1 A hand rising against the red sands

EARTH, ATACAMA DESERT.

Most people when they think about a desert, the first thing that comes to mind is the Sahara desert, but in reality, the Atacama Desert is the driest nonpolar desert in the world, in other words, the most lethal.

A dry land, devoid of life with red sands that spans for an entire continent. This is the Atacama desert. The most lethal desert on Earth.

In this inhuman place, a man could be seen crossing the red sands on a motorcycle and behind him, dozens of police cars pursued him while a helicopter tracked everything from the skies.

The man in question, running on his motorcycle, looked at the gas gauge to check the fuel level, and seeing it was already on the red, he took a bottle out of his backpack, opened the gas tank from the motorcycle, and turned the content inside the gas tank, and just like that, he refueled while still driving.

A thing that cars could never do, and that was the most important thing about a pursuit in the open, the size of the gas tank. If you could not change that, you needed to refuel.

After refueling his motorcycle, the man looked behind and noticed that the number of cars pursuing him was already less than before because the cops did not expect to pursue him for miles and miles through the desert, and some of the police cars already ran out of fuel.

...

Thirty minutes later, and seeing no car behind him because all of them had run out of fuel, he stopped the motorcycle, put some earphones, and touched the play in an old K7 player.

While listening to the AC/DC song playing, he grabbed his backpack from the back of the motorcycle, then took out a rifle and a small scope out of it and attached the scope to the rifle.

The man walked a few steps with the rifle resting against his shoulder and crouched on the red sands in a firing position and, while looking through the rifle's scope, he shot. 

BANG

BANG

BANG

After shooting three times, he lowered his rifle and looked at the blue skies where he could see a helicopter spinning in the air with smoke coming out from its engine.

The man raised himself from the ground, turned his back, and lit up a cigarette while walking.

BOOOOM

The helicopter exploded when hitting the ground, producing a shock wave so big that the long hairs of the man almost covered his face, moving as if he was in the water.

"Ok, this must buy me some time before they show up again. Let's see what father hid here." the man said while looking at a monumental sculpture of a hand that raised itself from the red sands of the Atacama desert, as if the hand wanted to rebel against the odds of such cruel place.

Dragging smoke from his cigarette, the man took a small shovel from his backpack and started digging right there as if he was in his own garden.

After a few minutes, he cleaned the sweat from his face and looked at the metallic thing that shined inside the hole he just dig.

"It's indeed here." he said, while removing the remaining sand that covered the metallic object, and just as he expected, it was a metal box.

He pulled the small box out of the hole and looked at it, perplexed. "No lock?"

The man shook his head and opened the box, and to his surprise, he found a book. A book with a cover made from some kind of wood, and the cover, albeit damaged from time, depicted a snake eating his own tail.

"An Ouroboros?"

Even being infuriated about his father's poor taste for gifts, his curiosity still gained over his rage, and he opened the book to see what was so important about it.

Turning the first page, he saw a note, and recognizing his father's calligraphy, he almost burst into tears.

Almost.

Trying to keep his emotions in check, he took a deep sigh, and begun to read the letter aloud, he was sure that if he didn't read it aloud, he would probably hear his old man's voice in his head while reading and would start crying like a baby.

"Dear Mack, If you are reading this, it's because I'm too old or I'm already dead. I don't hope for the last one, but I'm a realistic person." 

"As an egoist father such as me, I ask you my last wish now. Please read and memorize the entire book and after it's done, hide it again somewhere safe until you have children to pass on this book. Remember, this book is our family legacy."

"Love you son"

With the memory of his father returning vividly in his mind like he was in front of him telling him bad jokes, Mack felt heartbroken again, but alas, time was short.

Mack put the note from his father on his pocket and glanced back at the book. His curiosity was killing him. After all, his deceased father made him come all the way here just to grab this book.

"Time to see what's so important about this book." Mack said while reading the first page, and to his surprise, he saw a familiar runic language written in it that his father used to teach him when he was a kid.

'So that's why father insisted on teaching me this dead language?' he thought, realizing that his father planned this way before he was even born.

Reading the first runic symbols, Mack got stunned by the translation and could not keep himself from frowning while re-reading aloud.

"Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law."

"One is the Law, the Law is one."

"You are the Law, and Chaos is your domain."

Reading these three disconnected phrases, Mack could see how hard it would be to memorize the entire book. "..and here was I thinking it was something like math or just some garbage story..... tsk...".

Mack then turned the page and started reading again, because the first page only had those three sentences in it.

Reading more pages of the book, he found various quotes like the first three. They seemed profound and disconnected but also connected somehow, but he could not pinpoint where this feeling came from.

But the oddest thing Mack found in the book was on page thirty-three. It was a picture of a naked man with various runic symbols over his body. Those runes had no translation. They were as if symbolizing something more abstract.

Mack didn't pay too much attention to the picture of the naked man and kept skimming through the pages of the book, and in the last one, he saw something that looked like a breathing technique from yoga.

Right now, Mack was not trying to memorize the entire book. He just skimmed through the pages to get an idea of the book, and seeing that the book seemed to be some kind of cult stuff, he closed the book put it in his backpack. When doing so, he looked at the horizon on his back and could see dust rising.

More police cars were coming.

'Well... Just in time for me to leave this cursed place'. Mack thought, while turning his head in the other direction.

His 'ride' had arrived, but was something that no one would ever suspect, because in front of Mack, now raised a fog, the Atacama fog.

The Atacama desert was not the biggest desert in the world but had the biggest Fog Desert in the world. A dense fog that could cover the entire England, if compared in size, was coming from the sea and covering the red sands.

With the night coming, at west a dense fog came advancing from the direction of the sea and from east a small sandstorm made by the police cars, and right at the middle, a man in a motorcycle hearing some rock-and-roll music with a K7 player.

If someone could see his face under fog that hid the dark sky, they would see he was smiling, because his destination was Solomon Islands, or for him, home.