CICADA: A Stone Age World Novel (19 page)

An electronic display on the machine flashed numbers. Carrington looked around, again making sure no one was there and he remained unseen. He was the only one inside.

The display showed a bar graph with 1.00 on one side and 50.00 on the other, and the red bar was a little more than two-thirds, or a reading of around 30. The unit of measure was MeV.

Megaelectrovolts
?

Carrington’s mind raced. This couldn’t mean what he thought, could it? This machine was generating radiation of some sort, perhaps gamma radiation. A huge amount of gamma radiation, in fact. Cobalt-60 could produce maybe 1.5 MeV, but not 30 MeV. And to what purpose? And why have some sort of gamma ray generator on top of a vent going deep into the earth?

His face sagged, and he quavered, faltering as the weight of it all pressed down on him.

“Oh my God!” His voice cracked. He felt faint and very scared.

He turned and stumbled from the room. He had to get out of here now. Halfway through the turbine room, a voice yelled from the other side, “Stop! Dr. Reid, you were not supposed to go there.” It was Guard #2, coming from the Shaft Room early. “Stop!” the guard yelled, jogging to him now while pulling out his radio.

Carrington didn’t wait; he bounded up the steps three at a time.

The Teacher took a big drink of water, but it didn’t satisfy his thirst. He thirsted for something more. Ever since he saw it in a strange vision that day when the bright orange nuclear clouds erupted over that shitty little town in Illinois, he yearned for that city under the dome below the three-pointed mountain. He even saw the image of the cicada. It had taken the better part of a year, but tonight, they would reach the place he prophesied. By morning Cicada would be his.

It’d been a difficult journey.

He guzzled some more water and continued the trudge forward with several hundred of his finest warriors. Each step along this deserted road brought them closer to the end of their long journey. His mind wandered to what had brought him to this point: his early preaching, the crowds of followers, the miraculous healings, the visions, the end of the world and then the arduous trip to Colorado with over two thousand people. But it had been more than his talents and efforts that brought them here. He believed that John and the Book were the “game-changer” for them. It was John who led him to the cave after a hike in the woods, and there they found the Book. John said that a god, not the God, directed him to this revelation, to write it down and to give it to the Teacher to give to the world. It took a week, but they arrived from the cave with the written revelation. And what a revelation it was.

All who followed the Book would one day become gods themselves. It was the ultimate secret and yet the epitome of the human condition. It was why we were wired the way we were: to be in control, to be selfish, to have so many wants. But we could never get what we wanted because we had not yet achieved that next evolutionary leap. The Book provided the catalyst for this leap. By focusing our energies inward, we would one day achieve this perfection that we were meant to have.

The Book changed everything for the Teacher and his followers, as epic as—or more so—than any of his visions or preaching. They now had a purpose to go along with a place.

He knew that John had designed this from his own mind, using his own education and experience to write the Book, but where did the concepts come from? Where does any creative thought come from? Are we the creator or was someone else prior to it the originator? It didn’t matter; he and his people had an answer to whatever their question was.

Meanwhile, John continued to have revelations. And that was the Teacher’s only concern. Would John one day lose sight of his purpose and attempt to usurp the Teacher’s rule? This worried him because the Book was bigger than any one person. It was even bigger than him.

First they would take over Cicada, and then he would reveal the Book to Cicada’s residents and their settlers outside. Then, he would deal with John.

He repositioned the satchel resting against the small of his back, its straps digging into his shoulders, with the Book safely protected inside. He wished that the Book was just a little smaller.

John couldn’t help but wonder if he made a mistake with the Teacher and the writing of their new bible, which he coined the Book. There was a great need for a new kind of purpose to lift up the Teacher and his followers from their doubt. They already had the Teacher’s great preaching and his visions, but they needed something more. As it had been for most of his life, John’s own purpose was to make other leaders great. He merely needed to find what would work for the Teacher. John himself was not best at being the leader, but he found that he could raise up others to be remarkable ones.

He did this in his Catholic high school, when he chose the school president. Part of his desire was to be part of the “in” crowd, and part of him just wanted to see if he could do it. So he recruited a popular football player and convinced him to run; John would get him the presidency. They became friends and he introduced John to all sorts of pretty people in the school, while John worked his plan over the entire school year to lift him up to the role. It was a landslide; he received one hundred percent of the vote. Of course, the new president promptly forgot who put him there and belittled John publicly. So, naturally, John did what any spurned leader-maker would do: He arranged for a convenient car accident, which ended the president’s term and life.

The Teacher was an entirely different story. Paul Agabus Fairhaven was already a great speaker with creepy visions that often seemed to come true, but he was functionally illiterate. So, having a degree in religion from Notre Dame, John gave Fairhaven the words to speak. Later, as Paul became the Teacher, John witnessed the man’s ability to embellish with each sermon and his belief system evolving didactically; and the crowds grew. John didn’t have a plan, until then. He reasoned that so many men and women were willing to release their coin, and so many women would release themselves to a preacher and his followers who gave them what they wanted. It was a great run before and just after the Event.

But then the food started to run scarce, and their followers were starving and everyone was losing hope. John remembered the Mormon and Muslim faiths, how they grew out of God handing down a text that they could follow. Both tribes flourished through indoctrination, often by physical or psychological force, and at their root was their faith in a made-up text, written not by a god, but man. Taking from science fiction and a little bit of L. Ron Hubbard’s
Dianetics
, John contemplated how he might craft the Book. It didn’t have to be complete because the Teacher didn’t really read, and John would control it and add to it over time. And then providence set in.

John and the Teacher were hiking in the woods. They split up to see if they could rustle up some game and John found a cave, already occupied and turned into a home by some kind of metaphysical writer. John killed him and read some of what he was writing. It was a masterpiece. It was there John decided a god would deliver the Book. If everybody had a purpose, a reason to move forward, other than to get somewhere safe, they might not just survive, they might thrive.

He moved all of the writer’s pages into his backpack, hid the body and made up the whole story to the Teacher about a vision and revelation. John copied from the Mormons, telling the Teacher that when John sat behind a curtain in the cave’s bedroom, he received the revelation from a god. The Teacher didn’t believe at first, but when he wrote the first ten pages of what would become their Book by hand and read it to him, the Teacher believed. For John, it was a combination of plagiarism from the man’s manuscript, liberally sprinkled with John’s own words, to personalize it to their situation. Most of the be-your-own-god doctrine had already been written down by the dead author; John just made it better.

When they emerged from the cave and wandered back to their camp a week later, they amazed their followers with this new revelation. And it was the Book that brought them this far these past six months. Now they were at a precipice. The Teacher had taken three-quarters of their troops, and they were headed into a trap; John was sure of this. Meanwhile, John was left here with maybe two hundred of their troops to play babysitter to their women and the children, and of course “watch for their treason.”

He was sure that the treason was in their show. Like the Great Oz of
The Wizard of Oz
, he believed there was a little man sitting behind the controls of a giant smoke screen. John just had to find a way past those controls. Regardless of what happened to the Teacher at Cicada, he would find Bios-2’s Achilles’ heel and he would take it for his people.

John lifted up the telescope, its tripod firmly planted in the middle of the road, his men protecting him. He scanned the walls of this place called Bios-2 and considered this version of Oz. It wasn’t a scary smoke cloud they used to maintain control of its people…
It was their weapons
! These gave them their advantage over the settlers here. These had to be their weak point.

He looked at each of the five weapons, studying them carefully. He thought of how Stephen had been burned to a blackened crisp and knew it was an electrical discharge, but couldn’t figure out how they controlled it. Then he remembered a strange shiny glint from what looked like a long strand of hair leading to Stephen.

Could it be?
he wondered and then concentrated on the weapon. The gun to the right of the gate was turned down and gave a profile image, while the other looked at him straight on. Then he saw it, the dish that must focus the beam of electricity, but the small barrel below this must send something metal, like a bolt that would keep the beam from jumping to ground.

John moved his hat up and looked with unaided eyes at the small city. “You sneaky devils you. You only have one good shot, don’t you?”

A plan started to come together.

Max and five other volunteers waded silently through the pines and aspens that only a year ago made up a majestic forest of green. Now dead or dying, they were all victims of no rainfall for almost that long during a perpetual summer. He wondered how long it would be before all plants and animals would perish, and with them humanity.

Tonight’s auroras were very mild, only a dusting of the usual green luminescent clouds, barely giving them enough light to avoid a hidden ditch—or worse, a cliff. This was why Tom was leading. His eyesight was much better than Max’s and he was a good tracker, as well as a great soldier.

A pine branch whipped back and slapped Max in the face, digging its needles into his cheek and threatening to do the same to its next victim walking behind him. With not so much as a flinch, he grabbed it and snapped it off.

Max veered off left so as he wouldn’t be following the two rookies in front of him. Tom was a pro and had seen many battles, but his two recruits were very green behind the ears. Sue was thirty and was former US Army but had never done anything more than Basic when it came to using a weapon. She left the service as a food inspector. Rob had no formal military training but was a bit of a prepper and had taken some defensive tactics training. He was a little more hardened than Sue, having had to defend himself several times before making it here. Max’s two recruits were not much more seasoned. Felix, at least he knew, having trained him a little to accompany Magdalena from Mexico to Cicada. Pel had some hunting experience and that was about all.

There was a whistle to his right; Tom’s signal for “eyes open.”

Max looked up and clenched his teeth to keep his jaw from dropping. There it was: their nemesis, Bios-2. It was huge—definitely bigger than Cicada. In many ways, it was like Cicada. It was on top of a mesa, accessible by an elevated road, and its complex was surrounded by a massive wall. But there was something peculiar over it and around it: a delicate transparent dome.

“It has some sort of resonating field above it,” said Pel, a particle scientist. “I’m guessing it’s a protective force field.”

“Great. Now what, boss?” asked Tom.

“Let’s move closer and observe. I’ll take the lead.” Max eyeballed Bios-2 and wondered how they would break into that.