Children of the Source (4 page)

    Colonel Steve Deckart saw me through the window of his office, nodded, and went back to his paperwork.
  I was truly grateful he wasn’t in-charge.  If there was a friendly bone in his body, no one had discovered it yet.  The perfect bureaucrat - no common-sense or compassion.  Not intentionally malicious, he was dangerous in his ignorance.  If an original thought crept into his mind, he’d have swatted it like an unwelcome bug.  Part of me wanted to get him drunk to see what made him tick.  Another part of me said, ’Jamie lad, do ya really wanta know?’  With him in-charge we’d have been shipped back east or scattered to the wind to live in some distant valley always looking over our shoulders.

    Deckart  looked up, scowled, tossed his pen on his desk, and walked out to see me.
  Always a pleasure.  “Carson’s in a foul mood today.”

    “I’d be, too.
  His son was killed just south of Salt Lake.  We heard.”

    “How’ d you hear?
  None outside of Carson, me, and the radio operator knows.”  His dark eyes fixed their suspicious gaze on me.

    I shrugged.
  He scowled, more than used to our unorthodox methods of gathering information.  “Why don’t you bother to explain?”

    “Right word, b
other
,” I said.  “You make a joke out of everything we do.  Proof is in the pudding.  What we do works.  You don’t like it, that’s your problem, Steve.”

    “It’s unnatural.”
  His mouth tightened.  “But at least you’re not freaky like Benson.  Son of a buck.”  I could sense his intense need to confide, to get something out.

    “What’s bugging you, Steve?”
  I could actually talk to the guy, but it was like I almost had to wring it out of him. 

    He grimaced and gestured me into his office.
  We faced each other over his desk.  “I had the strangest dream of my life.  I’m not sure it was even a dream it was so vivid.”

    “Go on.”

    “I was on this other planet, and we, this group, were discussing traveling to another planet.  It wasn’t anything like space movies or TV shows.  We were completely sure of ourselves.  We could move things easily with our minds.  Reconstruct matter to whatever we needed with sound by voice.  We used light and sound for healing and destruction.  There was no fragmentation of knowledge as we have in the various sciences and religions.  Everything was one.”  His face convulsed.  “It made everything we have and do look crass, primitive, and pathetic.”  He looked away, mouth crumpled, eyes tormented. “Yet people were the same; good, helpful, mean, and bad.”

    I smiled thinly.
  “Once you jokingly asked one of our trance mediums for a past life reading about four years ago.  We gave it.  Do you still have the transcript?”

    Deckart rummaged through several desk drawers, and came up with the four sheets of closely handwritten pages.
 

    “Read it yet?”

    “No. Forgot all about it.”

    “Good.
  Don’t.  Not yet.  Write down your dream first.  As much as you remember.  Everything: emotions, physical descriptions of everything, and yourselves - clothes, hair.  Don’t leave anything out.  After you’re done, read your life reading.”  I cleared my throat. “I need to see O’Banion now.  Maybe later we can talk about what you find.”

    Deckart nodded and beckoning a young lieutenant from the outside, and instructed I be taken to O’Banion.
  As we walked to the holding cells deeper in the building, I could sense the lieutenant eying me with a badly hidden awe, but also a strange animosity.  “What?”  I said.

    “Everyone says you’re a wizard.
  Healing people, seeing the future, seeing the past.  Kind of like a god of some sort.”  He swallowed, eyes squinting behind glasses, lips wrinkled, and voice tight with anger. “Small ‘g’.”

    “I’m just a regular man, lieutenant.”
  He opened a heavy steel door to a room lined with holding cells.  The hinges squeaked.  A man stood, shoes scraping on the tile floor.

    “You do these things, though?”
  The stubborn cast of his chin told of his disbelief.

    “Yes.
   Anyone can do this if they understand the nature of energy.”

    “Energy is energy.”

    I laughed. “All energy is conscious, and aware.  That is what people won’t admit, forget, or don’t understand.  Remember that.”   Should I have told him that if you know how, you can communicate with these energies?   And that makes all the difference.  Nah, he’d never have believed me. 

    “I’ve always been taught what you’re saying is a bunch of crap.”

    I shrugged.  “Another approach,” I said.  “Doesn’t change anything.  Might consider what you’ve been taught is a bunch of crap.”   He turned red, but kept his mouth shut.

    He walked to the first door on his left, and opened it with a set of keys.
  O’Banion hopped off the bunk to greet me.  The lieutenant stepped back quickly.  “Relax,” I said, and clapped him on the shoulder.  He shrugged off my hand.  I entered and he closed door behind us.  We heard the key grate in the lock.  I snorted a short laugh and Chuck O’Banion managed a slight smile.

    “Chuck,”
  I started, but he cut me off with a wave of his hand, very agitated.

    “Got a daughter named Meg.
  You got to take care of her.” 

    I nodded. “Okay, where do we find her?”
  He seemed relieved, but there was still plenty of tension.

    “She’s here at the fort.
  With the orphans.  Look, you gotta promise me she won’t see me executed.”

    “I can arrange it.
  What does she look like?”

    “She’s little, dark shoulder length hair, brown eyes.
  Takes after her mother.  Real pretty.  There’s a scar, a big one, diagonally down the side of her right cheek.  You can’t miss her.  She’s six years old.  I’ve told her about you.”

    “We’ll take care of her as one of my own.”

    He had a lot of things to get off his mind.  “You know, they didn’t even bury my wife.  I don’t know what we’ve come to.”  His voice held the anger of not understanding, perhaps the most terrible anger of all. 

    “She visited you in your dreams.”

    “Several times.  So I know she still lives.  It’s incredible to me.  I’d never believed such a thing unless it had happened.  First time was like a nightmare.  Then everything pulled back.  There she was alive and real.  You were there.”  He shook his head.  “She’s visited me three times in the last month.”  Bemused disbelief in his eyes.

    Then a familiar sound, the lever of the first gallows moved and the jarring of the sandbag dummy pulled up short.
  Chuck’s face went white.  “Soon I go to meet her.  That I don’t regret.  She’s the one person I’ve always felt comfortable with.  There were lots of other good people murdered in that slaughter.  Sure a bunch I don’t understand.  I want to thank you for your help, my friend.”  His eyes brimmed and his voice caught.  He looked up.  “I need time alone to speak to my Father.  Thank you for coming.”

    I rapped on the door for the guard.
  “Don’t fear for Meg.  We’ll raise her as our own daughter.  I’ll see she doesn’t forget you.  Consider coming to our community and speaking to Meg through one of our mediums after you’re out of your body.  Meg would like that.  Need that.”  The guard let me out and I left Chuck O’Banion to speak with the Creator Within.

    Deckart met me in the front lobby.
  “Think he’ll try to escape like Joaquin Garcia?”

    I chuckled at the memory. “No.
  He’ll handle himself well.”  Joaquin Garcia considered himself a great and gallant bandit.  He led his band of criminals up from Mexico preying on the surviving populace.  He hated white folks and tried to focus on them exclusively, but found it hard as Hispanic and Anglo populations pretty much integrated themselves via marriage and living in the same communities.

    Anyway, Carson literally caught him with his pants down relieving himself behind a bush.
  Tried and condemned for murdering seventeen men, women, and children, he lost his bravado.  Carson refused to commute his sentence. 

    Brought out of his holding cell, Joaquin asked that his hands be untied so he could blow his nose.
  Hands untied, he caught his guards unaware, knocked them down and bolted for the door.  Carson always dressed his condemned prisoners in pants four sizes too large so the unfortunate had to hold them up.  Taken to the gallows the pants were belted with thin string.  On his reaching the door the string caught on the doorknob and snapped.  The pants came down and Joaquin tripped into a very undignified heap.

    Guess death can have its humorous side.
  Maybe to show us it isn’t all we’ve cracked it up to be.  I’ve seen dozens of hangings.  Seems word got around that people died better after they’d seen me.  The Angel of Death was one of the things they called me.  Carson never denied his prisoner’s request to see me, but he never sent for me either.  I usually managed to be there.

    “I think it will be memorable,”
  I said carefully, “but not for any reason of escape or violence.”  Deckart gave me a questioning look, but changed the subject.

    “I did as you suggested, wrote my dream down, and then read the reading.”
  He was confused, excited, and curious all at the same time.  A new idea had actually introduced itself into his reality.  Gawd Almighty, will miracles never end. “They were both the same.  I mean really the same.  They confirmed and filled in gaps for each other.  I don’t know what to think.”

    “More will come,” I said.
  We walked outside.  I pointed to the spacecraft.  “Familiar?”  I left him with his thoughts, looking up at the sky.  Deckart was a very solid down-to-earth person, but his thoughts were elsewhere now.

    I looked around for the orphans.
  They usually hung out together.  These were children whose parents had died of the many disease epidemics, jay hawker raids, weather exposure, and even starvation.  Then there were those whose parents died executed on Carson’s Long Beam.  The emotional scars of these children bordered on the unbelievable.  Carson and Deckart took great care not to permit these children to watch their parents hanged.  But the damage seemed inescapable.  Periodically Carson shipped these children back to Denver.  But none had gone in the last eight months because of the deteriorating social conditions.

    Then I saw her.
  She sat huddled by one corner of the trading post.  Laith came over and I nodded to the girl. “Meg O’Banion,” I said.

    “O’Banion’s daughter?”

    I nodded.  “She’s going to need what you have to give, my man.”

    Laith studied Meg silently, eyes closing often, facial expression changing, once hard, then relaxed.
  “I understand.  Benson has to be kept at bay.  I’ll leave that to you, Dad.”

    “Indeed.
  You’ve got it.  Let’s go.”  We walked over to Meg.  I saw Benson with a group of followers come out of the trading post.  Laith saw me raise my eyes to the sky and shake my head in disgust.  He laughed.  “His Ignorance has seen you.”  He snickered.

    “I’ll run interference,”
  I said breathing a prayer for guidance, and tolerance.  Laith grinned and turned to Meg.

    Eli Benson stood there huge, rawboned with shaggy white hair and beard framing a craggy face.
  He looked like some bigger than life prophet walking right out of the pages of the Old Testament.  And he knew it, cultivated it, and used it for effect.  But a prophet with no precognition, only a fanatical zealousness that knew only the bounds of his doubts and ethics, which were many and real.  They kept him from the extremes some religious absolutists used to create their own brutal, and often violent cults.

    Benson came close.
  The stench of his breath almost made me vomit.  Then his words fell in sounds worse than his breath.  “Son of Darkness, why have you come with your spawn to torment this child?  She is sick with the sins of father and whore of a mother, and she needs me.”

    I heard Meg wail.
  Laith didn’t turn around.  “Good God, man.  She heard you,”  I said.

    “I know.”
  The smile, strange, with a wild tick started just above the left upper lip.  He bordered on the edge of self-imposed religious ecstasy.  “She needs to come to God, as you do.”  The voice lowered and white flecks of foam showed at the corner of his mouth.  “Come to me, Jamie.  Come to God.  Come to his Son.”  He reached out big, powerful hands, which matched his body well.  My skin crawled.  It took a lot just to keep my mind straight and stay focused.

    “Not even you or your spawn with all your powers can take her sins away,” he breathed, eyes bright and intense.

    “Why haven’t you these powers you speak of?” I asked.

    “They were given to you by Satan.
  Those of God must sometimes be tested.”  He trembled.  “But now I think God will grant me those powers and use me as His Instrument to put an end to you and your spawn’s legend.”  His voice rose, “Yes, I feel it.  The Power.”