“Thirty seconds,” said Asiro.
The mission was not one of capture. Couldn’t risk Al-Hansi escaping or being used as a later bargaining chip. Already Montross had worried that the terrorist leader might have had his own psychic in his employ, the way he had almost supernaturally evaded both internal enemies and allied attacks for the past few years, seemingly one step away at all times. With this mission only planned in detail in the past six hours however, the likelihood of his warning system picking it up was remote.
There was that, plus the fact that the team back home had done a follow-up and seen the success of this mission, seen Al-Hansi’s body pulled out of the wreckage, along with those of several top lieutenants. This was going to be a huge win, an undeniable resume builder. Hell, if all these people here — even Miriam — didn’t line up to kiss his ass afterwards, then Montross would be shocked.
“Ten seconds.”
He held his breath, collectively with the others, and watched the screen. For just an instant, he let his mind take a short jaunt forward, just a few minutes. Just a little preview before the others.
He had tried this a few times before, and either just got a fuzzy glimpse of wreckage, or saw the successful visions from before. Afraid to over-use, and to waste time. Nothing had changed, this future path was unavoidable for Al-Hansi. They were going to win, and…
Wait.
Something was different.
As the room vibrated with excitement, as the others cheered the resulting explosion and the silence of voyeuristically watching a precision assassination, Montross instead witnessed something else.
It was as if a gossamer veil had lifted and the initial transparency it had provided turned to be a complete falsity. He staggered and gripped the table, knocking over several glasses. Aware all eyes were on him. Murmurs and confusion coming from all except one.
Miriam.
She stood unmoved, expressionless except for a slight smile as if this, finally, she had been expecting.
And then he saw it, saw what the following recon force, advisory team and ultimately the Press and the Red Cross would soon discover:
The mountain retreat… demolished, in smoking blacked ruin. Bodies pulled from the wreckage in pieces. Limbs and torsos, heads… gruesome bits and gore-splattered walls.
A small stuffed alligator, still burning. Still with the child’s hand gripping it tightly in blissful ignorance.
No terrorists.
No leaders, no men actually of any kind over the age of twelve. This had been a secretive base to be sure, but had been occupied only recently by fleeing Christians. Nuns who had saved over two dozen children from a fate worse than death, making the difficult trek to this mountain hideaway to wait for rescue that came in a much different form.
Montross struggled for a breath. “Impossible, impossible…”
The others had no idea, couldn’t fathom why he was collapsing in the midst of this apparent victory.
All he could do was weakly raise his head, blink away the vision — the one he knew now to be true, the valid future that had been somehow suppressed behind a false vision.
He lifted his eyes, and couldn’t see a thing in a red haze, besides Miriam watching him with grim satisfaction.
7
The man in the tattered army jacket and wool hat retreated deeper into a narrow alley behind 7th Avenue. Still in the shadow of the spires of St. Jude’s Church of the Cross, its steeple’s shadow pointing the way to safety as the sun inched across the sky, the man — homeless, filthy and by first impression quite drunk still — clenched his eyes shut and prayed, as he did so often, to avoid what the Lord decided to keep showing him. Surrounded by ever-present pigeons, fluttering overhead, landing on and near him, he cringed and hugged his shoulders tight.
He may not have been particularly religious, or at all, in his past life, but nothing mattered now. He bore such little resemblance to that former person, it was inconsequential.
People walked by, faster and faster it seemed. He could hear them, he could see them even with his eyes closed: the businessmen in their trench coats, on their cell phones; the women with their scarves and sunglasses, the tourists, couriers, and sightseers all with such limited vision. All so focused on the path ahead, not seeing the reality of what was around them. Seeing but not seeing, he thought. They didn’t know how lucky they were.
He knew they all saw him, huddling, curling into a ball. Somewhere deep in the recesses of their thoughts they either spared a momentary speck of sympathy, a ‘but for some bad luck, that would be me’ notion, or they glanced in his direction with scorn and ridicule.
If only they knew… If only they could see.
He cringed and again looked up desperately to the steeple, and his eyes pleaded with the sun — or the cross — until they wept.
Please.
Make it stop.
Did he hear laughter in return? Possibly from the teeming crowds, from any number of the hundreds shuffling by in such orderly but intense speed. Possibly from the entrance to the Metro, echoing from the subterranean depths that reminded him of…somewhere else. A distant, distant world and an existence that had been his long before he had ventured back out into the world.
That underground world was no Eden, by any description. Bleak, sunless and mercilessly lonely. The weight of responsibility that came with the exile, and the visions — sights and sounds that would never cease — it was no better than this.
Eyes clenched again, hands in fists, he reached deeper into his coat and found the bottle. Nearly empty. He would have to go again and appeal to the world, to the generosity of strangers who if they only knew what was coming… Wouldn’t they do the same, and drink until nothing mattered? Obliterate all thought and consciousness.
Why can’t I escape?
The bottle felt like a hundred-pound block of ice in his grip. And the drops inside…frozen and useless.
Impotent now to stop what was coming: another flood of unwanted — oh so unwanted — visions.
“I’ve seen it all before!” he shouted, and damn any who looked at him, who even bothered to do anything other than to nod and think to themselves ‘yes, that’s a crazy drunk bastard’.
But he was wrong.
He hadn’t seen this before.
Not another glimpse of a bombing in some bright café overseas where smoking pieces of bodies and gore were revealed in highest definition in the theater of his mind. Not another glimpse of that tsunami destined to obliterate half of Jamaica in a week; not the rape and murder about to occur in an apartment basement six streets over. Or the countless sights from so many different times and places and…
No, this…this was so much worse. Something had changed, and the future had been rewritten. That could only happen if…
He moaned and clutched his head. It was truly too late.
The man let out a cry of pure despair, but no one gave him a second thought. He crumpled into a tighter ball, finally whimpering, begging to the air, to the pigeons, to anyone, to the sky, for help. Not for a drink, a drug, a needle. None of that would help him. Maybe though, at this point, a gun to end it all might work…but not likely.
Once, he had thought there was a chance. A few of those humans out there with their blinders off, and with the courage and hope to do something about what was to come.
He had tried to help one of them once, in a tunnel so long ago, and yet it might have been yesterday.