Chapter 1
The magenta glow of the Ark Cave bathed the rail-thin figure in a light so pure it seemed to drip from his dirty, blond dreadlocks.
Perry Symons had first heard the voice of the Lord in July of 1998 as his fish knife sliced into the throat of his beautiful Vanessa. So much blood, bubbling out across his arms and hands, hot and slick, making it difficult to maintain his hold on both her hair and the blade as she flopped beneath him.
Vanessa had been the sacrifice that brought him to the Lord's attention, the act that made him worthy. Perry had sacrificed the love of his life, his sweet Vanessa, so that God would recognize the new Gabriel, the one to lead His children through the coming apocalypse.
There in the back of his green Volkswagen van, as Vanessa’s lifeblood wept into a five-gallon bucket, God had spoken in his mind.
“Await ye the sign of the end of days.”
At Bottomless Lakes State Park, just outside Roswell, New Mexico, Perry had carried sweet Vanessa’s plastic-wrapped body out to the rowboat and paddled far out onto the lake before dumping her chained form over the side. Although he had bled it well, the corpse bobbed briefly on the surface before tilting down into the salty depths, trailing tiny red bubbles behind it.
Another sign. Even after making the ultimate sacrifice, sweet Vanessa’s corpse was reluctant to leave him, struggling to stay afloat even as the weight of the chains pulled it inevitably down into eternal blackness.
Perry had returned to his apartment on South Main Street, sold everything he owned, bought some survival gear, and moved to the remote Bandolier canyon country near Los Alamos, an ancient stretch of land, once home to the Pueblo Indians’ cliff-dwelling ancestors.
Perry was convinced that year 2000 would produce the Lord’s promised sign, but his wait for the resultant disasters proved to be in vain. When nothing happened in the year that followed Y2K, depression seized him. Perry came to doubt his own sanity. Had he sacrificed his soul mate for nothing? Losing himself in heroin, cocaine, and crystal meth, he wandered the canyon country aimlessly, tempted by the relief a suicidal jump would bring.
God had challenged his faith in a manner reminiscent of the trials of Job, remaking him a bedraggled wretch that little resembled his prideful former self. Then, one day in the autumn of 2002, he met Screaming Eagle. And Screaming Eagle introduced him to the ancient ceremonies of the native peoples, and to the wondrous pathways visible only in the smoke of a sweat lodge.
It was in one of those peyote-induced dream states, as he stumbled out of the sweat lodge and along the high canyon walls, that he first stumbled through the concealed entrance of the Ark Cave. It was there that God had given him his sign.
Perry straightened, the memories fading as he looked around the cavern he had come to know so well. God’s Ark rested at the back of the cavern, having cut its way through the canyon’s stone walls as it plunged from the skies all those years ago.
Striding under the smooth, curving edges of the vessel, he found the hole that Satan’s weapon had punched through the ship’s hull. He swung himself effortlessly up and inside, as he had done countless times in the past. Bypassing the first landing, he followed the smooth borehole, pulling himself upward onto the second deck.
There on the silky smooth metal desktop that extruded from the wall, silhouetted in the all-pervading magenta glow, lay the four halos. Although they looked like shiny metal, they were much too light and flexible, glittering with a rainbow of hues no earthly metal had ever produced. As always, his hands were drawn only to the fourth halo.
Perry picked it up, turning it slowly in his hands, lost in the memory of the first time he had slid that supple band over his temples.
Pain. Even now, the memory of the white fire in his head sent tendrils of agony along his limbs, so intense he expected sparks to fly from his fingertips, arcing outward to consume this world. Baptized in that river of pain, he had emerged, no longer Perry Symons, but as the fourth horseman, anointed with God’s own speed and power, along with a cunning the like of which no mere mortal possessed.
But it was not the pain, nor his newfound powers that drove him to become a hermit. The visions filled his dreams. God’s Ark had not come to earth alone. There had been another…Satan’s Chariot. In his visions, he had seen the two vessels battle across the night sky, both crashing to earth in tremendous gouts of fire. Although both had been damaged in the conflict, both survived, hidden away—each seeking out its champions. Armageddon’s disciples.
All these years, Perry had waited, patiently biding his time for the final sign, a signal that God’s Ark would call the other horsemen, a signal that the remaining three halos would no longer lie dormant, that each would fulfill its unique purpose in the coming apocalypse.
As Perry let his halo slip into place and its divine visions filled his head, a thin smile split his lips. His long wait was nearly over.