Amalfi Echo Read online

  Amalfi Echo

  John Zanetti

  Smashwords edition

  Copyright 2014 John Zanetti

  Fiction by John Zanetti:

  The Gardener Who Could See

  Writing Home

  Amalfi Echo

  War of the Shadows

  Non-fiction:

  The Christchurch Destructor

  Who Owns the Fish?

  Smashwords Edition, License Notes

  Thank you for downloading this e-book. You are welcome to share it with your friends. This book may be reproduced, copied and distributed for non-commercial purposes, provided the book remains in its complete original form.

  Cover images: Blue and red fire dragons image, copyright, Dvargfoto; Burning and exploding Planet Earth image, copyright, Ig0rzh; Images courtesy Dreamstime.com

  Cover design and production by the author. Cover copyright John Zanetti 2014

  This e-book is a work of fiction. All characters in this work are fictitious and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Table of Contents

  Amalfi Echo

  Novels by this author

  About the author

  Amalfi Echo

  The handcuffs bit into Marion’s wrists. A chain, linked through the cuffs, tethered her to the floor. Scattered through the hall of an old desert fortress in Algeria, other prisoners were similarly cuffed and tethered, the passengers, mostly American, of a hijacked airliner. The soft, crumbling walls of the ancient hall muffled scattered conversation, fear and distress in the snatched whispers. Many passengers kept quiet, not wanting to attract attention to themselves, knowing that it was not much protection against a jihadist beheading.

  Across the hall, a man called Digby, whose last name Marion did not know, rose and moved stealthily towards a group of heavily-armed terrorists sprawled over sofas. He was only metres away when they realised that one of their prisoners had freed himself. It was of no consequence. They gave it no thought. One of them raised his assault rifle and sent a burst of fire into the man. Miraculously, the bullets missed, although where they had actually gone couldn’t be discerned. Before any of the others could raise their weapons, a ghostly combat suit or spacesuit flickered and shimmered about Digby. He pointed his hands at the group of men. The air vibrated around them and they were transformed into bloody, quivering heaps. Digby kept moving. He turned and pointed at more jihadists pouring in the doorway. These too, were slaughtered. A grenade tossed in through the doorway exploded harmlessly and silently.

  A hiatus followed. Digby took many small, glowing spheres from a ghostly pocket and rolled them along the floor. A swarm of jellyfish creatures popped from the spheres and darted about in the air. They vanished out through the doorways and into the corridors of the fortress. Screams and gunfire followed. More glowing spheres rolled along the floor. From these sprung huge, pale and transparent three-legged Trifid creatures, much of whom disappeared up through the ceiling until the creatures’ legs walked through the walls and away from the hall.

  Digby came over to Marion, reaching behind her. His hands were warm on her skin. The handcuffs fell away.

  “I’m not really from East Lansing, Michigan,” Digby said.

  “I didn’t know that you were,” Marion said, a stranger speaking the words.

  “Then it’s even less relevant.”

  “I was puzzled by your accent. I couldn’t work out where you were from,” Marion said. Although she did wonder why she was making polite conversation.

  “I never did get the hang of American accents,” Digby said. He left her, going to an empty corner of the hall and sketching with his hands to bring into being three enormous screens set at angles to each other. Scenes of carnage quickly unfolded on the screens in 3-D and living colour.

  The jellyfish creatures were killing anything that moved and were impervious to the hail of bullets and grenades from the terrorist fighters. The few that tried to surrender were mercilessly cut down whether carrying weapons or not and this extended to the many families of the fighters in the fortress. A group of women and children had fled into a storeroom and cowered in a corner, the women trying to hide their children under their black chador. Perhaps they thought the cloth, or their Faith, would protect them. Neither did. Their dying screams filled the hall. The Trifids, standing astride the fortress on giant legs, hammered the surrounding city, suppressing rocket attacks and attempts to reinforce the fortress. Whole city blocks crumbled before the onslaught.

  Digby returned to Marion who had not moved from her position on the floor. She stared blankly at him. From another ghostly pocket he took a couple of small green lozenges and went to press one of them against her forehead. Marion pulled away in sudden fright.

  “I’ve just freed you,” Digby said. “Why would I now hurt you?”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” Marion said. “I’m sure I could think of a dozen reasons.” Although, in truth, thinking was beyond her at this point.

  “Band-Aids for the mind,” Digby said. “These, let’s call them ‘green lozenges’, will take all the trauma and tuck it away into a box so that you can function normally. You’ll still have to deal with the trauma later, though.”

  Marion didn’t know what to say and, unresistingly, allowed Digby to press one of the lozenges to her forehead. Seconds later, as Digby had promised, all the pain, all the hurt and fright, sucked away into a little box tucked in the back corner of her mind. Within moments, her mind was clear again.

  Digby turned towards the screens and said something to them in a musical language. She could see the actual notes issuing from his mouth like music had been written in the air. One of the screens changed to show an aerial, or satellite view, of another city where jet fighters were taking off from an airport. Now dust and debris obscured the images as though the entire area had been hit by missiles.

  “Libya,” Digby said, by way of explanation. He stood up and went to another prisoner, still cuffed and tethered. This was a young American teenager called Tessa. He freed her and, without asking, pressed a green lozenge to her forehead. Then he went back to stand in front of the screens.

  Tessa came over and hunkered down beside Marion. “WTF?” she said.

  Even in their brief acquaintance Marion had already noticed Tessa’s liberal use of four-letter words. “Your parents wouldn’t like that,” she said.

  “My parents are dead. Not that she cares.” Tessa jerked a thumb at Joanne Fleischer, a middle-aged woman, still handcuffed and staring uncomprehendingly at Tessa.

  Marion already knew that Tessa’s parents had died in a car accident, having learnt this in a conversation on the plane with Joanne although why the woman had felt the need to unburden herself on a stranger with such intimate detail escaped Marion altogether. Marion had gathered that Tessa was in foster care and that Joanne had been tasked with returning Tessa to the United States because, so the story went, Tessa had run away to the UK, having stowed away in the crew’s quarters of a cruise ship. Marion herself had been on the plane because, after 18 years in the UK, she was finally going home although she was still not sure what had prompted the decision.

  The rest of the airliner’s passengers, still imprisoned, had, till now, been mesmerised by events which had unfolded too swiftly to fully absorb. Now they began to focus on the possibility that they too could be freed. Demands for help began to flow towards Marion.

  “Tessa,” Joanne called. “Go and get that guy and ask him to come and help us.”

  “You didn’t say, ‘please,’” Tessa said.

  Marion scrambled to her feet. “We’ve got to help them.” She went over to Digby. “We need to help the others too.” Yet she knew she had said it without conviction, already having a
sinking feeling that Digby was perfectly well aware that the others were still imprisoned and had made no move to help them. “Why Tessa and me, anyway?”

  “Little busy right now,” Digby said, gesturing at the screens. “Wars to fight and so on.”

  “Only busy when it suits you, I’m thinking,” Marion said. Her reply had more bite than she had intended. She backpedalled. “I don’t want you to think we’re ungrateful.”

  “The others are not my responsibility,” Digby said.

  “And Tessa and me are your responsibility? How do you figure that?” The trend of the conversation was beginning to frighten Marion. Had they simply swapped one captor for another?

  “Relax,” Digby said. “After we leave here, you go wherever you want.”

  Which wasn’t really a satisfactory answer. Marion left it for the moment because a bad thought had occurred to her. “Are you intending to leave the rest of them behind? You can’t do that. The terrorists will kill them.”

  “They are not my responsibility.”

  “I am not leaving without them,” Marion said. She meant it too.

  Digby hesitated. Sensing an opening, Marion said, “There are children here, Digby. There’s no way I could leave them behind and live with myself.” It was the simple truth.

  “Well, now I think about it,” Digby said, “this could be useful training for you.” He tossed an invisible something over to her. “I cut you free with this.” A short silver rod appeared in her hands. “It comes with instructions,” Digby said and turned, with an air of finality, back to the screens.

  “Useful training.” Marion didn’t like the sound of that but right now, it was much more important to free the other passengers. As she hurried away towards them she found that the silver rod did indeed come with instructions. “It’s speaking to me,” she said to Tessa, showing her the silver rod.

  Tessa had been following the exchange with Digby. Her eyes lit up. “Alien technology. What does it do?”

  “It’s speaking in my mind,” Marion said.

  “No shit!” Tessa said. “Can I hold it?”

  “No. It’s a one-woman gizmo. It’s bonding to me so that only I can use it.” Marion frowned at the rod, concentrating. An intense metre-long, glacial blue light, shot out of one end. Marion concentrated again, reducing the blade to a couple of centimetres. She used the silver rod to cut the cuffs and chains from the other passengers. When they were all free, everyone stood around not sure what to do next.

  “Listen in, people,” Marion said. “As soon as Digby has a moment, you know, the war and all that, I’ll see what the plan is for getting us home.”

  “We should cover them up,” a woman said, pointing at the ruined and bloody bodies of the terrorists. “The children shouldn’t be seeing this.”

  “Sounds like you’ve got the job then,” said Marion. “Perhaps some of you others could help as well.”

  “Digby, huh?” a man said. “He got a last name to go with that?”

  Marion had to admit that she knew nothing about Digby, not even his last name.

  “So who put you in charge?” the man continued, standing aggressively, with his head thrust forward. A fragile thing, gratitude.

  Tessa jumped in. “If it wasn’t for Ms. Dath Vader here, jerk off, you’d still be tied up waiting to be an ass-wipe.”

  “I want you over here right now,” Joanne Fleischer said to Tessa.

  Tessa’s immediate response was to give her the finger and say, “Eat this, bitch.” In an aside she said to Marion, “Do the light sabre thing. That’ll freak her out.”

  “That will be enough, Tessa,” Marion said, wondering why she felt this overpowering urge to protect Tessa, whom she hardly knew.

  Joanne Fleischer addressed Marion. “That child is a ward of the court and you have no authority over her. I warn you that you risk being in breach of applicable laws here and may have a case to answer, on our return to the United States.”

  Tessa turned her back on the others, so that she could whisper in Marion’s ear without them hearing. “I can’t go back into foster care. They did… bad things to me. You know what I mean? I’ve told them, Fleischer and the others, what’s been happening and they freaking ignore me. I’m not going back. I’ll kill myself first.”

  Unfortunately, Marion had no way of telling whether this was true or not. She looked at the tattoos covering Tessa’s left arm and down one leg. The most striking tattoo circled her right eye, reaching up into her hairline and completely obscuring the top right hand corner of her face. Perhaps it was not just a defiant statement but an attempt to hide an attractive face lying underneath.

  “We may not even get out of here so let’s wait and see what happens,” Marion replied to Tessa.

  Unexpectedly, Tessa snuggled into her like a lizard trying to hide inside Marion’s clothing. It should have been quite inappropriate, yet the flood of protectiveness overpowering Marion stopped her from shrinking away. Encouraged, Tessa said, “You’re the only one who cares about me. No one else does. Don’t let them take me away.”

  “Tessa, do you know about advocacy? These are people who are experienced with situations like yours and may be able to speak on your behalf. But I can’t promise you anything and right now we’ve got to focus on getting out of here.”

  Marion had spoken loudly enough so that Joanne could hear so she didn’t bother replying to Joanne who also didn’t speak but stood glaring at her. However, Joanne made no move to come closer, to physically take Tessa away so perhaps she too was thinking of the light sabre gizmo. To discourage her further, Marion moved herself and Tessa over to the screens, to the uncertain protection of Digby. After a time, he joined them, sitting down on the floor, so that the three of them formed a triangle.

  “Not much will happen now for a while,” Digby said. “They can’t penetrate our defences and have fallen back to work out what to do next. Gives us a little time to talk and, possibly, that’s overdue.”

  Marion needed no second urging and started with, “I don’t imagine that it was a coincidence that your seat on the plane was so close to ours.”

  “No. But the same could be said for you sitting beside Tessa, who was a total stranger to you.”

  “That was nothing,” Marion replied. “I wanted an aisle seat and managed a swap with someone else. It was entirely coincidental that the seat was beside Tessa.”

  “Not so. In fact, you wanted that swap to be close to Tessa, even though, at the time, you had no idea she even existed,” Digby said.

  “I just wanted an aisle seat. I ended up beside Tessa. End of story,” Marion said.

  “Yeah, the bitch wanted the window seat,” Tessa said.

  “Tessa, I’m not a big fan of Joanne Fleischer myself,” Marion said, “but she is only trying to do her job.”

  “You don’t know anything. Joanne is part of the conspiracy,” Tessa said. “My Mom was going to be President.”

  “Of the United States?” Marion said, taken aback.

  “Uh huh,” Tessa said.

  “Happens to be true,” Digby said. “Until a mysterious and not very much investigated car accident happened three years ago.”

  “How do you know about that?” Tessa said, her face falling.

  “Accessed your records,” Digby said. “Let’s leave that for later.”

  “I want to know why you were on that plane,” Marion said.

  “Because I was following the two of you, or rather, not you, but something called an ‘Amalfi Echo’ which I’ll explain in a minute.”

  Digby produced from nowhere an object like a tropical sea shell, gnarled, with pearly iridescence. “The Amalfi Echo is the key to all of this and it’s best shown rather than explained.” Digby stood up and led them over to the other passengers, selecting a businessman who had a bad case of nerves, fidgeting and constantly flicking glances at anything that moved. He shrank back in alarm as Digby approached.

  “I haven’t done anything,” he said with fear
in his voice. He appealed to the others. “Jesus. Help me.”

  The rest of the passengers edged away.

  “Settle down,” Digby said to him. “Your life is in Marion’s hands, not mine. I want you to help me with a simple demonstration and you might even learn something.” Without waiting for an answer he pointed the sea shell at the man. An aura manifested itself about the man, made up of millions of long hair-like tendrils emanating from his body and swaying as though underwater or bending before a breeze. Digby now pointed the shell at himself and a similar aura became visible.

  Interested, despite themselves, many of the passengers moved closer to get a better view.

  “The aura you’re seeing is the life force every living organism has,” Digby continued, “and you might regard it as the soul. Notice how the aura around this man is bending away from me as though seeking to get away from me. Notice how my aura is bending away or seeking to escape this man too. This is because we don’t like each other—.”

  “I never said that,” the man protested.

  “You don’t need to. The evidence is here. It is this effect, or process, that occurs when we instantly dislike or like a total stranger from across the room which your scientists have explained in various ways, however, their explanations are incorrect. The life force is like a magnetic field which can attract or repel other life forces but let’s not go into that now, suffice to say that it exists.”

  Digby made some unobtrusive movement and the auras vanished. Now he turned the shell towards Marion and Tessa. The difference was immediately obvious. Their auras strained towards each other and were much bigger than the auras that had been seen before, so much so, that they easily crossed the distance between Tessa and Marion, the tendrils intertwining and locking together.

  “Clearly, your auras like each other and you can also see that the auras are much bigger than ours which is unusual in itself but there’s something more.” Digby moved the shell closer to Marion, pointing to a specific spot in her aura. A window opened in the aura, giving the impression that the shell was zooming in on a specific spot and presenting it in much greater detail. A pulsating, heart-like object came into view.