One Minute to Midnight (38 page)

Susie opened the door with her pistol
out in front as the red necks on fire began to fall to the ground
in burning heaps.

"There's the truck!" Susie
yelled.

The kidnappers had parked it in a
grove of trees, and now that everything was on fire she could see
it in the darkness. They began to jog toward it when Rob was hit in
the back by something hard, and suddenly fell to the ground. When
he rolled over, scraggly beard was standing over him with a
twisted, evil scowl on his face.

"You killed mah whole fam'ly!"
Scraggly beard screamed.
He had the axe handle in his hands, and was preparing to bring it
down on Rob’s head again, when Rob slashed his Achilles tendon with
one of his knives. Scraggly beard hollered and fell over while Rob
tried to get up. Susie was coming back for him.
"Get to the truck! Now!" Rob screamed.

The axe handle hit him in the knee and
Rod howled with pain, scraggly beard wasn't giving up easily and
had gotten to one knee again.
Rob thrashed with one of his knives, catching the other man in his
cheek. The dizziness was worse now, and flames were engulfing the
compound as Rob fought to kill or be killed in the struggle of his
life. Scraggly beard hit rob in his crotch with the axe handle but
Rob's adrenaline had never been so high in his life, and he felt
nothing. With the last of his energy Rob fell on top of the other
man and stabbed him in the stomach. With a gasp, scraggly beard
made one final attempt to fight, but went limp as he died in the
dirt like a dog. Fire rose high into the sky, burning everything in
sight, as morning approached on the horizon. Susie could see a
strip of light blue to the east and got in on the driver's side of
the truck while Derrick got in the back seat.

"Rob, come on!" Susie yelled. "They
left the keys in the truck!"

Rob heard her from what felt like a
hundred miles away and pulled himself off the ground. He stumble
walked like a zombie to the truck and got in, feeling for a split
moment that someone was going to grab his arm, but when he turned
there was nobody there. Susie drove down the dirt road, leading
away from the burning houses, and Rob laid his head back to sleep.
After about thirty minutes of driving over a rutted, bumpy road,
Susie found the interstate again and turned right. She drove on in
silence to the next town.
Rob had been in the passenger side, winning shotgun from his
friends after the last convenience store stop and gas-up. He
snapped awake from the horrible nightmare and hit his head on the
roof of the truck.
"Don't stop!" Rob shouted.

"Holy crap, dude! Are you alright?"
Doug laughed. "That's some dream. Ha ha!"

Susie was driving and Jackie was
lighting another cigarette as she stared out of the
window.

"You almost made me wreck, man!
Jesus!" Susie yelled.
"Sorry…it just seemed so real." Rob said. He was rubbing his head
where the axe handle hit him, but it was clean and he felt no pain.
He shook his head and looked out into the darkness in a
daze.

Twenty yards from their truck a young
girl stepped out into the road, covered in blood. It was just like
in his dream.

"DRIVE!" Rob screamed.

With the reflexes of a cat, he grabbed
the wheel from Susie and stomped on the gas, steering them around
the bloody girl. Alarm and confusion spread through the vehicle as
Rob commandeered his 4Runner for another three miles before giving
control back to Susie. While his friends never understood what he
did, and Rob never explained, he knew that what he had done saved
them all from a terrible fate, and in his mind at least, Christmas
would never be the same again.

atlantis returns

Josh Henderson builds a radio telescope from
spare parts. Then, he receives the strangest transmission he’s ever
seen.

Twenty-six million years ago, planet
Earth was inhabited by two dominant races: the reptilians, and a
small pygmy race of humans called the troglodytes. Each species
developed high technology and had been using it to further their
own dissimilar agendas. The reptilians were a cold-blooded race
concerned with power over the planet, her people, and natural
resources. The troglodytes sought wealth and unrestrained leisure.
As it happened, the two societies were able to tolerate one another
for almost a million years without territorial dispute because they
were on separate sides of the world. But, time moves on and
populations grow and multiply. Territory once seen as wasteland or
frontier becomes vital to emerging megacities, and when two species
who tolerate each other become next-door neighbors, circumstances
tend to change.

Their trouble did not begin in a day
or a week or even months, but after thousands of years of
negligence, pollution and disrespect for each other and the planet.
Skirmishes at first; shows of strength and power, and then came the
religious zealotry within each group; the signs from God that
wiping out the enemy was the path to righteousness. These beliefs
and practices were distributed throughout society on both sides and
as the fights grew more vicious, the fervor became more intense.
The Earth, Gaia, was bombed day and night, as the two competing
factions ignored her silent pleas for peace. She became angrier and
more wounded with each passing day.

One morning as her father, the Sun,
rose over her face, she cried out to her father for
help.

"Ra, my father, I must speak with
you." She said. The Sun, who had not spoken to his daughter for a
billion years, was delighted to hear her sweet voice.
"Yes, Gaia. What may I do for you?"

"My children have gone to war and have
ignored my pleas for peace. They have hurt me with their bombs and
guns. They do not regard life with the sense of preciousness that
they once used to."
"What would you have me do? The Sun asked.
"Father, although my heart is heavy, I beseech you to cleanse my
surface with your fiery embrace." Earth said. The Sun thought long
and hard about her request, and in one hundred years, he
replied.
"Daughter?"
"Yes, father?"

"Is it now as it once was? Does the
fighting continue?"
"Yes, and I am ill. My oceans are dying and my blood is poisoned."
She said.

"I will help you with your dilemma,
but do you understand what it is you ask of me?" The Sun
asked.
"Yes, father. My children will die and I will renew."
The sun loved his children and all life in the universe was sacred
to him, for he used his energetic core to provide sustenance for
all living beings in his sight. Earth loved her children too, and
her heart broke as Ra reached out with his fiery embrace and held
his daughter close for an entire month. Her skin burned as she wept
for the senseless loss of life, and for her part in the demise of
the warrior children she had raised.

"Father?" Earth cried.

"Yes, daughter?"

"I will do better next time." She
replied. The Sun nodded and released his daughter.

Gaia cried for a million years,
saturating the planet and causing rain to fall from the heavens as
the oceans filled once more, and tiny microscopic creatures began
to grow and multiply. Millions of years passed, and creatures big
and small filled the world again, and through a complex system of
evolutionary change, humanity was borne upon the planet.
Twenty-five million years after the first human stepped on land,
Josh Henderson was setting up a homemade radio telescope in the
bonus room of his house.
"Dad! Mom told me to come get you for dinner!" Timmy Henderson
yelled. He was the ten-year-old son of Josh and Tammy.

Josh stood five foot six, with an
athletic build and long brown hair he kept tied back in a ponytail.
His beard was short, and neat and he had kind eyes that viewed the
world with a sense of wonder and mystery. Josh had been so immersed
in the tweaking of the satellite dish that had once been on top of
their house, that he did not hear his son the first time. He almost
had it working. He had the computer hooked up and the software that
Yuri Denokov, a friend of his at the National Astronomy Institute
wrote for him. It was a drag and drop, point and click application
coded for simplicity of use. Yuri had coded it with a graphical
user interface that displayed coordinates of stars and a command
line for programming the telescope application if Yuri ever needed
to access it again, or if Josh felt adventurous enough to write his
own code and implement it. One feature of the application was the
ability to translate the feed from neighboring star systems into
binary ones and zeros. This information would be easily
translatable by copying it into an online binary translator. If
anything intelligible came across during a session of listening to
the stars, it could convert the signal into English. His obsession
had become so all-consuming that his family wondered if they would
ever see the old Josh again.

"Daaad!" Timmy sang.

Josh popped his head up. "Yeah! Be
right there! Thank you, son!" He said. Josh plugged the USB cable
in and turned on the laptop. Josh had the satellite dish connected
with a fifty-foot cable, and set it on the little roof overhanging
their front porch outside his window. When the computer booted, he
double-clicked the icon Yuri had created to resemble Mars and the
program opened.

"Josh, come down for
dinner!" Tammy yelled.
"Be right there!" Josh said. He left his radio telescope on and ran
downstairs to eat before he got in any more hot water with
her
. What he did not
know was that his radio telescope had been pointed directly at the
sun, and if he had been up in the bonus room five minutes later,
Josh would have seen a transmission of ones and zeros coming across
his screen.
Tammy had the table set when he got downstairs and they had already
begun to eat.

"You're always so consumed with that
thing up there. I'm beginning to think we may never get you back."
Tammy said.

"I'm almost done, I promise." Josh
said. He sat down next to Timmy and rubbed his head, winking with a
smile. "I just turned it on before I came down here, and if it
works, we'll be able to hear the stars talk." Josh was
excited.

"I get it, I do, but we haven't seen
you in a week." Tammy said. She was pretty with long brown hair and
soft skin he loved to touch. Tammy reminded him of Mary Ann from
Gilligan's Island, which often helped her get anything she wanted
from him.

"After dinner we can go see what it
does." Josh said.
Tammy had been with Josh for over twenty years, through all of his
ups and downs, and although she sometimes scolded him for his
flights of fancy, below the surface she was proud to know him and
loved his imagination.
"OK, sounds like a plan, now let's eat before it gets cold." Tammy
said. She smiled at Timmy, who nodded and bowed his
head.

Timmy said grace, and as he did, Josh
closed his eyes and bowed his own head. Like a flash of lightning,
Josh saw an image of the sun in his mind's eye. Roiling, rolling
mountains of flame undulating over one another as the star closest
to the earth beat like a heart in the vacuum. "It's alive!" His
mind told him. Josh opened his eyes.

"…and thank you for the food we are
about to eat. Amen." Timmy said.

Josh was stricken by his
vision.

"Josh, are you alright? You look
pale." Tammy said.
"I'm fine, I just had a weird vision when I closed my eyes. It's
nothing."

"I made a paper turtle in art class
today. We covered a wire thing with wet paper and it looked like a
turtle when we were done!" Timmy said. Josh and Tammy turned to
their son.

"That's pretty cool, buddy! I did
something like that with a balloon and paper in first grade, but
all I made was a weird face. Pretty cool, though. Congratulations."
Josh rubbed the small boy’s head.
"Trudy and Bill are going out to the lake this weekend and invited
us to go with them. You interested?" Tammy asked.

"Meh, I don't know…" Josh rubbed his
chin.
"They are two of our best friends, and it’s a free chance to chill
out at the lake on a boat. What's to discuss? Plus, it's been so
hot lately; I need to cool off." Tammy said.

"Yeah dad, let's go. It's going to be
fun, and besides, Bill is a nerd like you. You two can talk about
your telescope." Timmy said.

"I am not a nerd! OK, you might have a
point there. I'll go."

"I'll call Trudy after dinner. I sort
of told her we'd be going anyway, but you can be our plus one."
Tammy smiled.

"You're a real comedian."

"You married me for my quick wit and
good looks, remember?" Tammy said.

"No, I married you because your dad
was the sheriff and he said he'd shoot me if I broke your heart."
Josh replied.

"Well, that's Daddy. I'm sure he was
mostly kidding."
"He showed me the gun, and wrote my name on a bullet with a black
sharpie." Josh said. He fixed her with a dry gaze.

"He's got a sense of humor. You can't
blame him though, he's only looking out for his little girl."
"Yeah, right. He tried to kill me once, you know?" Josh
said.