The Secret Life of Tom Bradbury
The Conclusion-Chapter Six: The Fruits of Faith
The conclusion to the series. Previous chapter links at end of the story.
The fire in Tom’s left arm subsided, but the fear in his chest did not. He had lost Delia.
She was right. He didn’t know how to wield the Rod of Aaron, and now she was gone. The holy staff, too. Aside from the nerves in his arm feeling like they had been through an electrical shock, a high-frequency tone rang ear to ear through his head.
Sorrow, regret, guilt, and anger flooded him. In his sure-handedness, arrogance, and misunderstood knowledge, he had done the unthinkable. Chin slumped to his chest, Tom Bradbury wept for Delia, himself, and his failure to protect them both, let alone the rest of the world.
“Son?” A gentle voice said. “My son, do not grieve for them.”
Tom felt the man’s closeness but did not flinch or turn to face him.
“They chose their path as you have held yours. It’s not for us to judge. You are doing only what you must, and it must be done.” A firm, gentle hand clasped over Tom’s shoulder.
Turning, Tom looked up and saw an elderly man with thin white hair over a round, rosy face. He wore black slacks, a black blazer over a black button-up, and a white collar. Unsurprised that a priest was the first person he saw after what he had just done, Tom felt no absolution would be delivered if he confessed.
Tom gathered himself and stood, but the sight before him buckled his knees a second time. Behind the priest stood Delia, tears streaking down her high Nordic cheeks, with the Rod of Aaron in her hand. She moved to the priest’s side. Taking Tom’s shaking hand, she said, “This is Father Luciano. He was kind enough to help me to my feet.”
Tom’s eyes, still wide from the shock, looked from Delia to Father Luciano, who waved his hand dismissively and said, “Now that’s not nearly an accurate description of what occurred, dear girl.” Reaching for Tom, the priest said, “Tom, shake my hand and let’s tell the truth, shall we?”
“I don’t really know what to say, Father. I can’t say what happened,” replied Tom, shaking the priest’s hand.
“Well, I’ll tell you what happened!” exclaimed the suddenly jubilant padre. “I was making my way around the corner, you see, when suddenly a streak of lightning came down from the sky with a crack of thunder so close it threw me from my chair!” Voice pitched with excitement, his hands gestured to the sky. “I saw the light come into the street, into you, into the staff you held in your hand! A rush of wind blew through, and with it flew the rod, glowing green, casting beams in all directions like a feather caught in a tornado! Then, from between the cars, leaping like a gazelle, this beautiful creature came bounding! She spun and twisted in the air, catching hold of the staff, and when her lovely feet touched down, this angel tumbled into me!”
Delia rolled her eyes, stifling a smile.
Lowering his brow, Tom asked, “Father, you said you were in a chair? On the street?”
Father Luciano’s smile beamed. “Yes! See for yourself — she is an angel!” Stepping away from Tom, Father Luciano extended his arm and pointed down the street. Tom stared at a wheelchair.
“The rod, my son,” spoke Father Luciano. “Look at the rod.”
Delia handed Tom the Rod of Aaron. At the first knot below the sapphire sprouted a new branch and two green leaves.
“We watch them,” said the priest, “we know what they are and when they come.” He pointed at what remained of the entities. “It’s no accident I was here.”
Delicately placing his hand on the rod, Father Luciano said, “The Lord giveth and He taketh away. Through you, this heals and destroys.”
After a hurried explanation to tell Father Luciano their destination and goal, Tom and Delia were in the car headed into Denmark. From there, they would make Norway by sunrise. The priest promised to send word along his channels, hoping to run as much interference and offer as much safe passage as possible to aid their safe arrival at the compound. Once there, at the frozen pond below which held an army of these not entirely human clones, Tom and Delia would engage in the mechanics of saving the world.
Crossing from Sweden into Norway was barely noticeable except for the linguistic change of the road signage. Unfettered, Delia and Tom drifted through the country as though pushed by a western wind. Whatever strings Father Luciano had to stroke, he must have pulled them all. Heading northeast from the border, they turned at the fork of Highway 26/28. Keeping right on 28, the pair rocketed up the road much less traveled.
Here, tucked in the back bays of Lake Korssjoen, sixteen kilometers south of the copper mining town of Roros, the Octopus Group had developed their neural net convergence computer systems based on biological brains. The total physical integration of biological and digital entities was complete. Once the incubation time beneath the pond was reached, their conspiracy would commence.
When the Octopus Group secured the town of Roros as a Unesco World Heritage Site, they quietly secured the source copper they required and were able to maintain control of who came and what was allowed to be seen. No one suspected that the most insidious plan against humanity lay buried seven kilometers away at the end of the lake.
Fenced off with placards declaring the area a wetland sanctuary, a wide buffer kept what was natural from all that wasn’t. Tom and Delia looked through binoculars at this third of the lake with its surface frozen over in midsummer.
The plan was relatively simple. Tom would neutralize the enemy, and Delia would destroy the net. Steeling their nerves and concerns for each other, the last members of the Tribe sworn to the permanent dismantling of the Octopus Group, Tom Bradbury and Delia Sandersson summoned forth the courage to engage in their end game.
Cutting through the chain link fence, Delia and Tom moved toward the pond. Diverging their paths, Tom moved to the center of the frozen surface while Delia stayed low in the shadows, taking cover behind shrubbery and rocks scattered along the shoreline.
Before Tom made it to the center of the frozen pond, floodlights snapped on and illuminated him, the surface, and what swam below. Through the translucent lens of the ice, Tom saw endless rows of humanoids undulating in the icy water, affixed to a bank of instrumentation panels, and attached to a mass of copper wire stacked as far down as he could see.
As the forest across the lake came alive with movement from advancing guards, Delia crouched behind the trunk of a massive, ancient pine. Eyes fixed on Tom, waiting for his cue, she held herself statuesque until he employed the bit of trickery to confuse the enemy and buy time for her entry.
Tom carefully laid the Rod of Aaron on the ice to his left. Looking up at the tree line, he was disappointed that only a small count of soldiers scrambled toward him. Then, he counted a dozen men, and without proper recon he couldn’t know how many were on-site and holding their reinforcement positions further back.
Delia watched Tom disappear behind an eruption of light. The reflective cloak he’d pulled around himself cast back the glare from the floodlights. As a result, he became nearly invisible in plain sight. In the blindness of her enemies, Delia moved to the entrance, disabling the locks. Seconds later, she headed into the bowels of the lair, undetected.
Feeling as though she had invaded the womb of a grotesque mother, Delia looked upon the thousands of these…things. The humanoids dangled from tentacles of digital umbilical cords while copper wire coils cradled their feet. Swept with a feeling of emptiness, her senses felt the void of life in the mass of the manufactured beings. It was a great watery catacomb of lifeless bodies, stacked in columns and rows without a living, breathing human in sight. No patrol guards, no one working the mainframe of the supercomputer.
In the center of servers sat a vacant control hub.
Standing at the control center, it took Delia only minutes to see what was at play. The neural net fed into the cloud and carried out its programming into the wide world of wireless communications. The virus was they had released already well in play. The vaccine announced as the salvation was being delivered across populations at a staggering rate. Once the trigger was pulled, every inoculated citizen would be powerless to reconfiguration from this program.
Fingers hitting keystrokes with rapid-fire, Delia began her work.
Back above water, Tom waited patiently, relying on Faith for the cue. When the shouting voices finally reached his ears, the moment had arrived.
Launching the reflective blanket into the air, Tom grasped the Rod of Aaron in his left hand once more. Marking his body with the sign of the cross, Tom drove the staff into the ice with every ounce of his might.
In a shockwave of light and thunder, bodies were eviscerated by the rod’s wrath. Beneath his feet, the ice shattered, and Tom felt himself falling through the lake, rocketed from the power of the rod as it increased in intensity. The desecration of man burned to ash by the touch of the light in his descent, Tom fell through a tunnel of nothingness, the depths of the lake split like the Red Sea, he loosened his grip on the staff, and watched the Rod of Aaron propel up toward the surface as his plummet into blackness was complete.
The explosion of ice, light, and scorching blasts of combusting bodies threw Delia off her feet. In a blink, she saw Tom. Then he was gone. Held in a column of searing white light, she watched him fall, hurling down like a bullet. Before her senses could respond, the rod shot toward her. Gathering the strands of copper wire at its base, the rod grew from the center, sapphire eye. Copper coils twisted into a thousand arms woven into the matrix of the neural net. The once bare wooden stick grew into a trunk that sprouted a forest of new branches lush with fresh leaves and blossoms that bore golden pears. A new tree of knowledge was birthed, and her fruits of Faith would feed the world.
EPILOGUE
Fruit-bearing trees across the globe suddenly produced golden pears. Like pumpkin spice in Fall, the pears were everywhere. Knowledge of cosmic consciousness was consumed with each bite. Without judgment of man or casting into heaven or hell, only the impure were taken. The great reset had arrived to restore humanity’s soul with faith and enlightenment.
“Let there be light.”
Three months later…
Delia ran as fast as she could from the far edge of the pasture. Bursting through the door of the old watermill, she rushed through the kitchen toward the cellar.
“Tom! Tom!” she hollered down. “Come quick! It’s time!”
Appearing at the bottom of the stairs, a significantly aged Tom Bradbury sprinted up to his Delia.
“Has she come in at all?” asked Tom.
After the “event,” Delia knew as sure as her next breath would come that she needed to go to Tom’s homestead in France. All these months later, his appearance still shocked her.
Wearing a snow-white beard and a mat of matching platinum hair, an old man from a distance, Tom’s eyes shone with youthful enthusiasm. With barely a crease across his face, he had the strength and endurance of a twenty-year-old.
Each sight of him filled her heart with astounding joy.
“No,” she answered. “Bandit is still at the edge of the pasture, and Smokey won’t leave her alone. She’s ready to birth, but the damn Vikings are circled around her and won’t let me through.”
Tom chuckled as they walked toward the pasture.
“Tom?” asked Delia. “Will they ever learn to trust me?”
Tom stopped and smiled at the love of his life, took her hand into his own. “The Ouessant are a funny breed,” he said, throwing Delia a wink. “Have Faith.”
Author’s note.
This is the conclusion of both the Vocal Summer Fiction Series and the series; The Secret Life of Tom Bradbury. From a story I never intended to turn into a series, it has been a lot of fun to write and I would like to thank (the real) Tom Bradbury for letting me fling him across the globe in his series of adventures.
Thank you for reading.
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Originally published at https://vocal.media.
