For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.
Ephesians 6:12
“Welcome to the Abyss, Gemma.”
“It doesn’t sound right. I may have been Gemma before I died, but I am Eliphas now.”
“Very well, Eliphas. This is the last thing I want to show you before we go our separate ways.”
Eliphas and Leraje stood on the edge of time looking down into the abyss. The river roared above them but branched downward into darkness in hundreds of tributaries, large and small.
“Why are some of the limbs blackened?”
“You’re sharp, my friend. That’s exactly what General Forneus and I have been investigating. The short answer is that they are dead branches off time.”
“How can there be so many? I thought there was only past, present and future.”
“Time is a river of infinite possibilities. There is no right now. It only seems so from our perspective.” Leraje pointed under their feet.
“This is the riverbed built of past events behind and potential events ahead of the crest of what we perceive as the present. Tributaries form when mankind alters the stream. When events of the future are negated by events in the past, they fall to the riverbed of the abyss. Recent changes are like sediment. Centuries behind are more like bedrock. It causes massive upheavals when they change events far behind the crest of time.”
“They can alter time? But why?”
“Some cataclysmic event in the distant future they keep trying to avoid. I’m not sure what yet. But I have my suspicions.”
“And the dark tributaries?”
“Something or someone is draining the life energy from them. I fear this is the pending fate of our own timeline.”
“Not if I have anything to say about it!” Eliphas said fiercely. “How do we stop them?”
Minutes later Eliphas programmed his transport dial to Washington DC and vanished from the abyss.
A Valkyrie Safehouse
Amarillo, TX
“Don’t tell me we just came here for drugs after all you suffered breaking free?” Gama asked while Boudikka rummaged through drawers and closets frenetically. Boudikka rolled her eyes and kept searching.
“I’m looking for a cell or laptop that’s been jailbroke so I can get onto the dark web.”
“I see. Apologies.”
“Skip it.” She snapped and slammed a door in disgust. “It’s been cleaned out. They’re supposed to leave a…” she stopped and stared suspiciously at a padlocked case in the rafters.
“Why is it abandoned?”
“Are you kidding? After California dropped and the fireball blackened the sky, your orange god king has declared war on every non-Christian organization in America. We’ve had to pull from the red states and hunker down near the blue wall. It’s not just immigrants he’s putting in his slave camps. There’s a civil war coming.”
Boudlikka backed up a few yards and ran up a central pillar, barely gaining finger hold on a rafter. She pulled herself up and trotted to the box with the ease of an alley cat. “Watch out”. She kicked the box over and it dashed upon the concrete below, bursting open.
“Yes!”
Boudikka dropped and ran to the booty. She grabbed a cell phone and called Lexi. Lexi was shocked to see her boss’s code pop up.
“Boudikka! How on Earth? Where are you?”
“Still Texas. What news?”
“It’s bad. Putin has basically taken over Europe. We have no more allies in contact. We’re down to just the Canadian sects and the northern states. Trump’s militias have arrested and imprisoned half our ranks. He’s picking us off like meat on a bone.”
“It’s been three weeks. How can it have gone south this fast? We were swelling ranks like crazy from all the resistors.”
“Religious fervor. The plague sent a lot of them to his side. This whole Christian nation thing Trump keeps ranting about.”
“What happened to all the Artemis believers?”
“Joan of Art stopped posting her sermons a couple weeks ago. No one knows where she is now. She was our best recruiter. I think we’re finished.”
“Bullshit. We still have to far outnumber them. Hey, what the hell am I looking at?”
Boudikka took a photo of one of the devices that had spilled out of a trunk.
“Oh, that. We found it on one of the cops we ran up against. Micro says best guess is some kind of weapon.”
“It’s a sonic gun.” Gama chimed in.
Boudikka turned from the pile of electronics to look up at him.
“Trump told me about them. He was supposed to be sending Chody a shipment from what he called ‘the factory’. Which I strongly suspected was the slave camp where they took my Mom.”
“Interesting…” Boudikka examined the weapon. “Do you know how to operate it?”
“Not a clue.”
“Micro said he thought it might be an inoperable prototype he couldn’t make it do shit.” Lexi explained.
Boudikka flipped a switch on the side and depressed a button on the handle. Nothing happened.
“Hmm.”
Just then a swarm of rats darted from a pile of rotting wood and barreled across the room to the far corner.
“Sonic, huh?”
She aimed at the rats and pressed again.
They all started squealing, defecating, vomiting and convulsing in their own excrement. Boudikka chuckled.
“A whole shipment, huh?”
