Sneak Peek to For Peace and Purpose

Glistening with sweat under the naked glow of an LED light, a young man waited for a fate worse than death. The stainless-steel shackles around his hands and feet kept him rooted to the surgical chair that comprised the sole furnishment in the tiled, windowless room. 

When the door latch snapped open, the young man jerked against his restraints hard enough to draw blood from his wrists. The door swung open on silent hinges to reveal a man in fatigues too clean to have ever seen any action abroad—a colonel, perhaps, but without any insignia. 

“Salvador Brody,” the officer said, as if he were a doctor confirming a patient’s identity before administering treatment. The young man didn’t give an answer, and the officer didn’t press for one. Everything at this point amounted to mere formalities. 

A thick silence passed between them before the military man exhaled through his nose. “The crucible for silver, and the furnace for gold, Mr. Brody. No other way around it. You’ve got the same odds as everyone else. My own nephew went just yesterday.” 

Young Mr. Brody looked at the colonel with baleful eyes. 

“You’re about to become part of something far greater than you or me,” the officer said. “You are about to render a great service to your country.” 

“I’ve already served my country,” the sacrificial lamb said with an accent that marked him as an odd transplant from what was a mostly unmodified, backwards community. 

“Any grunt can do what you’ve done so far. This…” The colonel leaned in, putting a reassuring hand on Brody’s shoulder. “This is what you were made for. It’s your destiny.” 

“I didn’t get any say in what I was made for.” 

“None of us did. Our fates were written in petri dishes and grown in labs. But our creators knew what they were doing. Trust the plan.” 

“From the looks of the news, it don’t look like the plan’s working out too well.” 

The lines around the colonel’s eyes deepened in a grimace that looked sincere. “A lot of people have died. People higher than my pay grade knew that going in. And I’ll tell you right now, a lot more people are going to die before this is over. But you—you are special. You’ve been granted something like immortality. Progress marches on, Mr. Brody, and the next age will be an age of gods. But time and circumstances are not on our side, and it’s my job to make sure the first gods of the next age will be red-blooded Americans.” 

A moan in the darkness rose to become a wail and woke Old Man Brody from a fitful slumber. His hand went to his raw throat, and he realized the howl had been his own. Another nightmare. He lay back down, waiting for the relief of reality to calm his heart. 

But that relief never came. A fresh rivulet of sweat ran down his temple, and he realized he had not woken from a nightmare; he’d woken into one. Something wicked had pulled him back from oblivion. Something that was still in the room with him. 

Eyes straining in the dark, Old Man Brody pulled the matchet from his bedside sheath with a palsied hand and tried to murmur, “Who’s there?” He couldn’t seem to get the words out—not that it mattered either way. This darkness would give him no answer. 

He struck a whetstone against his matchet in a shivering swipe and lit the wick of his bedside lantern on the fifth try. Wavering orange light bloomed in the narrow confines of his bedchamber. In the aged wallpaper of the wall opposite him, words were etched: I require sacrifice. 

Old Man Brody forced himself to blink and look away, to think of loved ones long gone—either of his two wives, smiling in the light of morning. Images of their pale, lifeless faces flashed before him, and he lost the tenuous control over himself. “Goddamn you, you won’t have me or any one of mine!” he hollered. “Not a one!” 

The darkness outside his room gave no answer but for the skittering of retreating claws on worn-out planks.