Damali forced peacefulness to ooze from her being. Her husband was so upset the man was practically levitating. By this point, she'd seen so many phases of Carlos that she should have been prepared for this one, too-but she wasn't. She was pregnant and halfway into the first trimester. That reality and the fact that the worst of Hell was chasing them had clearly sent him to a place of pure primal reaction. Yet, the best of who he was had always been his intellect under fire. If he divorced that, none of them would make it. But to reach that place that had retreated so far behind the panther was going to be a delicate process. Right now, the panther was feeling cornered, hunted, its mate and progeny at risk, and itwas bearing fangs.
"The problem," she said in a nonjudgmental tone after a while, "is that you've been working on this alone." She covered his hand with hers as he sat across from her, staring out the sliding-glass doors. "Two heads are better than one, especially when there's this much heat in the system. I'm your better half, remember?" She smiled but knew it was bad when the offhanded comment didn't break through his stonewall expression. "Drop the veil around me, baby . . . seriously. I need to be able to see."
"Fine.I can't argue with you, Damali. Never could."
"I don't want to argue . . . I understand why you didn't want me to know-but in these end times, we have to have each other's backs . . . I have to have yours, if only as an extra pair of eyes and ears right now so you can do what you have to do. I also need to know as co-general of this team."
"I respect your position on the team, D, but how about respecting the fact that I don't want my wife and baby traumatized, all right?" He looked at her hard."How about if I wanted you to get one good damned night of sleep. To let you eat one meal that ain't been tainted or poisoned."
"I know that," she said softly, trying to pour balm on his shattered nerves. "And I love you for that . . . respect the hell out of you for doing that. But the only thing that will truly traumatize me is having something happen to you while I am blindsided. Please don't shut me out of our future, Carlos." She'd made her voice as tender as shecould, knowing that to fight him like she had in her old ways and days would just make the panther roar louder, when the objective was unity.
When he didn't immediately respond, she touched his arm and looked at him deeply. "I know the weight of the world is literally on your shoulders right now in a way that, as a woman, I probably can't imagine. But as your woman, let me have your back by helping you dissect this threat so we can come up with a serious strategy as one. Would you trust me, baby? I'm not demanding . . . I'm asking you, as your wife, to let me in."
He stood and walked over to the sliding-glass doors and stretched out both arms to bracehimself against them. She heard him let out a hard breath and watched the thick muscles in his shoulder blades knot with tension.
"Damn, I loved thishouse, D . . . wasn't trying to move again. Not in this lifetime.Pisses me off!"
Within seconds she saw plumes of smoke and fire lines decimating the landscape. The relentless sound of chopper blades beating the air made it appear like a scene out of an old Vietnam War movie. Everything as far as she could see was being consumed by a fast-moving, glowing red carpet as though Hell had vomited itself topside like napalm. A quick, unimpeded scan sent the deafening roar of new fires exploding, gobbling up land like a moving freight train at her. That sudden, intense sound, followed by a blast-furnace of heat almost knocked her off her stool.
Fire planes crisscrossed the horizon, dropping plumes of ochre-colored flame retardant. Yet as she scanned she could feel the unnatural heat within the flames, could see the metal alloy in car hubcaps turn to molten, liquid amalgam as it leaked down blistered streets. A sickening awareness then hit her; the National Guard ranks were all deployed in Iraq-culled down in numbers so critically low at home that the local human population didn't stand a chance against natural disasters at home now.
It took everything in her not to yell at her husband for keeping this from her while she'd slept or to jump up and run hollering through the house for an emergency team meeting. Instead, she stared out at the surreal scene and took another bite of lumpy oatmeal from her spoon and then quickly shoved several pieces of cut banana into her mouth with it. Five more minutes wasn't going to change what was happening, and she needed to use that time to chill Carlos out.
Yeah . . . to keep him chilled out, she needed to remain chilled out. That was the only way they could pull it together and think. The third biblical seal had been broken on the beach in the Greek isles, breaking the economy with it. The black horse was riding hard, devastating industry, crops, tanking the insurance industry, screwing with jobs, thus the housing market-this fire, not unlike the billions being plowed into the war, would have a long-term economic impact that she couldn't even fathom.
Damali briefly closed her eyes. Revelations 6:6 entered her mind as a black scale flashed through her second-sight."A ration of corn for a day's wages, and three rations of barley for a day's wages." But the oil industry and the pharmaceutical industry, known then asthe wine , would not be hurt.
Panic was unacceptable. Panic was deadly.Futile. But at the moment, there were simply no words.
CHAPTER SEVEN
"Do what?"
A hard silver stare met her as Carlos turned away from the glass doors. Incredulous, he rubbed his palms down his face and began to walk away. She could tell he was going for distance before he said something that couldn't be taken back.
"You missed the obvious, that's why I said what I said." Damali knew the riddle would hook him and she smiled inwardly as she heard his footsteps stop. She casually got up from her kitchen stool and went to the sink to rinse out her bowl and then shook her head. Some things were simply reflex. Who cared if the dishes were done, given that the house was probably about a couple of hours from beingash.
"Love?" he said, indignant, and then folded his arms over his stone-carved chest. "Love them to death, D. . ."
"Check it out," she said calmly, pointing toward the horizon. "When I had my vision before, everything was being consumed by these dark entities entering people. No doubt there's been a lot of bodies snatched, but I'm still seeing choppers out there, planes . . . what did you tell me . . . there's like eighty eight hundred firefighters on the line, plus how many Red Cross shelters open and neighbors helping neighbors, right?"
"Yeah, all right," he said, dragging his fingers through his hair and coming more deeply into the kitchen.
"That means that the vision I had was skewed. Just like that food that came in and turned all maggoty, my vision was off. Maybe it was residual tainting from before J.L. installed the filters. But all of us in this house have been panicked out of our minds. Krissy wigged so hard that me and J.L. had to take her out of the War Room for air. The goal of this thing is to make people hopeless, make them panic, make them think that the end is finally here-when you and I both know it ain't over until the Creator says it's over . . . and we have to keep on keepin' on."
"All right, all right, I buy that part. Yeah, the illusion is to make everybody trip. I know I've been buggin'-with good cause, too. But how in the hell are we supposed to love this so-called shit to death?" Carlos threw his hands up in the air and began to pace. "I mean, what the f**k, D. What's to love?"
"People," she said flatly. "It can't win if we focus on loving and helping people, rather than going after the darkside directly. That we've never done before on this team." She walked to the glass doors that led out to the deck. "Normally, as soon as the blazes started, we would have kicked in a hellhole, sent in troops, and did a search-and-destroy operation. But we're messing with their heads right now-we haven't surfaced. So, they're going nuts blasting the whole country with everything they've got, trying to get a reaction."
She watched as her husband moved in closer and leaned against the sink. She had him where she wanted him-open and listening.
"Think about it, Carlos. We need to employ a judo move here, allowing the adversary to fall from the momentum of his own weight. They're aggressively attacking . . . we fall back and let their forward momentum roll them over our heads."
She turned and gave him a hard smile."Yeah. We kick their asses with love. See, I'm figuring that the people who couldn't be taken over by the shadows had to have a love of humanity within them so hard . . . a love of the Creator, by whatever name they know, something sterling within their spirits that wouldn't allow the takeover. Not every kid got taken over. Not every doctor, not every policeman, or man, woman, chick, or child. Feel me? Something is causing a barrier tothat, otherwise it would be anarchy out there. LikeDawn of the Dead . People would be looting, killing one another out in the streets right before everyone's eyes, cops and anyone with a gun would be up on rooftops and towers like snipers picking people off as we speak. When it goes there, baby, that's when we're at the last of days. That'sthe prom . This is just a midweek dance. Right now, this is bad, but not the worst."
Ever so slightly, she watched Carlos's shoulders begin to relax. By degrees the tense muscles in his biceps lengthened as his arms unfolded. She watched him glance out the window, brows knit, silver gaze on the flaming horizon. She could almost feel his razor-sharp intellect slice through all the illusions before him and engage like a gear that was back on track. Then he nodded.
"Yeah," he said, going to the glass. His tone was so low and distant that she knew he was really talking to himself.