The Phoenix Apostles PDF
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THEPHOENIX APOSTLES: A SENECA HUNT MYSTERY by Lynn Sholes and Joe Moore The Phoenix Apostles © 2011 by Lynn Sholes and Joe Moore. All rights reserved. No part of this e-book may be used or reproduced in any matter whatsoever, including Internet usage, without written permission from Midnight ink, except in the form of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. As the purchaser of this e-book, you are granted the non-exclusive, non- transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. The text may not be otherwise reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, or recorded on any other storage device in any form or by any means. Any unauthorized usage of the text without express written permission of the publisher is a violation of the author's copyright and is illegal and punishable by law. This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. Midnight Ink is an imprint of Llewellyn Worldwide Ltd. Midnight Ink does not participate in, endorse, or have any authority or responsibility concerning private business arrangements between our authors and the public. Any Internet references contained in this work are current at publication time, but the publisher cannot guarantee that a specific reference will continue or be maintained. Please refer to the publisher's website for links to current author websites. Midnight Ink Llewellyn Worldwide Ltd. 2143 Wooddale Drive Woodbury, MN 55125 www.midnightink.com Manufactured in the United States of America DEDICATED TO Jayne Ellen ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The authors wish to thank the following for their assistance in adding a sense of realism to this work of fiction. Dr. Ken Muneoka, PhD Department of Cell & Molecular Biology Tulane University Dr. John Gore, PhD Director of Imaging Science Vanderbilt Kennedy Center Vanderbilt University Special thanks to Chris Fineout "Wherever the corpse is, there the vultures will gather." -MATTHEW 24:28 "The evil that men do lives after them; The good is oft interred with their bones." -WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, JULIUS CAESAR AUTHOR'S NOTE ALMOST EVERY CULTURE AND religion throughout history has had a doomsday prophecy. Probably the most well-known predictor of such an apocalypse is the ancient Mayan calendar. Archaeology has revealed that most Mayan locations had astronomical observatories that enabled them to predict events based on equinoxes and Venus cycles. They possessed such advanced knowledge of time and space that their calendar was more precise than any in use today. The Mayan calendar is three calendars in one: a solar calendar based on 365 days which is ten-thousandths of a day more accurate than the currently accepted Gregorian calendar; a ceremonial calendar based on 260 days, the same as human gestation; and the combination of the two where the number of days and months only repeat every fifty-two years. The ancient Maya and other Mesoamericans used this same fifty-two-year pattern, or a cycle called the Calendar Round. The Maya also had what they called the Long Count that began measuring time elapsed since their beginning-August 13, 3114 BC-and ending 5,121 years later. December 21, 2012. The Aztec calendar had a date very close to the Mayan. The same date can also be calculated using the ancient classic Chinese text, I Ching. And there have been other similar prophecies and predictions of doomsday from the Hopi, Nostradamus, Mother Shipton, and Cumaean Sibyl, along with many interpretations of various legends, scriptures, and numerological constructions. So what might occur on the predicted doomsday? A rare cosmic alignment that happens every 26,000 years when, on the winter solstice, the sun lines up with the center of the Milky Way. At the same time, the Earth completes a wobble on its axis and a pole-shift takes place-the North and South Poles reverse. The resulting cataclysmic effect on life as we know it could be beyond imagination. The next time this galactic phenomenon will come together is exactly on the date predicted by the ancients. December 21, 2012. ………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………… RESURRECTION 1876, NORTHERN SONORA, MEXICO BILLY GROVES DIDN'T KNOW if he was dead or alive. His lungs were starving. He attempted to draw in a breath like it was the first in a long time, but the dirt choked him. He clawed at his face and suddenly realized what was wrong. He was buried. Panicked, he scuffed away clods of soil and debris, fighting to breathe, to take a single life-saving breath. Which way was up? Was he digging in the wrong direction? Scratching and plowing, he pushed with his legs, trying to squirm free of the blackness. The panic grew and his body convulsed. He would have cried out but there was no air to power his lungs. Finally, his fist broke through. He pushed at the heavy layer of gravel and earth until he saw light. The heat from the sun struck his skin as he opened his mouth and gulped in the air. Spitting grit, he crawled out of his would-be grave and collapsed beside it. Groves brushed the dirt from his eyes and looked around. He saw what was left of the valley floor and suddenly started to remember everything-the cave, the gold, the Apaches, the earthquake. And the arrow. Groves forced his gaze to his torso. The arrow was there, it had run him through nearly to the fletching, entering his chest at an angle and exiting from his side. He twisted and looked at it in fearful anticipation of what he would find at the end of the shaft. But there was no arrowhead. It had broken off.
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