The Mad and the MacAbre (29 page)

And to honor her memory, he would now
protect the faith of millions.

“
Are you ready?” Jess
asked.

Gabriel nodded, and squeezed her hand.

They turned away from the distant silhouette
of the cross and the amassed rocks that now clogged the spring, and
began their descent of Mount Isolation for the final time.

***

Gabriel sat on the couch with his laptop on
the coffee table in front of him. Beyond that small screen was the
much larger television, which Jess watched from the kitchen behind
him while she doled out the Mongolian beef and Szechuan chicken
onto plates from the take-out containers. He heard the clatter of
plates on the eating bar and smelled the divine mixture of aromas.
Oscar had taken notice as well. Despite his useless rear leg, he
managed to leap out of Gabriel’s lap and scamper around the couch
to entangle himself in Jess’s feet.

“
Ready to take a break for
dinner?” she asked, massaging Gabriel’s shoulders to make sure she
had his attention. Oscar meowed and pawed at her legs until she
picked him up.

“
Yeah. I just need a couple
more minutes…”

His voice trailed off.

The rerun of Seinfeld had been interrupted
by another news flash showing aerial coverage of the fire in Rocky
Mountain National Park, which had now been burning for more than
seventy-two hours. They speculated it may have been caused by a
lightning strike, or perhaps a carelessly discarded cigarette butt.
Either way, it made Gabriel nervous. Thirty-five hundred acres had
already been consumed. The remote location and steep slopes,
coupled with the gusting winds, made the fire nearly impossible to
contain. Pine Springs had been evacuated the day before and the
highway closed to all but emergency personnel. Pockets of fire
burned from the scorched earth while a halo of towering flames
advanced outward in all directions. The image zoomed out to
encompass the greatest extent of the damage. The sharp topography
of the mountains looked like the landscape of another planet
entirely. Rugged peaks and chiseled valleys aligned in such a way
that they almost looked like a—

“
Jesus,” Gabriel
whispered.

He leaned forward, grabbed the remote from
the table, and paused the picture on the screen with the aid of the
DVR. Carefully, he saved the paper he had been preparing on the
unclassified species of salt-loving microorganism he had been
writing for publication in the Journal of Bacteriology of the
American Society for Microbiology entitled “On a New Species of
Haloarchaea: H. stephanii,” and typed in a quick internet search.
He breezed through the sites until he found what he was looking
for, and enlarged the image to fill the small screen. It was an
image of the surface of the Cydonia region of Mars as captured by
Michael Malin’s Mars Orbiter Camera in 2001, the infamous “Face on
Mars.”

Gabriel glanced from the monitor to the
frozen picture on the TV, then back again. Over and over.

It was the same face, the same seemingly
natural alignment of peaks and valleys on planets separated by
hundreds of thousands of miles.

The same gaunt, desiccated face into which
he had stared in a cobweb-riddled cockpit in the heart of Mount
Isolation.

The true visage of God.

About the Authors

Jeff Strand and Michael
McBride have written over thirty books, though not together. Their
novels include PRESSURE (Jeff), BLOODLETTING (Mike), DWELLER
(Jeff), THE INFECTED (Mike), WOLF HUNT (Jeff), GOD’S END (Mike),
BENJAMIN’S PARASITE (Jeff), and INNOCENTS LOST (Mike).
Mike likes to write about science and the end of the world, and
does a lot of research. Jeff likes to write about psycho killers
and flesh-eating monsters, and does significantly less research.
Jeff thinks Mike should really be taking better advantage of
Facebook as a promotional tool, but the fact that Mike doesn’t
waste time on Facebook might help explain why he writes his books
at a steady, consistent pace while Jeff freaks out right before the
deadline.
You can visit Mike’s website at
http://www.MichaelMcBride.net
and Jeff’s website at
http://www.JeffStrand.com
.
You should visit both.

Dark Regions Press has
been publishing since 1985 and is an award winning press. We
specialize in Horror, Fantasy, and Science Fiction. However our
favorite niche is Horror. We have published such renowned writers
as Bentley Little, Kevin J. Anderson, Michael Arnzen, Elizabeth
Massie, Jeffrey Thomas and many others. Dark Regions Press has had
many Bram Stoker Award nominations and
four award-winning short story and poetry
collections.

Visit our
website
for more exciting
books.