2013: Beyond Armageddon (34 page)

As the group broke up and made their way to the lounge, Zeke noticed Michael Price and Anthony Unger having a private conversation off to the side. They seemed to have bonded in the few hours Unger had been here. Zeke was relieved that everyone n seemed to have adjusted quickly to the presence of a man dressed like a monk.

We might just pull this off
, he thought.

Mordecai came up beside him. “I know we’re in a situation where minutes count, Zeke, but these people have been working non-stop. They need a break before they burn out.”

“It’s a good decision, Mordecai. We can only do so much. And I did promise there would be some fun on this dig.”

“Good. Now, before Leah tries to get me to shake what’s left of my booty, come here for a moment. I need to show you something.”

He led them to the large monitor, where he’d pulled up the pre-dig survey. He used the mouse to point to two of several highlighted shapes inside the rectangle that indicated the proposed boundaries of the dig.

“These are the sites we’re currently working on, The Building and The Dwelling. Two smaller teams can finish those. Since we are uncovering an ancient city, which could be fifty, a hundred acres—who knows?—we have much more excavating to do. Look at this.” His finger traced a barely visible crooked line, about fifty yards beyond the northeast boundary of the survey. “This is what I wanted to show you. I’ve been so caught up in studying the area inside our artificial boundary, I missed this.”

“Something that faint,” Zeke said. “What would that indicate?”

“Can’t tell you for sure. The lightness of the image tells us the sonar signal was weak, which means it was bouncing off something very diffuse. Could be a chemical deposit, could be a cave or something from when that area was dry land. Could be old construction materials that the mining company buried and have rotted away. Could be a stratum of rock with some iron in it. Could be nothing.”

“Could it be a tunnel?” Zeke asked.

“If it is, it doesn’t seem to go anywhere. At least from what we can see here. It goes about fifty yards, then fades out. Could be what’s left of a tunnel that collapsed. Thousands of years of seismic activity have shifted this earth around a lot.”

“Whatever it is,” Zeke said, “we need to take a look.” He continued to stare at the faint crooked line. “Fifty yards. Too big for just you and I to handle, isn’t it?”

“Probably. We’d need to make an exploratory dive, see if we can find out what we’re up against. If it’s a hollowed out tunnel, then in effect somebody’s already done the digging for us. If it’s a tunnel filled with debris—far more likely—it would depend on how big it is. Judging from this, it would probably be too long. And the line slopes slightly downward, which means we’d be fighting gravity along with everything else. Too much for hand digging.” He shook his head. “We’d probably be looking at dredging. It wouldn’t be good archaeology, but I know our priority is different there.”

“Let’s you and I make that exploratory dive. See what we’ve got and go from there. I know you gave us all the day off tomorrow, so—”

“I don’t want to wait. Do you?”

Zeke knew they were both thinking the same thing: this might be the opening they had come here to find. “Not really,” he said.

“Then we can go out in the morning while the others take the day off.” He paused, considered something. “We’ll have a lot to do. A third person would be good.”

“Only people from the Hell Squad can come on this leg of the journey.”

“I know. I’m thinking this would be the time for Hassan to join us. He is anxious to help down there.”

“Fine. I’ll stop by the party just to be polite, but I need to get some sleep. What time do you want to start in the morning? Around six?”

“Six it is,” Mordecai said.

“It’s a date.”

“With destiny?”

“We shall see.”

Anthony Unger sat at the edge of the Dead Sea, waiting for Michael Price to join him. He’d been intrigued to meet someone as knowledgeable about Satan as he was about God, and after so much time alone was eager to continue their conversation. He also wanted to test the theory about Price that he and Zeke had discussed on the ride here this morning: whether someone spending too much time in the company of Satan-influenced murderers might absorb some of their evil energy. Possibly even embrace it. Zeke had quoted Nietzsche: “Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. When you look into the abyss, the abyss also looks into you.”

Wanting to clear his mind for their upcoming meeting, Unger focused on the stark beauty of his surroundings. In his explorations of the Holy Land he had been to the Dead Sea many times, never failing to be stirred by its ever-changing appearance. As the sun sank behind him over the Judaean Wilderness, it scattered pink highlights over the waves, as if dressing them for the evening. Normally this kind of scene helped him transcend his frail human limitations, but today was different. Today was the first day of his attempt to rejoin the human race—not as Anthony Unger, but as John the Baptist. Depressing impressions from his first few hours on the dig kept clouding his mind. Not until now did he realize what he had given up, how far he had fallen.

He was
not
the Forerunner. God had chosen Ezekiel. The selfish part of him, the Anthony Unger he had never been completely able to bury, clung to the stubborn hope that God would still choose him to pave the way. But in his heart he knew otherwise. Even though Zeke had tried to deepen their bond of trust by making him a member of the “Hell Squad,” the others didn’t take him seriously as a holy man. They hid it well, but he could see it on their faces.

He
was
John the Baptist, he kept telling himself. And he had promised in the name of the Lord to help Ezekiel on this dig. If he was not a man of his word, then he did not deserve to call himself a man of God. The deadly sin of pride was pulling him off the path of righteousness, no matter how slightly. With the help of Jesus, he must find his way again. He closed his eyes and strove to reach at least some level of hesychasm to pull him out of this petty, negative spiral.

An image began to form. He was walking along a golden path. Ahead, off to the side, he saw Jesus on the cross that fateful day. Storm clouds were gathering overhead.

He sensed more than heard someone beside him. He opened his eyes just as Michael Price sat down beside him.

Price wore a silky white V-neck T-shirt tucked into the elastic waistband of shiny black jogging pants with a black and white stripe running down each leg. Black sneakers with white accents completed the stylish ensemble that emphasized his trim, muscular physique. Unger knew well the vanity behind such an outfit; it was the same vanity he’d tried to reject as John. With a quick glance at his own monk’s habit he realized that changing one’s dress didn’t automatically change the man. Just a moment ago he’d been engaged in the very un-monklike contemplation of his wounded pride.

“I try to come down here every evening,” Price said. “It’s a good spot to come and think things over.”

“It is,” Unger said.

They sat on a relatively smooth stretch of craggy rock that ended at the water’s edge, their legs dangling above the waves breaking softly several feet below. Crystallized salt formations jutted up through the water all along the shore. In places the salt formed a white border where the thin strip of sand met the water. A strong briny smell floated in the air.

“I’m told this is the saltiest body of water on earth,” Price said. “In ancient times people believed salt had the power to ward off evil.”

“We should be safe here then,” Unger said. “Maybe God put all this salt here for a reason. Do you believe in God?”

“I believe in Satan. I guess that means an
ipso facto
belief in God.”

“Coming in through the basement, so to speak.”

“So to speak,” Price said, gazing out at the water. “I can certainly see why the Dead Sea has long been considered the anteroom to Hell.”

“Why do you say that?”

“It’s more than just the harsh environment, the ovenlike heat. There is evil here. I feel it.”

“Do you think your career interviewing the worst death row murderers has made you more sensitive to such things?”

“I believe I have become more attuned to the presence of evil, yes. But you don’t have to be to feel it in this place. Don’t you feel it?”

“I haven’t been here long enough to say. I’ve certainly become acutely attuned to the widespread evil that plagues the human race. Pride. Vanity. Greed. All the deadly sins.” Unger nodded at the monk’s habit he wore. “Despite my rebirth into a holier life, I am not immune. Being around people today has brought out those very frailties in me.”

“We all have those,” Price said. “I’m talking about uncommon evil. A very unusual chain of events has brought a bunch of strangers to this strange place. For the strangest of reasons. Especially strange to me is that you and I are even here. Ostensibly we are the resident experts on Good and Evil. Maybe that will prove useful, but I know I’m not welcome.”

“I feel the same way,” Unger said. “Not unwelcome, per se, but not taken seriously. That could just be me being over-sensitive. I have not been around people for many years, and a layman walking around in a monk’s outfit…I understand the skepticism. Hopefully with a little time I can gain some credibility, be of some use.” He glanced toward the sky. It would be dark soon. Shadow was erasing the color from the landscape as the sun got closer to the mountains. “You referred to us as the resident experts on Good and Evil. I’d like to hear how you acquired your expertise. And I can tell you of my encounters with God, if you like. After that we can go to the party and maybe even enjoy ourselves.”

“Sounds good,” Price said. “Why don’t you go first. After so much time in the presence of—if not Satan himself, then certainly Satanic power—I could stand to hear from someone who might have been in the presence of God.”

Unger resisted the urge to change Price’s
might have been
to
was
, and simply told his story of being born again, of how the spirit of John the Baptist had come into him as he walked the footsteps of Jesus, making him believe he’d been chosen as the Forerunner, driving him to amass his collection of relics as part of that responsibility. He described the many ways he had experienced their power, especially during visitations from Pilate’s mirror.

“Jesus and Satan materialized in the mirror. Zeke experienced it as well. That is why he brought the relics here—for their divine power to protect us.”

Price’s eyes narrowed in skepticism. “One can only hope,” he said.

Unger looked at the darkening sky. “I’m sure we will have much to talk about, but that’s the short version of how I reached this point in life. What about you?”

Price gestured at Unger’s monk’s habit. “What you’ve told me about yourself, the way you’re dressed…it feels like I’m confessing to a priest. God knows I could stand to unburden myself. I’ve got secrets that eat at me. Dark secrets I’ve kept to myself for far too long.” He hesitated. “If I tell you these things, will what I say have the same confidentiality as confession?”

“Absolutely,” Unger said. “We must trust one another.”

“Trust. Something I haven’t had for a very long time. Maybe if you’ve managed to find a new you over here, I can do the same.”

Unger smiled. “I had to change my name from Anthony to John. At least you can keep yours. You probably know that Michael was God’s supreme archangel. The leader of his army against Satan.”

“I do know that. Michael means ‘who is like God.’ Ironic.”

“Unburden yourself, Michael.”

He began just as the curtain of night completed its fall.

“I dabbled in Satanism as a teenager. That’s almost always how it starts. People start out dabbling and end up on death row. Ouija boards, Tarot cards, anything to do with conjuring dark forces. Later it got worse. Much worse.”

After a brief description of his longstanding love/hate relationship with Satanism, Price quickly got to his relationship with Zeke in the Army. In an emotional rush he recounted that night in the jungle, the recent murder of Zeke’s family, his own questioning of the killer—who turned out to be his best childhood friend. A spiritual twin. Since then he’d been on a downward spiral, pulling him back into the hole he’d spent years trying to crawl out of. He shrugged. “Anyway, the past can’t be changed. It’s now that I’m worried about. I feel like I’ve got one foot in the abyss and the other on a banana peel.”

Unger maintained a neutral expression while being inwardly appalled. “I thought my life had been difficult. Full of persecution. My tribulations have been nothing compared to yours.”

“Here’s what it boils down to for me: Does one’s past dictate the future? Can a person really change? That’s my dilemma. There’s a part of me that I loathe, but can’t seem to make go away. I’ve always wanted to believe that I’m basically good, that it’s Satan who has driven me to evil. I thought I heard his voice that night in the jungle. Even now, I sometimes think I hear a nagging voice that wants to pit me against Zeke.”

That last comment hit Unger like a poison dart. Some nagging voice in his own head wanted the same thing. He’d been thinking it was the covetous part of himself that still wanted to be chosen over Ezekiel. After listening to Price, he wasn’t so sure. Could Satan be preying upon them both, seeing which one would weaken first? “What is this voice you hear?” he asked.

“Not mine. It’s clearly demonic. But it’s me who opened myself to that voice in the first place.”

“Satan is present here,” Unger said. “We know that from the inexplicable things that Zeke says have happened. I’m sure he’s told you about them.”

“The vision on the television and so forth.”

“Yes. So knowing that, and knowing of the weaknesses we both have that can be used against us, I beseech you—as I do myself—let’s don’t be the ones to ruin this.”

A sudden wind came up, bringing with it the sulfuric smell that seemed to be eternally lurking beneath the salt. Unger offered his hand, palm up. Price clasped it, and Unger laid his other hand on top of Price’s. “We must put our faith in God,” he said.