The Screaming Season

By Joseph Armstead

To everything there is a season... even Death. An experiment gone horribly wrong nearly destroys an American city, unleashing a Hell on Earth. A terrifying message from within the disaster zone tells a story of chase and pursuit across a nightmarish landscape. More, it warns of the approach of an enraged celestial being, a godlike conqueror, marching his Army of Abominations ever closer to Earth. The secret to survival lies within the quarantine zone, where monsters dwell. To everything, a season… Some seasons are for screaming.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wings ePress, Inc.
• Release date: Sep 1, 2003
• ISBN: 9781590882139

Book preview

Prologue

The Ways of the Worlds

And the earth was formless and void and darkness was on the face of the deep. Genesis 1:2

When the universe was still young, a magnificent unimaginably vast infant of burning suns and raging storms, its darkness hid a mystery to exceed any secret it would ever develop, a mystery kept even from itself.

It, the universe itself, was not alone.

Incredibly, there were other universes. Not just one cosmos, one universe, but instead a Multiverse. Many universes existed side-by-side, out-of-sync with one another. Some were reflections of the embryonic, fathomless colossus we are still only beginning to explore.

Others were older and darker places full of savagery and dangerous wisdom.

Each universe was its own separate Reality, segregated from its cosmic brethren by a chronal-space Veil, a time-space membrane, which cloaked each Reality’s existence from the other.

One origin, but many places, many faces, many spaces and a rushing flood of differing time frames, filling an incalculable nothingness that still vibrated from birthing its thousand thousand star-filled children.

And each universe had its Keepers, beings evolved from the cores of the stars. Immortal and incredibly powerful, these Keepers were not quite sentient or humanoid. Yet they were independent in thought and personality, standing outside the flow of biological evolution. They were called The Zuraphym.

There were three, forming a unit called a Host to each universe.

One Zuraphym represented Order, cold and precise, controlling all that has structure, form and logic, creating harmony, yet rigid, stifling evolution.

One Zuraphym represented Chaos, that which, by nature of its violence and turbulent formlessness, creates change, mutating the Order, evolving the universe from Then to Now to Next.

The last Zuraphym represented Balance, demanding that all things, both Order and Chaos, reach an equitable agreement that nurtures the existence of each Reality.

The Zuraphym were aware of one another, and knew that there were many different worlds.

They worked diligently, a single cosmic family to keep all Existence in a harmonious state.

So it went unchanged for millennia until one day, one Zuraphym, a Keeper of the Balance, went mad and demanded that all things change, that Chaos and Order were irrelevant to the existence of all the worlds. This solitary Keeper decided that the Zuraphym were meant to be the ruling masters in each of the many universes.

This Keeper wanted massive and sweeping change regardless of the consequences.

Like most families, there were those who loved and trusted this Keeper of the Balance who, until his madness manifested, was the most trusted and most courageous of them all. And so they sided with him against those who disagreed that the Order and Chaos were invalid, inefficient and inadequate concepts.

So the mighty Zuraphym went to war.

Reality tilted out of control, the time-stream fractured into many tinier divergent streams. Suns died, galaxies ruptured, worlds wound down like old clocks.

Others froze like glacial ice and the time-space veil ripped like a sail caught in a hailstorm.

Eventually, the Keepers of Order defeated the Keepers of Chaos and the Balance was restored, but not before the one Zuraphym who started the massive conflict that threatened all creation was rousted and cast out; doomed to exist outside the time-stream, doomed to have no home in any one Reality.

He was named Achrion. They called him the Chaos-bringer and his punishment, his banishment, drove him even more insane.

So it was that of all the Zuraphym, it was Achrion who became the most... human.

Part One

Gathering the Damned

One

This was not how he’d wanted to start his day.

Oh man, this just can’t be true, he said aloud, though he was alone in his office, this can’t be real.

The sky outside his ninth floor office window was streaked with reddish-orange as Trey Williamson sat back in his chair and rubbed his aching eyes. Sunset was fast approaching.

After eleven consecutive hours sitting in front of the flickering light from his computer screen, he was close to eyestrain as he continued with his work, but he felt compelled to press on.

He wanted to get most of the work done before his partner Dr. Annette Doran and his boss Robert MacCauley III arrived in response to his urgent phone call of an hour ago.

They were not going to be happy with the news he was about to give them.

Trey worked in the Document Investigation & Verification department of the Field Retrievals division of Broddicker Technologies International. He was the Lead Archival Investigator under Bob MacCauley.

Broddicker Technologies, a company bubbling just under the Fortune 500, according to Forbes magazine, was generally referred to in the press releases as an alternative resources technologies think tank.

BTI specialized in the business of developing odd scientific ideas involving energy and power resources outside the norm of electrical, oil, solar, and nuclear fuels. Often what they researched ran contrary to current technological trends.

They were funded by private enterprise and the U. S. Government Department of Energy and Interior.

BTI was a haven for engineers, both mechanical and electrical, renegade astro-physicists, chemists who verged on being called alchemists, geophysicists who were nearly mystics, and inventors who trod the very thin line between being certifiable crackpots and revolutionary geniuses.

They investigated practical applications of alternative power resources still in their infancy like magnetic, gravitational and photonic energy, even bioelectric energy.

Trey found BTI an interesting place to work—full of fascinating ideas.

No idea ever entertained had been quite as radical as those associated with the contents of the Kent Journals.

The Kent Journals were Trey Williamson’s project.

This is just plain impossible, Trey whispered to himself as he looked at his computer’s monitor for the hundredth time.

It has to be impossible.

He needed it to be impossible. If what the screen revealed was actually possible then the universe was teetering on the threshold of madness.

Nine weeks ago, the President of the United States had declared the Kohler Pass Region in northern Ventresca County a disaster area. He’d had the thirty square mile area quarantined as a biohazard, ringing it with armed National Guard troops. A no-flight zone was established over Kohler Pass’ borders, called an aerial DMZ by the press.

The area was then patrolled around the clock by Air Force warplanes.

Something terrible had happened in Ventresca County. Something, as far as he knew, completely unlike anything that had ever happened on Earth.

Some thought it was the result of eco-terrorism.

Some thought it was a medical epidemic of some heretofore-unidentified disease run amok.

Still others thought it had something to do with UFO technology run awry at Lockland Air Force Base, popularly known as Looking Glass or Alice One, as in Alice Through the Looking Glass because of rumors that alien off-world technology from Area 51 at Groom Lake had been relocated there.

No one knew for sure.

A special Marines Urban Hazards Crisis Recon Unit called a Hacker Unit had been sent in just after the borders to Kohler Pass were secured. No one had heard from the fifteen-man force since the tenth hour of the mission-incursion.

The decision to cordon-off Kohler Pass Region had resulted in extremely negative press for the President’s administration. Six townships contained a total of twenty-three thousand people in those thirty square miles of densely wooded territory. This did not include the four thousand soldiers and their families at Lockland Air Base, which was within the quarantine zone. The President, the military, the FBI, the Department of the Interior and even the World Health Organization stressed the absolute necessity of keeping whatever had happened in Kohler Pass from spreading.

They urged the population of the rest of the state and the rest of the country to remain calm and to be patient. They would soon find out what was going on in the area now called Limbo.

Nine weeks.

In media terms, considering how electronic journalism had become an industry of splashy transient events and personalities, nine weeks was a small eternity. For the people of northern California and for the President it seemed a nightmare without end.

There’d been static across all bands of commercial radio for nine weeks. Ham radio couldn’t get through. No telephone communications could get through.

Pacific Telephone and Wireless had lost all connection with cable trunks and wireless antennae in the area.

Infrared and spectrothermic readings from aerial flybys the first couple weeks produced nothing but featureless, blank pictures.

The place was there, and then again, it wasn’t there.

Apparently nothing human and capable of communicating with the outside world remained alive in Limbo.

Yet the Ventresca County Municipal Water District said there was still public and home water usage going on.

The Pacific Utilities Electric Company said that power was still being drawn by homes there.

Several Internet service providers said subscriber usage in that area was way down, as befitting the situation in a disaster area, but it was not non-existent. A fair-sized group of someones still used computer access to the Internet.

The inscrutability made a lot of powerful people very nervous.

Then, four days ago, the Kent Journals mysteriously appeared.

A National Guardsman outside Limbo woke to find a computer disk stuffed into the folds of his knapsack.

His tent was billeted in the middle of an encampment of over two hundred soldiers, with at least forty of them on active guard duty, around and within the camp’s perimeter, at any time.

They had seen no one enter the area.

Motion sensors around the camp had detected no one breaching the perimeter.

Eighteen television cameras on 270-degree scanning mounts, fitted with night-vision starlight lenses, scanned the camp’s grounds continuously and did not show anyone irregular approach or leave.

But there were footprints leading away from the soldier’s tent... moderately small human footprints. The Army contingent’s Forensic Scientist believed those footprints belonged to a woman.

At the edge of the encampment, the tracks had simply ended, as if the being who’d left them had vanished, flown or matter-transported themselves away from the area.

Why that guardsman out of the thousand or more soldiers stationed outside the Limbo zone? Why that encampment out of the twenty encampments set up around the circumference of the area? It left the Guard feeling impotent and vulnerable.

Military minds did not like mysteries.

The mystery deepened when the contents of the disk were examined.

After extensive virus-scanning, it was found that there were only two files on the disk.

One file’s properties showed it to be a compressed file, actually larger than it first appeared.

The other one was a decryption file, apparently an executable key to be used on the larger file.

The software attributes and statistics imbedded in the files showed standard mass-market computer software had been used.

However, when the larger file was decompressed and, at the time, thought to be decrypted, the resulting file displayed was a mess of randomly arranged assembly language characters, addition signs and asterisks.

It followed no pattern cryptographers could decipher.

The disk was couriered to Military Intelligence in Washington, D. C. with no luck in deciphering it there. The military reluctantly sent the data to the Justice Department.

Again, no headway in untangling the mess of symbols.

Then it went to the advanced cryptography specialists in the super-secret National Security Agency which discovered the symbols were themselves only a frame, a secondary layer of encryption, surrounding the actual file’s contents.

But, again, even though the frame’s code was broken, the internal data was still inaccessible.

About that time, one of the lead cryptographers at the spy agency remembered seeing a news article in a computer magazine about experimental software used by an exploration team in Northern Scotland to decipher pre-Druidic culture rune-symbols and translate them into reasonably modern text.

That experimental software was being developed and tested by an alternative technologies think-tank.

That was when the NSA decided to contact the Document Investigation & Verification department of the Field Retrievals division of Broddicker Technologies International.

The contents of the disk were transferred onto a mini-CD, while the disk had been subjected to various forensic tests.

Since it had apparently come from the Limbo Zone, everyone needed to know whether or not there were any weird matter-altering effects contained in the physical construction of the disk.

People in high places needed to be reassured. No one knew exactly what it was that cut off that area of California from the rest of the world.

They had to be sure there was no risk that whatever the contagion, if a contagion it really was, or contaminant could be spread through this single physical source.

The tests came back negative.

The disk was not infected, nor did it seem to be any sort of a timed molecular trigger.

That left investigators and scientists only its contents to consider. So the BTI team deciphered the contents. And that was how Trey Williamson wound up with the Kent Journals. As near as he could tell, it had been kept almost daily for something like a month to six weeks.

It had been written by a seventeen-year-old girl.

What Trey read in that journal had frightened him.

Terribly.

This can’t be real, he muttered.

While he waited for Dr. Annette Doran and Bob MacCauley, he tried to stifle the emotional background static that ran through his overworked mind.

The week had been a long and lousy one, the type that seemed to stretch on agonizingly.

Trey, a trim athletic black man still retaining the look of the former collegiate football star he once was had moved out of the apartment of his girlfriend of twenty-two months.

A knock resounded on the door, and he rose from behind his desk to answer.

A slim, severe-looking red-haired woman and a thickset, bearded gray-haired man quickly entered. Dr.Annette Doran, a bio-physicist and statistician, and Bob MacCauley, a former Air Force Colonel and Pentagon crytographer, entered the room looking harried and gravely concerned.

Dr. Doran was a reserved, quiet woman who chose her words carefully, while MacCauley was a boisterous hard-charger who shot from the hip.

Neither of them had wanted BTI to take on the investigation and translation of the Kent Journals.

The first thing MacCauley said when he came in, moving swiftly past Trey to the console, was, Look, I know you’re our best man for the job so don’t take this the wrong way when I ask it, but are you absolutely sure you translated this gibberish correctly?

Yes. Without a doubt, Trey responded, hiding a sudden flash of irritation.

You realize that this just cannot be true. This is total insanity, MacCauley continued.

Again, without a doubt, Trey answered as he shrugged.

Then someone, or some group of someones is playing a very elaborate, very unfunny joke on us, MacCauley concluded.

Trey made a non-committal gesture with his hands and cocked his head.

Before we go drawing conclusions and start searching for people to blame, let’s examine what we have, okay? Annette Doran offered as she drew up a padded chair to Trey’s workstation.

"Your decryption provides a few details of some kind of disaster that occurred within the quarantined area called Limbo. Let’s look at this logically, just the facts. The journal is a series of personal entries made by a non-technical, non-professional observer.

This observer is recording her impressions of physical phenomena and events that have affected her and a group of friends who have survived a calamity that may have a technological origin.

"She refers to the deaths of members of her group and alludes that these deaths may be the result of an unnamed event that may have occurred at a nearby government facility.

"We at BTI, so far, can find no record that this facility ever existed.

The phenomena this observer describes is beyond anything we have ever encountered or even heard of this side of Hollywood. Everyone with me so far?

Trey nodded.

Bob MacCauley looked like his impatience was causing him physical pain.

Annette Doran continued.The phenomena described are patently impossible. No logical progression exists in this narrative. We are expected to make the leap to accepting that these things may have happened. How? No technology we know of could have caused this.

That’s pretty much it so far, Trey allowed.

Odd, isn’t it, that this may involve the same NSA who wanted us to unravel the contents of that disk? MacCauley asked.

This is complicated enough without us making that connection, Dr. Doran said waving her hand.

Monsters. The young woman who supposedly wrote that is talking about monsters, MacCauley growled.

We can’t go back to the NSA or anyone else except maybe The National Enquirer with that kind of lunatic tabloid crap!

No argument there, Annette Doran said evenly, the sequence of events this young woman, who may or may not actually exist, describes has simply got to be a work of total fiction.

Really? Does it? Trey asked calmly.

Inwardly, he suppressed a tremor of rising panic.

He knew the crucial evidence he was about to offer them was open to refute, borderline paranoid, and quite possibly true.

He had to sell them rock-solid on it if they were going to do anything about what was happening within Ventresca County, California.

Trey Williamson had already made up his mind that what he had read had the undeniable ring of truth.

Both Doran and MacCauley gave him very unfriendly stares.

After deciphering the key to the secondary encryption on the Limbo Zone file, I naturally began reading the contents of the journal. Right away, I came to the same conclusions both of you did. This is crap, this is crazy, this is a fraud. But something near the beginning of the journal triggered a recollection about a top-secret project I once heard about. What’s worse, it was research that I think may be uncomfortably familiar to us all.

What are you saying? MacCauley asked.

About a year ago, there was some talk, at an international Physics Symposium in Vienna, about something called sidereal transynchronous exposure, also called the plate stacking theory.

Dr. Doran picked up on Trey’s reference.

I kind of recall that. Something about multiple planes of temporal and physical life co-existing in overlapping layers, like pancakes on a huge platter. Some crackpot was postulating that there were multiple Einsteinian Relativistic universes simultaneously existing independently of one another. Space is full of galaxies, islands of light in the Void, so he claimed that temporal space, Reality itself, as we mathematically define Reality, was also full of these isolated islands.

Right, Trey said, and it was hypothesized that on occasion where the planes of existence intersected, there were storms. They thought there were violent disturbances that could rip holes in the bonds separating one Reality from another.

This is all theory. MacCauley said dismissively. Quantum theory, inverted Chaos Theory double-talk. As far as anyone can tell, this isn’t real science! No one could ever prove nor disprove it. I can hardly see how this relates to anything we’re talking about here.

This is a bit off the subject, Annette Doran agreed.

Trey quickly trotted out his aces in the deck. I found some corroborating evidence. Articles buried in science magazines, a television news tabloid segment from about nine months ago and a newspaper article from seven months back. These are all public domain information. I also uncovered a cable-TV news interview for the Science & Innovation network.

Articles about what? MacCauley asked in spite of his growing impatience.

Articles about how a team of crack mathematicians, physicists, and quantum mechanical engineers created something called a zero doughnut from the guts of a linear accelerator in White Plains, New Mexico. They supposedly tossed an apple through a pulse laser-modulated electrical field. A doorway to an alternate plane of existence, they claimed. And how in place of a piece of fruit, they got a block of dry ice twice the size of the apple.

No, Doran said softly, understanding dawning behind her eyes.

The zero doughnut? White Plains, New Mexico? You’re right, this does sound a little familiar, MacCauley said cautiously, looking from Trey to Dr. Doran, but I can’t place it now. Fill me in.

Doran answered slowly.

"There’s a Code Ultraviolet high-security BTI facility out in New Mexico. They do real techie-nerd wonderland stuff out there. Science fiction stuff, and really hush-hush.

They explore the wildest scientific theories, practical applications be damned. Strictly Pentagon-funded, as usual. The facility has had hundreds of millions of dollars funneled into it since it was first opened over three years ago. No one without Ultraviolet clearance even knows about it. There are less than eighty people at BTI, out of nine thousand employees total, with that clearance. You’ll note that none of us in this room have that clearance."

Shit, was all MacCauley could manage as he shook his head.

BTI has a total of about seven such facilities spread throughout North America Trey said.

All Code Ultraviolet, all military-funded, all exploring various covert-ops super-science weaponry-theories. Anyone want to give a guess about where the one in California is located?

Are you telling me they built more than one zero doughnut? MacCauley growled.

It’s not in the company charter to perform weapons research of any sort. If we did, we’d lose half the eggheads who work here. We don’t do development that gets people killed.

Trey nodded in the affirmative.

There was some minor press coverage around the New Mexico facility, Doran commented.

And rumors about the cover story the corporation had in-place. You know, that we were developing a Star Trek-style warp drive propulsion engine for spacecraft out there. For some reason a warp drive is more believable to the general public than an inter-dimensional doorway to another spatial reality. Less frightening, too, I might add.

Shit and goddamn, the head of the BTI Field Retrievals Division Document Investigation & Verification department hissed.

If you recall, Doran concluded, "the White Plains facility experienced a minor China Syndrome. The nuclear engine powering the Lawrence Berkeley Lab’s shiva-style multi-beam laser went off the charts. Something about a negative coolant flow, and half the two-acre square base was irradiated with gamma-level radiation. Six dead, nineteen diagnosed with fatal radiation poisoning.

But the Colonels in the Pentagon liked the end product. They thought it was an idea still worth pursuing. That’s why they built the second zero doughnut and kept BTI on to develop it.

We don’t do weapons research or development MacCauley repeated stubbornly.We don’t get people killed.

Tell that to the folks in Ventresca County, Trey said curtly.

So it looks like the Code Ultraviolet facility is at Kohler Pass, near Lockland Air Force Base, MacCauley concluded.

Trey nodded.

You’re saying there might be a chance that we, BTI, caused this if this project actually works, the department head said softly.

He nodded again.

MacCauley sighed.

So, by inference, this means that the contents of the Kent Journals are legitimate, Doran said.

You’re saying that the monsters are real.

Look, maybe I’m being thick-headed here, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves, MacCauley warned.

We’re drawing an awful lot of far-fetched conclusions based on here-say and coincidence! We’re basing this on the assumption that everything in the Kent Journals is true. Frankly, that’s hard to swallow. Secondly, we’re assuming that any work done at the Ultraviolet facilities was successful. We don’t know that to be true. Thirdly, we have no physical evidence of the conditions inside the area designated as Limbo. We don’t know what is or what is not going on in there. There’s some kind of electromagnetic field preventing us from observing the area through standard electronic surveillance.

In other words, Dr. Doran finished for her long-time associate, the only thing we know is that we don’t know anything for sure.

Correct, MacCauley agreed.

Not correct, we simply do not want to recognize the validity of what we know, Trey said firmly.

The evidence supports the hypothesis I’ve presented to a T. We have no reason to believe that either the disk or the Kent Journal information from that disk is fraudulent. Extensive examination by both the military and BTI supports its legitimacy. The articles and documents I’ve unearthed support the BTI involvement of unknown experimental technology from a Code Ultraviolet facility. If it were a hoax, there would be nothing to gain monetarily nor by way of personal fame since we can neither confirm nor deny that the author of the Journals even exists. There is no motive. To quote one of Conan Doyle’s codicils of Holmesian deduction, ‘Once you have eliminated the impossible, then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth’.

Monsters, MacCauley said softly, you realize that we’re talking about the existence of monsters.

What we’re talking about is a journal written by a seventeen year-old girl detailing her descent into Hell itself. A hell BTI might have helped create. We’re talking about a lot of innocent, desperate people who will die horribly unless we can get them some help, Trey stated grimly.

The trio sat quietly for a long moment, lost in thought.

We need to go through the journal again. Carefully. And then we need to get our asses out to the containment perimeter, MacCauley said decisively.

They all agreed.

Two

They were still arguing inside the Great Hall, the generals and the politicians and the Soldiers of the Holy Order.

The faint echo of angry voices reached his ears even past the walls of the fortress.

There was a good chance that soon they would be going to war, and it had been so long since they’d had to actually strive and fight that the very thought of actually doing that which they were trained to do horrified them.

Things had been happening, unusual things, frightening things, things not foretold in any of the ancient texts, things only seen in the dark and disturbing dreams of the master they all served, the one called the Chaos-bringer.

The Chaos-bringer, a stern and unyielding figure of great power and influence, himself an alien to this world they inhabited,