The Beginning of Sorrows Read online

  THE BEGINNING

  OF SORROWS

  ENMESHED BY EVIL . . .

  HOW LONG BEFORE AMERICA IS NO MORE?

  GILBERT MORRIS, LYNN MORRIS, ALAN MORRIS

  Copyright © 1999 by Gilbert, Lynn, and Alan Morris

  All rights reserved. Written permission must be secured from the publisher to use or reproduce any part of this book, except for brief quotations in critical reviews or articles.

  Published in Nashville, Tennessee, by Thomas Nelson, Inc.

  Published in association with Alive Communications 1465 Kelly Johnson Blvd.,

  Suite #320, Colorado Springs, CO 80920

  Scripture quotations are from the KING JAMES VERSION of the Holy Bible.

  Printed in the United States of America

  ISBN 0-7852-7000-0

  Printed in the United States of America

  1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 QPV 05 04 03 02 01 00 99

  To Douglas E. Freeman, our favorite Screaming Eagle.

  Thanks again, Uncle Buddy, for taking that hit

  for us on the road to St. Lo.

  And no marvel; for Satan himself is transformed into an angel of light.

  —2 CORINTHIANS 11:14

  CONTENTS

  PROLOGUE

  PART I EARLY SPRING

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  PART II FULL SUMMER

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  NINE

  TEN

  ELEVEN

  TWELVE

  THIRTEEN

  PART III AUTUMNAL EQUINOX

  FOURTEEN

  FIFTEEN

  SIXTEEN

  SEVENTEEN

  EIGHTEEN

  NINETEEN

  TWENTY

  TWENTY-ONE

  PART IV FALL, DYING

  TWENTY-TWO

  TWENTY-THREE

  TWENTY-FOUR

  TWENTY-FIVE

  EPILOGUE

  ABOUT THE AUTHORS

  PROLOGUE

  IT WAS FRIGHTENING, but uncommonly beautiful. The eerie bluish green lights began as narrow as a laser pointer’s beam, then grew longer, thicker, then bent and twisted and danced. The ribbons grew, separated, whirled in circles, spirals, filament clouds of hallucinatory loveliness in the impenetrable darkness of the cave’s small, hot chamber.

  One of the dancing circles brushed against Dr. Niklas Kesteven’s forearm. To his consternation, he was so tense—and so enthralled— that he almost screamed.

  The ring of light disintegrated at his touch, and he felt nothing, not even the brush of air.

  But, the touch of the unearthly seemed to energize him. Whirling, he fell to his knees and scrambled out the narrow opening into the cavern’s wide subterranean passageway. Five men huddled against the far wall, their eyes wide with fright under the miner’s lights mounted on their helmets.

  “Cover that opening with one of the solar blankets,” Kesteven ordered them brusquely. “Seal it as best you can.” He turned and ran up the passageway toward the cave entrance. His going was awkward; he lurched and shambled, for he was a big man and he didn’t fit well in parts of the underground hallway.

  The five men left behind looked weakly rebellious. The smallest of them, a young Russian man named Vaclev Mikhailovich Mirinov, was their guide. The other four men were sturdy Georgian “pack mules”—bearers. They watched Mirinov warily.

  He blinked rapidly, staring at the maw of the secret chamber. “Better do as he says, I guess. He’s paying the bills.” After seeing that the men had a silver solar blanket and were gingerly tacking it around the opening with pitons, Mirinov went to see about Dr. Kesteven.

  The big half-Russian, half-melting-pot-American was standing just outside the cave entrance, shouting into his SATphone. “I don’t know what it is, Alia! Which is why I’m telling you that we need to grab the samples, and fast!”

  His face changed, and then his voice changed. “Love of my life, listen to me. It could be an electrochemical phenomena, or it could be animate . . . like Lampyridae. Fireflies. Only smaller. I just don’t know yet. But no matter which it is, I’ve got a—a sense about it, a blood and guts instinct that we need it, Alia. It’s important. It’s really important. You’ve got to trust me.”

  He waited, and Mirinov got the impression that the other end of the connection was silent too.

  Finally Kesteven’s tense expression relaxed. “Where are we?” he asked Mirinov.

  Mirinov shrugged. “This mountain has no name.”

  “No, I mean who does this mountain belong to? Is this Georgia? Azerbaijan? Dagestan?”

  “I don’t know, Dr. Kesteven. Nobody knows.”

  To Mirinov’s surprise, Niklas Kesteven grinned. It was like a shaggy grizzly bear showing his teeth. “Nobody knows? That’s good, Vaclev Mikhailovich. That’s good. Hold on, Alia.”

  His SATphone, which was merely an earpiece with a wire wisp of an amplifier that he could position in front of his mouth, was connected to a portable Cyclops. Mirinov was fascinated as he watched Kesteven rapidly push keys on the keypad. Everyone—at least everyone in America, and the wealthier citizens of Russia— had a Cyclops in their home, of course. But Mirinov had never seen a unit this small.

  The six-inch-square screen showed a grid, then numerical notations. “Alia. I’m at 47.355° longitude, 41.280° latitude. Send an atmospheric sample kit, an electrical engineer’s toolbox, and a full microbioassay kit. When can you get here?”

  He listened. “Then black-ops it. Probably best. Of course I set the RS voice scrambler for the call, Alia, I’m not an idiot. So when?”

  He paused, then nodded. “I’ll be waiting.”

  Untangling himself from his SATphone wires, he laid the Cyclops on top of a nearby flat rock. With furious haste, his great meaty fingers flew over the keys. Once he placed his thumb over a square red icon in the lower left corner of the screen, and the Cyclops said in a colorless female voice, “SID tools authorized.” Kesteven touched a few more keys, and the blue grid appeared again, this time with a flashing yellow dot in the center of the screen. He turned to Mirinov.

  “Don’t move this, don’t even touch it. In about fourteen hours, a black dot will appear on this screen, heading toward the yellow dot,” he told the younger man. “Come get me as soon as you see the black dot.”

  Mirinov stared uncertainly at the Cyclops thinking, I’m supposed to stand here and look at that thing for fourteen hours?

  Niklas grabbed his backpack and headed back into the cave, but turned at the entrance, just before he stepped into the murky blackness. “Vaclev Mikhailovich,” he said patiently, “I’ll send the mules back up. You can take turns watching.”

  Mirinov nodded with some embarrassment.

  “And Vaclev? If you should see any black dots, any at all, before four o’clock tomorrow, all of you get into the cave. Do you understand me? All of you get into the cave, and bring all the equipment with you. Except the Cyclops, don’t touch that. And no fires tonight.”

  “Yes, Dr. Kesteven.”

  Kesteven stepped over the line of light into the darkness.

  At eight minutes before two o’clock the next day, local time, a tilt-wing V-22D Vindicator buzzed over the mountain and reeled down a bulky package to Dr. Kesteven. He disappeared back into the cave.

  The bulky, spiky chopper waited, slowly circling, sometimes hovering as if impatient.

  When Dr. Kesteven returned, the chopper dropped lines and reeled him and his precious package in. Dr. Kesteven never gave a backward look—or thought—to his five companions. The helicopter’s high, throbbing whine faded into the distance.

  Vacle
v Mirinov turned to his bearers. “Let’s go. Now. Hurry.”

  One of them exclaimed, “Now? But we had no sleep last night!”

  Vaclev Mikhailovich Mirinov shook his head stubbornly. “Did you see the insignia on that helicopter? Oh, of course . . . it was in English. It was the Sixth Directorate. Commissars. American, I guess. But it doesn’t matter, does it?”

  “No,” the man agreed hastily. “We must leave now.”

  Within half an hour, they were scrambling down the nameless mountain. They never spoke of Dr. Niklas Kesteven, or the odd events of that long day and night, to anyone.

  Sixteen hours later, another Vindicator appeared on the mountain. An eleven-man squad, dressed in black with no insignia at all, line-dropped down. They took many samples in the chamber—air, soil, geologic. Then they sealed the cave with native rocks. Within twenty-four hours all entrances to the cave were disguised so expertly that no one, except the commissar squad and perhaps Dr. Kesteven, could ever recognize it.

  But no one, not even the men who knew exactly where it was, would ever see the cave again.

  PART I

  EARLY SPRING

  Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools, and changed the glory of the uncorruptible God into an image made like to corruptible man, and to birds, and fourfooted beasts, and creeping things.

  —ROMANS 1:22–23

  O Rose, thou art sick.

  The invisible worm

  That flies in the night

  In the howling storm

  Has found out thy bed

  Of crimson joy,

  And his dark secret love

  Does thy life destroy.

  —WILLIAM BLAKE, “THE SICK ROSE”

  ONE

  THE ROUGH YELLOW ROCKS flecked with mica moved—but Zoan knew that this could not be. Rocks do not move, he thought and fixed his eye on the spot where the lambent beams of the rising crimson sun touched the earth in front of him.

  Zoan himself sat as still as a candle in a crypt watching the thin line of pale light move imperceptibly over the solid rock on which he sat.

  The rock moved again but this time Zoan smiled. A lizard. He relaxed and met the gaze of a foot-long lizard who had flattened his lithe body against the coarse rock. The golden eye of the lizard regarded him with a sentient alertness. For nearly ten minutes neither man nor lizard moved one centimeter. It was as if the two were carved out of the rough impasto of sandstone on which they rested. As if drawn by a magnetic force, the red wafer of a sun rose from behind the broken lines of the hills that stood as rugged sentinels blocking off the valley.

  All was still and all was silent except for the sigh of the breeze. Zoan reached out his hand.

  Extending his forefinger, he bent forward until his hand was two inches from the lizard’s face. The malevolent eye of the lizard flickered as whatever primitive process that passed for thought stirred him. His tongue flickered out, touched the finger of the man. Once—twice—three times. He did a series of rapid pushups, flipped his body in a sudden contortion, then scurried away to disappear into a small crevice under an uplifted slab of basalt.

  Coming to his feet in one smooth motion, Zoan stood for a moment considering his encounter with the lizard. It would be nice to be a lizard—to be able to change colors anytime I wanted. He was pleased to think of changing his coppery tan to meld in against the brilliant reds of the sandstone cliffs or the dark brown color of the earth itself. It was a way he had of always putting himself inside the being of any bird or beast or reptile that passed his way. For one brief moment, he became a lizard, felt his scales scraping against the rocky surface of the canyon floor, heard the slow slogging of his lizard heart. He felt the hunger for living food and felt his claws tighten as the sharp concept of a crunchy grasshopper formed in his lizard brain.

  This sudden metamorphosis—the putting aside of his human flesh and putting on the body of the lizard—had not been a thought but merely an impression that came and left like the desert breeze. It was an unconscious exercise that had been with him for as long as he could remember. Such moments were the most pleasurable element in Zoan’s barren existence.

  Zoan had always been conscious of time, space, and the physical senses on the surface in a way that he could not explain, nor could anyone understand. For him, time was not a long line that one plodded along in a linear fashion. Rather, it was a meandering river that he could step into or out of, always changing, never the same. Yesterday was like ten years ago. Dr. Kesteven had told him once, “A smart man said, ‘Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in.’ You’re like that man. You move back and forth through time in your head, Zoan, just as most people move back and forth through space.”

  Without haste, Zoan moved slowly across the green grass that was just beginning to show the signs of the year’s age. His looks were not notable; indeed, he was nondescript. He was no more than of average height or weight, had brown hair of no particular beauty, and the only thing about his face that ever called attention were his eyes. The pupils were much larger than normal, which gave him a deep, dark-eyed look. They also tended to dilate excessively in low light. Zoan could see in the dark much better than humans who were born in an ordinary fashion.

  As he crossed the fields, Zoan’s mind was bisected by the two worlds that were his. He knew only these two worlds; together, they had been his whole life.

  The first world lay under the arching blue heavens. It was composed of green grass and sandstone cliffs with pinon trees and scrub brush, and the ranch, which was laid out neatly with a white framed house, a red barn behind it, four more sizable outbuildings behind that, a corral where the horses were kept, and a large green pasture where the four dairy cows now stood grazing, their heads down. This picture-book world was set in the larger one of yellow sand and dark green foothills leading to the lifting hills that ringed all with their serrated peaks.

  This was the best world for Zoan, for he was a part of it in a way that he was not of his other world, which lay beneath the ranch. As he walked about now, his eyes moved from point to point, sweeping the landscape, taking in the vultures that circled lazily miles away in the high azure sky.

  The massive, circular laboratory lay concealed deep beneath the canopy of sky and yellow sun and green grass. The two worlds were sharply delineated by the surface of the earth itself. Even as Zoan reached over to pat the large dog that came up to nuzzle his legs, he was aware of the powerful engines throbbing beneath his feet. The massive dynamos were the heartbeat of his second home. This world could not be seen by human eye, not even by those who flew over it from time to time.

  Zoan’s two worlds were as separate as the medieval heaven and earth or perhaps earth and hell. The one buried deep in the bowels of solid stone was illuminated by cold, fluorescent lighting and powered by mighty atomic-fueled dynamos. It was a cold, clinical world and Zoan was never sorry to ride the elevators up through the colors of the different levels and emerge under the canopy of space and smell the odors of life. Each time he left the laboratory and emerged into the world of warm sunlight, it was like a new birth. The very moment he left the house that concealed the elevators, he was invaded by the sense of life. Always he could feel, somewhere deep down inside his very being, the life, the force, the very breath of animals and of men that moved in this world.

  Suddenly, Zoan stopped dead-still, for something had come to him. It could not be called a thought but was more a combination of nerves and memory—a galvanic force of sorts. He had often felt this visitation, and always it came to him much like the small electric shock he had felt sometimes during his testing when he was young. The feeling was not painful, but all of his outer rational faculties were abruptly halted as the sensation flowed over him. Even had Zoan been capable of such philosophical reasoning, he could not have isolated the organ that received this impression. It was not the brain or the heart; it was much clearer than any thought or impression that came through these organs.

  Once D
r. Kesteven had told him that butterflies knew how to fly to the coast, and then launch out blindly over the pathless ocean. Dr. Kesteven had said, “No scientist has ever been able to explain how they know there’s something out there. All the eye can see is water. But they leave; if there’s no island there they all die. But there is an island, and they fly there, and they stay there in winter. I’ve been there when they’ve covered the rocks, looking like a multicolored garment of red and yellow and blue and green, alive and fluttering. But how do they know that something is there? We don’t know. I don’t think we’ll ever know.”

  Zoan had pondered the force that instructed the butterflies to go to a place they had never known, and had come to believe that whatever power led them was like the inexplicable feelings and instincts that came to him sometimes. He understood nothing of how or why these impressions came, any more than did those colorful butterflies. But time and again he had been invaded by something, and he always obeyed blindly.

  And now he knew without question that something was wrong. Quickly he broke into a trot, and like a hound on a scent he moved from one point to another. He traversed the scant green grass of the pasture, at other times leaping easily over the yellowish rocks with the few inches of soil that composed the mantle of the earth. He sniffed the air and his eyes probed constantly as he loped across the field. Something is wrong! He knew this, but he had no concept of what might be setting off such strong signals inside his head and along his nerves.

  Finally he saw the black-and-white yearling that he had taken such pride in. The calf was standing on the border of a field close to a group of evergreens that formed the base of a mountain that shouldered its way out of the earth, rising like a burly giant. Zoan broke into a dead run, flowing over the rocks like a shadow. His eyes were dilated, the pupils enormous, as he swept in front of the yearling, who stared at Zoan wild-eyed and snorted with sudden alarm.

  At the exact instant that Zoan flanked the calf, he turned and saw the lithe form of the jaguar. The North American jaguar, which was thought to have been extinct in the last century, was now very much alive, and roamed the West at will. She was at once graceful and frightening, this feline, in the way of big cats. Her face was round, the ears clipped, with emerald green eyes that dominated the face. The tawny coat with rosettes of deep rich brown rippled with tightened tendons. She was made for killing; those sharp incisors were for tearing, the powerful claws to hold helpless prey securely, flawless muscles of that special powerful beast’s quality so superior to humans. She was crouched, a quiver shimmering along her flanks.