The thing that my wife and I unwittingly helped to unleash has destroyed mankind, except for a tiny, ravished remnant. Without someone with knowledge like hers in one of the most unique fields of human study, it wouldn’t have happened. Without her genius mind connecting seemingly un-connectable dots, it wouldn’t have happened. Without the expedition that found what, to me now, should never have been found, it wouldn’t have happened. Without the expedition having been so successful, it wouldn’t have happened. Without some seemingly random mutations, it wouldn’t have happened. Without the release of the virus, it wouldn’t have happened. The virus. The Berserker Virus. Once the “release line” was crossed, there was no going back, no matter how good the containment attempts were. And, my goodness, were those containment attempts good! But they didn’t work. And that is how I come to be sitting on a rocky prominence in the Drakensberg mountain-range looking out at the vast expanse of hills, and fields below, in what once was South Africa.
Maybe I should formally introduce myself. Frank Smit. Professor-of-Napoleonic-Studies-at-the-University-of-Kwa-Zulu-Natal-turned medical doctor. The year is 2020. I am currently 40 years old. The month is September, date is the 21st. It would have been my wife’s 38th birthday today. And since I have survived, I thought it best to honour her memory by putting to paper the events that began in July of 2019. It truly is remarkable to think it has been over a year now.
My wife’s name is, or was, should I say, Rachel. She was a world expert in an extremely narrow field - that of medical mytho-archeology. It sounds really impressive, and to tell you the truth, I still don’t fully grasp it. But I know enough to give you plenty of back-story to my account of the events from that July morning onwards. We had two children. Carmen would have been seven this December if she had survived. Matthew, our honeymoon baby, is now fourteen years old, and has matured unnaturally fast since the gates of Tartarus were opened and has seen more horror than a boy of his age should.
Rachel’s expertise took her all over the world, and most of the time I got to go with her. In the beginning, when she was just starting her PhD, I would lead all of her expeditions. Those days were exciting, and often frustrating. Her first PhD finally and conclusively dated fossilised bones at being no more than seven to ten thousand years old. It took her five years to have her PhD granted because her research and conclusions were so earth shattering that the staid old scientific community resisted it to the last. Kind of like General George Custer. But, just like him, their days were numbered. As a result of her work, there followed a slew of high-profile research projects that confirmed her findings on multiple continents and under the authority of a number of world-class universities. Within five years of that PhD having been granted, the scientific community finally put to bed the reign of Darwinism and Neo-Darwinism, which had held sway over the scientific community ever since the very first publication of Darwin’s ‘Origins’. Intelligent Design became the new gold-standard for scientific research. To us, it was a huge leap in the right direction, and was far more than we could ever have hoped or expected. Those who had wanted to publish research that had relied on the premise of Intelligent Design before Rachel’s paper had stood no chance. But after Darwin was laid to rest, there was once again a major upsurge in scientific discovery. For decades, research had kept scientific knowledge growing at a slow rate, despite what the popular media said. However, soon that knowledge exploded, and major advances were made in every major field of study.
Rachel went on to do a further five PhD’s, during which time I studied medicine, did my internship and Community service and then immediately specialised in Pathology. Rachel’s last two PhD’s focused more on the medical side, and especially ancient medicine. She became a leading expert in Norse medicine and mythology for her last paper, and the second last was the about the medical advances of the ancient Zimbabweans and the impact they had on the other ancient, post-Babel peoples in Southern Africa. She was the youngest person to ever achieve six PhDs in the space of four years (that is the granting of them, not necessarily the hair-raising hell-ride through Darwin-infested waters!).
It was because of these two fields of expertise that she received an unusual Skype call on July 3rd 2019. It was because of these two fields of expertise that she received an unusual Skype call on February 3rd 2019. Akeesha, one of her graduate students from University of KZN in Durban had taken up a position in Norway teaching Norse mythology to under-graduates. During a local dig in the mountains north of Oslo, Akeesha and her students had excavated a very strange and never-before-seen artefact that made no sense to her. The reason for this was that the runes on the piece of pottery were much older than the oldest known Nordic runes, and along with them was accompanied drawings and another artefact. This second one was a perfectly round stone that had obviously been placed inside the original pot, which was recovered fully and re-constructed. The strange thing was that the rock had been engraved with a type of hieroglyphic that seemed to have elements of Norse and some completely new element that had never been seen before. It took Akeesha and her fellow Professors some eight months to unlock the first two words of the Nordic runes only, and that slow progress made Akeesha call Rachel.
I know I’m probably boring you, but I have to write this down so that maybe some day my stuff will be dug up and deciphered and those future archeologists will be warned against the Apocalypse. And, I don’t care if I’m boring you - it’s cathartic for me!
Anyway, now that I’ve had my explosion, I will carry on. But I will cut a long story a bit shorter. The pottery runes described a meeting that took place between one of the first Nordic warlords, and a group of powerful warriors described in the runes as the “Dark gods”. But the runes for “dark” were not apparently describing their fierceness or magical power. They were describing the warriors’ appearance. But it was known that the meeting that took place happened about 1100 years before any Nordic race came into contact with any African or Middle-Eastern people. And, the runes placed this particular Nordic clan a good 2000 years before it had been thought the Norse had formed into a particular group and in an area that was thought to have been covered by the post-Flood ice-sheet. Anyway, they subsequently deduced that the group had been isolated from the outside world because of the geographic location. Even though they were well north of the ice-sheet limit, it seems they lived in a valley that somehow kept ambient temperatures at survivable levels, and after more extensive digging, it was found that a whole village had once be there. As the Ice Age neared it’s end, it seems that these “dark gods” had ventured from a very distant land on some sort of sea-going craft built in a long-boat configuration, but was much more durable. This is where Akeesha and her colleagues began to draw blanks. More and more questions piled up, so she called Rachel, and after a three-hour Skype conference-call, Rachel and I began sifting through the information that had been sent to us. (You notice how liberally I am including myself in this venture! (Cheesy grin in the background)). By day three of our investigations, our joint study-room in our home in Winston Park was filled with pictures, diagrams, multiple MacBooks and desktop computers. It was looking like your typical manic Professor’s office. I was staring at a diagram of the valley in Norway where the discoveries had been made, admiring the military knowledge that those people must have possessed, and on my iPad on the desk next to me was an image taken of the some of the stone engravings laid alongside some runes that looked similar. By this point I had learned to read Nordic runes like I knew Afrikaans. I knew the answers to many of the questions lay right in front of us, but it eluded my brain.
Suddenly, there was a sharp intake of breath from my wife from across the room, and a sudden silence.
“Frankie, I think I have figured it out, but it is beyond the craziest thing that even I could dream up.” There was obvious excitement on her face and in her voice.
“Look at those images right in front of you, but instead of the valley on your Macbook screen bring up an image of the last few rune ‘words’ on the pottery shards.” Having done that, she continued, “See the runes that make up the word . That is the oldest recorded version of the god Odin - Gwadan. But here, these runes tell us that he was a real person, and that he was the Warrior-Chieftain of this clan. Now look at the hieroglyphics on the stone engravings directly half way through. The hieroglyphs are similar in shape. But open the image of those in Photoshop and fiddle with the contrast, remove the greens and bring out the reds.” I duly followed orders, and suddenly gasped. Underneath the engraving was the impression of another engraving, but not done with any sharp instrument. They must have used some sort of dye - even luminous dye that only reveals itself under certain lights. Kind of like certain bank notes that we use, aaaah, used! Beneath the engravings was the unmistakable shape of the Zimbabwe ruins, but with a number of other structures attached, obviously showing it in it’s original shape.
“But honey, that’s not all. Read the last few lines of the runes on the pottery shard. No, let me just tell you. The secret of the Bezerker state is revealed. There seems to have been a certain genus of early wolf which was sacrificed before battle and the warriors drank the blood of the sacrificed animals, and then wore their skins and covered themselves in the wolf’s blood. It describes how it would drive the warriors into a frenzy, and we know the rest. So the original inhabitants of the Zimbabwe settlement were much older than I thought, and the climate must have been much cooler because there were great populations of wolf-type animals. We always thought those engravings in the Zimbabwe ruins were simply early kinds of the current Wild Dog, but now it seems like they were these wolf-kind ancestors. And, from what these are saying, I’m beginning to be able to decipher the stone hieroglyphics and so far it seems that the “Dark gods” were driven from their land by warming temperatures and by the subsequent dying out of the wolf-kind population. They wanted to find a cooler place to live, and somehow, where the current Great Rift Valley is now, there was a huge river existed back then, obviously a left-over of the Great Flood, which they said took seven days to cross and I’ve got to the point where they say it took them two full moons to enter the ‘Great Circular Sea’ - my guess that being the Mediterranean. But the parts I can’t yet decipher probably describe how they ended up so far north. So, these “Dark gods” were given deity status in that early Nordic Valley because there was some kind of property in the wolf blood that really did cause a Bezerker state. Wolves were bred specifically for the purpose of preparing the Bezerkers for battle. The ancient Zimbabweans brought a pack of these wolf-kind with them on their journey north, and the Nordic runes end with a chant of praise to the ‘Dark gods’ for bringing with them the power to defeat their enemies.”
She sat back in her chair with a look of triumph on her face, grinning from ear to ear.
“So, Miss-Multiple-PhD,” I said in a fun way, “what ist thou bidding?”
“Well, I won’t take much longer to finish deciphering the pottery hieroglyphs - by the ay, they have some interesting correlations to very early Egyptian hieroglyphs - and once that’s done, we need to arrange an …”
“…Expedition to the Zimbabwe ruins.” We finished the sentence together and then burst out laughing.
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