The Last Qumranian

Chapter 3

3

4 B.C. – The Province of Judea

Against the brilliant glow of the eastern sunrise, a shadowed form blurred across the dazzling desert sand. Clouds of dust billowed in its wake, leaving the scent of burnt earth and charred metal behind the thing that moved too quickly to be of this Earth. Over rolling dunes and past rising peaks of harsh, unrelenting stone, baked by the sun into a merciless wilderness, the figure sped. Its shadow shortened behind it as the sun rose to its zenith, and still the dark thing did not stop the straight, terrible line of its singular purpose in the suffocating heat.

When the sun glowed fiery red in the west and winked over the Sea of Salt, the otherworldly being ceased its unnatural pursuit and stopped beneath the curving arch of white and brown stone. The gust of wind behind it brought a surprised squawk from the chickens pecking at the fine sand, and they spread their wings and hopped away from the man standing now in their midst.

The peddlers stared in animosity toward such a stranger, coupled with fear of the man dressed so strangely and in such dark colors beneath the desert sun. None of them interfered, choosing instead to watch and wait, whispering to neighbors when he passed and hoping he would not stop to ask of them what they knew not one of them could answer. The man continued toward the other end of the small, dry settlement until he reached the wide, dusty square home of baked clay and the stable fashioned against the back wall. A donkey brayed inside, and the man’s figure cast a long shadow across the dirt and the straw and the thin, tired family huddled within.

“May I help you?” From where he lay atop a pile of straw, the man with a long brown beard and exhausted eyes looked up at the strange visitor.

The oddly dressed stranger slowly removed from his pocket a red orb, which shot a thin stream of blazing light into the man’s chest and filling the stable with the nauseating odor of singed flesh. The bearded man slumped sideways into the straw, smoke curling from the gaping hole in his chest. A scream erupted from the woman reclining beside him, and she threw her body across the babe, swaddled in rags, who had been lying between his parents.

With another hiss and whir, the orb in the stranger’s hand turned its fury upon the woman as well, her selfless act of defending her innocent child unnoticed—ineffective. The babe did not once cry out as it stared up at the blank void of the stranger’s eyes within an expressionless face, nearly crushed beneath the dead weight of his mother’s lifeless arm. For a moment, the whole of existence flashed behind the infant’s calm brown gaze—worlds upon worlds, time unending, love and light and what any other man might only call rapture. Then another red flash of light erupted, and the infant silently joined its parents.

The donkey brayed again, its eyes rolling as it jerked its head up and down against the thin wooden rails of its pen. Outside, the chickens screeched and flapped about the yard, scratching and pecking at each other in terror.

Without a word, the stranger turned away from the bodies inside the stable, took one step forward, then burst across the dirt to resume its unearthly speed. The pillar of stacked stones supporting the town’s welcoming archway rumbled and cracked when the dark thing streaked past. The force of the stranger’s departure upturned the peddlers’ tables and sent crates and thin tents flying against the sunbaked walls of the buildings. The foundation of the town itself seemed to shudder in the ensuing stillness, left to endure the coming darkness of night.