Gaia Dreams (Gaiaverse Book 1) (3 page)

"You," said Tiknay, stabbing a finger toward
Alex's chest, "you do not hear the music of the earth? You do not hear the
cries of pain and sorrow?"

"Well, uh, no, I don't hear it," said Alex.

"Go back to your home, your land. The danger has
already come there. You must be with your own people in the danger times ahead."

"Wait...what danger has come there?" asked Nathan.

Tiknay eyed him carefully, and then responded, "The
ground shakes and moves, many die."

"An earthquake?" he asked, surprised. "There
have been earthquakes before. We're used to that sort of thing happening."

"No! Not like now. No earth-shaking ever came
like this. It is the beginning."

"Look, Alex and I need to talk--" Nathan began.

"You talk, then go," Tiknay replied. "We travel
now."

"Hold on a minute--maybe--what if we want to
come with you?" he asked.

"You cannot come with us. We will not feed you.
You will starve and die. Go now, go back to your people," Tiknay said with
finality, turning away.

Alex called out to her and watched helplessly as
the tribe quickly moved away. Stunned, she turned back to Nathan, saying, "What
now?"

Nathan tilted his head back to check on the
position of the sun, and then said briskly, "How much gas do we have?"

"What? I don't know," Alex said dejectedly.

Nathan stood in front of her and grasped her
shoulders. "Alex, come on, we need to make some decisions quickly here.
Something strange is happening."

Alex interrupted him hotly. "You bet something
strange is happening. We are the first team of anthropologists to fail so miserably
in the history of the university. Don't you get it? Our careers just went down
the toilet when they walked away. Who is going to fund us now?"

"Alex," Nathan said patiently, "this is bigger
than funding. Think about what she said. Nobody has ever reported anything like
this before. I think that old woman is on to something. Something unusual. You
know these people are closer to nature, to the land, than we are. This behavior
is totally atypical. It must be happening for a reason. I think we need to get
back to civilization, to a phone, as quickly as possible. We need to check out
her story."

Alex gazed at him, opening and closing her mouth
for several seconds, trying to find the right words to annihilate his argument.
"You're telling me you believe her--about the 'big earth-shaking'--"

"Yes!" Nathan said adamantly. "Yes, I do. And
even if I'm wrong and she's wrong, don't you think we need to contact someone
with more experience to see if this has ever happened before? Look, if we find
out there have been no major earthquakes reported, then we can always find a
way to track them down again. But following them without the proper supplies is
crazy. The supply run was scheduled for next week. We don't have what we need
to go after them and survive without their help. Come on, Alex," he finished in
a wheedling tone.

"I hate this! But, okay, we'll do it your way. I
don't know what else we can do. I think we have enough gas to get to Gaborone,"
Alex stated, capitulating. "But I want you to know, I have a bad feeling about
this."

"Then, for once, that makes two of us," Nathan
replied cheerily.

Climbing into the jeep, Alex said, "Well, don't
just stand there, get in! I'll drive."

Nathan groaned.

Somewhere over the Western U.S.

As the C-130 aircraft lumbered through the night
sky, Zack busied himself, checking the video equipment while surreptitiously
watching Maria. He'd never seen such tension on her face before, features
frozen into a mask of fear. Even in Bosnia, when sniper fire hit the camera,
Maria had kept her cool. Zack knew part of her reason for staying in the
business was the same as his--love of action and the next thrill, the next
challenge. The exhilaration of almost dying meant you were alive.

Zack didn't want to lose that feeling. He
remembered what it was like to feel dead inside. For two years after Karen
died, Zack felt like he died with her. High school sweethearts, he and Karen
married right after graduation, and then attended NYU together. She was going
to be a nurse and he was studying geology. Then in their junior year, their
lives were irrevocably altered by a man with a gun who pumped four bullets into
Karen's body, all to steal a purse that held $21.36. Karen died instantly, but
Zack seemed to die gradually from the grief and guilt. He was late picking her
up that night, studying blind thrust faults in the library, so caught up in the
subject that time got away from him. He arrived on the scene a few minutes
after the police and would never forget the sight of Karen's body covered in
blood. After that, nothing much mattered to him anymore. He bought a gun and
spent hours on the practice range perfecting his aim as he visualized the
killer's face on the target. He lost interest in school and dropped out.
Amazingly, Karen's killer had been caught, tried and convicted, but even that
couldn't assuage Zack's rage.

After six months of therapy, he decided to
return to college, but couldn't face studying anything from the time that
reminded him of Karen. A change in major led ultimately to video journalism and
an internship at SNN as a cameraman. Zack found that the adrenaline rush of
live reporting, filming the action as it happened, gave him a sense of being
real again. Somehow, seeing the world's events through the lens of a camera
gave him the distance to finally heal.

He wondered how Maria would react if her parents
had been injured or killed in the earthquake. Zack could not recall ever
hearing of an earthquake this large before, and the likelihood was that Maria's
parents were going to be among many dead and wounded. He looked across his
cameras to Maria and realized that along with the fear written across the
delicate features of her face was the strength and courage he had come to
recognize as an integral part of her personality. No, he thought, she won't
crack, won't come apart, no matter what we find in Los Angeles.

Gaborone, Africa

"It can't be," said Alex, shaking her head in
denial. "There's got to be some mistake."

They had made it to the town and, by a minor
miracle, Nathan had gotten through to his folks on the telephone. His parents
relayed the astounding and horrifying information that an earthquake had indeed
hit the U.S., right under their University from the sound of it, an epicenter
in Los Angeles.

"I can't believe it, either," Nathan said, his
pale blue eyes bleak, thinking of their friends back home. "But Mom said the
reports on SNN were that it was huge quake. They're supposed to have pictures
soon. TV networks are sending people, cameras out there now. They're not sure
how hard it will be to even get into the city, Alex. It sounds bad, really bad."

"What--what do we do now?" Alex asked, shaken,
sounding lost for the first time since Nathan had known her.

Nathan didn't know anything about Alex's family;
she never spoke of them. He decided now was not the time to ask. Instead, he
said, "My parents suggested we come back to the states. Re-group there and
figure out where to go and what to do next. We're welcome to stay with them.
Let's just try not to think about L.A. too much and focus instead on getting
ourselves on the series of airplanes it's going to take to get home."

Alex took a deep breath and straightened her
shoulders. "You're right. We can't help them from here. And our work with the
tribe is at a standstill, if not finished forever. Let's go." And with that
they headed out to the jeep to the small local airport to negotiate their first
leg of a long journey home.

Los Angeles suburb, California

"No," she whispered. "Please, God, don't let
them be in there."

Maria climbed gingerly over cracked asphalt and
tree trunks, scrambling to reach her parents' house a hundred yards in the
distance. The house resembled a crumpled piece of twisted modern art. Rescue
workers were not even close to the suburb, and Maria told the network she had
to find her parents before she would go on the air. Zack had hijacked a network
van and drove to within a mile of the house. It took an hour to clamber through
the devastated neighborhood.

"Maria, slow down!" Zack shouted. Throwing aside
branches from the downed trees, he muttered to himself, "She is going to break
her neck and then who will they blame? Me. We're supposed to broadcast now,
dammit. Oh, hell, if it were my parents, I wouldn't listen to the network,
either."

The house was almost flattened. Zack caught up
to Maria, who was standing stock-still in front of what used to be the garage. Tears
slid down her face as she pointed straight ahead. Zack followed her gaze and
saw the back end of a red Toyota. The garage had caved in on most of the car.

"They were home. That's their car, Zack. You
know, I kept thinking they might have gone out of town or something. Maybe they
were on one of those fishing trips Dad loves to take. But they were home."

No one stirred on the street, not a sound was
heard as Maria silently sobbed. Zack looked at the massive destruction
surrounding them, thinking it resembled a bad horror movie after Godzilla,
using houses as stepping stones, had stomped his way down the street.

"Come on," she said, grabbing his arm. "I have
to find them, have to know for sure. They would have been asleep, and their
bedroom is over there on the left side of the house...under that big cypress
tree that's down."

"You don't want to wait for the rescue people or
police. No, I can see that you don't," Zack said after looking intently into
brown eyes turned almost black with emotion. "Okay, then, let's do it."

A narrow passageway supported by wood beams
shaped like a pyramid gave them access to the demolished bedroom.

"Look out--broken glass there, must be from the
window."

"I see it."

"Almost there. I think I can see something. Oh."

"What can you see? Are they in there? Mama? Dad?"

Zack rocked back on his heels. "Umm...Maria, I
don't think you should go in there. It's...well, oh, man, it's not good."

She stared at him, at the sudden furrowed brow,
the tightening of skin around his mouth, beads of sweat popping out above his
upper lip. Gray-blue eyes returned her gaze, and she remembered the look--the
same way he'd looked after going inside the bombed out orphanage in Bosnia.

"They're dead, aren't they," she said
matter-of-factly.

He nodded.

"You have to move so I can get by. I have to see
them, you know." This said gently, almost apologetically.

He sighed and squeezed past her.

"You need to be prepared, Maria. There's lots of
blood, and your father--well, he--"

"Shut up and let go of my arm. I've reported
from Bosnian and Iraqi war zones. Now get the fuck out of my way and let me see
them. I have to know!" She paused, took a breath and said more quietly, "It has
to be real...to accept it."

He nodded sorrowfully.

Sonoran Desert, Arizona

"Why did you come to me?" the shaman woman asked
Margaret.

"I've been searching, most of my life it seems,
for answers and for peace. I've done a lot to heal myself and was feeling that
perhaps the craziness of my life was coming to an end. Then this strange thing
started happening." Margaret stopped, looking for the words to describe an
experience that felt supernatural.

The shaman, whose name was surprisingly enough
Irene, sat on the ground with blue-jeaned legs crossed, waiting patiently for
Margaret to continue. As she watched Margaret rake her hands through a mass of
wavy, reddish-gold hair, she wondered what could make a successful attorney
leave her practice to spend months in the desert searching for a shaman. It
wasn't like Irene advertised in the yellow pages. She was hard to find.

"This is the thing," Margaret explained. "I've
had a difficult life. But then, who hasn't? Still, mine took a while to recover
from, get beyond. I thought I was finally past it all. Done with the bad
memories, the panic and anxiety, the weird times of dissociating from myself.
Then one day...I started hearing a voice, not a voice from inside me, it felt
like a voice that was inside everything. I didn't understand what the voice
said at first--it was waves of pain and loss--almost like hearing a different
language." Margaret paused, and then smiled ruefully. "I guess this is all
sounding pretty strange."

"Go on, keep talking and perhaps it will make
sense," said Irene.

Margaret nodded and realized what a relief it
was to finally talk about all of it. She'd been too afraid to tell anyone about
the voice.

"When this started happening, I was studying
crop circle formations. It was something that interested me. In fact, I felt
drawn to them. I thought at first that it was because they were a strange
phenomenon and I had led a fairly weird life. But it was more than that. The
more I read about them and viewed photographs of them, the crop circles seemed
to me to be saying something. Like they were an actual communication of some
kind. I travelled around to see them whenever I got the chance, and then I
heard about the ones that had appeared out here in the desert--not exactly crop
circles, but unnatural patterns in the sand. Again, I felt drawn, no, more like
compelled, to visit them. I decided to take some time off from my job to work
more on self-healing, and made arrangements to come here. That's when I started
hearing the voice."

Margaret paused to sip herbal tea from the
ceramic mug at her side. The shaman watched her sort out her thoughts and
wondered if Margaret was the person she had dreamed about. For several months,
she had dreamed that someone of the earth was coming, someone more deeply
connected to the earth than anyone ever before, but the images had been
unclear. The woman before her was a shock because she was not Native American,
but white with lightly tanned skin, deep emerald, oval eyes framed by heavy
dark lashes under straight, reddish-brown eyebrows. The strong face showed
traces of humor in the deep dimples when she smiled and the fine laugh lines
around the eyes. A light scattering of freckles across the bridge of her
straight nose gave Margaret a look of youth not totally congruent with her
stated age of thirty-eight. Yes, the shaman thought, this might be the one from
the dreams, the one who will be the connection.