House of Cabal Volume One: Eden (2 page)

As the sun arced across the sky, temperatures
soared into the triple digits. Dana was thankful that at least the
Blackwater employees were professional enough to follow orders.
They drank bottled water, draped wet undershirts over their heads,
pissed, and drank more water. Most were ex-military and accustomed
to the harsh desert environment. Despite their precautions, officer
Joey, while excavating with a shovel, dropped from heat exhaustion
as if suddenly dead.

The officer next to him rolled his eyes.

"Well, help me get him up."

Dana feared that she had been the stubborn
one, not the guides, for making everyone work through the heat.

“Don’t worry your pretty little head, Dana.
He’ll be fine. Joey’s a big boy.”

Joey was a barrel-chested gentle giant and
was always the first to get motion sickness or food poisoning or
stung by a scorpion.

Four officers worked together to carry him
into the Parrs’ tent, all the while recounting how Joey once
fainted while waiting his turn in a brothel and how it sucked that
there weren’t brothels in the Middle East.

Dana's husband gave the fragile ex-marine
liquids and dabbed him with a wet cloth. “Look at this hulk!” he
said to Dana. “He’s like Paul Bunyan. And handsome too.” Joey
stirred, disoriented. “You okay? You went away for a little
while.”

Joey was back on his feet in less than an
hour and out under the sun again, searching quadrants.

"At least we’re not getting shot at,” Joey
said, still embarrassed. “Knock on wood." He wiped his forehead,
raking salt grit across his skin.

“If you feel faint, go sit down. We can
handle this.”

“And let you guys have all the fun?”

The scientists were puffy from the heat,
their eyes sunken, but as they staked out further quadrants to keep
the search organized, no others passed out. Boris helped for the
first hour and then walked away from his team without
explanation.

He remained on the outskirts of the search
perimeter, facing away from camp, and held his hand close to his
chest. Sometimes his five fingers looked like six. Then he noticed
with a turning of his stomach that his right index finger was
missing the nail. In the nail’s place had grown a tiny row of baby
teeth.

Every so often Dana checked on the search
progress. Everyone besides her and her husband were getting paid a
small fortune. She wanted to do more to ensure progress, but it was
too damn hot. Mostly she stayed in her tent and told her husband to
be careful not to overexert himself. Let the professionals do the
heavy lifting. Each time she went out she noticed Boris in the
wavering distance.

Feeling self-conscious, her husband busied
himself in an attempt to appear useful. He watched the Eden mite
under the microscope, though he couldn’t make heads or tails of it
without Boris’s guidance. He charged the battery in his wheelchair
with the portable generator. He handed out wet rags to combat the
heat. He reviewed the tablet’s ancient symbols.

One of the more lucid sections of the text
referred to the valley where they now resided, between the dead
rock in the south and the twin hills in the north. "For the
faithful, the garden was there and is there still." Only the text
was in primitive Aramaic.

At dusk, the couple surveyed the day’s work
together, Dana on foot and her husband in his wheelchair. The
desert valley fluttered with a square mile of marker flags.

“Maybe the Eden mites only come out at
night,” she suggested.

Her husband nodded, with an apprehensive
expression. He watched the far dunes as if something was
coming.

The guides, who usually became more animated
near the end of the day, huddled and smoked cigarettes.

The sand radiated heat like fire pit
stones.

The people waited silently for the other shoe
to drop, afraid that voicing their concerns would make their fears
manifest.

Boris, after rehydrating, wandered back out
among the flags. Dana almost told him to be careful but didn’t want
to sound paranoid in front of the men. Boris seemed discomposed,
his steps more of a shamble than a walk. They all watched him.
Maybe Boris just needed some time alone.

Her insides flipped over from the day’s heat,
or from anxiety. She ate some dried Iraqi figs, a food she usually
relished. Now the tiny seeds made her cringe. Her husband refused
her offer to share, and she begrudgingly ate the rest herself,
breaking the dark, almost purple, skin and turning the fruit inside
out before biting off small pieces.

The sun turned blood red, likely from the
smoke of an oil refinery burning beyond the horizon. The country
was at war. It was a fact easy to forget out in the middle of
nowhere.

Only Boris saw in the sky above the sunset an
Aurora Borealis ripple like a suspended red sheet. His right hand
was a phantom body-part, even if it wasn’t missing yet. It ached
and throbbed and felt like it belonged to someone else. He knew it
would be missing soon enough. Everything was red. The sun. The
marker flags. The wavering light in the darkening sky. He heard his
wife giving birth, despite the fact that she was six hundred miles
away.

Not that he trusted his senses anymore. His
brain itched and squirmed like a swollen aphid in his skull.

The Eden mite. He had thought it was his
savior and now knew it was his damnation. Science couldn’t explain
its effects, at least not in time to be useful. He was getting
worse. He needed to inform his colleagues of his condition. He
didn’t want to admit it, but the best course of action was to
amputate.

As the wind picked up, he spread out his
arms, closed his eyes to the sand and sun, and listened to the
flags flutter.

“God, help me,” he said in Russian.

Joey saw Boris standing out there like a
scarecrow and started to cry.

“It’s the Antichrist.”

One of his brothers tried to comfort him.
“It’s just Boris.”

“It’s not him. It’s not him anymore.”

A sandstorm crested over the dunes like a
flood. It consumed Boris first and then the rest of the expedition,
dropping visibility to no more than a few feet.

Boris called for help. The rush of the sand
was too loud for anyone to hear him. He groped forward, shielding
his face with his arm as he watched the ground. The marker flags
formed a grid. Maybe he could use them to navigate back to
shelter.

All he wanted was the satellite phone, so he
could call his wife one last time.

In only a few minutes, night fell and
visibility dropped even further. From the darkness he heard his
wife's labor grunts and outcries, as if she was in the sandstorm
with him, giving birth.

“Hold on!”

Panicked, he ran toward the cries with his
infected hand reaching out, stumbled into what he thought was a
Humvee grill, and he braced himself on the smooth vertical bars.
His hand now felt like a marionette, like it was missing the joint
cartilage and could only be manipulated indirectly. He wrapped his
fingers around the bars to make his hand feel more solid. The
“grill” swung open, letting out a fuzzy, white light. Though dim,
the light pierced his retina. It bored into his brain. He tried to
keep his eyes open, despite the pain, to understand what he was
seeing.

The swirling sand around him suspended in
midair like time had stopped. The knuckles in his right hand became
universes. He could almost see something through the light,
something vaster than the desert, something more glorious than the
surface of the sun. He closed his eyes to the sting.

It was too late.

His eyes ignited.

He screamed in agony and pulled back.

His hand came off at the wrist. Arm skin
bunched up like plastic wrap, and the exposed veins and tendons
wriggled away from the bone, reaching for the light the way plants
grow in time-lapse.

If you're not familiar with the Bible’s
creation myth, near the dawn of time, Adam and Eve ate the
forbidden fruit born of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.
For violating God’s trust, they were cast out, and Uriel, with a
sword of God’s fire, guarded the garden’s entrance and made sure
Adam and Eve never returned.

In reality, the garden had no forbidden tree
or fruit. Uriel wasn’t keeping Adam and Eve out, but the whole
human race. And his weapon wasn't literally a fire sword. But the
metaphor was apt.

Trespass resulted in incineration.

Boris, with burnt-out eyes, saw his wife. She
was in a hospital gown, exhausted. Sweat clung to her brow as she
gazed at their swaddled newborn. Was it a boy or girl? Before he
thought to ask, Boris, his wife, and his child were consumed by the
holy flame.

The tedium of guarding a gate that existed
outside of time and space made Uriel a bit overzealous. Finally,
here was the reason behind all the waiting. He wanted to get his
wrath’s worth.

The blinding sand provided the cherub cover.
Those not killed by the "sword of fire" were killed by friendly
fire as the Blackwater officers shot at any perceived threat. Joey
passed out, missing most of the action, and was incinerated all the
same.

While Uriel slaughtered those with guns,
those with scientific knowledge, and those native to the land, Dana
ran toward the light, only glancing back once to make sure her
husband followed.

The gate, the portal to paradise, closed just
as she and her husband crossed the threshold.

Uriel took his time, relishing his grim work.
He found an Iraqi guide cowering, praying to Allah. There was an
atheist scientist hiding in the latrine. A Christian clung to the
stone tablet and begged for forgiveness. The sandstorm swept up the
ashes and flowed south, leaving only the charred, twisted husks of
the Humvees and mobile laboratory behind.

Chapter 2

I

Dana and her husband had entered paradise
while Uriel was distracted. Impossible. Yet there the two humans
were, inside the gates.

To find out how, I entered the timestream and
witnessed the expedition, the Eden mite, and the tragedy that
befell Boris’s family in Tbilisi, Georgia.

At the David Tatishvili Medical Center, the
mother and child’s death was classified as a rare case of
spontaneous combustion caused by childbirth. Their ashes were kept
in a large ceramic tub for scientific study in a private room only
accessible by keycard.

Experts flew in from Germany and hastily
concluded that the remains were similar to a 1980 case. Old Man
Henry combusted in his home in South Wales. His greasy clothing
caught fire in his sleep and acted like a candle wick. He died from
smoke inhalation, and his fat burned over the course of the night,
leaving an ash pile and his legs below the knee eerily untouched.
The “wick effect” didn’t explain the mother and child’s combustion.
Among other things, their incineration was too instantaneous and
complete. The experts ignored the contradictions and flew back to
Germany.

The hospital disregarded the extended
family’s wishes (most of the family were still in Russia), and
unceremoniously threw the remains in a reusable plastic bin for
biomedical waste, burying used syringes, bloody gauze, and a
swollen foot amputated from a diabetic in the coarse, gray ash of
the mother and child. An outside company later that day removed the
waste and in strict accordance to procedure disposed of it off
site.

II

The ravenous bugs of Eden left Dana and her
husband naked and trembling. The humans were frightened, but
unharmed. I re-entered the timestream, this time back before the
expedition, still thirsting for a fuller picture.

Omar al-Jamadi strode down the deserted main
hall of the Iraqi National Museum and scanned the darkness with a
flashlight, making sure no one lay in wait. He had worked here as a
security guard. His boss had let him go (really, he had fired him)
for his own safety, saying it was too dangerous for anyone to
remain behind during the invasion.

Outside the quiet museum, looters ravaged
Baghdad. Bombing had knocked out most of the city’s power, and men
with guns and makeshift weapons now prowled the darkened streets.
Many scrounged for necessities, while others, some in large groups,
looked to cause trouble.

The museum stood out in the open and begged
to be plundered. Its front facade resembled a castle, but its back
half, with its large glass windows, resembled an office building,
and it would be easy to infiltrate.

The galleries appeared scavenged already.
Whole display cases were empty. Mannequins overturned. Banners
strewn across the marble floor.

The museum staff, hearing the US’s drumbeat
for war, had hastily moved much of the collection to an undisclosed
location outside the city, leaving the place in disarray. Before
that, the Iraqi government had confiscated a significant portion of
the more valuable exhibits without explanation. There wasn’t much
left to loot.

Omar quickly descended the back stairs. He
scanned the underground storage rooms and searched for a
distinctive symbol that was supposedly carved into the lid of a
wooden box. The symbol looked like a figure eight with an arrow on
both sides pointing to the center. He didn’t see it anywhere.

In and out as fast as possible. That was his
plan. Back home, he had left his old Glock 22 with his eldest son
to protect the rest of the family. In the eerie silence of the
underground, he tried not to regret that decision.

More than a hundred cuneiform tablets were in
storage, with thousands of similar tablets on display across the
world. These kind of tablets weren’t a rare artifact by any means.
No one would notice if this one in particular went missing. He
deserved some kind of severance package for his many years at the
museum.