Page 10 of The Godhead Complex
“The lights are a sign of the end times,” a man murmured, and although Alexandra was prepared for their doubt to show up in many ways, she couldn’t help but be annoyed. The Pilgrims of countless religions had been wishing the end times upon them for longer than recorded history. Why was every generation bound to the hopelessness of the generation before it? Why couldn’t something so grand as the Borealis be a sign of good things to come?
“The northern lights are a promise of hope. They are telling of the times ahead, the evolution of the world to come and—”
An ungrateful and uneducated Pilgrim interrupted her. “Red appeared in the sky before the Sun Flares!”
Alexandra stood tall and recited the digits in her head. She was far too tired from a sleepless night to coach the citizens into their future. Always, she was forced to comfort their feeble minds. But today, shifting their perspective took more time than what she had patience for. Always more time. She hated progress halted by such lack of foresight.
“The sun will never flare or scorch the Earth again,” she said calmly.I hope. “Nicholas foretold times just like these. Your Godhead has prepared you, have we not?” She enunciated every word as if to cut their doubt and fears in half.
“The Godhead is good!” a woman in the crowd shouted as she held her baby up in the air. Those around her murmured in support and raised their voices together to repeat, “The Godhead is good!”
Alexandra smiled. All it ever took was one voice to guide the others back to faith. She made eye contact with the woman holding the baby and nodded in gratitude. She remembered the faces of those who supported her just as much as the faces of those who spoke against her. Glaring back at the others who’d expressed fear, she said the words herself along with the crowd while peering deep into their eyes, “The Godhead is good. The Godhead is good.”
The people breathed and chanted as one, a single organism moving and swaying together with each word. Something caught Alexandra’s eye. Movement in the distance. A hooded man walked in the opposite direction of the town’s square, his back to the crowd. But she didn’t need to see his face to know whose shoulders lay beneath that cloak. It could be only one person: Mikhail. And Alexandra knew exactly where he was going.
“The Godhead is good,” she chanted again. “The Godhead is good.” And she watched Mikhail disappear around a corner, turning left toward the former home of Nicholas. Their former God.
CHAPTERFIVE
Dear Nicholas
He knocked on Nicholas’ wooden door again. Two knocks, pause, two knocks, pause, and then a burst of knocks in succession. Then even harder, until the blood pooled within his skin and formed a fresh bruise along his pinky.Patience, dear Mikhail.That’s what Nicholas would say, but the panicked feeling had followed Mikhail around all morning, and now it intensified.He had the same dream again.The dream that only visited him when things were off course. Mikhail knocked one last time, ever louder. He tried the door. Locked.
Nicholas’ intuition was so strong that all Mikhail had to do was think about stopping by for something, anything, and Nicholas usually met him at the door. He wasalwaysat the door. Well, unless he’d left on one of his trips.Was he gone?Mikhail searched his memory, but his memory was shit. Complete mush ever since Crank Palace. At least when he was a Crank he had all his memories. But now, even the things his brain remembered, things he knew for sure, he couldn’t pronounciate. Wait, that last word didn’t sound quite right in his head. That happened, a lot. Pronounciate?
He reached for his keys to open Nicholas’ door, not wasting time to remember which key out of the six in his collection would work, trying them all.
One by one, the keys failed, until the fourth, a red dot painted on the metal, did the trick. “Nicholas?” Mikhail whispered in case he forgot something he should have remembered again, but as soon as the name left his mouth, the overpowering smell of rot filled his every sense, gagging his throat. Mikhail coughed to clear his airway, he couldn’t find oxygen. Only decay, and he knew the smell of death all too well from Crank Palace.
Ever since Mikhail’s senses came back to what Alexandra called “healthy again,” Mikhail believed that there were no good smells left on earth. His sensory nodes performed ten times what they did before and amplified all the worst stench of all the worst cities. Flare pits that smelled like charred skin and bones. Soggy, foggy days that reeked of moldy earth. The odor of sewer water that hung heavy in the air after a storm.
But this . . . Mikhail choked on it.
“Sir?”
He walked through the great room slowly, immediately spotting Nicholas’ robe, lifeless on the ground, draped over a cushion. Nicholas would never have done such a thing, discarding his holy robe on the floor, even in his own apartment. Mikhail coughed again, using his own robe to cover his mouth. Finally, when his eyes adjusted to the dim lighting of Nicholas’ apartment, he realized it wasn’t a cushion that Nicholas’ robe covered, but a bloated body. It took him a handful of seconds to realize what he was looking at—not because his brain was confused, but because he had never before this moment seen a body without a head.
3, 5, 8, 13, 21 . . .
Sitting at the table, she recited the numbers out loud as she pulled closer the hard-cased, red-leather briefcase with Newt’s blood inside. Despite having it in her possession, she still felt anxious. Alexandra tapped the glass case holding Nicholas’ head three times, then five times, then eight times while she waited for Mikhail. She understood the power of the digits better than Mikhail and Nicholas ever did. For one thing, Mikhail was too erratic to remember the numbers in their organized sequence. But Alexandra knew the infinite loop of numbers and could recite them at any length. It was as if the digits were born inside of her and she birthed them into existence with every reciting. Each number equaled the sum of the two before it, creating within the string of digits their own frequency sequence. The Evolution was always inside of her, and the time had come to bring it to others now. She’d guide them as their one true God, no longer a divinity of three.
Even though she risked dropping the vial of sealed blood every time she held it, she couldn’t help herself as she whispered the digits and pulled out one of the vials.
34, 55, 89, 144 . . .
The small sealed tube grew warm in her hand, a warmth of possibility that fueled her through the coldest nights for the last thirty years. She’d waited for this moment when she’d finally no longer have to answer to Nicholas. When she could choose who was blessed and who would be changed like she once was. Never mind the irony that he’d been the one to choose her, after all.
She often wondered why he did so, chose her of all people all those years ago, but her intentions, even now, were always pure. As pure as met her needs and wants, anyway.
It was Nicholas’ intentions that had changed over the years.
What started as a relationship based solely on survival allowed Nicholas to manipulate her until his end. For years she let him think that he was greater than her, but now it was her turn. She’d once read a funny word in an old book: switcheroo. That described it delightfully. Just like the Aurora lights returning to the skies of Alaska, she’d step forward to brighten the world with Subject A4.
But despite her love and appreciation for numbers, she didn’t know what in the Mazes of Hell “A4” meant. An arbitrary letter and number that once perhaps held great meaning was just a symbol now. But even numbers had vibrations to them. Did A4 vibrate with the frequency of Newt? She wasn’t sure. Four wasn’t a holy number. It wasn’t in her digits. But the lab tape on the vial, with Newt’s name on it, was undeniable; this had to be the sample of what was left after Nicholas injected her and Mikhail each with variated sequences of Newt’s DNA. But even three decades later, Alexandra never thought the word “Cure” fit. What it did for Mikhail was much more than that. It was a miracle. A cursed miracle. Parts of Mikhail had returned to human while other parts remained animalistic—like the urges of insanity. Madness. Traits of the Cranks. Things that terrified her even while she subdued them.
What the slightly variated sequence of DNA had done to her was even more astounding. She’d received clear knowledge. Clear as the glass box in which Nicholas’ head nestled. Intuition that not only predicted future events but also received elements of the past, as if her very own cells, once upgraded, carried the knowledge of previous civilizations within them. As if the wireless internets of old were alive again and only she had access to them directly from her brain. Preposterous? Yes. True? Also yes.
The re-wiring of her DNA had been subtle but powerful, unlike the hellfire Mikhail had to go through. His body had to physically reproduce cells that were being eaten by disease. His cells undoubtedly held no knowledge. It took him months to be able to speak like himself again, and even after that he was never truly the same. Nightmares haunted him at every sleep. Nicholas expected Alexandra to grovel at his feet day in and day out with gratitude for saving her dear Mikhail, but Alexandra had watched him change twice, and the transition back from The Gone was somehow harder. Because he didn’t come all the way back.
