The Emissary (2 page)

The thought of that kid pulling a knife on the other, for something as trivial as a stereo, was unconscionable to a simple, peace-loving man like Nathan, who grew up in a time when people still talked to each other … when there was still a dialogue going on. Sure, there had always been violence, he didn’t deny that, but it was the exception when he was growing up, compared to the new “normal” of today: this constant threat, all the time, everywhere … around every corner. The world was seething now, bubbling over in a cauldron of rage. From the looks of things that he saw come down on a daily basis, in that microcosmic corner of a crazy new world, the Mall, reason was all but gone. The human dialogue was over, and what had replaced it was irrational, unyielding disregard for everyone and everything. It had given way to the animal instinct: take what you want; kill or be killed.

That was how Nathan had come to perceive the world in which he was growing old … and he did not like what he saw.

Was a human life really worth nothing more than fifty bucks to the youth of today? He knew that answer. Kids were killing each other out there for far less than that—even just for the fun of it. And where the hell were these kids’ parents, he wondered, dragging them, like a couple of snarling pack dogs, back to the security office, by the scruffs of their necks. Where, for the love of god, were the parents?

Meanwhile, while this drama was unfolding, at the north end, a frantic young mother came running out of Macy’s, screaming hysterically, moments after her little girl disappeared, in seconds, from her sight. The security team of more than one hundred guards—in uniform and plainclothed—executed emergency procedures throughout the mall, controlling all the exits, questioning anybody who looked suspicious and everybody with small children. They scrutinized every inch of the stores and the parking grounds via the network of surveillance equipment, but the girl was gone without a trace. Nothing showed up on the monitors; nobody had seen a child fitting her description; not a soul had noticed anything out of the ordinary.

It was as if she had simply evaporated into thin air.

Shoplifting throughout the mall’s seventy-eight stores was rampant—security arrested thirty-four people in one day alone, and more than two hundred in a week. Each time they had had to call in the police, and these people were booked, handcuffed, and taken away in squad cars. Why had this national pastime become so predominant in the youth culture of the day? Did they have any idea what it meant to spend even one night in a jail cell? Nathan just couldn’t get his mind around what people were thinking anymore; he was admittedly out of step with the times. He didn’t understand what motivated the youth, if anything even could, or where society was headed, and he just generally felt out of place and out of touch with the twenty-first century, altogether.

By the end of his shift, he couldn’t even feel his feet anymore. His
back hurt, his head was throbbing, and it was just adrenaline, he knew, that kept him from collapsing. He wondered if he really could wait out another whole year, until the glory days of retirement—the minute he turned sixty-five. Then, at long last, between Social Security and his pension, he would finally be able to live out his old age with dignity: enjoying the grandkids; going fishing like he used to do; leaving the mall and the world at large to work themselves and all the drama out without him.

He opened the door of his wounded Chevy, placing the bag of splintered glass carefully on the floor in the back, and fell into the driver’s seat, so worn out he could barely turn the key. “Take Daddy home, Jezebel,” he said out loud, caressing the steering wheel. “Poppa’s all out of gas.”

Nathan sighed wearily at the thought that on top of his ten-hour workday, he still had to face two hours of stop-and-go traffic before he could finally kick off his shoes and dive onto the sofa, next to an ice-cold beer … with nothing he had to do, and nobody he had to think about for the next forty-eight hours. The only thing on his mind was “chilling out,” like the rest of America, with the NFL playoffs in his face, pizza in one hand, and beer in the other.

After being trapped in Ventura Highway’s infernal freeway gridlock for more than two excruciating hours, he finally reached the exit that led to his neighborhood, where, but for kids playing loudly on the streets and a few barking dogs, life was relatively quiet … and still reasonably sane. He’d lived there twenty years. It was a small, tightly knit community, where everyone knew and watched out for each other, and where trouble rarely found its way in: as safe a hamlet as one could find in suburban L.A., where “normal folk” (as he referred to himself and his neighbors) still lived.

He smacked his lips in anticipation of a frothy cold brew, knowing how close he was to being finally able to escape, away from people, into the sanctity of his own four walls.

Turning onto his street, he honked and waved at his neighbor, who was outside watering the lawn. “Yo, Willie boy!” he shouted, rolling down the window. “You have got to have the greenest lawn in the country, dude!”

“Mister Beals!” Will called back, approaching the sidewalk. “How about this heat—in January? Wild, huh?”

Nathan slowed the car to a complete stop in the middle of the street. “We just took down the tinsel at work and it’s ninety degrees out here. The world is some kind of upside down, man.”

“It is indeed! Are you finally off duty?”

“I am! Not a minute too soon, neither,” Nathan answered, wiping the sweat from his brow, with the crisply ironed handkerchief he carried in his shirt pocket.

Will took a long slurp from the water hose. “And you’re sure I can’t convince you to come over tomorrow? We’re throwing some mighty fine lookin’ sirloins on the grill!”

“Thanks. You know I’d love to join you guys, but I am too wiped out even for Will’s mean-ass barbeque.” He didn’t have the heart to tell his good friend that the only human activity he wanted to see for the next two days was a bunch of helmets running the ball down the field on his thirty-six-inch screen, and the pizza delivery guy from Guido’s knocking at the door.

“The Jets and the Patriots … gonna be one hell of a game!”

“I hear that,” said Nathan, tempted.

“Thelma and the girls—they’ll be going out to spend the day with her mother, so it’s just us dudes, plenty of brew … barbeque … and some kick-ass football, man.”

“I thank you, I do,” said Nathan, “but I have just got to lay low this weekend. And as tired as this ol’ body is right now? I am just as likely to sleep right through the whole thing anyway.”

“Hey, man, you know the invite’s always open, if you change your mind. After a good night’s sleep, I bet you’ll be knocking on my door!”

Just as Nathan waved goodbye, his foot about to step back on the gas, two small blackbirds dropped, simultaneously, out of the sky—right in the middle of the street, between the two men. Before either even had a chance to react, hell unleashed its fury. In one terrifying moment, hundreds of red-winged blackbirds plummeted to the ground, all at once, blanketing the pavement, as if something had zapped them right out of the sky. Not one of them moved. No flutter of wings. It appeared they had been hit by a force so fierce it had killed them instantaneously—in flight.

“Damn!” Will shouted, having been pummeled on the head and shoulders several times, as the tiny corpses hailed down from the sky and crashed down around him. He stared out at Nathan, dumbfounded. “What the hell?”

“You get yourself into the house and stay there, until we find out what just happened!”

Will dropped the hose and walked hurriedly back towards the porch, stepping over dead birds everywhere around him. He felt a strange, gripping fear—a sense of foreboding—rising in the back of his throat. As he turned off the faucet, he looked back over his shoulder at Nathan, mystified, before going inside, and then he slammed the door closed and locked it with the dead bolt. Both of them were incredulous, sensing that something sinister—something ominous and unprecedented—was literally coming down all around them.

As in a scene reminiscent of Hitchcock’s film
The Birds
, Nathan drove in a slow crawl to the driveway, trying to avoid the fragile little bodies, but there were hundreds, maybe thousands, of dead birds strewn in every direction. They lined the pavement for as far as he could see down the road ahead of him. Their bodies were smashed against the windshield and the hood of the car and, looking through the rearview mirror, he saw the same black blanket of death, covering the street behind him. He cringed as his wheels
crunched over each little bump, praying that the little creatures had died instantly, knowing no pain.

As he guided the car slowly onto his driveway, he asked himself if Judgment Day had finally arrived, just like the Reverend had warned them—only days before, in congregation. When the automatic door of his garage opened, he pulled the car in, closed the door back down, and went straight inside, through the kitchen. Once in the house, he threw the dead bolt—knowing that whatever had killed those birds wasn’t going to be deterred by locks or closed doors if it wanted in, but somehow it felt like the right thing to do.

In a quiet little resort town in Maine that same day, Judy Levine prepared a nutritious picnic basket for her and the children, after home-teaching them all morning. Outdoors, the whipping wind snapped with the chilling sting of winter, but she had them bundled up in their down jackets and, besides, the rugged beach and the fresh air beckoned. It was a welcome break having lunch outside, at the water’s edge—no matter how challenging Maine’s winter weather proved to be. Judy always marveled at how invigorating it was to breathe in the crisp sea air and to listen to the roar of waves breaking, mighty and commanding, over the jutting cliffs nearby.

Situated directly in front of their beachfront property was a rocky cove, which served as a natural barrier to the winter winds that rolled over the coast. She and the children called it their “secret fort.” There, the kids would entertain themselves for hours, making sculptures in the moist sand, and Judy would kick back and relax, watching the blue water crabs climbing sideways, up and around in rocks of the tide pools: one of Mother Nature’s oddities that so enriched the palette of her artistic creation.

Spending time together out by the water was always a great way to break up the tedium of the day’s lessons, and it was a vital part of her work with the children, teaching them to honor and always
celebrate the wonders of Earth’s own garden, while enjoying the magic of play. That day, however, when they stepped out through the backyard gate and approached the shore, she was horrified to discover a strange, silvery patina covering the sand that, on closer inspection, turned out to be an enormous mass of dead fish. Their suffocating bodies littered the entire beachfront, all the way down the coast. She stared in disbelief, gazing as far down the shore as she could, estimating that there were tens of thousands of them, heaped up over each other, their gills expanding and contracting, as they lay dying in the open air.

Whatever had caused this horrific catastrophe had to have struck so suddenly that it still had not been picked up by the local media. No mention was made of it on the morning news that she and her husband had watched at breakfast, only a few hours earlier. There was no stench of death, that putrid odor of rotting fish, in the wind. No, this was fresh—many of them were still alive, so it had to have only just happened. She was quite possibly the first person to discover the disaster: massive and instantaneous—and probably highly toxic.

Panicked, she dropped the basket and grabbed her children, almost dragging them back to the house. Pouting and carrying on, they wanted to stay outside, and they couldn’t understand why their mother had done an immediate turnaround. Trying not to frighten them, she rushed the children through the gate and back into the house, closing all the windows and doors, and locking them all inside—until she could find out what dangers lurked outdoors. Who knew what new environmental catastrophe had taken place out off the coast, enough to cause such a massive fish kill? With the way things were going in the world—the poisoning of the skies, the earth, and the sea—she knew anything was possible. She most certainly wasn’t going to let the children or herself get any more exposure to whatever had killed those fish than they
had already. God only knew what toxin was being released into the air, or what chemical was laced within the ocean’s spray, seeping deep into the sand.

Just hours later, halfway around the globe, on the South Island of New Zealand, locals woke up to the horrifying news that fifty humpback whales and more than a hundred bottlenose dolphins had beached themselves during the night. According to the first morning news reports, it was a scene of “devastating proportions.” Almost all were dead when the first observers discovered their lifeless bodies, lined up along the beach, like ships thrown out of the sea, in a hurricane. A gruesome, heartbreaking scene, it made no sense at all. Why were such unfathomable numbers of whales and dolphins washing up along the beaches of the world in such catastrophic scenes as these? What was driving them from the deep waters to meet their death on Earth’s shores?

Hundreds of animal conservationists and volunteers poured onto the beach to help, but with low tide sucking the waves back out to sea, there was no way to save the immobilized prisoners from their fate. To the despair of those who worked tirelessly throughout the day, the few remaining mammals still alive were dying now, and it was clear that not even a shift in the tide could save them. It was too late. Captives of the scorching summer sands, they struggled to breathe their last breaths, their eyes fixed on the humans who were there for them, in their final hours.

Desperate people worked unrelentingly to free them, but it was all for naught. Slowly, torturously, the mighty whales and their cousins, the dolphin beings, succumbed, leaving an immense void in their passing.

All anyone could do was to try to comfort them.

To be utterly impotent before the mass death of such magnificent beings was to lose a piece of oneself forever. No one present
that day would ever be free of that memory. The heartache would linger forever in the deep, deep waters of the subconscious, from where such sadness would ripple and wave, always asking, “What could have been done differently?” Who amongst them could not be struggling to accept the inevitability of such a cruel, tragic death? Such painful memories would never be erased from the hearts and souls of the people who had watched, helpless to alter the course of the events that day, and it was only right that they not be forgotten.