The Flames Of The Phoenix

Chapter 2

CHAPTER TWO

Brian Elliott’s feet ached. He climbed the dark stairs to his second-story apartment as though in a fog and fumbled the keys at the lock. He hated his job. Still, he was lucky to have one. If he got too sick of restaurant work he could always go the route most had gone after the big computer crash had left companies too frightened to rely on such vulnerable technology. He could always enlist.

Brian only occasionally wondered why he had not been drafted along with all the other healthy male seventeen- to twenty-five-year-olds. He had filed the registration forms as required and that had been the end of it. It was probably just another cluster of data that had been left useless in the aftermath of the computer virus wars. Brian felt little disappointment or curiosity. He had long since ceased caring about the insane political and economic struggles of the world beyond the scope of his own meager paycheck.

Brian got the door open and stepped inside. Closing it, he flipped the light switch, frowning when the light failed to respond. He recalled the dark stairs and that the lights had been out on the street as well.

He hated showering in the dark. He wanted to be free of the kitchen grime but was too tired to bother with it. Especially in the dark. It was time to wash the sheets again, anyway. Returning the switch to the “off” position so he wouldn’t be woken if the power returned while he was sleeping, he made his way cautiously across the darkened room when the phone rang.

Groping for the phone, almost dropping it, he answered, “Yeah?”

“Brian? It’s me.”

The soft contralto belonged to Kristiana Morrow, the one bright spot in his life; the only thing that made him question his lot in life and yearn for something more. They had been seeing each other for over a year. He wanted to marry her, but they had not spoken of it. He wanted to have something to show—something to offer her besides being married to a cook at an all-night diner.

“I wasn’t sure when you’d be in,” she said. “I thought you might have to stay longer again with the blackout and all.”

“Nah, I lucked out. It must have hit right after I left. I just walked in the door.” The last time there had been a blackout, Brian had been asked to watch the place and then clean up everything once power was back.

“How about some breakfast tomorrow?” she asked.

“Breakfast?” The thought of an early rise made Brian wince.

“Yeah, breakfast. You know,” she teased, “it’s that meal that people eat in the morning?”

“Oh, yeah. I think I’ve heard about that. How about lunch instead?”

“That’ll work.”

“Something up?” he asked her.

“Well, I’ve got some news I wanted to talk to you about.”

“You can’t tell me about it now?”

“Nope. Not over the phone,” she said cheerfully. “You’ll just have to wait.”

“Alright,” Brian sighed. “What time do you want me to come by?”

“How about noon?” she suggested.

“How about one?” he asked hopefully.

“You must be pretty tired.”

“Yeah, these twelve-hour shifts are starting to get to me. I'm falling asleep right now.”

“Okay,” she relented, “I'll compromise. Twelve-thirty.”

“How about one-thirty?” Silence. “No, huh?”

“No, huh.” The amusement had evaporated from her voice.

“Okay,” he said. “I'll see you tomorrow at twelve-thirty.”

“I love you.”

“Me too.”

“You love you too?”

“No. Me love you too. Now stop tormenting me and let me go to sleep.”

“Oh, all right. Get some sleep.”

“Thank you. G'night.”

He heard her chuckling as she hung up the phone. He smiled, seeing her face in his mind. He peeled off his work clothes and tossed them in the hamper. He climbed into bed and was asleep moments later.

The dream came to him then. The same dream. It had visited him nearly every night for weeks.

It began with a vaguely familiar voice talking to him from the mist. Calling him. Warning him. Urging him to hurry before it was too late. There was someplace he had to go.

Go where?

Valikara.

What's Valikara?

Your destiny.

I don't understand.

In time…

Then the voice left him, and his sleeping mind was assaulted by images of destruction. Fire blazed intensely and the screams of the dying sent him fleeing to consciousness. He woke in a cold sweat.

“s**t,” he croaked, his pulse racing. Gradually it slowed and his breathing returned to normal. He sighed heavily and ran his fingers through his dank hair. “Why do I keep having these dreams?” he asked himself aloud, trying to reassure himself with the sound of his own voice.

“In time…”

Brian froze, his anxiety a sudden knot in the pit of his stomach. The dream voice had answered him, and he was awake!

Quietly, he slipped from his bed. Reaching the wall switch he flipped on the light, noting vaguely that the power was back on. He stood alone in the room. He checked the rest of the small apartment. Empty. Yet he had heard a voice.

Uneasily he returned to bed. This time, he slept undisturbed.

The repeated smack of a rubber ball on the pavement below his apartment slowly brought Brian from his slumber. He opened his eyes and regretted it as the light brought him more fully awake.

Smack!

He squinted at the clock, noting with a scowl that it was not even close to when he had planned to wake up.

Smack!

He rolled to a sitting position.

Smack!

That was going to drive him crazy.

Smack!

He went to the stereo and queued up an old Gypsy Kings album to help him wake up and to drown out the sound of that damned ball.

He had hoped to get more sleep. He did feel somewhat rested, but the dream had left him disquieted. He shaved and showered quickly, feeling better once he had scraped the previous day’s grime from his body.

He dressed and, answering a vague pang in his stomach, went to the kitchen only to stare glumly at the meager contents of his bare refrigerator. Then he recalled that he was out of coffee as well. Disgusted, he turned off the stereo and left the apartment.

Without thinking, he found himself heading to the used bookstore on the other side of the nearby park. In a lot of ways, e-books were more convenient, but Brian liked the feel of a good book in his hands. After making a side trip to the coffee shop next door to get a large mocha, he entered the store and went toward the paperback fiction section. The mousy clerk behind the counter was the only other person in the small store and she flashed him a shy smile as he walked by. He browsed the shelves, thinking that a Philip K. d**k story might suit his mood. Ah! There we go, he thought, spying a collection of short stories by the author. He reached for the book.

Smack!

Brian’s head jerked around at the sound. A book lay in the middle of the aisle several feet from him.

He picked it up and glanced at the title. “The History of Valikara.” Valikara?

Echoes of a dream… your destiny.

Brian looked around uncomfortably; no one was nearby. He wanted to throw the book down and run. Something was happening that he did not understand; something that did not fit into his clear-cut, black and white view of reality. It left a sickly feeling in his stomach.

Just a coincidence, he thought, trying to convince himself. I’ll read the book and find out it’s just coincidence.

Holding onto that thought and feeling better, he took the book to the counter and handed it to the clerk.

“That’s odd,” she said as she rang it up.

“What is?”

“Oh.” She looked embarrassed. “You were in the fiction section, right?”

“Yeah.”

She shrugged, her face red. “It must have been moved by a customer. That actually happens a lot.”

“What do you mean?” Brian asked, confused.

“Well, this is non-fiction,” she paused, looking up at him. “You still want it, though, right?”

“Uh… yeah.” The sick feeling had returned. “Yeah, I want it.” He gave her a twenty and pocketed the change.

Brian tried to organize his thoughts as he exited the bookstore and headed back through the park. Valikara? He was sure he had never heard of the place before his dreams. No, he thought. I must have heard of it. And someone moved it in the bookstore… they set it down on top of a stack and it slid off… I just happened to be there when it finally fell. Simple. The feeling in his stomach began to dissipate as he clutched at this explanation.

Smack!

Brian started at the sound. He looked and saw two men standing near a couple of trees. Smack! Smack! One of the men packed his cigarettes, striking the butt of the hard-pack into the palm of his left hand.

Brian sighed, I’m getting way too jumpy.

He sat on a nearby bench and tried to quiet his nerves. The warm sun felt good on his face, and he thumbed through the beginning of the book. What he read there made him look back at the “non-fiction” designation on the cover. Incredibly, the book claimed that Valikara was a continent on the world of Sélanados, and that this world had been created by a man from Earth!

Skeptically, Brian read on. The book said that the man, Arlown, had lived during the Earth’s final years, in the time of its Armageddon.

Okay, Brian thought. The cover was marked wrong. This is fiction after all.

The text further informed him that Arlown had died and gone to the heaven of his beliefs. Arlown had eventually found this to be boring and decided to create a world of his own to alleviate his boredom, he just needed to find out how.

Brian paused in his reading. Regardless of whether the book was fact or fiction, it would be interesting to be able to create a world from scratch. What would I do? he mused. How would he create the perfect world? What stories and myths would he draw from? What cultures would he recreate?

Not far from where Brian sat, the man with the cigarettes lit another one, leaning against one of a pair of trees. His companion stood near the other, only a few feet from the first. A third man walked toward them. Deep in thought, Brian absently followed the man with his eyes. His mind snapped to attention as the man stepped between the two trees and vanished!

Brian looked closer. The first two men had not moved. He glanced around to see if anyone else appeared to have seen anything, but the park seemed deserted. The air between the trees was slightly hazy. He shook his head, dismissing the disappearing man as a trick of the sun and returned to the book. He skipped ahead, looking for the details of what had been created for the world. Specific information was hard to find in the text, it just did not seem to flow right. One strange passage caught his attention and he read from the page.

Arlown walked upon the world of his creation and looked into the hearts of men and saw that humans have in them both good and bad impulses. He wished to free himself of all that was not good, so he removed from himself that aspect from which negative thoughts and ideas are born.

Yet discarding such does not cause it to dissipate, and over time these discarded impulses coalesced into a being, and that being formed itself opposite in all ways to Arlown, hating him for casting it aside. Where he was good, it was evil. Where he was male, it was female. Where he wished to build, it wished to destroy. Where he wished to give his world enlightenment, it would bring only darkness.

When Arlown saw what had been created by his action, he mourned for his world and the peril he had placed upon it. Then he knew that to overcome his negative aspects he must accept them, not cast them aside or succumb to them; in knowing them completely they would lose all power over him. He then determined that he must somehow draw the evil back into himself without being overcome in the process.

What the hell is that about? Brian wondered. Best to go back to where I left off at the beginning.

Glancing up from the book, he noticed that the two men still stood as if rooted to the ground next to the trees. Out of the corner of his eye he picked up movement. He turned his head curiously and saw two more men, one several yards ahead of the other, walking across the grass. His eyes narrowed when he saw that they were heading straight for the two trees.

As the first man drew near, he exchanged nods with the waiting men. Without slowing he stepped between the two trees and was gone.

Brian’s curiosity peaked. He rose, shoved the book into his back pocket, and started for the trees. As he closed on his objective from the side, the second walking man stepped between the trees and disappeared.

One of the leaning men turned to the other. “That was the last one. Now our turn.”

With that, the two men turned to step between the trees. Brian quickened his pace and stepped through, barely a breath behind them.

Briefest blackness—Brian stood in a corridor that branched out in several directions.

“—urn off the portal,” one of the men stood speaking into a device on his wrist. “Field test successful.” He glanced over his shoulder and jumped when he saw Brian. “s**t!”

“What was that, Roberts?” a voice came from his wrist.

“Just a moment, sir.”

Both men drew instruments that appeared to be some sort of high-tech weapons from beneath their coats.

“What are you doing here?” Roberts demanded.

Brian had been too caught up in the moment to even ask himself that question. He fumbled for an answer, “I saw those men disappear. I was curious.” He shrugged.

“I saw him in the park,” the second man said. “He was sitting on a bench. Reading.”

“Roberts,” the voice came again, “respond immediately!”

Roberts looked at his companion. The man shook his head. “Jefferson’s gonna have our ass for this one.”

Roberts nodded and spoke into his wrist device, “It seems we have an uninvited guest, sir.”

After a moment, the voice came again, “I think you better clarify that, Roberts.”

Roberts turned away from Brian and began speaking in lower tones into his communicator.

“What is this place?” Brian asked the second man. The man glared at him but said nothing.

His report evidently concluded, Roberts turned back to Brian. “It looks like you’ll be the first person to try out our jail.”

“Hey.” Brian stepped back. “Why don’t I—”

“This way.” Roberts indicated one of the corridors with his weapon.

The grim looks on the two men’s faces convinced Brian that he had no other choice. They led him through a maze of corridors and down stairwells. Finally, they came to a section that had small rooms lining both sides of the hall. The rooms appeared to have wide doorways with no doors.

“Welcome to the detainment sector,” Roberts said. “In there.” He motioned Brian toward the first room on the right.

Brian stepped into the room. The furnishings were not lavish. A table and chair of wood, and a bed that was a square wood frame with slats and a mattress that looked incredibly uncomfortable.

“Stand back,” the second man called out. “If you’ve got anything metal on you, I’d keep it well away from the doorway. And metal or not, you won’t want to get too close to it yourself.” He turned a key in a panel on the wall outside Brian's cell. As he removed the key, a crackling, followed by a steady hum, came from the entryway. Taking the key, the two men started down the hall, leaving Brian alone in the chamber.

“Wait!” he called. “How long am I supposed to stay in here?”

“No telling,” Roberts answered him. “You've really kicked up a hornet's nest. The big boys here are pretty paranoid about security, and this is the first breach we've had. They're gonna nail my hide to the wall over it unless I can do some fast talking. As for you…” he shrugged.

“Don't I get a phone call or something?”

Roberts emitted a short bark that may have been a laugh. “No.” Both men turned and left.

Brian looked glumly around the cell. The clock on the wall said 12:30.

“Well, Brian,” he said to himself, “you're late for lunch.”