Iglesia ………………………………………Episode16

(Iglesia is a serialized novel, published on Tuesdays and Saturdays at midnight ET, you can read all the previous episodes by clicking on the tab.)

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Yes, rest would be VERY good….and with that thought expressed, he realized he was indeed resting right now. In a place outside of time and space, he was getting the first real rest he could ever remember. The detachment from the events in the physical world granting him some odd sort of ‘time out.’ He floated and reflected, most decidedly not in any hurry at all. He seemed to have gained some bare measure of control over this process he was undergoing, whatever it was. Some control over his attention it seemed like to him.  In this disembodied state…where whenever or when wherever he thought of in the sequences of his life…he seemed to go. And he was using the minuscule modicum of control he had gained over it to furiously avoid….something. Something he dare not even think about avoiding, lest he lose the power to avoid it.

Suddenly, he wondered if he were dead! But…….by focusing his attention, he could access the self of his that was on the train. And now being acclimated a bit to being outside his body…outside his life,  his observer self did not flinch away from this scene. He took in the scene with a little more detachment after having experienced his birth and the resulting trauma, and after having seen the rest of the film of his life in ultra fast motion in glimpses of the highlights. So now he looked at the speeding train car with the hole he had blown in the roof, he looked at his partner’s body in its pool of still warm blood,  he looked at the four operatives from The Center in their camo and the visors that hid their faces, and he looked at Ralph sitting very relaxed on his crate.

And he looked at Smith, the tall black figure standing above him and looming over him like a shadow …like the shadow, holding the gun with his finger already pulled all the way back on the trigger, his knuckles white, his wrist cocked already anticipating absorbing  the kick of the powerful fire arm, and he looked at the hammer and firing pin…moving as slowly as anything can move and still be called moving. No he wasn’t dead …yet.

And that wasn’t even the place in his life he was afraid to look.

.That place contained a horror of pain that seemed to weigh more on him than his own death. It was a pain he had never fully looked at, and had certainly never faced. If there was one blessing that had come out of being forced into The Center, it had to be the excuse it had given him to never deal with the other events of that day …Oh shit… he had thought about it too hard and he could feel himself being sucked into the vortex of yet another episode of his life…

…..and he felt the choppers as they swept over the jungle canopy like a giant sword, nearly silent…but incredibly powerful, their downdraft sliced through the trees and beat down on him. The low, intense humming whine of the silenced motors thrumming in time with the rotors in a carefully designed oppressive sonic pattern that seemed to expand the growing fear in his chest with each thrum. It spurred his panic and made him run even faster through the jungle towards the small clearing that contained his village.

The helicopters were, of course, black.