Glorious Appearing Read online

  Mac's thighs ached and quivered with fatigue. The wall behind him had lost its coolness, and he couldn't figure it. Had his body heat finally tempered the subterranean effect? No, something was happening. The temperature was rising. How could that be? What would cause it?

  Even Carpathia, immune to hunger and fatigue and thirst since his resurrection, if the reports could be believed, noticed. He tugged at his collar. "What has happened to the air-conditioning?"

  "None is needed, Excellency, " Leon said. "We are forty feet below the sur—"

  "I know where we are! I want to know why the temperature has risen. Do you not feel it?"

  "Of course I do, exalted one. But there is no source of heat here. It has always remained a constant of—"

  "Will you silence yourself! The temperature has risen, and even our collective body heat should not have resulted in that much difference. "

  Could it be? Mac wondered. Was there a chance this was a sign of the imminent return? Might Jesus appear even here, in the lair of His enemy? "Lord, please!"

  Maybe outside the sun had darkened.

  Rayford shielded his eyes and squinted into the sky. Not one cloud. The sun had finally coursed far enough to see the temperature drop, perhaps more than ten degrees, since its brutal noontime peak. Rayford gratefully accepted Abdullah's offer of his cap, which was a little small but served its purpose.

  "If we're not going to be able to carry you to Petra, " Leah said, "we at least need to sit you up. Can you manage it?"

  "I can't imagine," Rayford said. "But I know you're right. I'll need help. "

  "You're going to be dizzy, " Leah said, which proved an understatement. When she and Abdullah sat him up, blood rushed so quickly from Rayford's head that he felt he'd lost his bearings, though he was still firmly planted—albeit on his seat now—in the shallow grave of his own making.

  "Whoa," Rayford whispered.

  "When you're steady," she said, "tell me what hurts most."

  "I can tell you that now. The ankle. Then the shin. Then the hand."

  "I'll take them in order," she said, "but it's all going to be temporary and makeshift. It's not what I would want done if I had you in a sterile environment and could do an MRI. "

  As Leah cleansed and anesthetized the ankle, which had a gaping gash and obvious damage inside, she said, "A surgeon will want to work on the bone before closing this up, but you don't need sand and air in it." She cut away dead and damaged skin that could not be salvaged and sutured it in such a way that it could easily be accessed again.

  "This is going to hurt," she said, cutting away his khaki pants below the left knee and examining his shin with both hands. "No doubt you have a fracture, but this is not an easy bone to set. I can give it a try, but only before I numb it. You up to it?"

  "I have a choice?"

  "No. We may have to try to put you on one of our bikes, and without this set and splinted, you'll pass out from the pain."

  "And what about the pain from your trying to set it?"

  "No promises."

  Rayford had been severely injured before, but he could not remember agony like this. Leah failed in her first attempt to set the shinbone, but she simply said, "Sorry, I can get it, " and took another run at it. Despite a wad of gauze to chew on, Rayford screamed loud enough— he feared—to alert the Unity Army. Even once the bone was clearly in place, his leg hurt so badly that it jumped and quivered for more than ten minutes as he fought to keep from whimpering.

  "I'll let that settle down some before applying a splint," Leah said.

  "You're so kind," he said, and elicited a smile from her.

  The splint, fortunately, was inflatable plastic and once in place provided enough stability that the pain finally started to subside. Leah busied herself cleaning and dressing the wounds on the heel of his hand, his chin, and on both arms and both knees.

  "I'm going to look a sight," he said. "Better not let Kenny see me until some of this stuff is off. "

  George Sebastian was relieved to know that Rayford had been found alive, but he had to wonder how busted up his boss must be. More pressing, he was uneasy about what the Unity Army was up to. They had closed the mile gap by half, advancing on his position so slowly that the maneuver had taken hours. And now they were stopped. If it was some sort of psychological warfare, it was working. Sebastian's people were spooked.

  It was as if this roiling armada, fronted by the hundreds of thousands of mounted horsemen, was just waiting for one word from Antichrist to either open fire or charge. Bothering Big Dog One most was that he now had to turn his head more than 120 degrees just to take in the breadth of the fighting force he faced. And regardless of how high he could place himself, he could never see its full depth. The end of this army literally blotted out the horizon.

  Mac was as stunned as Leon clearly was when Carpathia said, "I need a chair. Get me a chair!"

  Nicolae rarely sat anymore. He was known not to have eaten or slept in three and a half years, persuading loyalists he was the true and living God, and confirming to his enemies that he was indeed Antichrist, indwelt by Satan. His rage was legendary. But no one had seen a weakness or physical frailty in him. And now he needed a chair? Leon Fortunate leaped from his own and slid it behind the potentate, who shakily sat. Nicolae tore at his collar and unbuttoned his shirt, feebly fanning himself with his hand. "Allow me, Excellency," Fortunate said, and he knelt and grabbed the hem of his own ostentatious robe, lifted it to his waist, and began fanning the potentate.

  Normally Carpathia would quickly tire of such obsequiousness, but he actually appeared panicky and grateful. But when Leon turned to ask Viv Ivins to pour Nicolae a glass of water, his garish fez slipped off and landed in the blousy folds of his skirt. His next tug tightened the fabric and launched the hat into Carpathia's lap.

  "Oh!" Leon cried out. "Oh, majesty! Forgive me!" He lurched forward and tried to retrieve the fez, succeeding only in knocking it out of Nicolae's lap and onto the floor on his other side. Leon's momentum carried him over the potentate, and now he was stretched out across the ailing world leader, his ample belly in his boss's lap. He grabbed the hat with both hands, and as he rocked back to his feet he jammed it atop his head again, uttering every apology imaginable.

  Mac was certain Nicolae would execute his right-hand man for such a breach of etiquette, but he appeared to have hardly noticed. Carpathia was in trouble. Viv Ivins finally got a glass of water in front of him, but by now his hands were at his sides and his usually ruddy countenance had paled.

  Leon grabbed the water and held it to Carpathia's lips as the fez began to tumble yet again. This time Leon angrily batted it away with his free hand and it toppled to the floor behind them. Carpathia could barely manage to open his mouth, water sloshing down his chin.

  "Get paramedics in here!" Leon squealed. "Someone, please! Hurry!"

  FIVE

  SWEAT TRICKLED down Mac's back. The temperature was rising, almost as if there was a fire below the Temple Mount. With Carpathia having his own problems, Unity Army sentries fell out of attention and wiped their brows, tugged at their shirts and jackets, and traded looks as if to ask what was going on.

  Mac turned and leaned out the arched opening at the sound of shouts. Whatever this was, it was widespread. And suddenly, the stables were in chaos. Unfettered horses broke free from their handlers, neighing, spooking each other into a stampede that had nowhere to go. Stablemen tossed lassos but found themselves pulled off the ground when the steeds reared, and then thrown to the ground when they took off, horses jostling horses, fighting for space to get through the arches.

  Men and women were trampled, some to death, but

  when a shortsighted soldier fired into the air, things only got worse. More than a thousand full-size Thoroughbreds were manic and terrified. Following their instincts, they tried to flee, crushing anything in their path, including each other.

  Mac saw great equine shoulders ripped open as horses were crushed agains
t the stone walls. He heard legs snapping, saw horses nipping and biting each other, and soon it was a free-for-all.

  "Where's the fire?" someone shouted. Many must have heard only "fire, " for it was repeated and repeated, soldiers screaming it all over the underground. Mac saw no flame, smelled no smoke. But he heard "Fire!" "Fire!" "Fire!" and like the rest, his instinct was to head for the surface.

  But a commander nudged him back into the room with the barrel of a nuclear submachine gun. "There is no fire!" he announced. "Every soldier in this room has a job, and that is to protect the potentate. That is what we shall do. No one enters; no one leaves. "

  "Permission to speak, Commander, " came from a corner.

  "Granted. "

  "What is causing the heat?"

  "No idea, but let everyone else kill themselves trying to escape a fire that doesn't exist. You're not going to best a twelve-hundred-pound horse that wants your space anyway, so stay here and do your job. "

  "What's wrong with the potentate?"

  "How should I know?"

  "Are the paramedics coming?"

  "I don't know how they'd get here. But you can bet no one else will get in. If this is a plot against His Excellency, it stops right here. Now come to attention! Weapons at the ready!"

  Mac had never liked being underground, but up till now this foray had not brought on claustrophobia. The sheer size of the area had given him room to move and breathe. But now, outside the only room where everyone remained still, pandemonium reigned. There would be no escape, no freedom, no daylight, no air, no lessening of the heat, even if he opened fire and killed everyone around him and made a break for the surface. What was happening on the dirt ramp and the wood stairs dwarfed mass tragedies due to fire in crowded buildings. Even without an actual fire, this was going to be catastrophic.

  With his safety turned off and his firing finger on the trigger, Mac fought to maintain his composure, remaining at attention, staring straight at Carpathia, sweat running freely now inside his uniform.

  Nicolae looked wasted. His formerly full head of hair appeared somehow sparse now. His clear, piercing eyes were bloodshot and droopy. His face was sallow, and though it made no sense, Mac believed he could see veins spidering across the man's face, framing his hollow eyes.

  Carpathia's fingers looked thin, his skin papery, his shoulders bony. It was as if he had lost fifty pounds in minutes. His pale, bluish lips were parted, and his teeth and gums showed... the mouth of a dead man.

  "You must drink, Excellency!" Fortunate whined.

  "I am spent, " Carpathia said, and though Mac could barely hear him, his was clearly not the voice Mac had come to recognize. His words seemed hollow, faint, echoey, as if he spoke from a dungeon far away. "Hungry, " Carpathia said flatly. "Exhausted. Dead. "

  No doubt he meant that last as a figure of speech, but to Mac he did look dead. Were his skin any worse he could have passed for a decomposing corpse. Even his ears had lost color and appeared translucent.

  In the next instant, Mac found himself on his knees, shielding his eyes from the brightest light he had ever experienced. It reminded him of a science experiment in junior high more than fifty years before when he and his classmates wore heavily tinted goggles as they ignited magnesium strips.

  Mac peeked to find that he was not the only soldier on the ground. Most had pitched forward onto their stomachs, weapons rattling to the floor. Whatever the source radiating from the middle of the table, it lit the room like the noon sun.

  "Beautiful! Beautiful!" people whispered, interlaced with the oohs and aahs associated with fireworks displays. All the dignitaries had thrust their chairs back from the table and covered their eyes, peeking through fingers to gaze on this magnificent appearance, whatever it was.

  Mac pushed himself up and rocked back on his haunches, his eyes gradually becoming accustomed to the initially blinding radiance. As he squatted there, hands on his weapon again, it was clear why so many

  thought this... this apparition was so striking. It seemed to hover inches above the table, directly in the center, such a bright gold-tinged white that you could not take your eyes from it. It shone with such brilliance that no detail was clear, from the bottom to the top of what appeared to be a roughly six-foot human form. There was no way to tell whether it—if it was a human-oid being—wore shoes or clothes or was naked.

  Gradually Mac realized he was looking at the back of a being that faced Carpathia and Fortunato. Flowing blond hair came into view, but it appeared that the rest of the body would remain a mystery to the human eye. Clearly, this was not the Glorious Appearing of Christ, as Mac knew He was to return on the clouds with His faithful behind Him.

  Viv Ivins's chair was empty, but Mac could hear her moaning in ecstasy on the floor.

  Leon was also on the floor, head buried in his hands, rocking, weeping.

  Carpathia had fallen forward in his borrowed chair, his cheek on the table, arms outstretched, palms flat. "Oh, my lord, my god, and my king, " his death-rattle voice repeated over and over.

  From outside the room Mac heard the awful, terrifying sounds of death. Panic, screams and screeches, pleading, bones being crushed, air pushed from lungs, horses snuffling and caterwauling as other, smaller creatures might do.

  Pitiful, lonely cries could be heard from grown men and women. "Save me! Oh, God, save me! I don't want to die!"

  And yet die they did. Without even being able to see, it was clear to Mac that the carnage between him and the exit would be unlike anything he had ever encountered. Shooting began, and he could only guess it was the few remaining soldiers putting horses or comrades out of their misery and trying to pave themselves some macabre exit route over dead bodies.

  Carpathia raised his pathetic head, his Zorro getup hanging as if on a cadaver. "Lucifer, " he managed in that rasping, hollow voice, appearing to squint into the eyes of the being. "My lord king, why have you forsaken me? Why have you withdrawn your spirit from me? Have I not given myself wholly to you, to serve you with my entire heart and being?"

  "Silence!" came the response in a voice so phantas-magorically piercing and awful that it made Mac recoil and want to cover his ears. "You disgust me! Look at you! You dare suggest you have anything to offer me besides your pathetic frame?! You are drunk with a power whose source is far beyond your own! You are merely a vessel, a tool, a jar of clay for my purposes, and yet you parade yourself as if you had a shred of value!" "Oh, my king!" Carpathia gasped. "No! I—" "You do not even understand the meaning of the word silence! You are nothing! Nothing! You had no power to rise from the dead! You were a carcass, stiff and decaying. Look at you now. Aside from my grace, you would return to the earth, ashes to ashes and dust to dust. "

  "Spare me, oh, my lord! I love you and long to serve you! I will do anything for—"

  "Oh, spirit of nothingness, mere speck of my imagination. I will borrow your otherwise worthless skeleton yet again. But you must know, and if you cannot fathom it, I must myself remind you who you are and who you are not. You are not me! I am not you! You are mere inventory, goods and services. You are a piece of equipment, and you must never dare imagine otherwise. "

  "I have never, divine one! Never! I am humbly at your serv—"

  "I am the lord your god, and I will not share my glory!"

  "Absolutely, " Carpathia said, panting. "O king of heaven and earth. "

  "Do not think it was by accident that my Adversary, in His own words, acknowledged that I originated in heaven and called me the son of the morning! Do you not know, as He knows, that it is I who have weakened the nations?"

  "I know, " Carpathia sobbed. "I know!"

  "I, not you, not anyone else in all of the evolved world, am the one who shall ascend into heaven. I will exalt my throne above the stars of God; I will also sit on the mount of the congregation on the farthest sides of the north; I will ascend above the heights of the clouds. I will be like the Most High. "

  "Yes, precious master. Yes!"
r />   "Yet my Enemy claims I shall be brought down to Sheol, to the lowest depths of the pit."

  "No, lord, no!"

  "He claims that those who see me will gaze at me and consider me, saying, 'Is this the man who made the earth tremble, who shook kingdoms, who made the world as a wilderness and destroyed its cities, who did not open the house of his prisoners?'"

  "May it never be so, my sovereign!"

  "Oh yes, my Enemy derides me! He claims all the kings of the nations, all of them, die in glory, every one in his own grand tomb, but that I—I—shall be cast out of my grave like an abominable branch, like the garment of those who are slain, thrust through with a sword, who go down to the stones of the pit, like a corpse trodden underfoot. 7 will be buried like a common soldier killed in battle?"

  "Never!" Carpathia sobbed. "Never! Not as long as I have breath!"

  "Are you so thick you do not understand? It is I who give you breath!"

  "I know! Yes, I know!"

  "And what shall be your contribution, knave, when the Enemy attempts to make good on His promise that no monument will be given me, for I have destroyed my nation Babylon and slain my people? He taunts me that my son will not succeed me as king."

  "Oh, let me be your son, " Carpathia blubbered. "And you shall be my father!"

  "But no! The Enemy derides me. He says, 'Slay the children of this sinner. Do not let them rise and conquer the land nor rebuild the cities of the world. I, myself, have risen against him, ' and He has the audacity to call Himself the Lord of heaven's armies. "

  "But that is you, O beautiful star! It is you alone!"

  "He has already destroyed my beloved Babylon, but He will not be content until He makes her into 'a desolate land of porcupines, full of swamps and marshes.' He promises to 'sweep the land with the broom of destruction, ' this so-called Lord of the armies of heaven."

  "We shall never let that happen, Your Grace."

  "But He has taken an oath to do it! He says this is His purpose and plan. He has decided to break the Assyrian army when they are in Israel and to crush them on His mountains, saying, 'My people shall no longer be their slaves. This is My plan for the whole earth—I will do it by My mighty power that reaches everywhere around the world. '"