Dark Faith
Edited by
Maurice Broaddus
and
Jerry Gordon
Copyright 2010 by Apex Publications
Cover art by Edith Walter • Cover design by Justin Stewart
Published by Apex Publications at Smashwords
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“The Story of Belief-Non,” © 2010, Linda D. Addison; “Ghosts of New York,” © 2010, Jennifer Pelland; “I Sing a New Psalm,” © 2010, Brian Keene; “He Who Would Not Bow,” © 2010, Wrath James White; “Zen and the Art of Gordon Dratch’s Damnation,” © 2010, Douglas F. Warrick; “Go and Tell It on the Mountain,” © 2010, Kyle S. Johnson; “Different from Other Nights,” © 2010, Eliyanna Kaiser; “Lilith,” © 2010, Rain Graves; “The Last Words of Dutch Schultz Jesus Christ,” © 2010, Nick Mamatas; “To the Jerusalem Crater,” © 2010, Lavie Tidhar; “Chimeras & Grotesqueries,” © 2010, Matt Cardin; “You Dream,” © 2010, Ekaterina Sedia; “Mother Urban’s Booke of Days,” © 2010, Jay Lake; “The Mad Eyes of the Heron King,” © 2010, Richard Dansky; “Paint Box, Puzzle Box,” © 2010, D.T. Friedman; “A Loss for Words,” © 2010, J. C. Hay; “Scrawl,” © 2010, Tom Piccirilli; “C{her}ry Carvings,” © 2010, Jennifer Baumgartner; “Good Enough,” © 2010, Kelli Dunlap; “First Communions,” © 2010, Geoffrey Girard; “The God of Last Moments,” © 2010, Alethea Kontis; “Ring Road,” © 2010, Mary Robinette Kowal; “The Unremembered,” © 2010, Chesya Burke; “Desperata,” © 2010, Lon Prater; “The Choir,” © 2010, Lucien Soulban; “Days of Flaming Motorcycles,” © 2010, Catherynne M. Valente; “Miz Ruthie Pays Her Respects,” © 2010, Lucy A. Snyder; “Paranoia,” © 2010, Kurt Dinan; “Hush,” © 2010, Kelly Barnhill; “Sandboys,” © 2010, Richard Wright; “For My Next Trick I’ll Need a Volunteer,” © 2010, Gary A. Braunbeck
Apex Publications, LLC
www.apexbookcompany.com
PO Box 24323 Lexington, KY 40524
—Table of Contents—
Introduction ~ Maurice Broaddus
“The Story of Belief-Non” (Poem) ~ Linda D. Addison
“Ghosts of New York” ~ Jennifer Pelland
“I Sing a New Psalm” ~ Brian Keene
“He Who Would Not Bow” ~ Wrath James White
“Zen and the Art of Gordon Dratch’s Damnation” ~ Douglas F. Warrick
“Go and Tell It on the Mountain” ~ Kyle S. Johnson
“Different from Other Nights” ~ Eliyanna Kaiser
“The
Last Words of Dutch
Schultz
Jesus Christ” ~ Nick
Mamatas
“To the Jerusalem Crater” ~ Lavie Tidhar
“Chimeras & Grotesqueries” ~ Matt Cardin
“Mother Urban’s Booke of Dayes” ~ Jay Lake
“The Mad Eyes of the Heron King” ~ Richard Dansky
“Paint Box, Puzzle Box” ~ D.T. Friedman
“A Loss for Words” ~ J. C. Hay
“C{her}ry Carvings” (Poem) ~ Jennifer Baumgartner
“First Communions” ~ Geoffrey Girard
“The God of Last Moments” ~ Alethea Kontis
“Ring Road” ~ Mary Robinette Kowal
“The Unremembered” ~ Chesya Burke
“Desperata” (Poem) ~ Lon Prater
“Days of Flaming Motorcycles” ~ Catherynne M. Valente
“Miz Ruthie Pays Her Respects” ~ Lucy A. Snyder
“Paranoia” (Poem) ~ Kurt Dinan
“For My Next Trick I’ll Need a Volunteer” ~ Gary A. Braunbeck
Introduction
In the foreword of Orgy of Souls, my novella co-written with Wrath James White, I wrote that “Faith is that sometimes tenuous, sometimes stronger than we think thing that keeps our world in order. [Wrath and I are] both men of faith in our own way, be it faith in ourselves or faith in God. We each are on our own spiritual journey.” All quest journeys begin with a leap of faith—that is, what we choose to put our trust in. We each have a worldview that helps us navigate the world. For some, it is ourselves (the individual or humanity). For some, it is science (the determination of our senses and what we can prove). For some, it is the spiritual (under the assumption that there is more to this life than presented, both in terms of the spiritual and in terms of after this life). And there is, or can be, some overlap.
But we all believe in something.
So I invited horror, science fiction, and fantasy writers to riff on the idea of faith. Who we are, artists and people of faith, expressing our theology, whatever it may be, in our writing. And with the challenge to take it to another level: art is never for its own sake, but for people’s sake. I believe that art should be engaged with—and, in its own way, explore—truth; and we shouldn’t be afraid of truth, no matter where it takes us.
In this anthology, it has taken us to new and interesting places as we explore various tangents to the ideas of faith. Life can be magical and terrifying, filled with both fantasy and horror. There is life and there is death; everything in between is unknown. We live in the throes of “why?” We react to injustice, we question why bad things happen to good people. We feel the existential terror of what it means to encounter God, the ultimate Other. On the other side, there’s the idea that God is personal and relational, Jesus can be a guy you can sneak around back and share cigarettes with. We can see faith lived out in love and relationships or be horrified by the things done in God’s name. Faith in action can move us to do something, to confront the sins of our age, such as sexism, homophobia, and racism to name a few.
I’d like to thank several people for their support during all of this. The Mo*Con family: Brian Keene (whose own spiritual journey inspired all of this), Wrath James White (whose “anti-spiritual” journey continues to challenge me), Alethea Kontis (who reminds me that life is magic), Kelli Dunlap (who taught me that sometimes you have to give life the finger and take a smoke break), Chesya Burke (my sister, for better or worse and all that entails), and Gary Braunbeck and Lucy Snyder (mentors and inspiration). My co-editor, Jerry Gordon, for all of his hard work. I wouldn’t have been able to do this without him. My fellow Indiana Horror Writers without whom Mo*Con would have remained a neat idea. Jason Sizemore for having faith in this project. And Sally, Reese, and Malcolm, who allowed me time to read, write, and edit, and sacrificed time with me to make this happen. It’s to them that I dedicate this book.
And my Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, with me during times of praise and doubt, chasing after me when I wander off. I am often the most failed of His ambassadors, but I thank you for the freedom to explore my faith and continue my weird journey…which is all mine.
Maurice Broaddus
February 16, 2010
To God and the story He has written
The Story of Belief-Non
An expanse of water
the first cool breeze
of fall, red leaf floating
to earth, relinquished
by maple tree, a newborn’s
first cry entering atmosphere.
The result of evolution,
scientifically dissected into
proteins, neurons, defined
parts of the Table of Elements,
tracked by global warming
trends, the end game of
a drunken night of groping.
H2O, the beginning, the end,
the place life dances in precise
explicit units, found deep in Earth,
alluded to on Mars, hinted at in
faraway galaxies, as close as
Neptune, a mark made in dark spots
of methane drifting in thick clouds.
Even in denying Zeus or Ra, there
is an innate beauty to the mind
unraveling fables often used as
weapons rather than song, in that
absence of belief, seasoned by
curious doubt, watching the inhumanity
of choice, heartbroken at the hunger,
the wasted life, the Shadow Story unwinds.
Faith doesn’t come easily, let Truth
recognize insubstantiality, choose
to believe or not, on the Walkabout
the protagonist falls in love with
Endless Possibility, mirrored in the
grand story of perfection/imperfection.
—Linda D. Addison
Ghosts of New York
Poets and sages like to say that there is clarity in certain death. That a calm resignation settles over the nearly deceased, and they embrace the inevitability of the end of life with dignity and grace.
But there was no clarity for her, no calmness, no life flashing before her eyes in a montage of joys and regrets. There was just pure animal terror, screams torn from her throat as she plummeted toward the ground in the longest ten seconds of her life.
And then there was an explosion of pain.
She remembered flailing at the air, as if she could somehow sink her nails into it and cling there until help arrived. She remembered the crash and pop of the people who were landing mere seconds before her. She remembered a fleeting moment of shame when her dress blew up over her head, exposing her underwear to the crowds gathered below. She remembered the burst of shit and piss as she crashed through the awning just a split second before she hit—
The only people who find clarity in certain death are those who somehow cheat it, those who can reflect back upon the experience and use it to goad them into living a better life.
For the ghosts, there is only terror.
After her first fall, she stood by the roadkill smear that was her body, not recognizing what she was seeing at first, until two more bodies rained down from above, splattering on pavement with a crash of glass and a sickening splat.
Then she knew.
Then the North Tower collapsed.
All around her, people screamed and ran while she stood helplessly by the wreckage of her body. Debris flew through her, burying her corpse, leaving the ghost of her untouched.
And then she fell again.
If anything, it was worse than the first time. Now, it was an echo of a fall, a non-existent body falling from a non-existent building, with all the terror of the original fall—the same flailing, the same flash of embarrassment, the same piss—
The same body-shattering moment of pain at the end.
Days passed, the dust cleared, the debris and bodies were carried away, but still she fell, over and over, sinking through the sky for the same interminably long ten seconds, the pain of impact fresh and raw each and every time.
Between falls, she wondered if she were in hell. She wondered what terrible thing she’d done in life to merit this kind of eternal punishment. But she couldn’t remember.
She couldn’t remember anything.
No, that wasn’t strictly true. In the chest-heaving intervals between falls, she could remember, if she tried, the blistering heat and choking smoke. She remembered mobbing a broken window with a half-dozen other people, gulping in precious lungfuls of clean air. She remembered a floor too hot to stand on, the eerie creak of metal. She remembered a man and a woman dropping past her window, hand in hand. She remembered looking over her shoulder at the impenetrable wall of smoke. She remembered a scream stuck in her throat, a heart that felt like it would burst through her chest, a desperate wish to breathe just once more before she died.
She remembered a split-second decision, legs suddenly unfrozen, propelling her out into the blue September sky.
But before that?
Nothing.
She couldn’t even remember what she looked like. She would think back to standing over her body after the initial fall and try to conjure up hair color, skin color, but all she could remember was the pool of red in a sea of glittering glass.
She could see the other ghosts, though. The hundreds of others who still rained from the sky, all still trapped in the same deathly cycle as she was.
She didn’t talk to them. They didn’t talk to her. They each lived in their own little bubble of pain. They could each only fall, catch their breath, and fall again.
The living couldn’t see them. She wondered if they could feel them. They certainly didn’t come near them. All around Ground Zero she saw the same dance—the living weaving around the invisible dead, speeding up their steps to get out of the way of a falling jumper, brushing a hand across their pants legs as matterless gore splattered up from the impact. She wondered if she and her fellow ghosts were why the site had stayed empty for so long. Each year, as people gathered on the site for their memorial, she would hear them talk about bureaucracy, red tape, financial woes, lawsuits, respect for the families of the dead. She didn’t believe a word of it. No force on earth could keep Manhattan from putting a building on a prime piece of real estate.
But eventually, build they did.
Between falls, she watched, rapt, as the steel beams climbed into the sky.
Sometimes, she wished she could take in the details of the construction work on the upper floors as she fell. But every time, the animal fear took over right from the start. Every time, it was the same. She was nothing but a frozen moment, repeatedly playing out exactly the same way.
She quickly learned to keep away from the construction workers so they could do their jobs without having to step around her. The other ghosts did the same. They were uniformly polite in their silent suffering.
As the new tower grew, a memorial was constructed where the old ones once stood. She would land next to the waterfalls that poured into the old buildings’ footprints, pick herself up, and stare at the water as it flowed down into a churning mist. She tried to find her name among the lists of the dead, but none of the names looked familiar to her. Out of the corners of her eyes, she could see the other ghosts looking for themselves as well. She suspected that none of them had any better luck than she did. She wandered through the museum, looking at the photographs, and finding no images of people jumping from the buildings that day. It was as if they were some shameful taboo. It was as if they had never existed.
The memorial wasn’t any comfort to her. It didn’t bring her any closer to knowing who she was, or really, who she had been before she died. She was still a ghost. She still fell.
Maybe she could find answers elsewhere.
For a while now, she’d been feeling less stuck to the site. As the new building went up and the memorial and museum were completed, she could feel herself coming loose, bit by bit, but it had never occurred to her to try to leave until just now. How many years had it been? She didn’t want to know.
She stepped off the site for the first time in her unlife.
All around her, she could see the other ghosts coming to the same realization as they, too, left the site and started cautiously exploring the world around them.
New York City was in places familiar, in places bewildering.
Had she only been visiting the Twin Towers that day? Was she not a New York City regular? That, she didn’t know. She read an ad on the side of a bus and wondered why it said the same thing twice before realizing that half of it was in Korean. She knew Korean? Was this a clue to her past? But then she read the headlines on a Chinese newspaper and a taxi ad in Spanish, and realized that it meant nothing. Everything about her meant nothing.
And then she was falling again.
She took several short jaunts into the neighborhoods around the Towers, always being dragged back to fall from the window that no longer existed to land on the precise bit of pavement that was similarly nonexistent, before deciding to take a more ambitious walk.
That was the day she learned that they weren’t alone.
Standing at the base of the Empire State Building, she stifled a scream as she watched a small plane crash into the upper floors. Not again. Not another one. Weren’t the Twin Towers enough? A body flew from the gaping hole that had been torn through the side of the building, but no one on the street seemed to notice a thing.
Another ghost, with a ghost of an airplane creating a ghost of a hole in the building.
And then came the rain of jumpers, hitting the pavement or phantom cars in a staccato rhythm of death. No one seemed to notice. They were ghost jumpers, just like her, stuck in the same never-ending cycle.
One woman, lying on the crumpled hood of an old-fashioned limousine, looked positively serene.
She ran across the street to take a closer look, but the woman sat up, staring dumbly at her torn stockings, and moaned, “Oh god, make it stop.”
“I can hear you!” she gasped. “Oh my god, I can hear you! Can you hear me? I haven’t talked to anyone in so long. This is wonderful!”
The woman just covered her beautifully made-up face and moaned again, a long, keening sound that seemed to come from a place far deeper than her body could hold. “It never ends. It never ends.”
“What do you mean? How long have you been falling?”
The woman turned wild eyes to her. “Where did you come from?”
“The Twin Towers.”
“I saw them rise and fall. A new one’s rising, isn’t it?”
She nodded.
“But you’ll fall from the old ones forever. No one’s going to forget you.”
“Forget me? What do you—”
But the words were ripped from her mouth as she found herself back at the North Tower, leaping through the window, and clawing at the air for ten long seconds before hitting bottom again.
She could talk to the dead, just not the Towers’ dead.
But she didn’t like what she’d heard, and wasn’t sure she wanted to hear more.
She walked to the memorial park and stared at the waterfall cascading into the ground where her Tower had once stood. The living wove around her as she stood there, unmoving, not caring for once that she was bothering anyone. She was a sentinel of pain. She saw it on the faces of the people doing their little dances to avoid walking through her. It wasn’t just this memorial that disturbed them, it was those who were left behind.
Why wouldn’t it end?
How did that woman even know?
From the look of her clothes, she’d been jumping for at least half a century.
She looked down and felt the echo of her fall in the movement of the water.
In a way, it was the perfect memorial.
Why was she still here? Wasn’t she supposed to move on? Did she even believe in an afterlife? She couldn’t remember. There was so much she couldn’t remember.
Maybe she hadn’t believed. Maybe that was the problem.
But what was the point in some god punishing her if she didn’t remember why she was being punished?
She found an old church nearby, walked through the iron gate, through the front door, and stood facing the altar, waiting to see if she felt anything. But she didn’t feel any different here than she did at the Towers, or on her walks. It was just as cold as it was everywhere else, even when she stood in the postcard-perfect beams of sunlight streaming down through the massive windows.
Maybe she needed to pray to actually feel something. But she couldn’t find the words. Has she known them in life, or was this yet another wished-for revelation about her past that really meant nothing?
An old man sat on a badly-scuffed bench off to the side of the room, his head bowed in silent prayer, and she sat down as close to him as she dared. If there was a god out there listening to this man’s prayer, maybe he’d see her and realize that he’d forgotten to take her when she’d died.
She waited.
And then she was yanked away to fall again.
So that was her answer.
She didn’t feel much like walking anymore. The few longer trips she tried showed her a city full of people jumping from or being pushed out of buildings, all still going through the motions for countless years after their deaths. She couldn’t deal with them. It was bad enough to be stuck in this endless loop herself, but seeing it played out across the city was just too much.
But some days, she would step off of the site and cross the street, if only to get away just a little bit. She needed to prove to herself that she could still leave if she wanted to. That her eternity wouldn’t be completely made up of monotonous terror. She’d sit on the curb, stretching her legs into the street, watching as cabs swerved to avoid hitting her ghostly feet.
When the new tower’s skeleton was nearly complete, she had a visitor.
He was young, a teenaged boy, dressed in short pants and a cap, like something out of an old black and white movie. He was soaking wet, both hands clasping the tattered life jacket that was draped around his neck. “You!” he screamed.
She tucked her feet up and stared at him, puzzled. “Where did you come from?”
“The East River. We were almost gone, until you happened.”
At that, she was on her feet. “Almost gone? You mean we can go away?”
“People were forgetting about us. We were finally fading. And then you!” He jabbed a finger at her. “You! You made them start talking about us again! We weren’t the biggest mass death in the city anymore!”
“So if people forget us—”
“I hate you!”
She heard a splash as he was pulled away, a gurgle.
But she didn’t care about that. She knew the answer now. People had to forget them. Then they’d move on.
She stared across the street at the memorial park, and felt her hopes plummet.
That was never going to happen. They were going to be remembered forever.
She crumpled to the ground and beat it with her fists, howling like an animal at the unfairness of it all.
And then she fell again.
And again. And again. And again.
But now, every time she landed, she screamed.
She screamed at the pavement, she screamed at the memorial fountain, she screamed at the visitors, she screamed at the people working on the new tower. She would step off the site, stand in the middle of the sidewalk, and scream at the people walking by. She would stand in the middle of the street and scream at taxis who would swerve and honk at the other drivers as if it were their fault.
She hated them for remembering her. She hated the whole world for making her a repeating memorial of terror.
The boy kept coming back, standing at the periphery, spewing hate at whichever ghost was the closest. And the ghosts would scream back, their voices a chorus of anguish and betrayal.
The site was filled with their screams.
How could anyone not hear them?
That boy—he’d been screaming for...how long? A century?
They’d brought him back. Their deaths had brought him back.
But it wasn’t her fault.
She’d had to jump.
It wasn’t her fault.
She’d been suffocating. She’d needed air.
She needed air.
She needed it now.
She staggered off of the site, gasping for breath. This time, a woman was waiting for her. She looked young, but with old eyes. Her dress was long and simple, her hair messily pinned up, and there was soot on her pale face. “Stop it.”
“Stop what?”
“Stop screaming.”
“I have every damned right to scream.”
“You’re too loud.”
“I don’t care! If you had any idea—”
“Of course I have an idea!” the woman shouted back. “We’re all jumpers. All of us who are left behind, we’re jumpers. Surely you’ve noticed that by now, or are you stupid?”
“That boy was wet. He didn’t jump, he drowned.”
“You mean that boy from the Slocum? He jumped into the river. History only makes ghosts out of those who try to fly.”
Before either of them could say anything else, woman was snatched away, screaming.
And then she was back in the air, falling, landing.
She screamed her frustration into the air, pounding on the pavement with her fists, and looked up to see the woman from the fire looming over her. “I said stop it!”
“Don’t tell me what to do!”
“We can hear you all the way over at the Triangle building. Everyone can hear you.”
She pushed herself up off of the pavement and snarled, “Good. If they won’t forget us, then they should hear us.” She tried to storm off, but the woman stepped in front of her.
“They can’t hear you,” she said, gesturing at the living. “But we can.”
“Why should I care?”
“Because we’re all we have left. We barely even have ourselves. Can you remember what you look like? What your name was? If you had children? What you did for a living? If you were rich or poor? We’re just pieces of people, not actual people.”
“I know that. Don’t you think I know that?”
“So have a little respect for the rest of us and stop screaming. There’s too many of you. You’re too loud. We just….” The woman looked like she was about to cry. “For the love of God, we just want a little peace.”
She spat out a laugh. “Oh, please. We don’t get to have peace. Whatever the hell we have, it’s the opposite of peace. You’ve been around long enough. You should get that.”
“We’re here until we’re forgotten,” the woman said. “And you and I will never be forgotten. If a pack of girls jumping out of a burning factory could learn to stop screaming, then so can you. Have a little courtesy for your fellow ghosts.”
“I’m going to spend eternity reliving my death. Screaming is the only logical—”
And then she felt the wind tearing by her as she fell, again.
When she hit the ground, she lay there, staring up at the sky, not able to summon the energy to pick herself up.
Why shouldn’t she scream? She was a walking beacon of pain, the icy feeling that trailed down someone’s spine as they visited her death site. She had every right to scream. She should scream without stopping until the end of time.
But instead, she cried.
She curled onto her side and sobbed until she felt empty, which didn’t take long at all.
It must have been because there was so little of her left.
She repeated that thought, and rolled over onto her back, letting the sun wash through her insubstantial form as she mulled it over.
There really wasn’t very much of her, was there? Like the woman from the fire said, she was just a piece of a person, just the horrific slice of a woman’s life as she died. The rest of the woman was who knew where—maybe heaven, maybe hell, maybe reborn into a new body, maybe nothing but worm food.
Wherever the rest of her was, she was missing this part. This death part. The part that lingered here in the shadow of the non-existent Towers.
How wonderful it must be not to be saddled with those last seconds of her life.
She sat up, staring down at the ground that all those years ago had been stained red with her blood. How strange to think that the rest of her could be out there, somewhere, not burdened with this memory.
Maybe her unlife wasn’t a curse. Maybe it was history’s gift to the woman she once was.
If so, that was a greater gift than anyone could ever know.
She looked over at the shouting boy and the soot-covered woman who was now lecturing another of her fellow Tower jumpers, and wondered if they’d ever had this thought.
Maybe this was the right way to stop the screaming.
She picked herself up, walked over to the memorial, and selected a female name at random from the list. Maybe that was the woman she’d once been. She had a nice name. She hoped she’d been a nice person. She hoped she was having a lovely afterlife.
She looked around the memorial, found a visitor scanning the list of names, and decided that she’d be that woman’s sister today.
“It’s all right,” she told the woman. “Your sister doesn’t remember what happened to her. She’s at peace.”
She reached out to stroke the young woman’s hair, and for once, the living didn’t flinch away from her.
Out of the corners of her eyes, she saw a couple of her fellow jumpers stop screaming and stare at her with expressions of astonishment.
She smiled back at them.
She hadn’t smiled since she’d died.
It felt good.
And then she fell again.
But it was all right. At least, it was once she landed.
Because there was no clarity in death, no dignity. And history didn’t fulfill any grand purpose when it plucked jumpers from the sky.
But perhaps there was a purpose to her suffering.
And that was enough.
I Sing a New Psalm
1 Blessed is the man who has never known the love of God, for he will never know the pain of a broken heart.
2 And blessed is the man who lives in ignorance of the forces around him, for he can exist in peace.
3 I was such a man, once. I didn’t know the love of God, for I did not believe in Him. God was something for superstitious people. He was like the tooth fairy and Santa Claus. God was a story told to children to give them comfort when someone they loved had died.
4 “Rover is in Heaven now, sweetheart. He is playing catch with God, and one day, if you’re good and eat all your vegetables and follow the Ten Commandments, you will see him again. Just like if you’re good, Santa Claus will bring you a new toy.” Growing up, that was all I knew of God.
5 I did not believe in God or the tooth fairy or Santa Claus. I believed in working hard and succeeding at my job and becoming a partner with the firm. These values were instilled in me at a young age by my father. He worked seven days a week, with one day off for Christmas and a week off for deer season. My father loved me, and although I didn’t see much of him growing up, I know that he worked those hours for me. He wanted me to be the first person in our family to go to college.
6 John Lennon once said that a working class hero is something to be. He was gunned down by a fan who loved him. John Lennon was more popular than Jesus.
7 My father died of a heart attack before I finished law school. My mother followed a year later, from melanoma. Years after the initial grief passed, I still felt unsettled when I thought of their passing. It bothered me how they would never know of my accomplishments, or how I’d repaid my father’s unselfish work ethic in an equally driven manner. He would never know of these things because he didn’t exist anymore. I did not believe in God or Heaven. My father was not with the Father. He was simply dead. Ashes to ashes. Dust to dust.
8 Would they have been proud of me?
9 My co-workers had a party for me the night I was offered a role as full partner with the firm. I drank too much Scotch. Head swimming, I returned home to an empty apartment. There was no solace to be found in the silence. Despite my achievements, I was left unfulfilled.
10 Blessed is the man who finds the love of a good partner, for that is the key to fulfillment.
11 I did not find fulfillment at a singles bar or on a dating website or in any of the other places one goes to find love these days. I found it in a church. I found fulfillment in Valerie. We met at a wedding. She was a bridesmaid. I was a guest of the groom. I still remember how beautiful she looked in her soft baby blue chiffon gown. Sunlight came through the stained glass windows and sparkled in her chestnut hair. At the reception, we made small talk over the punch bowl. Later, we danced to the Chicken Dance and the Electric Slide and other wedding reception staples. At the end of the evening, we exchanged phone numbers.
12 What did Valerie see in me? A lost soul, ripe for saving? Her Christian duty? Was it a forbidden attraction, perhaps? A chance to tiptoe over the line to the wild side with a secular atheist type? No, it was none of these things. When she looked in my eyes, I like to think that she saw mirrored the same things I saw in her.
13 Blessed is the man who finds love, for love is the greatest gift of them all.
14 The Lord gives, and the Lord takes away.
15 I started going to church with Valerie not out of a desire to know God, but out of a desire to please her. I loved her and it was important to her and I wanted to make her happy. We went each Sunday, but I did not feel the Lord. We sat in the pew together and shook hands with those around us, but I did not feel the Lord. I wrapped an arm around Valerie as we shared a hymnal and sang, but I did not feel the Lord. I read aloud from the bulletin with the rest of the congregation, but I did not feel the Lord. I sat dutifully, listening to the scripture lesson and the sermon each week, but I did not feel the Lord. I tithed, but I did not feel the Lord.
16 When I asked her to marry me, she asked if it would be forever. When I said yes, she asked me to accept Christ as my personal Lord and savior—to ask him to come into my heart so that I could be born again. Valerie said this was the only way we could be together in the world beyond this one. She asked me if I would do this thing and I said yes.
17 That was the only time I ever lied to her.
18 We were married on the last Saturday of March. We stood at the altar in front of our friends and our family and God, and when I looked into Valerie’s eyes and heard the emotion in her voice when she said “I do”…I almost felt the Lord.
19 And then Mark came along.
20 Mark was born four years later, after a struggle to conceive and many visits to fertility clinics and adoption agencies. Valerie was in labor for twenty-five hours. The doctors finally decided on a Caesarian delivery. I knelt beside her in the operating room, whispering into her ear and kissing her forehead. She squeezed my hand and told me that she loved me.
21 And then the doctor asked me if I’d like to see my son. I peeked up over the curtain and there were Valerie’s insides. The skin of her stomach had been folded back like a bedspread and her insides were on display. The overhead lights glistened on the red and purple and yellow and brown hues, but this barely registered with me, for there in the doctor’s hands was our son. There was Mark.
22 And then I felt the Lord. I felt His goodness and His love and I wept for joy and I praised His name and gave thanks. I prayed. I apologized for my foolish disbelief. I made amends for doubting. For surely, here was proof of His provenance and His love. I wept happily, and my chest swelled as if my heart would burst.
23 An alarm blared over my cry, and through my tears, I realized that something was wrong. Mark was blue, and when I tried to go to him, the nurse whisked him away. Valerie squeezed my hand, but her grip was weak, and when she moaned, I heard the fear in her voice. Then her hand slipped away and the staff pushed me aside. The alarms grew louder, drowning out my prayer.
24 Later, after the alarms had faded and the lights had dimmed and the staff had muttered their sincere apologies, a doctor came to me. I was kneeling in the hospital’s chapel. The doctor was a short, rotund man with a receding hairline and a gentle, kindly face. He pushed his glasses up on his nose and cleared his throat softly. He offered his condolences on the death of my son. I asked him if there was any update on Valerie’s condition.
25 And the doctor said, “We’ve done all we can. She’s in God’s hands now.”
26 Valerie died two hours after Mark.
27 I tried to pray for them both, but my voice was a harsh, ragged thing and my words were ugly.
28 My God, my God, why have you done this to me? Why did you give me the fruits of your love, and show me the path to your light, only to then rip them away? Why are you so far from helping me? Do you hear the words of my roaring? I cry in the daytime, but you don’t hear me. I beg to you at night, but you don’t answer.
29 For the Lord our God is a jealous God. He is a demanding God. You shall have no other gods before Him, and you shall love no other like you love Him. He demands this of us, His creation.
30 John Lennon once said that happiness is a warm gun. He was gunned down by a fan who loved him. John Lennon was killed because he was more popular than Jesus.
31 There was a small bell over the door of the gun store that jingled when I walked inside. It sounded like the chimes of freedom ringing. A heavenly chorus. I bought a shotgun and two handguns, and while we waited for the results of my background check, I asked the proprietor if he clung to God and guns, the way the President had suggested.
32 “We all need something to believe in,” he said. “But I don’t care what they say. I didn’t vote for either candidate. None of them have our best interests in heart. The people in charge never hear us.”
33 You shall hear the words of my roaring.
34 How long did you plan to ignore me, oh Lord? Forever? How long did you plan to hide your face from me? How long must I counsel my own soul, so utterly filled with crippling sorrow in my heart daily? How long do you expect to be exalted over me?
35 Consider and hear me, oh Lord. Look in my eyes before I sleep the sleep of death.
36 I will sing unto you, Lord, because you have dealt unfairly with me.
37 Later, they will say that I have prevailed against you. For I trusted in your mercy and you spat in my face; my heart will rejoice in your pain.
38 You gave and then you took away.
39 Blessed is the man who can play that game, as well.
40 Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I do not fear you, for Valerie and Mark are with me. My shotgun and my pistols, they comfort me. Blessed is the man who knows the satisfying weight of such an instrument in his hands. And blessed is the man who finds solace in the handguns holstered to his hips. He shall take comfort in such weapons and through them, he will know fulfillment.
41 I wait in the car as the parishioners file into the church. I watch the greeters shake their hands, and I remember when it was Valerie and me walking through those doors.
42 Eventually, the doors close. I wait until I hear the muted sound of the organ. When the congregation begins to sing, I get out of the car. The guns are heavy but my heart is light. I feel at peace.
43 Hear this, all you people; give ear, all you inhabitants of the world. Listen to the words of my roaring.
44 I shall sing a new Psalm.
He Who Would Not Bow
Joshua walked as casually as he could manage as he wound his way through the teeming throngs of worshippers lining the streets outside the newly renovated Vatican. Joshua had seen what had happened to the Pope on TV. Who would have thought that of all people it would be the Pope who would have the guts to question Him? They had played the unedited footage on CNN for more than a week, showing the flesh being rent from the old Jesuit’s bones by unseen hands while he shrieked and wailed in mortal anguish and cried out for Jesus to save him. Joshua now knew the man’s last agonized screams and prayers by heart. He hoped that he could avoid the same fate.
The Vatican was not the only religious site He had claimed. Nearly every temple, mosque, and church across the globe now belonged to Him. For some reason, He did seem to favor this one. It had become one of His many centers of power from which He ruled all of mankind.
He claimed all faiths as His and demanded they all worship Him. His need for constant praise was limitless. Were He a human being, everyone would have thought it a sign of His insecurity. Those who refused to worship Him, those who did not accept Him as their deity, who questioned His authenticity, at least those who did so publically, suffered the fate of millions of heretics throughout history. They were killed, burned, and many were first tortured horribly at the hands of His followers.
He would be addressing His adoring worshippers soon. Whipping them into a frenzy with promises and threats and declarations of His eternal affection for His imperfect children. Joshua had heard His speeches before. They were moving, eloquent recitations that tapped all the right emotions, inspiring love, fear, respect, and guilt in equal measure along with a hatred for all blasphemers against His vain and capricious will. He knew exactly what words to use to elicit these emotions. He should. It was He who had authored them. They had no power over Joshua, but he wasn’t certain about the others and Joshua didn’t want anyone having a change of heart when they were so close to their goal.
There was a nuclear device strapped to Joshua’s chest. A dirty bomb. Six pounds of C-4 attached to a sealed canister of weapons grade plutonium in an army flak jacket. The jacket chafed around his underarm and the weight of it bit into his shoulders. He ignored these minor annoyances. Concentrating on them would have been fatal.
Joshua gripped the detonator in his hand so tightly that the metal cut into his palm. Once he let go of the detonator it would all be over. If he could just get close enough, he could end this whole mess, avenge his dead brother, save the world. These thoughts, too, he pushed out of his mind.
It began to snow, a light dusting of snowflakes that made everyone think of the coming Christmas and brought memories of Christmases past. More of His theatrics. Joshua kept his mind fixed on the words to “Jacob’s Ladder.”
“I aaaaaam…climbiiing…Jacooob’s Laaaadeeer…Everyyyy...rung goooooes… higheeeer, higheeeer.”
He didn’t want to remember last Christmas. It had been his first Christmas without Dalton.
It wasn’t just revenge that Joshua was after. Though it was his brother’s face that he thought of, his voice that he heard in his head, whenever he thought about the mission. The truth was that Joshua could not live in this world even if his brother was not dead. He could not supplicate himself. His knees were not meant to bend. His head not designed to bow. He was too much of an individual—a militant individualist, his brother had called him. The very being he now sought to assassinate had made him this way. If he could not be free, he did not want to live but he wouldn’t die alone if he could help it. And Joshua was convinced now that he could.
He kept his mind clear. He had rehearsed it over and over in his head, in field simulations, during grueling, tedious practice runs. He had tried his best to imprint every movement into his muscles, to make them instinctual, because thinking about what he was doing could get him killed. Like that old Nike commercial, it was time to just do it.
He ignored the loud, joyous praise and raucous prayer that swirled around him from a million voices. Hymns he recognized from his youth growing up in the church mixed with unfamiliar ones in a dozen or more different languages. He tried not to look at their rapturous faces, many of which were weeping actual tears of joy. He fought to keep his mind blank, not to wonder how they could all be so taken in by this despot, how they could all accept this madness. Happy sheep. Happy slaves. He didn’t understand. He wondered if his own parents were among them. Even after Dalton’s death they had not renounced their faith or rescinded their love of Him. But thinking about it now would not be wise.
He heard the voices of his fellow revolutionaries singing their own hymns as they dispersed among the crowd, making their way into position until their voices were swallowed by the cacophonous din of mindless worship. Each of them had weapons of some sort. May had five grenades tucked in the oversized pockets of her baggy cargo pants. Javier and Armando both carried fully automatic AR-15s with scopes beneath their puffy ski jackets. Tommy was strapped with a similar bomb to the one strapped to Joshua’s chest. In their heads, they were all singing gospel songs. They had decided to pick songs that they barely knew so they would have to struggle to remember the words. Concentrate on the songs, not the mission. They knew their minds were being scanned every second. One stray thought was all it would take. They had chosen Gospel because it would help them to blend in. Half of the million-plus mindless acolytes crowding the streets of Rome had similar hymns floating through their heads.
They had been training their minds and bodies for months to act without thinking, but since none of them were psychic it was hard to know how successful they had become at it. They had to trust each other’s word that they had gotten it right and would not allow their thoughts to betray their intentions. If one of them slipped they all would die, and Joshua knew that dying would be the easy part. What would happen next would be worse than any of them could imagine. The only other fear Joshua had was about how much of the future He could see.
Joshua didn’t understand a lot about predestination. It was one of the things they had argued about before beginning the mission.
“Even if He can’t see the future now that He’s here, don’t you think He would have checked every last possible scenario before entering the physical world?” May questioned. She was a 46-year-old former housewife whose husband and daughter had both been immolated when New Orleans went up.
“According to everything I’ve read, the minute He entered the world He changed the future. Everything that happens now is new territory now that He’s participating. Even if all of our actions are predetermined, His are not. So He cannot predict how we will react to His unpredictable actions,” said Joshua.
“Unless He’s following a script He laid out before entering the world. Then he could predict everything,” Armando replied. He was a former gun runner from Brazil who had supplied all of the weapons they now carried. He’d lost his mother and father when Rio went up. Javier was his brother.
Joshua looked over at Tommy, the young street kid who’d had a grudge against God long before He’d entered the world. Tommy had been born to a meth whore. He had never known his father and his mother had known the man only long enough to earn the thirty dollars for her next hit of meth. He had run away from home after his mother had started pimping him out sometime around age six and had been on the streets ever since. He’d been a drug addict himself but had gotten himself clean in the past three years and had gone back to school, completed his GED and enrolled in college. Then He had come and destroyed it all. Tommy stared back at Joshua expressionlessly, offering no comment.
They were all right, of course. It could be that He already knew every step that they would make. It could be that He had already seen them creeping up beneath the grand balcony where He was prepared to address His children. It could be that He had already witnessed Javier and Armando raising their weapons and opening fire on the guards a hundred times or more. That He’d seen May toss the grenades onto the balcony a thousand times in his head. Seen her smile with satisfaction before she closed her eyes and waited for death. That He’d seen the heavenly guard take her down in a hail of gunfire, bullets tearing through her flesh like raindrops through tissue paper. That He’d seen Javier and Armando burnt alive a million times. Joshua’s only hope was that He hadn’t seen him and Tommy release the detonators on their bombs. He really hoped that He hadn’t seen that coming…or else they were all doomed.
“I don’t know. I don’t know. Maybe He has foreseen all of this. Does that mean you don’t want to try? You want to just submit to this tyrant? Become like one of those mindless sheep out there? We have to fight. What else is there to live for?” Joshua tried to sound strong and confident, but he could not keep the panic and desperation from seeping into his voice.
It had begun last year, December 12, 2020, though to Joshua it seemed like many lifetimes ago. He had been Christmas shopping with his mother and father in Center City, Philadelphia, listening to his father complain about how he hated going downtown and hated it even more during the holidays when it was packed with cars and people all shoving and cursing, bumping into one another and stepping on each other’s feet.
“There’s pick-pockets down here too, you know? And muggers. They get you when you’re not looking. They always come out on the holidays and this is their favorite place to hunt for victims.”
“Don’t worry, Dad. I won’t let them get you.” Joshua laughed.
“Oh you laugh now, until some thug sneaks your wallet out of your pocket, steals your identity and empties your bank account. And just look at all the traffic out there. It’s gonna take us two hours to get home if we ever get out of this damn mall.”
“Well, it’s a good thing I drove. You can sleep the whole way home if you like.”
“How the hell can I sleep in all that traffic with everyone honking their horns and the car driving and stopping every second? Let’s just get this over with so we can get home.”
Joshua had gone into an electronics store in the Galleria Mall to look for an iPod for his father, intending to load it with all of his father’s favorite golden oldies. He had just walked in when he sensed that something was wrong. The store was packed but it was eerily quiet. No one was making a sound. The entire store had come to a halt and everyone was standing in the TV section, staring at the screens, watching as cities burned.
The angel of death came first. He was the herald, announcing His coming. San Francisco, New York City, Tokyo, Bangkok, Hong Kong, Tijuana, Rio de Janeiro, Amsterdam, and about two hundred other cities all went up in flames that first week. These were the cities that He had decided were irredeemable.
Governments stood by and did nothing as their citizens were immolated. Images filled the world’s TV screens of burning homes, charred bodies, shadows burned into concrete, some of them with hands clasped in prayer, piles of ash that had once been living human beings. Images that made the pictures from Hiroshima look tame by comparison. NATO held emergency meetings. The leaders of every nation made their public addresses and discussed military options, diplomatic options, evacuation, but in the end they did nothing and their cities burned.
There had been warning signs for weeks. Some said months. Bleeding statues, an increase in the number of doomsayers haunting the subways, public parks, and shopping centers, screaming about the end of the world and God’s wrath. There were plagues and natural disasters. There were even some bizarre occurrences like swarms of locusts and rats traveling across the United States. Scientists explained it away—global warming—and everyone went back to normal. There were frogs falling from the sky, people long dead who seemed to have come back to life, babies born without faces. Scientists offered their theories, rationalizing each event. Then the Mississippi, the Hudson, the Nile, the Yangtze, the Amazon, the Yenise, the Congo and seven other large rivers around the world all turned to blood, human blood, all with the same blood type and the same DNA. And finally an angel appeared in the sky over Amsterdam with wings the size of a 747, carrying a flaming sword, and the scientists ran out of explanations.
Joshua rushed out of the store to look for his mom and dad. He found them in the food court, stuffing their faces with soft pretzels.
“Mom! Dad! We need to get out of here. There’s something really bad happening.”
His father’s eyes widened.
“Terrorists?”
“I think it’s much worse than that.”
It had taken them two hours to get home, just as his father had predicted. Joshua took his parents to his house because it was closer and the traffic was getting worse. They listened to NPR the entire time as reports came in of cities on fire.
“You think it’s a nuclear attack or something? The North Koreans?”
“I don’t know, Mom. They said that there’s some kind of flying monster burning everything.”
“A flying monster?”
“Some kind of angel or something. I saw it on the TV when I was in the electronics store.”
His father snorted.
“That’s just one of those camera tricks. The government is trying to hide something.”
“I don’t know, Dad. It looked pretty real.”
They arrived at Joshua’s home just before sunset. He and his parents sat in the living room and watched the news reports as they came in. Again and again the cameras would show this enormous bird thing floating in the sky above some city. The images were always hazy and unclear, taken from miles below, and then the cameras would go blank a second later and the report would come in that another city had gone up in flames.
The religious wingnuts and fundamentalists that everyone else used to laugh at were the first to spot the signs and get out. They poured out of the cities and into the mountains and deserts. They joined religious communes and huddled in churches. Most of them were spared, but many still burned, even as they huddled in their churches, clutching their bibles and praying for forgiveness. Joshua’s brother was among them.
Dalton Wright had been four years Joshua’s junior. Joshua had changed Dalton’s diaper when he was a baby, taught him to throw a football, got him drunk for the first time, and was the first person he came out to and the first one he called when the angel appeared over San Francisco.
Ten cities had already burned that day. There was no question what the angel’s appearance meant by then. They had been watching CNN for several hours when it occurred to Joshua that San Francisco might be next. The reports had changed from describing the thing in the air as a monster to an angel, and religious leaders around the world were declaring the destruction God’s wrath, his judgment upon human sin. Joshua knew it was just a matter of time before this “angel” made it to San Francisco, Sin City. Joshua dialed his brother over and over, leaving frantic messages on his voicemail.
“Dalton? It’s me. Call me back, please! We’re worried to death about you.”
Dalton finally called him on his cell phone.
“Dalton? Where are you? Are you okay?”
“I’m trying to get the fuck out of the city! Have you seen what’s going on?”
“Yeah, Mom and Dad are here with me. We’re watching it on CNN. Are you okay?”