40 Days In The Desert

Chapter 1 - Blood On The Sand

Souss-Massa Region, Morocco, 2nd of July 1999

"Eternal Father," I whisper while looking at the clear blue sky above me with the shining sun sending its rays to the already overheated sand underneath my wounded body, "don't leave me."

My fingers are stuck in the terrible bloody mess that my abdomen has become, in a failed attempt to keep myself together. However, I'm completely aware that if I'm not going to die from the hot air around me, or the poisoned sting of any desert animal, the cold of the incoming night will surely do it faster than the wound which created a pool of blood on the sand around me.

By the direction of the lethal shining circle which blinds my view as I try to look after it, it's past noon. This means that only four hours went by since the confrontation which brought me in this state occurred. Two hundred and forty minutes of continuous agony, while my soul refuses to exit my body faster in order for my suffering to end.

But, as I close my eyes trying to avoid the sun, some events of my life start unfolding, almost like I'm watching a movie on fast forward.

Almost nineteen years ago, my father passed away and left me to carry, along with a cursed force legacy, one of the hardest tasks in the history of humanity. A small piece of parchment belonging to one of the best guarded secrets of the Vatican, known also as the Last Scroll of the Apocalypse.

Although I have no idea how such an artifact ended up in my family, my dad was precise about what I should do with it. However, it's safe to say I fucked things up on several occasions during the last couple of years when it comes to guarding it, but that's yet another story to tell.

Securely kept in form of a little pendant, the piece of scroll was nothing but an Aramaic scribble that made absolute no sense to me the first time I took it out of its silvery hideout. And, for many years after, it continued to be just an unimportant piece of parchment in a pendant. Until one day that changed it all, the day when I was about to lose my life because of it.

•

Steinstücken Enclave, Federal Republic of Germany, 5th of April 1987

There is one way out of the Steinstücken Enclave, the southernmost territory of West Berlin where only two hundred people reside, and that is running through one of the most dangerous roads in West Berlin, the Bernhard-Beyer-Straße.

After I "illegally" cross back into my own country and the Federal Republic guards mistake me for an East German spy, things take a tumultuous turn-around. For sure I can let them catch me, and after hours of interrogation, I might get released when I'll tell them the crazy story of traveling through East and West regularly in order to find my sister. Of course, I can do that. But, what's more exciting than running on a tight road, with The Berlin Wall on both your left and right side, a couple of guards shooting at you from behind, while another police car is blocking the way upfront, probably announced by their colleagues who were chasing me?

The tragic aspect is that I don't regret a thing. Early on when I decided to cross through the railway point of Steinstraße, I assumed that this might happen. And, since my senses are hardly ever wrong, I tend to believe that part of me was in need of this dose of adrenaline after three days of unsuccessful searching through East Berlin.

Using my force was always out of topic. I learned it the hard way that under no circumstances I should let loose of the power I have within me. Ever since a terrible incident happened, I put it all in the hands of God and sworn I'll never use it unless it will also be His will. And, judging by the circumstances of my uncanny adventure, it's safe to assume that God won't come to my rescue after I lazily chose a shortcut back into my own side of Berlin, only because I wasn't in the mood to go round and waste more time for the safer option.