What Dr. Vandyle could see of the alluvial plane outside her dirty window was hazy desolation. The featureless land dropped away into the invisible river that, over the course of tens of millions of years, had carved a deep canyon through solid stone, unseen, but still there, beyond the land’s end and steep declination.
The doctor turned back and tapped her pencil on her blotter.
Or did natural phenomena need to be observed to be manifest in her reality? She began to wonder if she’d somehow made a wrong turn somewhere and become an atom deflected by an outside force to spin free of its fixed orbit. Since Owen Brindle had disappeared unexplainably as Anna had in the days prior, Ingrid Vandyle questioned her own corporeality and wondered if her own world, as well as the overarching operating system of which her awareness was one tiny part, was disintegrating like a free radical flung from the disrupted orbit of an atom’s infinite space. She suspected Anna’s dream she had infiltrated to relive the Church of Universal Protest’s massacre had been the point she’d been eddied into a tributary of temporal dislocation; shunted off to a dead end that would gradually decay into a half life wherein they all spun off into oblivion, one by one by one by one. As if reality was a covalent abstraction or nothing more than a numerical simulation: bytes breaking to bits. A wild tangent to be sure, but since her love had been due back from the zombie stronghold of New Bethlehem the previous day but had still not shown, she needed, even craved, some avenue of distraction complex and strange enough to keep her from obsessing on the dread possibility she would never see the lieutenant ever again.
On top of that worry, rumors of an invincible black dragon patrolling the skies and swallowing planes whole added a darkly humorous strain of conspiracy to the screwed up situation. The thought of her love sharing airspace with some monster straight out of the Book of Revelation increased her anxiety sevenfold.
She lay her head down on the desk. Her thoughts went to the thing she’d sensed in Anna’s dream, a black wheel, an absolute negation. Had that been the dragon people were talking about then: perhaps the beast of Babylon that would usher in the final war between the angelic cohorts and the legions of Satan she had read about in her undergrad course on world religion? Or the parables of the Hindus that hinted at the never ending annihilation and regeneration of the universe, an unending conveyor belt of blue Krishnas going on forever representing the beginning and the end, the Alpha and the Omega of each cycle.
She caught her breath and pushed herself to a sitting position. Other cultures believed all matter also had consciousness, not just those organic creatures with internal chemical processes moving through their individual systems. Perhaps rocks, planets and all cosmic phenomena had consciousness, too. Maybe it was only a dragon because that was the label that men had given it. For all she could figure, it might be prescient black hole birthed by the sacrificial rites of a depraved cult of Abaddon upon which the repetition of the divine comedy would play out seemingly like clockwork every Millennia? The biblical “second death” could actually be a cycle that had always gone on forever and ever…
She remembered how odd that in Revelations the devil was only banished “permanently” for a thousand years and then would be released from hell to do its damndest upon the world again; a singularity of repetition that ended abruptly at the eternal gates of New Jerusalem. In Christianity, the repetition was just a one off, a skip trace leading to the abolition of the human heavens—the stars and planets and all the matter the Big Bang was heir to—for the eternal light of the Father and the Son.
She had always questioned the primacy of the books that the powerful of their time had chosen to fill the scriptural canon. What and why the excluded Book of Enoch and the mysterious “watchers” who sired a race of giants? Or the Gospel of Peter that documented giant angels escorting a giant Jesus into heaven followed by a floating, talking cross? The fact of man’s discernment in relation to what became known and remained unseen told of an ulterior agenda. What had they wanted to keep hidden?
“May the circle be unbroken, by and by Lord, by and by…”
She hummed the old hymn and then thought of Ezekiel’s account of God’s throne room having “wheels within wheels.”
Clues were everywhere.
The final product printed for mass publication had been corrupted by the machinations of man. Man’s ability to create monsters for other’s consumption, to anoint with the negative colors of their fear, was well known to her. Possible though theoretical, these prefabricated monsters paled in comparison to the firsthand human monsters she’d known to be real. Passable enough in appearance to mingle with their prey undetected, they’d relinquished their claim on being human long before. Harvesting children who had been tortured before being ritualistically slaughtered, these real-life vampires feasted on the flesh and blood of youth’s essence in the vain hope it would vastly prolong their own miserable lives.
More horrible still, Dr. Vandyle had over time come to believe it was more the rush of dopamine from the physical act of the killing and the witnessing of the children’s pained despair before the ultimate release of death that was the main addictive cause of their soul-killing perversion. The drinking and devouring was just the cigarette after the spectacle of endurance of suffering had triggered a chemical avalanche of psycho-sexual release in the disfigurement of their grotesque brains.
Misdirection being the enabling factor of mundane evil’s conceit, the blood drinkers had kept their chattel distracted by the fear-driven hysteria of international hoaxes and the perpetual chessboard reconfigurations of endless war. After the seismic paradigm shift of the Zombie Resurrection and its subsequent aftershocks, the slave class had been reduced to such an extent their numbers didn’t even rate the briefest moment of the cabal’s cynical attention. They had all just been wished to fade away, and largely the civilian population, unhappily, had complied.
If the dead could rise and its biblical significance be explained away by a coxcomb’s worth of poorly-furnished science it was not impossible to believe in giant bat-winged reptiles that dined on aeroframes of supersonic metal. Not at all impossible…she put down her pen…but at that moment it was all too much to fully comprehend.
Just as the doctor was nodding off into a discontented slumber, she was roused by a banging at her office door.
“What is it!”
“Lt. Langtree’s radio’d ahead,” the out-of-breath airman blurted through the door.
Dr. Vandyle lurched to her feet. The chair crashed to the floor behind her as she lunged and flung open the door, “When?”
“He says he’s in the air,” the 1st class Airman relayed the good bad news. “Could be a rough landing.”
“Did he say why?” Dr. Vandyle grabbed the airman’s arm and pulled her inside then shut the door behind her. “Is he hurt?”
“That’s all I heard,” the airman shrugged, then put her hand in front of her mouth and pantomimed sucking on a cigarette.“But, now that you mention it, I think I might have heard something else...”
Dr. Vandyle smiled wickedly, thinking as it ever was thus. She reached inside her lab coat and handed her spy two hand-rolled cigarettes, “I trust dis will jog your memory?”
The airman dropped the precious smokes in the breast pocket of her BDUs before relaying all that she knew. “Some kind of zombie revolt in New Bethlehem, could be an all-out assault on our―”
“Why the rough landing?” the doctor grabbed the airman by the shoulders and shook her. “Is the lieutenant hurt?”
“Says he’s lost a lot of blood,” the Airman switched gears. “Will definitely need medical attention if he makes it this far.”
“ETA!”
“Ten minutes,” the Airman replied with a nod. “The osprey’s signature should be on the horizon anytime now.”
The Doctor dropped two more cigarettes in the good spy’s breast pocket before running out the door.