Chapter 11 The Book of Aztlan

Copyright David A. Kearns

The Book of Aztlan
“…Now, as the humans grew on the land called Aztlan, and its cousin, Posaztlan, some of the human beings became very wise, and very powerful through trading (companies/clans), built on trade (networks/contracts) with Egyputus, Phoenezia, Grezia, Cyprus, Tlaloc, Moxcatlala, Hybernus, Brayazayo, the island of Unctum, and many other nations and even of the fair-skinned people Ibernactumbalta, Brintandecea, Geltoiac, Eustruscania, Belgica.
“The rulers of these clans built family lineages on huge fortunes. Through their travelers they had seen that the garden of stars was much larger than they had ever imagined; that some stars in the garden would appear as others fell away over the retreating horizon on long trips, and from this they concluded the earth is far more like the ball used to play Chimbamba, than a flat morning cake. From there great mysteries fell away solved.
“Humans ground stone crystals to better see the garden at night, to look deeper still into the garden, and from these crystals, they began to see the power, the magic of light. Humans learned to send light, bend light and bounce the light, as well as receive it from Ra, to use it in as many ways as they wished.
“From this knowledge, of using light, and from the crystals used to channel it, and produce unseen light when pressed, and with this new, more powerful kind of light called biabahalik (energy), they built a garden of (generators) on the land of Aztlan, and Posaztlan to bring light and energy into the darkest corners of those lands.
“They used the light to cut massive stones, and sound harmonics, combined with waves of light bahik (energy? Or perhaps lasers?) to levitate them and place them in the great buildings.
“And with these great buildings came centers of learning, and came ages of learning, and more learning still. From here more mysteries faded into the darkness of the past and were listed as solved in the garden of learning. These were mysteries of the body, of the essence of life itself, of the bahk (DNA) and blood.
“Humankind discovered how being-creatures could transcend one form of life, and make their offspring into another, if they so desired, which was a very dangerous game to play with the powers they had learned of the bahk and blood.
“But tamper we did. The essence of power had us in its grasp and we entered a dangerous garden filled with fruits, thorns, and vines that were toxic. Yet we played in this garden, still, like the child ignoring the sage voice of his mother.
“Because there were those that wanted always, ever more power. And they saw feathered lizard, Queztalcoatl, as the god he pretended to be, and they wished to be like him, so they stole bits and pieces of his essence, his bahk, thinking it magic, though feathered lizard was merely another creature bred from the harshness of his world.
“And the men began hideous experiments with this bahk, which Queztalcoatl and his cousin creatures shared.
“ But beneath the shade trees of the garden, where there has always been truth, it was found that humankind had been tricked into doing so by fathered lizard, himself, who then encouraged mankind to make more experiments; for this feathered lizard kind, of many forms and talons when it wishes, and no form at other times, and of the flying form when it desires, or the man form when it needs to appear wise and loving, and evil as evil itself when it shows its true heart, was so ancient their bahk no longer had the power to replicate through love making, only through mixing their bahk with the bahk of humankind, as well as the bahk from creatures related to their original kind, could Queztalcoatl, feathered lizard, hope to survive and perpetuate his sons into the future.
“And with the help of some of these greedy families of Aztlan, feathered lizard was able to do that.
“Quetzalcoatl, and these greedy families took a dishonest show to far nations, poorer nations with which there was no trade, and they convinced the poorer, ignorant masses of those nations to lay down, at the splayed talons of feathered lizard, the one of the many forms, the rose of their offspring, every few months of the year, at certain times.
“And so that the tribute of blood and bahk would be recognized at correct times, agreed upon by parties, the wheeled, time-piece of the Aztlan people, our most sacred achievement, in that it tracked the movements of Ra, was shared with those other nations.
“And the deadly alliance between the greedy ones and feathered lizard, convinced these tribes, such as Olmecazan, Mayapatzan, Nauhautlan, Mozicza and many more, that Ra would not rise unless feathered lizard was fed the rose of their very youth.
“And from those offerings of the dead, the blood and bahk of their very living, beating hearts were used to create creatures; thousands of creatures, imbued with human intelligence, lizard skins, feathers of birds, at times even snouts and tusks of Akzeeboyo, and always with long life-spans of the Gembe ...” -The Book of Aztlan

July 2, 2011 4 p.m. 2011 Melbourne Beach
I looked down at the date on Ryan’s declaration as I unlocked the car door and got in.
Somehow, Ryan had known the precise day we would discover this document and all those with it.
“Are you alright Tim?” Gary asked. “Can you drive?”
“Yeah, I’ll be fine,” I said.
“We’ll finish up here man. C’mon back over to the house after you see Trisha. Give her our best,” he said.
“Gary, tell Jay I’m sorry for yelling that stuff at him earlier. I didn’t mean it,” I said.
“Hey, Tim. Forget it. When he sees all this stuff, he’s going to believe. Then he’ll understand what you’ve been going through,” he said. “Now only if he and I can remember what happened that night.”
“Maybe a little beer will help,” I said.
“Speaking of which, we’re out. Can you grab some,” he asked.
“No worries,” I said. “I’ll head down to the Seven-E,” I said and headed south on A1A for the beer first. Just incase I forgot on the way home again.
I slid into the parking-lot across from the Ebb Tide condominium. I needed a little gas too. The heat of the day had stacked the thunderheads over the mainland to twenty-thousand feet. Their white tops where sheared off and drifting east.
The sunburn still stung a little, although I had put aloe all over my face and shoulders.
I figured about a case of Bud would do. After filling the tank I sauntered into the Seven-Eleven with my head down, buried in my thoughts about seeing Trisha again.
It was like getting slugged in the stomach when I edged the case of beer up on the counter to find Red Dancing Bear behind it dressed in the familiar 7-11 employee uniform.
“Red?” I asked hesitantly.
The man looked up into my eyes, terrified for a second.
“Who?”
“Red, that’s you right? I watched you with the turtle earlier today,” I said.
The man held his fingers to his lips, came around the counter and grabbed me by my arm. In an instant we were outside. One of the other employees took over for him.
“Look Mr., I don’t know what kind of game you’re playing at but…”
“Red Dancing Bear, it’s me! Tim Stanton, we spoke this morning,” I said. “You were hacking up that turtle they had left behind, giving me shit about shopping at Wal Mart.”
The man slapped me hard in the chest and said “just shut up for a second!” He leaned back against the wall and held onto his heart. Then fished inside his right hand shirt pocket for a Marlboro which he lit with a lighter he extracted from his jeans pocket.
He exhaled in my face.
“Buddy, I swear to God if this is some sort of joke, I’m going to beat the living shit out of you,” he said.
“Hey man, why all the hostility?”
“Red Dancing Bear is my grandfather, man. And there ain’t no fucking way you saw him this morning,” he said.
“Look, don’t get riled, man. I saw a guy who looked just like you this morning. He knew me from back when, back when the lights had come around. The South Beach lights, you know? The dead turtles? Years back they did a story on it in the newspaper, the dead kid, Myles Neiderman?” I said.
“He saved our asses. I knew your grandfather,” I said.
“You were one of those kids, man. The ones they arrested,” he said.
“Yes, that’s right!”
“I was living with my grandfather, in the trailer down the beach, by the old Indian mound. I remember you, you and that other kid, the blonde one, what’s his name?”
“Ryan Cogswell.”
“Ryan, right. A real pistol, man. Everybody thought he would turn pro surfer. Whatever happened to him?” he said.
“He died, last week behind South Beach Willie’s. They think he shot himself,” I said.
“I saw that! In the newspaper. Awe man, that was him?” he said. “Dude, I am sorry man. I didn’t make the connection.”
“Yeah, we’re here for his funeral. All of us, well, most of us from that night,” I said.
“Man, I am sorry about freaking on you like that. Red’s uh, he’s in the hospital. He has been for three months. If you want I can take you to him,” he said.
“Sure, I’d love to see him,” I said.
“Alright you can give me a ride too. I have an apartment near the hospital, until…Anyway, I’ve got to punch out. You want your beer?” he asked.
I went back inside, purchased the beer and brought it out to the Explorer. The young man and I then put his mountain-bike into the back.
“My girlfriend has the car. She’s a bartender. I don’t like her walking at night,” he said.
“So tell me about this discussion you had with Red this morning,” he said, getting into the Ford.
I outlined what had happened, told him that I must have hallucinated during a dream on the beach.
“My mind isn’t working right these days,” I said. “I think it has to do with everything, you know Ryan’s death, all these memories brought up about, the lights,” I said, leaving it at that.
“Yeah. You about flipped me out,” he said.
“Back in the day Red told my buddy Ryan, you know, that he was actually 157 years old, the first time they met,” I said.
“Crazy old bastard,” the young man said.
It was then I realized I didn’t even know the man’s name.
“Stanley Erskine,” the young man said, sticking his hand over to shake mine.
“Nice to meet you,” I said. “Tim Stanton.”
“Yeah, likewise,” he said.
I kept looking over at him.
“You know you look exactly…”
“I know. My grandmother tells me that all the time,” he said.
“Are you guys from here?” I asked.
“No, we live out in Okeechobee. Every year granddad would come over here. He considers it our ancestral homeland,” he said.
“He told Ryan that he was the last of the Ais,” I said.
“If you believe the stories, that’s true,” he said. “That’s some memory you’ve got on you, Mr. Stanton. I can’t remember shit that happened to me last week. How do you do it?”
“Well, since my buddy died, I’ve been thinking a lot about everything that went on that summer. It’s weird but the memories are coming back to me much stronger now than I could have imagined they would. They’re almost like little movies playing in my head. Sometimes I get headaches. In the past two days I’ve passed out a couple of times,” I said.
“Hey don’t go tripping down memory lane while you’re driving, huh?” he said.
“Yeah, heh-heh. So what brought you back this way?” I said.
“Granddad got sick, two weeks became three months, so I took a job in town at a Seven-Eleven. They needed someone beachside today and here we are,” he said.
“What are the odds?” I asked.
“Well, if you listen to granddad and his crowd, odds have got nothing to do with it,” he said.
“Oh?”
“It’s a Seminole thing. There are no coincidences, things move according to a plan. You can fight it, but, you just hurt yourself when you do,” he said.
“Seminoles also got a word for your visions,” he said.
“Really? What?”
“Visions,” he said flatly with a wry smile. “They say it means something deep. Blessing and a curse. But they’re yours and you’re supposed to figure out what they mean.”
“You don’t believe that stuff though,” I said.
“Man, I was raised on speed metal, motorcycles, beer, and air-boats. I was in the Army for two years in Iraq. Came back to Florida; been a fishing guide but the hurricanes took my boat, and my ex-wife took my F-350 and the kids, which sucks,” he said.
“Sorry to hear that,” I said.
“All that and we bump into each other like this. Which is what really freaks me out, you talking about Red like that,” he said.
“Why?”
“Well, that’s the sort of story he’d tell me, and then I’d tell him that he was full of it. See, that I was at that Seven-Eleven today is a pure fluke, a one-time deal. The kid who had that job spilt,” he said.
“Enough to give me the chills,” I said.
“Me three,” he said.
We parked in the hospital lot walked into the cool air-condition building and took the elevator to the cardiac intensive care unit.
“I know this visit is going to disappoint you, and you’re going to be angry with me,” he said.
“For what?”
“For bumming a ride from you like that,” he said.
“Not at all,” I said.
“The truth is, you need to see the kind of shape he’s in, so you can understand just how weird it is, that you said you spoke to him,” Stan said.
“Mee-Maw? How are you old girl?” he asked an elderly woman outside one of the rooms. She was sitting in a chair with a rumpled Kleenex in her hand.
She had tears in her eyes. She was obviously glad to see her grandson. She held the young man’s hands and kissed them.
“Have you called Carla?” she asked looking up into his eyes.
“Grandma, she don’t want nothing to do with us…?” he said.
“The kids should know what’s happening with him, Stanley,” she said, kissing his hands again.
“Grandma, this man’s name is Tim Stanton. He says he had a vision about Granddad this morning,” Stanley said.
“You did?” she said looking up at me. She was afraid, she was asking me to elaborate.
“Years ago, Red taught me and my friends about the beach lights. Told us what they meant. This morning I thought I saw him preparing a turtle for soup on the beach. When I ran into Mr. Erskine here later in the day, I almost fell out of my shoes, ma’am. He looks just like him. I must have passed out on the beach during my run. It’s been happening lately,” I said.
“Did he say anything, in your dream?” she asked.
“He said he really didn’t like standing on-line at Wal-Mart,” I said.
The old woman looked at her grandson while a tear fell from her eye. A beautiful smile creased her lips. Tears formed at the corners of Stan’s eyes. He put his hand over his mouth suppressing either a laugh or a sob. He stooped down and placed the other hand in his grandmother’s so she could hold it.
“Did he say anything else?” she asked.
I tried to remember.
“In the dream there was a little boy wearing tennis shoes playing in the surf. When I asked him who he was, Red said ‘he is me, and I am him.’”
“That’s you Stanley. That’s who he was talking about. You remember all those times he took you with him and you wouldn’t do anything but goof around?” she said.
Stan stood up.
“C’mon in and see him then, Tim,” he said.
As I entered the room it became obvious Red definitely did not have long to live. A machine did his breathing for him. He was surrounded by gear that kept him alive like a rocket on a launch-pad.
Stan said Red was in a coma following a heart operation. There really was no hope, or so everyone thought.
“How old is he, really?” I asked Stan.
“He’s actually seventy-nine,” he said.
“What’s that bit with the one hundred and fifty-seven years of age, he told my friend back in 1981?” I asked.
“It’s a religious thing. If you ask him now, he’ll tell you he’s nearly three hundred years old. See, as Red gets older, the more he remembers the lives of his direct male ancestors. So much so, he says that death and birth are like little moments of rest in a very long life,” Steve said.
“You don’t buy that do you?” I asked.
He shrugged; “He says that very gradually I will begin to feel his presence in my mind. Over the years, I will begin to see the past as he did. Soon, I’ll begin to feel the need to change my name,” he said.
“To…?”
“To Red Dancing Bear of course, a name that has been in our family, in one form or another, since the time of the Ais, and even before that,” he said.
“Where does it come from?” I asked and he merely shrugged.
“ I’ll know that story when the time comes. Until then it’s kept secret.”
“So, what was his given name?” I asked.
“Earl Erskine,” he said.
“Earl, huh?” I said.
“Doesn’t fit him, does it,” Stan said.
“No, it really doesn’t,” I said.
“You got any Native American in you, Tim?” he said.
“My mom was from North Carolina. Family legend has it that there was some Cherokee in there somewhere way back, but I don’t really know. She died giving birth to me so…” I said.
“What about the English side?” he said.
“The English side?”
“Stanton. That’s English isn’t it?”
“Well it’s Yankee. I don’t know how English it is. One of my ancestors served President Lincoln for a time, if that tells you anything.”
“Could be. They say he had the gift, Lincoln, and surrounded himself with people who had it too,” Stan said.
“What gift?”
“Seeing things, being able to communicate with others who do too,” he said.
“I’m not sure I have that, Stan,” I said.
“Red thinks so. Otherwise you wouldn’t be standing here,” Stan said. “What you did today, you’ve got me rethinking every damned thing the man in that bed ever said to me, Mr. Stanton. You made his wife of fifty-four years smile for the first time in three months. I’ll give you a couple minutes alone with him.”
Stan walked out of the room.
I looked down at the old Indian as the machine did his breathing for him, noting the familiar curve of his face. All of his hair had somehow gone limestone white.
I reached down to touch his hand and closed my eyes.



July
“They say that the first time you allow yourself to laugh at yourself, is the first time God shines a light into your heart,” Red said.
We were facing the mighty Atlantic which was shimmering with energy, as if the ocean was more than an expression of water in motion, but a form of life; a sentient, wise one at that.
“You ever get in that water, Tim, and feel like it was speaking to you?” he said.
“Sure, all the time.”
“Tell me about it.”
“There are times I feel like I can feel all my rage, my trouble, all my aches and pains, all my sweat is being sucked out of me by it. I can feel all of that being drawn out from the shallows out past the sandbars, out past the mid-depths and over the continental shelf into the deep.
“There are times when I’m sitting on my board and I have a thought that is precisely true; that’s the exact moment a perfect, wave will stack up to meet me. I call that my truth wave,” I said, adding for affect; “never fails.”
“She do talk, don’t she?” he sighed. “Where she mixes with the Caribbean is a very special place, Tim. It’s where her heart is, where you’ll get the best from her. Her waters are magical here. They can cure just about anything, accept a heart that won’t listen anymore. You must always listen to her, Tim, just like you do.”
“You’re going away, Red,” I said.
“For a little while, but, I’ll be back soon. The boy, he don’t hear me just now,” he said. “Why do you suppose that is?”
“Maybe he’s too much like you, Red. Some things he refuses to figure out using any other means but trial and error himself, experiencing it his way,” I said.
Just then a perfect wall of water stacked up in a ruler straight line off shore, broke and peeled into the shallows; similar to its fellows, yet, just a cut above the rest.
“I want to show you something,” he said. “Don’t try to stop her as she speaks, just listen.”
I looked around and noticed we were standing a little south of the Indialantic Boardwalk, maybe a hundred yards or so. The waves stopped for a moment, and then slowly at first, but building speed, the waves rose up from the shore and traveled out to sea one after the other until they were a steady conveyor belt, which became a blur. Likewise, the sun rose in the west and fell into the east until it became a stream of light flowing across the sky, a stream that shifted and bent at different angles until those streams became a blur causing a twilight of blue and gold.
Then the beach began to change. Trees –Australian, and southern pines, palmettos, oaks, coco palms – formed from piles of decay and lifted themselves from the ground stacking themselves like rising dominoes to their full heights, then shrank into the ground again as saplings, dwindling into seeds, followed by more trees repeating the pattern, moving ever eastward.
I turned to look at Red and his face changed, his body type changed and morphed with the shapes and faces of his ancestors all the way back.
A wall of dunes moved in front of us and plowed eastward, barely keeping abreast of the line of rising and shrinking trees and the retreating, shimmering surface of the Atlantic.
Red and I rose up into the air, above it all for a better view.
The eastward-moving Atlantic crept outward and fell, until the beach we had been standing on became a high bluff, looking down onto a dense forest covered with palms, palmettos, pines, birch, live oaks dotted with hammocks and streams, and marsh grasses. Red and I moved magically eastward just in time to catch a glimpse of the retreating dune line strike something solid and leap over it.
It was a wall, fifteen-feet high forming an expansive, man-made arc of limestone, about two miles in diameter, trees sprouted up in front of it as the shoreline continued to fall away.
The dunes then struck and uncovered limestone houses, and then a pyramid temple, then a courtyard filled with standing stones covered in human figures, writing, and monstrous looking faces sticking out at odd angles. Then two more temples sprouted from this strange conveyor like giant parts of a train emerging from tunnels of sand. Finally the dunes uncovered two giant, Mayan-style ball courts, each a hundred yards long and fifty yards wide, made all of limestone; their sloping walls leading to temples and platforms at their crests.
The dunes descended more than retreated eastward beneath the waters of a lagoon that filled and dissolved a shrinking forest. The dunes plowed just beneath the surface of the ocean forming an island of trees that rolled like a wave over an expanding lagoon.
I turned back to the west, trying to get a fix on where the “Mayan” complex could be. The faint outline of the modern hotels came shimmering into view for a second as if to answer me.
As a surfer I had learned how to triangulate while off shore; to dead-reckon for the purpose of finding a known sandbar or rip. I took lines-of-sight on the outlines of familiar buildings; the Holiday Inn Oceanfront, Indian Harbor and the Ebb Tide in Melbourne Beach, noting that they, and I, described corners of a right triangle, of which I stood at the ninety degree crux. Just as soon as I had a bead on where this complex was in respect to modern landmarks, the faint outlines of the hotels vanished and I was left fully in the past.
Then I turned my eyes to this city that was vaguely Mayan in appearance.
“There are five more like this between the Cape and where the state bends due south,” Red said. “All of them have been destroyed but this one and the other which stands on Canaveral Shoals less than a mile from the cape.”
“But since…?”
“Since those shoals are controlled by the government now, the ruins at Canaveral Shoals cannot be access by anyone but government agencies who would surely keep them secret,” he said.
“What is this place?” I asked.
“Glad you asked,” he said. “She is about to show you.”
Soon the ocean slowed in her motions. I turned back with horror to note that the wall, the complex, the buildings were all vanishing, blinking out one group at a time, like lights in a rolling blackout, replaced by familiar groves of trees. Time continued moving backwards, but slowed like a train decelerating into the station.
All chaotic motion subsided to the gentle hiss of the ocean lapping at my feet. The canopy of trees above me was fifty feet high, a gorgeous expanse of live oak, pine and palm.
Red was gone and around me was a group of thirty or so Indians. They obviously comprised a hunting party of some kind, although there were a few women and young boys in their midst. Some of whom had stingray spines pierced through their noses, and garments made of woven palm fibers. Others wore skins of animals. Some of the men carried spears terminated with Clovis-type arrow heads. Husky features all, well muscled, obviously bred for cold climes, these people were chatting with great excitement and pointing at something out to sea.
I looked offshore and noticed the faded remnants of the ancient barrier islands, barely poking their sandy shoal head above the surface of the waves, three miles in the distance.
Between those islands and the shoreline, one could see the trunks of dead trees languishing in the water, islands of mangrove, palm and cypress.
A mile from our position and slightly to the south and east a vessel was approaching, followed by another and yet a third.
“What year is it?” I asked.
“What is happening is roughly six-thousand years before your time,” Red said.
The first vessel was truly astonishing. It looked like a floating tern or plover riding across the flat expanse of the lagoon. The aft portion swept upwards in the configuration of a tail covered with wooden rooms. The forward peak terminated in what appeared to be the head of giant Macaw or parrot.
Between these, the gently curving length of the one-hundred foot boat carried more than one hundred people all gazing toward the shore in silent amazement.
Two giant, raked masts rose from the decks to contain the billowing sails. In a ketch design the aft mast was shorter than the main.
Atop the mainmast was a golden dish, perhaps a satellite receiver, or perhaps a solar array pointed skyward. As the vessel steamed past the shore, giving her broadside to the Indians for their inspection, I could hear the whir of an electric engine laboring somewhere below the waterline.
Her broadside was brightly painted with a swirling pattern of stylized, multicolored feathers and scales, representing an animal that seemed part bird, part snake and part lizard. Glyphs could be seen near the bow of the vessel. Obviously, as with modern vessels, here was proudly displayed a name lost to history.
Screams erupted around me. I looked down the beach to see an incredibly huge and dusky-colored jungle cat with elongated teeth, covered in oversized, baggy lip pouches, as it jogged down the beach toward our position.
The men armed their atlatls with long spears and flung them at the cat which loped just out of range, turned back toward us, sullenly hissed, yawned, then lolled on its side while licking its huge paws.
And another scream erupted as another of the cats had used his fellow as a decoy and had grabbed one of the men from the hunting party by the arm and was dragging him away toward his partner.
A bolt of energy erupted from the ship and struck the cat square in the flank. It instantly released its human prey and thundered down the beach with a pained roar.
Both cats circled back, hissing and growling preparing to charge the hunters, when another thunderbolt of electricity shot from the vessel. This time in a beam that spread and crackled the air like gigantic waves of static electricity. The cats ducked low to the ground turned their heads then ran down the beach, darting back and forth attempting to escape new hits as they came one by one.
Cheers erupted from the hunting party as the cats darted into the cover of the bush.
Men and women were surprised and filled with delight to find everyone in the group had their hair standing out from their heads. A pained moan from their compatriot brought them back to reality. They found their fellow on the beach with wounds to his arm and shoulder. But from the hopeful look on their faces, it was apparent their man would survive.
Soon the ships off shore were unloading cargo and passengers into smaller vessels which were rowed ashore.
Though the men and women aboard the ships were smaller in stature, they were equipped with gear and devices the larger, fairer skinned natives had never seen before. Clocks, devices that made sounds, that sent pictures and sounds to other individuals somewhere else on the coasts. Hunting gear, tools that pointed to the sun, that pointed to the north, devices that could locate fresh water.
The native peoples had never seen such things, nor such peoples, clothed in finely woven cotton, richly embroidered with stripes of gold and adorned with dyes and feathers.
They had pets, as well: parrots, macaws, smallish cats, dogs, chickens, goats, pigs. Never had the natives seen human beings who could make animals understand their commands in words, calls and hand motions.
Everything about these visitors, who had apparently come to stay, brought wonder, amazement and joy. They had elegantly curved and polished musical instruments fashioned from ivory, cherry-wood and jade. They possessed sources of magical light and power.
One could see genuine friendship blossoming between these two groups on that very first day. The visitors were kind, not greedy for land. They only wanted a small portion of the coast which they would demark with a stone wall. They welcomed the native peoples to inspect and learn the magic of everything they possessed.
“They taught them their religion which worshiped nature and life above all things. They provided the native peoples with hunting tools to better defend themselves against the large cats, and other creatures which plagued them,” Red said.
“And..?” I asked.
“And they were doomed,” his voice said. “Enough for now.”
In an instant I was whisked back to the hospital room. I found myself holding on to Red’s hand.
I looked down at him and understood him to be in a very deep sleep, somewhere near death. It was only a matter of hours now.
When I left the room, his grandson and his wife were no longer in the hallway.