Phobos: Mayan Fear by Steve Alten Page B

physical dimension—
    “—destroying the entire planet.”

    The approaching dawn burns Mitchell Kurtz’s eyes. From his perch on the deserted mountain highway he can see wisps of fog gathering along the treetops below, the village of Peki’in still asleep. The bodyguard yawns, then stands and stretches. He contemplates another set of push-ups, opting instead for an energy bar.
    The motion sensors in his glasses alert him to the intruder a split second before he activates his pain cannon.
    “Ow!”
    He traces the woman’s scream, surprised to find his new female acquaintance lying on the tarmac next to her road bike, the metal still sparking. “Arlene?”
    “Albert?”
    The name catches him off guard, Kurtz momentarily forgetting his new alias. Albert Phaneuf … you’re a movie producer. “Arlene, what are you doing out here?”
    “Taking my morning ride. What are you doing here?”
    “We just finished shooting a scene, that’s why they closed the road. Didn’t you see all the vans?”
    “No.”
    He helps the brunette off the ground, her well-endowed bust enhanced by her neoprene bodysuit. “Arlene, how did you get past the roadblock?”
    She slips her arms around his neck, their lips inches apart. “I told them I was in your movie.”
    Kurtz collapses in her arms, the paralyzed bodyguard never seeing the barbed prong of the divorced woman’s ring as it pricks the back of his neck.

    “Jake, that makes no sense. If humanity was wiped out in 2012, how were we born? Why are we still here in 2047? And what kind of anomaly could annihilate an entire planet?”
    “I cannot provide all the details, to do so could jeopardize your mission. What I can tell you is the anomaly’s creation and subsequent expansion into the physical universe opened wormholes, space-time portals. They are unstable and largely rendered moot … unless someone enters. In that scenario, an alternate universe is created, the repercussions of which can affect all physical existence.”
    “I’m still lost. Who entered the wormhole?”
    “You did. As Chilam Balam.”
    The blood rushes from Manny’s face. “The cenote … But that happened more than five hundred years ago.”
    “As Einstein proved, time is not linear. While the anomaly bound the wormholes to Earth, some appeared in our past and present, others opened in the future. Ultimately, that’s what offered humanity a second shot at salvation. A wormhole opened in near-Earth space on July 4, 2047, again as a result of the anomaly created by the Doomsday device. Lilith’s fleet of Mars shuttles were inhaled down the time tunnel’s vortex, depositing them on Earth, only Earth millions of years in the future. The planet and cosmos were so alien, the colonists had no idea they had crash-landed on their own home world.”
    “What happened to them?”
    “Though the surface was barren, the sky harbored a magnificent domed city hovering in the clouds, possessing technologies so advanced they remained inaccessible to the Mars colonists. The cloud city had been abandoned, or so the colonists thought. Over time, consumption of the water supply genetically altered the colonists, allowing them access inside the alien structures. One of these vaults contained the physical remains of an advanced species of humanoids, possessing elongated skulls.
    “The post-human society had split into two sects. One sought to explore the physical universe; the second desired to access the higher dimensions of existence. To do so, the latter group abandoned their physical forms to unleash their consciousness into the spiritual realm … something that violated the laws of creation.
    “Lilith, my son, Devlin, and all but a few of the surviving Mars colonists discovered the post-humans’ remains. Accessing their DNA, the colonists became more powerful than they already were. In doing so, these fallen ones—the Nephilim—condemned themselves to a purgatorylike existence in a spiritual realm—an eleventh