Chapter 10: The Black Temple
The following morning, Ben, Fiela, and Sam had mounted horses and traveled with the expedition to Cash, promising Eliza and Celeste they would return before nightfall.
The town was twenty miles southeast of Denver. It was large enough to merit a gas station and small grocery store but reaching it from the Interstate required navigating a maze of rural roads that had a lot of not-much on either side of them. It was one of those towns that defied logic. There were no rivers in the area or mineral deposits or oil fields. The town did not lie at a crossroads. There was no geographic or commercial basis for such a town, and yet there it was, stuck in middle of nowhere, like a meteorite flung haphazardly to the earth from the darkness of space.
Similar to other small town in the plains, Cash was, even prior to the collapse, on its deathbed. Its children had been moving away to larger, more sophisticated cities, and its retail stores had been unable to compete with the giant box stores in Denver and the online retailers that delivered products for a fraction of the price to its dwindling population. Many of the old two story brick buildings that abutted one another on Main Street were boarded shut. Signs in the windows announced that the buildings were for sale or rent. Ben imagined they’d collapse and become the sites of archaeological digs in a few centuries, assuming humanity lasted that long.
As the expedition wandered the broad street on their horses, Ben became melancholic. He’d been through many such towns before the collapse and even now felt that they had been done an injustice by modernization. The collapse had just forced history’s hand. It had killed what was already on life support.
Something on the far end of town piqued his interest. Raising his binoculars, he said to those on either side of him, “I can see a van. Looks like a news van. It’s got an antenna mast hoisted into the air.”
Sam looked without the aid of binoculars. “Yeah. That’s what it is.”
“Let’s check it out.”
Disparthian made a hand gesture and a troop of Peth-Allati shot forward on their horses toward the distant vehicle as the rest of the visitors advanced at a more cautious pace. The Peth on either side of the column scanned the windows of every building looking for signs of life. There wasn’t any. A few of the soldiers dismounted to begin a building-to-building search.
A perimeter was in place by the time the main body of the squadron reached the news van. One of the scouts rode up to Ben and Disparthian and said, “The vehicle has been shot many times by small-caliber weapons. There are more than a hundred bullet holes. The windshield and windows are shattered and snow has filled the inner compartments. There are bodies inside. One is in the driver’s seat and two are in the back of the vehicle. There is also the body of a woman in the snow perhaps twenty feet from the passenger side. She was wearing a cap with a logo identical to the one on the side of the van.”
“Is it safe for the king?” asked the lord.
The scout nodded. “What was done was done long ago, sir. It was an ambush. The snow is undisturbed.”
Disparthian dismissed the man and rode forward. Sam moved up beside Ben and said, “The murder of a news crew would have been national headlines before things went to shit, but I never heard a peep about it. Did you?”
“No,” said Ben. “I was at Steepleguard - at a hotel - the week before the end came, but I was checking the news regularly. There were no stories about this. It must have happened on the last day, or close to it, at which point there were even more pressings news events, like nuclear missile launches. The murders couldn’t have happened afterwards. The EMPs took out all the vehicles and electronics.”
“Local militias are my bet,” said Sam. “They were running rampant during the final days.”
Ben thought this doubtful. “Did you actually see any?”
“No, but they were in the news. Most of the Midwest and southern states had to deal with them. Them and the anarchists.”
Ben blew out a breath. He knew that the reports of crazed militias were fabrications of the Nisirtu. The man ahead of him, Disparthian, had been responsible for most of the misinformation. It was unsettling to see the effect the Nisirtu misinformation campaign had on Sam, who, like most others, believed what he was told by the media as long as it fit into his own worldview. Sam was a survivalist who had spent much of his life preparing for the end of the world. He had decided that roaming hordes would be his number one enemy when that happened. Though the man probably challenged much of what he read on the internet or heard on the news, just like everyone else, he only challenged what didn’t fit into his own personal view of the world. The rest he accepted as gospel.
Murderous militias fit very nicely.
Fiela dismounted and drew her Glock. When she reached the van she peered inside through the busted windshield and raised her tinted goggles. She saw the corpses the scout had alluded to, racks of shattered communications equipment, and daylight shining through the bullet holes. She wandered to the corpse lying in the snow and ruffled through the dead woman’s pockets. When she found nothing, she walked back to the van and began sifting through the snow that had accumulated on the floorboard in front of the passenger’s seat. It took her only a second to find what she was hunting. A purse.
Withdrawing and opening a rectangular wallet with designer markings, she said, “Cynthia Luciz, from Aurora. Thirty-nine years old.” She made a weird face. “Huh!”
“What?” asked Ben.
“She has a customer loyalty card for a place called ‘Candle Bright Universe.’”
“So?”
Fiela laughed. “How many candles does a person need?” She smirked, “A loyalty card?”
“Fiela, show a little respect. She’s dead.”
“Sorry, Mutu,” the girl said, the smirk vanishing instantly. She closed the wallet reverentially and looked at him for guidance on what to do with it.
“Ditch it,” he said, and the girl threw the wallet into the snow.
He turned to Disparthian. “There’s a large building on the south side of town. I saw it through an alley as we passed down Main Street. It looks new and…weird.”
“New?” asked Sam, pulling a pack of cigarettes from his shirt pocket. “That doesn’t make much sense. The town was dying.”
“Exactly,” said Ben.
The mysterious structure was far larger than Ben had imagined from his brief glimpse of it earlier. Bigger, more imposing, and very, very wrong. Its square footprint measured twenty yards to a side, except for a protruding antechamber guarded by two large metal doors. Ten yards above their foundations the square walls stopped and a round wall with a smaller diameter began. Ten yards above the round walls a roof in the shape of a cone began. The building was shaped like a cone on top of a cylinder on top of a cube.
The bottom was made of massive stones that were as wide and tall as a compact car. The cone was formed from metal. The building had no windows, and everything, from the walls to the conical roof, had been painted flat black. The paint was pristine and the ground around the building was littered with tools, bags of mortar and cement mix, hundreds of empty paint cans, ladders, and other construction materials and tools.
“What is this place?” asked Fiela, looking up at the towering cone that pierced the gray sky.
“What interests me more is ‘how did it get here?’” replied Ben. “To build a structure like this quickly you’d need cranes, dozers, excavators, and a huge crew, not to mention drawings, surveying equipment, and other materials. But vehicles and heavy machinery were disabled from the EMP blasts, the roads are blocked with stalled vehicles and snow, and the survivors of the collapse are, by and large, weak and near death. They certainly wouldn’t spend what little energy they had left erecting something like this.”
“What people?” asked Fiela, making a show of looking about the site.
It was a good question. The entourage had not crossed paths with a single individual on its way into the small town. Nor were ther
e footsteps in the snow or smoke from a campfire or chimney. The area was deathly still and ominously quiet except for the howling of the winter wind.
“Dead, I’d imagine,” said Ben.
“Yeah, but where?” asked Sam. “Most of the houses have cars or trucks parked in front of them. But your guys who reconnoitered them didn’t mention corpses.”
Ben looked at Disparthian, who said, “He’s right. The homes were empty, as were the few business establishments. No bodies were found.”
“Okay, that’s weird,” agreed Ben.
“Maybe they’re under the snow,” suggested Fiela.
Sam shrugged. “I guess a few of the townsfolk might have wallowed around and died on the ground, but all of them? There are no animal tracks. No signs of scavengers. That seems a bit odd, doesn’t it?”
Ben said, “Maybe the area is contaminated. Maybe there was a fuel or chemical spill during the collapse and the town was evacuated. Maybe the scent of the spill is deterring animals from coming here.”
Sam said, “Lot of 'maybes.' What do you want to do?”
The king shrugged. “The only thing left to do is go inside this monstrosity.” He nodded toward Disparthian, who issued an order to the lieutenant on the horse behind him.
Within minutes a squad of Peth had assembled at the doors. There was a flurry of activity as the doors were pulled open, flash-bangs were popped inside, and the squad made a rapid entry with their carbines raised. All that could be seen from the outside was a dark cavity and a thin stream of gray smoke. The residual smell of the chemicals from the flash-bangs permeated the cold air.
Minutes later, the squad leader trotted from the door to the team waiting outside. Taking off his goggles and his face mask, he said grimly, “Corpses, Lord. Hundreds of them.”
Ben retrieved a flashlight from his saddlebag before heading inside, Fiela two steps ahead of him, Sam and Disparthian on either side.
Three hundred or more corpses lay on the floor on their backs, gazing up at the inner tip of the conical dome. The state of decay was advanced. They were skeletons with a layer of beef-jerky like skin stretched taught over them. There were males and females, adults and children. Some wore work clothes suitable for construction, but others wore casual clothing, even dresses. Others wore no shoes. All of them were splattered with black paint.
The building was an open book on the inside. There was only a single room, which was the room they were in, painted entirely in black. The walls sucked the life out of the daylight that crawled inside the building through the exterior doors. There was no furniture. Ben looked up at the distant tip of the cone that was the building’s apex.
“Is it my imagination, or are all these corpses fixated on the roof?”
“Hard to say,” mumbled Sam. “They ain’t got eyes.”
“True. But they’re mostly on their backs with their feet pointing toward the center of the room. The placement of the bodies isn’t random.” He cast his flashlight back and forth over the corpses for a few minutes before saying, “Have the bodies searched, Diz. Get me a count of the number of adults, children, genders, that sort of thing. See if there’s anything beneath the bodies.”
“As you say, Anax.”
Ben shook his head and moved toward the doors. “I need to think on this.”
Ben sat in a recovered lawn chair and stared into the distance at nothing in particular, taking the occasional draw on a cigar.
Eventually, he said, “Diz, where is the nearest set of railroad tracks?”
“According to our maps, only a quarter mile from here. On the opposite side of that building.” He nodded toward a large warehouse a block away.
“The state of decay on the bodies suggests they’ve been dead for a long time,” the king noted.
“Months,” said Sam. “I’ve seen a lot of corpses since the world went to hell, and those definitely are not fresh.”
“Uh-huh. But it’s been at or below freezing for months. That would normally preserve the bodies.”
“Yeah, to a point,” agreed Sam, looking at Disparthian.
“That shot-up news van we found on the outskirts of town is odd, too.”
Fiela shrugged. “News vans were everywhere during the collapse – and lots of things got shot up.”
Ben nodded. “Yeah, but according to the sign we passed coming into town, the population here is four hundred. It’s miles from Denver. Why come here, of all places, when the world is going to hell?”
Disparthian spun slowly about, surveying the skyline. “A valid question. It is remote.”
“Right,” said Ben. “It’s curious, isn’t it, that the bodies in the van look a lot like the bodies in this building? The same state of decay, I mean.”
“Does that mean anything?” asked Fiela.
“Yeah, I think so.”
Sam crossed his arms, cradling his rifle, and said, “Alright, I give up, boss. Why? What are you thinking?”
The king said, “I’m thinking we need to go to that warehouse next to the railroad.”