They took a black canvas tarp from the back of Numec's SUV and draped it over his body, weighing it all down with rocks. Davila had wanted to take the body with them so she could more closely examine the mysterious blue fabric, but Delbert and Peter convinced her to let the authorities deal with it.

Peter drove them all back down the mountain in Numec's SUV, thankful to have the steering wheel in his hands to keep them from shaking. At the rocky knoll, he stopped next to his mother's brown Corolla and got out. The car listed under a fresh shroud of snow, its front-left tire down in the ditch. Opening the passenger door, he rummaged through the glove compartment until he found the cassette tape he was after, Grieg's Peer Gynt Suite.

They continued down the snowy road in silence. Davila sat in the front passenger seat, Delbert in the second row, the black container on his lap, his arm around Demi. The girl leaned close and held the bandana to her grandfather's forehead.

Brisling was waiting for them on the front porch of Delbert's house. Demi marched right past him through the open front door, rifle slung over her shoulder. As the rest filed by in silence, Brisling informed them that he had been unable to contact the Feds, or anyone for that matter. There was no cell signal, and Gryphus had cut the cables to the satellite dish.

Peter stoked the fire in the stove, his hands still trembling. Davila cleared a space on the coffee table for Delbert to set the black container. Relieved of its weight, the old man fell into his armchair and stared numbly at the bloody towels in the hallway.

He pressed the blood-soaked bandana to his forehead. "What the hell happened here?"

Peter closed the stove's little door. "We had no choice. He would have killed us."

"Who would have killed you?"

"Numec's little buddy," said Brisling, lifting a clear plastic bag of mostly melted snow to his swollen eye. "Don't go into the downstairs bedroom."

Davila barely acknowledged the conversation. She stared at the black container weighing down Delbert's coffee table. It was one of those impact-resistant, waterproof cases with heavy latches all around.

Brisling set aside the bag of snow. "So where's Jason Numec?"

"We didn't have a choice with him, either," said Delbert. Demi sat at the dining room table, face buried in her folded arms, rifle slung haphazardly over the back of a chair.

"Ah, Christ, really?" Brisling plopped onto the couch and put on his glasses. He could open his right eye now, but the lens was still cracked. "We needed him alive. He might have known how to stop JCAV. He might have built in a weakness, a kill-switch."

"He said he had nothing to do with making that virus."

"So you asked him about it?"

Delbert hesitated.

"Look. I know he was your friend, but the Feds are going to make you talk, whenever they decide to show up." He twisted around and parted the curtains, careful it seemed to avoid the showy plant growing on the sill.

Delbert gingerly peeled the bandana from his forehead. The bleeding had finally stopped. "I won't let them set foot in my house."

"You won't have a choice," said Brisling, letting the curtains fall and turning back around. "Jesus, that's a nasty cut. Let me have a look at it."

Brisling ran Delbert through a battery of neurological tests, peering into his ears and nose, pushing on the bones of his forehead. "Well, at least you don't have a skull fracture. But that laceration's going to leave one hell of a scar."

"The ladies will like it."

"Not if it gets infected, they won't. Do you have any first aid supplies?"

"You'll find what you need in the cellar. It's all in a big red trunk in the back-left corner."

As Brisling shuffled past Demi into the kitchen and down the cellar stairs, Peter turned to Delbert. "What's this virus you guys are talking about?"

Delbert did his best to summarize what Brisling had told him, and a few minutes later, the doctor returned with an armload of supplies. "Christ Almighty," he said, dumping it all on the side table. "You weren't kidding about being prepared. There's enough food and supplies down there for a hundred years."

"Like I told you, Doc, we live fifty miles from the nearest city."

"Right."

Delbert leaned back so Brisling could drape several clean dishtowels over his face. Then he began irrigating the laceration with sterile saline from a bottle, letting the towels soak up the overflow.

The sight of it made Peter queasy, and he had to look away. "Is that what Anna had, this JCAV virus?"

"She had the first signs of it," Brisling said as he worked.

All Peter could see was Anna's lifeless body lying on the dingy carpet, fragile and small, like a child. Yet she had been the strong one.

"It's the same thing that killed the vice president," Brisling was saying. "The number of cases is still relatively small, maybe ten thousand in the US, but it's doubling every three weeks. And it's showing up in other countries now."

Peter had seen them—the crazy woman in the red dress ranting bare-breasted from the roof of her car, the big woman in the muumuu convulsing under the Rosetta Stone, the redheaded man seizing along the bank of the Columbia River. "How bad is this going to get?"

Brisling patted Delbert's wound with sterile gauze and began applying adhesive butterfly bandages. "To be honest, I don't know. But I've been an infectious-diseases doctor for almost four decades, and I've never seen anything even close to this, never even imagined it. If I had to put this thing on my Oh Shit scale, I'd give it a solid ten." He carefully positioned the last butterfly bandage. "So, what's in the container?" he asked Delbert.

Delbert mumbled something from beneath the towels, and Brisling lifted them. "What did you just say?"

"A cure, maybe."

He ripped away the towels. "A cure for JCAV?"

"That's what Jason Numec told me."

Brisling frowned at the container on the coffee table. "Is that Numec's?"

"No. I buried the container years ago, before I even met him."

"Then how can it be a cure? What's even in there?"

"An old Viking artifact."

Brisling turned to Davila, wet towels dangling from his upturned hands. "Artifact? What the hell is he talking about?"

She knelt before the container, her hands floating over its dirt-streaked surface as if it were too hot to touch. "May I?" she said, looking up at Delbert.

"Go right ahead. I've kept it from you people long enough."

One by one, she undid the container's heavy-duty latches, but when she tried to open the lid, it would not budge.

Delbert offered her his Swiss Army Knife. "It must be under pressure from the drive down."

The seal broke with a trailing hiss, and they all gathered around, Demi too. As Davila lifted the lid, a vaguely pleasant scent filled the air, piney and smoky, like incense. Inside, they could see the square surface of a wooden object nestled in black foam rubber.

Donning a pair of latex gloves from the pile of Brisling's medical supplies, Davila slipped her fingers in along either side of the object, coaxing out a cube of solid wood about twelve inches to a side, dark and burnished, its corners and edges smooth with age. If it had a lid or even a seam, Peter could not see it.

Davila held the cube up to the side-table lamp, tilting it so Peter could read the line of angular letters carved across two of its surfaces.

"Those are definitely Viking runes."

"That's why I called on your father back then," said Delbert. "He was the only expert willing to drive out here and take a look."

"Did he translate them?"

"I don't recall the exact words, but I remember something about a Norwegian king from Viking times."

Peter met Davila's eyes. Olav Tryggvason, first Christian King of Norway, who gave the Mustard Seeds to Leif Eirikson before his voyage to North America.

Davila held the cube at arm's length, leaning back at the hips to keep from falling over. "Your father's letter mentioned six Hebrew letters, one on each surface, but I can't see them."

"I can from here," said Peter. He slipped on a pair of gloves and took the cube from her. It was surprisingly heavy. "Stand back and take a look."

"You're right," said Davila. "They're shallow and faint, but I can definitely see them now. There's a heh, late Semitic, yes." She motioned with her finger for Peter to rotate the cube. "And that could be a vav. And another heh, and an ayin. There's a yod on top—and let me see the bottom—yes, a shin."

"Are those the same letters from inside my dad's ring?"

"Yes, yes. But now we know their proper order, or rather, their orientation. Fascinating."

"Orientation?"

"Don't you see? The six letters were never meant to be read in a single line." She got close and with her finger drew a clockwise circle around the cube from above it. "In this direction they spell yad-heh-vav-heh, the holiest of holy words for Jews, the tetragrammaton, the unspeakable four-letter name God gives himself in the Torah. It is often translated I am that I am, although its true meaning remains a mystery."

"What do the other two letters spell?"

"Alone, I don't think they spell anything. But turn the cube on its side." When Peter had done so, she drew another clockwise circle. "Now if you read the letters, they spell a second name."

"What name?"

"Yad, shin, vav, ayin—Yeshua, a common boy's name in first century Galilee and Judea. In ancient Hebrew, it means he is saved. But I imagine all of you are more familiar with its Greek equivalent, Iesous, Jesus."

The cube in Peter's hands grew even heavier. The Father, the Son.

"Absolutely fascinating," said Davila. "We could be looking at an early Christian symbol never seen before, a six-letter code in three dimensions. A hexagrammaton."

"What's the third name?" said Demi. All eyes turned to her.

"What do you mean?" said Davila.

Demi shrugged her bony shoulders. "It's a cube. You can read it in three linear directions."

Davila asked Peter to roll the cube forward ninety degrees then rotate it slowly about its vertical axis. After two full turns, she stopped him. "It's not Hebrew. It's Persian."

"Persian?" Peter's arms were beginning to ache.

"It reads shahah, perhaps a form of shah, the ancient Persian word for king."

"King?" Peter was expecting something else, something along the lines of Holy Spirit, as in Father, Son and Holy Spirit. "What king?"

"The Rab Mag," said Delbert.

Davila whipped around.

"A king from Persia, one of the Magi from the Bible."

"How did you know that?" she said.

"Jason Numec told me."

She looked confused. "What else did he tell you?"

"A whole mess of things I didn't quite understand, crazy things." Delbert went on to share Numec's outlandish story about being a messenger from the future, sent back in time to prepare the righteous for a great plague only they would survive. Everyone listened in rapt silence, except for Brisling. He sat on the couch scoffing to himself.

"They're all the same person," Delbert continued. "Jason Numec, the Rab Mag, and the Old One. That's what he told me. He said they got split up by the process of time travel, something about cut strings and flashes of light."

"And you believed him?" Brisling struggled to his feet. "I know you people like your peyote, but Jesus H. Christ, time travel? Come on!"

"Watch your mouth, Doctor. We don't use peyote. I don't know anyone who does. And I never said I believed him."

"And yet you maintain he had nothing to do with making JCAV. So you believed that much."

Delbert smoldered.

"I hate to say it, but all the evidence points to Jason Numec, and nobody else. He was the only one with the resources, the technology, the opportunity, and the motive to make JCAV. And now you're telling me he thought he was some sort of time-traveling messenger from the future? Jesus." With a long sigh, he plopped back onto the couch, muttering to himself, "This is a fucking nightmare."

A light wind buffeted the windows. The fire crackled in the stove. Brisling peeked out through the curtains again. Then letting them fall, he turned to Peter, eyes on the wooden cube in his gloved hands. "There's no cure inside that hunk of wood. How could there be?"

Peter hefted it again. "It feels like there's something in here. It's so heavy."

Davila leaned close. "If there's something inside, it would have taken a highly skilled woodworker to put it there."

Brisling snorted. "I hear Jesus was a pretty good carpenter."

"There's no need to be facetious," said Davila. "Besides, Jesus of Nazareth was probably not a highly skilled carpenter. The authors of the Gospels themselves describe him as a tekton, a general craftsman."

Delbert got to his feet. "There's something inside that cube. I'll show you." He headed off to the cellar.

As they waited, Davila took the cube from Peter and examined every square inch of it, every divot, scratch, and gouge. She was just about to say something when Delbert returned with a huge manila envelope in his hand. From it, he extracted three sheets of X-ray film. "I had a doctor in Burns take these years ago."

Brisling hauled himself from the couch, grabbed one of the X-ray films, and held it to the side-table lamp. Against the film's black background, the wooden cube appeared as a fuzzy gray square. In the precise center of the square was a solid white disc about the size of a grapefruit. Brisling adjusted his glasses and held up the remaining two sheets, one after the other. Each showed the same thing. "Are these copies?"

"No," said Demi. "They're pictures taken from three different perspectives."

Brisling shot her a quizzical look. "You're absolutely right. x-, y-, and z-coordinates." He tapped the white disc with his finger. "This is a sphere. And it's made of electron-dense material, probably metal." His peered over his glasses at Davila and the cube in her hands. "How old did you say that thing was?"

But before she could answer, the front door burst inward and smashed against the partition wall, knocking loose the shepherd's staff hanging there. In rushed a dozen or more commandos in dark body armor and helmets, yelling for everyone to freeze and put their hands up. They streamed by like army ants through the living room to the kitchen, down to the cellar, and up the hallway stairs, their boots pounding the floorboards above.

Davila just stood there cradling the cube in her arms, her face stern and beautiful.

Header image: snow on Steens Mountain (taken fromhttp://www.coavalanche.org/content/condition-report-steens-mountains)

My clumsy attempt at assembling the cube: