“No,” I said. Mary looked at me, and suddenly we were both laughing.
“I know I sound crazy, Mike,” she said. “But will you just do one thing for me? Will you trust me? Just keep an open mind and hear what we have to say.”
I looked at Mary, and I couldn’t help smiling. I knew then that if I was going to do anything important in my life, she’d be the one I’d want to share my butterflake roll with too.
“What the hell,” I said. “I’m in. I want to know everything.”
She smiled wide. “Really?”
“Really.” I took her hand. “Here goes nothing!”
And then she kissed me.
We were back at the campfire. I sat on a log, my back to the house, with Mary by my side.
John was sitting on a stump, using a stick to prod at the coals. It was after 10 o’clock now and the sky was a deep midnight blue.
“So, you’re ready to learn about Endgame?” John asked.
“I guess,” I said. “Ready as I’ll ever be.”
John nodded. “Mary has vouched for you. So has Tommy. They’ve only known you for a couple of days, but if they already feel this strongly about you, I trust you too.”
“Yeah,” I said.
Bruce, the big guy with the tattooed arms, spoke up. “How do we know you’re not a narc?”
“I’m not,” I said.
“We’re not doing anything illegal anyway, Bruce,” said Julia pointedly.
“No,” John said. “We’re not.” He was looking at me in a way that made me feel like he was looking directly into my soul. “Where to start?”
“Start with Walter,” Mary said.
“Sounds good,” John said. “Walter?”
Walter leaned forward in his chair, elbows on his knees as he spoke. “I joined the army. I wasn’t drafted, not like John. I wanted to be a Green Beret—the best of the best. When I got to ’Nam I was assigned to an operational detachment that was right up around the demilitarized zone, and we’d work back and forth across the line, trying to disrupt the NVA’s supply runs on the Ho Chi Min Trail. We would go on missions for one or two weeks at a time, living with only what we had in our packs. And we chalked up the kills. We were brutal. We captured one soldier who told us we were known as the ‘ghosts of the jungle.’”
I looked at Mary, who was listening intently to Walter, and wondered what was going on in her head. She had to be thinking of her brother Hod in Vietnam. Back at the bar, she’d said that his letters were spotty. Maybe he was out on secret raids like this.
John spoke. “I was just a drafted grunt, but I applied and made it through Green Beret training. I managed to get promoted to sergeant because everyone else outranking me kept dying. I got assigned to Walter’s unit.”
It was hard to think of John as a soldier, let alone a sergeant. Walter looked the part of a Green Beret vet, but I just couldn’t imagine John. He was too . . . happy? No, that wasn’t it. He just wasn’t worn down like vets usually were.
“There’s no glamorizing war,” Walter said. “This is no John Wayne, World War Two movie war. It’s gruesome. Inhumane. Numbing. You stop seeing people as people. They’re just targets. They’re just obstacles in the road. They’re not even things. They’re nothing. And we killed and killed until we found it funny, until one of our own men accidentally planted a claymore backward and blew himself up and we laughed and laughed because there was no other option. We were past being sad. We just couldn’t feel sad anymore. We couldn’t feel anything anymore. We’d seen so many Charlies blown to pieces, or cut in half by our machine guns, or hit in the head by our sniper rifles, that the only feeling we had anymore was to laugh, like we were shooting ducks at a carnival.
“And then, seven months ago, some son of a bitch at some airfield decided to bomb our position. Not their fault, of course—no one knew where we were. But they wiped us out. The only three left were me, John, and the captain, and the captain had lost both his feet and his right arm. We patched him up as best we could, and then we promised him we’d sit with him until he died. It didn’t take long.”
John spoke. “Walter made an offer to me. He said that if I followed him, obeyed his orders, we could get out of this damned war. You see, he wasn’t just an average, ordinary Green Beret. He’s had special training. He’s Cahokian. It’s his line—an ancient tribe that a huge percent of North America’s population sprang from. Some of the people around this fire are probably Cahokian.”
“It’s hard to tell for sure,” Walter said, “but Cahokians are an ancient people here in America. The Mound Builders. We come from the center of the US, around Missouri.”
John stepped in, barely able to contain his excitement. You could tell this was something he loved talking about. “I want you to imagine all the way back to the beginnings of civilization on Earth. There were these twelve tribes.”
Walter recited the names. “Cahokian, Minoan, Mu, Koori, La Tène, Donghu, Olmec, Shang, Harappan, Sumerian, Nabataean, Aksumite.”
John continued. “It’s the whole world. Cahokians are the ancestors of the Native Americans—Tommy is Hopi, so he’s of Cahokian descent. Harappan are India, central Asia. The Sumerians and Nabataeans are the Middle Easterners: Egyptians, Palestinians, Persians, Arabs—Bakr is Sumerian.”
Bakr—a black-haired man who was whittling with a short, curved blade—nodded his head.
“Minoans are the Greeks, Romans. Anyone with Italian blood probably descends from the Minoan line. Mike Stavros, maybe you? Aksumite is African—Phyllis, Tyson, Jim, and Julia descend from the Aksumites. Donghu is Mongolian. Shang is Chinese—Lee and Lin are both descendants of the Shang line. Mu is Japanese. La Tène accounts for a large part of Europe, Switzerland, France, Spain, Germany, England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales. Mary, Molly, and Bruce are all from the La Tène line. Olmecs are from Central America, the ancestors of the Mayans, the Aztecs. And lastly, Koori are the ancestors of most modern Australians.”
John turned to me. “Mike, does all of this make sense so far?”
What they were saying made sense. But why they cared didn’t. “Sure,” I said. “I didn’t know that this was a genealogy club. But the idea that we all came from twelve groups of common ancestors—I can see that.”
Walter spoke. His voice was hard and curt. “The point is, we all fall somewhere on one of these bloodlines. It isn’t as clean as we just described, but that gives the necessary background. Make no mistake, though: Zero line is not a genealogy club. When Endgame comes, there will be a war between the twelve lines. Whoever wins, wins the right to survive and have their line carry on. Everyone else perishes in the end of the world. All of us here today in the Zero line want to stop Endgame from happening. So we’ve turned our backs on our own lines and formed a new one.
“There is a secret council of the Cahokians that survives. I used to be their trainer, teaching the best and brightest young Cahokians to be Players and win Endgame. I joined the Green Berets with one purpose: to hone my skills in wilderness survival, to be a master of the art.”
“And he’s damn good,” John said. “When we were bombed and our unit was almost wiped out, we were on the North Vietnamese side of the border, with no communications and few provisions. So instead of going south to the American side, we went north to the Chinese side. Walter led me through the wilderness of Vietnam and China. We eventually caught a boat to Hong Kong, and he used his contacts to get us home.
“Mike.” John looked right at me. “Walter was only one of dozens of trainers to the Cahokian Player. He was the master of wilderness survival, but there was someone for hand-to-hand combat, for marksmanship, for knife fighting, for acrobatics, for lock picking, for bomb making—it just goes on and on. This Player is supposed to be the best of the best. The best on earth. One Player from each of the twelve lines is chosen to compete in Endgame.”
I stared back at John, and then at the fire. They were quiet—everyone was.
“But how do they play?” I asked.
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“There are three keys, hidden across the globe. The first Player to obtain all three keys—and be the last Player standing—wins.”
“What do you mean, keys? And who organizes all of this? Who is hiding the keys?” I asked.
“That’s a big question—” John started to say, but was cut off by Walter.
“Aliens. The Sky Gods. The Makers. The Annunaki. They have many names.”
I laughed uncomfortably. Walter couldn’t be serious. This was all a ghost story around the campfire. “Bullshit. This whole story is shit from start to finish. You had me there for a bit. But really, what are we going to do now? Go snipe hunting? Search for Bigfoot?”
But no one else in the circle was laughing. Just me.
“Aliens,” I said. “Come on. That’s insane. How? Why?”
“Their own entertainment,” Walter said. “It started with early man, with the aliens hunting us for sport. When things grew dull, they made us smarter, better competitors. And on and on until here we are. Killing us is their ultimate game. But we still have to try to win.”
I still laughed, but no one else made a sound.
I turned to Mary. “Come on. Tell me. What is this really all about?”
She shook her head and then looked into my eyes. “They’re telling the truth. Remember, Mike—trust me. Listen and keep an open mind.”
“There are three ways this can go,” Walter said. “The first is that we, Zero line, do nothing. The Players aren’t called to Play the game, and we all live out our lives just fine until we die of old age or heart attacks or car accidents.
“The second is that the Calling does happen, and we don’t do anything. One of the Players kills all the others and solves the puzzle, and everyone on Earth—everyone not of their bloodline—dies. I don’t know how it will happen: disease, earthquake, alien invasion. But it will be something big and something bad.
“The third way is the whole reason we’re meeting: If the Players can’t Play, then no one will win Endgame. If no one wins Endgame, there’s no end of the world. So if we can stop the Players from Playing, then the game will end. And we’ll save humanity.”
The group was quiet, watching my face, waiting to see how I would react.
“So do you have . . . um . . . proof?” I asked.
Mary answered. “We have Walter. He knows this inside out.”
“No offense,” I said, looking at Walter. “But what if I don’t believe you?”
“You don’t have to believe me,” Walter said. “I don’t care if you do. I know it’s true. I’ve lived it since I was born, part of my Cahokian line. If you want something tangible, I have ancient texts that I found by tracing leads across the country. They lay out the truths of Endgame.”
“Let me see those.”
“In a moment. First, I will prove to you that I am a Cahokian.”
He unbuttoned his shirt. I glanced at Mary. She nodded at me and smiled reassuringly.
He pulled off his shirt and turned his back to us. There was a tattoo that twisted back and forth on his back until it reached his neck, where a snakelike mouth stretched to swallow a large oval. In that oval there was a large scar—an X.
“It’s the Serpent Mound in Ohio,” he said. “It represents my culture and my line.”
“That’s a cattle brand,” Mary said. “The X.”
“That’s my punishment for questioning Endgame. I returned from the war, searched for the papers, and when I found them and tried to discuss them with the line’s leaders, I was branded a traitor and kicked out. Excommunicated from my family, my line.”
He pulled the shirt back on, only buttoning a few of the buttons before pulling two folded pieces of paper from his pocket. They looked tattered and worn. He read from the first.
This is the lie, the one that has fueled your life and the lives of all who have come [unreadable] before you. I have risked everything to remove the veil of mystery that shrouds the Annunaki, to show [unreadable] It will all be for nothing [unreadable] understand.
The Mu had a choice. You have a choice.
To Play the game is to lose the game; success, survival, freedom can only come . . .
Prove to the Annunaki that you are not mindless animals, that you can think [unreadable] we, all of us, deserve a chance to live.
Choose to question what you have been taught.
Choose to be free, that we might all be free.
Choose not to Play.
Everyone was quiet. Some nodded. Some looked up at the sky. Some turned toward me, as if my reaction was important to them. I just shrugged. Phyllis broke the silence. “I’ve researched the Annunaki. They were the gods in Mesopotamia. Kinda like the Titans in Greek legends—they were there before the gods. They even made the other gods. I found them in the Epic of Gilgamesh. They created something called Esagila—this crazy temple to the protector god. Standard kinds of stuff from old legends. But if we accept that they were the Makers, aliens—not myths, not real gods—then it’s easy to cast them as aliens who helped start the human race.”
I looked at her for a moment and then stared into the depths of the fire, where the coals were glowing white and flaking apart like little bits of paper in the wind. “So is that what you’re saying?” I asked no one in particular. “You’re saying that aliens started the human race?”
“Look,” Mary said, turning to face me. She touched her finger to my chin and made me look back at her. “We’ve all been brought into this. Every one of us has had the same doubts that you do, because—I mean, aliens, right? That’s crazy stuff. But is it really crazy?”
I nodded. “Yes.”
John laughed, but Mary reached out and grabbed my shoulders. “We know the universe is unimaginably huge. Our galaxy has a hundred billion stars. And there are a hundred billion galaxies in the universe. Isn’t it the height of arrogance to say that we’re the only planet with people on it? I don’t care if you’re religious or not. It doesn’t matter. I was raised Catholic and still go to mass every week. But we’re talking about science here, not religion, not myth. I doubted like you. But I find it easier now to say that aliens are out there than to say they’re not. With that many solar systems, there’s got to be something out there—”
I cut her off. “I’m honestly not stumbling over the existence of aliens. Sure. They exist somewhere. That’s logical. What I’m fighting against is the idea that the entirety of human experience is one big game.”
John stood up, looking at me but speaking loud enough for everyone to hear. He grinned. “Would you like to meet someone else caught up in this spider web?”
There was an audible gasp around the campfire. Mary swung around to face him. “Who?” Then she looked at Walter. “Another Cahokian?”
John answered. “Not Cahokian. La Tène. She actually found Walter. Well, they found each other. She doesn’t want to be a part of that world anymore. She was a Player until a couple years ago—” He looked at me. “All players have to be twenty or younger.”
“How did she find you?” Bruce asked, worry on his face.
“That, I don’t know,” John said.
Walter shook his head and looked at Bruce. “You have to understand, these people are experts at everything. I was one of dozens of trainers. The Players are constantly being tutored: practicing martial arts, boxing, swimming, rock climbing. They know how to tail someone—on the street or in a car. They know how to disappear. And they can find anyone. It’s one of the biggest things we stressed during training, because they have to kill all the other Players, and that means they have to hunt them down. Our contact lived that life.”
“So, when do we meet her?” asked Bruce.
John smiled. “What are you doing next weekend?”
CHAPTER FIVE
“This is huge,” I said to Tommy as we made our way through the crowd on Sproul Plaza, back in Berkeley.
He looked back at me with a grin. “You need to come to more protests. This is small, maybe five or six
hundred.”
“Five hundred is small?”
We’d been back from the ranch for five days. It was Thursday, and we knew that we’d be meeting the La Tène Player tomorrow. Zero line was electric—like a kid counting down the days until Christmas morning. But all we could do was wait.
“I finished that book this morning,” I said. “The one by the German guy.”
“That book is something like eight hundred pages,” he said with a laugh.
“I take it to work with me. I figure, if one of the other janitors can spend all day in the stairwell smoking grass, I can sit in a room and read.”
“You’re going to get fired.”
“Come on, it doesn’t take long to mop some floors. Have you read that book, cover to cover?”
“No,” Tommy said, peering over heads, looking for the rest of the group. “I’ve barely cracked the spine.”
“Have you heard of the Piri Reis map?”
“No.”
“Okay, get this. There’s a map that was drawn in, like, 1500 AD. So, not long after Columbus. It shows the Atlantic Ocean, and everything that touches it: Europe, Africa, North America, South America, and, the crazy one, Antarctica. The map makes some mistakes, but it shows the exact coastline of Antarctica. The Air Force was shown the map and they confirmed the accuracy of the map’s representation of the coast.”