Running From Destiny, page 1
part #1 of New Beginnings Series
Running From Destiny
M.A. Rothman
Primordial Press
Copyright © 2020 Michael A. Rothman
Cover Art by Allen Morris
Internal Art by Paul Pederson
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
All rights reserved.
Also By M.A. Rothman
Technothrillers: (Thrillers with science / Hard-Science Fiction)
• Primordial Threat
• Freedom’s Last Gasp
• Darwin’s Cipher
Levi Yoder Thrillers:
• Perimeter
• The Inside Man
• Never Again
Epic Fantasy / Dystopian:
• Agent of Prophecy
• Heirs of Prophecy
• Tools of Prophecy
• Lords of Prophecy
• Running From Destiny
• The Code Breaker
• Dispocalypse
Contents
An Unexpected Summer
The Freak
An Unexpected Turn Of Events
A New Guest
An Unwelcome New Life
A Death Sentence
A Partnership
A Runaway
An Omen
Missing
The Romani
Target Found
Flight From Danger
Meeting The Big Man
Welcome Home
A Traveler
The Gatemaker
A New Mission
The Training Begins
In a Dwarf’s Footsteps
India
A Nighttime Visitor
A Trusting Fool
Captured!
The Tenebrarum
The Luminatum
Touching Evil
Trial of the Oppressor
Eden
Pass or Fail
Seeing the World
Back to Work
An Unexplainable Discovery
A Strange Land
Plaelatura In De Impia Crucis
Trimoria
Nicnevin
Preparing for the Date
It’s Almost Time
The Date
The Future
Destiny Found
A New Beginning
The Next Steps
Author’s Note
Preview – The Code Breaker
Addendum
About the Author
An Unexpected Summer
Gazing across the food court of the Arundel Mills Mall, Jason watched a girl with pink hair who was leaning over a plate of chili fries. She was cute despite the neon-bright hair, with a slightly upturned nose and full lips.
Then he cursed as a stream of people walked between them, blocking his view. The mall was packed today with people trying to escape from Maryland’s hottest and most humid June on record.
“Dad, I’m trying to lip-read,” he said, “but none of it makes any sense.”
His dad was seated next to him, sipping at a vanilla milkshake. “Watching someone’s lips is only a small part of interpreting what they’re saying, son. Try extracting some meaning from other context clues, like her facial expressions and mannerisms.” He leaned in a little closer. “I’ll give you a hint. She isn’t speaking English.”
Jason raked his fingers through his mop of brown hair. “You’re kidding me. I can barely figure out what’s being said when people are speaking English. You expect me to read lips in a foreign language?”
“It’s not like we only speak English at home, Jason. Think outside the box, use what you know, and try to match things up with what you’re seeing. Your mom can read lips in over a half dozen languages. If she can do it, there’s no reason you can’t.”
“But she’s been practicing for most of her life. I’ve only been at this for a couple of months. And anyway, why is it so important that I learn to read lips?”
But as Jason looked up at his father, he saw that he wasn’t going to get an answer to that question—or any other questions. The crease between his dad’s eyebrows and the set of his jaw spoke volumes. Some people were easy to read.
Jason turned back toward the girl. She was becoming agitated now. Her face was getting redder as she talked to the guy sitting with her.
And then something clicked. As he matched the movement of her lips with her facial expression, the words “Ich bin fertig” materialized in his mind.
She tossed her soda in her companion’s face, stood from her chair, and stormed toward the exit.
“Well, so much for the parakeet,” Dad quipped.
“I think she was speaking German,” Jason said. He turned to his father. “Am I right?”
“What do you think she said?”
“The only thing I think I caught was, ‘I’m done.’”
His father looped his muscular arm over Jason’s thin shoulders and laughed. “Pretty good. Though considering the scene she just made, it wasn’t too hard to figure out that she must have said something like that. I think she gave you some fairly major context clues.”
“Hey, give me credit, I did figure it out. I just need more practice. Now, answer my question: why is this so important to you?”
His dad smiled. “Jason, you’re like me in more ways than you can imagine. We both love challenges. That’s what drove you to get accepted to Yale. And this… well, I thought you’d find it to be an interesting challenge.”
“Somehow I doubt Yale cares whether I’m any good at lip-reading.”
“It’s not for Yale.” Dad stood, signaling the end of today’s lesson. “Just trust me. You’ll find a use for this.”
Jason shrugged. “If you say so.”
“I do.”
Sitting at the desk in his bedroom, Jason took a deep whiff of the bundle of herbs his mother had prepared to help with his headaches. The strong scents of cedar, lavender, and sage were soothing, but nothing ever truly rid him of the blinding headaches he’d been getting so often lately. He tried to ignore the pain as he pored over his World History textbook. He’d kept a 4.0 grade point average through his first three years of high school, and he refused to succumb to the “senioritis” that lots of his friends were suffering from. Besides, his family had instilled within him a sense of responsibility for his own education. Education is your key to the future was an oft-repeated mantra in the Rogers household.
Even at an early age, Jason had always pushed himself to excel. He knew that hard work was going to help prepare him for real life, get to the schools he wanted to attend, and ultimately land him his choice of jobs. His acceptance into Yale had been just one more step on his life plan—an important step, to be sure, but one of many.
He tried to read his textbook, but the words on the page wavered and his vision was streaked with flashes of white. A wave of nausea washed over him, making him salivate uncontrollably, and he feared he’d throw up again. And then the dizziness hit. As the room tilted, Jason closed his eyes and pressed his clammy forehead against the book. He breathed deeply, hoping to make the episode pass more quickly.
He felt a strong hand on the back of his neck. “Jason? Are you all right?”
Jason shot up into a sitting position, and he barely kept his stomach contents down as the room spun. He felt cold sweat dripping down the side of his face.
“Sorry, Dad. I’m just feeling queasy.”
There’s no way he’d be able to hide how he felt, certainly not from his father. Heck, his father had been teaching him for years how important it was to be aware of his surroundings and to especially pay attention to anyone who was nearby. Were they fidgeting? Did their eyes dart about? Did they look nervous or have any distinguishing characteristics? At first, Jason had assumed all kids were taught these things by their parents, but eventually it became obvious that his lessons were not the normal life skills people learned. Yet Dad insisted, and he wasn’t the type to take “no” for an answer.
Dad never spoke about what he did at work, but Jason suspected it had something to do with interrogating people for the government. It’s the only thing that made sense, and it would have been a reason to keep it hush-hush.
Now Dad put his hands on Jason’s shoulders and turned him so they faced each other. “What are your symptoms?”
“It’s another headache. But they’re getting worse. More often than not they now also make me feel dizzy, which really turns my stomach.”
“When did these new symptoms start? The dizziness and the nausea?”
“Umm… I’m not really sure. It’s been quite a while.”
Dad frowned with concern. “Did you take a spill on your bike or something? Have you had a fever I don’t know about?”
“Well…” Jason paused. “About two weeks ago I fell off the ladder when I was fixing the satellite reception, but—”
“You did what?” Dad grabbed Jason firmly by the arm and escorted him from his bedroom. “What the hell, Jason! You get yourself hurt and you don’t bother telling us about it? What were you thinking?”
“Dad, it’s no big deal. I don’t think my headaches have anything to do with the fall.”
As they walked into the kitchen, Mom looked up. She was deaf, but could easily see from body language that something was amiss. “Zahseen? What’s going on?”
“Zahseen” was the name on Jason’s birth certificate, but only his Mom called him that. He’d given up trying to make her stop.
It was Dad who answered. “I’ll tell you what’s wrong, Mirela. He’s been walking around with a concussion and never told either of us. I’m taking him to the emergency room.”
Jason thought this was a massive overreaction, and his feeling on the matter didn’t change when they arrived at the ER and a nurse asked him a ridiculously long list of questions about his symptoms. But his dad didn’t say a word until the nurse prepared to take Jason’s blood.
“Is that really necessary?” he asked.
The nurse swabbed Jason’s arm and fanned it with her hand. “Doctor Smalski asked for a CBC—a blood count, as well as a few other tests. The headaches might be coming from an infection. Is there any reason I shouldn’t be taking blood, Mr. Rogers? He doesn’t have hemophilia, does he?”
Dad waved away the question and shook his head. “No, nothing like that. Go ahead and do what you must.”
After the blood test, an MRI, and even a lumbar puncture, Jason felt like an abused lab rat. But as a doctor carefully studied the computer images of his skull, neck, and brain, Jason started to feel as worried as his father looked.
Maybe Dad was right to bring me here.
Finally the doctor turned to Jason and winked. “I think you’ll live.”
Dad put his hand on Jason’s shoulder and gave it a squeeze. “Did he have a concussion?”
“If he did, I don’t see any evidence of the trauma. I’ll prescribe something for the headaches, along with a muscle relaxant and something for nausea.” He smiled at Jason. “You’ll be fine, son. But if you continue to have issues, contact my office.”
As the doctor wrote out the prescriptions and talked to Jason’s dad, Jason felt his vision blurring with those white streaks again. He prayed the medicines were going to take care of everything.
Jason was cutting across a park on the way home when one of his headaches stopped him in his tracks. He clutched the bark of a nearby sycamore to steady himself, but still the world tilted and his nausea was overwhelming.
He wondered if this was what a migraine was like. He’d read about them in the school library, but migraines were supposed to give some kind of warning before they hit, whereas Jason’s headaches came on so suddenly it was like being smashed with a sledgehammer out of the blue.
He grimaced against the pain, and the park blinked out of existence. For a moment, all Jason could see was white.
And then, just like that, the world snapped back to normal. The pain was gone just as quickly as it had arrived.
How can it come and go so quickly?
Starting off again, he tried to dismiss the incident. He’d just completed his final day of high school, and he was looking forward to a summer of watching TV while relaxing on his dad’s massage chair. Maybe that was all he needed. Maybe he’d put too much pressure on himself in maintaining that perfect 4.0 average.
Yet as he continued to walk home, things felt… out of place.
He’d been walking the same route for years, and he knew exactly what to expect. Mrs. Patterson’s garbage cans were at the end of her driveway, even though garbage pickup had been two days ago. The usual kids’ bikes were on their front lawns. Mrs. Dougal was yelling at one of her dogs for digging holes.
Jason was good at noticing such ordinary things—thanks to his dad’s training. The two of them used to play a game where Jason would walk into a room after Dad had changed a couple of things—the angle of the TV, the placement of a magazine, the absence of a book on a shelf—and Jason would have to figure out what it was. So when something was off, he noticed it.
Such as the silver-gray sedans with tinted windows currently idling on the street. One of them had a Department of Defense sticker—just like the one on Dad’s car. That was different.
And when he turned onto his own street, he saw something else was different. His dad was home, and both Dad and Mom were leaning against his father’s car.
Why is he home so early?
As Jason walked up the driveway, Mom waved excitedly and Dad smiled.
“Congratulations, son. You’re now a college man. Now get in the car—I made an early reservation at the Old San Francisco Steakhouse to celebrate. It’s not every day that my only child finishes high school.”
Jason grinned as Dad ruffled his hair and Mom pulled him down and kissed him on the forehead.
As they drove to the restaurant, Jason’s parents chatted about how this would be his last summer of freedom before college. Mom wanted to go on vacation somewhere as a family. But Jason was having a hard time listening. Something was still wrong.
He twisted in his seat and saw a car driving about fifty feet behind them. He swore it was one of the same sedans that he’d seen on the way home from school. He was just about to say something to his father about it… when the world flashed white.
There was no sound. The car, the trees, the road… everything disappeared. And for the briefest of moments, a sandstone cliff towered over Jason like an ominous sentinel. At his feet, a stream snaked across desert scrub and into a dark cave at the cliff’s base. Jason felt himself being pulled toward that mouth of darkness.
Then everything went white once more.
Flooded with panic, Jason screamed—but he made no sound in the endless white abyss.
Slowly, his senses returned.
First he heard the crackling of fire. Then came the acrid smell of gasoline and burnt hair. Jason blinked, and the whiteness transformed into flame-streaked clouds of smoke.
He felt the heat then, heard the sound of breaking glass and the creak of metal scraping against metal.
“Grab the kid and let’s get the hell out of here!” yelled a deep voice.
Jason felt hands pulling him from what he now realized was the wreckage of his dad’s car. Searing pain hit him, and the world blinked out of existence.
The Freak
Staring at herself in the bathroom mirror, Anya frowned and rubbed her cheeks in a futile attempt to get some color into them. “It’s pointless,” she huffed.
She was always going to look like some kind of freak.
She pushed her lip up and gritted her teeth. Only yesterday she’d visited Dr. Livingstone, her dentist at Fort Meade. He’d filed her canines down so that they were flush with her other teeth, just like he’d done every week for as long as she could remember. But already, her fangs were showing signs of growth.
She tried to calm herself. Her teeth only grew more quickly when she was stressed.
But who wouldn’t be stressed at this time of the school year? The junior prom was coming up. Everyone was either stressed about getting ready, or stressed about not going.
Anya, of course, was in the latter category.
Mom came up behind her, plopped her chin on Anya’s shoulder, and smiled at her adopted daughter in the mirror. “Baby, why so gloomy-looking?”
Anya wished she looked more like her mother. Wavy brown hair. A smattering of pale freckles on the bridge of her nose. And that warm smile….
Anya would never have a warm smile. Even with her teeth filed even, she was at best a pale-faced girl who looked as if she were about to snarl. What’d they call it at school… resting bitch face? Yup, that was her, it was undeniable.
