Divine Destruction (The Return of Divinity Book 1) by Lester Suggs Read Free Book Online

arms flopping lifelessly in front of him. He was exhausted. His body spasmed. He opened his eyes and looked around his familiar bedroom. Early sunshine washed the room evenly. Griffin was comforted with its yellow glow. But there was a difference here. His normally straight and clean bedroom was a tossed salad of personal belongings. Griffin craned his neck to take in his surroundings. The cell phone was not on the bedside table, clothes were everywhere, ejected from the now opened closet door. His watch lay by the closed bedroom door. The door was cracked from bottom to top right down the middle.
    An hour later, Griffin noted with displeasure that he was running twelve minutes behind the established normal schedule. Further displeasure crossed his mind when he realized he had no other route into Pittsburgh except the west parkway. Griffin punched his radio up and down, scanning for news channels that may have information on a local quake event that happened last night. And, adding to his annoyance, he noticed, he was paying little attention to the traffic in the Ft. Pitt Tunnel. There were no news of the quake.
    "There had to be an earthquake." Griffin rarely spoke to himself in the car, rarely spoke to himself at all, but this had been a serious event. His home damaged.
    Griffin switched off the radio, thought of a play list on his iPhone, and then dismissed that too. Relaxing his shoulders, he yielded to the emerging beautiful day, and exhaled a long slow breath.
    "Stop fighting the universe,” Griffin said as he repositioned his weight in the car. Conceding to the relative quiet of the hum of the road and wind Griffin thought of last night's dream. It was odd that he could so easily recall the dream. The older he got the faster dreams vanished. He often joked, to himself, that when he reached fifty years old he would have forgotten going to bed by morning. Last night's dream, though, was amazing. The sand, vacuum of sound, the robed figure, the ring of statued Buddhas, what the hell did it mean?
    Griffin wasn't a person who gave in easily to superstition. Having been raised Catholic by his mother, "hocus pocus" wasn't in Griffin's vocabulary. He couldn't claim this last thought with certainty. Mother had only kept him under the Catholic umbrella of learning until fourth grade. After their return to Pittsburgh, mother had switched their faiths to Episcopal. Diet Catholic. Soon after, mother had guilt-forced him to volunteer as an acolyte, assisting the priest with Sunday services. After many years he had become the head acolyte and was slowly exposed to the 'under meaning', of the church. A business disguised as a religion. During an earlier separation of his parents, Griffin’s grandmother had dragged him to the local Baptist church. And just like that, Griffin was Baptist. A couple of years of hell and brimstone followed. Looking back, Griffin considered this a darker time. During his adult years he became agnostic, and eventually atheist. Sifting through his religious past had no foundation with this dream. Griffin couldn’t correlate his past to the dream.
    After parking his car, and grabbing his coat, gloves, and keys, Griffin exited the parking structure and made his way down to the automated pay machines. As he was thumbing with his debit card to insert into the machine, a fellow commuter walked over to the machine on Griffin's right and began the same pay process.
    “I’m going to miss summer,” the stranger said.
    Griffin glanced over. Many people this far north truly dreaded Fall, only because Fall was the harbinger of Winter.
    “Winter wasn't so bad last year,” Griffin said. “And that quake last night, wow!"
    Griffin made a hand gesture to match his raised eyebrows.
    The stranger was reaching out to select a button but stopped at Griffin's remark.
    "Quake?" he said in a soft bark. "What quake?"
    The man’s face turned into a sour concern as if someone had just informed him his dog was on fire.
    "You