The Last Day

by Glenn Kleier

Genres: Thrillers

Synopsis

An apocalyptic thriller centered around a mysterious woman with extraordinary powers.

Release date: July 22, 1999

Publisher: Grand Central Publishing

Print pages: 496

Sample

1

WNN Television Studios, Times Square, New York 4:38 P.M., Friday, December 24, 1999

Jesus Christ!” the first man exclaimed.

“More or less,” the second responded.

The two well-dressed TV executives sat alone in a World News Network editing suite as a series of bizarre, silent scenes played out on the huge video wall before them.

Towering on the screen was the face of a grinning, feverish-eyed, middle-aged man with a scruffy beard. He was dressed in a tattered robe. His long stringy hair was matted with blood that trickled from a laurel wreath of rusted barbed wire on his head. As the camera pulled back, a heavy wooden cross became visible across his shoulder. Behind him, a street sign read “Via Dolorosa.” A title font on the screen identified the man as “Douglas Bandy, former stockbroker from San Jose, CA.”

The first executive nodded appreciatively.

Emerging next on the large screen was a young family of five, also shabbily dressed, seated on the worn cobble-stones of what appeared to be an ancient market bazaar. The family extended their upturned palms to every passerby, and ultimately, to the camera taking the video. The font read: “The Étien Dubois family, formerly of Orléans, France.”

The video then cut to a wide scene of a highway choked with cars, buses, bicycles and animal-driven vehicles. Beyond, the contorted skyline of Jerusalem loomed in the distance.

“Here's where we come in with the historical material,” the second executive explained in a genteel English accent.

Obligingly, the video screen presented sweeping footage of a beautiful, elaborately embroidered wall tapestry. As the camera moved in to slowly migrate down the full length of the mural, an epic story unfolded.

“The Catastrophic Millennium Pilgrimages of A.D. 999,” the title font described it. The sequence began with wealthy, medieval European families giving away their belongings to the poor and setting off for the Holy Land. On their journey, the travelers soon fell victim to terrible hardships. The tapestry depicted graphic scenes of marauders waylaying, pillaging, raping, enslaving and murdering the pilgrims. Those fortunate enough to survive the trek were then shown arriving, destitute, in the forbidden Jerusalem of the Muslims, left to starve in frustrated desolation.

“We'll add the voice-overs next week,” the Englishman commented, “and that will finish it.”

“An outstanding piece,” his cohort acknowledged, an expression of admiration spreading across his face. “It looks like your Millennium Eve special will be a huge success. Airtime's selling well all over the globe.”

“Was there ever any doubt?” the Englishman said, feigning surprise.

His associate emitted a short, snorting laugh. “I'll tell you what, Nigel, when you first proposed this whole idea, a lot of us here in the States thought you were crazy. I mean, forming special news teams, sending them all over the world at such expense to chase after a bunch of religious fanatics! I honestly thought corporate was going to take a bath on this one. But once again, you've shown your knack for creating news. You developed this millenarian craze into a major international story. Hell, if things go as well as we anticipate, maybe we'll run it again next year for the real turn of the millennium!”

“To be quite honest,” Nigel confessed, “it falls short of my expectations.”

“What do you mean?” the fellow executive protested. “The setup couldn't be more perfect! Your coverage of the millenarian movement over the last six months—the growing insanity in the Holy Land, Rome, Salt Lake City. All the crazy speculation about what's going to happen when the world odometer ticks over to the year 2000. The TV audience can't get enough of it! You were light-years ahead of the other networks, Nigel. You had the foresight.”

The Englishman remained unconvinced, wagging his head slowly. “The story lacks substance. These zealots may be entertaining, but they have no true credibility with our audience. They're a sideshow. A curiosity. I was hoping we'd eventually find something with a harder edge.”

“Like what?” his associate wondered.

“If only we'd been successful in getting one of the heavyweight religions aboard. A choice, ominous statement from the pope would have been nice. Or perhaps the discovery of some foreboding new Dead Sea Scroll. What our report needs is a jolt of drama. Something to give the evening a little more… impact.”

2

Mount Ramon Observatory, Negev Desert, southern Israel 11:57 P.M., Friday, December 24,1999

At this late hour, four Japanese astronomers were hunched over an assortment of infrared monitors, spectroscopes and optical instruments, gazing skyward from the open deck of Israel's only celestial observatory. Bundled against the cold, the men were special guests of the Israeli Ministry of Science, on leave from Kyoto University, Japan. The latitude and dry atmosphere of the southern Israeli desert was ideal for studying this, the largest meteor phenomenon in two thousand years, as the earth passed tonight through the Geminids asteroid belt. Already the astronomers had recorded hundreds of encounters.

“With all this activity, you would think a few might survive the descent,” one colleague commented in Japanese to no one in particular.

“Yes,” another replied. “It would be exciting to collect a fresh specimen.”

In fact, at the very foot of Mount Ramon lay the scars of several ancient meteorite craters, the only such sites in the Middle East, stretching for miles across the great rift of the Negev Valley. But the scientists were uninterested in things terrestrial. Their eyes were fixed firmly on the heavens.

Quite unexpectedly, the most senior fellow of the group noticed in his instrument one meteor far brighter and larger than typical. Lips trembling, he rose slowly from his chair to confirm the sighting with unaided eyes. Certain of himself now, he blurted out in exhilaration, “Gentlemen, I think we have an impact!”

He and his associates gaped with fascination as the light grew rapidly in size and intensity. It hurtled directly toward them on a flat trajectory, from approximately thirty degrees above the eastern horizon. The younger men remained spellbound only long enough for the danger to register, then abruptly abandoned their posts for the questionable cover of a nearby table. The senior astronomer, however, stood his ground, avidly absorbing every detail as the object passed well overhead.

In its flight across the Negev, the fiery mass illuminated a large swath of craggy mountains and rambling desert valleys. Its brilliant passing scattered the livestock of bewildered nomads, frightened an elderly Bedouin couple traveling in a donkey-driven cart and roused various camps of millenarian pilgrims paused on their way to the Holy City of Jerusalem to celebrate the New Year 2000.

Nor did the meteor elude the detection of Israeli Air Defense. Coincidental with the astronomers’ first sighting, an image was captured on radar at an Israeli military airfield, located near the southern side of the mountain.

“God damn!” a stunned sentry shouted in alarm, jolted out of his complacency by a conspicuous blip emerging on his screen. His fellow sentries were at his side in an instant, squinting closely at the object, each finding it hard to accept that the peaceful state of Jordan was the seeming point of origin.

“Code D, hostile,” a telemetry specialist made the call. But having never seen the likes of this, he couldn't identify it. “Too small for a plane,” he decided, “too fast for a cruise missile, too low to be a Scud.”

The officer of the watch, frantically trying to determine the exact source and direction of the invader, sounded a full-scale alert, scrambling aircraft and enabling batteries of Super-Patriot missiles. But there was no time for an intercept. The object was already across the border and rapidly losing altitude.

3

Negev Research Institute, Negev Desert, southern Israel 11:59 P.M., Friday, December 24,1999

Rising up stark and indifferently out of the weathered rock and red sands of a secluded desert canyon, an imposing glass-and-steel structure lay directly in the path of the meteor. As if to direct the oncoming visitor, there were two wings to the complex that converged in a large V. At their intersection sat a huge geodesic bubble, its one-way bronze glass reflecting multiples of the oncoming fireball.

“Israeli Negev Research Institute,” the installation proclaimed itself in bold Hebrew and English signage. For years, the Israelis had professed this to be a biotechnology laboratory, but the center was known to be affiliated with the Israeli Defense Force and considered by neighboring countries and U.S. intelligence to be a major military research and development facility. Fully fenced and guarded by motor patrols, the institute was aglow with activity.

Inside the dome was a multitiered laboratory of dazzling complexity. The huge infrastructure was composed of seven separate levels, each suspended from a central supporting shaft. Set well back from the dome, each floor afforded an open, cinemascopic view of the night sky.

The institute was staffed by scores of preoccupied technicians tending a vast, layered network of cybersystems. Lengthy arrays of electronics at the top level fed downward into banks of computers on the next, which interacted with lower levels of endless coiled tubing. These, in turn, percolated clear fluids into an ever-descending sub-strata of processors, filters, auxiliary systems and convoluted bionetworks.

Eventually leaching its way to ground level, the refined alchemy met up with the sole recipient of all this mass science: a virtually motionless, naked human figure, submerged in dark amber fluid in a transparent sealed rectangular vessel. The still form lay on its side, doubled up in a fetal position, legs tucked, arms drawn into its chest.

But the figure was much larger than a fetus. The physique was slight, adult and female.

The body floated pale and free in soft spotlights, attended by assorted monitors and scholarly men and women. Its entire head was encased in a helmeted Medusa of electrodes and spiraling wires. These attachments fed into a port in the back of the holding tank and continued upward in spreading branches to unite with the various technologies above. A larger tube, the thickness of a garden hose, meandered its way from the gut of the body, out the top of the vessel to disappear in a tangle of connections overhead.

Beyond the figure, separated and off to one side like a couple of abandoned prototypes, were two identical female forms in similar support vessels. Their heads were also encased in helmets but only partially linked into the labyrinth above. Each, however, bore umbilical hoses which tapped into the grand placental network.

To the other side of the showcased subject, the scientists were focusing their attention on monitors displaying three-dimensional, holographic images of a human brain. Visible within the brain were thirteen distinctly nonorganic devices. Thin square wafers less than a millimeter in size, the objects were distributed deep within the cerebral hemispheres.

Originating from each device were wisps of ultrafine fibers which collected into tiny threads. The threads traveled up through the brain tissue, penetrated the skull, then migrated under the scalp to a central gathering point in a larger wafer attached to the back of the skull. From here, a single, coiled wire emerged from the scalp and through the helmet to join the mechanisms and monitors beyond. Next to the monitors were other displays, including EEG screens, which recorded wildly active readings.

“My God, look at this one!” A gratified administrator summoned his charges, and they converged to marvel at the progress of their work. “This is a historic moment, ladies and gentlemen,” he crowed, taking full advantage of the euphoria to squeeze an attractive female assistant next to him. “We're about to steal a page from the Book of Genesis!”

Inside the central vessel, the slumbering form would twitch occasionally, reminiscent of an infant's startle reflex. Hunched down, observing this closely, was a frail, elderly, white-haired gentleman in lab coat and tie. The vessel's glass reflected his troubled frown. “What have I done!” he reproached himself softly. “God forgive me, what have I done!”

Just before the fireball impacted, there was a synchronized moment when all in attendance sensed the ominous presence, suspended operations, and turned in spellbound unison to fathom the approaching spectacle of their doom.

Steadily disintegrating in its fiery descent, sloughing off hot chunks of itself to the desert floor below, the core mass of the object was still sizable as it plunged into the swollen dome of the complex. Tearing through layers of whirring cybernetics, it penetrated deep into the pulsing tubes and electronic ganglia.

There was a pause as if the entire structure were sucking in its breath, and then the top of the dome erupted in a white napalm concussion. The upper four tiers, and any person stationed there, vaporized instantly. As air defense sirens bellowed belatedly in the distance, a series of smaller explosions in the lower levels began to issue thick black smoke.

Miraculously, the substructure containing the human forms remained, for the moment, intact. The frail white-haired man, struggling desperately in the acrid fumes to free his imprisoned subjects, staggered against a chamber and collapsed.

Abandoned by the other attendants, their support systems disastrously interrupted, all the encased figures were showing escalating movement; particularly the main subject, which was becoming frantic, grappling clumsily with its helmet and kicking against the sides of its vessel. Reacting to a more intense electronic burst from the circuitry above, the figure underwent a grand mal convulsion, arched its back and exploded the sides of its container with a powerful thrust of its legs.

Outside the inferno it was the chaos of the dead and dying. Frustrated security patrols held well back beyond the perimeter fence, unable to do anything but watch as the terrible drama played itself out. Over the mournful tremolos of the sirens, the first interceptor jets could be heard arriving overhead, too late to do anything but make wide, futile circles over the stricken installation.

From within a ruptured wall of the building, a struggling, naked, bleeding female form was thrust out onto the ground. The thin white arms that made the deposit hesitated, then quickly withdrew back inside.

Left sprawled in the dust, the abandoned escapee, driven on by the fumes and heat, desperately began to claw and lurch itself forward. It had scarcely dragged itself out of lethal range when the last of the infrastructure gave way and a final explosion atomized the greater part of the installation, hurling the terrified victim violently across the ground. The battered form recovered quickly and immediately resumed its crazed flight. Without apparent knowledge of its direction, it writhed its way onward, unobserved, through the main gate and out into the night.

4

Ben-Gurion apartment complex, Jerusalem, Israel 1:05 A.M., Saturday, December 25,1999

The phone jangled Jonathan Feldman out of the last truly undisturbed sleep he would ever have.

Groping in the dark for the receiver with one hand, his wire-rimmed glasses with the other, he sent a half-eaten bowl of yesterday's cereal tumbling from cluttered night-stand to floor.

He snapped on the light and squinted nearsightedly down at Cheerios and milk sloshing in his Nikes. Swearing profusely, Feldman cradled the phone between ear and shoulder and wrestled on his glasses.

“What?” he croaked, pouring back cereal from shoes to bowl.

“Jon, get over here. Jordan just hit a military installation in the Negev!”

It was the familiar, if unusually excited, voice of Breck Hunter, a videographer and close friend with whom Feldman worked as a World News Network Middle East TV correspondent.

“What?”

“Just about an hour ago. I can see the glow in the sky from here.”

“Jordanians?”

“That's the buzz over the military radio band,” Hunter explained. “Let's get out there.”

At a relatively young thirty years of age, Feldman's crisp reporting style and disarming on-camera presence had already caught the attention of the World News Network hierarchy. It had helped net him this prestigious assignment, his first outside the U.S. Yawning, Feldman pushed up his spectacles, rubbed unfocused, pale gray eyes, and began gathering his resolve. “Okay. See if you can get us clearance. I'll pick you up in five minutes.”

Checking his clock, he was doubly glad he'd left WNN's dull Christmas Eve office party early. But his hopes for tonight's more promising U.S. embassy function, he realized, might now be jeopardized.

Journalistic instincts began taking over. Why Jordan? he wondered to himself. Why would a poorly armed, moderate Arab state risk war with a military power like Israel? He shoved papers around his desk, searching for his keys. And wouldn't a surprise attack be more effective over Rosh Hashanah? This is a Jewish state, for chris-sakes. Not exactly Washington at Valley Forge.

He pulled on his sneakers, stopping only long enough to swear at the wetness, grabbed his worn leather jacket from a chair and bolted out the door. Once again, he was thankful he'd slept in his clothes.

Although he'd only been on assignment here a few months, the newsman had come to learn his way around Jerusalem quite well. Firing up his rented all-terrain Land Rover, Feldman hustled away from his downtown apartment complex, heading south. The dust in the streets kicked up in turbulent swirls with his passing, the result of a severe drought that had begun long before his arrival.

He found it fascinating the way the night transformed this strange city. The bright gleaming lights misrepresented Jerusalem's antiquity, and obscured its truth. To the passing eye, the artificial illumination cast shadows, disguising the Holy City as a stable, thriving metropolis. But as Feldman knew, sadly, the reality was otherwise. Beneath Jerusalem's veil lay the ancient origins of three very proud religions with a history of violent opposition to one another. Jew, Christian and Muslim lived grudgingly side by side in segregated sections of the city amid continuing tension and distrust. Locked in an eternal struggle that dated back to before the Crusades, they competed in a three-way ideological tug-of-war over control of the city's sacred shrines.

Despite their intense political differences and animosities, the three religions were surprisingly similar. They were, after all, born of the same God, tracing their theological descent back four thousand years to one common source — Abraham, the grand patriarch. To their lasting frustration, the three faiths were inseparably commingled in the dust of Jerusalem's past, each playing an integral part in the Holy City's celebrated, historic encounters with divinity.

As Feldman picked his vehicle's way through the narrow corridors of the downtown district, he had to be careful to avoid yet another kind of religious encounter. With the calendar inching relentlessly toward the year 2000, Jerusalem was inundated with thousands of millenarian visitors. Comprised of hundreds of bizarre cults, the millenarians had burdened the intolerant city with their own peculiar brands of religious fanaticism.

Drawing near Hunter's apartment block on the outskirts of the city, Feldman at last got an unobstructed view of the horizon. Due south he spotted the red shimmer of what he assumed was the Negev disaster. Shrugging off a spell of déjà vu, he rolled up to the courtyard where Hunter awaited him, video camera and travel bag in tow.

Above average in height and powerfully built, Hunter was dressed in fatigues left over from headier days covering Operation Desert Storm. A respected, hard-story video journalist, he looked at the world through alert, squinty blue eyes.

Before the Rover could slow to a halt, Hunter slung his gear into the back, slid in beside his colleague, slapped the dashboard hard twice and they barreled off toward the glowing sky.

“So what did you find out?” Feldman wondered.

“Nothing more than I told you,” the cameraman replied. “It looks like an isolated attack. Nothing else hit so far.”

“Did you confirm it was Jordanian?”

“No. But that's the intelligence read.”

Jonathan Feldman, the wordsmith of the two-man team, was athletically lanky with clean features, a long, straight nose and bright gray eyes that stood out boyishly under unkempt dark hair. Slightly older, Hunter was rugged, outdoorsy, with light hair and blond-tan complexion.

Their relaxed familiarity underscored a strong friendship they'd developed over the past year as members of a WNN field unit crew. They'd worked closely together covering some of the many millennialist movements that had sprung into prominence across the U.S.

As both reporters had soon learned, many of these millenarian sects had been in existence in America and throughout the world for decades, patiently anticipating the new millennium. But most had only come into being within the last few years.

The majority of these millenarian cults had religious orientations, ranging from the uplifting, who saw the twenty-first century as the beginning of a holy reign of Christ, to the doomsdayers, who perpetually envisioned Armageddon. Some groups were secular, others more metaphysical. Still others were merely social or political. And many remained as yet undeclared, but found the millennium an exceptional excuse to drop out and reinvent the “live-for-today” hedonism of the mythical 1960s.

From groups numbering in the thousands to single voices crying in the wilderness, there was a millennial philosophy for every inner calling, with more than 297 separate millennialist organizations currently listed on the Internet.

It had been obvious to Hunter and Feldman early on where most of the important millenarian activity would end up. Requesting to be included in WNN's Israel operation, the two men had maneuvered themselves into the Jerusalem post. It had been a timely move. With each passing day, the numbers of these cults all over the world, like so many colonies of lemmings, would reach critical mass and converge on the Holy Land. And while the greatest concentrations were clustering around Jerusalem, other famous biblical sites, such as Nazareth, Bethlehem, Mount Sinai and Megiddo, also had their advocates.

6

Somewhere south of Jerusalem, Israel 1:42 A.M., Saturday, December 25,1999

In the convoluted topography of southern Israel, there were few direct highways to anywhere. And although the research institute was only about seventy-five kilometers due south of Jerusalem, Hunter and Feldman had to take a roundabout route. The first legs went quickly with Feldman's aggressive driving.

“So, you still thinkin’ of quitting WNN when all this is over?” Hunter rehashed a dead topic.

Feldman smiled, turned and raised an eyebrow at his friend. “Hey, if you'll recall, ‘quitting’ isn't exactly the operative word here. My contract ends when this millennium story's over.”

Hunter shook his head, knowing better. “Hell, Bollinger told me he's asked you to be a part of our East Coast special assignments crew. Party time, man! We'd kick some ass together back in New York!”

‘Tempting,” Feldman said, laughing at his friend's enthusiasm, “but I can't pass up this deal in Washington—a chance to cover a presidential election. An opportunity to do some really serious reporting. WNN's too crazy for me. You know I'm too conservative to make it in show-biz news.”

Hunter shrugged his big shoulders. “I just hate to see us break up a good team. It's been fun.”

Feldman nodded his agreement. “Yeah, it's been great working with you, Breck. I'm going to miss you and all the gang. Hard to believe I'm coming up on my last day.”

As they zigzagged south, the terrain became increasingly rugged, the vegetation sparse. In the crisp, clear night air, the reporters could make out the beginnings of the scabrous Negev Mountains, massive sandstone formations thrust up in ever-higher, primeval slabs. Soon, they had to exit the transit highway at a small desert kibbutz town marked “Dehmoena” on the map, but spelled “Dimona” on the road sign. A common situation in this country, which has no uniform rules of spelling. Hunter and Feldman were used to these inconsistencies, but regardless, the beacon of the glowing fires told them this was the place.

Concealed on three sides by a box canyon and sunken slightly, the remains of the installation were virtually impossible to see from any angle but due east. And at ground level, even that angle was unsatisfying. Particularly since the Israeli military, which was everywhere, was ensuring that bystanders kept their distance. The two journalists were not surprised to see more than a hundred vagabond millenarians drawn to the disaster.

“Shit, we're not going to get anything from way out here,” Hunter fumed, watching the Israelis holding the curious onlookers well away from the front gate area.

“No,” Feldman concurred.

“And the militia will never let media through.” Hunter spoke from experience.

“Especially if this is a covert military facility,” Feldman added. “But we have to try.”

Hunter nodded in agreement. “Why don't you see what you can learn from some of these onlookers while I check out the equipment. Then we'll drive up to the front gate and talk with the field commander.”

One group of about twenty men and women appeared as though they'd been there awhile. Next to their old faded-blue school bus, they had a small camp stove with a blackened pot of coffee perking. Feldman walked up and introduced himself to a scraggy-bearded man in worn blue jeans and sandals, seated on the ground with an old U.S. army blanket around him. Despite his bedraggled appearance, the man had a ready, pleasant smile, and he responded in German-accented but excellent English.

“Fredrich Vilhousen, from Hamburg,” he said.

“Tourist or pilgrim?” Feldman began with his standard millenarian entrée.

“We are Sentries of the Dominion,” Vilhousen explained, “one of the largest new orders in Europe.”

Feldman had never heard of them.

“We've been in Tangiers and are traveling to Jerusalem to meet up with our main group for the Arrival. We are called to make ready His Way, and to His purpose—”

“Sorry, Fredrich”—Feldman had no interest in yet another take on the Second Coming—“right now my only concern is to learn more about the air strike here. Did you see it happen?”

“Air strike?” The German looked puzzled. “No air strike! It was the Hammer of God, the First Sign!”

Feldman started to nod and back away.

“It was no air strike,” the millenarian insisted. “We see it come out of the eastern sky, a bright burning star, and it light up the whole desert. And then it strike this laboratory of evil. Righteous, man!”

A missile, then, Feldman concluded to himself. Probably a cruise missile. So how did the Jordanians get ahold of one of those?

“Okay, thanks. And, uh, good luck with the Arrival and all.” Feldman was not a particularly cynical person, at least not as bad as Hunter. But the past months of evangelical barking had jaded him somewhat. Now that he was on to something far more meaty, he wasn't about to muck up this story by giving it a millenarian spin. He took one last look at the Sentries of the Dominion and turned to go. They were all so alike, these millenarians. Yet each different. At least this group seemed a bit more subdued than most. Of the thirty-some-odd sects he'd reported on, he least liked the hell and damnation crowd. The doomsdayers. Zealots whom Feldman found less man sane and more than scary.

While generally lumped into the millenarian classification, too, these doomsday militants, Feldman realized, weren't certifiable millenarians. To be precise, as Feldman had discovered through thorough research on the subject, true millenarianism included only those who subscribed literally to the New Testament Book of Revelation, chapter twenty. This scripture proclaimed that Christ would return, physically, to subdue Satan and rule on earth in peace, harmony and happiness for a thousand years.

And of these true millenarians, there were further sub-classifications: the postmillennial optimists, who held that Christ would bring peace on earth at the Last Day through His Church. And the premillennial pessimists, who believed peace would come only through a decisive battle between the forces of Christ and the forces of Satan.

While also adhering to the Book of Revelation, the doomsdayers—or “Apocalyptics,” as they were more accurately called—tended to see the millennium not as a beginning but as an end. Their vision was one of earthly annihilation in which all who did not subscribe verbatim to their narrow interpretations of scripture would perish miserably in hellfire. The faithful, on the other hand, would be escorted triumphantly and corporally to heaven by Christ Himself. These were generalizations on all accounts, of course, because there was a broad spectrum of ideologies at work. Feldman had come across many subtle distinctions separating the different eschatologies— those formal branches of theology that dealt with the end of the world and