From Black Rooms by Stephen Woodworth

Author:Stephen Woodworth
Format: epub, mobi

AMONG THE PLAINS AND MESAS WEST OF

ALBUQUERQUE, NEW Mexico, a thorny fence of

wooden posts and barbed wire hemmed in a twenty-acre sprawl of dusty earth and brittle brush. A few head of cattle listlessly ambled the land's perimeter, but they were for show, to make outsiders believe this

compound was simply another ranch. For this patch of desert nurtured a far more precious commodity than livestock--one that had to be isolated and protected from the mass of common humanity.

A large, low, adobe-style building squatted at the center of the property, its brick wal s a burnt umber in the stretching shafts of daybreak as Serena Mfume rumbled up the dirt road toward it in a rented Jeep. To Serena, who spent most of her late teens and early adulthood here, this was a sort of homecoming. Yet the sight of the stark pueblo structure--part bunkhouse, part

temple--did not inspire smiles, but rather a reverential pensiveness, as if she were paying respects at a grave site. The burial mound where her youth was interred. The severity of her mood only intensified when she arrived at the adobe complex, knowing that she had to confront the traumas of both the past and the future. The sound that greeted her as she got out of the Jeep drove the point home. The dry, brisk air of the desert morning quavered with the strangled groans and squeals of people in torment. Serena recognized the cries in an instant; she had made them herself on several

occasions.

They could only have come from the Ash Field.

Serena sighed. She'd hoped that by arriving at dawn, she might meet with Simon before he began the day's training. Alas, Master McCord never was one for letting his acolytes sleep in.

Bypassing the main entrance to the pueblo, Serena went around the western face of the building, toward the place of pain. This ranch served as the private boot camp where Simon McCord indoctrinated his inner

circle of handpicked disciples--conduits he believed had exceptional abilities worthy of his tutelage. To Simon, Violets had an obligation to consecrate their entire lives to the divine duty given them by God. Anything less was sacrilege, and Master McCord used his grueling practice regimen to weed out the weak of wil . Among his hapless acolytes, the Ash Field had earned notoriety as the worst of al these exercises. It resembled nothing more than a vacant square of dirt about twenty feet to a side, the soil distinguished from the surrounding desert by its color--darker in some spots, lighter in others. When not in use, the Field was covered by a broad canvas tarp, anchored in place by heavy metal rods and stakes to protect the sacred ground from the wind and infrequent rain. But today the cover had been drawn back to reveal the Ash Field's singular quintessence of dust: soot imported by the sackful from Auschwitz and Dachau, Hiroshima and

Nagasaki, from napalmed vil ages in Vietnam and from Ground Zero in New York. Anywhere the human form

had been reduced to its elemental carbon and pulverized to a fine powder.

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