Anthony DeCosmo - Schism

"You have no authority to attack us," Malloy shot. "We have chosen to ally with the Witiko. Attacking us would be immoral and wrong."

"You would be nothing more than Ghengis Khan or Hitler," Evan suggested in a tempered tone that came across more a warning than an insult. "You don’t want to invade. You wouldn’t be able to live with yourself."

Trevor finished, "There is nothing more to say. I have communicated with you for nearly a year. My message has not changed. We have arrived at a juncture, Chancellor. There will be no more negotiation. You must decide."

The Chancellor stood. Trevor did the same.

"The Witiko do not take well to threats."

Trevor corrected, "You mean The Cooperative, don’t you?"

D’Trayne’s eyes burnt crimson. The alien leader turned to Evan Godfrey.

"You are a wise man, Senator Godfrey. Perhaps you can still salvage this situation before it deteriorates into war."

Trevor said forcefully, "Time is running out Chancellor. I will give you a few days to consider. Your choice is simple; return to the home world from where you came, or die here, on my world in a fight you could have avoided."

The Chancellor suggested grimly, "Perhaps some things are unavoidable."

Gordon Knox walked the first floor of the mansion, his eyes fixed on a paper. A few couriers and assistants shared that hall, each giving the broad-shouldered man a wide berth, no doubt in some small part due to his more intimidating appearance these days; in an effort to go bald on his own terms, Knox had shaved his head last year.

The Director of Intelligence stopped walking as an interesting piece of data grabbed his interest. He traced a line on the sheet with a finger and leaned against an open doorway. A flash in the corner of his eye-movement-diverted his attention.

He stood at the entrance to the "den", a chamber that served as a library, a playroom, and sometimes a classroom. The movement that caught his attention came from the side yard as visible through the den's casement windows.

Gordon crossed the room slow, almost trance-like, and came to the window.

Ashley and her son, Jorge, played in the yard. The sun had baked the muddy lawn hard and a slight hint of green infiltrated the otherwise brown grass. The mother and son kicked a soccer ball between them.

JB-still two months from his eighth birthday-giggled incessantly as his mother tried to steal the white and black ball from between the blond haired boy’s legs. The sound of his playful laughter managed to squeak through the window pane, albeit muffled and dulled.

Gordon watched.

Ashley smiled as she lunged one foot then another at the ball, as if actually trying to steal it away. Gordon knew it a mother's ruse.

Knox grew transfixed by that smile, by those giggles, by Ashley’s lunging at the ball, at JB’s clumsy but successful dodges. He pressed a finger against the glass, as if maybe he could touch the giggles, the fun, and the mother’s love through the window. But he felt only a cold barrier.

He did not dream of winning Ashley’s love. He lacked these designs not merely because of the twelve years separating their ages or his unflinching loyalty to Trevor Stone. No, Ashley lived on another plane. He watched her with the same sense of awe that a young art student might feel strolling The Louvre; studying and watching but knowing his hands could never grasp such splendor.

Ashley showed The Empire her smile when they needed to see the warmth of the mother of the post-Armageddon world. She gracefully walked at Trevor’s side as per the script drawn for her character to play on the public stage. She lent her name and her words to the fight against infant mortality, to gather volunteer work parties to build new schools, to conservation initiatives during times of rationing.

He pulled his finger from the glass. At that moment the ball careened toward the house and smacked into the side of the mansion below the window, drawing both sets of playing eyes to the man watching them. JB waved enthusiastically. Ashley flashed an unsure smile. Gordon walked away. — Trevor Stone sat at the head of a long table in the mansion's basement. A collection of televisions, audio equipment, and computers surrounded the room in cabinets and on counters.

Two doors led away as did a set of stairs. One of those doors opened to the armory. The second to a small utility room.

Unbeknownst to the council members gathered at the table, that second door led to more than a hot water heater. Trevor’s portal to the strange device that provided him with access to mankind’s genetic memories lay hidden in there while the key that unlocked that door-a key visible only to his eyes-hung on his neck.

Trevor glanced around the table at the assembling military council. They had met on numerous occasions in the three years since Trevor returned from his cross-dimensional excursion yet he still missed Reverend Johnny’s booming voice.

However, Jon Brewer attracted Trevor's full attention as he began the meeting with a disturbing report.

"We found the same thing in Seattle that we found in Grand Forks, Oklahoma City, Dallas, and Cincinnati," Jon licked his lips and fidgeted in his seat. "We found nothing."

"Nothing?" Dante Jones, Director of Internal Security, repeated with a question mark.

Brett Stanton scratched one of the scars on his thin, pot-marked face and asked, "There were supposed to be bad things there. Now wait, this wasn’t a reconnaissance goof, was it?"

Gordon Knox answered definitively, "I had people in there a month before the troops. Seattle was crawling with Deadheads, Mutants, and we even had reports of Wraiths." Brewer responded, "Well they were gone when we got there. Not a trace. Well, I mean, lots of bodies of people." "Wait a second," Dante asked. "You found bodies? Human bodies?" When Jon nodded Dante concluded, "So they were there not long before you guys marched in. They just vanished."

Trevor noticed Anita Nehru sitting at the far end of the table with her head cradled in one hand while vacantly swirling a twizzle stick in a cup of coffee with the other. Her husband, Omar, sat across the table trying to get her attention but failing.

"Trevor?"

"Huh?

Gordon repeated what Trevor missed, "I said, the way the hostiles are disappearing reminds me of how people were disappearing before all this."

Dante agreed, "Yeah, this looks kind of familiar."

"Alllrriiigghtty then, does that mean they're all going to come back, too?" Lori Brewer’s flippant remark raised a scary question.

Brett Stanton leaned forward and scratched his noggin as he laid it out, "Okay, now, well, if we were to go thinking back to all that, when was the last time we know for sure a bunch of people went missing?"

Trevor closed his eyes and revisited those chaotic days some ten years prior. The first signs of impeding Armageddon came in the form of mass disappearances. Those disappearances included Ashley.

Her group had been the first recovered, but not the last. For more than four years the expanding armies of the human Empire happened upon caches of ‘ark riders’, pulling them from gooey green sarcophagi with no recollection of their ordeal. However, no such riders had been found in the three years since ten thousand baseball fans showed up at Wrigley field. That group had disappeared the day before the invasion began in earnest; an invasion triggered by the conception of Trevor's son.

Unfortunately, the baseball fans at Wrigley field completed their journey through time before Trevor’s armies marched into Chicago. Instead of finding people waiting to be liberated from green globs, they found torn and shattered corpses. The ark riders, in that case, had completed their time travel too soon, arriving in the midst of a hostile city where they ended up a food source for a variety of nasty predators.