The God Experiment

Chapter No.13. Encounter

Chapter No.13. Encounter.

The next day, Janet answered the phone and felt her heart skip a beat. She held the phone up to her husband. "It's the FBI."

He accepted the phone. "Yes?"

"We've isolated the target."

Robert hesitated a few moments before replying. "Okay, I'll be there."

He noted the concerned look on his wife's face, but he couldn't allow fear to stop him in his mission. "I'll be back," He said before he vanished.

When he appeared in the FBI office, the two agents were there waiting for him.

"We've isolated Otto to a heavily mined area of Uzbekistan. Pollution has made some of the lakes there highly acidic. The conditions there are hellish, putting it mildly."

"An appropriate locale for a devil," Robert said. "I think it's showtime, gentlemen."

"Don't go near the water," Mark, the head agent said. "The Ph of some of those lakes is near zero."

Robert nodded before disappearing.

He appeared on a rocky protrusion over a lake that was garishly yellow with green streamers snaking through it. He could literally smell the acidity and the metallic taste that accompanied it. The hot arid humid air added a backdrop to a scene from Dante's Inferno.

Robert realized that he couldn't go into the water. It would kill him after an agonizing dissolution of his flesh. He opted to levitate just a few centimeters above the lake's surface. To a viewer, it would appear that he was walking on the lake's surface.

After a ten-minute wait, his opponent, a burly man dressed totally in black, appeared on the opposite shore. Confidence literally oozed from his hard chiseled face. Surprisingly, his nemesis didn't say anything, choosing to stare at him with deep penetrating eyes for several minutes.

Robert stayed still, hoping that Otto wouldn't notice what he was doing. He was unarmed, so to speak, with no offensive weapon or strategy. He was essentially at his opponent's mercy.

Otto continued his aggressive stare before he stepped onto the water and began walking toward Robert.

Robert swallowed hard. He realized there wasn't much he could do to defend against a devil, but something happened that changed everything. Otto's face began to exhibit fear. He stopped and looked down at his feet. When he looked back up at Robert, his expression was of surprise before he began to sink into the water. It was as if he lost his ability to control his powers.

Robert watched as Otto screamed whenhe sank into the acidic water, swinging his arms wildly as the acid dissolved his flesh. Slowly, he slipped under the surface as bubbles popped up, the carbon dioxide and methane gases that resulted from organic decomposition.

Robert transported back to the FBI office. The two agents stared at him with surprise showing on their faces.

"I don't understand him. He tried to walk on the acidic water but lost his nerve and sank."

"Where were you?" Mark asked.

"I was levitating just a few centimeters above the surface. He must have thought I was standing on it and tried to do the same. As it turned out, it wasn't much of an apocalyptic battle."

"We appreciate you taking care of this character. He has caused a lot of problems."

Robert sighed. "I don't know how long I'll be here. I think that my time is over after I defeated the evil one."

The two agents didn't have a response to that.

When Robert appeared in the living room of his house, his wife looked at him with concern,

"I got rid of Otto without any violence. He literally destroyed himself."

She exhaled a relived breath.

He sat down on an easy chair and sighed. "I'm not sure how long I have left now that I've completed my mission."

"Did the man you met while in a coma say that you wouldn't live after you . . . "

"He didn't really say that specifically. I just got the feeling that I was revived from a slow death to complete the mission, not live out my life."

"Well, maybe your feeling is wrong. No use worrying about it."

He sighed. "Yeah, you're right. Maybe I'll get a message that will explain what I'm supposed to do."

"I would think that your main mission is to help people," she said. "You have the power to cure without limit, and I don't think that God would kill you just because you completed a mission to destroy a devil."

Robert offered her a subtle smile. He felt helpless in a situation that was not of his making. His only course of action was to live one day at a time.

James entered the room and flopped down into a chair. "How'd it go, Dad?"

"The evil one is no more, and I didn't have to do anything other than stand there."

James gave him a confused look.

"I was levitating a few centimeters above an extremely acidic lake. Otto evidently didn't realize that and tried to walk on the water. He lost his nerve and sank."

"That wouldn't go well with a Saturday afternoon movie crowd," James said.

"Yeah, but at least I didn't have to resort to trying to doge his attempts to kill me."

"What's next?" James asked.

"I don't know, Maybe the FBI will come up with new challenges."

Little did Robert know how this would come to fruition.