart with me now.  You're the one who asked, remember?

"Later that day the Pope survived an attempted assassination.  Three 
bullets were fired from a gun held by a man wearing a T-Shirt depicting 
the Virgin Mary's appearance at Fatima.  Needless to say, after he 
recovered from his wounds he publicly forgave the man for shooting him, 
and then he dialed the number.

"It was a special number, one only to be used by members of our field 
teams should they have an emergency and no other way to contact us.  
Imagine the operators surprise when they answered the phone to the 
Pope!

"It took some convincing on both sides, but eventually he shared 
everything that the Vatican had collected over the years that would help 
us, and we in turn shared everything that we had learned with them.  
We've been working together ever since."

Allen interrupted, "Let me get this straight.  The Catholic Church... is 
working with us?"

"That's right.  So long as we keep our findings to ourselves and not go 
public, they won't interfere with our research.  We're both on the same 
side, Allen, we just have different methods.  Even though they are a 
thorn in the side of science, they understand that as far as the dark one 
is concerned, they can't do it all on their own.  The enemy of my enemy 
is my friend."

The pair of them stopped after reaching another circular room.  In the 
center of it was an elevator with its door standing open.  All around the 
room were those strange characters, painted in every color, shape and 
size, but there was a definite pattern within the chaos.  They seemed to 
flow somehow, one leading to another, to another, and so forth.  All of 
those lines seemed to stretch out from this room and spread to the rest 
of the facility.

"Time to go into the lion's den." Mal stepped into the elevator. "Coming?"

Allen joined him inside, and as soon as he did the door slid shut.

"So now we had two pieces of the puzzle.  Cayce's ones and zeros, and 
the Fatima document.  Unfortunately we didn't know that the two were 
connected.  It had been years since anyone had taken a look at Cayce's 
last prediction.  We were just as lost and confused as we were before 
the Pope called.

"Then one day, completely out of the blue, a young computer tech was 
working on the security system in our document storage room.  That's 
where originals and copies are kept safe after they've been scanned into 
the computers.  He was just setting up his equipment when he tripped 
over something and fell into a box full of Cayce's predictions.  He was 
stunned to find the pages of ones and zeros that had been written in 
1945.  He recognized them instantly, it was binary code.  Computer 
code!

"He abandoned his work, gathered up the papers, and brought them to 
our attention.  At first we were intrigued by his discovery, but didn't think 
much of it until we read the final line about it being the key.  Everything 
changed that day.  Everything.

"The code ended up being a program.  As soon as it was booted up it 
logged into our network and began compiling every piece of data that we 
had gathered concerned with prophesy or predictions.  It searched 
through each and every file, locating keywords and phrases, joining 
them together in sentences based on the frequency of their usage.  After 
years of guessing, the computer spat out the true path in just a few 
hours.  We had finally found what we had been looking for, hard 
evidence of the Dark God's coming."

The elevator stopped and the door slid open.  Mal stepped out but Allen 
stayed behind. "When?  When is he coming?"

"Today, tomorrow, next week, next year... we still don't exactly know.  All 
we know is that he is coming, and there may not be anything that we can 
do to stop that." Mal turned to face Allen. "All we can do is be ready 
when he does come, and Eve is our best hope of stopping him once he's 
here."



Continued in Chapter Eight....


You can find more of my stories at:
https://www.asstr-mirror.org/files/Authors/Moments_In_My_Mind/www/Index.html

Join my forum and I'll send you an email notification
of when I update my stories:
http://fw13.suddenlaunch3.com/index.cgi

Read what I've been up to on my Blog:
http://fictionwriter13.blogspot.com

Feedback, Questions or Comments can be sent here:
FictionWriter13@msn.com


  
Eve7