The Forgotten Angel ✔️

Chapter 12: Visions of Truth

Luke shot up in his bed as if he had just been injected with a dose of adrenaline. His heart was beating fast, and his mind was traveling at the same speed.

What I saw-that dream...it wasn't just a dream, Luke thought. It was a memory. He was gathering this memory sequence not just from the dream he had that night, but also from the visions he saw before he woke up at the hospital almost two weeks before.

The story he was putting together was just too difficult to believe. Michael, he took me to a Garden and fed me a piece of fruit. It couldn't be THE Garden?

Luke checked the time and noticed he had slept past his alarm. His first class started at 9:40 AM and it was already 9:25 AM. He shot out of bed and got ready. Kev had left the room to go get breakfast, something Luke always did before his series of classes that took him until 2 PM. He knew his stomach would produce whale mating calls throughout the day.

As he got ready and shot out the door he was trying to think through the visions he saw. The dream, it ended at the Basilica. I know it was the Basilica. I saw the painting of football Jesus on top of the back dome. It has to be a sign. The answer to what's been afflicting this campus-I can find it there.

On his way to class he pulled out his phone and saw a notification from the Tower. He clicked on it and read the headline that explained the shelter-in-place that occurred the night before.

According to the Tower, a janitor had been approached by a Middle-Eastern male who was requesting directions to the administrative building. The janitor pointed him in the direction of Leahey Hall, where the Department of Public Safety's headquarters was located. When the man left, the janitor spotted what looked like the hilt of a gun latched onto his belt. The janitor panicked and called DPS saying he spotted someone with a gun.

That's when the alarms went off and the sirens came rolling in. A bomb ordnanceunit was called in because of the description of the man and they examined the nearby buildings for any explosive materials. They found none.

The flaw that the Tower pointed out was the delay in the response from spotting the threat and alerting the campus. The threat was spotted at 7PM and the campus wasn't alerted until over an hour later. There were some pretty grim depictions of situations that could have occurred due to the slow response to alert students to shelter-in-place. Had that man actually been a shooter, students might have had to rely on the sound of gunshots to know that something was wrong.

While Luke was walking to class, he heard many discussions around him focused on the shelter-in-place. Many were scared because they were not used to any threats on their lives since they originated from suburbs that faced little conflict in their neighborhoods. Even Luke, being from a suburb of DC, was a little freaked out by the event, but he had bigger worries on his mind, especially after nearly meeting his death in the fire, and still feeling partially responsible for the death of Darryl.

And the end of that dream, along with speaking to floating shadows, proved that something sinister was happening on this campus. Luke was resolved to camp out at the Basilica after it closes and investigate whether or not his dream had actually tipped him off to the potential source of all his troubles.

After grabbing dinner at the Pryz, Luke went to the Basilica. There was a mass wrapping up, and Luke partook in the last fifteen minutes. He then explored the Basilica, it's lower church chambers filled with chapels made from different materials and decorated in various murals of the trinity, Mary, and even one mural showing various landmarks from across the globe with the most prominent one being the Statue of Liberty. Luke's favorite chapel was one made of yellow sandstone. It was a small chapel, but it felt like walking into a door that led to a different part of the world. He was in a desert now, thirsting for God.