The Thrones of Eden 3 (Eden) (30 page)

The world was impenetrably dark. Yet she knew she was trapped somewhere beneath the earth.

She reached her hands out and felt the boulders that pinched her into a gap that was no larger than the width of her hips, a very tight squeeze. Above her was a slab of stone that was so flat and smooth that it appeared to have been carved rather than a natural formation. And when she touched it the stone tilted. It was not locked in like the other stones. Dust and dirt began to sift downward the moment the stone shifted, eliciting a bark from her throat. It was like the sands of an hourglass filling the bottom bell.

She began to pound at the sides, at the walls of stone as panic began to brew.

She tried to move her legs, only to realize that they were pinched beneath rock and black silica.

With the flats of her palm she slapped at the surrounding walls and the tilted slab above her, her attempts futile as desert sand rained harder into her makeshift tomb.

“Help me! Somebody, please HELP ME!”

The level was steadily creeping up on her, having reached the height of her breasts.  

“SOMEBODY—”

#

“—help me.”

It was distant and hollow. But Savage clearly heard her voice. She was to the right of him, but buried.

“Help . . . me.”

Savage’s cloaked body of dust quickly galvanized into action as he moved toward the source. “Alyssa!”

“John . . . the sand . . .”

And then her voice disappeared.

“ALYSSA!”

John searched diligently until he saw the telltale signs of her soon-to-be crypt. A swirling vortex of sand was moving in a clockwise motion, telling Savage that it was sinking into open space underneath. “Hillary, over here!”

The two began to dig as one, each man using their clawed hands as their fingers scraped against sharpened stones that ripped open wounds. Neither man was deterred. Neither man gave up or surrendered their quest. And both men would see this through to the end no matter the outcome.

“Alyssa . . . speak to me!”

Silence.

Savage moved as a machine, quick and steady, as he bit back the pain of his damaged hands.
Please, God, no! Not when we came so far! 

Hillary struck pay dirt first. There was a slab of stone angled downward. But between the wedge-shaped open he could see Alyssa’s hand rising limply from beneath a cairn of sand and rock. “She’s over here!” he yelled.

John joined his side. And with team effort they carefully removed the stone slab.

For a long moment Savage could only stare at the hand that rose out of the earth, at the way it seemed to have beckoned for help a moment before falling lifeless.

They forced back the sand as traces of blood from open wounds fell and clotted against the sand. When they unmasked her by removing the sand from her face and from her nose and mouth, they could see that she was not breathing.

Dear God, no!

Hillary continued to dig, removing the sand from her chest as Savage began to slip into the throes of loss and agony.

A dark wave swept through him like no other, something that was so painfully cold that it was like an arctic blast snuffing out the flame of a candle and leaving behind the coldest, darkest void imaginable. It had emptied the man within the beat of a heart the moment he realized that Alyssa Moore was dead.

CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE

She did not see a tunnel of bright light. Nor did she see the world of Loving Spirits.

But she did hear voices.

They sounded hollow and distant. And they spoke in tongues that were not her own.

Her heart had stopped beating for nearly two minutes. But it was by the aid of John Savage who dragged her from darkness with mouth-to-mouth resuscitation and brought her to the light beneath a desert sun.

For a long moment she coughed and hacked while her lungs simultaneously responded by sucking in air that had been lost to her, the sounds coming in rasps and horrible wheezes.

Then her eyes began to focus, her pupils beginning to contract and fixate until they settled along the face of John Savage. His features were dust laden and marred by tear streaks that ran along his cheeks, the man smiling, the void now gone and the flame once again alight.

“Alyssa?” To her ears his voice sounded far off.

She smiled weakly.

Then she raised her fingers softly to his cheeks and against the tear-stained trails. “Were you crying?”

John reared back slightly and drew a forearm across his dusty face, cleaning it. “No . . . of course not.”

Her smiled blossomed. “You liar.” Her hand fell gently against her side, the woman too weak to hold it up any longer. “You’re not as tough as you think you are, are you?”

Savage quickly turned to Hillary, who was smiling.

“What?” Savage asked him. “I wasn’t crying.”

Hillary nodded. “OK. Whatever.”

“I wasn’t.”

At that moment shadows appeared at the crater’s rim, images of people from Tent City who were silhouetted against a clearing sky and flourishing sun.

The dust was beginning to settle.

But it would take better than two hours to extricate Alyssa from the crater since her legs had been pinned and broken beneath stones that once served to protect the halls of Alnitak.

And what had been the cradle of the Second Generation was nothing more than rubble—the kings and queens of a new age gone.

And the thrones of Eden were no more.

EPILOGUE

Kahramanmaras Sutcu Imam University Hospital

Southeast Turkey

“This is the second time you’ve been here in the last year. You must like this place,” said Savage, who smiled down at Alyssa as she lay in bed with both legs in casts that were elevated by wires and pulleys. “Doctor says you’ll be fine in a few months. And after therapy you’ll be at one-hundred percent with no loss or function in either leg.”

As naturally beautiful as Alyssa Moore was, she looked less than appreciable in appearance as she lay in bed. Her face was nicked and band-aided, and the hairs on her head were in wild twists. Her lips remained scaly and chapped with open nicks from dryness. “That’s nice,” she said. But there was a certain distance to her tone, a detachment.

John Savage reached forward and grabbed her hand. “Why didn’t you tell me about the baby?” he asked her.

She enfolded her hands over his. “I just wanted to be sure,” she told him. “I didn’t want to go by the results of a test kit.”

“Well you are. And the baby’s fine.”

She smiled. It was a quick flash before it disappeared.

Then: “What?” he asked.

“You saw the images in Alnitak,” she told him. “You saw why we have been a colossal failure as a race of beings.”

“The threat is gone, Alyssa.”

“Are you sure?”

“What do you mean?”

She hesitated for a brief moment before speaking. “Do you remember when I asked it ‘
how
’ we would end?”

“Yeah, and it played the same loop over again—a malfunction that simply responded by voice command.”

“What if that wasn’t the case?” she told him. “What if it
was
the answer?”

Savage cocked his head, not grasping the meaning of what she was conveying.

“What if the answer was somehow—in some way—telling us that mankind will eventually destroy itself in the end. And that something will happen between the equinoxes in the year 2021, when the Mintaka calendar ends, either by warfare—nuclear, chemical or otherwise—or by some other means. But in the end we would be responsible for our own demise and just another scene to be added to what we saw play out in Alnitak.”

He patted her hand. “It was aged technology that had a hitch. That’s all it was. It was a malfunction that was looping and showing the same events over and over again.”

“No,” she stated with conviction. “We have been an abysmal failure as a race and those things inside Alnitak were just waiting to rise when we expired.”

“They’re gone, Alyssa. Every single one of them. There is no Second Generation. The pyramid imploded and there’s nothing left except Mintaka, which is burning.” There was a slight hesitation on his part, and then forlornly: “Eden is gone.”

She turned her eyes ceilingward. “I can’t buy that,” she said. “Something is going to happen in less than ten years in which man will erase himself from this planet.” She shifted her eyes to Savage, who looked at her with endearment. “There were only—what, a few thousand of Second Generations inside Alnitak?”

“Roughly.”

“That wouldn’t be enough of a genetic pool of diversity to sustain life for any length of time—almost like inbreeding after a while, don’t you think?”

“I’m not getting your point.”

“Lack of diversity,” she said. “There wouldn’t be enough of a genetic difference in the gene pool to further a strong stock of humankind over time. After a while the genetic structure and makeup would be the same, causing the inbreeding effect that would ultimately reduce strength and stability in a living structure, causing eventual deformities and widespread disease. Ask Hillary. He’ll tell you the same thing.”

“I doubt Hillary can answer since he took the first train out of Ankara. I think he’s had enough adventure for awhile.”

“You don’t understand,” she told him urgency. “Eden was not meant to be found, agreed?”

Savage nodded.

“Only by the determination of my father did he find something that had been buried for millenniums.” Her eyes widened. “Don’t you see,” she told him. “Eden was a satellite station harboring one set of this new breed of humankind. One . . . set! The diversity will come in time because there are other satellite stations out there with the Second Generation waiting in hibernation. The diversity is there. It’s just scattered throughout the planet, each station hidden.”

“Honey, seriously—”

“John, there are pyramids all over the world in every country. More than ninety percent of them are buried and well hidden.”

“Look. We’re not going to destroy ourselves, OK? It’s over. Everything that had been a part of Eden is now gone. Everything.”

She lifted Savage’s hand and placed it on her abdomen. “John, what if I’m right? What if there are satellite stations all over the world? If what we read in the chamber of Anu was correct, then our child would have less than ten years to live.”

Savage wasn’t buying it. “Sweetie, you need to rest—”

“What if Atlantis isn’t just a folktale. What about other lost cities and the tales tied to them?”

“Honey, you need to relax and stop getting yourself all worked up.”

She groaned in frustration.

He patted her hand. “Try to get some rest.”

When he stood she reached out and snatched his hand, and smiled. “I love you, John Savage. And in time we’re going to have a baby. Its future is most important.”

He winked at her. “Try to get some sleep. I’ll check on you in a bit.”

“’Kay.” She leaned her head against the pillow.

When John left the room he grabbed himself a snack from the vending machine, a drink, and sat out along a terrace that overlooked Ankara. The city was strikingly magnificent with ornate and beautiful structures that dotted the landscape.

And in time he began to consider Alyssa’s concerns, believing her theories were driven by the probability of her pregnancy—that a mother’s instinct to protect her child was paramount and that any and all possible dangers existed, proven or not.

She was bright and intelligent and normally spot-on with her conjectures. So he could not dismiss her theory that Eden was a satellite station that had given birth to man, and would subsequently give birth to a new mankind.

Man had been a dismal failure. That was something that could not be debated as the cons certainly outweighed the pros by a wide margin.

Furthermore, the Second Generation
did
exist.

So who’s to say that additional humankind weren’t already in their locked bins waiting for a resurrection the moment current man decides to slice his wrists open in a carnage that would last for a period of six months during the equinoxes in 2021?

More so, Alyssa was correct when she stated that there were pyramids all over the world with most of them harboring mysteries. But the one thing they all had in common, the one element they shared, was that they all referred to Gods originating from the Heavens or distant planets. It was a common thread that ran throughout the world many thousands of years ago from civilizations that never joined, banded or contacted each other since they were so incredibly diverse in culture. Yet the notion of a God coming from the stars remained a global theme.

He thought of the baby.
I hope you’re wrong, Honey. Between now and then, between now and 2021, I hope we as a people learn a lesson. I want my child to live.

But deep down inside he knew that it was a sick world out there and it was getting sicker all the time.

If he had any faith in man when he left Alyssa’s room, it was quickly fading away.

On some level he knew that Alyssa was right, that the images played along the wall inside Alnitak were detailed descriptions of everything that was wrong with mankind.

“Everything,” he murmured out loud, catching the attention of the person sitting two tables away.

He looked over the landscape and considered this: it was a big world with big mysteries that held the impossible.
Were there more satellite stations out there?
Were there more pyramids that housed the new beginnings of mankind that may be a kinder, gentler race?

If there are, then we will find you. We will traipse all over the globe if we have to. But we . . . will . . . find you.

He then held his drink out to the person sitting a few feet away and raised it in salutation.

“To a brave new world,” he said. “And to the mysteries it continues to hold.”

The person beside him turned his head away and ignored him.