Salvation: A Return to Eden

SALVATION: A return to Eden

Roger Russell

Published by Roger Russell

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2015

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Smashwords Edition, License Notes

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Table of Contents

Chapter 1 - Trapped

Chapter 2 - Escape of the Family

Chapter 3 - The Book of Tiberius

Chapter 4 - The Rise of the New Order

Chapter 5 - New York

Chapter 6 - Conversion

Chapter 7 - Mountain Wolves

Chapter 8 - Back to the Caves of the Shedu

Chapter 9 - Sacred Trust

Chapter 10 - In the Caves of the Shedu

Chapter 11 - Desert Bandits

Chapter 12 - The Coming of Adam

About the Author

Other Books by Roger Russell

Chapter 1

Trapped

He became aware that there was nothing except darkness. The darkness was total, the kind of black that has no depth or width, only the potential of an eternal presence. He lay for a long time and sensed his body piece by piece; his arms, legs and the sensations on his skin; the things that touched him. He slowly realised that somewhere close by something was dripping; he was hearing a steady repetitive sound. The memories associated with water came to him and he believed that he was hearing slow drops of it falling into a pool of some kind.

He knew that he was lying flat on his back and moved his arms around to let his hands explore the ground at his sides. There were small stones there and grit and it was dry so the water was not there. He raised his arms and probed the space above him; nothing. He rolled onto his hands and knees and lifted himself to squat on his haunches. Again he probed the space around him and found nothing. He stood carefully and with his arms stretched out in front of him took a few steps forward. He stumbled on loose rocks and saved himself from falling against what felt like a hard rock wall. How did he make that analysis? Where did the knowledge come from that recognised the feel of the wall and gave him the understanding of a rock face? He somehow instinctively knew what was around him. Some distant part of his past came up from deep within and he knew without any doubt that he was not blind but underground and he was there in terrible circumstances. He called out but the sounds of his shouts were strangely dead; flattened by an absence of distance, by an absence of everything. Suddenly he was scared; there should be light, he should be able to see. There should be other people, he should not be alone. He knew that he was far away from normality and that something had happened that had separated him from the things he needed to live. Yet he was not injured, only cut off.

He was wearing trousers and a shirt made of a canvas-like material. His memories gave him a picture of a miner and that told him he should have a cap lamp and a heavy battery on a belt. He felt around for a belt and a helmet but there was nothing. He had heavy leather boots on his feet but no helmet, no lamp. He needed to know more so feeling his way carefully he explored.

Later he sat down on a large rock that he had found and considered the results of his cursory examination of the space around him. There was no in front of him or behind him because there was no indication of where he should or should not be facing. At one end of the darkness that enclosed him the rocks were lying in a tumbled slope that climbed to a ceiling of rock. He had felt along the ceiling’s surface above them to find that it continued past where the rocks had closed that direction off. He was in a tunnel and stretching back away from the fallen rocks were walls of rock; cracked and irregular but basically solid. They did not go far and ended in another pile of rocks and broken timber at the opposite end of his space. On the ground in between were some rails leading from the one fall to the other, alongside the rails was a drain. Above the drain, suspended against the ceiling were two columns of pipes. He had found the water dripping from a chain on one of the pipe columns. He followed the wet trail of water up the chain with his fingers to a drilled hole in the ceiling that held a small bolt set inside it to which the chain was attached. The water was dripping into a small section of the drain and as it had been dammed up by the falls at either end of the tunnel it had formed a pool inside the drain of about fifteen feet long and two or three inches deep. He had tentatively wet his fingers in the pool and sucked the moisture from them. The water was warm and tasted foul. A memory of Don’t drink the water! came to him but he was very thirsty and knew that if he did not find a way out soon he would have no choice. He decided he was in about twenty feet of tunnel, closed off at both ends by falls of rubble. He was alone. He was also hungry and also knew that that too would soon become a problem.

Although he instinctively knew some of what was going on around him he had very little specific memory of any useful information. He did not know how he had got there, when he had lost consciousness or what he could do to help himself. He did not even know why he had been unconscious; he had no pain or evidence of injuries on his head or body. He felt strong and capable and like most healthy people thirsty and hungry. He dozed off and woke again a little later. This time he was completely aware of his surroundings and remembered everything he had discovered before he had slept. But again he could summon up nothing from any time before that. He sat a long time in the dark and decided he must do another, more careful, search of the area around him. Try to find out more about what was in his favour; to find anything that would help him survive and even better, to find a way out of there.

He started at one end of his little black world and worked his way along the pipes, feeling for chain, loose bolts or manifolds, taps; anything that might present some hope or ideas. At one of the joints he realised that the bolts in it were all placed with the heads at the one side of the flange and the nuts on the other. He remembered… The heads of the bolts always point to the main entrance of the mine. So if he was to stand a chance of escape from his tomb he would have to dig at the fall of rock at which the bolt heads were facing. He found several holes in the ceiling from which chains hung to suspend the pipes. Only the one had water seeping from it but in one of the others he found a loose half metre length of 12mm steel rod. It had a bent section at the bottom and a sharp taper at the other end. It was a kind of wedge that had been used to jam the bolt holding the chain into the hole. When he shook it loose it came out of the hole quite easily. He felt it carefully and recognised it as an eyebolt wedge another small memory. He kept it; it would help him dig when the time came.

He searched for a long time and became fatigued. He did not expand his knowledge much except to confirm his first assessment. It was difficult to form a mental picture of his prison but he tried. The only other piece of information he gleaned made it clearer to him that he must dig at the rock fall indicated by the bolt heads in the pipe flanges. At the top of this fall he thought he could feel a slight draft; the faintest breath of warmth moving along the ceiling and into his space. He had no idea of how far he would have to dig or how much rock he would have to move to save himself but he had little choice. All hope for life was on the other side of that rock fall, or perhaps the other one, but most likely that one. He got down on his hands and knees and sucked up some of the water, grimaced at the taste and then sat on his rock. He leant back against the wall and rested. He would gather his strength and then start digging.

He fell asleep again and was woken up by a slight scratching noise. He kept very still and listened. The scratching was faint but close and getting closer. Then he felt a thin, feeble touch of wetness against his hand. He snatched his hand away and whatever it was disappeared in a flurry of movement. The noise and the sensation were both gone and although he waited in silence they did not return. Whatever it was, if it returned he had to catch it; it was food.

It was not just light that was missing from his world; time was also non-existent. There was no end to the night or start to a day. Time was a matter of hours or long minutes; he was never sure and sometimes he was tired and sometimes he was just frustrated.

Moving the rocks from the fall was fraught with difficulties. He could not see to choose a suitable stone to move or evaluate the danger of pulling any specific rock from the pile. If he pulled on something and it came loose in his hand he had to first control it and then try to throw it behind him. It was only after he had stumbled on a loose rock and fallen for the second time that he realised he must choose a place that was out of the way to put the rocks he had removed from the fall. He spent some time searching the spaces in front of the rockfall and found a place that would hold a lot of material. He cleared a transport route from the bottom of the pile to his space. Then he started at the top of the pile and took the rocks one by one to the bottom and along his cleared road. If the rock he was busy with was too big he would push it down the fall and then roll it out of the way to the left or to the right at the bottom. It was slow work and a few times he did not anticipate a rock loosening and coming down on his fingers. Some of the rocks were heavy and had sharp edges. Soon his finger nails were broken and his fingers bruised and lacerated.

It was after he had spent three work periods and was on his fourth sleep that the dream came: The sky was brown and dark with blasting sand that stung his face and rimmed his eyes. He looked across a wide plain and saw the hosts of the devil streaming over the dunes and wailing of death. They sped towards his position across the desert in armoured jeeps, raising their own clouds of murky dirt and carrying heavy machine guns. On the back of the vehicles were men dressed in white flowing robes; men with rifles and machetes or curved swords. Men who screamed in anticipation of the brutality they were about to inflict in the name of Jihad. They struck fear into the very marrow of his bones and he knew that they were in fact looking for him. He fell to his knees and prostrated himself before the storm hoping that he would be hidden. He waited and then silence suddenly descended everywhere. The wind ceased to blow and the sand particles slowly settled around him. He looked up and saw the grill of a small pickup truck about three feet in front of him. A figure stood on the loadbed behind the cab and looked down at him. He stared back up at him from his knees and found eyes of fire burning from behind an ornate ghutrah with an agal of gold forming a crown around his head. The devil’s burnoose was the bottomless black of the mine and bound at the waist by a red sash holding a huge curved scimitar.

The burning eyes dissected his soul and the apparition spoke, "Fear me traitor for I am Sulamujin. I