I Remember the Zenith 

I

A short story

Undisclosed location, Southern California 

August 10, 2027

“Line!”  The sound of Dr. Shanlings voice easily carried the hundred feet upward, reaching the opening above him. 

      Soon enough he felt the descent begin again as someone above began doling out more rope.  Looking around he could tell he was in a large cavernous area that was almost pitch black.  Looking below his feet he could make out the dim headlamp of his most senior grad student Marcus.  Patiently waiting for the doctor's arrival, he tended the bottom end of the rope with care.  Even with his headlamp the walls of the cavern were too far away to be seen, so there wasn’t much detail to make out in the enormous chamber.  As far as he could tell it was a natural formation.

      His feet touched down and Marcus began hurriedly unclasping him and helping him shuck off the harness he had been hooked up to.  Leading off to the right he could see a trail of glow sticks making a path that trailed off into the darkness.  Marcus must have already walked to the site and laid them down so it would be  easier for him to make his way there.

“How far?” Was all he asked while looking in the direction of the glow sticks

“Not very” Marcus replied

“The path from here is relatively flat except for a spot at the end where it drops about a foot so watch out”.  Marcus wasted no more time and began walking the path of glow sticks.

“Have you seen it?…what does it look like?”  His breath was coming quickly now as his excitement built. Dr. Shanling rarely left his office these days, this discovery though, had been too good to miss out on.  

“I did see it…it’s…hard to explain” He left it at that.

    It had been only a few months after the disaster when the hole above him was discovered by some amatuer adventurers.  A new trend the young people were hyper about.  They called it “venturing”.  Without even thinking about it they had cobbled together their own climbing equipment and lowered themselves into it.  It had been their excited exclamations and wild stories, told in his office, that had brought him all the way out here.  He could barely believe what they had described.

“Is it much further?” He asked, more out of impatience to see it than annoyance with the terrain.

“It’s just up here”. Marcus pointed to the pitch black in front of them vaguely indicating it was just over there.  

     He came to the end of the path noticing there were no more glow sticks leading off anywhere.  Remembering Marcus’ warning he felt with his foot for the advertised drop off.  He didn’t have to search long as his foot soon met open air.  He carefully put it down, making sure he was on solid footing he stepped all the way down to join Marcus in front of it.

    At first, he didn’t know what to say.  Whatever he had been expecting, it wasn’t this.  In front of him was a round column made of some kind of stone he wasn’t familiar with.  He panned the headlamp on his helmet from side to side.  He noticed there were other columns.  Lined off to the right and left as far as he could see.  Made of the same material.  It was red, with white patches here and there.  He looked over to see that Marcus was also giving the column in front of him a thorough examination.  

     Suddenly, without saying a word,  Marcus took out the climbing pick ax he had brought with him and swung it with all his might at the column.  It happened so fast he never heard the anguished cry to stop coming from the doctor.  The ax struck with a resounding clang and bounced off the surface violently, causing a large spark and knocking Marcus off balance enough that he fell.

“Why the hell did you do that?” The doctor exclaimed as he rushed over to help Marcus to his feet.  

“I wanted to see how hard that rock is”

“Well…you certainly accomplished that.  Are you okay?  You hurt?  Anything broken?”  He watched as Marcus felt his extremities looking for any problems.  

“No…I don’t think so.  I’ll tell you what though, that thing has no give whatsoever”.  Looking around searching for and finding, he bent down and picked up the ax that had flown from his hand in the fall.  Hefting in front of the both of them so they could see they were both shocked at the result.  The tip was bent in at an odd angle and showed signs of burning where it had struck the stone.  

“Never seen that before”. Marcus exclaimed with a bewildered look on his face as he examined the damage to his equipment.  Dr. Shanling had to agree, he had also never seen that before. 

“In order for it to do that this rock must be right around the same hardness as diamond”. The doctor thought out loud.  It wasn’t a question it was a statement 

“Just how far do these things go Marcus?”  He asked.

“Not sure, I followed them that way for about twenty columns where this plateau drops off about 500 feet..haven’t checked the other direction yet.”  The doctor nodded his head absently absorbing the information while continuing his examination.  Then something occurred to him.

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“Could it be?”  He asked the open air, it was a question more to himself than to anyone who might hear it.

“What was that?” Marcus asked.  

   The doctor didn’t reply. Instead he cast his light about the chamber as if looking for something.  After a few seconds of wildly gyrating light beams he seemed to have found what he was looking for.  Pointing directly away from the columns he asked.

“That’s north…right?”  Looking at Marcus for confirmation.

“Uhhh…I’m not sure.  How could we even tell down here?”

“Nevermind…I’ll confirm it another way” The doctor reached into his pants pocket and pulled an ancient looking brass object.  Opening it up revealed that it was a compass, from what looked like the sixties.

“I forget sometimes that you kids don’t think like that.  You would have pulled your phone out to check.  Down this far though I’m betting there’s no signal.  Well, then it’s time for a taste of the 11th century.”  The doctor was always putting things like this into his lessons.  

    His constant reminder that although the modern world is fantastic, it still can’t improve on some very old ideas.  He seemed to enjoy that fact quite a bit in Marcus’ opinion.  The doctor was squinting in the dark trying to get a proper look at the compass reading, murmuring to himself as he did it.  

“So..if that’s north, and that way is west”. He concluded by pointing off to their left.

“Then….it could very well be”. Suddenly whatever had occurred to him stopped him cold.  Rather than explain himself he turned to Marcus and asked.

“If I used the name The Zenith…would you know who I’m talking about?…you’re a little too young to have been there personally.”  He watched Marcus search his memory, finally coming up with an answer.

“Do you mean that super dude who just disappeared?'' The doctor looked at him for a beat then just nodded his head.

“Yes…the super dude who disappeared.  That’s correct.  Do you know much about him besides that he disappeared?”

“No not really, I think my dad mentioned him once in a speech about how ‘you never know’ and such”. Marcus shrugged his shoulders sheepishly

“Yes…you never really do know.  The point is there is much much more to the story than a young person like you might know about.  I was a younger man in those days.  A new professor with only a year of teaching under my belt.  It was one day in a sea of days resembling each other when out of nowhere he just appeared”. The doctor now turned back to the columns.  His eyes now laser focused, he took the time now to have an even closer look at them while he spoke.

“It was a marvelous thing to find out in your lifetime that there were in fact super beings in the universe.  Not only in the universe but right here on Earth. He was straight out of a comic book.  He wasn’t human, we found that out later.  To most people that didn’t seem to matter though.  He looked and sounded human.  The things he could do though, told us all that he was far from human.  Do you know he once disarmed an entire country just by thinking about it?…yes indeed he was a marvel to behold.  He also did a lot of strange things too.  For one thing, he didn’t save everyone he could.  He had the ability too, just not the will apparently.  

    Often though he would say he was here to save us all…and then he would cryptically say, well, most of you anyway.  Which is a thing I always found so bizarre about him.  He said that phrase over and over whenever he was in public, like a mantra.  Until now though…it never made sense”. Something else occurred to the doctor and he consulted the compass again while walking a few paces west.

“Maybe he did….”  Marcus, now wholly confused, blurted out the first thing that came to mind.

“Maybe he did what doctor?”  Dr Shanling popped his head up suddenly as if freed from a spell

“Maybe he did save us all Marcus…most of us that is.  Do you know what’s directly above us?…”. He pointed upwards for emphasis.

“Sure..Border field state park.  We’re right on the very edge of it.”  Nodding his head in agreement the doctor continued.

“Do you know much about what’s inside the state park?…As in anything strange that doesn’t belong for instance.”  He could tell from the confused look on Marcus’ face that he had no idea.  

“If we could keep going south from here past these columns.  Eventually we would come to a place that sits below the former residence of the being we once knew as The Zenith.  His party house..or so everyone thought.  This can’t be a coincidence”. The doctor was now breathing a little heavier as a realization settled upon him.

“Doctor…I just don’t get what you're saying.  Are you saying you think these columns were placed here by that super being?”  It was his turn to scrutinize the row more closely now. 

“Yes..that’s exactly what I’m implying.  He put them here, in secret.  Oddly though, they did in fact save most of us.  You know of course what was supposed to happen that day”. He didn’t have to say any more than that day.

     Everyone in California remembered that day, those that had survived it that is. A little known fact about that day, no matter how horrible that day had been there had always been a silver lining to it…it could have been way worse.  

“We’ve wondered since that day what exactly happened to halt it.  It was nothing we had done, that’s for sure.  The whole state should have slid into the pacific. It didn’t though..right when we thought it was at its worst, the slide stopped, the earthquakes ceased, the ground went still.  I think THIS…is the reason for that”  He pointed to the row of columns.  

   It was then that everything dawned on Marcus. Looking down at his feet at what they were standing his mind put two and two together.  The entire San Andreas fault had destabilized at once.  It seemed that the bottom section of the shelf was now butted up against this row of seemingly indestructible stone columns.  As impossible as it seemed, the evidence pointed to only that conclusion.  Marcus gave his head a shake and asked the first question that came to mind

“How could he possibly know to place these columns here?”  The doctor looked over to him considering the question.  

“Of the things we do know he did that you and I would consider miracles, something like this would be well within his abilities.  He did things that are unchangeable, even with today’s technology.  Some of it, maybe not ever.. But this….was not something we even considered, and he never ever hinted at it”. He looked down for a second before continuing.

“You see, he left us.  However, in a way, he had already done that some time earlier.  About a year before his dramatic departure he stopped going out in public.  He retreated to his property on this reservation.  Just a few miles away as a matter of fact.  He stopped showing up at parties and big events, he stopped saving random people.  He wasn’t seen by anyone for almost a whole year…and then he crashed the White House correspondent’s dinner to announce his immediate departure, never to return”. The doctor took a moment to visualize his own reaction to the news at the time.

“And now we have this.  Do you know just how bad it could have been? No?…I suppose most people don’t.  Most were just glad to have survived.  We had so much to be thankful for…it’s a wonder no one ever once thought we might have someone to thank. If the continental slide hadn’t been halted it would have been more than just the US that would have paid a dear price.  The models I’ve seen, plotting the destruction for the event, seemed to indicate that any country with a coastline facing the pacific would have been affected.  The demise of the sixth largest economy in the world, California, would have crashed every major market on earth.  Overnight several countries would have entered the third world involuntarily.  Hawaii would be wiped off the map completely.  Estimated loss of life north of 500 million.  And none of it happened, because of these columns.”  His face was now pale in his moment of contemplation of this event.  

“We’re not even taking into account the possibility that all these destabilizing activities would lead to war.  The less scrupulous of the world’s governments would seize upon this misfortune to improve their own positions.  This one catastrophe would have caused a massive global realignment.  One that would not have favored us very much at all.  But we were spared that.  By these columns.” He stopped for a second to reach his hand out.  This time more carefully and with a touch of reverence.

  After a moment both men in silent agreement sat down in front of the columns.  They stayed that way for hours just staring at a miracle….