The Theocracy - The Blackened Cross - Prologue. Prologue (revised)

Brad Anderson woke up early each morning to go on his morning jog. This was a precious moment he’d discovered, cliche as it might seem; that precious all too brief window of time when the rising sun turned the sky into liquid and the world was his for the taking.

Heidi and Little Annie were still asleep when he rose out of bed. Little Annie clutched her Dora the Explorer doll to her chest, her thumb tucked safely in her mouth. He smiled privately to himself before tiptoeing down the stairs to make coffee. A peek out the window showed the first streaks of blue and umber and magenta in the sky. The coffee would be done by the time he came back from his jog.

The earbuds and medical mask slid into place. He hit the PLAY button on his MP3 player - jogging without music was like drinking coffee without creamer - and passed the boundary that marked his house at the end of the cul-de-sac from the rest of the world. The houses started out as brick and limestone, steadily turning into prefabs as he drifted towards the center of the maze. The windows, many of their curtains still drawn and dark, and lawns were white with frost from the early Autumn chill. The swelling of muscles and flow of blood pumping through him like a well-oiled machine kept him warm.

By the time Anderson reached the corner of Hooper Hill, the sky had brightened considerably, now more blue than magenta. He ran against the chill, against the rising sun, against the fat boy everyone had hated in grade school - of course no one had hated him more than he’d hated himself. No amount of running or workouts at the gym could completely erase the chubbiness from his cheeks or the freckles that dotted his nose and cheeks.

He passed Bethany Thomas, a fellow jogger like himself. She too had in her eardrums, a custom all joggers seemed to understand. In this way exercise was like religion, which in his mind was a practice that should be shared sparingly. She also had a medical mask on, a reminder that the world was not as perfect as it might appear. While signs of the Gehennic Plague had yet to reach the residential neighborhood of Hooper Hill, the fear and paranoia was there, a creeping dread that refused to be ignored. They nodded at one another as they passed but maintained a distance. Civility and conversation was a luxury few could afford these days. He couldn’t stop himself from searching her for the black varicose veins or black insect eyes that would mark her as a victim of the plague…or she him.

Two blocks later, Anderson came across what Little Annie called “the goose bridge.” The geese had abandoned the bridge in flight of the cold months. For now the bridge belonged to Anderson and his daughter in sentiment if not in the literal sense. He always made sure to pass over it during his morning circuits around the neighborhood.

Today the water was sluggish even as sharp gusts of wind - much too cold this time of year, an arbitrary sign of the long and nasty winter to come - stirred through it. He was half way when the light reflecting off something silver snagged his peripheral. He made to pass it. He’d never been the kind of person to pick up abandoned treasures off the concrete slab, especially during this period of government-sanctioned sanitation. But a small voice murmured in his head, bringing him to a full stop.

Stop. See, indulge.

Later Anderson would think most of the bad things that happened in life were out of simple human curiosity. He would think that if he hadn’t kept running things would have been different. Ignorance is both a bliss and a sin. Alas, he bent over to examine his new find. Perhaps it was a quarter.

It wasn’t a quarter.

It was a lighter. A Zippo to be exact.

He moved on. He hadn’t had a cigarette since his boyhood days when such acts of rebellion were expected, and in some circles, encouraged. That life is behind me, he thought.

He tried to keep walking. He didn’t make it far.

Didn’t you used to own a Zippo lighter like the one you just passed? a secret voice in his mind suggested. It had a pretty gnarly skull back when you were into that shit.

He came to a full stop, frozen in a moment of indecision. He could still see the object in his mind, winking at his back, urging him to examine it further. He turned around and went back. A part of him felt as if something was dragging him back while his body was a willing participant.

Anderson picked it up. The moment he lifted it up, he almost dropped it. It must have been lying here for a while for it was hot to the touch. He felt the thrill of nostalgia, a thrill in his heart that was deeper and more intimate than memory. Once a reliable tool for oversea soldiers during the ‘40’s, the Zippo symbolized the old American swagger, masculinity, and rebelliousness any fourteen-year-old would desire.

He turned it over to look at the front. The thrill Anderson felt dried a cool death, first transmorphing to surprise and then a dawning terror like a black sunrise.; it made his balls shrivel up and filled his mouth with the taste of cold, hard steel.

The snarling face of a horned skull grinned back at him, promising horrors yet to come. A long forked tongue emerged from the tunnel of its cavernous mouth. Waves of ice water passed through his veins, numbing him to the bone. It wasn’t just the face on the Zippo that scared him, it was the power of familiarity it held over him. No. that’s not impossible, Anderson’s mind jibbered in a desperate search for meaning in the chaos. That was thirty years ago…

But the memory was there in his head, re-emerging from the land of the forgotten. He remembered walking home from school on an Autumn day much like this one. The smell of rain and damp earth tugged and buffeted at him as if he were a ship lost at sea, immediate and heavy. He remembered how the leaves looked as if they were burning; the way they looked like they were burning right now. He remembered picking it up and feeling the weight in his hand. The same weight he held right now. He remembered turning it over and over, a grin of pleasure fixed on his face. Finders keepers, losers weepers. It’s mine now.

In the present, the words touched his lips, tender as a lover’s kiss: “Finders keepers, losers weepers. It’s mine now.”

He flipped the top off and pressed the wheel and button down with the pad of his thumb, thinking the trinket was nothing more than an unlucky find. The flame sprouted into being with a flicking sound that made the fourteen-year-old inside him grin.

Another memory reached the surface, streaking across his mind like a comet. The smell of meat, of cooking flesh. Of lighter fluid, burning wood, and smoke. And he knew with utter certainty that this was the same lighter that had been taken from him twenty-eight years ago.

Something was burning. A sacrifice. “I bow to you in submission, Hamon…I offer you this sacrifice in good faith…in reverence.”

The smell of burning meat made him salivate.

The lighter had a heart. Anderson could feel it beating in his hand. When he looked down at the lighter the face of Hamon grinned back at him. The Architect’s eyes burned with carnal delight. His voice rang in Anderson’s head, deep and resounding: “I answer your call…”

The spell that kept him pinned in place broke. The lighter tumbled from his hand, bouncing off concrete. Time slowed. It started to plummet over the side of the bridge. Hamon continued to grin at him as if they were playing a game. Catch me if you can.

Anderson scrabbled for it desperately. When it rested in the twin cups of his palms he breathed a sigh of relief. He was covered in cold sweat. He offered a prayer of thanks to the Good Mother, Elysia.

When he came into the kitchen ten minutes later, Heidi was standing at the kitchen, slicing Little Annie an apple. He felt the buds of his wife’s nipples brush up against his arm through the fabric of her slip when he leaned over to kiss her. Her breath smelled of toothpaste. “Did you have a good run?”

“I did,” he said, even as a hand sneaked into the pocket of his shorts to make sure the lighter was still there.

I answer your call.

It had been a good run. A good run indeed.