The Second Ship (The Rho Agenda #1)(3)
Perry had returned to his apartment on South Main Street, sold everything he owned, bought some survival gear, and moved to the remote Bandolier canyon country near Los Alamos, an ancient stretch of land, once home to the Pueblo Indians’ cliff-dwelling ancestors.
Perry was convinced that year 2000 would produce the Lord’s promised sign, but his wait for the resultant disasters proved to be in vain. When nothing happened in the year that followed Y2K, depression seized him. Perry came to doubt his own sanity. Had he sacrificed his soul mate for nothing? Losing himself in heroin, cocaine, and crystal meth, he wandered the canyon country aimlessly, tempted by the relief a suicidal jump would bring.
God had challenged his faith in a manner reminiscent of the trials of Job, remaking him a bedraggled wretch that little resembled his prideful former self. Then, one day in the autumn of 2002, he met Screaming Eagle. And Screaming Eagle introduced him to the ancient ceremonies of the native peoples, and to the wondrous pathways visible only in the smoke of a sweat lodge.
It was in one of those peyote-induced dream states, as he stumbled out of the sweat lodge and along the high canyon walls, that he first stumbled through the concealed entrance of the Ark Cave. It was there that God had given him his sign.
Perry straightened, the memories fading as he looked around the cavern he had come to know so well. God’s Ark rested at the back of the cavern, having cut its way through the canyon’s stone walls as it plunged from the skies all those years ago.
Striding under the smooth, curving edges of the vessel, he found the hole that Satan’s weapon had punched through the ship’s hull. He swung himself effortlessly up and inside, as he had done countless times in the past. Bypassing the first landing, he followed the smooth borehole, pulling himself upward onto the second deck.
There on the silky smooth metal desktop that extruded from the wall, silhouetted in the all-pervading magenta glow, lay the four halos. Although they looked like shiny metal, they were much too light and flexible, glittering with a rainbow of hues no earthly metal had ever produced. As always, his hands were drawn only to the fourth halo.
Perry picked it up, turning it slowly in his hands, lost in the memory of the first time he had slid that supple band over his temples.
Pain. Even now, the memory of the white fire in his head sent tendrils of agony along his limbs, so intense he expected sparks to fly from his fingertips, arcing outward to consume this world. Baptized in that river of pain, he had emerged, no longer Perry Symons, but as the fourth horseman, anointed with God’s own speed and power, along with a cunning the like of which no mere mortal possessed.
But it was not the pain, nor his newfound powers that drove him to become a hermit. The visions filled his dreams. God’s Ark had not come to earth alone. There had been another…Satan’s Chariot. In his visions, he had seen the two vessels battle across the night sky, both crashing to earth in tremendous gouts of fire. Although both had been damaged in the conflict, both survived, hidden away—each seeking out its champions. Armageddon’s disciples.
All these years, Perry had waited, patiently biding his time for the final sign, a signal that God’s Ark would call the other horsemen, a signal that the remaining three halos would no longer lie dormant, that each would fulfill its unique purpose in the coming apocalypse.
As Perry let his halo slip into place and its divine visions filled his head, a thin smile split his lips. His long wait was nearly over.
Chapter 2
Heather McFarland had always been an early riser, but the dreams were leaving her wide awake long before dawn. She couldn’t even remember what the dreams were about, only the dread they left in their wake.
This morning, the digital clock on the microwave read 4:43 a.m. when she came downstairs. Far too early, even for her. The nightmares had started shortly after summer break began, and after a week, she had stopped trying to fall back asleep again after they awakened her. The general sense of wrongness that lingered made that impossible. She hoped they would stop before school resumed next week.
She prepared her morning pot of herbal tea and carried it to the back deck, looking out to the east as the sun crested the mountainous horizon. There was something about the sunrise in the high country of New Mexico that was pure magic. Perhaps it was the way the air was so thin a mile and a half above sea level that the sun's rays sparkled and danced across the rock cliffs, tinting them the pink of a dew-covered rose. Or maybe it was the way the reds and yellows of sunrise splashed the eastern sky. The tang of the high pines hung in the morning air, which was cold at this hour even in early August.
White Rock had been her home all her life, the bedroom community for the Los Alamos National Laboratory providing homes for her closest friends, although many of her school chums lived a few miles away in the Los Alamos city limits. Heather chuckled to herself. Los Alamos and White Rock were beautiful towns situated in the stunning surroundings of the high canyon country of northern New Mexico, but the term “city” was a little generous for their sizes.
Despite the lingering worry from the dream that tickled at the back of her mind, Heather still could barely contain her excitement. Today, Jennifer and Mark were scheduled to return from their family summer vacation. While a cruise up the coast of Alaska sounded fun and she did not begrudge them those activities with their own family, she had missed the twins immensely these last three weeks.