House of Cabal Volume One: Eden Read Free

belonged to someone else. He knew it
would be missing soon enough. Everything was red. The sun. The
marker flags. The wavering light in the darkening sky. He heard his
wife giving birth, despite the fact that she was six hundred miles
away.
    Not that he trusted his senses anymore. His
brain itched and squirmed like a swollen aphid in his skull.
    The Eden mite. He had thought it was his
savior and now knew it was his damnation. Science couldn’t explain
its effects, at least not in time to be useful. He was getting
worse. He needed to inform his colleagues of his condition. He
didn’t want to admit it, but the best course of action was to
amputate.
    As the wind picked up, he spread out his
arms, closed his eyes to the sand and sun, and listened to the
flags flutter.
    “God, help me,” he said in Russian.
    Joey saw Boris standing out there like a
scarecrow and started to cry.
    “It’s the Antichrist.”
    One of his brothers tried to comfort him.
“It’s just Boris.”
    “It’s not him. It’s not him anymore.”
    A sandstorm crested over the dunes like a
flood. It consumed Boris first and then the rest of the expedition,
dropping visibility to no more than a few feet.
    Boris called for help. The rush of the sand
was too loud for anyone to hear him. He groped forward, shielding
his face with his arm as he watched the ground. The marker flags
formed a grid. Maybe he could use them to navigate back to
shelter.
    All he wanted was the satellite phone, so he
could call his wife one last time.
    In only a few minutes, night fell and
visibility dropped even further. From the darkness he heard his
wife's labor grunts and outcries, as if she was in the sandstorm
with him, giving birth.
    “Hold on!”
    Panicked, he ran toward the cries with his
infected hand reaching out, stumbled into what he thought was a
Humvee grill, and he braced himself on the smooth vertical bars.
His hand now felt like a marionette, like it was missing the joint
cartilage and could only be manipulated indirectly. He wrapped his
fingers around the bars to make his hand feel more solid. The
“grill” swung open, letting out a fuzzy, white light. Though dim,
the light pierced his retina. It bored into his brain. He tried to
keep his eyes open, despite the pain, to understand what he was
seeing.
    The swirling sand around him suspended in
midair like time had stopped. The knuckles in his right hand became
universes. He could almost see something through the light,
something vaster than the desert, something more glorious than the
surface of the sun. He closed his eyes to the sting.
    It was too late.
    His eyes ignited.
    He screamed in agony and pulled back.
    His hand came off at the wrist. Arm skin
bunched up like plastic wrap, and the exposed veins and tendons
wriggled away from the bone, reaching for the light the way plants
grow in time-lapse.
    If you're not familiar with the Bible’s
creation myth, near the dawn of time, Adam and Eve ate the
forbidden fruit born of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.
For violating God’s trust, they were cast out, and Uriel, with a
sword of God’s fire, guarded the garden’s entrance and made sure
Adam and Eve never returned.
    In reality, the garden had no forbidden tree
or fruit. Uriel wasn’t keeping Adam and Eve out, but the whole
human race. And his weapon wasn't literally a fire sword. But the
metaphor was apt.
    Trespass resulted in incineration.
    Boris, with burnt-out eyes, saw his wife. She
was in a hospital gown, exhausted. Sweat clung to her brow as she
gazed at their swaddled newborn. Was it a boy or girl? Before he
thought to ask, Boris, his wife, and his child were consumed by the
holy flame.
    The tedium of guarding a gate that existed
outside of time and space made Uriel a bit overzealous. Finally,
here was the reason behind all the waiting. He wanted to get his
wrath’s worth.
    The blinding sand provided the cherub cover.
Those not killed by the "sword of fire" were killed by friendly
fire as