Dark Light--Dawn Read online

  She’d met Thomas, a noted cancer researcher, at a conference on the role of genetics in epidemiology through history and couldn’t believe her luck. How many times had she woken in the morning expecting to find him gone, their love blessed with a fairy tale–like feeling to the point she always feared it would end, or she’d wake up to the realization it had all been a dream. Now that dream really had ended, and the pain left her throat clogged and mouth desert dry no matter how many glasses of water people kept handing her at the house in which she and Thomas had planned to start their family.

  Vicky tried to settle herself with some deep breaths, but felt her muscles seizing, the breath bottlenecking in her throat, as if she were in the midst of some panic attack. She fled to an upstairs bathroom and locked the door behind her. Closed the toilet seat and sat down upon it, breathing deeply again.

  She heard a scant buzzing sound, remembering her cell phone from the handbag that now seemed to be vibrating slightly, snapping her alert again. Vicky fished it out because it was her work phone, to be carried on her person at all times, since she was on the first-line response team to alerts called by the World Health Organization.

  HEADQUARTERS lit up in the Caller ID box and she answered it.

  “Vicky?”

  “Who is this?” she asked, voice short and scratchy.

  “I’m so sorry to be bothering you at a time like this, so terribly sorry,” said Neal Van Royce, an assistant director at the WHO. “But it’s an emergency, a true one.”

  “I’m kind of dealing with my own emergency here, Neal.”

  “I know that, and you have my deepest condolences, as well as my apology. I have no right to be disturbing you in a time like this, no right at all. But it’s a potential Level One. That’s the only reason why I’m calling.”

  “Where?”

  “A remote village in Jordan. We need someone who speaks the language, someone with your qualifications.”

  “I’m not the only one on staff fluent in Arabic.”

  “Vicky, the dire nature of what’s happening over there falls under your precise area of expertise.”

  She shifted atop the closed toilet seat. “Care to give me some notion of what we’re facing?”

  “I can’t, not over the phone without a secure line. But I can tell you it’s something you’ve never seen before.”

  “I’ve seen quite a lot.”

  “Nothing like this, Doctor,” Van Royce told her.

  NINE

  Az-Zubayr, Iraq

  “I see almost all the men of your village are gone,” the dark figure said from the cargo bed of a pickup truck between two black-clad figures wielding assault rifles, addressing those who’d been herded into the village square. “I suppose they’ve joined the local militias corrupted by the West into seeking to wage war on those who serve the one true God as He wills. Because they are infidels, no doubt. But my presence here today does not come from hatred of such infidels; it comes from hatred of those who oppose me and the word of the one true God.”

  The figure cast his gaze over the people of Az-Zubayr, a small desert village located at the foot of the Sinjār Mountains in western Iraq. The buildings were a loose amalgam of sand-shaded brick and mortar with not a single doorway carved out in uniform fashion. Angled this way and that, as if the world was slanted and nobody cared.

  “I am Mohammed al-Qadir, chosen by God himself to lead the New Islamic Front. And had your men chose to fight alongside, instead of against, me, they would have known an entirely different destiny than the one that will greet their return.”

  Al-Qadir leaped agilely down from the bed of the pickup truck. His flowing black cleric’s robes billowed outward in the stiff desert wind, creating the illusion he was floating. He stood silhouetted by the truck’s frame, the tawny color of his ruddy complexion a fine match for the rust beginning to overtake its frame. His motions were smooth and agile, befitting a man much younger than his fifty-odd years. His eyes held all those years and more, piercing but tired somehow, as they blinked lazily and seemed to focus on something no one else could see. He was tall and broad with a long black beard and black hair flowing untamed from the confines of his keffiyeh. His black robes concealed the chiseled frame born of a past to which not even his closest advisers were privy. He wore a pistol holstered under his left arm so it seemed to hang in the air. A sheathed sword hung from the right side of his belt.

  Enclosed by a bevy of his hooded gunmen, al-Qadir clasped his hands behind his back and moved closer to the villagers, his sandaled feet scratching against the desert floor that passed for a square dominated by interconnected market stalls featuring carts of dust-coated vegetables. No guards accompanied al-Qadir in his stroll; no warrior of his reputed acumen needed escort to walk through a crowd of women, children, the infirm, and the elderly.

  “Most of your men will never see their homes again,” he said, starting in again suddenly. “They will fall to the misplaced ideals that have claimed them and those who escape deaths at the hands of my holy warriors will return home to an even worse fate. They will return home to find that the Front has taken their daughters as the slaves God willed them to be. They will serve me as they were put onto God’s Earth to serve, and they will do so without protest lest they see the side of me that lacks all compassion.”

  Al-Qadir stopped before the stooped figure of an old woman with wrinkles dug so deep into her face they seemed more the work of a hammer and chisel than the years. He smiled and stroked her cheek tenderly, respectfully. The old woman cowered and turned away so fast, she stumbled and felt her knobby legs almost give out.

  “The mothers and grandmothers gathered here,” the leader of the New Islamic Front resumed, “will be spared to tell the tale of my coming to those who come in my wake. You will tell them of how I took only what the one true God willed to be mine.”

  Now al-Qadir stopped before a long-haired teenage boy doing his best to look defiant, refusing to show any fear or deference or to break al-Qadir’s stare. He smiled at the boy, impressed by his bravery and bravado, then turned his gaze on the woman the boy had positioned himself protectively before.

  “You are this one’s mother?”

  She nodded.

  “And your husband has left to wage war on the holy mission of my forces?”

  The woman said nothing, swallowed hard.

  “I’ll take that as a yes. In the spirit of our righteous God, I’m going to give you a choice.” Then al-Qadir turned to address the whole of the square. “I am going to give all the mothers here a choice. I’m going to spare your sons the kind of deaths I am reputed to bring to those who would oppose me. You may have heard the tales of how I’ve cut the limbs off of the sons of those who stand against the word of our God, and made their parents watch while they died bleeding, screaming from the agony I wrought.

  “But that is not my intention here,” al-Qadir continued, steering back for the pickup truck, “because, as I said, I wish to show you my mercy imposed by the one true God. Because He has bestowed a great gift upon me, a gift that once released into the world will punish all infidels who would besmirch or ignore His Word. Those days, the End of Days, are coming and only those who give their allegiance and prove their loyalty to me as His vessel will be spared.”

  He climbed gracefully back into its cargo bed and rotated his gaze among the faces aimed his way, beginning to show a glimmer of hope al-Qadir relished in quashing. He smiled thinly before he resumed, tugging at the long beard so thick it threatened to swallow his hand.

  “So I am going to give all of the mothers a choice: Kill your firstborn sons, or force me to do so in your stead, but not before I torture them until they beg for death, their tears mixing with blood spilled on your cursed sand.” Then, over the desperate shrieks and cries of protest, “Take a knife to their throat or their heart, so they may die quickly at your feet without suffering. Those who comply may comfort them in their dying moments. Those who don’t will witness my warrior
s cut off one limb at a time to prolong their agony. Then watch them burned alive by my hand.”

  The shrieks and pleas grew louder, echoing off the face of the towering Sinjār Mountains to the west of the village.

  “This is what your men who survive will find upon their return,” al-Qadir said over the women, many of whom had sunk to their knees, now crying hysterically. “They have brought this upon you. They have left me no choice. You bow and pray to me as if I am the one true God, when I am merely His servant, follower of His word on Earth. I serve His will, and when your men left to make war with me, they also made war against God. And when they return you can tell them had they turned toward instead of against Him, then their firstborn sons would still be alive to greet them.”

  As al-Qadir finished, a portion of his men dispersed through the crowd, handing knives to the women who let them fall at their feet while they hugged their children close. Those same men yanked the girls and young women away, leering at them as if to choose which they would take for themselves. The ripe and fertile would serve them well, al-Qadir thought, the younger well suited to more menial chores until they came of age.

  Al-Qadir watched the process unfold through a surreal fog that left him euphoric, reveling in the power that was his to dispense as he pleased. He knew the mothers would try defiance, leaving the blades glinting in the naked sunlight until his warriors made an example of one or two of the boys, starting with the teenage boy who’d refused to show fear of him.

  Al-Qadir drew his sword from its sheath and again eased himself down from the truck bed, starting toward the boy once so full of bravado and now with a urine stain spreading down the front of his Punjabi trousers. Al-Qadir envisioned his screams, envisioned his blood painting the air with the prophecies of things to come. Blood sinking into the sand, as the modern world would sink into the oblivion of history.

  Then the burning, those who did not heed the word of God reduced to nothing more than embers drifting off to dissipate in the air as if they had never been born at all.

  But first the screams, al-Qadir thought, as he brought the sword overhead and sliced downward, lopping one of the boy’s arms off at the shoulder.

  “Now,” he said, through the screams and cries, “I take the other one.”

  TEN

  Yucatán Peninsula, Mexico

  “It might’ve helped if I’d had a better idea of what we were dealing with here, Professor.”

  Orson Beekman swabbed the sweat from his face with an already soaked handkerchief and looked across the Jeep’s front seat at Eric Racine. “You were informed of everything you needed to know to get the job done. And this object you found…”

  “The rock.”

  “The object you found—you’re certain no one touched it, moved it?”

  “Those were my instructions.”

  “That doesn’t answer my question.”

  Beekman felt hot air surging through the open-air Jeep. No roof, windows, or sides. Utterly exposed to the elements that right now included wind dappled with the dusty grit kicked up by the vehicle’s oversized tires and then blown against him, sandblasting his skin. The road cutting through the back edge of the Yucatán was unpaved, branches whipping past him, just missing his skin.

  “My orders to the security team before I left for the airstrip two hours ago were explicit,” Racine explained, as the Jeep’s headlights cut through night’s first fall.

  The setting sun had burned the sky a beautiful shade of orange that made Beekman think of an autumn scene set against falling leaves. So too this landscape seemed almost preternaturally beautiful, in stark contrast to what he recalled from his previous visits to the area, and the barren wasteland that had yielded a fortune in black gold way back in 1990.

  Along with something else, as it turned out.

  “They secured the area around the find and I personally told the members of my team to stand clear,” Racine continued. “Not that I needed to with the stories floating around from the Mexicans we’ve come into contact with.”

  Beekman knew those stories all too well, having heard them himself for nearly thirty years now. How the area was cursed. How the rational explanations for a wasteland forming amid the rich ground flora of the Yucatán didn’t hold. How years before bigger oil companies had abandoned drilling efforts when inexplicable, bizarre, and often tragic circumstances befell them.

  How his own journeys here were made always with a level of fear and foreboding.

  Las Tierra del Diablo …

  The Land of the Devil.

  Beekman recalled the first time he saw those words painted across the side of a tanker. He, Dale Denton, and Ben Younger had passed it off as nothing more than graffiti, dismissing the rumors and folktales that hung over the area like the clouds of oil that had darkened the sky the day they’d struck oil and struck it rich. Beekman had been there when Younger had staggered through the black rain that seemed to tumble in sheets from the sky, having somehow ended up over a mile away with no memory of how he’d gotten there, or how he’d managed to escape the chasm down which he’d disappeared.

  Younger might not even have remembered his encounter with the object, or rock as Racine called it, deep underground had it not been for the strange mark it had left on his palm after he’d grasped it. His mind had gone dark in that moment and didn’t switch on again until he awoke in a dried-out riverbed.

  The company that grew into Western Energy Technologies, WET, had been looking for the object ever since, sparing no expense, without success. Any number of archaeological and geological teams had failed to recover it either within the chasm or greater cave systems themselves. Dale Denton still refused to accept defeat and redoubled his efforts. But none had paid any dividends until he’d hired Eric Racine, an expert in planetary science and geophysics who’d cut his teeth on NASA’s Mars Rover program. The cost to retain Racine’s team, along with acquiring the required equipment, dwarfed the costs of all previous efforts combined.

  “Could you explain how you located the object?” Beekman asked him.

  “I treated the site as I would a foreign planet, asteroid, or moon I was studying,” Racine explained. “Life, or anything organic, is distinguishable by a unique thermal signature that sets it apart from the surrounding landscape. That’s one of the things the Mars Rover keyed on. So I applied those same principles here by chilling small grids with a combination of gaseous dry ice and liquefied Freon, and then using thermal imagery to scan for outstanding heat signatures. Based on what little you told me about the … object, I was proceeding on the assumption that it radiated significant, heat-producing energy that would, without question, stand out. We were ninety days and three square miles into the process when we finally located it.”

  Beekman nodded, trying to appear casual.

  “You haven’t asked the most obvious question,” Racine continued, when Beekman remained silent.

  “What’s that?”

  “How a rock can give off so much heat, so much energy, without any indicators or evidence as to how. I believe you haven’t asked because you’ve already formed some conclusions, probably years ago. I believe that’s why you finally gave up on all your archaeologists and geologists from this world and turned to someone with experience dealing with foreign ones.”

  Beekman noticed the flora was starting to thin, the Jeep encountering less brush as the green world around him began to brown. He recalled the same impression the first time he, Denton, and Younger had driven out here, the world dimming from a paradise to a wasteland, even as their Mexican partners assured them the rumors that had chased off the big oil companies were exaggerated and unfounded. Everything seemed the same today, no regrowth he could see, the hold a once lavish landscape had relinquished never regained.

  Beekman glimpsed the clearing ahead through the barren branches and corpse-like trees, the sooty smell of oil that had never left the air scraping at his nostrils.

  “I have my theories,” he said finally.<
br />
  “Involving the object’s origins, no doubt.” Racine’s gaze darted from the narrowing roadbed to the titanium, vacuum-sealed container resting on the Jeep’s passenger-side floor between Beekman’s feet. “Based on the need for that.”

  “Precautions, that’s all.”

  It was the same type of container in which astronauts stored samples collected from space to warrant against contamination from a foreign body or microbe prior to returning to Earth. Pressurized to maintain proper oxygen and pH levels to ensure no degradation would befall the object in transit. It hummed slightly, powered by an advanced lithium battery with a life measured in years and capable of withstanding the rigors of space.

  The clearing drew closer, the smell stronger. Beekman felt his insides nudged by excitement, his heart rate picking up. A long quest about to be fulfilled at last, his nervous energy rooted in the vast potential of the object Eric Racine had managed to locate twenty-seven years after Ben Younger had likely been the first human being to ever encounter it.

  The tools required to complete that effort were stored in a guitar case–sized kit laid across the Jeep’s backseat. Distance from the stone needed to be kept, and the proper precautions observed, at all times.

  “Those strange occurrences all those years ago, the way you struck oil,” Racine chimed suddenly, as they rumbled into the scrub and stone layered over the clearing, “you think the object was somehow to blame.”

  “I never said that.”

  “You didn’t have to.”

  “And you don’t sound like a scientist.”

  “I like to keep an open mind, Professor. You said none of my team members were to get any closer to this object than absolutely necessary, you said not to touch it under any circumstances, even while wearing gloves designed for work in outer space. That tells me you must like to keep an open mind too.” Racine glanced across the seat again. “It also tells me NASA should be informed of our findings. Immediately.”