The Day of the Nefilim Read Free Page B

moved to the city and never came back. The area had its own history now, and the people who lived and worked there were fourth, fifth, and sixth generation. They were the locals now, and anyone who rolled through here in a convoy, army or otherwise, in trucks or shiny cars, was an outsider.
    When she got into town, Reina pulled up outside the Red Lion. It was hot and dry, and she had time for a drink before unloading at the buyer’s. Crossing the street, she saw the black cars sitting in the car park. If it weren’t for the two uniformed drivers leaning against the side of one of them, talking and smoking, it would have looked as though the mob was in town. She went in.
    Bryce was sitting at the bar.
    Reina sat beside him. She dropped a note on the bar and pointed at one of the taps. The woman behind the bar put a beer in front of her. “Thanks, Denise.”
    “What do you make of these?” Bryce nodded towards where the officers sat, sweating in the shade.
    “Their trucks passed me on the way in. Big ones, covered with tarps. Machinery or something,” Reina replied. “I suppose they’ve gone over to the dunes?”
    “Yeah, the trucks and the other stuff shot straight through. This lot must think they’ve earned a break. Pretty, aren’t they? Nice braid, shiny medals...” He was talking deliberately loud. A couple of the officers turned and looked coldly in their direction.
    “Jesus, keep it down…” Reina laughed, not really caring whether he did. She was well acquainted with his ideas about the military, authority, and the system in general. He was an anarchist, and he didn’t mind who knew it.
    Bryce stared back at the officers, goggle-eyed, daring them.
    Reina picked up her beer. “Give it up, shithead. What do you think it’s about?”
    “You mean none of the theories we’ve come up with have impressed you? You’re a hard woman to please. Shall we go over and have a look?” He nodded towards the open doors. Through them, the dunes on the other side of the harbor were visible.
    “Yeah, we haven’t been over for a while, have we. Not now, though. I’m working, as we speak. What about this weekend? After netball?”
    “After netball it is, then. A bit of fascist-watching to round the afternoon off. We’ll take lunch and a bottle.”
    The officers were about to go when their trucks came into view across the water. From where they sat, the vehicles looked like tiny matchbox toys as they entered the compound, but the comparison never occurred to them. Such thoughts do not commonly exercise themselves in minds such as these. The officers finished their drinks and watched as the compound’s gates closed behind the last of the trucks. Then they got back into their black cars and set off along the road around the bay, leaving clouds of dust hanging in the air behind them.
    In the leading car, the General, permanently assigned by his government and his uncle (in this case, the same thing) to the standing army of the United Nations, turned up the air conditioning and loosened his tie. The gin had made him sleepy.
    His lethargy was due to more than just the drink, though. He had been feeling haunted all day. The previous night, while he slept, he had dreamed.
     
    There was a huge room… It had walls of dark, finely carved stone and a high ceiling lost somewhere in a darkness that seemed to gather around him like a cold, shifting fog. In the dim light he saw obelisks, twice as high as a man. There was no one in the room, but it lacked the stillness that it should have had. There was a sense of being, of something, which slowly coalesced, taking on a form that was invisible but palpable, that brushed against him like seaweed swirling in a tide. The sensation of voices, a hot, dry rustle of moth wings, fluttered around his head…
     
    When he woke, he couldn’t remember anything of what the voices had said. That had frustrated him at the time, and the memory of it frustrated him now. There was an urgency, he