Children of the Source (3 page)

    “He’s son has been killed in a fire fight with jay hawkers.  He needs to know his son still lives.”

2

    To travel down Highway 180 into Flagstaff was like traveling back through time.
  We moved our mules around the potholes and ruts that only a four- wheel drive or a creature with four feet could negotiate.  The road hadn’t been repaired since the local and national governments decided to abandon the towns and evacuate the people in the San Francisco volcanic field.  The volcanic eruptions and earthquakes with the forest fires destroyed much of the area.   By that time government had broken down so much that many people stayed on without interference. 

    Jay hawking started about that time.  Within one year what was left of civilian government was suspended, and military regions were set up west of the Rocky Mountains.
  We fell into the Southern Utah - Northern Arizona Military Region.  Colonel William Christopher Carson assumed command six months in and was promoted to Brigadier General.  Carson, a hard compact man, looked out at people from a deeply weathered face and unwavering steel grey eyes. 

    By law every military governor maintained a sitting tribunal of three officers to hear felony and capital cases.
  Capital cases included jay hawking, rape, murder, theft of life-giving property, and assault with  intent to commit murder.  The tribunal could give prison sentences in lieu of execution.  Each sentence automatically appealed itself to the military governor.  Carson considered death preferable to being sentenced to hard labor in the prison camps.  The prison camps killed with brutality and neglect.  Carson knew this.

    Just down the road
from Cheshire lay the ruined Museum of Northern Arizona.  Eighteen months after Carson became Governor his troops cornered a traveling band of jay hawkers in the abandoned structure on the right side of the road.  The jay hawkers had left a sick woman with us.  The nine men and six women nearly collided with a squad of Carson’s men.  The jay hawkers made it to the museum, killing one soldier doing it.

    Carson, called in, used mortars, and blew the place apart.
  That finished the battle.  He ordered the bodies hung on his Long Beam at the fort,  then cursing thought better of it, burying them in the rubble.  We later learned his nephew had been killed in the initial exchange.  He was more like a beloved son to him than anything else.

    Mike Roseman
and I got to the Museum that just after the fighting ended.  We looked at the empty shells of flesh that once moved and laughed.  Now strangely doll like, personalities fled.  Where did they go?  Extinguished into oblivion?  I couldn’t believe that.  Several personal experiences had proved to me that the personality survives physical death.

    A number of times I’d talked in dreams with some of our people that had shed their physical bodies.
  They’d told me things only their relatives knew and events of the future that came true.  So I left behind the childish arguments of hallucinations and dying brain chemicals and the banal prattle of pious churchmen, and moved on.

    One night shortly after the Museum incident someone took chicken blood and wrote ‘Bloody Carson’ on the outside wall of the Headquarters.
  The name stuck.  This was a man to fear, respect and always tell the truth to.  His one focus was the job,
his
version of the job, and we’d better fit into it. 

    The Peaks, once a high end retirement complex, stood fire gutted on the left.
  Then we came on the Northland Press.  On the right stood a large group of houses called Faculty Flats, for the teachers from Northern Arizona University that used to live there.  Squatters lived a makeshift existence among the ruins of these houses.  They raised vegetables, grazed their assorted mules, goats, and sheep in the yards.  Chickens and ducks wandered freely in the warm July sunshine.  Few bothered these people who seemed to prefer the hand-to-mouth existence they’d developed.  At times we offered to take them in, but they always refused.  Our main contact came when they brought themselves for healing and medical help or we visited briefly on the way to and from town as we were now.  Most of their children elected to come to our school Fall through Spring.

    We stopped at West Whipple Drive and some came over to talk.
  Plainly excited, they pointed to the spacecraft circling lazily over the Peaks.  These had moved higher now - to somewhere near fifty thousand feet.  The thunderheads which gave us our afternoon showers, were already building..  We called them monsoons.  They started around the Fourth of July and ended in September.

    “What’cha know bout this, Jamie?”
  Amos asked, a short shaggy haired man who looked more like a bear than anything else.

    “They’ve come to help make a better world, if we let them.”

    “How do you know they won’t come with guns?”  Amos spit something nasty and black off to one side.  He grinned, the black juices showed around yellow teeth, and dribbled down disappearing into his beard.  He leaned over and spit again.

    “I do know.”
  I knew they were to come, and a little of why, but only a little.  I look for the whys in every place I can, every symbol, every incident, every experience until I put more of the puzzle together.  I’m usually way ahead of most people cause they don’t take the time to look.  They need to look.  I stopped.  He nodded and I saw the black ooze seep out of the corner of his mouth and dribble into his beard.

    He must have seen the look of fascination and incredulity on my face.
  I can’t hide anything.  He reached for his pouch with a twinkle in his eyes, and said in a confidential voice, “Wanna try some?”

    Everyone around us saw the look on my face, and broke out laughing.
  I held up my hand warding him away.

    “Now that is real terror,”
  Amos said, almost doubled over with laughter.  “Ya sure?” he asked, catching his breath.

    “Yeah, but thank you,”  I said.
  “I’m not at that level of advancement yet.”

    Madge McDonald hurried over, worry on her worn lean face, wiping her hands on her ancient apron.
  “Phyllis needs you, Jamie.  She’s asking for you.  Stopped us from sending someone to Cheshire.  Said you’d be along shortly.”

    “One of the Glory People,” I said.
  “I’m coming.”  We dismounted.  Glory people are individuals who know they are dying and going to the Other side.  They aren’t afraid of physical death, and indeed look forward to it.  They have a peace and aura about them that generates enormous joyous energy.  Nothing can touch them.  They’re often ecstatic.  Everyone around them can feel the energy.  The term for them came to me in a dream.  I’ve used it ever since.

    We entered the weather-beaten house.
  A cool breeze wandered in from a screened window.  Madge turned into a bedroom and walked to a bed piled with blankets.  An wizened woman peered up at me as I knelt by her.  “I knew you’d come, Jamie.”

    “Indeed,” I said and smiled. “Gawd, young lady, you got a party going here.
  Lots of folk ready to help.”  I could see six nonphysical people crowded around the bed.  A great joyous energy permeated the room.  “You’re one of the Glory People, Phyllis.”

    A smile twisted her ancient creased lips.
  “I know.  Guide me through it to the Other side.”

    “Yes,”
 I said.   Her eyes began to wander.  “Look to your left.  Up in the corner of the room.  You should see Tom there.  He’s come to get you.”  She swallowed and nodded eyes studying.

    “Yes, yes,
  I see him.  Oh, Tom, I’ve missed you so.  He’s smiling.”   She breathed, pleased smile lighting her face.  I moved her left hand to an energy on the bed next to her.

    “Who do we have here?” I asked.

    “Whiskey.  Whiskey.  God, you’re alive.”  The small dog energy licked her blue veined  hand. “You’re so warm and your tongue is wet.”  Her eyes shown with joy.  “It’s happening isn’t it?  I’m separating from my body.  Just like you said, Jamie.”

    “The forces of heaven have come to take you home, Phyllis.
  Tom and Whiskey are here to escort you.”  I waved Madge close.  “Wish her well.  She will visit in dreams.  Now is her time to go.”

    Tears scattered on Phyllis’s ancient hand from Madge.
  “Go, Mama.”  Madge struggled with her breathing and said,  “I know.  I know.  Go.  Go with Daddy.” 

    Phyllis swallowed.
  “I love you ... .”  The death rattle sounded in her throat and she was still.  I closed her eyes and kissed her forehead.  Blessed be.  The vast protective energy slowly ebbed. 

     Madge raised her
wet eyes to me.  “She knew.  She did.  Insisted we dig a burying hole.  Could you come tomorrow morning and say the words over her body?  She’d like that.”

    “I’d be honored to,” I said.
  We went out,  mounted our beasts and continued into town.

    The former Plaza Shopping Center stood gutted on the hill above the junction of Humphrey and Fort Valley Road (U.S. 180), long since looted and burned.
  Flagstaff High School off to the right, once extensively remodeled, burnt down in the volcanic fires.  We turned right onto Humphrey Street, and in four blocks went down the hill to turn left on Cherry Street and headed for the fort.  We came on the cathedral-like Church of the Nativity standing largely untouched on the outside.  The wood pews and doors had long since heated someone’s house. 

    We passed the remains of the county buildings between San Francisco and Verde which Carson blew up after one of his patrols found themselves ambushed by jay hawkers using the buildings for cover.

    Then we sighted the main gate to Snob Hill Fort.  A name used by the local people.  Cherry Hill - Snob Nob - used to have some of the wealthier families living there.  The Main Gate stood guarded by a huge bunker, two stories high sandbagged inside and out.  Five men manned it twenty-four hours a day.  Two M-60 machine guns pointed at us.

    Our mounts trembled and we glanced at each other.
  “Earthquake,” Grant said.   A mild earth tremor shook the earth.  We dismounted and talked easily to our mules. When our mounts reared, we steadied them with gentle hands and voices.  Slowly, walking between a corridor of concertina wire flanked by Claymore mines on both sides, we made our way up the two long blocks to the bunker.  Master Sergeant Henry Denton greeted us, “Need some supplies, gentlemen?”

    “There’s gonna be a hanging today,” Burt Clark said.
  A young Staff Sergeant, he was a veteran of seven years of warfare, knowing the ways of ambush, firefight, tracking among other things.  A survivor, he came west as a replacement recruit, married a lady from  our community, and was due for discharge in a couple of months.  They had decided to join us.

    Tradition had it that every time a person hung, the earth would tremble.
  It seemed to work that way, which had created a superstition over the years.  After a bit of exchanging gossip and news we moved on.  We took the wounded soldier to the fort hospital and went our various ways.

    Ella Marvin, ancient and cheerful, hobbled up, and claimed Laith.
  As they turned to go Laith said, “Remember Benson, Dad.”  I nodded. “I’ll be back in time for the hanging.  They moved it up one hour.”  He stopped, eyes closed.  I waited, familiar with his method of picking up information in an altered state of consciousness.  The brainwaves go from Beta to Delta - fourteen to four cycles per second.  He opened his eyes slowly.  “Carson’s son was killed in a skirmish south of Salt Lake yesterday.  He just got word of it this morning.”

    I nodded.
  “I knew his son had died, but not the details.”  Laith’s abilities were coming forward frighteningly fast, which had Judith and me on our toes.  Sometimes as helpless observers.  I watched them move off.  Old friends in deep conversation.  Grant and Mike had headed for the Trading Post with some honey to barter.

    I headed past Fort Headquarters (the former Mormon Stakehouse), past the gallows, and stood next to the perimeter overlooking the downtown.
  Every time I went into the H.Q. my heart gave a painful lurch. I don’t know why, but I needed the extra time to compose myself.  Especially with what I was planning to do.

    Everything for two blocks south and north of the tracks lay leveled by great armored bulldozers.
  In Vietnam we called them Roman Plows.  Carson called them in after he spent six days and lost five men in building to building fighting with a gang of gunmen dressed as soldiers who tried  to gain entry to the fort.  The Santa Fe Railroad cut the town in two.  It ran across Northern Arizona from Kansas City in the east to Los Angeles in the west.  Kansas City had been destroyed in the earthquakes that leveled St. Louis and Memphis.  Los Angeles no longer existed.

    I took a deep breath and entered the headquarters to the greetings of the guard.
  The first thing a person sees inside is a perfect scale model of the fort.  All approaches to the fort were cleared within a hundred feet to provide a clear field of fire.  Carson enjoyed tinkering with the defenses, and in all the years of his tenure no one had lived to penetrate the fort defenses.  The fort area was huge.  The perimeter took in more than a mile.