Glassing the Orgachine Read online

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  Recap of Book 1

  Begin Reading Book 2

  List of Characters and Glossary

  Copyright

  Sidebars

  From time to time in the text, you will encounter a link inviting you to read additional material. These are “sidebars,” the text equivalent of the bonus material on a DVD. While these sidebars may expand your understanding and enjoyment of the story, they generally contain no information that is essential to it. Read them now, read them later, or ignore them altogether. (Actually, do read them.)

  For my mother, Betty (Roycroft) Marusak

  May she awaken in Heaven after all,

  a child of wonder and curiosity.

  Previously in UPON THIS ROCK

  PU1 1.0

  STUBBORN MOUNTAIN, ALASKA, December 4, 2012

  A blinding light streaks across the Arctic sky and touches gently down in a remote National Park in the wilds of Alaska. Only two people witness the event, and they detest each other.

  One of them is Jace Kuliak, a young, studly, Backcountry Ranger for the National Park Service. He lives in a dilapidated house in McHardy, a tiny ghost town located within the park.

  The other is Poppy Prophecy, the two-fisted old patriarch of a huge Christian fundamentalist family that is converting a depleted copper mine inside a mountain into their own Apocalyptic retreat. There they plan to ride out the seven years of Tribulation in safety.

  To his horror, Ranger Jace discovers that he has fallen in love with one of the Prophecy daughters, the innocent and lovely Deuteronomy. He first laid eyes on her when she risked her own safety trying to defuse a deadly confrontation between her brothers and park service rangers.

  Ranger Jace believes that the light he saw in the sky was no ordinary meteor or aircraft or anything else he can think of. So, although the night is bitter cold, he sets off on his snowmobile to hunt for it.

  Poppy Prophecy, meanwhile, interprets the falling star as a sign from God that the End Times have finally arrived and that he has one last opportunity to drive out to civilization and spend the last few dollars of the family’s savings on food and supplies. Also, to get his and the kids’ teeth looked at by a real dentist. So he packs up his numerous offspring in a school bus and Dodge pickup and drives to Wallis, a highway town next to Anchorage.

  Left behind at the family compound are Mama P, the mother of the Prophecy brood, and her eldest daughter, Sarai. Mama P is in a catatonic state and has required total care from her family for several years. According to Poppy, Mama P’s soul is on vacation in Heaven with Elder Brother Jesus and the saints. Sarai is Poppy’s “special daughter,” the “twin of a twin,” who has been given to him for his comfort. She has stayed behind to care for her mother.

  While in Wallis, the Prophecys are the guests of a Christian family, the Lawthers. Before long, love sparks begin to fly in the Lawther household. Young Rory Lawther is smitten beyond belief by Deuteronomy Prophecy, who is a couple of years his senior and way out of his league. Deut, naturally, doesn’t even know he’s alive. At the same time, one of the older Prophecy boys, Proverbs, falls head over heels for Rory’s sister, Ginger Lawther. Ginger is a homeschooled high school senior, and she gently brushes off Proverbs’ advances. Sadly for the lovestruck boys, the girls are more interested in a friendship with each other. Ginger, who’s never had a sister, and Deut, who’s never had a friend who wasn’t her sister. When Deut invites Ginger to spend the Christmas holidays with them on Stubborn Mountain, she happily accepts.

  Poppy Prophecy has a chance encounter in a Wallis grocery store with Vera Tetlin, the wildly popular governor of Alaska. Vera is a faith-filled secular leader whose state fiscal policies have enabled Poppy to acquire his copper mine in the first place, and he believes God intends them to be together. He introduces himself in the Frozen Desserts aisle and invites her to take shelter with his family in their mountain keep when the Antichrist comes to town. Vera only sees a nutty old sourdough.

  Before they complete their shopping trip, the Prophecys are the beneficiaries of a miracle. Poppy’s friend, Not Jeff Bridges (NJB), has disappeared under suspicious circumstances and left Poppy a bag containing a quarter million dollars in cash. Now their shopping spree shifts into high gear; they truly can afford seven years of provisions, and they rent a U-Haul truck to transport it all back to their mountain. Ginger joins the family in the school bus on their long drive home.

  Meanwhile in the park, Ranger Jace is losing hope of ever locating the mysterious object that fell out of the sky. He’s been hiking over an extensive search grid every day in the blistering cold without a sign of it. And now a good old-fashioned Alaska cold snap is settling upon the park, with temperatures plunging to minus 60 degrees (–51 C). He’s about to call it quits when he finally locates the alien artifact.

  It’s not what he expected. It appears to be a tulip-shaped lamp on top of a ten-foot (3 m) sparkly glass stem. It’s a bizarre, pinkish-purple tulip lamppost jutting out of a frozen wilderness bog.

  Whatever it is, Jace extends it a peaceful welcome to Earth. He knows from the many sci-fi movies he’s watched that first contact with an alien species can be dangerous. You never know how powerful and destructive an alien species might be or how easy it is to inadvertently offend it.

  Unfortunately, Jace’s greetings don’t have the desired effect. Instead of acknowledging the earthling, the tulip thing drains the energy from his body, leaving him weak and disoriented. It goes on to steal the gasoline from his snowmobile tank, the juice from his batteries, the butane from his lighter, and the energy from his energy bars. Jace manages to stumble away before the tulip finishes sucking the very life out of him.

  Exhausted, Jace now faces a long hike in the extreme cold through a snowy wilderness in the darkness to find the nearest shelter. He is at the end of his rope.

  Around this time, the Prophecy caravan has returned and parked their rental truck at the end of the McHardy Road. It’s after midnight, but they still have to ferry sleeping children and tons of perishables the last sixteen miles (26 km) home by snowmobile. The extreme cold forces them to leave the children with the Bunyans, a family that lives halfway to the Prophecy mountain compound.

  With the children settled in for the night, the three older boys and Poppy continue moving their supplies. When they come across Jace, dazed and exhausted on the trail, they decide at first not to assist him but to leave him to his fate. They change their minds, however, when the Bunyan son, Chas, who is home from the Navy, shows up. They load Jace on a sled and haul him to warm up at the Bunyan house, reluctantly saving his life.

  At the Bunyan house, before Jace regains consciousness, Deut has her first chance at a close-up look at him. She’s been in love with him from afar for over a year, but Poppy and her brothers would never allow her to have a relationship with a park ranger, especially not with this atheistic, pony-tailed son-of-a-pup Jace.

  Later that night, the Prophecys follow Jace’s footprints in the snow back to the alien lamppost. Poppy doesn’t see a giant tulip or lamp post but rather a trumpet made from unbreakable heavenly glass. A herald angel must have dropped it. Unaware of the danger the thing poses, he digs it out of the ice to take home with them. The alien does not suck the life out of Poppy or his sons.

  The next day, when the rangers come looking for the historical “artifact” that fell on park property, Poppy hides the trumpet in the copper mine. He very much wants to sound the trumpet and summon whatever clumsy angel that dropped it. But when he tries to blow it, the trumpet crumples into dust, leaving behind only a small golden marble.

  The trumpet dust wafts through the old mine ventilation shafts and infects a raven on the mountainside, t
urning it into a striver. That is, an undead slave creature. The striver raven explores the 20,000-square-mile (52,000-sq-km) park and spies on the Prophecys and other humans residing there. Finally, it steals Poppy’s smartphone and plugs itself into the internet. First contact indeed.

  Soon thereafter, an angel of the Lord manifests herself to the Prophecys. She claims to be Angel Martha, the Fifth Angel of the Apocalypse as recorded in Revelation. Men’s sins have caused her to fumble her trumpet and the key to the bottomless pit of Hell. She must return the key (the golden marble) to the Throne Room of Heaven if the Bible prophecies are to be fulfilled, but she is unable to do so herself. Her wings are burnt and broken, and she is too weak to fly or fight. She implores Poppy to help her send up a flare to summon her fellow angels before Satan can find her. If Satan arrives before the angels do, the first battle of Armageddon will likely take place right there in the Prophecy mine, and they will all die.

  Meanwhile, their guest from Wallis, Ginger Lawther, has not been able to completely fit into the Prophecy fundamentalist lifestyle, and she is disturbed by ruinous family secrets she has uncovered, including Poppy’s rape of his eldest daughter, Sarai. Ginger is as astonished by the supernatural visitor in the mine as the rest of them, but instead of an angel, she sees a devil. Ginger, a homeschooled Christian girl, knows that there are no girl angels in the Bible, only on Hallmark greeting cards. She tries to warn the Prophecys, but Poppy is too obstinate to listen. So she makes plans to leave Stubborn Mountain on her own and return home to Wallis. There, she intends to contact the Alaska State Troopers, Fish and Game, and Family Services to report Poppy and Proverbs’ transgressions. But Angel Martha sees her plans, and, fearful of exposure to Earth authorities, she accuses Ginger of demonic possession and persuades Poppy to lock her away from his vulnerable children. Proverbs, who is still infatuated with Ginger, tries to convince her that they are imprisoning her for her own good.

  All the while, Martha has been secretly draining the energy from the family’s precious stores of food, fuel, and supplies.

  Although Poppy is at first suspicious of the angel’s credentials, Martha gains his confidence and persuades him to launch her signal flare to bring her cohort of angels. The flare inadvertently consumes several square miles of Alaska flora and fauna when it goes off, yet it fails to raise the alarm in Heaven. It is noticed by spy satellites, however, and it causes a small aircraft carrying U.S. mail to crash, killing the pilot.

  Now a host of federal agencies take an interest in this remote corner of Alaska. Angel Martha warns Poppy to secure his family because the Antichrist’s goons are sure to strike. And in fact, agents of the FBI and FIAS arrive at Stubborn Mountain. They use force and intimidation to persuade Poppy to give up the golden marble.

  Angel Martha, although ostensibly weakened by the sins of man, manages to subdue the agents and hold them for the Prophecys to slaughter. None of the Prophecys want to murder the men in cold blood until a second park service ranger, LE Ranger Masterson, draws his weapon on Proverbs. Proverbs shoots first, killing Masterson. The angel then sways Proverbs to also murder the two federal agents.

  A short time later, the murdered ranger and agents stumble out of the mine as newly-made human strivers who, like the raven, undertake the alien’s business in the outside world.

  Witnessing the reanimation of dead men, Poppy’s suspicions about the authenticity of the angel are confirmed. Martha is a devil in disguise, as Ginger has been claiming from her lockup cell. Poppy and several of his children rebuke Martha and cast her out of their mine. She doesn’t go easily, but in the end reveals her “true” identity as Beezus, the Bringer of Sorrow, who is a devil and brother of Lucifer. Beezus curses Poppy and vows to destroy him even as Satan, with God’s permission, destroyed Job in the Bible by killing all of his children and laying waste to his possessions. A wide crack opens in the rock floor of the mine tunnel, and Beezus leaps into the welcoming fires of Hell.

  The Prophecy mine is secure again, though the golden marble now lies at the bottom of their spring water cistern. Ginger is still a prisoner and is plotting her escape. She plans to wait until the family is asleep and then make a break for freedom in the frigid night. Mama P is still catatonic, and Sarai is losing all faith in her own goodness.

  Now the angel/alien needs a new human enabler to accomplish its goals, and it turns its attention from Poppy to Ranger Jace, who was the first one to discover it on the river flats (and whose life it almost ended). Jace receives an unexpected friend request on Facebook from the Prophecy family dog, Crissy Lou, who Jace presumes is the user name for his secret love, Deuteronomy. He hadn’t even known she had access to a computer let alone that she was on Facebook. They begin to chat online. She says she’d like to meet up with him sometime. Despite the danger of encountering her homicidal brothers, Jace is only too happy to agree.

  — End of Book 1 Recap —

  Boy Bait

  BB1 1.0

  [FOLLOWING IS A storyboard script for an animated prologue.]

  Panel 1: Interior—a spacious underground chamber dimly lit with a lantern. A natural, spring-fed cistern containing millions of gallons of water recedes into the background. In the foreground is an eight-year-old boy wearing a hardhat with headlamp, and next to him is a long-haired German shepherd dog. The boy is leaning over the rocky ledge with a wooden broom handle to play with a toy boat floating in the water.

  Panel 2: Close-up of the boat. It’s a toy Noah’s Ark carved from a block of wood. Windows are painted on the side of the hull with pairs of animals looking out: moose, bears, ermine, caribou.

  Panel 3: A flash of light!

  Panel 4: The ark “comes alive.” Light streams from all the windows. The painted animals appear real, and there’s a tiny bearded man in a robe standing on the deck, holding up his staff. No longer a toy, the ark has the look of a real vessel with real passengers, but in miniature.

  Panel 5: Close-up of the boy’s face full of surprise and wonder.

  Panels 6: POV from the deck of the ark, behind the little man who is waving his staff at the giant boy watching from the ledge.

  Panel 8–10: Boy clutches the rocky ledge with one hand in order to lean out further with the broom handle. Dog becomes alarmed; a speech bubble with “Yip! Yip!”

  Panel 11: A freeze frame. The boy has lost his balance and is falling into the water. Panic and fear in his eyes.

  A No Show

  NS1 1.0

  BACKCOUNTRY RANGER JACE Kuliak spent the better part of Thursday morning in Caldecott padlocking doors and hanging bear shutters on ground-floor windows. Come Monday, this remote National Historical Landmark, with its twenty-one scrupulously restored buildings, acres of rusting machinery, depleted copper mines, and the broken-down aerial tramways that once tied everything together, would officially close for the season.

  Jace rode between the buildings on his personal snowmobile because Ranger Masterson was off somewhere using the Ski-Doo.

  Speaking of Masterson, where the hell was he? Jace had checked in at the ranger station several times that morning, but there was no sign of the senior ranger. He should have been at his computer filling out end-of-season paperwork.

  Now it was lunchtime, and Jace nuked a plate of Old El Paso tamales in the microwave and took it to his desk. He put his feet up and gazed out the window. The Old School, now serving as the ranger station, had been built on the bank of the Caldecott Glacier in 1916, when the rough-and-tumble prospecting camp was being transformed into a proper Gilded Age company town. Jace wondered, as he ate his tamales, how any little kid back then could have possibly paid any attention to the teacher when right outside the windows was a real-life river of ice cracking, creaking, and grinding its way down the valley.

  A phone rang. The unexpected sound made Jace jump. Phone and internet service had been mostly down for the past week. Jace swung his feet to the floor and scrambled to Masterson’s desk.

  “Hello,” he said into the receiver, �
��Caldecott ranger station.”

  Ethan?

  It was a voice he recognized, the park superintendent in Copper Center, their boss.

  “Hi, Evelyn. No, Ethan’s not here at the moment. This is Jace.”

  Hello, Jace. Could you have him call me as soon as he gets back in?

  “Sure thing.”

  No telling how long we’ll have service before it goes out again.

  “Really? I was hoping your call meant the problem was fixed.”

  I know. It’s hard to get anything done. Valley Communications issued a press release yesterday basically admitting they’re still clueless and asked for community patience. Their equipment seems to be in working order, and traffic is flowing — somewhere.

  As his boss talked, Jace stretched the phone cord trying to grab his iPad at his own desk. He couldn’t quite reach it.

  Anyway, I wanted to check in with Ethan on how his special detail went yesterday. Did he say anything to you?

  Several investigators for the National Transportation Safety Board had arrived in McHardy the day before yesterday to look into the crash of the chartered mail plane and death of its pilot. Poor Ned Nellis’ body, charred beyond recognition, lay frozen in Ed Sulzer’s tool shed. The NTSB investigators were followed a day later by two federal special agents, and Masterson was tasked with guiding them to the crash site and beyond to interview residents near the Mizina River. That was why he’d taken the Ski-Doo Tundra. It wasn’t supposed to have been an overnight trip.

  “Sorry, Evelyn, we haven’t discussed it yet.”

  Before the federal agents left town with Masterson, they knocked on Jace’s door to interview him. Jace readily told them everything he knew, especially how the weird tulip lamp post had nearly killed him and how the Prophecys had stolen it. He even drew them a sketch of the thing. So he was as interested as the superintendent in Masterson’s report.