The Glooming (Wrath of the Old Gods Book 1) (42 page)

The third guard had dropped his gun, fell on his knees and begged for mercy while crying for his mother. Gyle just walked past him and through the broken partition as he stared down at Boland and Ariel, who were both lying on the floor as they gawked back at his fearsome image.

Boland sat up and their eyes met. “I’m sorry, Patrick. Sorry for betraying you to these Israelis. They made a bargain to take us safely out of the Middle East, but they screwed us.”

Ariel rapidly shook his head. “No, no! Your superior Boland begged us to get him out of there, he was the one who betrayed you … it was he who gave your locations to us!”

Boland glanced back at the old man with pure hatred in his eyes. “You lying bastard.”

Ariel frantically shook his head as he couldn’t take his eyes off of Patrick. “No, no, it’s true, Boland wanted a lot of money to bring you and the eternal man to us—”

But Ariel’s words were cut off in mid-sentence as Gyle had grabbed him by the throat and pulled him up to his eye level. The old man’s legs were now dangling off the ground as he gasped for air. Ariel tried to loosen Gyle’s grip, but it was like trying to stop an industrial vise with just his hands.

Gyle’s voice had turned guttural, it sounded like a growl of a monstrous dog. “Atrahasis, where is he?”

Ariel kept gasping, he couldn’t catch his breath. “The l-level down below … aargh … last corridor to … th-the right….”

Gyle let go and the old man crumpled to the ground. He looked at Boland for a brief minute and said nothing. Boland looked down at the messy floor and didn’t say anything either. Then Gyle turned and walked out of the exit and into the corridor.

Although the guards had disabled the elevators, Gyle nevertheless opened the lift doors and just leapt down to the lower level of the installation. He could see that this level wasn’t quite completed yet. The builders had evidently left one wing exposed to solid rock as they had not yet finished digging out the earth at this depth. Following Ariel’s directions, Gyle walked down the concrete-lined corridor to his right. A few people had seen him and they immediately got out of the way while a few just fell to the ground and screamed in terror. He ignored them and kept on going until he got to the door in the final corridor and opened it.

Gyle saw that it was a smaller room than where they had kept him. In the middle was a hospital bed surrounded by medical machinery. As he walked over, Gyle could see intravenous tubes all around the floor as he stopped at the foot of the bed. Lying on the hospital bed was Atrahasis, his gaunt figure dressed only in a hospital gown, his flowing white hair and beard had been shaved off; his arms were held down by restraints on the side of the bed frame. Intravenous needles had been stuck into his forearm and his blood flowed freely from it and into several machines that had tubes running from the floor and lay embedded into the nearby wall. Gyle quickly tore off the needles from his arm and ripped out the restraints as the old man stirred to life.

Atrahasis’s voice was a faint whisper. “Thank you, my friend.”

Gyle easily picked up the old man using his now massive arms. “There’ll be many soldiers in the upper areas. I’ll shield you as much as I can if they decide to fire at us. I can’t guarantee full protection if we do it that way unless I hide you first—I could go around and kill everyone before bringing you out.”

“There is no need for more killing,” Atrahasis said. “Did you recall that there are rock tunnels in this place?”

“Yes, I passed by one such corridor just awhile ago on my way here.”

“Then let us go there for I can guide you to a portal that will bring us to Irkalla, the underworld. They will not be able to follow.”

“Very well,” Gyle said as he carried the old man out of the room.

Rabbi Elijah Ba’al stood by and stared at the carnage in the examining room. Medical orderlies had finally carried the body of the dead guard out on a stretcher. There was broken glass and machinery all around. Ariel Weizman limped over to him as he kept rubbing his sore throat with one hand and led with his cane in the other.

“So they got away then?” Rabbi Ba’al said.

Ariel’s voice was hoarse and it was painful to speak. “Unfortunately, yes. We do not know how they got out since they never made it to the upper levels. My men swept the area multiple times and there isn’t a single sign of them.”

“They are unique creatures,” Rabbi Ba’al said. “I was not surprised we were unable to keep them for long.”

Ariel shook his head slowly. “That’s it then, we failed. The Holy Land of Israel will be lost. Our people will be scattered again.”

“Perhaps not,” Rabbi Ba’al said. “We have extracted enough blood and life force from the eternal man to animate at least forty golems, according to my estimation. We might as well proceed to stage three of the project.”

Ariel looked down on the floor. More blood would be spilled now, but what mattered was the country’s survival. Everything else was secondary. “So you want to deliver the Palestinian prisoners to the staging area now?”

Rabbi Ba’al nodded. “Yes, there is no time to waste.”

The Otherworld

The moment she stepped through the portal, Tara Weiss kept her mind focused. She realized that the little Chihuahua had somehow transformed itself into a large coyote as it stood there waiting as the portal closed behind her. She was now standing in some strange desert that resembled the scrublands of the place where she had just come from, but the sand was bluish in color and it glowed faintly. Looking up at the sky, she noticed that there were no stars shining in the darkness at all, but she could see other planets in the distance and they seemed so close that she could make out their surface details. Their incandescent bodies illuminated the twilit world all around her. It felt like the entire sky was crowded with other worlds that she could fly off to, if only she had wings.

As she finally turned her attention to the coyote, Tara smiled at it as she zipped up her jacket. “You were a little dog in my world, but you look like a big coyote in this one, Bibsy.”

The coyote looked at her grimly. “I hate that name.”

Tara laughed. “But that’s the name your owner gave you, right?”

“She sure did.”

Tara shrugged. “Okay then, what would you like me to call you?”

“Coyote the Trickster would be fine.”

Tara gave it the thumbs up. “Alrighty then, Mr. Coyote Trickster. What do we do now?”

Coyote looked around. “You said you wanted to save the world, right?”

Tara shrugged. “I did. But how do I do that?”

“Well, we are in the Spirit World so anything is possible.”

Tara stared up into the heavenly sky. “So this Spirit World that we’re in, is it like, you know … Heaven?”

“Sort of.”

“What do you mean ‘sort of’?”

“Many ancient peoples had different stories that interpreted the other worlds. The Yaqui for instance, believed that there were five separate worlds: the desert world, the mystical world, the flower world, the dream world, and the night world. Others believed in an afterlife which wasn’t any different than the world that they came from, while still others believed that one world held eternal suffering and the more deserving ones go to a place of eternal bliss. All these worlds have many meanings and it is only limited by your own power.”

“Wait,” Tara said. “Are you saying that this world changes depending on how you feel about it or how you sense it?”

“That’s one way of putting it.”

“So everyone’s beliefs in the afterlife are all here? In this world that we’re in right now?”

“More or less.”

Tara thought about it for a minute. “So this place, it can be Heaven or Hell and I can go to either one and it all depends on like, my imagination or something?”

“To a certain degree, yes.”

“Wow,” Tara said. “So this means I can travel back and forth, all I have to do is will myself to do it, right?”

“You’re starting to get the picture,” Coyote said. “You must know where you are going in order to create the path ahead of you.”

“Okay, I think I’m getting it now,” Tara said. “So if I concentrate on a place to go to, then the path will open itself up before me? What if I don’t think about anything and just keep walking ahead?”

“As to your first question the answer is yes. As to the second one, anything can happen because you may end up in someone else’s path.”

Tara nodded. “Okay, I get it. So the first thing I need to concentrate on is to how help America because the whole country is going down the tubes.”

“Ah, well there are many causes to that,” Coyote said.

“Well, I need your guidance then,” Tara said. “Where’s the biggest problem that the country is having right now?”

Coyote rolled its eyes. “Hmm, where do I start? Firstly, the thunderbirds are angry so they are destroying anything up in the skies.”

“That’s bad, what else?”

“Then you’ve got the Lords of the Night coming up from the south. They are very, very nasty gods, so I think it’s best you get some additional allies first before trying to defeat them.”

“Good point, I’ll have to take a rain check on them. Next.”

“Then you have the Hidden One who will soon be reborn in the great city to the east.”

Tara furrowed her brow. “Wait a minute, he sounds familiar. I had a vision about meeting a boy younger than me, and I had this giant gross worm in my hand, so when you said the Hidden One, I totally remembered that dream.”

“Ah, that is indeed him. If he is allowed to grow into the dark god, then he will do great destruction to the country you are from.”

“Okay then, we need to stop him first,” Tara said. “How do I go about doing that though?”

“The key was in your dream, think harder,” Coyote said.

Tara closed her eyes and concentrated. “Okay, before I had the worm in my hand, I met that boy and he was in a giant forest … okay, I think I’ll have to find him first. So all I need to do now is to get to the forest.”

“Ah, now we are getting somewhere,” Coyote said.

Tara opened her eyes. On the far horizon she could see a forest that seemed to glow neon green out in the distance. She knew that she would find the boy there so she started walking towards it. The coyote grinned and began to follow her.

Manhattan

When the rioting began, the staff of the American Museum of Natural History immediately closed their doors to the public and began to lock down the entire place in order to safeguard its contents. They weren’t sure how long until order would be restored, so they had kept the emergency generators on standby in case there was limited power within the city; because they made sure the alarm systems were still active. Over a week went by and the museum itself seemed miraculously untouched, despite all the recent damage to the other buildings nearby when the monsters began to attack civilians in Central Park. While there was burning and looting all over the rest of the city, the museum itself stood strangely silent as a tomb. But it all came to an abrupt end that evening, when a convoy of armored vehicles with machinegun turrets sped their way through from across the East River and into the Upper West Side.

Once the lead Stryker in the convoy had turned toward the museum’s parking garage, it instantly smashed through the iron-barred gate, rumbled in and down into the underground garage. The Stryker stopped at the closed glass entrance doors to the museum, while the other vehicles followed and began to park themselves in the once empty carport. Almost immediately, the rear doors of the Strykers opened and fully-armed soldiers and ESU troopers in battle gear streamed out and began to secure the area.

Valerie Mendoza opened the front passenger door of the Humvee that she was travelling in and got out, just as she drew her Glock pistol. Dr. Edwin Worlich along with Captain Laura Niven came out from the backseat of the vehicle and crouched down beside her. Valerie could almost immediately tell the difference between the cops and the soldiers. The ESU team members were all in dark blue uniforms underneath their black body armor, while the special forces operators were wearing TACAM and NWU digital woodland camouflage patterns on their combat fatigues. She noticed that quite a few of the soldiers wore beards, probably a habit they had carried over from their service in Afghanistan and Iraq, while the ESU troopers were all clean shaven. Valerie also saw that the black ops soldiers seemed more confident and relaxed, while the ESU troopers seemed tense and ready to explode at a moment’s notice. One police trooper made a hand signal to her to signify that they were going in. Valerie recognized him as Lieutenant Frank Carbone, the tactical commander of the ESU contingent. She nodded back to him in acknowledgement.

Using bolt cutters, the teams were able to breach the museum doors and soon split up. Several squads headed for the Theodore Roosevelt Memorial Hall in order to secure the front entrance, while others began to head down to the basement area. Valerie stood up and beckoned Dr. Worlich to follow her as Captain Niven brought up the rear. When Valerie entered the museum, she took a look back and noticed one squad of soldiers unloading a forklift that they had towed on a wheeled platform behind one of the Humvees, while another squad struggled to bring in a large plastic crate from the rear compartment of a Stryker. Rapidly turning her head back and concentrating on the task at hand, she thought no more of it as the three of them began to follow right behind a squad of ESU troopers while they headed towards the basement stairwell.

Brooklyn

The command tent was a hive of activity. Dr. Paul Dane stood alongside Lieutenant Joe Pascorelli and Police Commissioner Donovan. The three of them stood behind the military radio operators and General Russell Benteen, the NORTHCOM commanding officer. Two fully-armed soldiers from the DOD were standing guard near the entrance flap.

“Task Force Omega has entered the museum, no enemy contact,” a C2 officer who was supervising the radio team said.

“Make sure they have one team covering the Grand Gallery exit as well,” General Benteen said to the communications officer who quickly acknowledged.