The Prometheus Objective

20

Bullets tore into the elevator from twin carbines, and Orlando could make out frightened screams of the men wielding the guns. He had a glimpse of a large area, a lobby with a central desk, a few windows and a main doorway, flanked by metal detectors.

Four men in camo gear. He had a psychic glimpse of them pacing earlier, shaking their heads, screaming at each other and themselves, yelling at someone to “Get our orders!”, and then firing as a door opened and anguished administrators burst through like crazed criminals escaping their cells.

There was blood, a lot of it, on the walls and the desk and a body slumped over the terminal, but these four… they were well-trained. Disciplined mentally and physically, they were fighting the onslaught of this massive change.

Three of them fired away at the elevator as the doors opened.

“Can’t you do something?” Orlando yelled to his new friend, pressed flat against the side of the elevator cab. But she just hugged herself and kind of jumped up and down, still laughing at some internal joke.

“Guess not.” Orlando held the opposite position and just started hammering the Close Door button, but it was either extremely slow — or broken in the gunfire, and the doors remained open.

If they charge in here, it’s Game Over.

He wished he had a white flag to wave. As it were, all he could do was look into the bullet-riddled back wall, the mirrored surface, to see the men advancing, reloading, preparing to fire again.

All but one…

One with his gun pointed down. Free hand to his temple, eyes clenched. Then…

Come on, buddy, see something, do something. Help…

More bullets, some ricocheting and barely missing his head. “Damn it! Come on, don’t shoot, don’t!”

Suddenly screaming. Painful, surprised shouts. A glimpse in the mangled cab wall, and it looked like the guards were now shooting at each other. Two were down and the last two—

Orlando’s cab mate started clapping her hands, rolling back her eyes and howling.

The gunfire stopped as she spun around and calmly walked out into the lobby.

Orlando tentatively followed.

Three guards were down, slumped and twitching, full of bullets. The fourth, shot in the abdomen, was slumped against the main desk. He dropped his rifle and tried to offer a smile as they approached.

“Saw you,” he muttered through a mouthful of blood as he pointed to Orlando. “With a girl, a pretty thing…”

“What?”

“And two babies, a boy and girl with… oh god, bright gold eyes…”

“Oh,” Orlando moved past the woman and knelt by the guard. Took his hand. “You can see this? Is it…?”

He was rewarded with a look of pure confusion, but a broad smile took hold, as the eyes gazed past and through him toward somewhere else.

“There’s ice. Lots of ice. A glacier maybe…”

“Yes, what else do you see?” Orlando snapped around to check the woman’s reaction, but the crayon-smeared face was just aimed away, her head nodding to some unheard beat.

“The four of you… doing something. A sword of flame, so bright, BRIGHT, don’t go in, don’t!”

The guard shook his head, trying to dislodge the sight, but then nodded, smiling wider as he focused again, this time, right on Orlando. He squeezed his hand.

“You’re going to… save them. And end this…”

“I will,” Orlando said, like an echo to a different phrase. “I promise. And you hang on, we’ll get help.”

He shook his head, and Orlando felt a gentle hand fall on his shoulder from behind.

“His part’s done,” said the woman, and the guard just now seemed to notice her.

He smiled again as his eyes glazed over. “I see it. At the end, oh my…”

His hand squeezed Orlando’s so hard it felt like the bones were about to shatter, and then it went limp and slid through his fingers. The eyes closed, and Orlando choked back a cry.

He’d seen death so many times before, so recently, but this was different. Someone he didn’t even know, a connection at once so deep and personal, and being right here as his soul, or whatever it was, left…

It took forever to stand up, but when he did, he felt like the gentle hand on his shoulder was the one that lifted him, effortlessly, in a fluid motion.

And then they were up and walking toward the exit. To the sunshine.

And all Orlando could see in that blinding glare through the windows was an equally bright glacier, a triangular mountain of ice looming under a faded, low sun.

I’m coming…

They emerged onto a field, in a valley surrounded by tall oaks, speared with a boundary of thick Douglas firs. A chain link fence, topped with barbed wire, began at the end of a crumbling, unkept driveway, and extended toward the trees on either side.

Wispy, oblivious clouds traversed an otherwise azure sky of tranquility. To his right was a hangar — old, with chipped paint and rusted arches. No planes on a dirt runway that had been overrun with weeds.

Orlando followed the woman, who moved a little sluggishly, kind of dragging along her left leg. Did she always walk like that? He wondered what they had done to her, and for how long, before they reeled that Custodian back into her body. Were there others?

He had so many questions, and so desperately wanted to sit, focus and ponder just such an objective. But he couldn’t focus, couldn’t think of anything but getting out of here, finding his children, reuniting with Phoebe and doing whatever they had to do.

He took a moment and gazed up at the sky again, trying to picture beyond the blue innocence and see what it was causing all this fuss.

“Do not try,” the woman said. “The shield is beyond sight during the day, and only visible as an occasionally pretty aurora in the early evening.”

“Great. Silent and deadly. And we have to bring it down?”

The head turned, and red-stained teeth flashed. “We all got parts to play.”

“Can’t I give it to an understudy? I’m tapped out.”

Laughter. “I like you, Orlando Natch. And your wife. Special souls, for sure.”

“Thanks. I guess. Although I’m not sure how high that praise is, coming from someone who has hidden in a mountain for centuries and probably hasn’t seen anyone since the Flood.”

They passed across the field’s border, onto the runway as they neared the hangar, and now Orlando could see the sign above the main entrance.

ROME AIR FORCE BASE

“Ah, good old upstate New York.” He frowned, trying to remember — which wasn’t his specialty. “Wasn’t this place closed down? And a new commercial base…”

He noticed the immense grey B52, a memorial plane, parked in a side field, with a plaque and statues.

“Yes.”

“Then there should be more people here. Civilians. Employees, pilots, other aircraft. A new runway?” He stopped, turning around and around, looking about.

“Yes.” The only answer, as the woman/custodian continued — not to the hangar, but to a small shed beside it.

“What the hell does that mean? What’s happening? Where are we?”

“Wrong question.”

“Huh?” Orlando’s head spun, and his temples hurt. Bad. He realized he hadn’t felt right since returning to his body, but now it was all intensifying, or maybe after the escape adrenaline levels fell, and the pain was free to return.

She reached the shed, doubled over, gasping, then lifted her face and offered a big grin once more.

“Oh shit,” Orlando said in a whimper. “Don’t tell me. The right question is…”

“When?”

He looked around again. “So — what? We shifted back in time to when it was closed? Or forward, because the memorial is there. Yeah that makes more sense. But…”

“But it doesn’t matter,” she chattered. “Went through a portal, we did, when all hell broke loose. They had one open at the base, doing their experiments without thinking. As usual. I pushed you through it as we left the building. It’s not permanent, so don’t worry yourself.”

She laughed at some inside joke, and touched the padlock, which crumbled to dust as if it had been out rusting for centuries.

“I still don’t understand.”

She got up on tiptoes and rapped her knuckles on his forehead. “You really don’t need to. We’re just taking an end route to the transportation system, one that would have been guarded, or at least safeguarded, in any other time but this one.”

“Why? Can’t we just snag a plane to get to Alaska?”

She stopped, and her smile faded. “Did I misread you? Did you get your flying license and not tell anyone?”

“No. I thought… maybe you could fly.”

“Yeah,” she said in a mocking tone, “I learned by being locked in a tiny cell all my life.”

Orlando held back at the doorway, smelling the ancient dust and the crumbling masonry, and noticing only a stairway and broken iron bannister leading down.

“But you’re…”

“All-knowing, all-seeing?”

“Yeah.”

“No. I know things, but not everything. I can’t bake an apple pie. Can’t construct a diesel engine, and sure as shit can’t fly any sort of aerial vehicle.”

“Okay then.”

“Okay.” She stopped at the top, fiddled with a control panel and flipped some fuses. “I can, however, turn on some lights, assuming the generators still run.”

He started following her down the stairs, into the gloom, which suddenly flickered to life with dull yellow bulbs set in the corners of every other landing.

“Which they do. Yay for us.”

“Yay.” Orlando began to give in to his frustration here, letting go of fear at last. “So, another question, if I may.”

“Do you have to?”

“Yes. When did you become such a jerk?”

More chuckling.

“I mean, when we met you — your custodian spirit form at least, you were this nice and gentle monk from a hidden cavern world, and now…”

She spun around, eyes wide. “I’m batshit crazy?”

“I was going to say, just kinda rude.”

She shrugged and continued dragging herself down the stairs. “Must be the merge with this mind. This poor woman… girl, who has been here most of her life. Driven mad by splitting her personality over and over, ramming some other consciousness into her. I could tell you insane stories. About spirits, untethered souls…”

“Ghosts?”

“One word for them. She was a willing receptacle for them. Her mind phased in just the right vibrational state, echoing with — oh never mind, you wouldn’t understand. Or care at this point. Just know, I feel her pain and she — well, her nature bleeds into mine.”

“Sarcasm and wit improving your dryness?”

“Maybe, kinda yeah.”

They continued descending, the air becoming thicker, more concentrated with dust and age. But somewhere there must have been a ventilation tunnel or a cave, as a light draft came from below.

He had to break the silence. “Umm, are we really in the future?”

“Shut up or I will become rude. We have to hurry.”

“Why?” He moved a little faster, catching up, but on the next pass noticed something on the masonry. What looked like fresh drops of blood. “I mean if we’re only going back to the past, we could stay here for a long time, days, weeks, and it wouldn’t matter once we returned to the same moment…”

She stopped, out of breath, head down. Then turned to him. Glared, but then looked down, and pulled her left hand away from her chest.

“Oh, shit.”

“Shit. Yes.” She sighed. “Ricochet, back there.”

A large patch of red, at first blending in with all her other gaudy decorative crayon self-art, but this just drenched her left side, under her breast.

“Future or not, this body will not last much longer. I am pushing it far beyond normal as it is.”

She kept descending. “Almost there, please hurry.”

“Hold on. Jesus, if you die…?”

“Yes?”

“Won’t that just release your inner Custodian?”

“Maybe, but I am considering another alternative.”

“Which is?”

The word came back, echoed over the last landing, and up the uncounted flights of stairs:

“Escape.”

They emerged into what looked like a grotto. Strange green lights emanated from cracks in the walls, almost like he imagined nuclear-tainted water would resemble. A concrete slab of a floor, flanked by nine pillars, in a circle around a throne-like structure.

I feel like I’m in a D&D game, having reached the dungeon’s final Boss-level chamber.

The injured woman staggered ahead, to the first of the smooth pillars. She motioned to the chair.

“Have a seat, you’ve earned it.”

Orlando studied the thing: all strange angles, carved out of the masonry itself, like it was part of the floor. “Don’t we need one of those tablet things?”

“Not with you. Visualize where you want to go. See your kids.”

He hesitated. This was it. Turned back to her.

“So… you’re really done after this?” He studied her closely, looking for anything behind those opaque eyes.

“Indeed. My part, too, is quite over. Time to hitch a ride with this poor soul.”

“And then what?”

She gave him a sly smile. “You’ve had a taste of the other side, peeked behind the curtain. You know as well as I.”

“Yeah well, I didn’t see no con man at the controls, no puppet master or movie projector or dude writing code. I don’t know what’s out there beyond all this.”

“But you know this isn’t it.”

And knowing is half the battle? Orlando choked on the surreal nonsense of the moment.

“So, it didn’t matter? What I was, what I became and what I did? Despite all that power, despite what you could do as a Custodian, an Agent? It didn’t matter? Not in the big scheme of things?”

She shrugged. Her life was fading, eyes fluttering. She sunk to her knees.

“It may not be all. Maybe we come back.”

“Ugh,” he said, heading to the chair. “Reincarnation? Got to do all this shit again?”

She coughed. “But that is the beauty of it all. Ignorance. Remember that.”

“It’s good to be stupid?”

“Garden… of… Eden…”

He perked up as he stood before the chair. Sensed a dull humming. “This sounds like something Caleb would be all over.”

“He’s not here, you are.” She coughed up blood into her palm and looked at in wonder. “Listen. One last thing to teach you.”

“What? You haven’t taught me shit. Just spoke in riddles and scared the crap out of me.”

“You’ll have a choice to make. You and Phoebe and the others.”

“Yeah. You said Phoebe had a destiny. Thought you were leaving me out.”

She shook her head. “No. You most of all.”

“Save the world?”

“Or change it forever. Your choice. You will make it soon.”

“I don’t understand.” He touched the chair. No vibrations, no shock.

“Just sit down… and shut up.”

She slumped forward, head down on her chest.

“Goodbye, Orlando.”

He settled in the chair, put his hands on the arm rests.

“Goodbye. Whoever you were.”

A chuckle, a sputter and a sigh.

He thought he should say one more thing, and all he could think of was: “Enjoy your next life.”

If she replied, he didn’t notice. Didn’t see her anymore. In fact, the pillars shimmered and vibrated, seemed to lose solidity. It was like that page from the classic kids’ book, Where the Wild Things Are when Max’s wild surroundings reverted to the familiar confines of his room.

Why did that come to my mind?

The next moment the forest was there. Only, covered with fresh snow.

He’d been thinking of the twins, imagining their little fingers in his hands, their tiny cries in the night…

The wind blew at his hair, the crisp cold condensed in his breath.

And he was there.

Here.

Now. Back in the present. The brisk air, the low sun, just a glow over and between the snow-capped peaks in the distance, like a serene painting.

Everything familiar, comforting.

The twins, Please be safe, I’m coming, I’m—

Something wasn’t right.

The house.

It was gone.

Flattened, or more accurately, imploded.

Or dear God no…

He ran.