Chapter 14 History Repeats

Copyright David A. Kearns


“…Now in those days there was an apprentice to Backtun, a younger man named Belem who thought that to better escape the feathered lizard kind, it was best to sail west to the lands of Mayapaztan and Olmeca. But others argued they would be pursued by feathered lizard sons, or perhaps they were already corrupting those cultures with their poisonous deeds.
A council of the builders was held in secret to decide what to do. It was agreed then, that in order to spread the chances of wisdom being saved, two groups would be sent, one to each place, to Yucateka and Kembe, after the calamity that was coming.
And so the great war that had been brewing through smaller wars and battles, and the strife that had erupted and so distracted free-thinking people as to prevent them from seeing their own end, came to pass.
Posaztlan was struck with the weapon that can cause the rocks to hum and shift in the earth, which caused a slide of land in the mountains of Lucayonekay, which caused a volcano to explode. But those of Posaztlan had been provided with a terrible weapon as well, by feathered lizard kind; a ray of light from the power crystals that was turned for a bad use, and would burn hundreds of thousands of hectares of forest in only one day. The smoke and flames became so thick, many were forced into the sea, and the land burned both with the soot from the volcano, and the burning forests of Aztlan. The sun was blotted out from the sky for months. When the smoke cleared, there were corpses everywhere, and the diseases swept in, and the insects, until the lands stunk with the smell of rotting flesh.
But by that time, those followers of Backtun and Belem, had made their arrangements and had fled.
Then came the rising waters from the ice shelf which had fallen into the sea covering Aztlan and Posaztlan forever and all but erasing those places, histories and wisdom from this earth.
Our people arrived here, in Kembe, and founded an earthly paradise that lasted for three hundred years of Ra. Every one hundred years we meet with our cousin peoples who live among the Mayatl and Olmecatl and Nahuatl, and share our histories with them, as they do with us.
But now, we have noticed things that our far-seers have said will precipitate the return of feathered lizard sons who mean to wipe out our history.
Every thirty years of Ra, they quietly return from the seas and take our sacred Gembe for their experiments and their breeding. With the sinking of Aztlan, and Posaztlan, the noble Gembe has sought our beaches and coasts to lay their eggs.
Likewise, feathered lizard has secretly taken the rose of our youth for their breeding experiments in their night-ships.
Since we know they have the power to hear us when we think of them, we have limited the knowledge of their existence to but a few keepers of the records, so that not so many of us will know of them, and fear them, thus calling them to us with our very fears.
But the waters of the ocean Aztlan have now reached our beloved ball courts, eighteen stones to new Ra from this wall; alerting us to the fact that every year the storms bring more water, that takes more forests with it, water that will soon take all of this community.
Thus, it seems clear to us, although we have not the (technology) to see it as Backtun did, another ice shelf has fallen into the sea.
The feathered lizard kind have also obviously approached members of our society and given them wisdom and knowledge they did not previously possess, and they have created factions among our peoples, promoted fear and distrust, and even set them to war, both with themselves and the tribes of this land.
They, the feathered lizard sons, have again sponsored the old argument between those who saw the wise man Guhengetus as son of Ra and those who saw him as son of woman: a useless argument that for some reason breeds violence, always, though the man’s words were always those of peace.
Thus, by the wisdom of our mother seer, who finally made us understand the wisdom of stone over paper, we have written our history on this wall, and on the day when the ocean seas cover our beloved ball courts, forever, we will remove the covering stones and the chamber and reveal this text for all of our nation to see.
It will cause strife because many will be exposed for having kept a secret, a piece of wisdom away from the young. But we only did this to prevent strife, and prevent the return of the feathered lizard sons who will surely hear us lamenting and dreading them. For they hear out thoughts so well, as was a gift from their survival of the ice time, but now this is a means by which they follow us for their purposes.
And we will pass this knowledge on to those who move northward, and those who move inland so that the feathered lizard kind does not remove all knowledge of them, and other wondrous things from this earth, and so they do not finally commit humankind to the slavery feathered lizard kind has in mind for us.
Our far seers have warned us of a time in the future when feathered lizard kind will arm all of the nations of the earth with terrible weapons, and just as waves of energy come from Ra, these weapons will be unleashed to destroy all of mankind, but for the slaves chosen by those of the feathered lizard. And all human kind’s knowledge reason and wisdom will be undone forever.
This must not be allowed to pass.
We call out to you who read these words, from a time when humankind had a chance. We pray that chance still lives for anyone who reads these words after we are gone. Remember, do not hate your fellow human for any reason, not for land, not for religion, not for beliefs in how humans should be governed, not for the way your neighbor spends his shells. Those reasons to hate and make war are as foreign to us as the ice which created them.
If you find yourself hating for these foolish reasons, you must surely ask yourself if there is someone, somewhere making you do so with means you do not understand. Is there someone somewhere placing the weapons of all our demise in your hands?
You read the words from a dead people who have lost their homeland, their lives, their everything. It happened to us because we had forgotten how to love. You of living flesh and blood human being reading these words, you, have the choice not to put the weapon in your own hands.
Use it and keep our memories alive.”


July 2, 2011 Melbourne Beach
“Look, Tim,” said Jay. “Now it’s my turn to apologize. I don’t know what got into me.”
“Whatever man, it’s cool,” I allowed as I leaned on the railing looking out at the moon rising off the water.
After an uncomfortable silence Jay turned and walked back into the house.
He had become such a political animal. His needs met – the stability of the household before Ryan’s little brother, Sean, arrived – Jay drifted off to straighten his place up a bit.
Smokey and Dave came out on the deck.
“We re-reading the last of the translation,” Dave said.
“Find anything new?” I asked.
“No, but I think Russ has something to tell you,” Dave said.
“Sure, what is it?” I asked.
“Ryan had a lot of help doing the translations, Tim. A lot of help. He used some of my friends to do it,” Dave said.
“Oh really?”
“Some of the folks I had run into during my travels in Central America,” he said.
“And what Smoke? Tell me what’s on your mind,” I said.
“A lot of the documents passed through my hands over the years,” Smokey said.
“And while Jay was burning down Ryan’s memory, you were quietly listening and saying nothing about what you knew,” I said.
“I don’t feel good about that. I spoke to Jay. If you poke him with a stick he’ll even admit there’s a lot more to this whole thing that meets the eye,” Smokey said.
“Yeah, well, lemme hold my breath on that one, why don’t I. Again, your point Smokey?”
“If you dig a bit more in the documents you’re going to run into references to a guy named George Wendell; a hard-hat diver from Wabasso Beach. He was one of the first people around here, who knew about the wrecks of the Spanish fleet of 1715,” he said.
“C’mon, Smokey. Spill all of it. That stuff you told me when Tim here was on the beach thinking he was losing his mind,” Dave prodded.
“Jesus, Dave. I’m getting to it,” Smokey said.
I reached a hand over and touched Smokey on the shoulder and a visual image came through, it was sometime in the early 1940s. A man stood alone on a beach watching an airplane dance in the sky about two miles off-shore to the south. It flipped on its back, arched over into a dive…
“TBF Avenger. That’s what I’m seeing,” I said. “I’m seeing a World War II, single engine bomber on a training flight off Sebastian Inlet.”
“Jesus, how did you do that Tim?” Smokey said.
“One of the new powers I’ve picked up recently. Just continue with the story, Smokey,” I said.



July 3, 1941 Monster Hole, south side of Sebastian Inlet Florida
The plane rushed toward the aquamarine surface of the ocean as the sunlight glinted off the water and the shiny royal blue skin of the aircraft. The men in their seats were young, in their twenties, just kids having fun, dressed in kaki; juiced on adrenaline in their prime of life and youth.
The radio and rear machine gunner had his head craned around, looking back toward the pilot screaming with joy; his career at this point just one long rollercoaster ride at Coney Island.
The pilot in front had a grin that stretched his face nearly to the cracking point. He lined the target buoys up in his sights and waited until the beach rushed down into his view and steadied itself horizontally across his windscreen.
By the time the TBF leveled out of the dive the water was rushing merely thirty feet or so below the belly of the aircraft. Scrub and palmetto stood above the white strand.
A man on a long stone pier on the south side of the inlet watched the men make the practice run, or what should have been a practice run.
The over-eager young pilot reached down to the red safety switch, flipped it up exposing the bomb toggle. The motion was automatic, born of a thousand hours training. It had been done without thought, in a flash of instinct that would save his life time and again during the coming war, that same instinct would nearly cost him his flight status in an instant of over-exuberance Instead of merely saying “bomb release,” the pilot toggled the torpedo and said “bomb’s away.”
The plane jumped, liberated from its five-hundred pound burden.
“Oh shit!” went the young pilot as joy turned to worry and he pulled the stick back grabbing for sky. This was a serious mistake that might result in a write-up. He might even be put in HACK.
The men both leaned hard against the windscreen of the TBF as she arched high and left, watching the tell-tail progress of the armed torpedo’s bubble trail through the water, expecting it to run up on Sebastian Beach and impale itself in the dunes, but it never did.
Two miles off shore it stopped dead in its tracks, blocked by something forgiving enough that the detonation never came.
“Whew, shit! Roy! Musta been a dud round!” the pilot screamed to his REO man.
“It hit something, Johnny.”
The pilot circled where the torpedo stopped before correcting his position heading due east at five hundred feet.
“What do we do?” the radio-rear gunner asked.
“Get back to Melbourne. Tell everybody there was a SNAFU in the quick release,” the pilot said. “Then we cross our fingers.”
“But the fish. What about the fish?”
“Must be a dud, Roy. It would have gone off otherwise,” the pilot said.
“Shit Johnny, that’s not an answer, and you know it.”
“Alright already. If someone bitches we’ll tell ‘em where to find it.”
“But that never happened…” went Smokey’s voice down a long dark tunnel.
“Because the man on the beach was George Wendell, hard hat diver,” I said.
“He called the air base, told them where it was, and offered his services to retrieve it,” Smoke said.
Next came images of a barge on the water, the time had shifted to a different day, perhaps only a few weeks following the training, bomb run.
The diver carried a bulky plastic housing over his equally cumbersome camera gear.
When his shoes hit the soft sand bottom he was standing before an underwater wall that stretched to the north and the south in a gentle curve.
He was in twenty to thirty feet of water.
The torpedo lay quietly on the bottom in a pile of worm-rock and rubble. It had impaled itself into the wall and broken away part of it, revealing the wall to be the shell of a limestone chamber. The torpedo had removed the covering wall section for about thirty feet on either side.
The diver carefully documented the position of the torpedo with respect to the wall with his camera, fixed straps below the weapon and signaled topside to haul her up. A winch carefully raised the torpedo off the bottom and onto the barge. But as it was coming free of the bottom, it swung around and the fin of the torpedo nicked the accumulated coral and worm rock from the stones that had been inside the chamber.
The diver thought he saw something familiar scrawled in the gash section of limestone. He approached the wall and shined a light on it.
There stood the relief carving of a man wearing an elaborate head-dress. The diver used a scrub pad and a chisel to remove more of the encrustation, and another face emerged, and yet a third. Some of the faces were human. Others were combinations of human and animal, others not recognizably either.
The diver looked to the south and the north and realized the arching chamber stretched farther than he could see in either direction. All one had to do to see the complete text of hieroglyphs was rip away the covering side of the chamber, remove the encrusted material, scrub the surfaces clean and photograph it.
The images blurred in a montage, showing the diver working alone with SCUBA tanks and his familiar hard hat gear over the next few weeks prying tunnel sections loose with crowbars and winches aboard his barge until the entire covering wall was ripped down, and cleaned to reveal the complete work.
Other images showed the diver handing the photos he took of the entire wall to officials from the US Navy who handed him stacks of cash for the pictures.
But there in his darkroom in an old concrete block house in Wabasso Beach, he always secreted away copies of his pictures.
Then, on a warm muggy afternoon in August, the man stood on the beach again watching the sky. His brow knitted with pain and anger.
A fan of thunderclouds rolled over him from the west, but their grey fingers didn’t reach the flat calm waters of the Atlantic. To the east the sky was still wide open and robin’s-egg blue; perfect for flying.
They came in a group of five from the southeast just after four o’clock. They were the same TBF Avenger type aircraft that had uncovered the wall, and the story, written in hieroglyphs, in the first place. It was a live-fire training mission. And with German sub threats all over the nearby waters of the Atlantic, who could argue with the need for more torpedo training?
At precise locations the torpedoes hit the water and sought out their critical points of impact all along that wall; points engineered by demolitions experts to completely destroy the edifice and the story written upon it. None of these torpedoes were dud rounds, it turned out.
Bits and pieces of limestone came tumbling down from the sky. They were blasted for hundreds of yards, some of them; littering the bottom with chunks of unrecoverable history; grotesque faces of gods, demons, lizards and men alike.
When the smoke and water cleared, the pieces of the immense puzzle were scattered all over the bottom, sometimes filling holes in the sand with monstrous images.
Spear-fishermen, and surfers who would infrequently see the broken pieces of the stone relief carvings underwater would give the place a name: “Monster Hole” and people would slowly but surely forget where that name came from, only later to ascribe it to sharks, and lurking, giant grouper that fed there, in the depressions blasted by torpedoes, and the remnants of a limestone ledge that once contained a message.
Monster Hole became anything just outside and to the south of the Sebastian Inlet, because a wall had been there telling of a city buried beneath the sand in the waters to the east. A wall blown to bits after that first training flight, and those that followed erased it all, the town, the ball courts, the temples; so that none of it existed anymore.
Yet the man who had been a conscientious and accomplished hard-hat diver, named George Wendell, he knew of the wall, knew that it contained an earth-shattering message that was being concealed for thousands of years: and they knew he knew. And what was worse was, they knew, that he knew, that they knew.
It didn’t take long for his life to spin out of control following a series of quiet, otherwise innocuous coincidences of misfortune, leaving the dazed and perplexed man with nothing more than the sort of rambling, idiot story told in bars that no one believed.
He had signed agreements with people called “handlers” in the War Department. These agreements precluded him talking to anyone about what he knew. Yet he did, and they knew he did.
“You wanna know about the strangest thing I ever saw underwater?” he would say.
A reporter visited his home and saw the artifacts and even glanced at the photos. But without a way to confirm any of it, the story quietly drifted into the backwaters of liquid memory.
The diver gave the pictures to his nephew, Rex, in 1977 before dying of liver cancer. And before joining the Army Rangers and dying himself during a parachute accident in the jungles of Trujillo, Honduras in 1989, Rex Tyndall gave them to Ryan Cogswell in the presence of Russ Bridges at South Beach Willie’s. He told Russ and Ryan the wild story of the stones passed down from his dead uncle, George.
Even then Ryan knew there was a relation between the hieroglyphs and the lights of 1981.
Rex warned Ryan that he thought the stones had been cursed with some sort of voodoo.
He wanted no part of the photos anymore than he wanted more questioning from agents of the CIA who suspected the duplicate shots existed and harassed him repeatedly for them.
I sighed and let go on the connection to the past, just as Smokey finished his summation.
“Well Smoke, you’ve been holding this in all these years,” I said.
“Hey Tim, I didn’t know what the hell to make of it. Then Ryan and I sort of lost touch after he got the thing translated,” he said.
“Same old Smokey,” I said.
Dave cut in; “Tim, you’re really not being fair here. Smokey came forward now, you know? How can you be mad at him?”
“I’m not. I’m sorry Russ. It’s just that people seem so scared when it comes to the important stuff. And this really is important. Christ Ryan gave up his life for it. Can’t we at least honor him for doing that?”
“How?” Dave asked.
“By admitting this happened. That there is a threat out there, a threat to all of us,” I said.
“How would that bring him back?” Smokey asked.
“Not bring him back but at least recognize among ourselves that the man was not crazy. That some, if not all of this stuff really happened. If we can accept that he was ahead of the curve on this, and I mean ahead of everyone else, then, the weird behavior that Jay was talking about is explained,” I said.
“Now you lost me, Tim. How does this explain bad behavior?” Dave said.
“Easy for you, Dave. Your marriage has always been solid. Not to mention the fact Loni knew what the hell happened to all of us. I’m sure she doesn’t blame Ryan, or wouldn’t, at least not the way we have,” I said.
“Nice of you to speak for my wife,” Dave said.
“Sorry, please don’t get offended but, she knew Trisha better than we did. She knew Ryan. Think of what Ryan and Trisha went through together,” I said.
“With what?” Dave asked.
“Don’t you remember what Ryan told us? He said they took them both, abducted them and made them have sex as part of their amusement or some sort of experiment,” I said.
Dave thought for a moment.
“Is your memory okay, Tim?” he asked. “Because I don’t remember that part.”
“Ask Loni. If she kept in touch with Trisha, chances are she’s told her,” I said.
“Wait a second, I was there too. And I don’t remember them saying that and I sort of think I would remember a little detail like that myself, you know. I am a pretty smart guy,” Dave said.
“Yeah, they do that…” I said, non-committal.
“Oh shit…” sighed Smokey. “I’m going inside and waiting for Sean, guys.”
“Fine, go,” I said.
“Do what, Tim. They do what?” Dave prodded.
“I haven’t gotten it worked out yet, and this is going to sound strange but they can alter memories,” I said. “Or shift versions of the past.”
“Tim…”
“I know. I know it sounds abso-fucking-lutely nuts. Believe me. I know,” I said.
“Alright, let’s take it for fact that they can do this. How do you know your memories haven’t been polluted, altered and such?” Dave asked.
I thought about Red Dancing Bear. It occurred to me that only Ryan and I remembered him well. Now that Ryan was gone, only I did.
“I guess we don’t,” I said wondering how any of us could be certain of our memories.
“When we were in the eighth grade, in Mrs. Maguire’s social studies, do you remember her class?” I asked.
“Yeah. Brittany was in there with me,” he said. “Although she never would speak to me, then.”
“Hell she didn’t speak to anyone but Ryan. She had a huge crush on him,” I said.
“So what happened in class?”
“Do you remember that puzzle she had of the Titanic disaster?” I said.
“The jigsaw, sure. Front page of the New York Times,” he said.
“I worked that puzzle a few times. It was fun. And I always remember looking at the date on it front page,” I said.
“So?”
“Think back to that puzzle, in particular, imagine it in your mind,” I said.
“Yeah, I got it.”
“Find the date of the disaster on the page. It was on the upper left hand corner. Read the year for me. Just think back to the puzzle, not what you know you think to be the year but try to read the year off that memory, of that puzzle,” I said.
He thought for a moment, then sighed.
“That damned puzzle was too easy for me,” he said giving up. “I never worked it more than once.”
“That’s probably why I liked it. It was my comfort zone,” I said.
“What’s your point, Tim?”
“In my mind’s eye, the year on that puzzle is 1911,” I said.
“But Titanic sank in…”
“1912. Right. Everybody knows that,” I said. “And you want to know what else is weird?”
“Sure,” he said.
“I remember being in college looking back to the face of that puzzle in my memory and the year printed on it was 1910, not 1911,” I said.
“Pot. Booze, that has to be it,” he said.
“Sure, not the alternative,” I said.
“Which is?”
“Look, history is laid out in a certain way. This happens, then that happens. Boom, you’re left with the Titanic on the bottom of the ocean,” I said. “We know it’s down there, Bob Ballard found it in, what year again?”
“Oh shit. I forget,” he said.
“Right. So do I. But, it went down,” I said. “You remember the lights of 1981 and the dead sea turtles.”
“Yes,” he said.
“You remember Myles Niederman turned up dead, and we were blamed for it initially,” I said.
“Yes.”
“But you don’t remember how it happened?” I said.
“Not really,” he said.
“You further don’t remember a conversation, whereby one of your best friends in the whole world told you he had been abducted by aliens and forced into a sex act with another good friend. You don’t remember it happening and yet I was there and I saw you standing there when the very same words entered my ears,” I said.
“So back to the Titanic?”
“In short I think they can alter the past to a certain extent. I think they have to, in order to be able to do what it is they do,” I said. “They may be able to move events around so that the time progression comes out the same in the end: Titanic is on the bottom. Ballard finds it. It doesn’t matter whether it went down in 1910, 11, or 12 so long as the thing ends up there in the end for him to do so.”
“Do what?”
“You saw the way they moved? They were in six places at once. What does that sound like to you, Dave? Think in terms of physics,” I said.
“Quantum, light speed and stuff like that,” he said.
“Ryan and I talked about this. Think how jumbled their lives would be if they didn’t shift time around, even just a little bit. Paradoxical accidents would be as common as a winter sniffle,” I said.
“So the Titanic thing, is what?” he said.
“Maybe it’s a synapse in my brain that keeps misfiring every time I try to bring up an image on a jig-saw, or maybe it’s a ripple in space time,” I said. “Brought on by their coming and going, brought on by their need to standardize time every so often; to calibrate things again; reset values so they have a standardized understanding of the time progression.”
“Whoa space cowboy! My head is about to explode,” he said.
“I’m not saying my memory of when Titanic happened has really changed. I’m saying consider it as an example of what might be happening, why our memories of events in the past might be different,” I said.
“Explain what you mean,” he said.
“If they are zipping back and forth from Alpha Centauri, their concepts of time are going to become all jumbled with regard to each other. Those who zip and come back see time differently than those who stay here. It’s a weakness of theirs. They have to recalibrate everything so they move along on the same page again. It’s a hazard brought on by their advanced capabilities. It would explain a few things,” I said.
“Such as?”
“Their need for pure DNA. Complete DNA; without big chunks of it missing from quantum corruptions and gamma rays,” I said. “They’re so smart they fucked themselves. They can’t copulate normally. They have to snatch DNA from other critters, from us, namely. Pisses them off big time.”
“But why would our memories differ?” Dave said.
“When you read about quantum physics, you learn theoretically that those who travel through time space at light speed, may return to the same place in time, so to speak, but that version of it, may be altered,” I said.
“With respect to who, the traveler or the one who stays?” Dave asked.
“Both. They would view and remember recent events differently. Their set of what exists now would overlap on some things but other things would be different. The farther out you go at light speed, for the longer time period, the worse this effect would be. Say, you come back from a long light-speed trip. You zip a trillion miles away and then zip back through a quantum worm hole to the second you left. Only, when you get back, Oswald missed and Kennedy, instead of being assassinated got impeached after he was found in a tryst with Marilyn. In our case, maybe the trip wasn’t that far, so, we remember events differently, or only slightly so. Something like that,” I said.
“Which would mean one of us, Tim, went up in the ship and not the other,” he said.
“Possibly, or our memories are foggy,” I said. Then I shook my head.
“What?” Dave asked.
“Something Trisha said to me. She said if I remembered something else that went on that night, that pertained to she and I, I … Christ, my head hurts,” I said.
“Hey man, take it easy,” Dave said.
A car pulled into the driveway and Gary came out on deck.
“Sean’s here, guys. C’mon, let’s see how our marine is doing these days,” he said.

Chapter 13 Wal-Mart

Copyright David A. Kearns

“…But as Aztlan began to sink into the waters of the sea, the sons of feathered lizard saw their chance to strike at humankind, to send him into a very dark time, so feathered lizard son kind could feed on the rose of all his youth over the whole word for thousands of years.
To do this feathered lizard sons had to eliminate the knowledge those of Aztlan and Posaztlan had gained. It set the two cousin nations, who had always been at peace, to war with each other as the calamities of the earth approached.
For in Kractumbam, the white land of death, a mass of ice as large as Aztlan itself was preparing to fall into the sea, and feathered lizard son knew this, and knew the timing of it. There are some who say once feathered lizard sons knew of the approaching day arranged and timed for the falling of the ice into the sea. For once in the sea it would cause waves, floods that would eventually cover Aztlan and Posaztlan.
Quetzalcoatl, and his sons of the feathered lizard kind, had learned you see, over ages of existence, the secrets of the shifting earth, of the stars that fell, and had demarked the timing of these events as much to demonstrate their power to mankind as to plan for their future. They could predict the shadow which swallowed the moon and the sun, and make the peoples of many nations bow down to them, though this event is a simple thing as we know it to be.
Quetzalcoatl, and feathered lizard-kind, tricked factions of Posaztlan and Aztlan to regard each other as enemies.
Two great religions existed on both islands, and these religions spread to the long island as well, named Arawakumba. The long island was in the process of receiving power and the light, as was the smaller island Layayakos and mankind was nearly ready to unify all islands under one banner of peace, tolerance and wisdom, with a say for all who lived there.
But feathered lizard sons could not abide this, for he needed the knowledge of his existence to disappear, so he could harvest mankind, as would a gardener plant and pluck cacao roots specifically for his needs in all parts of the world.
Feathered lizard sons needed to appear to man as a god from the stars so that mankind could never gain an advantage over him, yet would always be there to serve his needs as a provider of bahk and blood for consumption.
Now in the land known as Posaztlan there had been a very wise man named Guhengetus, who had learned the power to heal with his mind, and had learned the power to see events in the future, and had learned the power of peace as a means to create a new age.
This feathered lizard sons could not abide, and in the man’s fifty-second year, which many consider the midday of life, feathered lizard sons contrived to have him executed, by using the Council of The One on the ruling island of Aztlan to deem this man heretic to the established order of things. Though he was a wise man, concerned only with the progress of human kind, that wisdom was dangerous to the well-being of the feathered lizard sons who had bought off many humans with gifts of (technology) that made them wealthy.
Yet still, two religions sprang up after the man’s death that debated the nature of Guhengetus. Was he the son of Ra, as one religion believed, or was he son of woman, as are we all? And this was the belief of the other religion, that his bahk may have been just as human as ours was but his wisdom came from Ra, as did light which, like wisdom, comes to us all if we but remove the shades we place in front of it.
Now, for a thousand years of Ra, the two religions each believing the other had it wrong, managed to live and commerce peaceably, agreeing if not on the nature of the man, then his teachings.
But as the falling of the ice shelf approached, feathered lizard kind, stoked the fires of hatred between these two groups, such that war erupted, and those believing Guhengetus to be the son of heaven were forced to occupy only Posaztlan, and those believing him to be the son of woman, only Aztlan.
Arawakumba and Layayakos became battlegrounds of both as recruits for the soldiery of both islands were sought. The big mountain island to the south and east, likewise.
Now the state was in order for feathered lizard kind, as the day approached, when the ice shelf was preparing to fall into the sea.
A human explorer named Backtun, managed to gain information from sky-seers, and from his own personal derived observations that the ice shelf indeed was about to collapse and that mankind needed to stop the wars, and peacefully work together for an orderly evacuation of both main islands, parts of Arawakumba and the entire smaller island of Layayakos.
Backtun knew of the lands of Kembe, to the north and west, and though the passage was treacherous with the current of the sea, and the creatures of Kembe were giant and ferocious, Kembe would make an excellent place to start Aztlan over again.
Backtun’s life work became a quest to make contact with those native peoples of Kembe, giving them knowledge they needed to survive against the creatures which terrorized them, in exchange for a place by the seas to live away from the eyes of feathered lizard kind. But Backtun, like Guhengetus, was denounced by the Council of The One as devil-speaker and executed.
Yet his children, and his followers continued his work through the creation of a secret society that worked through the guild of builders and architects, as this group was known for calm, rational thinking whose moral character remained beyond reproach. As no amount of bribery could make a building stand longer if its base was not designed correctly…”

-The Book of Aztlan


July 2, 2011 8:30 p.m., Melbourne Beach
“Jesus, what took you so long, man? That beer’s got to be warm by now,” Russ said as I entered Jay’s house with the envelope and the case of beer.
“Trisha and I got to talking,” I said.
“Old times, huh?” Russ asked.
“Yeah, old times. She still looks great. I guess she’s got about fourteen days left on her stint in there. She says she doesn’t want to do that crap anymore,” I said.
“I’ll believe that when I see it,” said Jay opening a bottle of rum.
“Jay, I am sorry for what I said earlier, man. This thing has me pretty tense,” I said.
“Don’t worry about it. Gary told me all that stuff you found in Ryan’s room. They have it all in boxes in my garage. Can’t tell me how much this thrills me, old buddy,” he said.
“You still don’t believe it,” I said.
“Nope. Not a wit, Tim. You weren’t in town when everything was going on with Ryan. He was going insane, and he was taking your ex-girlfriend right along with him man. Not to mention cheating on his wife,” he said.
“Jay…”
“No Tim, he was banging her in my office. I didn’t appreciate it at all. I began to look like the town pimp for bringing those two together again,” he said.
“But you didn’t…”
“Perception is everything in business. If there is a case for even saying something, it can be used against you. Hell, people are still whispering,” he said.
“Sorry to hear that, Jay. Sorry he disrupted your life,” I said.
“Look, Tim. I’m sorry. I keep forgetting how close you guys were. It only makes me mad he is still dragging you guys down with all this UFO bullshit. And that he would paint up his room like he did, even makes me more mad at him. So much talent and energy. Such a waste,” he said.
I had nothing to say to that. I couldn’t and wouldn’t judge Jay anymore. He was right. I hadn’t been here in town. Or so I thought for the moment.
I also began to believe he was being sincere, that he really didn’t remember, nor believe in what we apparently had all been through and nothing I said was going to change that. Being under his roof and hospitality I had to respect his thoughts on the matter.
I only hoped he didn’t talk about Trisha and Ryan when Sean got back into town. If he got back, better stated.
“Any word on Sean?” I asked.
“His mother called,” Gary said. Gary was bus reading the pieced-together account of what had been found on the wall.
“Sean is flying into Patrick Air Force Base sometime this evening. He should be here before ten. He wanted us to wait up for him and not hit the booze so hard we didn’t recognize him,” Gary finished.
“I’d know Sean anywhere, under any condition,” Jay said hoisting a rum-sunrise and slurping the frosty lip of the glass.
“Here we go again,” Tom said with a smile. “Only problem is, Timmy took so long getting back with the beer we have to resort to the hard stuff first.”
We decided to pool all the material and read the account of this entity called “The Book of Aztlan.” Jay of course, decided now would be a good time to go fishing down on the beach and no one dared disagree.
“Let me know when y’all are finished with the hokum,” Jay said.
“Roger that,” I replied.
Tom read Ryan’s Declaration of Human Independence.
“I have to admit, this does seem pretty wild, Tim. He’s calling for violence, kidnapping, destruction of public property against human collaborators,” he said. “This makes a pretty good case for the goons out in front of his house. Maybe he was dangerous, or at least getting there.”
“I suppose that’s true if everything he’s saying is false,” I ventured. “But, some of us in this room know that at least some of what he’s saying is true. Don’t we Smokey?”
Russ just shook his head and said ; “I…I’d …I ?”
“Smoke, spit it out, man. You’re among friends here,” I prodded.
“Timmy, I don’t know man. This is all just so damned strange. Think about what you’re saying,” he said.
“I haven’t said the first damned thing, yet, Smoke. And you guys are all ready to toss me under a bus, as a whack-o, a loon,” I said. “Now, why is that? Were you there too? And you Gary? Were we all there at least for the lights? Did we, or did we not, see them?”
“Ryan is saying there’s about to be a huge war, here. That it will start in the next year or so with the destruction of the internet. Now where in hell does all that come from?” Russ asked.
I went out to the garage and dug through the boxes until I had the document I was looking for.


Dear Tim:
Two months ago I squirreled away some cash for you and put it into a bank account in Belize. The information can be found taped to this letter. You’ll be able to wire this to an account here in the states if you like.
I tinkered with the Internet, some credit card payment websites, some of their major accounts, and some off-shore banks. You’ll find a CD with the software package to do this yourself should you find yourself in a position to get to a clean machine. You tweak the credit payment site with a couple little tools, get their major account information. From there you charge each major account: of which there are literally thousands, about $5 each for nefarious line- items, send the credit card extractions to an offshore. Then send the money back to the states, walk in and cash a couple of checks.
The money I got for you took about an hour of screen time to procure. It was easier than stealing candy from a baby. I know you can do it if you need more.
If you follow the footsteps, or better stated, the bread crumbs I have left for you, you will enter a world where you will need clean, untraceable cash resources, until cash itself is no longer valuable. It is the world you will likely inherit within the next few years after I am gone.
What I did was highly illegal but, I have a feeling after the internet crashes, the mess will be so great they’ll never catch this and you are going to need this money now. Soon after that, the money will be worthless anyway until a new currency comes to town.
There’s a good chance, that if this all goes down, beginning with my death, my family is also in danger. I hope I can save them but, I am so dialed in, they know my every move.
They have to keep others quiet so, they’ll do it to prove a point for the people still working at Camerdyne.
Here’s what I know: certain strategic faults have been dialed into all Savante Systems to be hacked into on January 3, 2012, with a bolis of unknown code from an “unknown” origin.
These events will coincide with heavy sunspot activity which will disrupt major grids at the same time. The world goes into chaos. No power, no cell, no banking, no commerce, no travel, no navigation to ships at sea, no guidance systems for missiles.
Within the time frame in question the upcoming wars are going to be about four things: religion, fishing rights, water rights, and food shortages. Credit, banking all of that goes to shit with the collapse, which is when they will sweep in for the kill. Read on in other places for the specifics of that.
I have discovered caches of the new language in our company main frame, again through hacking, these caches containing new code. Ostensibly this is being created to back-stop what we assume will be a cyber attack from China and eastern European corporate mob allies. Both the attack and the backstop are created by an entity I have been taught to refer to as “the customer,” however, you and I know him by another name. He is back in the building, Tim. This time he plays for keeps.
I know that surveillance of us as a species continues after the collapse of power and world markets. Our homes, our cars, our offices, GPS tracking our movements on the planet. All of that stuff remains intact but under the nose of our friend, not anyone, or government you and I are familiar with.
I also have found caches of code containing a construct for what I believe is an artificially intelligent internet programmed turn itself on again continuing all of the above functions at the flip of a switch a few years after we have fully been brought to heel as a species. I have therefore concluded that there is a separate hardware system of fiber optics stashed deep underground at key locations to handle the workload of the entire world.
One of those locations is likely located somewhere outside Mexico City. The only evidence I have to go on in this regard is heavy traffic over the last few years of our friends and their bio-entity tools.
Do you remember a girl named Jen Epstein? She was a couple years behind us in school. She works in San Diego at the space systems lab. In the event of my death, she expects you to show up with the documents I have provided you. You have to be very careful how you approach her or they will kill her.
I don’t know how you’re going to do it but I hope you do. There’s a lot more here. Keep reading my instructions.
You must also get your car, your house, your life debugged. I know they have been digging into our cell phone conversations, so they are likely now monitoring you.
I would say keep in touch but, that’s likely impossible now. Hate to get weepy on you brother. But, you have been a brother to me.
Good luck, see you on the other side,
Ryan. July 2, 2011

“Tim, what the hell does all this mean?” Tom asked. “This sounds insane.”
“Check the date,” Gary said. “You’re saying he knew when the letter would be opened and read.”
“Just like the date on his declaration, which you guys so easily have dismissed in your mind as bullshit,” I said.
“Tim, Ryan was seriously intelligent. He was also a paranoid delusional, man. He was bi-polar. We all knew that. For Christ sakes, Tim, he heard voices in high school. He drew pictures of engines he claimed could whisk you to the center of the galaxy and back in a day. He thought intelligent lizards were living under the ice in Antarctica,” Russ said.
“Since when were you up on all this, Smokey?” I asked Russ.
“Tom knows it too. Unlike you, Tim, Tommy and I got high with the guy a few times. He was brilliant, but he was also nuts; as in out of his freaking mind.”
“If he was so crazy why was he working for our defense department?” I asked. “Now, he was either a lunatic or he wasn’t, right? Does it make sense them hiring a nut-job?”
“Does it makes sense for a functional illiterate to be in the White House for eight years? Does it make sense for the federal government to pay $1000 a pop for airplane toilet seats?” Russ fired back.
“Why don’t we let Tim tell us what he knows about this letter, about this story,” Gary said.
Dave and Chuck came downstairs now and everyone, apart from Jay sat around the living room ready to listen to me.
“Years ago Ryan and I started dialoguing as he called it, pertaining to certain events we knew had happened in our lives, that for one reason or another, we could not clearly recall.
“A few years ago he started work on some project that involved some super advance computer language. His team’s job was to break down the tasks of this advanced language and translate it into something our computers could use,” I said.
“So?”
“This new language, whatever it was, was apparently so advanced it began to freak people out. Gave them nightmares,” I said.
“Why couldn’t they just use this new language on our computers? Explain to me why it had to be translated?” Russ asked.
“Well, either way you broke down the tasks, you know you have to flow it out…”
“Stop right there, genius. What do you mean, flow it out?” Tom asked.
“To run a task on a computer, a job you have to know what the task is, what it’s doing at any time in the progression. You can break down tasks either by data flow or task flow. Flow charts are like a paragraph describing what a program does, right?”
“Okay, just say “flow chart” next time and I’m with you,” Gary said.
“Sorry, well most applications can be broken down into diagrams that are viewable in 2-D. This stuff they were getting was both elegant and complex. You had to task flow it out in three dimensions, or even four dimensions. The diagrams looked like shapes, like rambling helixes and spiral, three-dimensional worms that criss-crossed.
“That was the beginning of the nightmare. Then you had to take bits and pieces of it and task that to like, a thousand nodes, or regular computers, synthesize it, then run that back into the master, a Cray Supercomputer. They kept hiring and firing people right and left to get them working on this stuff.
“The most successful people doing this, had no clue what they were working on, only that working in this new language made them mentally ill, well, most of them with an IQ less than 130 or so.”
“Yeah, okay their jobs were demanding, so what?” Dave said.
“Well Ryan who has an IQ off the scope, he began to see the elegance and the beauty of this new language, after he got over feeling weird about it. He started asking himself why the company was forcing the translation into language that could be utilized by Savante, who as we know, took over where Windows left off, right?”
“And?” Gary demanded.
“So why do it, right? Use this new language, whatever it was. The Savante shit is full of holes and faults. It cracks like glass-wear, he used to say, if you shake it just a little bit. Well it turns out the architecture we run everything on now is fundamentally flawed, like, stone-age, compared to this new stuff.”
“How so?” Chuck asked.
“All computers running today can’t tell the difference between data and code. Imagine how stupid that is. Your home security connected to your email connected to your Smartlife car systems, you cell, all of it running on flawed software and architecture,” I said.
“Okay, I’ll bite, what’s the difference?” Russ asked.
“This was how Ryan explained it to me. You have a bottle plant; that’s your computer processor, right?” I said.
“Right,” Dave said.
“Your orders for the staff and machinery are five-hundred bottles an hour: that’s the code. Your data..”
“Are the bottles?” Tom said.
“Exactly. Well, since the beginning of computing we started out building processors that were tricked into believing data and code are the same thing. All our systems are now based on this. He saw that here was a language whose very nature bespoke a different kind of computer architecture. So why not adopt it? Cut costs, build the thing to handle this new Mega Language and off you go,” I said.
“And?” Gary asked.
“That was apparently the wrong question to ask. Way wrong. They wanted to shut him up. But his mind keeps on it for years and begins to wonder…?”
“Why?” Gary demanded.
“Exactly. Why do that? Why all this waste? Why did the human mind suffer such decompression sickness dealing with this shit in the first place and, off you go with your wild theories,” I said.
“Left to its own devices and in the absence of information…” Dave said.
“The mind unravels,” I said finishing his thought.
“Fascinating,” said Tom. “Really and truly.”
“You haven’t heard the best part yet,” I said.
“I can’t wait,” Tom answered.
“Ryan began to believe there was a purpose for keeping everyone on the old Savante systems, which in the presence of new technology should get better over time not worse, right?”
“Well, it turns out that the newer the version of Savante, the worse it actually is; the more flawed it is, the crappier it is, understand?”
But Gary had an answer for that. He felt good to finally add something to this discussion.
“So, look at Bill Gates before he retired; that’s just a corporation with a monopoly producing junk because they have cornered the market and they know they can get away with it.”
But I fired right back.
“Yeah, right but like I said, everything we have, all of our markets, our beloved new God the internet, banking, home Smart Life Systems, your car, missile guidance systems, jet fighters, air traffic control, ships at sea, credit cards, huge damns holding back megatons of water, they all run on these flawed platforms by Savante or are intimately attached to them and the programs are only getting worse.”
“Problem brewing,” Dave said.
“And yet, you have all these people in rooms exposed to technology that shows these flaws glaringly by making them look at something so immensely better it’s almost laughable,” I said.
“I still don’t get what you’re driving at?” Gary asked.
“He worked with people from China, Taiwan, the Philippines, India, Saudi Arabia, Russia, every single day. Here we are training potential enemies. These people, when they frustrated with what they were doing, they just check out, go home. Get on a plane,” I said.
“Security threat,” Dave said.
“Right. Big time. Meanwhile, the government is monitoring our home systems, our email, everything under the auspices of National Security. Does this make sense to you?”
“Not unless you were trying to start a cyber war,” Dave said.
“Exactly. Not unless you were daring the monkey to blow up the dynamite stick by giving him a lit match,” I said.
“The monkey?” Dave asked.
“That’s how Ryan began to think of the human species after working with this software over the last few years. He felt like a chimpanzee in a cubical directing other chimpanzees to tinker with a bomb using sticks and bricks,” I said.
“So he began to believe the software was…” Gary asked.
“Exactly, not from around here…” I said. “Not from around here at all. Alien.”
“Whoa, now you lost me, sport. Suppose it’s..?”said Tom searching for any name or nationality he could think of but Tim knew where he was going.
“Russian? Chinese? Arab?...They’re spying on us, remember? They need to come to our schools to get trained on this stuff, on how to run a computer, how to program, remember? We’re the top of the food chain. So that leaves who?”
“Maybe some new computer genius locked in a room somewhere because he’s so smart,” Tom said.
“Cranking out code that only works on technology no one on earth has developed yet?” I said. “Believe me, you and I are having the same discussion that Ryan and I had two years ago.”
I continued.
“Ryan double majored at school in computer science and electrical engineering. He was at the top of his game before he died. He knew everything that was happening in computer software design. If there was someone out there developing a new language he would have known who it was and what they were working on,” I said.
“So that leaves what, some bug-eyed alien? Tim, I’m not going to become one of these guys writing blogs about UFO’s. I’m not going to hang out in the desert with a bunch of losers looking at lights through a telescope,” Gary said.
“Sometimes that’s the gig,” I said.
Dave had a thought here.
“Let’s say you’re right for a second and the big bugged-eyed alien is behind all this. Why not just have us off ourselves with our own nukes? Why cyber war?” he said.
“Cyber war is sort of like that one bomb they supposedly had that left the buildings standing but killed all the people. You throw society into chaos, wars may break out but they don’t go nuclear on a large scale. Most or all your infrastructure remains: conquest begins,” I said.
“To Ryan, that seemed to be the plan. That’s when he started digging up all that old stuff from his dad’s locker about UFOs, trying to remember what happened to us back in 1981, and checking around the company for indications, from what other people were working on,” I said.
“Guys, our buddy Ryan was no freak in the desert dressed in camo.’ He was a seriously intelligent engineer with a future, with a wife and kids, you know. Society classified him as a winner, one of the chosen to lead,” I said.
“Who also frequented strip clubs, and was cheating on his wife,” Jay clarified as he entered the room.
“Who also went to strip clubs, correct,” Tim said. “A perfectly natural, human male response to pressure. Who goes to strip clubs, Jay? Guys do. You ever been to one?”
“Sure, plenty of times,” Jay said. “The problem is, I wasn’t an insane forty year old man. I was a kid,” he said.
“Bully for you Jay, really. Bully for you, and God bless you for never having the slightest bit of marital trouble – ever,” I said.
“Timmy, you haven’t been around. Ryan was meeting some serious strangoids at strip clubs. Cops knew, and told me all about it. Creeps who were part of some ring of nationwide UFO whack-jobs. They thought they couldn’t be spied on if they met at strip clubs and at South Beach Willie’s.”
“Hey, those places are noisy, Jay. It does make sense. They’re random and noisy. Sounds like a place I’d want to go if I were exchanging sensitive information,” I said.
“South Beach Willie’s? That place is a damned dive, Timmy. It was since back in the day,” Jay said.
“You knew he was going there, again, didn’t you, Jay?” I said.
“No.”
“Whoa, easy cowboy. What the fuck does that mean?” Gary asked.
“Nothing, but like you said. It’s kind of convenient that somehow nefarious locations are now part of the lore, part of the urban myth under creation here as we burn down the memory of my best friend in the whole world. Dovetails nicely. I’m beginning to think that suited their plans pretty well,” I said.
“Whose plans?” Chuck asked.
“Who do you think, Chuck. Them, those them. They! You know….” Dave said with a nervous smile as he pointed up, and now I felt like a true lunatic.
“Thanks guys,” I said.
“C’mon Timmy, I’m just giving you shit, man,” Dave said.
“So Tim, you’re saying that the invasion has already happened. That they’re here already?” Gary asked.
“You forget, Ryan was saying this, and now he’s dead. What do you do to an enemy in times of war?”
“Kill him?” Tom answered.
“Kill him, right. Well, maybe someone declared war on Ryan. And if so, some of what he was telling me was true, if not all of it,” I said.
“Maybe it was an issue of National Security. We have jihad going on now, you know, and here he is in this declaration talking about violence and so forth. That’s not dangerous?” Jay said.
“All right, let’s look at warfare on a large scale, and Ryan and I had this conversation also. War: what is it, how do you commit war on an enemy? What are the steps? As on a playground, as on the stage of nations, step one is what?”
“Uh, find out about your enemy?” Jay said.
“Right. Know who he is, his strengths and weaknesses. Is he a righty or a lefty? You gather intel,” I said.
“Espionage,” Jay said.
“Beautiful word. Exactly. One of the first signs that someone is at war with you is finding a foreigner in your land, unbidden, unwelcome , gathering intelligence on you,” I said, adding, “And we’ve never seen this, huh?”
“You’re talking about sightings, of which there have been thousands of cases and only a handful unexplained,” Jay said.
“Glad you brought this up. This is what the debunkers always say. But of this one small percentile, there have been solid cases, photographs, dozens of witnesses and we still don’t have an answer,” I said.
“Like what? Give me an example,” Jay asked.
I went out to the garage and found another document. Coming back in the room I began going through it:
“In Trinidade Island six hundred miles south southeast of Brazil. In 1957 a photographer working for the Brazilian navy photographed an object that looked like the planet Saturn only flattened out, oblong. It has never been explained. More than thirty witnesses were on deck and saw the thing. I could go on but, that seems to be a pretty good piece of evidence so far,” I said. “Those boxes out there have thousands of cases compiled in there by Ryan and his father over two generations. Sure I could go on…”
“So. One sighting maybe,” Jay said.
“Yeah, but what a sighting and here’s the picture Jay! The object was huge. Look at it! It soundlessly moved around a mountaintop, hovered, stopped, seemed to know it had been observed then very cautiously carefully moved out over open sea,” I said.
“Clear case of espionage. It’s not from here. It meets intelligent creatures. Does it stop and say ‘hi’? Hell no, it takes off. Not the actions of a friend,” I said.
“Maybe it was shy,” Jay said with a smile ordering another round for everyone in the room
“Yeah right. Shy,” I said. “You’re not even talking about our sighting Jay. You’re conveniently forgetting all about that.”
“Timmy, we were stoned kids,” Jay said.
“As I recall, you didn’t smoke or drink anything that night,” I said.
“That’s not exactly true,” Tom said with a smile. “Can I tell them, Jay?”
“Why, you Bogarting hold-out,” I said to Tom. “You had weed and you didn’t tell me and Ryan?”
“When?” I asked.
“Earlier,” Tom said.
Jay smiled knowingly and now I knew, Jay had tried marijuana at least once. Likely for the first time that very night we had our encounter. That begged a question: I looked at Gary who was also smiling.
“Et tu Brute?” I asked.
“Yep. Me too, Timmy,” Gary said.
“Beautiful, so no one believes me,” I said.
“We just don’t remember, Tim. It was a long-assed time ago. Those lights could have been anything,” Jay said.
“Did you inhale, Mr. President?” I asked him.
Jay smiled and started mixing another round of drinks.
“Well, in Tim’s defense. I remember a lot of it, although it only started coming back to me recently,” Dave said.
“I do too, guys,” Chuck seconded.
“Well great. Let’s call in The History Channel and they can interview you three nut-jobs together,” Jay said derisively.
“You know what, Jay? I’m not going to argue with you because that’s precisely what they want,” I said.
“Those they again. I’m beginning to think of them as immense, imaginary pains in my ass,” Jay said handing drinks out to everyone.
“All I remember is driving some goddamned lunatic veteran to a hospital in the middle of the night with a bullet lodged in his calf. Then I remember the police arresting him and hand-cuffing him to the hospital gurney. I remember my dad pissed as shit at Gary and I. Remember that Gary?” he said.
“I sure do, man. God was he pissed at you guys,” Gary said.
“Who?” I demanded.
“You guys. The Surf Road crew. You Smokey and Tom and Ryan. Said you were all a bunch of stoners and we should stay the hell away from you guys,” he said.
“Whatever happened to him?”
“Who?” Jay asked.
“Alka-Hank,” I said.
“There’s a blast from the past,” Tom said with a laugh.
“He was arrested for parole violation that night. Then when his brother turned up….dude, he went bye-bye,” Jay said.
“Why can’t I remember that?”
“Yeah, he went from Starke, and from there up to some fed-prison, nut-house up in Milledgeville, Georgia,” Jay said. “Or so the story goes.”
“So, he was a federal lunatic,” I said flatly.
“He had done something in Cambodia or Vietnam; something very bad,” Gary said.
“Wasn’t he a sniper for the military?” Tom asked.
“Another urban legend probably,” Chuck said.
“No, that’s what he was, part of this sniper-op called “Lamplighter”, and at some point instead of whacking commies he flipped on acid and zapped his damned CO, but since he was so young back then, something like seventeen, they sent him to the army shrinks in the Philippines and they gave him a nice, quiet section-eight out of the military,” Gary said.
“How old was he when he went in?” I asked.
“I heard he lied on all his applications,” Gary said. “That’s why the army gave him a pass. He should never have been over there.”
“You know who would know the real skinny on all that?” I asked.
“Who?” Gary asked.
“Shakes,” I said. And everyone laughed recalling that variation on Ryan’s nickname. “He was the only one who had the guts to talk to him.”
“Hell even Myles was terrified of him,” Tom said.
“Not to change the subject Tim…?” Dave said.
“Shoot,” I said.
“You mentioned this new super language. What did it actually do? Even though the tasks were bits of a larger picture, surely the programmers had to get some sort of idea what the software did,” Dave said.
“Some of it was communications and surveillance stuff for satellites far superior in capability to anything Ryan had ever seen,” I said.
“Some of it was a kind of stock inventory program to monitor world food resources, but Ryan said he could see another use for it,” I said.
“But, from the way you’re saying that there’s more to it?” he asked.
“The double use,” I said.
“The software had another use?” he said.
“Code within code. Like the letters the Civil War spies would write, ostensibly between mother and son. He’d say ‘you can’t imagine how complex and paranoid their minds are Tim.’ Apparently their code is like gigantic segments of double entendre, double and triple uses, multiple ways to look at it and utilize it, a form of communication surpassing anything we have.”
“That did other things?” Dave asked.
“The creepy shit, stuff I had serious trouble believing,” I said. “Ryan saw shapes, spirals and so forth, that criss-crossed,” I said.
“The nightmares came in full fury and he began to see that the flow diagrams themselves were telling him something, a form of code,” I said, seeing if anyone understood me.
No one did so I kept going.
“Look at some of the nightmare pictures and diagrams he drew, do you notice anything?”
“At first he doubted his own sanity but then he started to think back on the things we had seen in our childhood,” I said.
“He saw that the same patterns were repeated; the same unknown character strings that kept repeating themselves, and there were four of them joined with each other in combination sequences. And that arranged in the good-ole double helix…”
“Oh, I think I see what you’re driving at,” Dave said.
“Well do share, brothers,” Chuck said.
“Genetics?” Dave answered.
“Bingo. He got a wild hair one day and started substituting four common chemical base pairs, adenine, thymine, guanine and cytosine for those unknown character strings. He took segments of the code and fooled around until they made sense and he came up with something,” I said.
“What Timmy?” Tom said.
“He got pictures,” I said.
“Of what?”
“Complete DNA molecules, connecting to others,” I said swallowing hard. I had never told a soul about this because Ryan had trouble believing it and talking about it very frequently. When he did he might go on about it for a minute then dismiss it as all part of his runaway imagination.
“And? And? C’mon, don’t stop now!” Dave said.
“He then began consulting biotech people on the outside. With some help, he began building pictures of what the molecules made, and he got…”
“Genes,” Dave said.
“When added to more of the same you get what?”
“Organisms?” Dave answered.
“Unlike anything any of us had ever seen. They gave him serious nightmares and visions. The organisms were a patchwork of DNA from many species, including humans. They would have capabilities beyond anything we know of,” I said.
“Wait. How would Ryan know which base would go for which character string?” Dave asked.
“Took him a while, but he built a compiler to ask that very question. Eventually he got an answer with a high percentage of probability,” I said.
“So our government is building bio-weapons. So what?” Jay asked.
“You could look at it that way. That’s one way to view it, Jay,” I said, utterly exasperated with Jay’s mule intractability.
“Alright then why not tell us what Ryan thought,” Jay said.
“We’re unknowingly creating the creatures which will destroy a good portion of the world’s human population, if not all of it,” I said. “We’re doing so under the auspices of national security, or jihad, or political ideology depending on what part of the world you live in,” I said, adding, “Ryan’s mantra became ‘If we’re doing it, they’re doing it too and we’re all fooling ourselves.’”
“A different ‘they’?” Gary asked.
“Other humans we have been tricked into calling our enemies,” I said. “If you read the Mayan writing, this has all happened before. We’re just not aware of that fact,” I said.
“Oh? Why’s that?” Jay asked.
“Atlantis, the Bermuda triangle – stuff like that,” I said. “Major cataclysms which have erased our past versions of civilization.”
“Jesus,” Jay said witheringly.
“Hey, what can I say?” I replied.
“So, you realize how absolutely insane you sound right now?” Jay said flatly.
“So did Ryan,” I said.
“Where exactly did that Mayan writing come from?” Jay asked.
I went out to the garage and retrieved the photos of the Mayan glyphs and the letter from the archeologists in Honduras.
“These pictures. He copied them in sequence, then he worked with archeologists to translate them; although there’s a good chance he did most of the work himself and had them confirm his work for him,” I said.
“Mayan? Ryan translated Mayan?” Jay said.
“As poetic as it sounds, yes. We all knew Ryan was smart, guys. But we never had an appreciation for just how smart he was. On top of which, his clearances at Camerdyne gave him access to the world’s most advanced computer systems. It was a puzzle he couldn’t resist. It started with the lights back in 1981,” I said.
“That doesn’t answer my question,” Jay said. “Where do these grainy underwater pictures actually come from?”
“That’s part of the mystery I haven’t solved yet. I am going on the theory they come from around here somewhere.”
“Around here. We have Mayan ruins, or the like, around here, in Florida?” he said derisively.
I shrugged. He could believe me or not. At this point I was tired of arguing with him.
“This is nuts, guys! Witness the great slurping sound of people getting taken in by bullshit,” Jay said.
“Jay, you don’t want to believe this. I can appreciate that. I just want you to ask yourself why Ryan would go to all this trouble to set up this after-death hoax that would take years to fabricate, not to mention involves real events that happened in our lives?” I said.
“You keep going back to that, Tim. And I guess I have to keep telling you, I don’t believe anything out of the ordinary happened back then,” Jay said.
“Myles Neiderman died! You don’t remember that? The kid died. Somehow we all conveniently forget that fact,” I said.
“His brother shot him!” Jay said.
“His brother shot himself in the leg. You said so yourself. Now, did he shoot his brother, or did he shoot himself in the leg? Which is it, Jay? Because I’d like to know myself, all these years I can’t figure out if maybe I shot him! How the fuck did that kid end up dead, does anyone in this room know?”
They were all silent except Jay.
“Hey man, ease off. I didn’t do it. None of this is my fault. Ryan’s dead because he shot himself. Maybe he was feeling guilty about cheating on his wife so much. That’s why we are here,” he said.
“I want you to quit talking about my friend like that, Jay. You have no right to judge him,” I shouted.
“I put up with his crazy girlfriend working in my office for a year, Tim. I put up with his phone calls to her interrupting the flow of work. You don’t know the goddamned half of it, pal. You need to shut the fuck up about what you don’t know!”
“That’s it guys. I’m taking a walk to cool off. This is bullshit,” I said.
“Yeah, whatever Tim,” Jay said.
“I don’t know why you invited us to stay at your house if all your were going to goddamned do is bad-mouth my best friend,” I said.
“Yeah, well, there are hotels all over the beach, Tim. Take your fuckin’ pick,” he shouted.
“You would know Mr. puke real estate,” I said turning around. “The beach looks like fucking Disneyland, I hope you know. Hey Mr. Mayor, why not put a damned Wal-Mart out here while your selling up the coastline, huh?”
“You’re just jealous because I figured out a way to stick around here and make money, and you didn’t,” he said.
“Yeah, Mr. fucking big shot. Big waterfront house: bad goddamn manners. How original is that for beachside,” I said.
“Timmy, that fucking mouth of yours always did piss me off!”
He swung like he want to punch me but Dave held him back.
“What, Jay? Do it, man. Let’s go,” I said.
“You and Ryan, and your smart-assed attitude. How far did it get ya’ Tim? Who’s the big shot now? How much you pullin’ down as headmaster at the laughing academy? What fifty-thousand? Oh, and how was that your wife makes end meet? Oh yeah, now I remember, she’s a REAL ESTATE AGENT! Just like me!”
“Guys, c’mon. This is getting ugly,” Gary said calmly holding me back.
“The difference between me and you, Mr. Self-Righteous, is, at least I wear the pants in my family,” Jay said.
“Speaking of self-righteous, why didn’t you talk to your friend about what he was going through before you judged him as a scumbag, huh? Did you ever think to ask?” I asked.
“Like I said Tim, the guy was laying pipe like a fucking Kennedy in my office. There were beer bottles and empty cigarette packs all over the place. One morning we found the two of them in there curled up like a couple of pregnant teenagers. I need this shit in my life? My wife needs to hear about this from her friends? Just who the hell does he think he is?”
“He doesn’t think he’s anybody, Jay he’s dead – remember?”
“And I suppose that’s my fault too, like the hotels on the beach?”
I tried to land a punch but it went sweaty and wild. The rum was kicking in too, and I was out of breath. All I could do was continue to trash talk in a winding-down kind of way.
“You’re such an asshole, Jay!”
“Back at you tough guy…”
The guys tried to smooth our ruffled feathers but I had had it. I needed the night air.
I grabbed an open bottle of red wine, took the beach steps two at a time and was soon walking south into the dying twilight. I up-ended the bottle like a belligerent French painter.
I walked south on Melbourne Beach as the music from Jay’s house dwindled in the background.
When I stopped thinking about killing him, I wondered, just what the hell had gotten into Jay? I hadn’t pictured him becoming the moralizing prig he had turned into, not in a million years. Some marriages went bad. Sometimes they nosedived, sometimes they recovered. Odds were about sixty-forty against these days. Who was to say what would have happened to Ryan’s had he not died; had the paranormal element never taken root in his life.
It was no business of Jay’s what Ryan had been through there at the end. He was dead now and his so-called girlfriend was in rehab. Wasn’t that punishment enough to go around for any sins, real or imagined?
I really couldn’t understand Jay’s anger and venom, nor how rapidly it had erupted. He never hated Ryan before that I had known. And what the hell was going on with the rest of the crew? Was I the only one who cared to defend him? It was as if Ryan never existed.
Back in 1981 there had been a lot of cowardice going around, as well. Most of the guys merely backed away from the story we began telling. We told people because we lived it, we believed it, what we could remember of it, anyway. But then came the quieting, “sensible” voices of from the adults, and for a time there, the Surf Road crew consisted of myself and Ryan, alone. Yes, bowing to the wise advice of their parents, the other guys avoided us as if we had caused the events in the first place. They left us to our dementia and assumed somehow we had brought on a form of mass hysteria with our freakish behavior and so we had to be avoided for months to follow.
Now we were adults, and I supposed it was our task again was to act “sensibly” and not “go crazy with all this stuff.”
That “act sensibly” business really infuriated Ryan and now I had the bug too. Here we are in the midst of an invasion and the best so-called adults could do was urge everyone, especially children, to ignore it; the way farm animals were trained to accept the fact that an abattoir would be part of the program, somewhere along the line.
In a cruel twist, humans were told to perform an even more curious bit of mental gymnastics from very early on called, pretend the rancher doesn’t even exist.
After all, beef cattle seemed to know the rancher very well by sight, and had no problem identifying him as a separate entity, even if they didn’t immediately connect the cowboy and the whole slaughterhouse process.
Humans were coaxed to believe that if they saw the rancher, or his trucks whizzing about, they were going insane. And now they were so thoroughly conditioned anyone questioning the conditioning itself, became suspect.
How have we become such compliant, mental bovines? Maybe it all takes place waiting on-line at the super center, starting with the soft beeps emanating from dozens of cash registers that quietly pulse you into REM sleep, beneath humming and buzzing thousand-watt halogens that distribute the soundlessly-sinister microwave signals, “masticate, defecate, copulate, hibernate.”
The greeter waves at you as you wheel your cart past him. Both of you play your parts in the zombie-drama for the benefit of the store cameras which scan your every move.
“Thanks for stopping by!”
Jay’s reaction was now the standard for so-called “sanity.”
Crazy fuck - don’t interrupt my real estate deals with your talk of alien activity!
I up-ended the bottle again and kept walking. You didn’t see beef cattle holding up graphs and chart paper to their young with diagrams showing that the top creature on the food chain, the apex, was another beef cow. At least they didn’t delude themselves and mislead their young.
We did that in school to ours. And though we had opposable thumbs to hold up that chart paper, our collectively huge human brain couldn’t, or wouldn’t, wrap itself around the concept that uh-un, no siree Bob – you’re not the king of the hill anymore, and you haven’t been for some time. There’s someone else, see? And what’s worse is, that someone else has been fooling you for thousands of years – jackass!
Ego; that was part of the problem. Also, how do you explain that, if you’re the Air Force official? If you’re the last guy left holding the bag for decades of majors and colonels who knew the real score and slid out before you, what do you say? And do you deserve such a harsh spotlight?
“Well, uh, yeah. Okay. See…but the thing is, see? Uh…”
Jackass!
A hand from the reporter gallery goes over the eyes. The chin points skyward.
“Awwww man! I just fucking KNEW something weird was going on and I didn’t follow my gut.”
The other part of the problem is retirement benefits. Beef cattle don’t have these. We do. No one is going to admit the whole show has been a sham until they are quietly baking somewhere on a Caribbean island with a spouse they can’t stand anymore. Their goofy comments make good copy for the cable shows, but not much else happens. It always sounds the same. The shows always air in the middle of the night so the viewers are all half asleep.
“Yeah, that’s true. We saw them things. Them-thingy things, flying around and on radar and such back in the eighties. Then we filed a report see, but, uh, no one ever got back to us. If congress is having a hearing, I’ll be glad to go, sure. Wait, I have to take my heart pills here before my next round of golf.”
Where does it end, I wondered? What is their end-game? It’s not like they’d have to keep it secret anymore. We’d cover it up for them, or ignore it. Ryan’s opinion was, we are now so compliant, those of us who know what that end game is, are actually helping it along; maybe in compensation for booked passage on the escape shuttle. What if there is no escape shuttle?
“Then at least we go down fighting, and not handing out the typhoid blankets.”
I turned around looking for the owner of that familiar voice but he wasn’t there.
When I turned back he was standing beside me.
“Your friends now are all backing away from you and you don’t understand it,” he said. He was wearing an old, faded pair of blue jeans and a Big Audio Dynamite T shirt. I had no idea why.
“Yes I do, Red. Yes I do.”
“That’s good. You’re stronger now. They can’t hurt you by using the ones you love against you.”
I let the comment sit as we watched the waves together.
“Are you ready for more?” he asked.
“Sure, bring it on.”
“Then I will show you why I call you World Ender. So you can fully appreciate what they do and how they do it.”
“How?”
“By recalling, that this was something you did yourself, nearly five-hundred years ago,” he said.
He grabbed my hand arm and in an instant I wasn’t me any longer.
I found myself sitting on a wicker chair of sorts. I was sweating profusely.
Two men with piercings and plugs of gold through their noses and lips were bowing before me. They kissed their hands then touched the ground with the hands they had kissed, then raised their hands to their heads spreading dust over themselves.
In front of me was a bowl filled with cherry-colored fluid. In the center of the bowl was something fleshy that looked like….oh, my god, no. It couldn’t be.
I leaned over toward it.
Human heart.
I felt myself rearing back in my chair. My leathered boot accidentally kicked the bowl and the heart flopped out onto the straw mat on the dirt-covered floor.
The men on the floor replaced the heart inside the bowl and continued to remonstrate themselves.
“They say that if you do not like this one, you may select one of them, and eat their flesh, if it more pleases you, Teule,” said a pliant voice.
I turned to look at the owner of the feminine voice. She was an Indian girl of no more than fifteen.
“Teule? What does this word mean?” I asked the girl.
“It means one who brings the last days. The ender of worlds,” she said.
I looked around the room which was arrayed with white men dressed in sixteenth-century clothing and an equal portion of Indians who wore bleached white cotton and softened palm sandals. The men on the floor sported brilliant headdresses adorned with ostrich plumes, and the iridescent, midnight indigo feathers of another bird. On their feet were bangles of dried husks of some sort which were filled with seeds so that they hissed like rattlers when these men moved.
“Tell them, Malinali, that I want neither this heart in the bowl, nor those beating in their chests,” I heard myself say.
“You tell them, that we have a sickness of the heart, which only the gold can cure.”
The girl turned to the men and began berating them in a foreign tongue; verbally flogging them while they remonstrated themselves on the dirt floor with their hands flat pointed forward toward me and their eyes cast downward.
One of the men looked up, and in a supplicating voice began to speak.
The girl turned to me and translated.
“This one says your faithful lieutenant, Motecazoma, has sent another gift, so that you will know he holds your palaces, your retainers, your entire city ready and waiting for your return,” she said.
“What gift?” I asked.
The man who had said this waved his hand to someone outside the hut. Two men bore the statue into the room on a bier made of wood. It stood three feet tall.
The belly of the coiled serpent was segmented with rings of scales like that of a snake’s. However the back was covered entirely in long feathers where the scales would have been. The coils terminated on top in the giant head of the beast which flared open to reveal the fangs of a jaguar.
And there resting on the tongue emerging from the yawning feline mouth was the perfectly proportioned face of a man with pale skin and blue eyes.
“What is this?” I asked the girl as casually as I was able.
“It is you, my lord. It is Quetzalcoatl; the feathered serpent, ender of words,” she said.
Then later.
The image shifted and I was standing beside a coco palm speaking to another white man with blonde hair and a red beard.
“Fortune smiles on us, ever my lord,” the man said with an exaggerated bow.
“Indeed it does, don Pedro. I think neither to dissuade them of this misguided belief nor promote it to the hilt, for now. Let them keep guessing as to our nature,” I said.
“These Totonacs have no love lost to the Mexica, nor their lord, Montezuma,” I said.
“Motecozoma, I believe they called him,” the blonde man said to me.
“Whatever is the case,” I said dismissively.
“The demons cast in stone all over this land are truly terrifying, don Hernando. Some of the men wonder if we’re not at the very gates of hell.”
“Some of the men need to steel themselves, for they will see their lord feathered snake do things they thought impossible in the eyes of God. And we will cast down these stone monuments and the temples that house them,” I said.
“In the name of our lord, naturally,” the blonde man said with a flourish of irony.
“Naturally,” said I.

“Hey! Timmy!” came a voice. I turned to the north to see Gary jogging toward me.
“Hey man. Whassup!”
“Are you alright?” he asked.
“Yeah, just thinking about some things,” I said.
“Who was that you were talking to?” he said.
“Who?”
“Looked like an Indian, long hair, white T-shirt,” he said. “Looked about thirty-five or so.”
“You saw him?” I asked.
“Yeah. He took off when he saw me coming,” he said.
I up-ended the bottle again. What to make of that. Who knew? Another mystery for the books.
“He’s a friend of mine. Your brother wouldn’t like him,” I said.
“C’mon, Tim. Sean just arrived at Patrick Air Force Base. We should be there when he gets here,” Gary said.
“Best news I’ve heard all day,” I said.

Chapter 12 Trisha

Copyright David A. Kearns

“…Some of these creatures were terrible, too hideous to look at, and so long-lived they were banished to the parts of the world where they would exist in a state of near eternal damnation, forced to feed on mankind, whom it hated and guarded with extreme jealousy, stained with the ancient blood-memory that at one time, it too, had been human, had enjoyed the warmth of its mother’s hands caressing its face.
“But the creatures themselves could not make love to replicate themselves; always it needed to come back to Aztlan and beg for help in that regard.
“There were so many at one time, they were sent willingly to clinics in Egyptus for help, but there was none to give, only sacrifice would end their misery, although they tormented many humans there before they accepted their end, and in some cases set themselves up as gods. These torments took on many forms and lasted for years, as revenge against all of mankind for what had been done by a few selfish families of Aztlan and their conspirators, the very sons of Quetzalcoatl.
“Still, one group of these half-breeds, reasonably well off in proportion, intelligence and not quite so hideous, although unpleasant of sight, and plagued with powers of the mind-sound, survived this hellish life, and came back, time and again, to Aztlan and Posaztlan, for the bahk of Gembe and the bahk of mankind to self perpetuate. In exchange for that bahk, it gave the families of the rich and the powerful tools to create wondrous things, sky-ships that floated to the stars and looked down from the heavens on all nations; sky-ships that also plumbed the seas…”
- The Book of Aztlan

July, 2011 7 p.m. Whispering Pines Psychiatric Care Center
I was allowed to sit with Trisha on the back porch of the facility while she smoked her cigarettes. She was only allowed two smokes every four hours. But she thoroughly enjoyed them.
She was given a half hour to talk with me, and not the typical fifteen minutes such a cigarette break would have normally permitted. The facility’s bending of the rules was rather rare. But owing to the fact she had suffered a recent loss, and she would not be released to attend the funeral, they were made to see that this would be good for her.
On the other hand, she was agreeing to give up one of her smoke breaks in the morning to make this happen. It was part of the give and take nature of the facility, which seemed to work: you want something, you take responsibility for the thing you want and the potential commotion it might cause to the entire group that you are being given a privilege, and you agree to pay for it by giving something up.
Her cigarettes and all her possessions were kept under lock and key. She wasn’t allowed any sharp objects in her room. She was given only two hours of television every day; otherwise she was drafting statements about what she had been through, regarding ‘drinking and drugging’ and how she planned to change. Or she was in group, either narcotics anonymous, or alcoholics anonymous, talking about what brought her here.
“How are you doing, sweetheart?” I asked.
She dragged in the sweet nicotine and exhaled.
“It’s okay, Tim. The place isn’t bad. Some of the folks are full of it,” she said.
“How so?”
“They’re bullshitting themselves about how bad they want to stop,” she said.
“And you?”
She smiled and exhaled.
“You know me, I’m always full of shit,” she said.
I wanted to hold her but, there was a prohibition against touching others during this crucial time; sexual touching, chocolate, salacious material, television – these were all considered potential triggers for her addictions. A medical technician sat in a chair leaning against the wall reading People Magazine with an alertness that let you know she really wasn’t reading but scanning the articles while the other eye remained on her patient, Trisha.
If I reached to touch her, even casually, it would end the session and get her into trouble. A privilege or two would be deducted.
“I missed you,” I said.
“Like hell, you never wrote,” she said. “Your emails bounced.”
“Sheila,” I said. “You know how marriage is.”
“I was drunk through most of mine, so, no. As a matter of fact, I don’t,” she said whimsically. She was doing the numbers in her head.
“Yep, not a week went by I wasn’t drunk with Phil. No wonder we fought,” she said with a smile.
“I don’t want to live like that anymore, Tim. And, some of the things I said to your wife, it’s no wonder she didn’t want me near you anymore. I have to accept responsibility for that. I feel like I’ve got a good start on a new life here.”
“And that other stuff?” I asked.
“What do you want to know, that I still think about it?” she asked.
“Yes,” I said.
“Of course I do, but, I’m beginning to understand something, Tim. And it’s something you guys, all of you, need to know and understand,” she said.
“What?”
She leaned in so only I would hear her; “You can’t win. Whatever they are, whatever they’re doing, they’ve already won. Live with it, deal with it, then forget it. Otherwise, you’ll end up dead or crazy. Look at Ryan for examples. Hell look at me,” she said.
“Why?”
She raised her hands like a teacher amazed at a student’s stupid question.
“There is no other way to deal with it without losing your mind. They won’t let you do anything but that. They play hardball and they play for keeps. You can either forget, or lose your mind and die. That’s it.”
“What happened to you Trish, specifically?” I asked.
“You mean, how did I get here? Drinking and drugging. Just ask the counselors,” she said.
“No. What set you off? I heard you were all past this sort of thing,” I said.
“You know what set us off,” she said accusingly.
“Us?”
“Ryan and I, Timmy. Damn it all, don’t play stupid,” she said.
“There are blank spots in the memories, Trish. I swear to God. Half of it, I can’t remember, the other half, I do, but it’s jumbled. When I am able to sustain a memory for a minute or two it all comes flooding back, then it’s too much. I either pass out or get sick. And I have time lapses, big chunks of it – gone. I’m sorry, baby, but I am a goddamn mess,” I said.
“You always were a baby boy. And you’re drinking too much, I would imagine, just like I was,” she said.
“Yeah, yes I am,” I admitted.
“ Timmy, you used to say that pot suited their purposes; made your mind go soft so they could use and discredit you. Do you recall those talks?” she asked.
“Yeah,” I said.
“Well you don’t think they use alcohol against us too?” she asked.
I had no answer, only a question. “Are you telling these counselors here about all of it? Everything you think? Things we went through?”
She had a quick answer; “Are you out of your mind? They’d never let me out. Back to your question, what set me off was Ryan.”
“How?”
“Ryan began to have these eruptions as he called them, just like the ones you’re having. The only person on earth he could talk to was me. And since I started working for Jay again, he called, we began meeting at the Oasis, and South Beach Willie’s and…”
“And one thing led to another again,” I said.
“And one thing led to another, again,” she said.
“And Debra found out,” I continued.
“Yes and I felt horrible and to deal with the pain.... But what people don’t understand is that Ryan and I shared something that not many people on this earth have ever had, Tim, and you weren’t around…”
“Oh so he was better than me?” I asked in mock wounded pride.
“No, I’m being serious and you’re hearing me sidewise, Tim. Because what I am saying scares you so bad you don’t want to remember.”
“What?”
“I repeat, Ryan and I shared something that not many people on this earth ever have,” she said, reaching for my hand. She held it closely and both of us looked over at her keeper who was deeply engrossed now in an article in People.
“And if you think back, Tim. You’re going to remember….”
The alcove began fade to darkness around me and soon, I was gone.

July 2, 1981
“Does anyone know where Ryan and Trisha are?” I asked as they lifted me off of the ground. I had collapsed for some reason at the side of the road.
“Second time he’s asked that,” Dave said. “Do you think he hit his head or something? C’mon, Tim. Stay with us man, stop fading out on us.”
“Dude, what year is it?” I asked.
“Uh-oh,” Chuck said. “You’re right. He must have hit his head on something.”
“Hey Timmy, where in hell did you get this gun, man?” Smokey asked. “It’s still warm. Did you shoot at them?”
“Them…?” I asked.
“Them,” Smokey said.
“Aren’t we missing a funeral somewhere?” I asked.
“He’s out of it, again,” Dave said. “Tim, stop passing out, man!”
I said; “I’m feeling sick.”
“There you go, boy. Get it all out of your system,” Chuck said comforting me, and slapping me on my bowed back.
“I’m feeling a little queasy myself,” Chuck said.
“You’re standing right over his puke, it’s no wonder,” Smokey shot back.
“No, I’m feeling it too,” Dave said.
“What the hell is that?” Chuck said, and now everyone was feeling it.
Something prompted all of us to look up at the same time.
A gigantic triangle of night sky shifted above us. White lights came on at the corners and the triangle moved off to the east enveloping itself in a mist that formed on its leading edge before blending in with the sky which shimmered and pulsated as the craft passed, as if through some sort of invisibility interface.
“Hey!” someone shouted.
I looked north on A1A and there was the creature in his robe of silver.
“That dude must be seven feet tall,” Chuck said.
An energy ball appeared and knocked us all down again and in an instant, the creature, the craft, and the energy ball had all evaporated.
“Jesus, I wish he would quit doing that,” Chuck said getting up slowly.
“I just want to know why,” Dave said struggling to his own feet.
“Because he can, and to show us that he can,” I said.
“Just to fuck with us?” Dave asked.
“Just to fuck with us. For the pure hell of it,” I said. “Fuckin’ Elvis-cape wearing asshole.”
Smokey laughed; “Elvis… that’s pretty good.”
“So, these things, are like mean and shit,” Dave concluded, as if he had solved a riddle.
“Oh? You think so, Finkles?” I asked.
“No. That’s not what I mean, I mean, they’re mean! They play jokes… they get pissed if you spy on them.”
“Did you see the way he shook his finger at me on the beach?” I asked.
“They get really pissed if you play AC/DC,” Smokey added.
“Yeah, I noticed that too,” I said.
“Now, who does all that sound like to you?” Dave asked.
“Sounds like my older brothers,” Smokey said.
And all of us looked at Smokey. He had said something truly wise which wasn’t like him. We didn’t know what it meant but we did know it was significant somehow. It resonated with us.
“Hold on. Where’s the gun?” I asked.
“The what?”
“The thirty-eight, Myles’s brother handed me? Where is it?” I asked.
“Where’s Myles?” Chuck asked.
“Didn’t he go with his brother?” Dave said.
“No, Hank was screaming for him,” I said.
“So he’s missing with Trisha and Ryan,” I said.
“No, Myles was with Hank. He told me to get those bastards, for what they had done to his brother,” Smokey said.
“No, guys, that’s not the way I remember it. Hank was screaming for us to kill those things for having taken his brother, or something like that,” I said.
“Taken his brother? They took him, Timmy?” Dave said.
“I don’t know. I…guess I sort of thought they did,” I said.
“When, when did you think that?” Chuck asked.
I had to sit down. What I was about to say would not make any sense but I had to say it. I did so posing it as a question. “The first time this happened?”
“He’s not making any sense again,” Chuck said.
“Come on guys we need to start for home,” Ryan said. “We’re not going to make it before 3 a.m. if we don’t.”
He had been standing behind us, somehow.
All of us turned around slowly.
“Rye? Where the hell you been, man?” Chuck asked.
“I don’t know. Around I guess?” he said.
“Oh shit. They took and brought him back,” Chuck said. “Rye! What was it like man?!”
“That is so bonus!” Smokey marveled.
“Did they?” Ryan asked sleepily. He had been crying as well.
“Rye, I want you to think very carefully. Where’s Trisha?” I asked.
He winced. Not good.
“I dunno know man. It wasn’t…” he said with a guilty sigh. “It wasn’t ….my fault.”
“What wasn’t your fault, Rye? What happened to her?” I asked.
“Timmy, I….”
I grabbed him by the shoulders. “Look man. I want you to think very carefully. I want you to tell us what happened to Trisha, Rye. You hear me?”
“Timmy, c’mon. Ease off. The dude don’t know,” Chuck said.
“No, the dude does goddamned know and he’s going to fucking tell me or I’m gonna kill his ass,” I said, taking Ryan around the collar.
I moved my grip to his throat and I wouldn’t let go. I wanted to know what happened to Trisha but somewhere in the back of my mind I already did know what happened to her and my anger grew.
“Tell me what happened or I’ll fucking kill you!”
“Back off Timmy,” Chuck warned.
“Fuck you, you back off!” I screamed at Chuck. “Rye, tell me what happened to Trisha or I’m gonna find that goddamn gun, see, and I’m gonna fucking shoot you with it. Now where is she, Rye! Where the fuck is she?”
Chuck grabbed me in a full Nelson and hauled me away from Ryan.
“I don’t know where she is Timmy. I don’t know where she is, alright! ….But I think I…”
“You think you what, Ryan? You what?” I shouted.
“ I did it with her! I think I, we just made it, man. Okay! You happy! They made me do it with her. They made us fuck and ….oh my God, then they watched us!”
Ryan fell down, curled up in a ball off the shoulder of the road and began sobbing and screaming as the memory of what had happened came to him in a rush.
“….those bastards watched while I did that, while I did that to my friend. They laughed, Tim. They laughed at us…..I tried to be gentle with her, she kept telling me it was okay. It was alright, that we had to do what they wanted. They wouldn’t let us go, but ….”
It took Dave, Smokey and Chuck to keep me from killing Ryan. I don’t remember all of what came out of my mouth but the curses and screams erupted with such force I could barely speak before I, like Ryan, was also a puddle of tears.
I stared into the palmettos thinking nothing would ever be the same again in my world, and I was right.
Chuck, Dave and Smokey stood off to one side and watched me cry for a while.
Slowly Ryan got up, came over and put a hand on my shoulder and sat down next to me he was still crying and I was too weak with rage at everything to even make a fist.
“She kept asking what you would think of her. More than anything that made her cry, Timmy. She kept asking me to swear not to tell you,” he said.
“Why did you?” I asked, looking at him.
“I couldn’t do that. You’re my best friend. I can’t lie to you, man?”
I nodded and looked into the bushes.
“What do we do? We have to find her, Timmy. We can’t let anything get in the way of that,” he said.
“We can’t find Myles, either,” I said.
“Oh shit,” he said. “Myles was there too. Something’s wrong with him, something bad.”
“Someone’s coming guys!” Dave shouted
The green Ford pick-up eased to a stop beside us.
We looked in the cab to find Trisha between an Indian in his late forties and a nine-year old Indian youth.
“Thank God she’s been found,” Chuck said.
“Trisha, are you alright?” I asked.
She made a half-hearted smile as the rivers of tears dried around her eyes.
I looked at the driver.
“Red?” I asked. “Is that you?”
The man only smiled and said; “I found your girlfriend for you.”
“It is him, Tim. How did you know?” Ryan said.
I shook my head. I didn’t know how I knew the man’s name, nor how he seemed to recognize me. We had never been introduced to my memory.
“You boys best get in the back. There’s some old man and his buddy driving a black LTD cruising around Melbourne Beach looking for you boys; especially you, Ryan. The man says he knows your father.”
We hopped into the back of the Ford.
For the longest time I couldn’t look at Ryan. The truck was heading south on A1A. I didn’t give a damn where to, nor what time it we would get there.
“She told me you were her first, Tim. And, she loves you more than anything or anybody. She said you were sweet to her,” he said finally.
“I wasn’t her first,” I said. “You were.”
“…it’s not what she said,” he offered.
“Let’s not talk about it,” I said.
“You’re being stupid man. She’s alive. That’s what counts,” he said.
“Easy for you to say,” I shot back halfheartedly.
“Look if you think what just happened to us was a good time, you can go fuck yourself, Tim. You can just go fuck yourself,” he said.
We pulled down a dark, tree-lined, sand path somewhere in the south beaches. The path wound around to a battered old camper tucked beneath a canopy of scrub oaks. Off to one side were a couple of ancient shell mounds covered in bushes and scrub.
“This is it,” Red said getting out. “This is where me and the boy hang our hats during the summer time. Plenty of fish, and sometimes we get turtles ...”
Red came over to me and brushed the top of my head with his hand the way an older brother would. I tried to move off toward Ryan and Trisha but he held me back.
“Hold on a second. You’ve had a hell of a night so far, little World Ender. You’re very brave. Now your friend and the little girl need to wash themselves up. They’ve had it worse this night.”
There was a dreamlike quality about this man. Whenever you came into his orb you felt as if you weren’t really conscious, at least not all the way. He seemed to be aware of more than he was saying, always.
“You know what’s about to happen, don’t you,” I said very calmly.
“And so do you, although you don’t want to admit it to yourself. It’s okay. We have to play it through, little fellow. In order for wisdom to be acquired one must live it,” he said.
“Do you remember telling me that?” he asked. And I shook my head no.
“No matter, you will. Now it’s your time to live it,” he said. “Welcome back.”
“I’ve done this all before, haven’t I?” I asked.
“But this time, you’ll remember it,” he said.
“Is this really happening?” I asked.
“Einstein tells us, little friend, that all the events of the past and the future are all connected, and time is really an illusion. They’re all happening; even the possible events and they are all real. I’m as real as you are, as are your memories of me, as are your memories of events that have never happened yet,” he said.
“I don’t understand, Red.”
“But you will, little man. You will,” he said.






July 2, 2011
I inhaled deeply and looked up into Trisha’s eyes. She was crying.
“I’m so sorry, sweetheart. I am so sorry,” I said.
“You remembered some of it, but not all,” she said letting go of my hand.
“What is happening with us, Trish? What does all this mean, these visions that we’re going through?” I asked.
Trisha leaned around and asked for her second cigarette.
“Some of us have the gift more than others. Ryan figured out that much. When you come in contact with them they can trigger this gift. When they come back around, you get the gift again only more so. And all the things you have forgotten, and all the things they make you forget, all of it comes rushing back,” she said.
“No wonder you guys were losing it,” I said.
“There’s something else,” she said. “They can hear you when you’re thinking about them, so the only defense you have is to not think about them. That was something Ryan didn’t or wouldn’t accept, Tim,” she said.
“Always the warrior,” I said.
“He thought there was a way to fight them, and I suspect, they got tired of it and…” she couldn’t continue.
“And what, Trisha?”
“They killed him for it,” she said.
I shook my head. I wasn’t prepared to believe that totally yet.
“Trisha, Ryan’s mother believes he just got sick of fighting all this stuff anymore,” I said.
“Either way, Tim. They can either kill you outright or make it so bad for you, you kill yourself. Believe me, I have been there. Which is one of the reasons I don’t know if I want my mother to let you guys have that document Ryan sent all of us. This needs to stop,” she said. “Before someone else gets hurt.”
“But he wanted us to know all of it, honey. All of it, good, bad or indifferent. And I think we owe him that much, to know everything he knew,” I said.
“Even if it means someone else gets hurt, Tim? Even if that someone is me, you or god forbid, someone in our family?” she said.
“Please, Trish. Let me at least read it. Ryan wanted me to know it all,” I said.
“Why did he give the last piece to me, then? Explain that to me?” she said.
“…I don’t know. Maybe he wanted to get you and I talking gain. And he knew that if I had to come to you and ask, that would happen,” I concluded.
“He could really be a manipulative bastard when he put his mind to it, couldn’t he, Tim,” she said.
“Yes he could. But always for a good reason,” I said, recalling the amorous relationship between Trisha and a UCF football player Ryan thwarted because he flat-out didn’t like the guy, nor think he had been good for Trisha. He sent the guy numerous letters claiming to be married to her. It was horrible, really but, it worked. The football player, Randy something or other, blew his knee out his rookie year with Jacksonville, turned to gambling, drinking, cocaine and was later arrested for domestic violence. Ryan had been right all along. She laughed at the memory.
“Alright, you win. I’ll call my mother and you can have it,” she said. “Just be careful, Tim. I have a bad feeling about all this.”
“And Tim?” she said.
“Yes?”
“If you remember anything else, anything about you and me, call me,” she said.
“I will,” I said.
I broke the rules with a hug which the proctor at the back door of the facility overlooked.
Walking back to my Ford, I wondered just what she had been talking about.