The Lost Continent

Umm... yeah.... here is the first draft of my prologue.... I guess I'll improve it later. (Everything can always be improved)

The Lost Continent

Prologue: Into The Blue

Mary Ellen Washington stared uncomprehendingly at the tall man sitting at her desk. She closed her eyes and let the day’s actions flood through her head. She’d always known that the apocalypse was going to be a tough day but she’d never thought of any scenario that could be so devastatingly awful. As she glanced up at the calendar the date seemed to burn itself into her eyes. 21^st December 2012. Today was her son’s sixteenth birthday. And possibly his last, she thought.  The mahogany panelled walls of the Oval Office blurred and shimmered as the first female President of the United States and possibly its last, slumped unconscious to the floor, in a dead faint.

“WAKE UP!” The tall man jabbed the cattle prod into President Washington’s side, as she jerked back into a cognisant state, her back arching and tiny sparks leaping coyly through her hair, from strand to smoking strand.

“Tell me where to find the Entrance” he growled menacingly.

“I don’t know what you mean!”

 He prodded her again and she let out a sob choked scream.

“My apologies Mrs. President Ma’am” he sneered sarcastically. “Of course the President of America, the most powerful woman in the world, has no clue where the entrance to your most valuable secret is. It must be some other President Washington I’m thinking of. How silly of me to make such a grievous error.”

He leaned down and slapped her hard on the face, leaving a stinging red mark on her cheek.

“Now tell me where the Entrance is!” he yelled.

“I don’t know what this Entrance place is.”

The tall man snarled and looked down at the twelve bloody corpses littering the cut pile carpet, smearing the white threads of the American eagle a deep crimson, all that remained of the President’s personal bodyguard.

Then he strode across the office to where two people were shackled against the grey stone fireplace. He held a pistol to the older man’s head.

“Where is the location of the Entrance?”

Mary Ellen could only shake her head mutely, as the salty tang of her tears dripped onto her tongue. There was a loud bang and then a fine red miasma splattered against the younger of the two, who vomited onto the floor.

As her husband crumpled, still held in place by the steel manacles, a jagged hole in his face, the tall man stepped aside from Edgar Alan Washington and lovingly caressed the gun before pointing it at her son.

“You’re a hard nut to crack aren’t you Mrs. President?”

Mary’s voice was practically incoherent by this point. “My son, please, don’t kill him!” she begged.

Suddenly a smile broke out across the tall man’s face and he started to hum the words to “I Can’t Decide” by the Scissor Sisters. “I can’t decide whether you should live or die. Oh, you’ll probably go to heaven. Please don’t hang your head and cry” he crooned. The words took on a sickeningly cruel significance.

He picked up a newspaper from the desk and scanned through the headlines. “Sweden Launches First Satellite” glared one. “Mistranslation of Mayan Calendar” blared another.

He read the first article aloud.

“Today marks the launch of the first Swedish satellite- the World Orbital Defence Node or WODEN as it is commonly known. Celebrations are being held in Stockholm at the successful launch of the satellite and the aspirations of Sweden’s spaceflight programme.”

He switched his attention to the second article, hidden away in the back pages.

“Linguists across Central America claim to have discovered a more accurate translation of Tortuguero Monument Six, the Mayan document that claims the world will end on 21^st December this year. According to Dr. Carlos Javez (32) the monument doesn’t talk about the end of the world, but the end of our world, he claimed. The implications of this are yet unknown. It could be referring to the Mayan society, remnants of which still survive in the Amazon rainforest or possibly to their cities. We don’t know. But it does mean all the hype and mass hysteria about this day are totally unfounded...”

The tall man dropped the newspaper onto the floor and raised a hand theatrically.

“Well Mrs President Ma’am”, he whispered conspiratorially, “it seems that I have no option. If murdering your husband had no effect on you then I doubt killing your son would make that much difference. Plus I do believe it’s rather more fun keeping him alive” he grinned maliciously, “for me at least.” He pointed towards the ceiling. “As the Mayans predicted, today is the end of our world. Their world. Your world. It is time to activate WODEN. He pressed a small button on a remote which he had taken from his jacket pocket.

“But isn’t WODEN just a satellite?” Mary Ellen asked nonplussed.

The tall man laughed. “Oh no, oh good gracious no. WODEN is your doom, my dear. In moments it will reduce America to nothing more than history.”

High above the surface of the Earth, matt black panels covering WODEN slid back as a large silver crucible emerged from the depths of the satellite. As the AI inside activated for the first time, it looked across the globe’s landmasses, zeroing in on the stream of numbers emanating from a transmitter in Washington D.C. And then the searing blue light was pulsing down towards the Earth, like the glare of an angry god, enveloping the two continents of America.

A warning light flashed red, as WODEN’s sensors detected an oncoming meteor, calculated its trajectory and arrived at the conclusion of a hundred percent chance of collision. Deep within the core of the AI brain, an emergency command flashed insistently as WODEN activated the OPERA protocols. Still emitting the sparkling blue ray, the neutrino emulsions whisked WODEN deep into the past, a deathly star, plummeting back through history.

And as the blue light enveloped the continents of America, it shone with a blinding intensity, erasing all that it fell upon.  So it was that North and South America, from New York to Los Angeles, from Buenos Aires to Toronto, from the northernmost iceberg to the southernmost point, from Boston to California and everywhere in between, the continents of the Americas vanished into the blue, leaving behind only ocean and silence and the sparkling azure glow.