Lost Diary: Guy de Chauliac

The following entry has been excerpted from a recently discovered unpublished
memoir, written by surgeon Guy de Chauliac during the Great Plague: 1346–1348.

(translated from its original French)

 

Diary Entry: May 18, 1348

(recorded in Avignon, France)

I am infected with sickness.

Perhaps I thought God had other plans for me, that He would keep me safe so I might tend to his flock. Perhaps he has stricken me with plague so that I might better understand the malady? Regardless, I remain bedridden and weak, the fever a constant companion. The carbuncles (Author’s Note: buboes) have sprouted red below my left armpit and, more alarming, within the crease of my genitalia. I have not yet begun spitting up blood, but I can detect the beginning of a strong stench in my sweat.

 

Diary Entry: May 21, 1348

An observation to whoever discovers this diary after my death: It seems there may be two variations of the mortality. The more severe was clearly prevalent in winter, the victims usually dying within two to three days. The second type, a warm-weather variation (?) appears to allow its victims time to linger. It appears I am blessed with the latter . . . or condemned.

 

Diary Entry: May 25, 1348

Awoke to church bells and singing in the streets. Was it a wedding? My own funeral? Delirious, I summoned my servant, who delivered the bad news—the Flagellants have arrived in Avignon.

Dressed in soiled white cloaks and bearing large wooden crosses, these troupes of religious zealots move from village to village seeking to cure the Great Mortality through self-inflicted penance. Armed with thorn-covered whips and iron spikes, they publicly flog themselves in order to earn salvation from a wrathful God, transforming Christianity into an almost erotic spectacle of blood.

And how the people do follow! In an era dominated by plague, pestilence, and corruption, fear has replaced sanity, allowing the self-righteous to impose their idiocracy upon Avignon’s surviving populace. The zealots expel the priest from his church and drag the Jews from their homes . . . burning them alive.

I was wrong. It is evil that rots humanity, plague merely our salvation.

Dying hard, I grow ever envious of those who perished in winter.

 

Diary Entry: May 27, 1348.

Fever. Abdominal pain worsening. Bouts of chills. Cannot eat. Bowels . . . diarrhea, traces of blood. Death close now. Clement absolved my soul before he abandoned Avignon.

Let the Reaper come . . .

(end entry)

 

 

 

 

SEVENTH CIRCLE

The Violent

“I thought the universe was thrill'd with love, whereby, there are who deem, the world hath oft been into chaos turn'd and in that point, here, and elsewhere, that old rock toppled down. But fix thine eyes beneath: the river of blood approaches, in the which all those are steep'd, who have by violence injured. ‘Oh, blind lust! Oh, foolish wrath! Who so dost goad us on in the brief life, and in the eternal then thus miserably o'erwhelm us.”

—Dante’s Inferno

December 21

Governor’s Island

5:17 a.m.

(2 hours, 45 minutes before the prophesied End of Days)

 

The cloak over her head paralyzed. It constricted each breath. It turned her blood into lead. Her body became a corpse, supported beneath each arm and carried away into oblivion.

Down the basement steps. Dragged by the two MPs.

Leigh Nelson’s heart jumped as punk rock music suddenly blared from speakers, the Ramones’ “Blitzkreig Bop” assaulting her inside the black hood. She twisted against unseen foes forcibly pressing her body down upon a hard surface, her head angled lower than her feet.

“Oh God oh God, please don’t do this! I swear I had nothing to do with that woman!”

She kicked blindly at powerful hands that restricted her legs, her assailants duct-taping her ankles to the backboard. When they taped down her chest, the terrified physician and mother of two expelled a bloodcurdling scream into the black hood.

Hey ho, let's go . . . shoot ’em in the back now—

A hand pinned her skull to the board while raising the hood above her mouth and nose.

What they want . . . I don't know. They're all revved up and ready to go–

In the frightening darkness in the dank basement in her worst nightmare a thousand light years from home, the suddenness of cold water poured into her upturned nostrils sent the bound woman into a full-body convulsion. Liquid suffocation. No breath to hold or release. The terror a hundred times worse than drowning in an ocean or pool.

The board was raised. The music lowered.

She vomited up water, her purged lungs struggling to gasp a life-sustaining breath. Finally, her esophagus cleared as she wheezed air and tears.

Captain Jay Zwawa spoke slowly and clearly into her right ear. “You helped the Klipot woman escape, didn’t you?”

Leigh sobbed and choked, unable to find her voice.

“Lower her again–”

She shook her head emphatically, buying precious seconds, the confession rasped. “I helped . . . I planned everything!”

“Did you inject her with vaccine?”

“Yes! Ten cc’s into her IV.”

“What was in the vial?”

“Tetracycline . . . other stuff.”

“What other stuff?”

“I don’t know, I can’t think–

The board was lowered.

“Wait! Get me inside your lab, I’ll figure it out!”

Zwawa signaled his men to cut her loose, ending a performance necessitated by Lieutenant Colonel Nichols and the Pentagon Nazis who still insisted torture yielded valuable field intelligence. The fact that Leigh Nelson had been cooperating up until then was a moot point, as was the reality that the terrified physician would have confessed to the Kennedy assassination and the Lindbergh baby kidnapping had it meant avoiding another waterboarding session.

“Get her warm clothes and clean sheets for her mattress.”

“Sir, shouldn’t we take her to the lab?”

Heading up the basement stairs, the captain ignored the MP.

Central Park/Upper East Side

5:24 a.m.

 

The white van raced east through a tunnel of rock nature had made impervious to the all-seeing eyes of the Reaper drones. The pitch-darkness forced Paolo to use his headlights. He powered them off the moment the vehicle cleared the tunnel, and the billowy brown sky reappeared overhead, the light from the luminous pink flares dimming as he distanced them from Belvedere Castle.

Ahead was Fifth Avenue. Central Park’s eastern border was blocked by a wall of cars and buses.

Paolo swerved onto the sidewalk, bulldozing his way south in the darkness.

Thump . . . thump! Thump . . . thump! Each collision rocked the van like a speed bump. Francesca was seated up front between her husband and Shep. With outstretched arms, the pregnant woman braced herself, using the dashboard. “Paolo, those are people you’re running over!”

“Dead people.”

“Get off the sidewalk.”

“And drive where? The streets are blocked.”

Manisha was in the second seat, holding Dawn’s head in her lap. Her daughter was coughing violently, expelling specks of blood. The necromancer turned to her husband, desperation and anger in her eyes. “We should have never left the cab.”

“Easy to say now,” Pankaj retorted. “How much longer could we have remained there?” The van lurched again, the jarring blow forcing everyone into seat belts.

“Paolo, enough!”

“They’re dead, Francesca. We’re still alive.”

“Excuse me,” Manisha interrupted, “but how are you still alive? None of you even looks sick.”

Francesca motioned to Shep. “Patrick has plague vaccine. At least he had it. He threw what was left into the crowd.”

Shep struggled to turn around, the pain coming from his severed left deltoid pushing him in and out of consciousness. “I still have vaccine left.” He half grinned at Virgil, seated behind him. “I emptied the box into my pocket before I stormed the castle.”

Reaching into his right jacket pocket, he retrieved three small vials of the clear elixir.

Virgil stopped him before he could pass them back. “What about your wife and daughter? Have you forgotten the reason we’re trying to cross Manhattan?”

Manisha’s expression of hope vanished, her mouth quivering. “Your family . . . where do they live?”

“Battery Park.” Shep grimaced as he searched his jacket pockets again.

“When did you last . . . I mean, are you certain—”

“Manisha!”

“I am so sorry, forgive me. My husband is right. I cannot take from your family to save mine. You’ve already risked your life–”

“No wait, it’s okay. There were eleven vials to start, I still have six left, two for Bea and my daughter, one for Virgil. Virge, maybe you should take yours now?”

“Hold on to it for me.”

Shep passed the three vials back to Manisha. She trembled as she accepted the gift of life, kissing Patrick’s hand. “Bless you.”

“Just be careful, the drug causes wicked hallucinations. Back in the park . . . I imagined something hovering over your daughter. I swear, it looked like an angel.”

Dawn raised her head. “You saw her?”

“Saw who?”

Her hands shaking, Manisha hurriedly uncapped the vial. “Dawn, swallow this. It will make you feel better.” She poured the liquid into her daughter’s mouth, fearing the one-armed man’s line of questioning.

“Her? Are you saying what I saw was real? What did I see? Answer me?”

Dawn looked to her mother.

“My name is Manisha Patel, this is my husband, Pankaj. I am a necromancer, a person who communicates with the souls of the dead. The spirit you saw hovering over Dawn, she shares a special bond with our daughter.”

The van lurched again, the impact nearly popping a shock absorber.

Francesca screamed, slapping Paolo on his arm. “What’s wrong with you? She just said she speaks to the dead. Stop running them over!”

“Sorry.” Spotting a break in the wall of cars, he veered across Fifth Avenue, working his way east along 68^th Street.

“Manisha, this soul . . . you called it a she?”

The necromancer nodded at Shep, swallowing the tasteless vaccine. “She has been my spiritual guide ever since we moved to New York. She warned us to leave Manhattan, but we were too late. How is it you were able to see her?”

Shep winced as the van rocked wildly, the pain in his shoulder excruciating. “I don’t know. Like I said, the vaccine causes hallucinations. To be honest, that’s all I thought it was.”

“What you glimpsed,” Virgil interjected, “was the veiled Light of the soul. Remember what I told you back in the hospital, that our five senses lie to us, that they act as curtains that filter out the true reality of existence. In order to be visible, light requires an object to refract upon. Think of deep space. Despite the presence of countless stars, space remains dark. Sunlight only becomes visible when it reflects off an object, like the Earth or the moon. What you saw was this companion soul’s Light reflecting off the girl.”

“Why her?”

“Perhaps the girl possesses something very special, like her mother.”

“And what is that?” Pankaj asks.

Virgil smiled. “Unconditional love for the Creator.”

Manisha gazed up at the old man, tears in her eyes. “Who are you?”

 

The high-rise apartment was heavy with the scent of aroma candles. The dying flames flickered within designer glass jars aligned across the granite kitchen table, reflecting off the stainless-steel surface of the Sub-Zero refrigerator. Powerless, the double-sized doors lacked the vacuum to remain sealed.

Forty-four-year-old Steven Mennella moved through the condominium as if he were wearing a lead suit. Steven was an NYPD sergeant, his wife, Veronica, a career nurse who had recently taken a job at the VA Hospital.

Steven grabbed a scented candle from the kitchen and carried it into the master bedroom. Leaving it on his bedside table, he stripped off his uniform, meticulously hanging it up in the walk-in closet. Searching by feel, he removed a recently pressed collared white shirt from a hanger, along with his favorite gray suit. He dressed quickly, then selected from a tie rack the patterned tie his daughter, Susan, had given him on his last birthday. He knotted the silk tie, slipped on his leather belt and matching dress shoes, then did a quick check in the closet mirror.

For a brief moment, he contemplated making the bed.

Leaving the bedroom, he returned to the living room. The apartment was situated on the thirtieth floor, twenty feet above the dense layer of an ominous brown maelstrom. At the moment, the night sky above the balcony was starry and clear, offering a bizarre view of a cloud city—Steven imprisoned in this penthouse nightmare . . . alone.

Veronica was lying on the U-shaped leather couch. The Veterans Administration nurse’s pale face was no longer pained, her blue eyes fixed in a glassy, red-rimmed open stare. Steven had washed the blood from his wife’s lips and throat, covering the frightening black tennis-ball-sized welt on her slender neck with the wool blanket.

Leaning over, he kissed his deceased partner on her cold lips. “I left the kids a letter, along with instructions . . . just like we talked about. Wait for me, hon. I’ll only be a minute.”

Steven Mennella blew out the candles. Clearing his throat, he strode toward the open French doors leading out to the balcony. The full moon was low on the horizon, revealing the thick bank of mud-colored clouds gyrating below. A frigid wind greeted him as he gracefully stepped up onto his favorite chaise lounge, balanced himself on the aluminum rail—

—and stepped off the balcony.

Icy crystals formed on his flesh as he plummeted through the noxious man-made chemical cloud, the wind howling in his ears . . .

There was no warning. One moment, Paolo was veering around a mailbox—

—the next, the van was struck by a human meteor.

The hood detonated, the impact crushing the engine block and bursting both front tires. Paolo jammed on the brakes, sending the crippled vehicle skidding sideways into a light pole. Antifreeze exploded out of the damaged front end, soaking the windshield, which looked like a burst watermelon across the spiderweb shattered glass.

The horn wailed and died, yielding to the whimpering chorus of hyperventilated breaths. Francesca palpated her strained swollen belly. “What the hell was that?”

“Everyone out of the car.” Shep kicked open the passenger door, ventilating the van with toxic steam from the antifreeze. For a moment, he stared at the remains of Sergeant Steven Mennella, the corpse embedded in the hood, face-up. Then he turned away. “We need to find another vehicle that runs.”

Not waiting for the others, he sloshed down East 68^th Street, his legs calf deep in a moving stream of cold water by the time he reached the intersection of Park Avenue. Main must’ve broken. Maybe a fire hydrant?

Then he saw the nightmarish scene and prayed it was the vaccine.

Park Avenue’s six-lane boulevard resembled a scene straight out of Hades. High-rise office buildings and condominiums formed an ominous corridor squeezed beneath a ceiling of roiling brown clouds. Functioning as insulation, the man-made atmosphere had encapsulated the heat from dozens of car fires, the rising temperatures melting the snow that had been piled high along the curbs, transforming one of Manhattan’s major arteries into a river. Contaminated with gasoline, the floodwaters sprouted pockets of flames that burst and receded across the hellish scene.

Whomp.

The distant sound was somehow familiar, causing the hairs on the back of Shep’s neck to stand on end.

Whomp. Whomp . . .

His eyes locked onto an object as it dropped out of the clouds a block away. He never saw the impact, but he heard it as it struck a parked vehicle, setting off a car alarm.

Another object dropped, then two more. Shep swooned, having realized what he was witnessing.

Manhattan was raining its dead.

But not every object was corpse. Plague-infested suicides leapt from candle-lit apartment windows, dancing in free fall before pulverizing the roofs and hoods and trunks of the countless vehicles that clogged Park Avenue, their insides splattering on impact.

Paolo joined Shep, the two men dumbstruck. “Is this an illusion?”

“No.”

The flood became a swiftly moving current as it swept around Park Avenue onto 68^th Street, dragging an object with it. The glow from a burning vehicle revealed the body of a small child.

The image triggered a collage of remembered images that staggered Shep. His heart raced, his senses blinking in and out of reality until suddenly he was no longer in Manhattan—

—suddenly he is back in Iraq, standing along the banks of the Shatt-Al-Arab waterway.

It is dusk, the horizon purging sunlight into orange flames, squelching the heat of day into a tolerable climate. David Kantor is with him, the medic assisting an Iraqi physician. Dr. Farid Hassan drags a headless body from out of the shoreline’s weeds.

David inspects the remains. “Looks like more of al-Zarqawi’s work. Dr. Hassan?”

“I would agree.”

Patrick Shepherd, two months into his first tour of duty, responds with a belch of acid reflux. “What I wouldn’t give to line those bastards up one at a time.”

The Iraqi physician exchanges a knowing look with the American medic. “Dr. Kantor tells me this is your first time in Iraq, yes?”

“Yeah.” Shep searches the weeds for more dead.

“He says you played professional baseball. My son, Ali, he also loved sports. A natural athlete, my son.”

“Hook us up. I’ll teach him how to throw a slider.”

“Ali died four years ago. He was only eight years old.”

“Oh. I’m sorry.”

“But these are just polite words. Are you really sorry? How can you possibly feel the sadness in my heart?”

A cramp-like stitch grips Patrick’s chest. He winces in pain, yet neither David nor Dr. Hassan seem to notice.

In the distance, a small boat approached. A lone figure stood in the bow, its cloaked outline silhouetted by the setting sun.

“If you were truly sorry, Sergeant, you would be home playing baseball, telling your many American fans that the war is wrong. Instead, you are in Iraq, carrying an assault rifle, pretending to be Rambo. Why are you in Iraq carrying an assault rifle, Sergeant Shepherd?”

An internal switch flips, his blood again running cold. “In case you didn’t get the memo, we were attacked.”

“And who attacked you? The September 11 hijackers were Saudis. Why aren’t you in Saudi Arabia, killing Saudi children?”

“American soldiers don’t murder children. I mean, with all due respect, no one ever means to hurt a child. Help me out here, Dr. Kantor.”

“Sorry, rook, it’s time you opened your eyes. There is no Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny’s dead, and everything you think you learned about war from Hollywood and Uncle Sam is bullshit. You think Cheney and Rumsfeld give a rat’s ass about WMDs or Iraqi freedom? Newsflash, Shep: This invasion was strictly about money and power. Our job is to control the populace so Washington can control the oil and make a bunch of rich people a whole lot richer. And those billions allocated for reconstruction? The money’s being spent on military bases, lining the pockets of private contractors like Haliburton and Brown and Root. Bechtel was given the contract to control the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, and they’re reaping a fortune while the locals are left with water that’s no longer potable. Money and power, kid, and the real casualties of war are the children. Of course, I doubt that story will ever air on the nightly news.”

“Again with the children? Sir, with all due respect . . . what are you talking about?”

“Half a million dead children, to be precise.” The Iraqi physician’s dark eyes fill with rage. “When you invaded our country back in ’91, your military purposely targeted our civil works, a calculated yet immoral act that violated the Geneva Convention. You destroyed the dams we used for irrigation. You destroyed our pumping stations. You destroyed our water-purification plants and sewage-treatment facilities. My little boy was not killed by a bullet or explosive, Sergeant Shepherd. My son died from diphtheria. The drugs I would have used to treat Ali’s inflamed heart were banned from entering my country, thanks to American and British sanctions imposed by the United Nations.”

The flatboat moved closer. Shep could make out a hooded figure standing in the stern. Paddling slowly.

“We are not a backward nation, Sergeant. Before the first American invasion, Iraq possessed one of the best health-care systems in the world. Now we are fraught with cholera and typhoid, diarrhea and influenza, Hepatitis A, measles, diphtheria, meningitis, and the list goes on and on. Five hundred thousand children have perished since 1991. Hundreds more continue to die every day because we no longer have access to safe drinking water. Human waste is rampant, leading to infectious diseases.”

Shep spots the body, submerged in weeds . . .

“—one in eight Iraqi children now dies before its fifth birthday, one in four is chronically malnourished.”

He lifts the seven-year-old girl’s drowned corpse to his chest, his body convulsing as he recognizes her face—

“So please, do not tell me you are sorry for my son’s death. You have no idea what it feels like to lose a child.”

—Bright Eyes.

“Patrick, watch out!”

Flames flared up as a pool of gasoline ignited. Shep staggered back, clutching his face.

“Are you okay?”

He nodded at Paolo, pulling his hands away. His blood ran cold. The flatboat from his daydream was moving slowly down Park Avenue.

A lone figure stood in the wood boat, the Grim Reaper using the stick end of his scythe to guide his craft along the flooded thoroughfare.

Shep backed away as the current swept the craft down Park Avenue and onto 68^th Street. The Angel of Death turned its wretched face to him as he passed. The supernal creature nodded, beckoning him to follow.

Shep slogged through the flooded street after him.

The flatboat spun out of the current and over the submerged curb, coming to rest along the sidewalk leading up to the darkened entrance of a neoclassical limestone structure. Nearly a century old, the four-story building, located on the northwest corner of East 68^th Street, had large arched windows that wrapped around the first floor and octagonal windows on the upper floor, all situated below a cornice and balustrade roofline.

An engraved sign reads: council of foreign relations.

The floodwaters were washing down the curbside gutter, which inhaled everything the rapids drew into its orifice. Including the remains of the dead.

The Grim Reaper stared at Shep. The two orbital cavities within its skull were filling with dozens of fluttering eyeballs, the unnerving image resembling a honeycomb overflowing with bees. The Death Merchant waved the olive green blade of his scythe at the sewer.

The flooded crevice widened into a massive sinkhole. Tainted water swirled down the oval gullet as if it were a drain, the aperture twenty feet across and still growing. Pools of gasoline ignited, illuminating the subterranean depths below in a fiery orange radiance.

The Reaper pointed a bony index finger at the void, silently commanding Shep to peer into the abyss.

Patrick refused.

The Angel of Death raised its scythe, pile driving the blunt end of the staff against the flooded sidewalk. The resounding tremor unleashed a ring of foot-high waves that cascaded down 68^th Street.

Shep glanced around. Paolo, Francesca, Virgil, and the Patels stood rigid as statues, as if they now existed in an alternative dimension from his own. It’s just the vaccine . . . it’s just another hallucination.

He moved to the edge of the breach. Knee deep in water, he braced his quadriceps muscles against the tug of the icy current as he looked down.

“Oh, God . . . no. No!”

Patrick Shepherd was peering straight into Hell.

 

Battery Park City

5:27 a.m.

 

Stone Street was a narrow avenue in Battery Park, its road paved with ancient cobblestone, the ground level of its buildings serving as storefronts to many popular eateries. Seventeen hours earlier, locals and tourists had been ordering lunch at Adrienne’s Pizzeria and buying desserts at Financier’s Pastries. Five hours later, they were crowding the Stone Street Tavern, the pub one of many public refuges for out-of-towners with no place to go to escape the mandatory curfew.

By 7 p.m., the free-flowing alcohol had transformed Stone Street into a raucous block party. Music blared from battery-powered CD players. A doomsday “anything-goes attitude” had paired women off with men they had just met, converting the backseats of parked vehicles into temporary bedrooms.

Families with young children abandoned Stone Street, initiating a pilgrimage up Broadway to Trinity Church.

By 10 p.m., the music had stopped playing. By ten thirty, the inebriated turned violent.

Fights broke out. Windows were smashed, businesses vandalized. Women who had consented to sex hours earlier were gang-raped. There was no police, no law. Only violence.

By midnight, Scythe had delivered its own version of justice to the debauchery.

Five and a half hours have passed since the calendar date changed to the dreaded twenty-first of December, the winter solstice transforming Stone Street into a fourteenth-century European village.

There were no lights, just the orange glow of embers smoldering from steel trash cans. A ceiling of mud-colored clouds churned surreally overhead. The cobblestone streets and alleyways were littered with the dead and dying. Melting snow had drenched their remains. Thawed blood flowed again from their nostrils and mouths—drawing rats.

Rats outnumbered the dead and dying sixty to one. High on fleas infected with Scythe, the vermin converged upon the fallen in cannibalistic packs, their sharp teeth and claws gnawing and stripping away husks of flesh, each meal contested, igniting another blood-frothed frenzy.

 

The black Chevy Suburban turned slowly onto Stone Street. For the last five hours, Bertrand DeBorn’s driver had squeezed and bulldozed and maneuvered the truck around endless avenues of abandoned vehicles that had restricted their speed to six miles an hour. Reaching another impasse, Ernest Lozano swerved onto the sidewalk, the truck’s thick tires rolling over human speed bumps, crushing rodents refusing to abandon their meals.

Sheridan Ernstmeyer was seated next to him, riding “shotgun.” The female assassin had killed anyone approaching within ten feet of the Suburban.

Bertrand DeBorn stirred in back. The secretary of defense’s glands were swollen, the low-grade fever building in his system. Eyes closed, eyelids fluttering, he rasped, “Are we there?”

“No, sir. We’re about a block away.”

“What the hell’s taken so—” DeBorn succumbed to a twenty-second-long coughing fit, his rancid breath filling the vehicle. The two bodyguards readjusted their own face masks.

Lozano turned right on Broad Street, New York Bay coming into view. The street was completely gridlocked with vehicles, the sidewalks clogged as well.

“Sir, we’re blocked. But the apartment building’s just up on the right.”

“The two of you bring her to me. Shepherd’s daughter, too.”

The two agents looked at one another.

“Is there a problem?”

“No, sir.” Ernest Lozano shifted the gear into park. Exiting the vehicle, he followed Sheridan Ernstmeyer down the corpse-laden, rodent-infested street, heading for the apartment building of Beatrice Eloise Shepherd.

 

Upper East Side

 

For Patrick Shepherd, time appeared to have stopped. The floodwaters, the flames, the members of his entourage—everything within the physical dimension Virgil had referred to as the Malchut was frozen.

Several hundred feet below his Park Avenue curbside perch was another reality.

The widening aperture reveals three distinct levels of the seventh circle of Hell. The first, running beneath the CFR Headquarters for as far as his vantage will allow, is a vast river of blood, as long and as wide as the Mississippi, fed in part by the gradually progressing waterfall sweeping its refuse from the Sixty-eighth Street gutter.

The stench of the river is as unbearable as the plight of those caught in its chop. Somehow, Shep can sense their aura—a deep, slowly reverberating malevolent pulse of energy, its negative frequency as asphyxiating as Hell’s stink. Men and women. Naked and bleeding.

The souls of the violent.

Countless thousands, their faces appear, then disappear, like tainted baptized meat within a broiling vermillion broth. Gasping desperate sustaining breaths before being forced to submerge once more. Clawing over one another, their focus is on saving themselves rather than on working together to charge the shoreline.

Patrolling the shallows and shoreline are the Centaurs. Half man, half horse, the creatures greet every emerging soul with the business ends of their pitchforks, stabbing the condemned until they are forced to retreat back into the river.

It takes Shep a moment to realize that these wretched men and women are surfacing en masse not just to breathe; they appear to be attracted to the Light coming from above—

—his Light!

Patrick shudders, terrified. Tyrants and murderers . . . is this the fate that awaits me?

“Help me. Please.”

Shep’s eyes track the plea to a crater-sized hole just beyond the shoreline. The vent reveals a second level beneath the first—an alien forest, the trees leafless, bearing only thorns. The voice is coming from a man in his forties, wearing a gray business suit, collared white shirt, and patterned tie.

Shep recognizes him. It’s the guy who landed on the van . . . the suicide.

As he watches, the man’s feet become rooted in the ashen soil. His limbs stiffen into branches, his fingers sharpening into thorns.

Flapping their way from branch to branch on this newly formed suicide tree are Harpies. Half female, half bird, the creatures are searching for leaves, plucking each green growth the moment one sprouts from the human/tree appendage.

Shep cannot see what is happening below the Wood of the Suicides and into the third level, but he can hear the echoes of screams, accompanied by tortured shouts of blasphemy, all aimed at God.

A now-familiar sensation causes Shep to look up. The Reaper is staring at him through eyes composed of hundreds of fluttering pupils, the creature’s grin curdling Patrick’s blood. A bony hand reaches out from the dark robe for him—

—another hand forcefully dragged him away from the seventh circle of Hell.

Shep shouted as he wheeled around to face Virgil.

“Are you all right? No, you’re not, I can see it in your eyes.”

Dumbfounded, Shep looked around for the Grim Reaper. Both the Angel of Death and the aperture were gone.

“Patrick?”

“I can’t take it anymore, Virgil. The hallucinations . . . the guilt. But worse, far worse, is the loneliness . . . always feeling empty inside. It’s like a poison that slowly eats away at every cell in my body. Only the fear of what happens to suicides in the afterlife has kept me from killing myself all these years. I feel so lost . . . surrounded by darkness.”

“It’s not too late, Patrick. There is still time to change, to bring Light into your vessel.”

“How? Tell me!”

“Allow yourself to feel again. Where there’s love, there’s always Light.”

“All I feel is emptiness.”

“That’s because you’re afraid to feel. Stop bottling up your emotions. Allow yourself to experience pain and suffering. You must be willing to face the truth.”

“The truth about what? What do you know, Virgil? What did your buddy, DeBorn, tell you about me?”

Paolo rushed over to join them, his eyes wild, his mind in the throes of his own hallucination. “Look! In the sky! Do you see it? A demon!”

Shep and Virgil looked up.

The Reaper drone was hovering just below the swirling brown clouds, its crimson camera lens spying on them from above.

Virgils squinted at the flying object. “It’s not a demon, Paolo; it’s a military drone. Where are the Patels?”

A gray Volkswagen van swerved around the sidewalk, its tailpipe belching exhaust as it skidded to a halt, the mechanical beast’s heavy idle scattering waves across the flooded street. Pankaj was driving, his daughter and wife up front. Francesca was lying down in the third seat.

Pankaj rolled down his window. “Soldiers are coming. Get in!”

Shep yanked open the sliding back panel, ushering Paolo and Virgil inside. The relic bashed and squeezed its way south along Park Avenue, heading for Lower Manhattan.

 

 

 

 

EIGHTH CIRCLE

Fraud

“Already we'd climbed as high as we were able to in order to observe the next burial place, standing midway on the bridge with an aerial view over the ditch. Oh Supreme Wisdom, how you embrace the heavens, the Earth, and even Hell with high art, and how justly your power dispenses grace! The sides and bottom were punctured by a myriad of round holes scattered over the livid-colored rock; each was as wide as I, and similar in depth and diameter to those basins found in my cherished San Giovanni, within which the baptizer would stand. From the mouth of every opening a sinner's legs protruded out, from the feet up to the thigh, the rest of the sinner remaining inside the hole.”

—Dante’s Inferno

 

December 21

Tribeca, New York

6:07 a.m.

(1 hour, 56 minutes before the prophesied End of Days)

 

The stairwell was empty, a good sign. David Kantor reached the second-floor landing, his legs dead tired, his quadriceps burning with lactic acid from the long bike ride.

Running out of time . . . come on!

Grabbing the rail, he dragged himself up the steps, each exhaled breath crackling in his headpiece.

 

The journey through Manhattan on the ten-speed bicycle had been treacherous. David’s military equipment had played havoc with his balance, his boots barely able to remain on the pedals. But the bike’s narrow width had given him the ability to maneuver through gridlocked streets, and the quiet ride helped keep him from being noticed by the military.

As it turned out, they were the least of his problems.

Racing through the Upper West Side, he had made the mistake of following the Avenue of the Americas. The CBS Building. The Bank of America Tower. W.R. Grace. Macy’s. The stretch of city blocks known as “skyscraper alley” had been transformed by the roiling brown clouds hovering below the glass-slab structures into a gothic scene resembling something straight out of a Wayne D. Barlowe nightmare. Burning cars, flooded streets. Bodies falling out of bizarre clouds . . . flying sacks of flesh and blood. A woman nosedived onto the roof of a yellow cab. Not from high enough to kill her, so she lay moaning, broken and disfigured.

The sudden jolt of adrenaline had quelled his fatigue. He sprinted past Rockefeller Plaza, refusing to gaze at the multitudes of dead piled high on the ice rink. He continued on through the Garment District and Chelsea. Passing through the arch at Washington Square, he entered Greenwich Village, a Bohemian neighborhood where he had spent most of his college years. He cut across the sidewalks of his alma mater, New York University’s campus deserted, its student body thankfully on Christmas break. He diverted past his parents’ old row house, traversing by the familiar basketball courts on Desalvio and Bleecker Street, where he had logged thousands of hours of pickup games. Like the ice rink, the asphalt rectangles had become drop-off points for Scythe’s unburied dead, the adjacent playgrounds a battleground for unbridled gang members determined to turn the Village into a shooting gallery.

Without warning, machine-gun fire erupted from out of the pitch, and suddenly he was back in Iraq, the unseen assassins seemingly nowhere and everywhere. One bullet grazed his shoulder, another ricocheted off a manhole cover and struck his bike, forcing him to take cover between rows of abandoned cars. Remaining low, wheeling the ten-speed through the narrow spaces, he managed his way out of the contested turf into SoHo.

The trendy shopping area named for its location South of Houston Street resembled a demilitarized zone. Eight hours earlier, waves of locals had run amok, looting and vandalizing the neighborhood’s shops. They had been met by SWAT teams wearing environmental suits and little tolerance. Bullet-ridden remains had been left over shattered store windows beneath the colorful tattered awnings as a warning to other curfew violators.

It had taken David Kantor almost ninety minutes to finally reach Tribeca.

Situated between SoHo and Manhattan’s Financial District, just west of Chinatown, Tribeca derived its name from its location—the Triangle below Canal Street. Once an industrial district, the neighborhood had become one of the Big Apple’s wealthiest areas, its warehouses having been converted into residential buildings and lofts, many providing second homes to some of Hollywood's biggest stars.

Claremont Prep was located just south of Wall Street in the former Bank of America International Building. The private elementary, middle, and high school consisted of 125,000 square feet of classrooms, art studios, laboratories, a library, café, gymnasium, outdoor play areas, and a twenty-five-meter swimming pool. The student body came from New York's five boroughs as well as New Jersey. Well-to-do parents, seeking the best education for their offspring. Twelve hours earlier, the entire school had been in lockdown.

Now it was left to David to see if anyone had survived.

 

Having accessed the Bank of America building’s stairwell, the Army medic continued climbing. He was panting heavily by the time he arrived on the third-floor landing. He tried the stairwell’s fire door. Locked. He banged on the steel barrier, using the butt end of his assault rifle. No answer.

Standing back, David aimed the gun barrel at the lock, then squeezed off a round, shredding the mechanism. Terrified over what he might find, he yanked open the door and entered the dark confines of his daughter’s school.

 

Lower East Side, Manhattan

6:16 a.m.

 

They had driven without lights, cruising along sidewalks and tearing through store awnings. Leaving Park Avenue, Pankaj had tried to avoid the major thoroughfares, finding it easier to maneuver south down the less congested northbound streets.

Midtown East was especially dangerous, the military presence still heavy surrounding the United Nations. Diverting west again across Park Avenue, Pankaj managed to work his way through Murray Hill before cutting back to the southeast through the quiet, older areas around Gramercy Park.

Entering the East Village, he had had little choice but to head south on the Bowery.

The crystal around Manisha Patel’s neck immediately began to vibrate. “No, this is the wrong way.”

“What choice do I have? Traffic is backed up from the two bridges; there’s no place to drive.”

“My spiritual guide says no. Find another way. Take us south through Chinatown.”

The Minoses were in the third seat. Paolo comforted his pregnant wife, who was lying down with her head in his lap, her swollen belly contorting. “Your son is abusing his mother.”

“Look how well he kicks. He will be a great soccer player.”

“He wants out, Paolo. I was afraid to tell you. My water broke back in the park while we were waiting for you to return.”

Overwhelmed, feeling utterly helpless, Paolo could only muster enough strength to squeeze Francesca’s hand. “Try to hold on, my love. We’ll be at the docks soon.”

Virgil was seated in the middle seat next to Shep. Exhausted, the old man snored in his sleep.

Patrick Shepherd leaned against the driver’s side back door, his injured left shoulder throbbing, the constant pain keeping him awake. Through heavy eyelids, he gazed at the young Indian girl seated up front between her parents, his psyche somehow drawn to her aura.

Ever alert, she sensed him staring. “Are you in terrible pain?”

“I’ve hurt worse.”

Unbuckling her seat belt, the girl turned around, kneeling on her seat to face him. “Give me your hand.” She smiled at his hesitancy. “I promise I won’t hurt you.”

He reached out with his right hand, allowing her to take it in her soft, delicate palms. Palpating his flesh, she closed her eyes, her fingertips resting on his pulse. “So rough. So much pain . . .”

“I was a soldier.”

“This is much deeper . . . a pain that comes from a prior journey made long ago. A terrible misdeed . . . so many dead. The burden weighs you down.”

“A prior journey? What kind of—”

“—something else . . . a great disappointment, all-consuming. Your actions haunt you.”

“Dawn!” Manisha turned around, apologetic. “Patrick, my daughter . . . she is young—”

“No, it’s . . . all right.” He looked at the girl. “Your name is Dawn?”

“Yes.”

“You have such pretty brown eyes. When I first looked into them back in Central Park . . . well, never mind.”

“Tell me.”

“It’s just . . . they remind me of someone I knew.”

“My mother says the eyes are the windows to the soul. Perhaps we knew one another in a prior life.”

“Perhaps. And what do you see when you look into my eyes?”

She made eye contact, staring easily at first, then deeper.

Patrick felt himself trembling.

The girl’s expression changed. Her lower lip quivered. Losing her composure, she suddenly released his hand and hugged her mother.

Shep sat up, trying hard not to freak out. “What is it? What’s wrong?”

The sobbing girl buried her face in Manisha’s lap.

“Come on, kid, don’t leave me hanging.”

“Forgive my daughter, Patrick, she didn’t mean to upset you. Reading a person’s face is tiring work on a good day. Dawn is exhausted, but there is nothing to fear. Dawn, tell Patrick you are sorry for upsetting him.”

“I’m sorry for upsetting you, Patrick. Please forgive me.”

“Yeah . . . sure, no worries.” Unnerved, he turned away, staring coldly out the driver’s side backseat window. Somewhere in the distance was FDR Drive, beyond that the East River. There was only darkness out there, save for two towering infernos—the Manhattan Bridge to the north, the Brooklyn Bridge to the south. The two expanses had been destroyed seventeen hours earlier, yet the incendiary thermite used in the blasts still burned, the chemical compound melting right through the steel girders—

—just as it had on September 11, 2001.

Three buildings had collapsed at near-free-fall speed. Two had been hit by hijacked planes, the third building—Building-7, a forty-seven-story structure—had folded like a deck of cards hours later, floor after floor, the skyscraper having been hit by nothing more than debris. While most Americans never questioned what their eyes had seen, scientists and engineers were baffled by events that defied every known law of physics, engineering, and metallurgy known to man.

In the end it came down to a simple numbers problem: How could jet fuel, which burned off rapidly at 800 to 1200 degrees Fahrenheit liquefy steel girders, which melt at 2500 degrees, more than twice the jet fuel’s highest recorded heat? There was no doubt steel had melted; molten steel was videotaped pouring from windows moments before the collapse, and a lake of molten steel had burned beneath the World Trade Center foundation for months after 9/11, despite firefighters’ best efforts to quell the fire with millions of gallons of water and Pyroccol, a chemical-fire suppressant.

Homeland Security had shut down all access to Ground Zero, effectively preventing any close inspection of the debris; still, resourceful engineers had managed to collect plenty of particle samples—their analysis revealing the presence of a foreign substance that should not have been in the wreckage: Thermite. A pyrotechnic material used by the military and construction engineers to collapse steel structures, thermite generated temperatures at a superhot 4500 degrees. Thermite also burned for extended periods of time. And it could be applied as a paint.

In response to independent experts’ unsettling discoveries, the National Institute of Standards and Technology released a thousand-page report containing explanations that contradicted every known case study of high-rise-building fires. The report never accounted for thermite residue; nor did it acknowledge the mysterious lake of molten steel. NIST officials also refused to address the series of explosions reported by hundreds of eyewitnesses moments before the towers collapsed. Or the videotape evidence of Building-7's collapse, which clearly showed squibbs—puffs of smoke created by demolition explosions—coming from each floor as the tower pancaked at near-free-fall speed.

More than four hundred independent architects and engineers disputed the NIST findings—to no avail. America had been attacked, and Americans wanted retribution, not ridiculous conspiracy theories.

It was during Patrick Shepherd’s second deployment that he first learned of the controversial 9/11 Truth Web sites from a fellow soldier. The accusations infuriated him. So what if the towers were known health hazards, filled with asbestos? So what if Building-7’s collapse was reported by the BBC forty minutes before it actually happened? Or that the tower housed the second largest covert CIA station in the country, as well as the SEC offices investigating Enron’s and WorldCom’s frauds. True, Larry Silverstein, the new owner of the World Trade Center, had shut down a few of the Twin Towers’ elevator shafts for “upgrades” a month before 9/11, but so what? How could any loyal Americans believe that elements within their own government could have aided and abetted such a nefarious terrorist attack, using the event as an excuse to invade Iraq? It was utter nonsense.

The mainstream media refused to buy into it, and most Americans, Patrick among them, refused as well. But as the years went by, and the deployments mounted, Patrick’s mind began to warm to the evidence, and the toxic thoughts turned his heart stone-cold.

He learned that modern history was littered with false-flag events—acts of violence, organized by ruling elites designed to direct blame at an enemy in order to amass the public’s support. In 1931, the Japanese blew up sections of their own railway as a pretext for annexing Manchuria. In 1939, the Nazis fabricated evidence of a Polish attack against Germany to justify their invasion of Poland. In 1953, the United States and Britain orchestrated “Operation Ajax,” a false-flag event that targeted Mohammed Mosaddegh, the democratically elected leader of Iran. Nine years later, President Kennedy stopped Operation Northwoods, a Department of Defense plot that would have blamed Cuba for a rash of incidents, including the hijacking and crash of a US commercial airliner. Years later, another false-flag operation—the Gulf of Tonkin incident—escalated the Vietnam War.

Three thousand innocent people had been murdered on September 11. As horrific as it was, the numbers were almost negligible when compared to the history of modern warfare. Hitler had exterminated six million Jews. Pol Pot had systematically eliminated over a million Cambodians. The Chinese were massacring Tibetans on a daily basis. Genocide had wiped out a million in Rwanda. The US invasion had killed a million Iraqis . . . even though Saddam had had no weapons of mass destruction, and Iraq considered Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda a sworn enemy.

To the military-industrial power brokers and Wall Street’s elite, three thousand casualties were nothing compared to Iraq’s oil reserves and a trillion dollars in no-bid contracts and military expenditures.

Seated in the backseat, Patrick recalled the moment the truth about September 11 had finally clicked. It was the last day of his fourth and final deployment, the day he had realized that the country he loved had been taken over by the corporate elite, that he had killed innocent people to support their empires of greed, and that he was destined to burn in Hell for his actions, never to see his soul mate again.

Staring at the burning bridges, Patrick registered the familiar copper taste of hatred in his mouth. It was a hatred that had blinded him for the better part of eleven years, an anger so deep that it smothered every ounce of love he had ever felt, destroying every decent memory, blocking every speck of Light. And in this sudden moment of clarity, another truth surfaced its ugly head . . .

“They’re going to incinerate Manhattan.”

His fellow passengers turned to face him.

Paolo gripped his wife’s hand. “Who’s going to incinerate Manhattan?”

“The feds. The Department of Defense. It’ll happen soon, probably when the sun comes up. It might have happened hours ago had they gotten hold of this vaccine.”

“How do you know this?” Pankaj asked.

“Back at the VA hospital, I overheard Bertrand DeBorn threatening to spill the beans about anthrax and the attacks back in 2001.”

“Kogelo’s secretary of defense?”

“What does anthrax have to do with—”

“The anthrax originated from CIA-run labs. I’m guessing Scythe was designed in a similar lab.”

“For what purpose?” Paolo asked.

“To invade Iran. Since we lack the manpower to take over another country, the intel guys came up with a new plan. We unleash a biological like Scythe, gut the country’s militia, then ride in with the vaccine and negotiate peace.”

“I don’t believe that,” Francesca stated emphatically. “I refuse to believe it. This is Manhattan, the Big Apple. No one’s going to incinerate the most populated city in America.”

“They don’t care,” Shep said, closing his eyes. “We’re simply numbers on a ledger sheet, acceptable losses. They’ll incinerate Manhattan, blame Scythe on a bunch of terrorists, and the next thing you know, it’ll be World War III.”

 

Governor’s Island

6:20 a.m.

 

Alone in the darkness, marooned on the moldy mattress on the damp concrete floor, Leigh Nelson’s body convulsed as she heard someone cross the first floor directly overhead. Terror gripped her mind as the heavy-footed soldier descended the wooden steps.

She cried out as he approached.

“No more waterboarding, I promise. I brought you something to calm your nerves. Can you sit up?” Jay Zwawa helped Leigh Nelson into an upright position, the female physician’s muscles trembling. He handed her the open bottle of whiskey.

She forced it to her lips and drank. Drained a third of the bottle before he could take it from her. Her insides were on fire, the internal heat soothing her frayed nerves.

“You okay?”

“Why did you torture me?”

“Why? Because I was following orders. Because the world’s gone crazy. Because common sense got tossed out the window the day presidents decided chicken hawks like Cheney and Rumsfeld and DeBorn knew more about running the military than men who had actually served in the armed forces.”

“I hate you and your damn wars, and your insane biowarfare programs. I hope and pray every maggot and warmonger involved burns in Hell.”

“I suspect you may get your wish.”

She cowered as he reached into his jacket pocket—

—withdrawing a cell phone. “Call your family. Tell them you’re okay. Nothing more.”

With a trembling hand, she took the device and dialed.

“Hello?”

She broke into a sob. “Doug?”

“Leigh! Where are you? Did you get out of the city? I’ve been calling you all night!”

She gazed up at Captain Zwawa through a pool of tears. “I’m okay. I’m at an Army base on Governor’s Island.”

“Thank God. When will you be home? Wait . . . are you infected?”

“I’m okay. Are you okay? Are the kids safe?”

“We’re all here. We’re okay. Autumn’s right here next to me. Autumn, you want to say hi to Mommy?”

A groggy child’s voice said, “Hi, Mommy.”

Leigh burst into sobs. Her throat constricted as she talked. “Hi, baby doll. Are you taking good care of Parker and Daddy for me?”

“Yes, Mommy. Are you taking care of Patrick for me?”

Leigh’s heart pounded in her ears.

Jay Zwawa’s eyebrows rose, his expression darkening.

“Honey, Mommy has to go. I love you.” She powered off the phone, terrified. “I took him home to meet my family. He bonded with my little girl.”

The captain pocketed the cell phone. Without another word, he trudged up the bare wooden steps, locking the door behind him.

Leigh Nelson crawled off to a corner of the basement and retched.

 

Battery Park

6:21 a.m.

 

Ernest Lozano followed Sheridan Ernstmeyer into the apartment building lobby, their guns drawn. The small marble foyer was dark, save for a lone yellow emergency light blinking along the ceiling.

Shadows crawled. Moans rose from coughing victims. Muffled screams reached out from first-floor dwellings. The foul air reeked of death.

Lozano was losing his composure quickly. “This is bullshit. DeBorn’s infected, he could be dead before we even make it back outside.”

“Shut up.” The female assassin searched for a stairwell, her cardiovascular system amped up on adrenaline and amphetamines. “Over here.” She yanked open the fire door, releasing a cat. The skittish house pet scurried past them into the darkness.

“Floor?”

“Huh?”

“Shepherd’s wife, what floor is she on?”

“Eleven. Sheridan, this is a fool’s errand.”

Turning to face him, she aimed the barrel of her 9mm at his mask. “DeBorn’s a survivor, he’ll make it out of here alive. Will you?”

“You’re crazy.”

“You mean I’m a crazy bitch. That is what you were thinking, isn’t it, Ernie? Go on, make a menstrual reference. We’ll see who will be the one bleeding.”

The eyes peering at Lozano from behind the woman’s mask were frenetic. “Let’s just find Shepherd’s wife and get the hell out of here.”

She poked his chest with her index finger. “Yeah, that’s what I thought you said.” Backing away, she turned and headed up the concrete stairwell.

 

TriBeCa, New York

6:24 a.m.

 

The death of a child was profoundly unnatural, a perversion of existence. Children were simply not supposed to die before their parents. When it happened, it unleashed boundless grief, a pain so intense, the emptiness so encompassing that it could spiral the bereaved parent into oblivion.

David Kantor had been to war. He had treated children missing limbs. He had held their lifeless bodies in his arms. After five deployments spanning two wars, the medic had never grown immune to any tragedy involving children. Only this was different. A sight so heart-wrenching that only the overwhelming need to find his daughter prevented him from a mental breakdown.

David staggered from one classroom to the next, the beam of his flashlight uncloaking Scythe in its most evil form. Infected by plague, the youngest had huddled together on the floor like a newborn litter of puppies, drawn to one another’s body warmth. Human snowflakes stained in blood.

She won’t be here. These are the elementary-school students. Find the seventh graders.

David heard someone moaning. Moving quickly toward the sound, he cut across the corridor into the library, his flashlight homing in on the source.

The headmaster was lying on the carpeted floor, his head propped on an encyclopedia. Rodney Miller opened his eyes, each labored gasp exhaling a breath of blood.

“Miller, it’s David Kantor.”

“Kantor?”

“Gavi’s father. Where is she? Where are the older kids?”

The headmaster struggled to form words. With a final gasp, he muttered, “gym.”

 

Chinatown

6:26 p.m.

 

A driving wind whipped the East River into a rabid chop, stirring the muddy cloud bank hanging over Manhattan into an atmospheric maelstrom. Below the toxic ceiling of carbon dioxide and chemical compounds, the survivors of Scythe huddled on rooftops, each patch of elevated asphalt a refugee camp, the buildings’ apartments having long been abandoned to the dying, the streets to the dead.

Pankaj Patel ground the gears of the gray Volkswagen microbus as he drove southwest along Henry Street, the bonnet of the clunky five-speed relic sideswiping awnings and everything else littering the tight sidewalks. He passed beneath the remains of the Manhattan Bridge. Turned right on Catherine Street. Drove another two blocks before he was forced to stop.

The north–south thoroughfare known as the Bowery was a virtual pileup of cars, buses, and trucks that occupied every square foot of asphalt and sidewalk as far as the eye could see. Most of the passengers caught on the Bowery had long since abandoned their vehicles, seeking bathrooms and food. Those few who had steadfastly remained inside their cars managed to avoid the pandemic into the night, only to find themselves trapped on their island of sanctuary with nowhere to go.

The silhouette of Chinatown’s redbrick buildings and rickety fire escapes loomed beyond the Bowery’s moat of vehicles like a medieval castle.

Pankaj turned to the others. “We have two choices: Remain here and die, or attempt to pass through Chinatown on foot. It’s a short walk to the Financial District from here, then it's clear on to Battery Park and Paolo’s brother-in-law’s boat. Manisha?”

“My crystal has calmed. My spiritual guide is in agreement.”

“Virgil?”

“Agreed.”

“Paolo?”

“Francesca’s water broke, she just had her first contraction. What happens when the baby starts coming?”

“We’ll have to make do . . . find a cart or something to wheel her around in. Patrick?”

Virgil nudged Shep awake. “Your wife and daughter are close. Are you ready to continue on?”

“Yes.”

Exiting the minibus, the seven survivors made their way across the Bowery on foot, climbing and sliding over the hoods and trunks of cars until they reached an eighteen-wheeler. The produce truck was lying on its side, blocking their entrance into Chinatown.

Sixteen hours earlier, the Asian enclave had been a crush of humanity, thousands of tourists filtering through dim sum restaurants and bargain hunting along the cluttered narrow streets. By mid-afternoon, the tourists had fled. By dusk, the Asian ghetto had segregated itself from the rest of Manhattan. Organizing quickly, Chinatown’s leaders had cleared the streets of vehicular traffic as far north as Canal Street, ordering access into the community sealed off from all outsiders, the borders barricaded with over-turned delivery trucks.

Pankaj signaled them to follow, the psychology professor having located an accessible fire escape. “We’ll climb up to the roof, then make our way south to Columbus Park.” Scaling a trash bin, he reached up and grabbed the lowest rung of a steel ladder, drawing it down from its slide axis.

Minutes later, the group was ascending the side of the building, the rusted slats of the fire escape’s steps creaking beneath their weight.

 

United Nations Secretariat Building

6:32 a.m.

 

The emergency generator had been powered on, its tentacles rewired to distribute electricity only to the building’s six elevators. In the lobby, the process of disseminating Racal suits began, the self-contained hazardous-environment apparel loaded onto carts and sent by military escort to the suites still harboring survivors.

On the thirty-third floor, President Eric Kogelo and his staff had already received their suits. The leader of the free world has been awake for almost thirty hours, under enormous pressure. Throughout the long night, he had been assured by CDC physicians that his fatigue and low-grade fever were simply a result of exhaustion and not Scythe. Kogelo had pretended to accept their verdict but had chosen to isolate himself inside his private office “just as a precaution.”

That the buboes had swelled along his groin and not his neck had helped hide the truth from the rest of his staff. Only John Zwawa at Fort Detrick knew that the president had been infected, the colonel hell-bent on delivering a cure by the time Kogelo arrived at Governor’s Island.

“Mr. President, the vaccine is in Manhattan, being acquired as we speak. If the buboes only appeared six hours ago, then we still have time. I know it’s difficult, sir, but try to remain calm.”

For a while, Kogelo had remained calm, tasking himself to leave video messages to his wife and children, his vice president, Congress, and the American people. Internal hemorrhaging had forced him to stop, each blood-drenched cough raking his lungs with pain.

Now, as he lay on the leather couch in his Racal suit, he prayed to his Maker that he be allotted a little more time . . . to see his kids again, to hold his wife—

—and to forestall the war that would end all wars.

 

Chinatown

6:37 a.m.

 

One level after another, they continued their ascent on the rickety fire escape. Manisha kept a watchful eye on Dawn, Pankaj assisting Virgil. Paolo helped Francesca up the narrow trellis-like steps, his wife’s progressing labor forcing her to pause every eight to nine minutes to “ride” a contraction.

Patrick was the last to step off the fire escape onto the eight-story building’s summit—an expanse of tarmac and gravel that revealed a disjointed maze of silhouetted rooftops. Some were flat, others angled, almost none equal in height, creating a labyrinth of shadows that concealed brick ravines and interconnecting bridges, pipes and heating ducts, air conditioners and chimney stacks, antennae and satellite dishes—all jutting out at varying degrees in the darkness.

“This way,” said Pankaj, certain of the direction yet unsure of the path. Ushering them to the west, he resumed the lead—

—when the asphalt suddenly rose before him in undulating waves, the shadows becoming people. Huddled beneath blankets, hundreds of Asian men, women, and children awaken to greet the invaders with utter silence, the dying light from their lanterns casting an unworldly aura upon the confrontation.

A boundary had been violated. Weapons were drawn.

Before Pankaj could react, before Manisha could register the vibrations of her crystal, before ten-year-old Dawn could scream or the Minoses pray, the mob cowered back into the shadows, dropping to their knees in fear.

Patrick stepped forward, his head and face concealed within the shadow of his ski jacket’s hood, his prosthetic arm held aloft as if it were the Angel of Death’s scythe.

“Paolo, I think it’s time I took the lead.” Pushing past the stunned psychology professor, Shep ventured forth, his presence parting the terrified sea of survivors.

 

Tribeca

6:38 a.m.

 

The gymnasium was located on the ninth floor. David tried the doors—locked. Using the butt end of his assault rifle, he banged on the small rectangle of glass, shattering it. “Hello! Is anybody in there?” He shined his light inside. Heard rustling . . . whispers. “Who is it?”

“David Kantor, I’m Gavi’s father. I am not infected.”

Someone approached. A heavy chain was removed from the inside of the door. It was pushed open, and David entered. Dark inside, save for a fading emergency light. The students were spread out on the hardwood basketball court, silhouetted in blackness.

“Who’s in charge here?”

“I am . . . sort of.” The young man was sixteen. “There are eighteen of us in here. No one’s infected, as far as we can tell. We locked ourselves in around two in the afternoon.”

“Is Gavi Kantor in here? Gavi?”

“She’s not here.” A seventh grader stepped forward, an African-American girl wrapped in a blanket. “She wasn’t in school today.”

She wasn’t in school! Did she cut classes? Maybe she’s not even in Manhattan . . .

“Dr. Kantor, do you have enough environmental suits for all of us?”

A young boy in first grade tugged on his pant leg. “I wanna go home.”

Home? David ground his teeth. If they leave, they’ll become contaminated. If they stay, they’ll die anyway. What do I do with them? Where can I take them? There’s no way off the island . . .

They gathered around him like moths to a flame. “Please don’t leave us.”

He looked down at the seven-year-old boy. “Leave you? Now why would I do that? I’m here to take you home. But before we can leave, everyone needs to cover their mouths and noses with something. Use a scarf or a towel, even a sock . . . anything you can find. You older kids, help out the little ones. Once we leave the gym, you can’t touch anything . . . you need to breathe through your scarves. Leave your belongings here, you don’t need them. Only your jackets, gloves, and hats.”

 

Chinatown

6:39 a.m.

 

The sudden reverberation of her crystal caused Manisha to jump. She looked around with a mother’s paranoia. “Pankaj, where’s Dawn?”

Her husband pointed ahead to where their daughter was walking hand in hand with the hooded figure of Patrick Shepherd. “She insisted. Is something wrong?”

“Everything is wrong,” Manisha whispered, trembling. “Our supernal guide is close.”

 

“Patrick, can we stop for a moment, I need to rest.” Dawn released his right hand and sat on an air vent, using the back end of her coat for padding against the frosted surface. “Sorry, my feet hurt.”

“Mine, too.” He leaned against the corner of the rooftop’s five-foot ledge, gazing below at Mott Street. “Columbus Park is only a few more blocks. Would you like me to carry you? I can put you on my back, just like I used to do with my own little . . .”

His voice trailed off, his eyes focused on the street below.

“What is it, Patrick? What do you see?”

The Chinese were efficient, he had to give them that. As the plague-infested bodies began multiplying, they had moved quickly, disposing of their dead directly into the sewers in the most efficient way possible—by dropping them headfirst down the open manholes. At some point, the seemingly endless procession of corpses had piled up below, clogging the makeshift burial ground. As a result, every manhole on Mott Street was stuffed with bodies, the legs of the last deceased protruding out of each open aperture upside down.

Inverted bodies, protruding feet first from the earth . . . The Scythe vaccine latched on to the long-extinct memory as if hooking a fish, dragging it up from the abyss and reeling it to the surface.

Wisps of gray mist rolled over Mott Street—

—revealing a muddy landscape that stretches for a thousand miles in every direction. The dead are everywhere—mottled, rotting corpses. Most lie in layers in the muck, others remain buried headfirst up to their waists in the bog. Prolonged exposure underwater had peeled the drowning victims’ clothes from their flesh, in some cases the flesh from bone.

It is a valley of the dead, a fermenting graveyard of tens of thousands, the aftermath of an unimaginable natural disaster . . . or an act of God.

Shep snapped awake, his body trembling, his mind still gripped by the terrifying images. Instinctively, he dropped to his knees and hugged Dawn with his one good arm, his shaken spirit somehow soothed by her aura.

“Patrick, what is it? What did you see?”

“Death. On a scale I could never imagine. Somehow . . . it was my fault.”

“You must go.”

“Yes, we have to leave this place.”

“Not us. Just you.”

“What are you talking about?” He pulled away—

—and that was when he saw the spirit. The luminescent blue apparition appeared to be hovering over Dawn, whispering in her ear, instructing the child as she spoke. “You must leave us to tend to another flock.”

“What flock? Dawn, is your spiritual companion telling you this?”

“Ten levels below us is Malebolge, a pouch of evil where the innocent are being accosted. Go to them, Patrick. Free them from servitude. We will meet you outside this circle of death when you have completed the task.”

Patrick regained his feet, his eyes transfixed on the Light as he staggered backward—

—nearly toppling over Virgil. “What’s wrong, son? Not another vision?”

“This was something different. Something much worse. Genocide. Destruction. The End of Days. Somehow, I was there for it, only it wasn’t me. But I caused it. I was directly involved!”

The others gathered around.

“Try to remain calm, we’ll sort this out.”

“I have to go.”

“Go where?” Paolo asked. “I thought you needed to find your family?”

“I do.” He looked from Virgil to the girl, the spirit’s light fading behind her. “But first I need to run a quick errand.”

Malebolge

6:53 a.m.

 

She was drifting between the pain of consciousness and the finality of darkness, the terrifying presence of the three circling predators ultimately keeping her from passing out.

She was bent over the tabletop, her jeans pushed down around her ankles. Her body trembled, her skin crawling as they moved in for the kill.

She squeezed her eyes shut, but could not escape the abusive aftershave of the one called Ali Chino. The lanky Mexican lurked before her; still she refused to look at him. She gagged as he licked her neck. She trembled as the blade of his knife glided past her throat and down her blouse. He removed each button with a flick of his wrist. She involuntarily jumped back, discovering Farfarello.

The Sicilian was twenty. He tore off her bra and groped her breasts from behind, his hands as callused and cold as his soul. Her mind blotted out the Sicilian and Mexican, the two followers having been relegated to leftovers at the feast. It was the alpha male who caused her to tremble, the demon pulling down her panties, groping her from behind.

Wanting her for himself, Cagnazzo shoved Farfarello aside. The Colombian was a psychopath. A monster who lived to inflict pain and suffering. Gavi Kantor cried out as the twenty-seven-year-old’s blistered fingers probed her with one hand, readying himself with the other. He leaned forward. Whispered in broken English, “This is going to hurt. It’s going to hurt bad. And when I’m done, I’m going to do it again with my gun.”

For thirteen-year-old Gavi Kantor, there was nothing left. No more fear, no more spent nerves, no emotions or prayers. The butterfly had been broken on the wheel, the last hours of her existence taking with it her identity, her future, her past.

The Colombian bent her over the desk, getting no resistance.

And then, suddenly, there was another presence in the room—another predator.

There are three of them . . . and the girl. She is in her early teens, her shirt torn open and bloodied, her lower body naked, stretched belly down across a desk. Dark eyes greet him as he enters the den of iniquity. The teen cries out. The garbled words need no translation.

“This is not our battle, Sergeant. Leave the premises now!”

“Not this time.”

Cagnazzo looked up, startled. “Who the fuck are you?”

Patrick Shepherd’s eyes widened, his nostrils flared. “Don’t you recognize me? I’m the Angel of Death.”

The prosthetic arm whipped through the air, its curved blade slicing cleanly through the front of Cagnazzo’s neck and esophagus until the steel edge lodged between the Colombian’s fourth and fifth cervical vertebrae. Shep kicked the dead man loose from his scythe, then turned his attention to the other two slave traders.

Farfarello, pale as a ghost, crossed himself and fled.

Ali Chino, his body paralyzed in fear, watched the bloodstained blade loop upward from the ground, splitting the inverted V between his legs—tearing through his jeans as it sliced open his testicles. The castrated Mexican youth screamed in agony, then fell forward, clutching his gushing privates . . . knocking himself out on the desk.

Gavi Kantor covered herself, her body trembling. “Whoever you are, please don’t hurt me.”

“I won’t hurt you.” Shep retracted his hood, revealing himself to the girl.

The teen dressed quickly, staring at his face in the flickering candlelight. “I know you. . . . How do I know you?”

“You’re shivering. Here, take my coat.” He slipped off the ski jacket, handing it to her.

“My name is Patrick. We need to get out of here.” He searched the dead Colombian, removing a .45 caliber Smith & Wesson from his waistband.

“They kidnapped me . . . they were going to . . . oh my God—”

He put his arm around her as she lost it. “Shh, it’s okay. I’m going to get you out of here. Is there anyone else here? Any other girls?”

“They’re locked up in a room. Down the hall.”

“Show me.”

 

Battery Park

7:04 a.m.

 

Sheridan Ernstmeyer arrived at the eleventh-floor landing first, sweat pouring beneath her rebreather mask and down her face. For a well-deserved moment, she luxuriated in the intense burning sensation in her quadriceps, the endorphin high always accompanying a good workout.

Turning back to the stairs, she looked down—Ernest Lozano lagged two floors below. “Anytime, Mr. Y-Chromosome. Preferably before the apocalypse.”

No answer.

“What’s the apartment number? I’ll handle this myself.”

“Eleven-oh-two. Why didn’t you tell me that nine floors ago?”

“You needed the workout. Man up while I grab Shepherd’s wife.” She yanked open the fire door, gun in hand.

The apartment was close to the stairwell, second door on the left. She knocked loudly several times. “Mrs. Shepherd, open up! Hello?” She banged again, readying herself to kick down the barrier.

Someone inside approached. “Who is it?” The voice belonged to a woman in her thirties.

“I’m with the military, Mrs. Shepherd. It’s very important I speak with you.” She held her identification up to the peephole.

A dead bolt was retracted. The door opened—

—revealing a thirty-two-year-old African-American woman dressed in a flannel bathrobe.

“Beatrice Shepherd?”

“No, I’m Karen. Beatrice is my mother.”

“Your mother? No, that can’t be right. Your husband . . . your estranged husband, Patrick . . . he needs to see you.”

“I’m not married, and my mother has been a widow for twenty years. I think you have the wrong person.” She attempted to shut the door, only Sheridan’s boot was in the way.

“You’re lying. Show me some ID.”

“You need to leave.”

The assassin aimed her gun at the woman’s face. “You are Beatrice, aren’t you?”

“Karen?”

The voice came from somewhere in the dark living room. Sheridan pushed her way in. Candlelight revealed a figure sprawled out on the sofa.

Fifty-seven-year-old Beatrice Eloise Shepherd lay in a pool of her own sweat and blood, the woman’s body wracked with fever. An obscene dark bubo, the size of a ripe apple, protruded above the neckline of her silk pajamas. She was clearly on death’s door—

—and she was clearly not the estranged wife of Sergeant Patrick Ryan Shepherd.

The female assassin backed away, then turned and left the apartment—

—running into Ernest Lozano in the corridor. “So? Where’s Shepherd’s wife? I thought you were handling it, hotshot.”

Raising the 9mm pistol, Sheridan Ernstmeyer calmly and coldly shot the agent three times in the face, bone shrapnel and blood spraying across her mask. “We had the wrong person.”

Stepping over the corpse, she hurried for the stairwell, enjoying the fleeting rush of endorphins flowing in her brain.

 

 

 

 

“This is the end . . . beautiful friend

This is the end . . . my only friend, the end

Of our elaborate plans, the end

Of everything that stands, the end

No safety or surprise, the end

I'll never look into your eyes . . . again.”

—The Doors, “The End”

 

 

 

 

NINTH CIRCLE

Treachery

“We silently climbed the bank which forms its border. Here it was less than day and less than night, so that my vision could hardly reach farther than a few yards. But if I was limited in sight I heard a high horn which made such a loud blast that the effect of thunder would have been slight by comparison. Immediately my eyes passed back along the path of the sound to its place of origin. Not even Roland's horn surpassed its dreadful wail. Not long after I'd turned my face to follow the sound there appeared to my eyes a number of high towers, or so I believed, and I asked: "Master, what is that city which lies before us?" And he explained: "What you've perceived are false images which come from trying to penetrate the shadows too deeply. You'll see how you're deceived once we get closer, so try to accelerate."

—Dante’s Inferno

 

December 21

Greenwich Village, Manhattan

7:11 a.m.

(52 minutes before the prophesied End of Days)

 

Major Steve Downey sat in the front passenger seat of the black military Hummer, his gaze focused on the live video feeds coming from the two Reaper drones hovering over Chinatown. For nearly two hours, his team of Rangers had maneuvered their military vehicles along sidewalks littered with the dead and dying, progressively working their way south as they tracked their quarry through Lower Manhattan. And then, somehow, Shepherd and his entourage had evaded them. By the time the Reapers had reestablished contact, Downey’s crew had reached Houston Street.

The east–west thoroughfare that separated Greenwich Village from SoHo was a wall of vehicles that could not be negotiated. With chopper extractions banned because of the cloud cover and the UN evacuation set for seven thirty, time was running out quickly.

“Base to Serpent One.”

Downey grabbed the radio. “Serpent One, give me some good news.”

“The ESVs have landed. ETA for ESV-2 is three minutes.”

“Roger that.” Downey switched frequencies to speak with his second-in-command. “Serpent Two, the road’s being paved, prepare to move out.”

While the backbone of the US Army’s ground forces remained the Abrams and Bradley tanks, these heavily armored vehicles, weighing upward of sixty-seven tons each, often required months to transport to the battlefield. For assignments requiring rapid deployment, the Defense Department developed the Stryker Force, eight-wheeled attack vehicles that weighed only thirty-eight thousand pounds, could be airlifted via a single C-130 aircraft, and possessed enough armor to stop small-arms fire.

The two vehicles that had been off-loaded from flatbed barges in Battery Park and Hudson River Park were M1132 Stryker Engineer Support Vehicles, each fitted with a seven-foot-high, two-foot-thick arrowhead-shaped steel tractor blade mounted to the Stryker’s front end, converting the ESVs into fast-moving bulldozers.

Having deployed at Pier 25 in Tribeca, ESV-2 plowed its way east along Houston Street doing thirty miles an hour, its driver viewing Manhattan through night-vision and thermal-imaging cameras as he rammed his V-shaped blade into the gridlocked avenues, pushing vehicles aside and flipping buses as the Stryker cleared a twenty-foot-wide path through Lower Manhattan. Reaching Broadway, the all-terrain vehicle turned right, obliterated the wall of cars blocking the two black military Hummers, then headed south, the two Ranger teams following in its wake.

 

Tribeca

7:17 a.m.

 

David Kantor exited the building’s southwest stairwell, the seven-year-old boy in his arms, the rest of the students in tow. The older teens looked around, in shock. “What happened?”

“Oh my . . . there are dead people everywhere.”

“Eww!” Children screamed, panicking the rest of the herd.

“It’s okay. Stay calm.” David looked around, desperate to find a means of transportation, even as he realized the futility of the task. “Kids, do you know where the school keeps its buses?”

“I do!” The sixth-grade girl pointed west down 41^st Street.

“Good. Okay, everyone stay together now and watch where you’re walking.” He followed the middle schooler through a tight passage between rows of cars, the older teens plying him with questions.

“Did these people all die of plague?”

“How are you gonna drive a bus? The streets are jammed.”

The sound was faint—popping sounds—like distant firecrackers.

“Manhattan’s been quarantined. How’re you going to get us off the island?”

“We were safer inside. Maybe we should go back?”

“Quiet!” David stopped to listen.

The disturbance was growing louder, approaching from the north, the popping becoming more of a bashing of metal on metal, accompanied by a deep, rumbling sound.

“That’s an ESV. The military must be clearing an evacuation route. Kids, come on!”

 

Battery Park

7:19 a.m.

 

Sheridan Ernstmeyer heard the eruption of metal on metal the moment she exited the building lobby, the sound resembling a demolition derby. She approximated the location, then hustled back to the SUV. “Bert?” She shook the secretary of defense awake.

“Where’s Shepherd’s wife?”

“Dead,” she lied, “but the military’s here. There’s an ESV moving north on Broadway. Must be an extraction team.”

Bertrand DeBorn sat up, his mask spotted with specks of blood. “Get us out of here.”

 

Chinatown

7:22 a.m.

 

The survivors—seven foreign girls wrapped in blankets—followed their one-armed angel and the American teenager through pitch-dark corridors and up a set of creaky wooden steps to the first floor of the Chinese souvenir shop.

The brothel’s 270-pound madam was standing before the store’s front door, the Mexican woman’s rotund mass blocking the exit. “And where do you think you are going, Chuleta?”

Patrick Shepherd stepped in front of the girls, aiming the dead Colombian’s gun at the madam’s head. “Move it or lose it.”

The madam smiled through bloodstained teeth. “You do not frighten me. I am protected by Santa Muerte.”

“Never heard of her.” Raising his right knee, Patrick launched a front-thrust kick into the obese woman’s belly, sending her crashing backward through the store’s plate-glass window.

The girls scampered over the body of their former keeper and into the night.

 

Columbus Park

7:25 a.m.

 

Pankaj Patel led his family and fellow plague survivors down Bayard Street to the perimeter fence. Columbus Park’s asphalt basketball courts and synthetic baseball field were covered in snow, the reflective alabaster surface offering a peek at the extent of Scythe’s infestation upon the rodent population.

Hundreds of black rats moved as one in a symbiotic dance of tug-of-war. Rendered mad by the perpetual bites of ten thousand starving fleas, competing packs of rodents swarmed and retreated across the basketball court like schools of fish. At the center of this blood-laced scrum were the remains of an elderly couple, their ravaged torsos left recognizable only by their tattered outer garments, which provided grappling materials for tiny claws and teeth.

The visceral battle caused the six survivors to back away from the fence.

Francesca moaned, her contractions coming more frequently with every passing minute. “Paolo, do something!”

“Virgil, my wife’s having our baby.”

“And what would you have me do?”

“Lead us away from this horrible place. Get us to the waterfront and my brother-in-law’s boat.”

“What about Patrick?”

“We can’t wait for him any longer. If what he said was true, then we’re running out of time.”

Manisha nodded at Pankaj. “He’s right. We cannot wait any longer.”

“Mom, no!”

“Dawn, sweetheart, whatever he’s doing, he’ll find us when he can.”

“Perhaps you should build a golden calf?”

The four adults turned to face the old man.

“Pray to the idol, perhaps it will grant you the salvation you seek.”

“Virgil, my wife is about to have a baby. We’re surrounded by death—”

“—and who led you across this valley of death? Who inoculated your wife and child from plague? Manisha, who was it who risked his own life to save your family from the hangman’s noose? Yet here you are, ready to abandon your leader as easily as the Israelites abandoned Moses at Sinai. Faith is easy when things are going right, when the challenges remain negotiable, not as much so when faced with your own mortality. But what if this is the very purpose of the physicality? To test one’s faith, to battle the ego, to trust the system.”

Pankaj broke into a cold sweat. He could hear the rats growling thirty feet behind him as they tore into morsels of human flesh. “What system, Virgil? What are you advising us to do?”

“Act with unquestioning certainty.”

Dawn pointed. “There he is!”

Shep was jogging toward them, accompanied by a small group of girls, ages ten to eighteen. The youngest—a Mexican child, clung to his chest.

Manisha burst into tears of shame, immediately connecting Patrick’s “errand” to the sex slaves he had just liberated. She took the child from him, allowing Shep to catch his breath. “We need to hurry, the sun’ll be up soon.”

Nodding at Virgil, the one-armed man led his growing flock west on Worth Street toward Broadway.

 

United Nations Plaza

7:29 a.m.

 

The Boeing CH-47F Chinook commercial transport helicopter flew low over New York Harbor, its tandem rotors kicking up the frigid waters, its pilots purposely avoiding the ominous layer of brown clouds swirling several hundred feet overhead. Reaching the East River, the heavy-lift airship headed north, following the narrow waterway to Lower Manhattan, landing at the United Nations Plaza.

A procession of delegates exited the lobby of the Secretariat Building, each survivor dressed hood to boots in an environmental suit. The ambulant occupied the permanent seats situated in the center of the Chinook. Those on stretchers were secured in the cargo area—

—President Eric Kogelo among them.

Foley Square

7:32 a.m.

 

The sound reached them first—booming metallic collisions that rattled the night. The lights appeared next, blazing and bright, silhouetting a wave of vehicles tossed from the monster's path as it crashed its way east on Worth Street.

"This way!" Shep led them south into Foley Square.

Engines growled in the distance. Strobe lights illuminated the columns of the surrounding civic buildings. A Reaper drone loomed overhead, its camera catching Shep as he attempted to lead his followers up the US courthouse steps—the same steps Bernard Madoff had trod years earlier. As with the captured Ponzi schemer, there was no escape.

A midnight wave of Rangers swarmed in from all sides. They pinned Patrick Shepherd to the concrete, their flashlight beams blinding his eyes as they pawed every square inch of flesh and stripped the clothing from his body. He screamed in agony as two Rangers wrenched his steel prosthetic from his lacerated shoulder, tearing nerve endings and tendons as they amputated the limb by force.

Patrick writhed on the ground, his wounded body in spasms, his mind set on fire. He heard Dawn cry out in pain. He registered Paolo’s protests as gloved hands performed a cavity search on his laboring spouse.

The terror ceased, its victims left naked and shivering on the snow-covered lawn. Major Downey stalked the area. “Report.”

“Sir, we found three vials of Scythe vaccine on Sergeant Shepherd, nothing more.”

Downey straddled Patrick, pressing his boot to the amputee’s bleeding left deltoid. “Where’s the rest of the vaccine?”

“I sent it to your mother as a thank-you for last night.”

The Ranger wound up to kick Shep in the face when Virgil, lying on the ground beside him, grabbed his ankle. “He inoculated these survivors. Take them with you, they remain plague-free.”

“No one’s going anywhere, old man.” Downey activated his internal headset. “Serpent to base, we’ve acquired the Scythe vaccine.”

“Well done. We’ll meet you at the extraction point in five minutes.”

“Roger that. Okay, people, let’s move!” The Rangers double-timed it back to their vehicles—

—as a black Chevy Suburban skidded to a halt in front of the Hummers, causing the men to aim their assault weapons. A woman wearing a cloth mask climbed out of the driver’s seat, her hands raised. “Don’t shoot! I’m with the Secret Service. I have Secretary of Defense Bertrand DeBorn in back. We’re to be part of your extraction.”

Downey opened the back door of the Suburban, gazing at the white-haired man, who appeared to be unconscious. “It’s him all right. And he’s got full-blown Scythe. Load him on board, we’ll get him into a Racal suit back at the docks.”

“What about her?” One of the Rangers pointed to Sheridan Ernstmeyer.

“She goes, too.”

The female assassin breathed a sigh of relief.

Across the park, a slight figure in a white Racal suit stepped out from behind a statue. The Tibetan monk removed his hood, his opaque eyes glittering like diamonds at Bertrand DeBorn.

The secretary of defense gurgled on a larynx full of blood, tumbling from the open rear door of the Suburban.

One of the Rangers checked for a pulse. “He’s done.”

“Leave him, we’re running out of time.” Major Downey climbed into the front seat of the lead Hummer.

“Wait!” Sheridan Ernstmeyer grabbed at the closing door. “What about me?”

“Sorry, lady. Looks like your ticket out of here just croaked.”

Before she could react, the two military vehicles executed wild U-turns across the snow-covered park lawn, skidding their way back down Worth Street.

To the east, the slice of horizon beneath the false brown ceiling of clouds had turned gray, summoning the dawn. Retrieving their clothing, the accosted survivors dressed quickly, shivering in the cold.

Patrick dressed, his mangled left shoulder on fire. With his bare right hand, he gathered a clump of snow to press against the wound—revealing a small in-ground plaque:

 

“These are the times that try men's souls . . ."

Thomas Paine.

 

Paolo comforted his wife, covering her with his overcoat. “It’s all right. God will not abandon us in our hour of need.”

“Wake up, Paolo. Look around you. God has abandoned us.”

“You should restrict your tongue from negativity. Especially with a child to be born.”

Francesca turned to see the bizarre-looking Asian. “Who the hell are you?”

Gelut Panim offered a slight bow. “A humble servant of the Light.”

Pankaj looked up. Seeing the Elder, he rushed over. “How?”

“It’s not important.” The monk scanned the group. “I seek the righteous one. Where is he?”

Heads turned as a yellow school bus barreled around Centre Street, skidding to a halt.

The front door squeaked open, releasing an ominous figure dressed in black.

The women screamed.

David Kantor removed his face mask. “It’s all right, I won’t hurt you. I saw the military vehicles drive off, and–”

“Dad?”

David turned, his heart pounding in his throat as his eyes sorted through a crowd of scantily clad women—

—finding his lost lamb. “Gavi? Oh, God, thank you.” He rushed to her, sweeping her up in his arms like a rag doll, crushing her in his embrace, his daughter weeping uncontrollably. “I was so scared. I’ve been looking for you! I went to your school—”

“They kidnapped me! They beat me. Daddy, I was so scared—”

“Who beat you?” He looked at her face. “Are you okay?”

“I’m okay. That man saved me. The man with one arm.” She pointed at Patrick, sitting slumped over on a park bench.

David stared at the gaunt figure. “Shep?”

“Daddy, you know him, don’t you? I saw a picture of you with him in Iraq.”

“Gavi, get on the bus. Get all these girls with you aboard, too.” David watched her go, then walked over to the bench, pushing past a small Asian and an old man.

“Shep, it’s D.K.”

Patrick looked up, his eyes swimming in pain. “Who?”

“David . . . Dr. Kantor. Don’t you recognize me? We spent three deployments together.”

“David?” Shep sat up, the pain snapping him awake. “What are you doing here?”

“The Guard sent me here looking for you. For the vaccine. That girl you rescued, she’s my daughter. Buddy, I owe you big-time.”

Patrick wiped back tears. “Wish I could have saved my own daughter. Bastards took the vaccine before I could get it to her.”

“Your daughter? Oh, geez.” David turned to the old man. “Are you a friend of his?”

“I’d like to think so. Patrick’s memory isn’t so good. Maybe you could help him?”

David sat on the bench next to his fellow vet. The others gathered around. “Shep, how could the vaccine help Donna?”

“Donna?”

“Your daughter.”

Shep’s eyes grew wide in recognition. “Donna. My little girl’s name . . . is Donna. I remembered Beatrice, but for the life of me—”

“Who’s Beatrice?”

“My wife. You know that.”

“Shep, did you get married while you were in the hospital?”

“David, come on . . . Beatrice! The only woman I ever loved. The mother of my child . . . my soul mate.”

David looked to the others, then placed his arm on Patrick’s good shoulder. “The surgeon said the explosion damaged your memory, but there was no telling how bad. Shep, I don’t know who this Beatrice is, but the woman you told me was your soul mate . . . her name was Patty. Patricia Segal.”

Patrick paled, the blood draining from his face.

“You used to call her Trish. I suppose it sort of sounds like Beatrice. Shep, the two of you never got married. You were engaged . . . there were wedding plans, but then her dad—your high-school baseball coach—he got sick. The cancer took him right before the Red Sox called you up. Right before the accident.”

An icy shiver ran down Patrick’s spine. “What accident?”

Across the park, the Grim Reaper stared at him . . . waiting.

David looked to Virgil, who nodded. “Go on, he needs to hear it.”

“Shep, Trish and Donna were aboard the flight from Boston . . . the one that struck the World Trade Center. Buddy, you lost your family on September 11.”

Francesca clutched her husband’s arm, doubling up with a contraction. Dawn swooned. Manisha grabbed her daughter before she fainted.

Patrick Shepherd’s chest constricted so tightly, he could not breathe.

And in that moment of revelation, a decade of pent-up psychological trauma suddenly released, freeing the synapses within his damaged cerebral cortex as if they were the clogged gears of a clock—

—and suddenly he remembered.

He remembers sprinting down Trinity Place after the second tower was hit.

He remembers thick brown smoke pouring into the heavens. People falling from the sky.

He remembers Trinity Cemetery and the funeral for his soul mate and his young daughter. He remembers filling their empty coffins with their belongings . . . everything put to rest beneath the sculpture of an angelic child . . . the very tombstone the Grim Reaper had been motioning at hours earlier.

There was one piece of the puzzle left . . . one final memory—the day he had realized the truth about September 11, the day he had pieced together the treachery—

—the day he had walked out of his barracks in the Green Zone and into the sunshine, the pin in his right hand—

—the live grenade in his left.

From across the lawn, the Grim Reaper opened his cloaked arms wide, beckoning an embrace. Shep leapt off the bench, sprinting awkwardly toward the Angel of Death, ready to end it all.

The Reaper smiled, disappearing into the shadows.

“Shep, wait!” David started after him—

—the old man blocked his way. “You are a doctor?”

“Huh? Yeah—”

“We have a pregnant woman in labor. Paolo, this man is here to deliver your son. Pankaj, get these people to Battery Park.”

“Virgil, what about you?”

“Patrick needs me. Now hurry, there’s not much time.” The old man patted Pankaj on the cheek, offering a wry smile to a transfixed Gelut Panim before following Patrick’s tracks through the snow.

David, Pankaj, and Paolo helped Francesca onto the awaiting vehicle, the interior of the bus fifty degrees warmer. Manisha escorted Dawn. But at the last moment, Dawn slipped past her mother and dashed across the lawn, retrieving Patrick’s mangled steel prosthetic from the short Asian man.

“Are you coming with us?”

“I’d like that.” The Elder turned, looking for the old man.

Virgil Shechinah was gone.

 

The horizon had turned a light gray by the time Shep reached Ann Street. Ahead was Broadway. Looking up, he saw the Reaper beckon from atop a flipped vehicle, the olive green blade of his scythe again dripping blood.

“Bastard!” Gathering himself, Patrick crossed Broadway, continuing east to the corner of Trinity Place and Vesey Street—

—the World Trade Center construction site loomed ahead.

 

Pankaj Patel raced the school bus south on Broadway, following the path cleared by the second Stryker. Morning’s first light lifted the veil of a long night, exposing the true horrors of the runaway pandemic. Bodies lay everywhere, strewn across Manhattan as if the Big Apple had been struck by a thirty-story tsunami. Some hung from shattered windows, others still occupied the hundreds of vehicles that clogged every city block. Every sidewalk was a morgue, every building a tomb. Men, women, and children, old and young, ethnic and Caucasian, domestic and foreign—Scythe had spared no one.

The bus passed Trinity Church and the New York Stock Exchange, heading for the southernmost tip of Manhattan—Battery Park.

Francesca leaned back against Paolo’s chest. Her husband entwined his fingers around hers as David Kantor worked between her spread legs, the Army medic having shed his bulky environmental suit aboard the heated vehicle.

“Okay, Francesca, looks like you’re fully dilated.” He turned to his daughter, Gavi assisting him from the next bench seat. “Find me something clean. A towel or blanket would be great.”

Francesca trembled, her body exhausted, her nerves overwrought with fear. “You really are a doctor, right?”

“With all the degrees. I gave up my practice to go into business. Maybe I should have gone into pediatrics, this’ll be my second delivery today.”

Paolo forced a nervous smile. “See, my love, God has taken care of us. The first child you delivered, Dr. Kantor . . . what was it?”

David swallowed the lump in his throat. “A healthy little Hispanic girl. Okay, slight push on the next contraction. Ready . . . steady . . . push.”

“Ugh!” Francesca bore down, her unborn infant sliding farther down her stretching birth canal, the pain excruciating. Looking up, she saw the strange-looking Asian man watching her from across the aisle. “Why don’t you take a picture, it’ll last longer!”

“My apologies. I am simply honored to bear witness to your miracle.”

“Miracle? You call this a miracle! I’m on a school bus, giving birth in a plague-infested city in front of a bunch of strangers.”

“Exactly. In a city taken by so much death, you and your husband have defied the odds and managed to survive. Now, out of the darkness, you bring forth a new spark of Light. And this is not a miracle?”

David looked up. “The man’s got a point. Okay, one more time—”

Hunched down in one of the rear seats, Sheridan Ernstmeyer watched the medic deliver the Italian woman’s child, her anger mounting.

 

World Trade Center Site

7:42 a.m.

 

The site had been sanitized. The crime scene scrubbed. Every ounce of rubble inspected, yielding everything from family photos to personal belongings to the smallest traces of DNA used to identify air passengers and office occupants. Everything except the virtually indestructible black boxes that had been aboard the two aircraft safeguarding the in-flight recordings.

Tons of steel shipped overseas. Replaced by gleaming fortified structures rising from Ground Zero’s excavated graveyard. Out with the old, in with the new . . .

Patrick slipped through a detached section of aluminum fence and entered the construction area, marking the first time he had returned to the site where his fiancée and daughter had been incinerated alive, along with three thousand other innocent people.

Trembling with emotion, he moved to the edge of a massive pit—the foundation of what would soon be another mammoth structure. A gray morning fog had rolled in off the Hudson, obscuring the partially constructed buildings looming across the site.

He registered the now-familiar presence and turned to his left. The Grim Reaper was standing beside him on the overlook, staring into the pit.

“Why have you brought me here?”

The Angel of Death raised its scythe to the heavens. The Manhattan sky was concealed behind a dense layer of swirling brown clouds—just as it had been on that day of treachery.

A dizzying bout of vertigo. Shep dropped to one knee as a sizzling wave of energy rattled his brain and extremities as if he had touched a live wire. Gasping a breath, he opened his eyes, disoriented and beyond confused.

The sky is a maelstrom of swirling dark storm clouds, the rain that pelts his exposed flesh as frigid as droplets cast from a frozen lake and as fierce as a monsoon. He is standing upon a raised wooden structure, towering fifty feet above a vast forest of cedar rendered into acres of stumps and saplings by the axe. The valley below is flooded. The floodwaters rising.

Advancing toward the wooden structure are people. Thousands of them. Carting children and possessions. Desperate and angry and scared. Standing in frigid water up to their knees, shouting at him in a Middle Eastern dialect.

His attention is diverted to a new discovery—he now has a left arm! Only it’s not his. He examines his left hand, then the right . . . both weathered. Knotty, and arthritic, his flesh bears a Sephardic tan. He palpates a gaunt face, the leathery skin pruned in wrinkles. He grips a handful of shaggy white hair and strokes a matching beard. His rail-thin body is cloaked in damp robes bearing the heavy scent of animal musk.

What’s happening to me? Is this another hallucination? I’m an old man. . .

The cries of the mob demand his attention. He walks to the edge of the wooden structure and realizes he is standing on the deck of an immense boat.

A crash of thunder rattles heaven and earth. The ground trembles, then the mountainside opens, the fissures belching molten rock, the magma setting the flooded landscape to boil.

The crowd screams. Many attempt to board, climbing atop one another, only the coracle’s steep sides and rounded bottom render the feat impossible. The raging current from the flooding Tigris River sweeps the ark from its pilings, the scalding waters searing the flesh of every man, woman, and child.

Shep bellows an old man’s wail—

—returning his consciousness to the edge of the construction pit.

Hyperventilating, his chaotic mind struggled to surf this last wave of anxiety, even as a new vision took form before his eyes.

From out of the gray mist appeared the Twin Towers. Scorched, yet still standing. The two World Trade Centers had shed their concrete facade, revealing floor after floor of steel beams. Standing in unified silence within the framework of every bared perch of exposed office space were the victims of September 11, their identities silhouetted in the shadows.

Shep turned, registering the heavy presence of these lost souls through the supernal being standing on his left. The Angel of Death gazed at him through three thousand fluttering irises rotating within his hollow sockets like percolating molecules. Dark blood poured from the upturned curve of his olive-tinged scythe—a steady stream that rolled down the wooden shaft, pooling and dripping from the creature’s bony right fist.

Without warning, the Grim Reaper dropped feet first into the pit, the entity’s gravitational vortex dragging Patrick Shepherd with it . . . into the Ninth Circle of Hell.

 

Pier A

Battery Park

7:45 a.m.

 

Pankaj Patel drove the school bus over the curb and across an expanse of snow-covered lawn. Reaching the waterfront, he jammed on the brakes, the front end of the skidding vehicle smashing through the construction fence surrounding Pier A.

The younger children screamed. Francesca Minos swaddled her newborn to her chest, shielding him from the jolt. “Paolo, find Heath. Help him launch the boat.”

Still overwhelmed with emotion over the birth of his son, Paolo exited the bus, Pankaj and David Kantor in tow. Pushing through the battered gate, the three men made their way to the southwest entrance of the pier, entering the dilapidated building.

The scent of plague was overwhelming.

Heath Shelby lay beneath the suspended hull of his ten-foot Cuddy Cruiser, the deceased still partially dressed in his Santa Claus outfit. His complexion was bluish-pale, his lips stained in blood. A plum-colored bubo was visible along his neck.

Paolo turned away in horror.

David repositioned his environmental hood and mask, then knelt beneath the boat by the dead man. “Your brother-in-law . . . he was repairing the hull?”

“Yes. He said . . . he promised he’d finish before we arrived.”

“I don’t know if these patches are going to hold.”

“You’d better pray they do.” Pankaj inspected the winch. “Paolo, how do we launch?”

“Start the winch, and the hatch will open beneath the boat.”

Pankaj activated the generator, then started the winch. Two steel doors beneath the boat slowly swung open, revealing the water eight feet below the pier. They watched as the Cuddy Cruiser was lowered into the harbor. It bobbed gently along the surface. Exhausted, the three men looked at one another, smiling at death’s reprieve.

And then the ten-foot passenger boat lurched to starboard, its bow heaving as its aft end filled with water—

—salvation sinking to the bottom of New York Harbor.

 

World Trade Center Site

 

He was falling into darkness, the sensation accompanied by a rush of voices—distant memories—echoing in his ears. Sewer ball! Go fetch, German Shepherd . . . Not our battle, Sergeant . . . Well, you gonna stay down there all day . . . You pitched a helluva game today, son . . . Damn IED. Arm’s gone, skull’s fractured pretty badly . . . You said your good-byes three weeks ago . . . It’s a lot of gear, but you’ll be glad you have it . . . I love you, Shep . . . Blood pressure’s dropping! I need another pint of blood . . . I thought I was your soul mate? . . . Now pitching for the Red Sox—

God, why am I here?

“Life is a test, Patrick . . .”

The speck of light raced up at him from below, growing larger . . . wider—

—and suddenly he plunged through, submerged in clear, blue water. He panicked, disoriented . . . unable to breathe. He struggled, then kicked and stroked to the crystal azure surface, his bare arms tan, muscular, and intact. Swimming to the ladder, he hoisted his bathing-suit-clad body out of the swimming pool. Disoriented, he knelt on the slate patio deck.

An oceanfront beach house. The sun, warm on his face. Water rolled off his physique. The Atlantic Ocean pounded softly a hundred yards to the east beneath a cloudless blue August sky.

This isn’t real, it’s the vaccine . . .

“Hey, baby. How was your swim?”

He turned as she stepped out onto the patio, her body curvy and tan and irresistible in the skimpy red bikini, the wavy-haired blonde as gorgeous as the last day he had set eyes upon her.

“Trish? Oh God . . . is it really you?”

“It’s okay, baby. Everything’s gonna be all right.” She held out the hooded bathrobe for him.

He slipped it on, feeling light-headed. “You’re not real. None of this . . . it’s all in my mind, I’m hallucinating again.”

“Not this time, baby. This was the life the Creator stole from us . . . all to teach you a lesson.”

“A lesson? What lesson?”

“Humility. The pain of losing a loved one.”

“But the war . . . all that came after you and our daughter died. It doesn’t make any sense.”

“Apparently, these were transgressions from a prior life.”

“This is insane. Why am I being punished for something I can’t even remember? Why am I responsible for some other guy’s mistakes? And why am I here . . . now? Is God rubbing it in my face?”

“This isn’t God’s doing, Shep. We’re in the eleventh dimension, a far-more-livable realm that plays by a different set of rules. All of the filtered Light here is controlled by the Adversary.”

“The Adversary? You mean Satan.”

“Relax, baby. There is no devil, no demonic force. In the eleventh dimension, we’re not required to jump through hoops or endure endless suffering. All we have to do is want. Don’t look so worried. Every one of us is born with the desire to receive, that’s the entire reason we were created in the first place. Lucifer isn’t the devil, Shep, he’s an angel who left Heaven to help man be happy. Our desire to indulge brings the Creator’s Light into the eleventh dimension—an endless existence of fulfillment without all the needless pain and suffering.”

A flash of light—

—and he was standing on the pitcher’s mound at Fenway Park, facing the Philadelphia Phillies in Game 7 of the World Series. The sellout crowd is going wild, chanting his name. The score is 1-0 Red Sox, top of the ninth inning, two outs, two strikes on the batter.

The scoreboard revealed that he was throwing a perfect game.

He wound up, launching a 106-mile-an-hour fastball that the batter missed by three feet.

His teammates rushed to him from all sides, their boundless joy intoxicating his soul. Fans poured out from the bleachers, delivering scantily clad women who pawed at his uniform—

“Enough!”

They were back at the pool, Shep lying outstretched on a cushioned lounge chair. Trish hovered over him, her oiled cleavage tantalizingly close.

“Baby, what’s wrong? Isn’t this what you wanted?”

“No . . . I mean yes, but I didn’t want it handed to me. I wanted to earn it.”

“Shep, honey, you did earn it. You earned it all . . . only He took it away. He took me away. He took our daughter away. It wasn’t right. It wasn’t fair. And do you know why He took it from you?”

Shep felt the blood rush from his face. “Because I took it for granted. I didn’t appreciate it.”

“Nonsense. Of course you appreciated it. Sure, there were moments you slipped, but who doesn’t? Even the fight we had over this house . . . I knew you still loved me. We’re soul mates, after all.”

“We are soul mates. I swear it.”

“The truth is, I was the lucky one. Look at how you suffered after we died. All that pain, all that emptiness. Have you experienced a single moment of joy since we were taken away?”

He pinched away tears. “No.”

“War . . . famine. Endless suffering. Is that how a loving parent is supposed to treat his children?”

“No, it’s not.”

“Life isn’t about suffering, it’s about indulgence. Ask the rich and powerful if they’re suffering. This beach house is a perfect example. Had I listened to you and allowed you to buy it, your daughter and I would have never been on that plane. You were right and I was wrong, and you paid the ultimate price for our ignorance.”

“Oh, God . . .”

“Forget God. God is nothing but a concept . . . a fictitious figure sitting upon a throne, always asleep at the wheel. We never needed God. The Adversary has grown strong in His absence. The Adversary offers us his gift of immortality without any of these hidden tests.”

“What do I have to do, you know . . . for us to be together again?”

“For one thing, stop worrying. There’s no violence involved, you don’t have to kill anyone. Simply join me in a toast.” She reached for a carafe of wine, pouring the red liquid into a gold goblet.

“A toast? To who? Lucifer?”

“Baby, you have got to stop watching so many horror movies.” She straddled him, still holding the goblet of wine in her right hand. “Remember that course in Latin we took together as sophomores? Do you know what Lucifer translates to in Latin? Light-bringer. Lucifer wasn’t a fallen angel, Shep, he was sent to bring Light into our world through our actions. I mean, seriously, baby, does this look like Hell to you?”

“No.”

“Drink with me. Let us get drunk together from the fruit of the vine and connect with the Light.”

Connect with the Light . . .

Shep’s heart raced as his mind replayed a similar conversation he’d had with Virgil hours earlier in the cemetery. “Noah made one last mistake, the same mistake Adam made. The fruit that tempted Adam was not an apple, but a grape, or the wine that comes from them. Wine can be abused, placing man in touch with levels of consciousness that cannot sustain a connection with the Light . . .”

He pushed the goblet aside. “And when I’m lying here, drunk, will you castrate me?”

She forced a smile. “Shep, honey, what are you talking about?”

“You know . . . the way my son, Ham, castrated me when he found me lying drunk and naked on the ark.”

Her expression hardened, her eyes spewed daggers. “Drink the wine, Patrick.”

“You drink it, soul mate.” He stood, tossing her from his lap, the goblet spilling wine across her face and down her neck and cleavage—

—the liquid melting the flesh, exposing an ancient skull, darkened with age, the eye sockets fluttering with a thousand eyes!

Their surroundings shattered like a hall of mirrors, revealing a dark, massive pit, the skeletal remains of the World Trade Center looming overhead. Shep was standing on a frozen lake, surrounded by thousands of animated heads, the bodies trapped beneath the ice. Treacherous traitors of humanity, babbling in tongues. Each garbled word generated a tiny spark of light that floated through the rank air like a firefly, the accumulated specks absorbed by the massive creature frozen dead center in the lake.

Lucifer was being held chest high in the ice, and still his shoulders and three heads towered ten stories above the frozen surface. The winged demon was terrifying to behold, yet it appeared oblivious of its surroundings, as if it were a front—a giant balloon puppet. Animated by the sparks of negativity generated by the babbling heads of the tortured.

Hovering over Lucifer’s left wing was the Grim Reaper.

On the demon’s right was the Reaper’s soul mate.

Santa Muerte was dressed in purple satin robes, her hooded skull adorned with a wavy ebony wig. The abomination snarled as she saw Shep. Gripping her scythe in her bony fists, she advanced, swinging the deadly blade like a pendulum.

Shep attempted to run, only he slipped on the ice and fell. He looked up as the curved blade looped downward from its arc, slicing through his deltoid and lopping off his new left arm in one brutal motion.

He dropped to his knees on the frozen lake, the searing pain pushing him toward unconsciousness—only Santa Muerte was far from finished with him.

Raising the scythe once more over her bony shoulder, she swung the instrument of death downward, the bloodstained blade whistling through the air—

—its lethal blow intercepted by the scythe belonging to her male counterpart. The Grim Reaper stood over Shep, protecting him from the assault.

And then a golden beacon of Light reached down from the unseen heavens—

—whisking his consciousness out of Hell.

 

 

 

 

PART 5

Transformation

 

 

 

 

Day’s End

 

December 21

New Jersey/New York Airspace

7:50 a.m.

(13 minutes before the prophesied End of Days)

 

The three MH-53J Pavelow-III Air Force helicopters flew east in a staggered formation over Jersey City, en route to Manhattan. Large and unwieldy, the “Jolly Green Giants” specialized in rescuing downed pilots and providing support to Special Operations troops. Their selection for this morning's mission was based on their ability to operate in bad weather—along with the airship's rear ramp, a deployment feature that allowed for the dispersal of a special payload.

First developed in 1958, the neutron bomb was opposed by President Kennedy and later postponed by Jimmy Carter, only to be jump-started again in 1981 under Ronald Reagan. Designed as a tactical weapon, the bomb’s purpose was to eradicate troops while maintaining the targeted area’s infrastructure. Unlike standard enhanced radiation weapons, the three ERWs loaded aboard the Pavelows were chemical incineration bombs designed for underground bunkers. Formulated to combust on contact with oxygen molecules, the conflagration would burn out every square inch of airspace before suffocating itself.

At precisely 8:03 a.m., the three helicopters would drop their payloads at their designated locations above the carbon-dioxide cloud hovering over Manhattan. Passing through the man-made insulating ceiling, the neutron bombs would detonate—

—incinerating every biological—dead or alive—in New York City.

 

Battery Park

7:52 a.m.

 

A frigid wind whipped across New York Harbor, driving the dark surface into froth. Liberty Island was visible in the distance. The statue beckoned.

They had gathered by a concrete boat ramp close to the water’s edge. The Patels and the Minoses. David Kantor and his daughter. The frail Tibetan monk who seemed bothered by nothing, and the female assassin who was angry at the world. The students and freed sex slaves stayed warm in the school bus. A Scythe incubator rendered moot by the arrival of dawn.

Francesca Minos clutched her swaddled newborn inside her coat, using her body heat to warm her son. “What are we supposed to do now?”

Paolo shielded his wife and child from the wind. “We’ll just have to find another boat.”

“There are no other boats,” yelled David. “There’s no way off the island short of swimming, and you wouldn’t last two minutes without a wet suit.”

Dawn Patel was seated on a park bench next to her mother, the girl examining Patrick Shepherd’s detached prosthetic arm. “Mother, this is so strange. Look at how these Hebrew letters are grouped together in threes.”

“May I?” The Tibetan monk offered a disarming smile. Pankaj joined him, looking over the Elder’s shoulder at the engraved letters. “This is most amazing. The letters are not written in Hebrew, this is Aramaic.”

“Who cares?” Manisha retorted. “Pankaj, come and be with your family.”

“In a moment. Elder?”

“Pankaj, Aramaic is a metaphysical tool used by the Creator. It is the only language that cannot be understood by Satan.”

“These letters . . . they were not there earlier.”

“You are certain of this?”

“I helped carry Patrick from Belvedere Castle after he saved my family. The engraving was not there, I am quite sure. Can you read the message?”

“It is not a message, Pankaj, nor are these translatable words. What has been inscribed upon the steel are the 72 names of God.”

“What did you say? Let me see!” Paolo left his wife and newborn son to join them. “How do you know they’re the 72 names?”

“I scan these words every day. Each of the letters comes from three encrypted verses in Exodus 14, lines 19 through 21. The Torah portion describes Moses’s parting of the Red Sea.”

Paolo took the steel limb from the Tibetan. Stared at the pattern of letters. “It wasn’t Moses. Virgil said it was actually a man of deep faith who parted the Red Sea.”

“You are correct. The true story of the Israelites escaping bondage had nothing to do with slavery, it was all about escaping chaos and pain and suffering. The parting of the Red Sea was not a miracle, it was a manifestation, an effect caused by the ability to use the 72 names engraved on Moses’s staff as a supernal tool to control mind over matter.”

“Elder, do you think Patrick was the righteous one chosen by God to offer mankind salvation?”

David approached with Gavi. “What are you two talking about?”

“Your friend’s involvement with the End of Days may serve a higher calling,” Pankaj explained.

“Look, fellas, I don’t know anything about this End of Days stuff, but I knew Patrick Shepherd, and trust me, he was far from a righteous man.”

Paolo stared at the steel limb. His body trembled. His mind raced . . . deliberating.

Francesca approached with the baby. “Paolo, what is it?”

“Wait here.” Gripping the prosthetic device, he headed for the water.

“Paolo, what are you doing? Paolo, are you crazy?”

The survivors gathered around Paolo, who held the prosthetic steel arm to the heavens. He hesitated. Then walked resolutely down the concrete boat ramp and into the harbor.

The near-freezing water hit him like a jolt of electricity, driving the air from his lungs, turning his blood and limbs to lead. He floundered in waist-deep water, then abruptly stepped off an unseen ledge and plunged underwater.

Francesca screamed.

Her husband’s head reappeared seconds later. Paralyzed by the cold, he gasped for air as he struggled to swim back to the ramp. David and Pankaj reached out for him, dragging the devout man to safety.

Gavi ran back to the bus to fetch blankets.

Sheridan Ernstmeyer laughed. “So much for divine intervention.”

The Tibetan monk approached Paolo, who was kneeling by the water’s edge, struggling to catch his breath. “Mr. Minos, why did you attempt to part the harbor’s waters? What made you believe yourself worthy of such a task?”

“The 72 names . . . I believed the story to be true.” The Italian was shaking uncontrollably, his face deathly pale, his lips purple. He looked up at Gelut Panim, completely lost. “I did as Virgil said. It didn’t work.”

“The crossing was a test of certainty, not faith.”

“I don’t understand?”

“You have faith, my friend, but your moment of hesitance revealed that you expected to fail. Certainty is more than prayer, it is knowing. There is a story of a man of faith who was climbing down from the face of a mountain at night when his strength gave out. Hanging by his two hands, freezing to death as you are now, he called out to God to save him. God answered by instructing him to let go. The man released one hand, but he was too afraid to obey. Instead, he called out into the night for help from another. The villagers found him the next morning, frozen to death, hanging five feet off the ground.”

Gavi handed a wool blanket to the shivering man. “Who are you to judge the depths of my faith? I walked straight into the water. I let go with both hands!”

“I meant no insult. When God asked Abraham to sacrifice his son, Isaac . . . that was a test of certainty. You merely went for a foolhardy swim.”

“Dad, look!” Gavi pointed to the southwest over Liberty Island, where three military helicopters had appeared on the horizon. “Are they coming to rescue us?

David swallowed hard. “No honey. Not this time.”

 

Governor’s Island

7:55 a.m.

 

Leigh Nelson was yanked from her sleep, the physician violently dragging her off the Army cot and onto her feet, where she was confronted by Captains Jay and Jesse Zwawa.

“What is it? What’s wrong?”

“You lied to us, lady.”

Leigh felt her blood pressure drop. “Lied about what?”

“The Scythe vaccine. We analyzed it.” Jay Zwawa thrust a half-empty vial into her hand. “It’s nothing but water.”

“What? That’s impossible—”

Jesse Zwawa signaled to the guard. “Take this traitor outside and shoot her.”

 

Battery Park

7:56 a.m.

 

Marquis Jackson-Horne had shed his gang colors but not his gun. The eighteen-year-old cornrowed Latino gang member and his seven-year-old sister joined the survivors of Scythe, everyone watching the western horizon as three dark gunships began a long circle, following the New Jersey coastline to the north.

Marquis nodded to Pankaj. “Ya’ll here to get rescued?”

“I’m sorry.”

“You’re sorry?” He glanced at the shivering Italian wrapped in a blanket. Saw the prosthetic arm lying in the snow by his side. “Yo, what happened? Where’s the one-armed man?”

“You knew Patrick?”

“He gave me the vaccine. Cured me and my little sis. Where he at?”

Pankaj looked the gang leader in the eyes. “He’s with his family.”

Paolo was with his family, but his thoughts were occupied by the sting of the Asian man’s words. All his life he had lived by the laws of the Catholic Church. Attended Mass. Taken communion and tithed when he could barely afford it. He had fed the homeless and confessed even his most minor transgressions. Now, in the last moments of his life, to be told he was not worthy . . . to be told he harbored doubts!

Leaving Francesca and his infant son, he stalked after the Tibetan monk. “I don’t know who you are, but I know you possess knowledge of the 72 names. Use them to save us!”

“Sadly, I cannot. Long ago, I made the decision to abuse the knowledge for my own selfish needs. As such, I am far from righteous.”

“Then teach me! Tell me what to do!”

“I already have.” The Elder’s opaque eyes glistened. He placed a reassuring hand on Paolo’s shoulder. “Think of it as a baptism.”

Paolo was shaking uncontrollably. His eyes darted from the three military choppers to the Asian man to the frail infant swaddled in his wife’s arm.

Defying his greatest fear, he shed the blanket, returning to his loved ones. “Francesca, give me our son.”

She saw the look in his eyes. The steel arm in his hand. “No!”

“Francesca . . . please.”

The others gathered around in silence.

The Elder watched, fascinated and humbled by the unfolding events.

“Francesca, it is a miracle that brought us here, now we must trust the cause of that miracle.”

Her eyes swelled with tears.

“My love, God has given us the tools, now it is up to us to act.”

She hesitated, then handed the blanketed newborn to her husband. “Go on. Sacrifice your son. Sacrifice yourself, too. I can’t handle this anymore.”

Gripping the steel limb in his right hand, his infant son cradled in his left, Paolo strode down the concrete boat ramp and into the harbor . . .

 

World Trade Center Site

7:57 a.m.

 

The brown maelstrom swirled overhead, blotting out the dawn. A cold December wind whipped up construction garbage and dirt into miniature tornadoes, then died.

Patrick Shepherd sat by the edge of the construction pit, alone, frightened, and lost.

The wind picked up again, howling through rivet holes in the bare steel girders.

Patrick . . .

The whispered voice was male and strangely familiar. Shep looked up, unsure.

You’ve endured a helluva journey, son. Now we need to start working on your mental game.

“Coach? Coach Segal? Is it really . . . what am I saying?” He gripped a handful of his long brown hair and pulled, doubling over in agony. “Get out of my head, get out of my head! I can’t take it anymore!”

I’m no hallucination, Patrick. You knew that the first time I communicated with you. On the roof of the VA hospital.

Shep’s skin tingled. He stood, facing into the wind. “You’re the one who stopped me from jumping?”

You trusted me then, son, trust me now. Everything you’ve experienced was real, except for the demon’s deception using my daughter. But you knew better. By trusting your instincts, you saw through the ruse.

“It’s true. I knew it wasn’t Trish, I knew it couldn’t have been her. When I’m with her, I feel . . . I feel—”

”Fulfilled.”

Shep spun around, his eyes searching for the owner of the new voice. He heard the sound of boots approaching on gravel and turned.

Virgil Shechinah stepped out from behind an earthmover and into a beacon of sunlight coming from a small break in the clouds. “And they said, come, let us build us a city and a tower, whose top may reach to heaven, and let us make ourselves a name. So Master Dante, did you enjoy your excursion through Hell, looking for your beloved Beatrice?”

The mention of Dante’s deceased lover angered Shep even more. “You know, you’re a liar, old man. You told me you spoke with my soul mate. She’s dead. She died with my daughter in this very spot, eleven years ago.”

“Yes she did. And she’s very worried about you.”

“What’s that supposed to mean? Are you some kind of medium, channeling her spirit? Or maybe you’re an angel? Is that what you are, Virgil? An angel, hired by Bertrand DeBorn to drive me crazy?”

“Not an angel. And I never claimed to be a psychiatrist, nor was I referred to you by the late Mr. DeBorn. That was your assumption.”

“Okay, so you’re not a shrink. Then who are you? Why did you come see me in the VA hospital? Wait, I forgot . . . my dead soul mate was worried about me, so she sent you.”

Virgil smiled. “The eyes are the windows of the soul. Look into mine. Tell me what you see.” He removed his rose-colored glasses. “Go on, I won’t bite.”

Shep moved closer, gazing into the old man’s blue eyes—

—his consciousness suddenly overwhelmed by a squall of ethereal white light, its warmth seeping through his brain, bathing every cell in his body with a healing energy that was so soothing, so loving, that it caused him to giggle.

He awakened, disoriented and lying on the ground, smiling as he opened his eyes. “God, what a rush.”

“Let’s just keep it to Virgil for now, shall we?”

Shep sat up. Incredibly, the fatigue from his long night was gone, the cold no longer affecting him. “I don’t know what you just did, but if we could bottle it, we’d make a fortunate.”

“What you experienced was Keter, the Light from the uppermost Sefirot . . . the highest of the ten dimensions of existence. The energy is only accessible to man once a year, on the dawn following forty-nine days of internal cleansing after Passover. The date commemorates a connection to the immortality that existed on Mt. Sinai thirty-four hundred years ago.”

“Great, more riddles.” Shep stood, shaking his head. “Look, whoever you are, you’ve been a friend these last twenty-four hours, but maybe just once you could give me a straight answer, seeing as how we’re probably only a few minutes away from being incinerated by the Defense Department.”

“Time has no place in the supernal realm, Patrick. Look around you. Time has ceased to exist.”

Patrick looked up. For some strange reason, the brown clouds were no longer moving, as if frozen in place. “What the hell? Okay, wait, I get it. This is another hallucination brought on by that damn vaccine.”

“Everything was real. As for the vaccine, it was water.”

“Water? Come on.”

“Water is the essential component to existence in the physical world. Long ago, water was imbued with the essence of the Light, giving it the power to heal and restore, protecting man at the cellular level. Life spans were far greater. It was humanity's overwhelming negative consciousness that tainted water’s nature after the flood. The process is reversible through certain blessings and meditations, which return the water to its primordial state. The vaccine was a highly concentrated form of this cleansing water, called Pinchas Water. The Defense Department confiscated a supply that had been used by those possessing the knowledge to help clean up parts of Chernobyl. A noble effort, silenced once again by man’s ego. The Klipot woman gained access to the water while at Fort Detrick.”

“And that’s what kept us safe from the plague?”

“What kept you safe was your belief. The water was simply the medium used to mobilize your thoughts. To coin a phrase, it was mind over matter.”

“This is insane . . . or maybe I’m insane.” Shep paced back and forth, unable to process everything at once. “Maybe I’m not insane, maybe I’m just delusional. Wait . . . that’s it! It all makes perfect sense now. This whole little Wizard of Oz adventure . . . it all began when the chopper crashed in the forest. Everything I experienced from that moment on . . . you, miraculously showing up in Inwood Park, me, living out Dante’s Nine Circles of Hell while I attempted to get back home to my family, the ‘helper characters’ we conveniently managed to pick up along the way . . . even that wicked Grim Reaper witch waiting for me down in Hades . . . it was all just a dream, none of it actually happened. In reality, I’m still unconscious in the chopper, or better yet, I’m lying in a drug-induced coma in some hospital bed in the Bronx. And that rush I felt when I looked into your eyes . . . that was probably a B-12 shot the nurse just injected into my IV.” Shep beamed a smile. “That’s it, isn’t it? God, I’m good. I didn’t mean you, Virgil, that was just an expression, you know, like I was talking to the man upstairs. The real dude.”

“The guy asleep at the wheel?”

“Exactly.”

“Tell you what, let’s do a test.” Virgil reached for Patrick’s face and pinched his cheek.

“Ow! That’s your test?”

“You seem wide-awake to me. Still, it pays to be sure.”

Shep jumped as a phantom sensation suddenly oozed a healing warmth from his butchered left deltoid muscle. As he watched in stunned amazement, the protrusion formed a humerus, the bone miraculously extending down from his shoulder, followed by a progressive web of nerves and blood vessels, tendons and muscles, the growing appendage extending into a forearm, wrist, hand, and fingers, the newborn limb atomizing flesh before his spellbound eyes into a fully formed and functional left arm.

Shep fell to his knees, flexing his fingers . . . giddy. Unlike the experience in the Ninth Circle of Hell, he could instinctively tell that this limb was real. “How?”

“Stem cells. Amazing things. It’s a shame mankind waited so long to begin using them. Imagine the boundless joy that could have been spread across the world by harvesting new limbs for amputees, spinal cords for the paralyzed, organs for the decrepit, or cures for diseases—all of which were intended to challenge man’s ability to better himself. Unfortunately, the Adversary bound you to organized religion. That was Satan’s trump card, and man’s ego embraced it like opium.”

Shep stared at Virgil, as if seeing the old man for the first time. “You really are God, aren’t you?”

“God is a concept of man, a digestible image of a ruler on a throne, a divine entity one petitions when one wants to hit the lottery or is faced with death. I am the Creator’s desire to reveal Himself to you within the Light of Wisdom, appearing to you in a reflected finite image your mind can accept and absorb.”

“The Light of Wisdom?”

“The essence of existence.” Virgil’s blue eyes danced behind his rose-colored spectacles. “You wish to know how all this came to be.”

“Please.”

“Very well. But what I explain now are supernal matters—matters that occupy neither space or time, nor material manifestations—the very elements that dominate your senses and surroundings. There are things you may not be able to accept or grasp, yet instinctively your soul will know them to be true. Try not to fight your gut reaction by using finite logic.”

“You’re telling me my brain’s too small to handle this.”

“I am saying your senses are hardwired into the Malchut, the physical world. The Upper Realm is a completely different reality. It’s like you, a three-dimensional being, having to explain existence to a two-dimensional cartoon character. You’d have to limit yourself to two-dimensional vernacular in order to describe three-dimensional concepts.”

“This is algebra, and I’m only in first grade, got it. Anything else I should know?”

“As I said, time and space do not exist in the spiritual realm. Therefore, if I use the word ‘before,’ it refers to cause. If I say ‘after,’ it is the effect.”

“Understood. Now tell me . . . what’s really out there? How did this all come to be?”

“In the reality of the infinite, there is the Creator, there is the unknowable Essence of the Creator, and there is the Light that comes from the Creator. The Light exists in the Endless. The Light is perfection. And though you can never know the Creator, at His essence is the nature of sharing. But because there was nothing upon which to share, a reciprocal energy was necessary to complete the circuitry, in this case a Vessel to receive the Creator’s infinite Light.

“And so the Vessel was created, and its entire purpose was to receive. And the Vessel was the unified soul. And now there were two types of Light in the Endless: The Light of Wisdom, which was the essence of existence that simply gives, and the Light of Mercy, or the Vessel, which desired only to receive. Remember the example I gave earlier? If the Light of Wisdom was the electricity circulating throughout your home, the Light of Mercy, the Vessel, would be a lamp that plugged into a wall socket to receive the energy. Without the lamp, you have no illumination, without the Light of Mercy the Light of Wisdom cannot reveal itself.”

“Like you said earlier with Dawn, it’s like the sun. The sun radiates energy, and yet its radiance can only be seen when it reflects off a body in space . . . like the Earth.” Shep paused, his mind racing. “Virgil, you said you were the Creator’s desire to reveal Himself to me within the Light of Wisdom. Does that mean you are reflecting . . . off my Light of Mercy?”

Virgil smiled. “Let’s return to the story of creation. In the infinite Endless that filled the entirety of existence, there was the Creator’s Light that gave unconditionally and now, through cause and effect, there was the Vessel, a repository of the unified soul and the only true creation that has ever occurred. The Torah encodes the Vessel with a name: Adam. But the Vessel Adam, like a battery, was composed of two aspects, or energies. Its male energy, positively charged protons, and its negatively charged female aspect—the electron, so named Eve in the encoded Creation story. And the Vessel had only the desire to receive, and the Light only gave, and so there was boundless fulfillment. Still, Adam lacked an awareness of its own fulfillment, for how does one appreciate a sunny day if every day is sunny? More important, how does one come to know and appreciate God if one never experiences the absence of God?”

“So what happened?”

“Cause and effect. As the Light continued to fill the Vessel, it passed along the Essence of the Creator, His desire to share. The Vessel, created only to receive, now desired to share, to be the cause of its own fulfillment . . . in essence, to be like the Creator. But the Vessel had no way of sharing; furthermore, it felt shame because it had not earned the endless Light and fulfillment it was receiving. And so, in order to be like the Creator, the Vessel shunned the Creator’s Light.

“This act of resistance caused the Tzimtzum, the contraction. Without the Light, the Vessel contracted into a singular point of darkness within the endless World—the infinite giving birth to the finite. Suddenly without the Creator, the Vessel expanded to allow the Light back in. This sudden contraction and expansion, what you refer to as the Big Bang, was the cause that led to the physical universe, giving Einstein his time-space continuum. And yet this bubble of existence is not true reality. The true reality of existence is in the 99 percent . . . the Endless. What’s wrong?”

“It feels right, it’s just hard to get my mind around this. But go on . . . please.”

“When the Tzimtzum occurred, the constriction formed ten dimensions, or Sefirot. Six of these ten Sefirot compacted, enfolding into one super-dimension, the Ze’ir Anpin.”

“Why ten dimensions? What is their purpose?”

“The Sefirot filter the Creator’s Light. The upper three realms, known as Keter, Chochmah, and Binah, are closest to the Creator and do not exert direct influence in man’s physical realm. The bundle of six that remain just beyond man’s limited perception is the source of all knowledge and fulfillment available to mankind in this physical world. The physical world, the lowest of the ten Sefirot, is called Malchut. As immense as the universe appears, it represents a mere 1 percent of total existence, and it is a reality based upon deception, reinforced by the limitations of man’s five senses.”

“Incredible. What about the soul?”

“Every soul is a spark from the shattered Vessel, Adam. When the Vessel shattered, it separated the male principle, Adam, from the female principle, Eve. Just as conception in the womb is followed by the division of the cell, so too did the shattered Vessel divide, its sparks becoming male and female souls. Lesser sparks filtered down into the animal kingdom, trees, vegetation, and so forth, all the way down to every aspect of matter and energy that makes up the cosmos.”

“But my soul is not whole, is it, Virgil? It remains divided. You promised me—”

The Light appeared before him as a luminescent blue apparition—the same apparition he had witnessed communicating with Dawn Patel. As he watched, it constricted into the human form of a woman. She was wearing the same outfit she had worn in the scorched Polaroid, her wavy blond hair falling past her shoulders down to the small of her back.

Patricia Ann Segal smiled at her long-lost soul mate. “Hey, baby.”

“Oh God . . .” Patrick collapsed to his knees, tears flowing from his eyes as he hugged her about the waist, the emptiness in his heart instantly replaced by boundless joy.

Virgil beamed a cherubic smile. “The reunification of soul mates is a force of Light that cannot be denied, greater even than the parting of the Red Sea.”

Trish drew Shep to his feet. He kissed her face. He inhaled her pheromones, the flesh of his whiskered cheeks warmed by her touch.

The old man watched the couple like a proud parent. “Women tend to complete their spiritual correction sooner than their male counterparts. A woman’s soul may reside in the Upper Realm while she attempts to assist her soul mate in his own correction.”

Shep pulled back from his embrace. “What about our little girl?”

“She has already returned.” Trish gazed into his eyes. “What does your heart tell you?”

“Oh gosh . . . it’s Dawn! The Patels’ daughter . . . she harbors our little girl’s soul.”

“I’ve kept a watchful eye on her . . . and you.”

“Trish . . . I’ve done such terrible things. I joined the military to avenge your death. I committed murder. I brought darkness into the lives of others.” His body trembling, Shep turned to Virgil and prostrated himself, hugging the old man’s boots to his chest. “I’m sorry, God, please forgive me!”

“Your repentance has been accepted, my son.”

Shep wiped back tears. Regaining his feet, he took his soul mate’s hand. “Will we be together?”

“Soon. Your soul must be cleansed before it reenters the Upper Realm, but the burden has been lessened by your selfless actions over the last twenty-four hours. The more Light a soul desires and receives, the higher it ascends. Everything you see around you, all that exists and that evolved to exist in the physical world of time and mortality was created so that the soul could spiritually transform itself from a receiver to a giver and earn its immortality and fulfillment in the Endless. This is the reality you requested as the Vessel, Adam, the request granted by the Creator because He loves His children unconditionally.”

“If He loves us so much, why is there so much hatred in the world? So much violence? So much pain and suffering.”

“As we discussed earlier, in order to earn the endless fulfillment, there must be free will. To challenge free will, there must be an Adversary. An opposing team. And the game cannot be fixed, or the prize has no meaning. The Adversary is the human ego at the genetic level, referred to in the Creation story as the consumption of the forbidden fruit from the Tree of Knowledge. Lust, gluttony, avarice, wrath, violence, fraud, greed, and treachery . . . all are symptoms of the ego, every selfish act diverting the Creator’s Light to Satan. Sin is man’s refusal to become what man was destined to be. If man would simply expand his own vessel by using the tools he was given, there would never be suffering in this world again.”

“And how do we do that?”

“By expanding your vessel to allow more Light in. By loving thy neighbor as thy self in the same way the Creator loves each of His children—unconditionally. Love is a weapon of the Light, it has the power to eradicate all forms of darkness. Spirituality isn't about just being nice, Patrick, it's about transforming one’s not-so-nice qualities. When you offer love even to your enemies, you destroy their darkness and hatred. What's more, you cast out the darkness inside yourself. What is left in the aftermath are two souls who now recognize the spark of divinity they both share. Think about that. It is not the positive trait that flips on the Light switch; the Light goes on when one identifies, uproots, and transforms their own reactive negative characteristics. When a mass majority of people reach this magnitude of understanding, then endless fulfillment and immortality shall be had for all. Conversely, when collective negative actions rise to a critical juncture, the Angel of Death is granted free rein, and even the righteous shall suffer.”

“Is that what’s happening here, Virgil? Has evil run so amok that humanity needs another do-over?”

The old man turned somber. “The generation of Noah was stubborn and bold enough to sin openly. The generation of the flood has returned.”

“Then . . . I really was Noah?”

“The soul that inhabits your existence as Patrick Shepherd also shared the physical being that was Noah, a righteous man born in a time of greed and corruption. You and your soul mate, Naamah, have returned to witness the end of another generation.”

Shep squeezed Trish’s hand, his face flushing red. “You’re not really going to wipe out 6 billion people?”

“Six million or 6 billion, in either case the Creator does not destroy. Man has become his own instrument of destruction. His desire to feed from the Tree of Knowledge without restriction, his insistence on receiving for the self alone . . . it is these acts that have summoned the Angel of Death to stalk the Earth, just as it did 666 years ago during the last pandemic.”

“But you could stop it, you could end the insanity. You talk about mankind being proactive, what about you? What about that Holocaust story you told me!”

“The story was yours.”

Patrick’s face paled. His body trembled. “The boy you spoke of?”

“It was your life, Patrick, your second deployment, as you call it. What you experienced was the severity of Noah’s tikkun. You lost your entire family at Auschwitz. Your soul mate perished there as well.”

“And you did nothing? While innocent children were being tossed into ovens. While planes were being flown into buildings—”

“—and innocent families were being slaughtered by American soldiers? As I said, God is not a verb, Patrick. The Light flows, regardless of intent. It’s all about free will. Those who live their lives by the Creator’s laws remain protected. A miracle of salvation at this juncture would be interpreted as a religious happening. In the end, it would lead to the very war you seek to avert, serving Satan, who continues to grow stronger through these acts of darkness.”

“I don’t care! Noah may have stood idly by while you drowned the world, but I won’t. You and I . . . we had a covenant after the flood. The ark was our covenant. You promised never to destroy humanity again!”

“It is not the Creator that will destroy humanity, Patrick. Behold.”

The brown swirl of clouds parted to the west, revealing three dark helicopters frozen in time over the Hudson River. “Man is responsible for this flood. And through his actions, Satan’s power grows.”

Virgil pointed to the edge of the construction pit, where the Angel of Death had materialized. The male Grim Reaper had been impaled by his female counterpart’s scythe, the blade buried in the base of the being’s barren skull.

“What happened to him? How can you slay . . . an angel?”

“Every element of creation maintains a male and female aspect. So it is with the Angel of Death. Each Reaper, both male and female, was born human into the physical world. When it is time for a Reaper to move on, they select their replacement from among the living. The female aspect of death, strengthened by the corruption of man, no longer remains held in check. Unless humanity is terminated, she shall walk the Earth unabated and poison the Malchut so that no Light can ever be again revealed in this dimension.”

Shep stared at the male Reaper. The supernal creature was vibrating, its eye sockets fluttering, its life force diminishing rapidly.

“I never completed my tikkun, did I, Virgil? Not as Noah or in Auschwitz. Not now, as Patrick Shepherd. You said each soul has four deployments.”

“This was your last.”

“Who else was I? A mass murderer? An alcoholic, like my father?”

“Actually, you were a poet, a man inspired by the Light, yet lacking the discipline to keep from getting perpetually drunk on the forbidden fruit. James Douglas Morrison. His friends called him Jim.”

“Wait . . . Jim Morrison of The Doors?” Patrick turned to Trish. “I was Jim Morrison?”

The former Pamela Courson squeezed the deceased rocker’s hand.

The old man placed his hand on Patrick’s shoulder. “Are you ready to continue your journey, son?”

“No . . . just wait, wait one second. You said every soul must complete its tikkun before moving on to the Upper Realm. How can I be reunited with my soul mate in the Upper Realm if I haven’t completed my tikkun? And how can I complete my tikkun if you’re allowing this pandemic to wipe out humanity?”

“Mankind has chosen to move away from the Light. The generation of the plague shall have no share in the World to come.”

“So you’re simply going to allow Scythe to wipe out everyone? Just like that?”

“God is not mankind’s servant. God just is. It’s man who needs to take action, not the Creator. This was the test of existence.”

Shep balled his fists in frustration. “You know what, God? You really suck as a parent!”

“Shep—”

“No, Trish, He needs to hear it. You say we’re moving away from the Light? Maybe that’s your fault. Maybe we could have used some more spiritual guidance? Or how about a sign every once in a while that you’re not asleep at the wheel? Hell, it’d be nice to see a little justice in this world, too.”

“Every soul is judged at the appropriate time. The Creator no longer micromanages, Patrick. That just leads to more religious dogma, more false prophets . . . more chaos.”

“Then appoint someone who will micromanage. Give me one last deployment. Let me fulfill my tikkun . . . as him!” Shep pointed to the Grim Reaper.

“Baby, no. You don’t know what you’re saying.”

“He’s been following me throughout Manhattan, Trish. I think he chose me. Humanity needs someone to keep the Grim Reaper’s old lady in check . . . the Upper Realm needs balance to be restored in the Malchut—well, I’m volunteering. What I’m not going to do is stand by and allow all those people to die. Not this time around . . . no way.”

“Know the ground rules, Patrick, before you volunteer for yet another war. The Angel of Death is a supernal being, able to access both the higher and lower worlds. There are demons out there . . . entities of existence that even Dante dared not imagine. Unless you remain vigilant, the forces of darkness will easily corrupt your soul.”

“My soul mate will protect me; she’ll keep me anchored to the Light.” Shep squeezed Trish’s hand. “It’s the only way we can be together again. It’s the only way I can protect our daughter.”

“You request this of your own free will?”

“I do.”

Virgil looked at Patricia, who nodded.

“Then the covenant is made. All those you choose to save shall be fruitful and multiply, all those you choose to condemn shall perish. And when the world regains its balance, your tikkun shall be completed, and you shall be reunited in the Upper Realm with your soul mate.”

Shep hugged Trish, holding her tight. “I love you.”

“I love you.”

Virgil waited patiently until they separated.

“One last question . . . why me? I’m about the farthest thing from a righteous man.”

“As were all the great sages. The greatest Light, Patrick, comes from the greatest transformation.”

Shep maintained his grip on his soul mate’s hand. “There are no accidents, are there, Virgil. You set this whole thing up.”

“No, son. You did.” He took their entwined hands in his. “Just remember, free will works both ways. Noah failed to restrict himself in the Malchut and was castrated. Should you fail to restrict yourself in the supernal realm, the forces of darkness will corrupt you so that even the Light and love of your soul mate will not be enough to rescue you from this self-induced purgatory.”

Patricia squeezed his hand . . . then let go, her aura fading into the light.

“Are you ready?”

“Yes.” Shep swallowed hard. “Any last spiritual advice you want to impart, Virge?”

The old man took him by the hand and led him toward the Reaper, the being’s body now bathed in the light of a rainbow. “Always remember, your soul is forever connected to the Light of the Creator. At times, your actions can veil this connection, but it can never be severed. Never.”

“Thanks. Hey, about that lousy parent remark—”

“Unconditional love is unconditional, Patrick. Embrace the chaos. Use it to eradicate the negative traits within you, and you will hasten your transformation into a true tzadik . . . a holy man.”

Shep took a deep breath. Then, reaching out, he touched the Grim Reaper’s bony hand . . .

 

Battery Park

7:58 a.m.

 

Armed with his newborn son, his certainty, and a mangled steel prosthetic limb, Paolo Salvatore Minos reentered the frigid waters of New York Harbor. So focused was his mind that he no longer registered the cold. The water rose past his knees . . . still nothing happened.

Think of it as a baptism. He continued on up to his chest, the thirty-seven-degree surface mere inches from the baby’s blanket—

—sound and sky were suddenly blotted out as he stepped off the unseen concrete ledge and plunged underwater!

His heart pounded in terror as his left hand felt for the baby’s nose, his fingers pinching his son’s nostrils. He forced a panicked stride—

—his left foot relocating the perch. Using the steel arm as a crutch, he regained his balance and headed back up the ramp to save his child. But as his head cleared the surface, and he released the infant’s nose, he saw that he was not standing on the concrete boat ramp; he was standing on a hunk of ice!

The harbor had not parted; instead, it was progressively freezing all around him, at least some of it is—a ten-to-fifteen-foot-wide swath that appeared to be stretching southwest across New York Harbor.

He exhaled a frozen breath, his body trembling, tears pouring from his swollen red eyes. Turning back to shore, he was met by his teary-eyed wife, who gathered the crying infant in her arms, wrapping him in a dry blanket. “Paolo . . . how?”

“Certainty.”

David and Pankaj looked at one another, unsure of what to do.

The Tibetan monk gripped them both by the elbow, jerking them back into the moment. “Do not analyze the manifestation; use it to get everyone off the island!”

“Take Gavi, I’ll get the others!” David sprinted back to the school bus to awaken the children while Pankaj and Manisha helped Dawn and Gavi climb onto the edge of the ice floe, which bobbed yet managed to maintain its buoyancy.

The children hurried off the school bus, racing to the water’s edge, as the three helicopters crossed the Hudson a mile to the north.

“Let’s go, let’s go, everyone move! We have to hurry!”

David and Marquis Jackson-Horne passed the children to Pankaj and Manisha, everyone holding hands, forming a line behind Paolo and Francesca, who quickly led the exodus across the harbor. The middle schoolers and former sex slaves helped the younger children, hustling them across the slippery surface. David climbed onto the floe, rejoining his daughter.

The Elder stopped Marquis. “Choose the course for the rest of your days now.”

His little sister nodded.

Reaching into his waistband, the gang leader removed the 9mm and tossed the gun into the harbor. He followed his sister onto the ice.

The Elder climbed after him, bringing up the rear.

Sheridan Ernstmeyer waited until the thirty-six men, women, infant, and children were a good thirty yards offshore before she convinced herself to follow, gingerly stepping onto the frozen surface. “This is crazy.”

Ahead, Paolo and Francesca slid their feet along the slippery opaque surface as if skating. Liberty Island was less than a quarter mile ahead, the Statue momentarily disappearing from view behind a white mist that formed around the frozen path, concealing the exodus from Manhattan—the frigid fog serving to obliterate their heat signatures from the Reaper drones’ thermal sensors. Paolo focused on the advancing ice floe as it continued to form and harden several yards ahead of him, even as he registered a sudden bone-deep chill that raced down his spine, causing him to shiver.

Glancing to his right, he saw the dark form appear out of the haze, standing along the path like a sentry.

The hooded figure was cloaked in black, the scythe held within the bony grip of the being’s left hand. The Angel of Death was standing on the edge of the newly formed ice, signaling for them to advance.

Averting his gaze, Paolo led his procession past Death, gripping the prosthetic arm even tighter. “Keep moving, keep your eyes on the path! Look at nothing else.”

Ignoring the warning, Dawn looked up at the Grim Reaper and smiled. “Thank you, Patrick.”

David Kantor’s eyes widened. The Elder swept the former Army medic and his teenage daughter along, restricting his own gaze, though he sensed the supernal being’s weighty presence.

Sheridan Ernstmeyer did not see the Grim Reaper until she was almost upon it. “What the hell are you supposed to be?”

The Angel of Death grinned—

—as the ice beneath the female assassin’s feet cracked open, and she plunged feet first into the unforgiving depths of the Hudson River.

 

Governor’s Island

8:01 a.m.

 

Her legs were moving, but she could not feel them, the numbness of fear making her trek across the compound feel like an out-of-body experience. The two guards half carried, half dragged her past the courtyard and out a small gate in the fortress wall.

Leigh Nelson stared at the fog-enshrouded harbor, her limbs trembling uncontrollably. She thought of her husband and children. She prayed they would remain safe from the pandemic.

The guard on her left placed the gun to the back of her skull—

—and collapsed . . . dead. The second man’s eyes bulged out of their sockets in terror, then he, too, joined his comrade in death.

Leigh looked around, giddy with relief—

—her legs buckling, her mind taken aback by the tall figure in the hooded cloak, his eye sockets aflutter with three pairs of seeing eyes. Floundering on all fours along the frozen ground, she looked up, terrified. “Please . . . don’t . . . hurt . . . me.”

The Reaper spoke, his voice a familiar rasp. “I have a basic rule: I never take a good soul after Wednesday.”

“Shep?” Leigh Nelson’s eyes rolled up into her head as she fainted.

 

High over Manhattan, the three military helicopters reached their designated drop zones. Praying for forgiveness, the distraught pilots released their payloads . . .

 

VA Hospital

8:02 a.m.

 

The corridors, rendered powerless, were vacated and dark. The interior was autumn cold, disrupted by an occasional chorus of coughs and moans coming from wards harboring the forgotten. Shown respect in words but never compensated for their sacrifice, the veterans of foreign wars remained yesterday’s problem—a burden to society, like the crazy uncle who never received an invitation to the wedding or mourners at his funeral. Dealing with amputees and cancer-ridden returning soldiers was a depressing reality to the “patriotic masses” and remained a very low priority for the members of Congress, who receive greater “fulfillment” by funding a new weapon of mass destruction than by cleaning up the “mess” left over from their two ongoing wars.

Of course, those who made it their life’s work to bring light into a wounded veteran’s life know different. And yet Scythe had chased even these stalwarts of spirituality away.

Having emptied the hospital of its staff, the plague had stalked the antiseptic halls like a hungry wolf. Desperate to feed, it had acquired new life when a fleeing member of the maintenance crew had failed to secure the vacuum seal on the doors leading into the VA’s wards, summoning the beast to the banquet.

Open wounds and immobilized victims. Fresh meat lined up like sausages.

Twelve hours later, there was nothing left but incubators of death.

 

The life sign resonated like a flower blooming on a desert pampa, its isolated bubble energized by a self-contained battery pack. The newborn, an auburn-haired girl less than twenty-four hours old, slept peacefully under the watchful eye of her mother.

Mary Louise Klipot stared at her daughter, yearning to hold her . . . to give her the love and affection that she was denied by her own parent. She looked up as a dark silhouette reflected off the neonatal intensive care unit’s Plexiglas incubator. “Go away, Death. You’re not stealing my baby. Santa Muerte protects her.”

The Grim Reaper slammed the wooden handle of his scythe upon the tile floor, the sledgehammer-like impact opening an eight-inch fissure that divided the room in half.

“What is it you want? Not my child!”

“You must answer for the ten thousand infants your actions stole this day. You shall reap the pain you’ve sown through all eternity, and your child shall be part of the harvest.”

“No!” She threw herself over the incubator, begging for mercy. “Please don’t compound my sins by stealing another innocent life! God, I know you are out there . . . please forgive me . . . have mercy on my daughter’s soul.”

The Reaper stared at the innocent newborn. “Renounce Santa Muerte, and I shall spare your child.”

Mary looked up as a brilliant white light filled the city outside her room—

“I renounce her!”

—the intense heat melting the scream from her larynx, liquefying the flesh from her bones.

 

Paolo and Francesca gingerly stepped off the ice and onto the pier at Liberty Island. The teens and children ran past them, everyone hurrying up a paved sidewalk leading to the Statue of Liberty.

David Kantor kicked open the sealed doors at the base of the monolith, and they entered the pedestal’s observation level—

—as a brilliant white burst of heat ignited to the northeast like an expanding bolt of lightning.

 

Governor’s Island

8:12 a.m.

 

President Eric Kogelo opened his eyes. The pain that had wracked his head and internal organs over the last six hours had ceased, the fever gone.

He stole a prolonged moment in bed, enjoying the sheer joy of simply feeling well again, until an overwhelming sense of dread forced him into action. He sat up, disoriented and still a bit weak, surprised to find himself alone in the isolation room, the door bolted from the inside.

A sudden jolt of icy fear sent the president scrambling over the side of the bed.

The gaunt figure in the ragged hooded robe was standing in the corner of the room, watching him through eye sockets flitting with hundreds of tiny pupils. The being’s scythe, held upright, dripped blood from the curvature of its olive green blade.

The skeleton animated, approaching the foot of his bed.

“Help! Somebody get in here!”

A burst of frigid air emanated from the Reaper’s mouth as the ancient skull spoke. “There is no one here to help you. The ark your people built to isolate your failed leaders has been breached. Plague has taken every living soul on this island, save one.”

“Oh . . . God.” The president gasped to catch his breath, then gathered himself and stood in defiance of his impending death. “Just tell me one thing before you take me . . . will humanity perish as a result of our stupidity?”

“That remains to be seen.”

“Will my death serve a greater purpose?”

“No. But your life can still bring Light to the world.”

Kogelo’s skin tingled with adrenaline. “You’re sparing me?”

“You are a righteous man born in a time of greed and corruption, tasked by the will of the masses to bring peace. You have not gone far enough. You have struck deals with the dark forces and been manipulated in the process. To unveil the Light, you must end war. To end hatred, you must make peace with your enemies.”

“It’s not that easy. Ending two wars . . . there were loose ends in Iraq. Afghanistan is complex, we’re dealing with Pakistan. There are issues . . . we’re making progress. I could set a new timetable—”

“Should ten more innocents perish in Iraq, the eleventh shall be your wife.”

“What?”

“Should ten more innocents perish in Afghanistan, the eleventh shall be your child. This is my timetable.”

Kogelo collapsed to his knees. His throat constricted. “Please don’t do this. Take my life, I don’t care. Not my wife and daughter. I beg of you.”

“Cause and effect. You hold the power over life and death. Reap what you sow.”

Fueled by desperation, the president stole courage. “I will end the war. But there are enemies about . . . entities who prefer the darkness. How do I bring peace when all they want is war?”

“For those who seek to harm others, Judgment Day has arrived. This is my covenant to you.”

The Grim Reaper extended its skeletal right hand—

—the bony appendage instantaneously wrapping with blood vessels and nerves, tendons and muscles, all sealed within a layer of warm Caucasian flesh.

For a brief second, Eric Kogelo swooned, then he willed himself to shake the offered hand, gazing up into the face of its owner.

The man who looked back at him was in his thirties, bearing Jim Morrison features, his long brown hair matching his eyes. The dog tags around his neck identified him as a US soldier. Kogelo squinted to read the inscription. Sgt. Patrick Ryan Shepherd . . .

Shep pulled back, releasing the president’s hand . . . and his own humanity—

—casting his soul to the underworld.

 

 

 

 

"Greatness is not what you have achieved

but what you have overcome.”

—Eliyahu Jian

 

 

 

 

“Are you going to get any better or is this it?”

—Earl Weaver, Baltimore Orioles manager, to the home plate umpire.

 

 

 

 

Lost Diary: Guy de Chauliac

The following entry has been excerpted from a recently discovered unpublished memoir, written by surgeon Guy de Chauliac during the Great Plague: 1346–1348.(translated from its original French)

 

Diary Entry: September 13, 1348

(recorded in Avignon, France)

Time has passed. So much has happened, and yet I am at a loss to account for everything. Perhaps that is best.

When last I recorded an entry, I was worse than dead . . . a hapless soul, drifting in and out of torturous pain. In my delirium, I prayed to my Maker to take me.

Death finally paid its visit one wretched night in May.

My confines were stifling, my fever refusing me a moment’s respite. Perhaps it was an incessant blood-soaked cough, perhaps divine intervention, but at some juncture I opened my eyes to the night. At that moment, the cloaked figure emerged from the shadows of my bedroom, his ragged garb blending with the darkness. The candlelight flickered in his presence, its orange glow revealing a scarred skull tinged brown with age, as if the bone had been left to rot in a pond. Or, by its overwhelming stench, perhaps a cesspool.

The room cooled noticeably as he spoke, his French twisting in an Asian accent. “I was once like you, a slave of the flesh, born in a time of greed and corruption. In my early years I bore witness to unaccountable bloodshed delivered by my own father’s blade, and many a man suffered by my family’s rule. But I turned away from the violence following my first battle as Emperor in order to pursue the mysticism of the spiritual realm. Instead of war, I waged peace, and in doing so, I changed our sworn enemies into allies, bringing prosperity to our entire region. But the knowledge I sought eluded me. And in my final hour, I was visited by Death, and he, too, offered me what I now offer you—the secrets of creation . . . the path to immortality. Agree to my terms by your own free will, and I shall extend your days in this world, and the knowledge of the ages that abandoned me shall be yours, bringing joy to the rest of your days . . . and beyond.”

I sat up in my deathbed, my mind waging a war with my own sanity. “And if I accept your offer . . . what then? What is to be my end of this covenant?”

“When the natural end of your days transpires, and you have taken your final breath, you shall relieve me of my burden as the Reaper of Souls. Complete this spiritual task, and you shall be forgiven all your earthly sins and be guaranteed a place in Heaven’s endless fulfillment.”

“And how many days,” I asked, “must I wander the Earth as Death?”

“Time is not measured in the spiritual realm, monsieur. But fear not, for a worthy soul, tarnished by his own past deeds, even now awaits his next rebirth. Together with his soul mate, they shall relieve you of your future burden as you shall relieve me of mine.”

He left me then, this Angel of Death, to ponder whether his visit was real or a delusion brought on by the fever. But soon after, my symptoms improved, and by summer’s end, I was my old self.

But while I was gone, how the world had changed.

More than half the European population that existed a mere two years earlier were dead, entire villages wiped out by the plague. Religion was brought to its knees by its own corruption. Papal rule was forced from its partnership with the Royals, who gradually lost their own coercive hold on the masses when food and land proved plentiful in the sudden absence of more than 45 million people.

I, too, have changed. Titles no longer have any meaning to me. I wish now only to serve mankind, sharing my acquired knowledge of the human condition with others.

Then this!

No sooner had I begun penning a manuscript that would become The Inventory of Medicine than I was visited by a peculiar fellow of Asian descent. That he knew of my encounter with death was outweighed by his most unusual gift—a journal accumulating the greatest medical wisdom of the ages, authored by Aristotle and Plato and Pythagoras, as well as some of the most renowned sages in history.

The bounty of knowledge this strange-looking Tibetan monk offered was as mind-boggling as his opaque eyes and the asking price: “Accept our Society’s invitation, and the knowledge is yours to preside over as caretaker.”

From darkness the Light, from sickness and death . . . a level of joy and accomplishment I could never have imagined. I no longer fear death, knowing that the promise of immortality awaits.

And so, I live out my days to help others, each act of kindness seeding an everlasting fulfillment . . .

Let the Reaper come indeed!

 

—Guigo

 

 

 

 

LAMERICA

Clothed in sunlight
Restled in waiting
Dying of fever

Changed shapes of an empire
Starling invaders
Vast promissory notes of joy

Wanton, willful & passive
Married to doubt
Clothed in great warring monuments
of glory

How it has changed you
How slowly estranged you
Solely arranged you

Beg you for mercy.

 

—Jim Morrison

 

 

 

 

Epilogue

August 6

Chartres, France

12:03 a.m.

 

The medieval town rose above undulating fields of golden wheat like an ancient Gothic island. Thousand-year-old walls, the mortar worn smooth, dated its baronial fortification. Narrow cobblestone streets weaved through rows of half-timbered houses. Ancient bridges traversed the Eure River, the inky waters of its three tributaries winding beneath archways of stone.

Chartres. Located sixty miles southwest of Paris, the French commune was a magnet of history, bearing witness to some of humanity’s darkest days.

Black Death: The Great Mortality.

Crowning the hill upon which the village had been erected was Our Lady of Chartres, one of the most magnificent cathedrals in all of Europe. Two towering spires, their unique designs representative of the architecture of the eleventh and sixteenth centuries, soared more than 350 feet into the heavens, rendering them visible for miles in every direction. Flying buttresses high-lighted a Romanesque basilica and massive crypt, its foundation encompassing 117,000 square feet. Gothic carvings adorned its facade, stained glass its portals.

It was just after midnight, and the streets surrounding the cathedral were deserted. The word had been passed—not a soul ventured outside, lest one tempt the wrath of God.

They approached the church on foot, each member having been sequestered in the village earlier in the day. Entries were purposely staggered, made through an earthen passage concealed within a dense patch of foliage adjacent to the church grounds.

Nine men: Each cloaked in a heavy hooded monk’s robe that concealed his face.

Nine men: Their names never spoken, their identities kept hidden lest one of their comrades be apprehended or tortured.

Nine Unknown Men.

The subterranean war room lay three stories beneath the church, its walls seven feet thick. The chamber contained its own power generator, and was equipped with sixteen-channel night-vision surveillance monitors and three wraparound computer security stations. One member of the Nine occupied a console, the other seven were situated in comfortable high-backed cushioned chairs that surrounded a circular oak table. Eight men, transformed by recent events. Awaiting the arrival of their leader.

Pankaj Patel was seated in the seventh chair. The psychology professor appeared to be speed-reading from an ancient Aramaic text.

Yielding to his curiosity, Number Five, a thirty-seven-year-old Austrian technowizard sharing the same bloodlines as Nikola Tesla, left his security post to speak with the sect’s newest member. “You are reading the Zohar?”

“Actually, I’m scanning.”

“What happened, Seven? Did you lose a bet with the Elder?”

“I’ve seen things, Five. I walked on water.”

“I thought it was ice?”

“It was a miracle, plain and simple. Now I am a changed man. I pray. I scan. I am even writing a spiritual book, with the proceeds going to the new Children’s Hospital in Manhattan.”

“Admirable. Tell me, Seven, when you pray, do you pray for the soul of Bertrand DeBorn?”

“Blow me, Five.”

“Seven!” The Elder entered the chamber, his opaque eyes scolding Patel. “Remember, my friend—restriction.”

“My apologies, Elder.”

The Nine men took their assigned places around the oval table. The Elder began. “Number Three, so good of you to be here, especially in light of your new responsibilities within the Politburo. Will our Russian friends agree to President Kogelo’s new disarmament plan?”

“If you had asked me two days ago, I would have emphatically said no. Since then, four of the communist hardliners have suffered fatal heart attacks.”

“Must be something in the water,” quipped Number Eight, a Chinese physicist in his sixties. “Two of our more radical communist leaders also died last week. No foul play is suspected, but, as the Elder likes to say, there are no coincidences.”

“You wish to comment, Number Seven?”

“It’s got to be Shepherd,” Pankaj stated. “Look at what happened to those neocons in Israel . . . the hardliners in Hamas. And don’t forget the two radical clerics in Iran who died before the election.”

“Every action has a reaction,” responded Number Six, a Mexican environmentalist bearing a Zapotec heritage. “While Shepherd attempts to micromanage the physical world, Santa Muerte grows stronger in the darkness below.”

“How do you know this, Number Six?”

“Somehow, the female Reaper managed to open a fissure that allows her access from Hell into the physical world. Two weeks ago, she exhumed the remains of a priest who had died in Guadalajara of swine flu and danced his contaminated remains at a local wedding.”

The Elder laid his head back against his chair. “Mr. Shepherd must learn to restrict himself as Emperor Asoka and Monsignor de Chauliac before him. We must find a way to communicate with our new Angel of Darkness. Number Seven, has your wife had any supernal communications since you and your family moved back to Manhattan?”

The professor looked uncomfortable. “None, Elder.”

“What about . . . your daughter?”

 

Trinity Cemetery

Washington Heights, Manhattan

12:03 p.m.

 

August roasted New York’s five boroughs in a midday broil, the heat rising off the sidewalks transforming the cement into a baking stone. The Hudson River, its surface stagnant to the naked eye, cascaded a subatomic tsunami of water molecules upward into the atmosphere, contributing humidity to the parade of cumulus clouds already forming to the west.

In the city below, a lunchtime crowd sweltered. Businessmen hustled between air-conditioned enclosures, red-faced vendors sought relief from umbrella-drawn shade and portable fans.

After forty days of inspection and 153 days of construction, debris removal, and public Masses, the Big Apple once more had a pulse. Manhattan’s population now approached six hundred thousand, with lower rent ceilings promising even more transplants.

The cemetery’s caretaker was sleeping off a hangover in his office. Venetian blinds were pinched closed above a window-unit air conditioner that had outlived its warranty. There were no graveside ceremonies on the schedule, and the summer heat had kept the visitors away—

—save two.

On a lonely summit beneath a relentless sun, a mother and daughter stood amid a metropolis of mausoleums and ancient graves, staring at a polished headstone. After ten minutes, the child asked, “Is this really where Patrick’s buried, Mommy?”

Leigh Nelson played mental dodgeball with the answer, debating which threads of truth would satisfy her child’s curiosity without leading to nightmares. “Patrick’s with God now. The headstone’s just a place where we can tell him how much we love him and miss him”—she tears up—“and how much we appreciate what he did.”

The Range Rover parked by the gated western entrance blared its horn.

Leigh smiled at Autumn. “Daddy misses us, we’d better go.”

“I want to stay.”

“I know, but it’s Tuesday and daddy needs to get back to work. We’ll come back another time, maybe on the weekend. Okay, baby doll?”

“Okay.”

Hand in hand, they made their way back down the steep hillside along the broken-slated path. Halfway down, Leigh saw the eleven-year-old Hindu girl seated in the shade of a concrete tomb. Waiting patiently for a private audience. Leigh waved.

Dawn Patel waved back. Then she hurriedly ascended the steep hill, her route through the grave sites guided by the headstone adorned with the sculpture of an angelic child.

She laid the first of two white roses on the older grave as she read the inscription silently to herself:

 

patricia ann segal

august 20, 1977–September 11, 2001

beloved mother and soul mate

 

donna michele shepherd

october 21, 1998–september 11, 2001

beloved daughter

 

The adjoining headstone was new, erected by the thirty-six survivors discovered plague-free in the Statue of Liberty Museum two days after the horrors of the December Mortality.

The two adult inscriptions were eerily similar:

 

patrick ryan shepherd

august 20, 1977–december 21, 2012

beloved soul mate—blessed friend

 

The girl placed the second rose on the tomb, the buried casket of which contained the prosthetic left arm of its deceased owner. Backing away, she sat on the edge of a nearby stone, its heated surface barely tolerable through her denim shorts.

After a few moments, she felt the female presence of her guardian angel on her left, the chill of the darker male force on her right. “The two of you were born on the same day. I think that’s so romantic.”

Dawn’s scalp tingled as the supernal female being played with the girl’s hair.

The Grim Reaper remained partially obscured in the shade of an oak tree.

“School starts soon. They say we’ll be combining grade levels until more people move back to the city.”

Thunder rumbled in the distance. The western sky took on a bizarre appearance—the cloud’s low-hanging ceiling undulating like a forty-foot sea, the distant horizon appearing lime green.

“Oh yeah, remember the miracle baby . . . the newborn girl they found alive in a neonatal enclosure at the VA hospital? She’s finally been adopted, only no one’s saying who the parents are. They think her mother was the one who released Scythe. God, can you imagine having to grow up with that hanging over your head?”

The upper leaves on the oak trees blew skyward. Telltale sign of an impending afternoon thunderstorm.

“Anyway, I wanted to come by and wish you guys an early happy birthday. I probably should go. My mother thinks I stopped by Minos for a slice of pizza. You know they named the baby after you. Patrick Lennon Minos. I thought that was pretty cool.”

The atmospheric change was sudden and electric, the static charge coming from behind the girl. Before she could turn to the source of the disturbance, the female spirit launched her sideways from her grave-site perch—

—a split second before the blade of the materializing scythe struck the vacant slab of concrete!

Regaining her senses, Dawn turned in horror to see the witch flying out at her from the iron-gated mausoleum, the female Grim Reaper wearing a wavy black wig and matching satin dress. The force from Hell reached for her with its ten fleshless fingers—

—only to be intercepted by her male counterpart.

The midair collision between the two guardians of death unleashed a bolt of violet lightning that shot skyward from the ground, splitting the century-old oak tree in half—

—the otherworldly charge inhaling the two figures into another dimension!

Dawn’s spiritual companion pushed and prodded the girl down the east side of the summit, her supernal mother refusing to allow her to rest until she reached Broadway.

Then she, too, disappeared.

The girl gathered herself, sweating heavily in the August heat. Overhead, the undulating olive green cloud formation has dispersed.

For the first time in this life, Dawn Patel felt alone.

 

The consciousness that was Patrick Shepherd awakens.

He is kneeling on a flat, rocky summit, enshrouded by darkness. Purple lightning illuminates the valley below, offering brief glimpses of Gehenna. A spark ignites a bush into an orange incandescent flame, the fire expelling sulfurous smoke but not burning.

The woman steps out of the shadows and into the light . . . revealing her nude form.

Her skin is composed of keratin, the fingernail-like substance as pale as reflected moonlight, her long, wavy hair as ebony as the abyss. Her naked body is the definition of sensuality, the raw musky scent of her pheromones releasing an involuntary paroxysm within her male counterpart’s being.

Her voice is deep and soothing. “Today is the ninth of Av, a time of reckoning. Reveal yourself to me.”

Within seconds, the male Reaper’s skeletal frame entwines in blood vessels, nerves, muscles and tendons, wrapped in the flesh-covered epidermis of Patrick Shepherd. “Who are you? Why have you summoned me to this place?”

She approaches slowly, each measured stride causing his pulse to quicken. “I am the tempest that awakened Adam, the spirit embodied in the Tree of Knowledge. I am a newborn’s giggle that haunts its sleep . . . the desire that causes adolescent males to pleasure themselves. And when the semen is spilt, it finds its way into my loins to father my demons. I am darkness personified, a black hole of existence where the Upper Light can never dwell—

“—I am Lilith, and you, Noah, are my soul mate.”

 

 

 

 

The story continues in...

 

 

GRIM REAPER: Purgatory

 

 

 

 

To contact Steve Alten go to:

www.SteveAlten.com

 

 

To learn more about the ancient wisdom of Kabbalah go to:

www.uKabbalah.com

 

 

 

 

Final Thoughts

By Nick Nunziata

 

 

Grim Reaper wasn't as much a book as it was a pilgrimage. Like most pilgrimages, it has had its ups and downs, trials and tribulations, and became less about the destination than the journey. The process certainly has left an indelible mark on how Steve and I now approach our material. I think we carried this thing with us like a malicious hitchhiker; it left a film on each of us both in its subject matter and its seeming desire to reach the world at any cost. Dante's Inferno is so deep and dark and timeless on its own but when coupled with real world dangers that have a distinctly modern hue, it takes on a far deeper meaning. Many of the things happening in our own lives and in the real world around us affected the story’s evolution, taking us on unexpected turns and avenues on its way to the book in your hands. It’s as if certain plot points waited for us in the shadows, seeping into Steve and me on the sly. In the night. Scythe at the ready. It just wouldn't die.

The seed for the series was planted back in 2005 at a time when the MEG movie (currently unmade) had just been optioned for the second time, and Steve and I were aching to collaborate on something new and different. During long conversations into the night, we shared a lot of great ideas that seemed to have merit for a script or book. Suggestions flew fast and furious, a few of which eventually made their way onto paper. The idea for Grim Reaper started quite innocuously but quickly evolved from a generic horror script into something much more dense and disturbing. In pursuit of the story, we met in New York. We walked Manhattan like Shep. We paid attention to the nooks and crannies. We went deep beneath the surface of the city and saw places that seemed out of . . . well, a book. As time went on it, became apparent that Grim Reaper was far too deep a story to make its debut as a screenplay. 

Like a man possessed, Steve dove into the novel. He reached into places you haven't seen in his other books, though in many ways this is a soul mate to some of his best work. The book grew and evolved, on the way seemingly ripping at us to decipher it and solve its riddles. Eventually, after a very long time, many discussions, many edits, it was finally considered done. That said, part of me wonders if there's not some parasite in Steve's head screaming different little things he can tweak and add to this day. And if you thought this book was epic and filled with harrowing and visceral moments, just you wait. So many of the big ideas and deep mythology we have fueling this story have to wait until books two and three. How fortunate for us that the Divine Comedy wasn’t just a singular story.

With End of Days complete, I think we're now in a position to dig deeper into Dante’s world and the stuff nightmares are made of while still carrying that golden light through it. I hope you agree, because as far as Steve Alten books go, this is a step in a new and more epic direction, and if you know the guy, once his sights are set on something, there's no turning back. Part of that is his tenacity, and part of that is his loyal and truly special readership. Hopefully I can carry my weight in this and do my part in keeping you awake late at night when you shouldn't be tempting the fates.

Grim Reaper was not an easy tale to tell, nor was it is the easiest book to sell at a time when publishers prefer simpler easier-to-market fiction. Still, as an avid book reader, I’ll always consider End of Days as a mainstream page turner. It certainly speaks to me in the same way Dan Simmons's amazing Carrion Comfort did and, of course, King's The Stand. Those great books of the seventies and eighties managed to avoid being caught up in a business model. They were stories that ripped your heart out, asked difficult questions, and took their readers through places both familiar and alien, their plots and characters sinister yet filled with the darkest thoughts we could muster. They were also frighteningly relevant, with a relevance that has taken on a different meaning as time has progressed. In their own way, these books were a living thing with horrors most people could relate to, both real and supernal. I’d like to think Grim Reaper fits into this same mold.

As much as I love movies, there's still nothing like a good book. I hope you've found this one worth keeping in your collection, wearing down the pages of, and recommending to others. Because He is watching you, you know. That scythe at the ready. Those eyes sparkling in the night.

 

Nick Nunziata

March 25, 2010

 

 

 

 

Many thanks to the Hal Leonard Corporation for providing permissions to the following:

 

L.A. Woman
Words and Music by The Doors
Copyright © 1971 Doors Music Co.
Copyright Renewed
All Rights Reserved Used by Permission
Reprinted by permission of Hal Leonard Corporation

Five To One
Words and Music by The Doors
Copyright © 1968 Doors Music Co.
Copyright Renewed
All Rights Reserved Used by Permission
Reprinted by permission of Hal Leonard Corporation

The End
Words and Music by The Doors
Copyright © 1967 Doors Music Co.
Copyright Renewed
All Rights Reserved Used by Permission
Reprinted by permission of Hal Leonard Corporation

 

 

 

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