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  The sun had set hours ago, filling the living room and dining area with shadow. My heart was as dark as the night. Eleven men were ranged around the house. Some hid behind doors; others were on the stairway and the balcony. Four more men hid behind the couch and drapes. They all carried rifles, shotguns and pistols. The women and children were downstairs. Although I had not shared what was going on, Aunt Wendy seemed to sense that something terrible was about to happen.

  Zack stood by the hutch. He was pale with worry. I stood up at the knock on the front door and walked over to welcome the traitors into my house. I had not met the elder Trumble, but I could tell by the way he appraised me, letting his eyes roam lazily up and down my body, that he was a threat. He was short and squat, with thinning gray hair and cold brown eyes. Zack had not exaggerated.

  Evan Trumble sauntered past me, followed by a number of other men, all of whom glanced around possessively…they might as well have worn neon signs, announcing their intentions. I followed them into the dining room. I swear I could have won an Academy Award that night. I chatted happily, offered coffee, served sweet rolls (an extravagant treat) and offered them seats around the table. I noticed that although Zack stood close to the chair at the other end of the table, Evan Trumble simply brushed my brother aside, going so far as to give Zack a slight shoulder check as he grabbed the chair for himself and sat down.

  “Where are the others?” Trumble demanded.

  “They’ll be here soon, I’m sure,” I said, glancing at the old grandfather clock in the corner. “You’re a little early.”

  “Well, we came early, because we wanted to talk to you about something,” Trumble growled.

  I felt my heart speed up. Zack had known at a gut level that these men were a threat, but even I was shocked at how quickly Trumble and his followers decided to act on their plans. Trumble stared at me, grinning.

  “Oh? What did you want to talk about?” I fought to keep the fear out of my voice.

  “Well, my boys and I were thinking…now that your uncle Allen is dead, maybe you need a man…” he glanced at Zack with scorn. “To help you run this place. Listen sweet-cheeks, I know that this is your family’s place and all, but you’re not strong enough to hold a place this big… not by yourself anyway.”

  I was about to open my mouth when I heard the hard, metallic rattle of firearms. Apparently, my guardians had heard enough. One by one eleven armed men stepped out of hiding and surrounded the men who sat at my table. I pushed my chair back and stood up. Sensing someone behind me, I turned around and saw that Lori and my Aunt Wendy stood in the door to the kitchen. Both of them held butcher knives and glared at the men who sat at the table. The traitors stared around in shock, and a babble of voices rose up in alarm.

  “Hey, what’s going on here?” Evan Trumble stood up so fast his chair fell over backwards.

  “You are not welcome here, Mr. Trumble,” I said. “I have heard rumors about your behavior and I didn’t want to believe it, but you have proven your intentions here tonight.”

  “Hey! You can’t—” I held a hand up as four of my men stepped close and leveled their weapons at Trumble.

  “I can, and I will see you and your people escorted off this ranch. I’m sorry, Mr. Trumble…I’ve made up my mind.”

  Cries of fear and protestations of innocence filled the air as I turned my back and ducked into the kitchen. I heard the front door open and heavy footsteps as the men were escorted outside. I heard a voice shout, “You’ll be sorry for this, you bitch!”

  What those men didn’t realize was that I was sorry—sick, and sorry, and sad. I huddled in the pantry, and wailed with grief.

  Chapter 13

  The following excerpts are compiled from interviews and written accounts of Dwight Engle and his followers (CHURCH OF THE SECOND COMING OF CHRIST) and the faction group (THE ANGEL’S SWORD).

  By no means do the statements reported in the following reflect the opinions of the writers or reporters of the facts herein; furthermore do we note, that most of the accounts recorded here were given by war criminals and enemies of the state prior to EX 2022. Steven Cummings, reporting for The New World Chronicle.

  William Schmitt –

  The double doors swooshed open for the third time. This would be my last interview of the day. Glancing out the window, I saw that Harmony’s third moon had risen in the purple twilight. Lillith was the largest of our moons and the furthest away. In her ascension, she gleamed as red as a ruby. Her rising was slow but sure…by the end of the evening her scarlet brilliance would be muted by the shadows of her sisters, Persephone and Isis, in a rainbow reflection of refracted light.

  A man stepped into the interview room. He was small and very thin. William Schmitt was once an elder of the Second Coming of Christ church. Even now, he was considered one of the most dangerous men on the planet. The practice of capital punishment was abolished years ago, and I was happy for that fact. There was an exception to every rule though, and for my part, the exception was standing before me now.

  The servo-bots hovered in the doorway, but I dismissed them. Even if Schmitt ordered refreshments, which I doubted, I wasn’t inclined to fulfill this man’s every whim. William Schmitt was responsible for the wholesale slaughter of over a thousand innocent human beings during the Sword’s military campaign in northeast Washington State before the exodus. I felt sick looking at him.

  “How can I help you today, Mr. Cummings?” Malice slithered from his tongue.

  Watery blue eyes studied me above half-moon glasses and his lips curled up in a smile. This man believed that anyone who was not Caucasian, heterosexual, and Christian should die. He welcomed the coming of the aliens to planet earth, believing that they were the instrument of God’s wrath. What’s more, Schmitt did everything in his power to become God’s scrub-brush… where divine (alien) intervention sometimes failed, Schmitt scoured humanity’s landscape in his ever-vigilant pursuit of the unclean; i.e. non-white, non-Christian, homosexual beings.

  I cleared my throat. I wished I didn’t have to speak with him at all, but he was one of the few remaining survivors of the “Sword’s” trek from Idaho to the Harmony ranch.

  “Mr. Schmitt, as you probably already know, I am compiling data on the events that led up to exodus 2016. I have gathered a lot of good information so far, but there are some holes in the timeline of the Sword’s trip from Montana to the Harmony ranch in Kettle Falls, Washington. Some people tell me that you might be the best one to talk to about that.”

  Schmitt’s blue eyes twinkled as he smiled. “Certainly, my boy. I always welcome a chance to chat.”

  Even those innocuous words left me feeling soiled. It was the expression in his eyes, a look of contempt so profound I felt like fleeing from the room before I melted into a doomed puddle, like an ant under an onslaught of bug spray. Then I smiled. Only two inmates within Harmony’s prison system were kept in solitary confinement: Lenny Marcovich, a drooling, hallucinating, schizophrenic, and William Schmitt. People like Schmitt reveled in company, in an adoring audience, and more than anything, worshipers. He probably did want to chat. I promptly decided to get only the bare basics of what I needed and send him on his way.

  “Mr. Schmitt,” I asked. “What do you remember about the Deep Underground Military Bases (DUMBs)?”

  “Getting right to it, are we?” His eyes glittered with wrath. “Very well, we’ll start there if you like.” He turned his face to the window and stared out at our three moons. He was silent, brooding, for almost five minutes.

  Finally, he said, “After the fiasco in Libby, Brother Dwight and the rest of the Church elders gathered for a meeting. It was obvious that the Washington/Idaho borders were compromised. I myself saw hundreds of alien craft in the sky before the Urkuli attack, stretching as far as the eye could see. This is where my expertise came in handy.” He smiled.

  “I’m sure you’ve read my work on the secret government installations that pepper the ground in Idaho, Washington
State, Utah and Arizona? I made it my life’s work, and was vilified by the press and my peers for my beliefs. To this day I don’t understand why people wouldn’t listen to me even though I had proof!” Schmitt shook his head. “Could I trouble you for a glass of water?” he asked.

  Spite made me consider denying him a drink, but if his throat seized up, I wouldn’t get my interview. I walked to the table at the back of the room and returned with a glass and a pitcher of water.

  “Thank you,” he said, sipping from the glass. After another long wait he said, “Everyone thought I was a head case; even Pastor Engle, I think. After the aliens attacked us that day though, things changed. Now everyone sought my advice. They knew that I knew where the DUMBs were, and how to access them. After all, there was no way we were going to get to the Harmony ranch above ground…not with all the harvesting going on, and all the aliens fighting to seize control of the magneto fields. I’d left most of my notes behind me in Montana, of course. There were boxes and boxes of maps, field notes, tapes and CDs left behind, rotting in the ashes, but there was no reasonable way to carry my things from Montana into Washington, and really no reason to bother with it anyway. I had committed everything to memory, and knew to the millimeter where all the DUMBs were.

  “The question now was which one was the closest and the easiest to access. Used to be the bases were guarded night and day by the USMC. I was fairly sure that there was no longer any need for the installations to be guarded. After all, the cat was certainly out of the bag, so to speak….” Schmitt barked a sharp yipping cry, like a hyena, in what I assumed was a giggle. “Heh…Heh….” Wiping a merry tear from his right eye, he continued.

  “Where was I…oh, yes! The deep underground military base. The one I settled on was located just a few miles outside of Athol, Idaho. It was a big one. I was sure it was fully equipped as well. I also thought that it might be the easiest one to break into. We would need to hump a few miles to get there…we would have to head north to Moyie Springs, in Idaho, and then turn southwest toward the Sandpoint area.

  “A lot of the elders thought the DUMB I chose was too far away to travel overland, and wanted to me find an installation that was closer. Problem was, the closer DUMBs would provide adequate shelter, but wouldn’t lead anywhere except to the south and east into the Great Plains, or into the underground heart of Spokane. What good would that do us? If we could make our way to the right one though, we could take our army from north of Athol all the way to about five miles east of the Harmony ranch. That way I hoped to avoid a lot of the alien activity that was reportedly taking place in the skies above Spokane, Coeur d’Alene and the suburbs of those two cities.

  “Long story short, after a lot of debate and belly-aching, the elders finally agreed to my plan. We rested a while in the John Deere dealership and took off in the dead of night. For some reason, the aliens seemed to take a snooze in the hours of darkness. I can’t imagine why…I’m sure their technology could turn night into day, if they wanted it to.” Schmitt paused for a moment and his eyes focused on the wall behind my right shoulder. Just as I was about to turn around and see what had gained his attention, he snapped back to the present and grinned. “Those aliens…you gotta love ‘em…” he whispered.

  I neither loved, nor hated the aliens who came to our world in those last frenzied moments of our doom. However, I had never forgotten the shock, fear and awe I felt at the aliens’ clinical annihilation of the living beings they found in the way of their pursuit of raw star-drive material. Even now, I had nightmares…techno-color flashbacks of burning towns and people, laser after-images of a dying planet that haunted me and kept me addicted to a sleep-inducing plant derivative on Harmony called Calm-Balm.

  Schmitt’s admiration for the aliens’ techniques was another reason for me to hate him, and to wish for the interview to be at an end. I needed more information however, so I simply nodded and waited for him to continue.

  “Anyway, we left at sundown the day after the attack. There were only about 150 of us left. This was both good and bad. Good because there were fewer of us to hide, and bad because there were, of course, less hands to carry vital supplies. I know I never worked so hard in my life! We walked at night, carrying everything we owned from Libby Montana to Athol, Idaho. It took about a week and a half.

  “We lost some people along the way…some dropped dead of fatigue, or illness, or grief. There were arguments and fistfights. Sometimes people just faded away into the night, either defected or picked off by the scavengers that hung towards the back of our army like birds of prey.

  “Finally, we came to within five miles of the DUMB I had picked. I asked Pastor Dwight for a halt so we could do some surveillance on the installations entrance port, and so I could do some mental recon on the site in question. I’m not afraid to admit I was nervous. By this time, the Sword’s army was over a thousand strong and everyone in it was clamoring to hit the base in force. I could see the appeal… there was shelter, and food, and weapons housed within the base; everything a frightened, weary and hungry mob could hope for. But what if I was wrong? What if I had led Dwight Engle’s army to a dead end?

  “We sent scouts ahead and I waited…and prayed. Four hours later the scouts came back. They were overjoyed. They had seen the entrance to the DUMB, and it was as I had described. The secret military base was disguised as an old mineshaft. Two warped, wooden doors hung a-kilter, exposing the bars of an ancient service elevator. No one was there; no guards, no people, and no aliens. My heart sang with relief…I had done it!

  “Pastor Engle organized our army into ten separate units. Each unit was led by an elder of the church, and by at least five of our best soldiers. This way, he reasoned, if one group was compromised, the other four groups had a better chance at escape or evasion. It was a good plan. I was in the vanguard, and again, all of the crazy sounding conspiracy theories I had staked my reputation on were proving correct.

  “As I led the first group into the old mine shaft, my heart was beating hard with nerves. Pastor Engle stood right behind me when I wrenched open the elevator doors and he whispered, ‘You better be right about this, Schmitt.’ I turned around and gazed into his cold black eyes. I knew that if this proved to be a dead end then I too was a dead man. I nodded and felt in my shirt pocket for the code to the elevator controls. An old army buddy of mine had told me once that these doors were keyed on regular Army and M.C. commands. I was only guessing, but my IQ wasn’t in the high 150’s for nothing. The old touchpad was grimy with dirt, and looked like it hadn’t been used since it was first installed, but it opened on the second try. ‘Open-says-a-me!’ on the numeral pad.

  “It was as dark as night within the elevator entrance, and at first the sound of whining motors was faint. Then the shaft was filled with light. There was a stir of excitement among the men who stood behind me, and a hush of awe as the light climbed up a cylindrical concrete shaft. What at first glance appeared to be the guide-chains of an ancient service elevator turned into a high-density power cable for a large service platform that rose into view from the ground below our feet.

  “Double doors slid open, revealing a twenty by twenty metal box. A sign on the back of the car read Maximum Wt. 5,000 lbs. A spontaneous cheer arose within the close confines of the entrance port. I cringed.

  “‘Shut up!’ Pastor Engle hissed when he noticed the expression on my face. One by one the jubilant voices faded and died. ‘What’s wrong, William?’ he asked.

  “‘Nothing hopefully, but we don’t know enough yet; there are two ends to this tunnel, see? This end is clear, but the other end could be full of…who knows? Humans, aliens, it makes no difference if they find us and kill us. Now is the time we need to be careful. We have to approach our target silently, and we need to kill anyone, or anything that gets in our way. Pastor Engle, may I speak with you a moment?’

  “Brother Engle nodded, and we stepped away from the others. I whispered in his ear.

  “‘Dwight, I don�
�t mean to tell you your business, but I wanted to suggest that you send everyone who had a silenced weapon forward; guns with silencers, bows and arrows, anything that has stealth capacity. We have almost four miles to go before we reach the base. A gun fight will be loud, you know?’

  “Engle nodded and stepped back. I heaved a sigh of relief. It did not do to give orders in Dwight Engle’s presence. Even though he was, in many ways, an undereducated fool, he was also a megalomaniac and didn’t suffer insubordination at all well.

  “Hissing orders, Engle quickly stationed fifteen men and woman at the front of our unit. We calculated that twenty people at a time could descend safely, provided no one person exceeded 300 pounds. Most of us were as skinny as sticks by now, but I pitied the person who weighed in heavy…they would as likely as not end up as crow food.

  “I was one of the first to go down the rabbit hole into Uncle Sam’s wonderland, but it is something I will never forget…not if I live to be a thousand years old.”

  Chapter 14

  Michael and Gary Anderson – The Rescue

  The protective bubble encasing Michael’s little compact car lowered suddenly with nauseating urgency. The images he saw in the aliens viewing platform still stunned his senses, but it seemed that he was not being allowed to wallow in his fears of the future. As the car lowered onto the pavement next to the two yellow school buses, the silver disk spun into existence. The alien’s dark eye appeared.

  “Go now and find the young ones who hide downstairs. These…children are in the continuum. My associate and I will do what we can to expand the shield, but you must hurry. Use this tool to enter the building.”

  The disk blinked out of existence and something else took its place…a cylindrical device, about four inches long and slightly flattened like a remote control. Michael reached out and grabbed the device. It wriggled slightly at his touch, and Michael flinched, letting go.