The Resurrectionist

by Jackson, Gil

  ‘Tony.’ Charlie called. ‘See you’ve a new penis.’

  ‘We thought we might have trouble with you, Charlie. We took precautions to make sure that the President’s wishes were complied with.’ Allan Georgos said with a satisfied expression.

  Charlie shook his head in disbelief. Worried the outcome. Had all along. It would not be cut and dry. He tried again with the para-army. ‘You think what you’ve got is better, do you? You’re deluding yourselves if you’re thinking along those lines, any of you. Men of science believing that they can bring God into their equations. Is your rationale so limited that you, are thinking, that good will come out of all of this? Fools that are not idiots are deranged. They are mad-men. You are mad men. Whatever your God, he has given us physics, chemistry, biology, philosophy, art, music, literature ... love, hate, and the freedom to do as we choose for good or evil. And what do you want to do with it? Nothing. Throw it back in His face. Do you think that He’s about to hand over His sperm in a test tube? He won’t. He’ll destroy all of us first, that’ll be His legacy if you continue backing this man. He’ll leave you with nothing more than a great pile of steaming shit! to lord it over! And my regret, my sorrow, gives me a shudder that I’m about to go to hell and rub shoulders with the likes of you, because your delusions put you above God, for eternity. With all that’s gone before in the last 2,000 years, have some of us still learnt fook all! Want to do something useful ... Go away from this place, and burn those uniforms!’

  If any of these men were listening they were not about to argue with Tony, not with that thing in his hand.

  Spannocs shouted. ‘She’s coming!’

  ‘Take up your positions.’ Dr. Allan Georgos said punching in the password to set AG-MX-960 back into motion. Then, she was there. Sister Annie Carter’s, Amazon Queen Orithyia: Annie dropped to her knees as if in prayer. Tony Di Sotto took his eyes off the ball, and she was on him around the hips in an English rugby tackle that brought him down face to face with her. The revolver’s business end pressed between their faces favouring Annie’s open mouth. Hamilton was on the pair of them, straining with the man, gently eased the weapon away from her mouth, while he attempted pressure to the trigger. Hairsbreadth might be an overused expression but in this case it was justified, Charlie thought. The gun went off the same moment Hamilton moved it across into Tony’s territory. The three inch cartridge took off and tore through his bottom lip, into the roof of his mouth, past the back of his nasal cavity, and out through the hole it had made for itself in the top of his skull depressing and liquidising his brain as it went. Charlie thought he might have been immortal, but even immortality had its limits. It had just been crossed and shattered eardrums would be restored sometime in the future.

  Georgos’s para-army seized the moment and fled the hangar. Our Marines? Held their ground. (They would, wouldn’t they?)

  There was a look of horror on Spannocs’s face. His hands locked around the Entity’s wrists let out a scream at the death of his lieutenant. Then the thought occurred to him that Tony’s body could no longer contain Spannocs’s demigod. He tried to let go the Entity. There was a rush of wind past Charlie. Spannocs tried to get away, make a run, but the spirit of the demigod looking for another host, was already in him. And with the gravitational pull of AG-MX-960 no one was going anywhere soon. The Angel sensing what had happened was onto it. Coming down at him with an ear-splitting scream. She was tearing at Spannocs’s head trying to get inside him. Then came the clicking beside her. It was trying to pull her off him.

  ‘Oh, fook!’ Charlie said. Then to himself. Am I right about all of this?

  The scientist engineers’ released another stream of data from the bus unit into the computer. They were not fazed by what was occurring, or what they were doing. It was pure scientific mechanics. The Entity. The man. The Angel. Held fast. A metre in height. To Charlie’s eyes, he was no more God’s representative on earth than a garden gnome. Wires and connections over his now un-hooded head revealed a face of just two eyes. Like, one of those ET images Marvel comic books are apt to draw as an interpretation. Whether one of their artists had actually seen one or it was the product of an industrial imagination, one could never be sure. Not now though. Knowing that such exists. Something told him that he had been fundamentally wrong about all of this. Was the Entity a go between representing Satan and not the Resurrectionist for God? But protecting the demigod from her. Or, had he got that wrong—?

  Even Satan’s demigod was worried.

  Charlie seeing the main power unit to the computer and fearing some sort of nuclear catastrophe from mixing spirits with gravitational magnetism of these strengths made a dive for it. Sullivan seeing him pulled a revolver on him as he was passing Georgos and the console. Hamilton seeing what Charlie had in mind went to his aid. ‘Stay where you are, Weinberg. A journalist is supposed to record news not get involved in its outcome.’

  ‘What did you call me?’ Hamilton said.

  ‘Another Weinberg put in the firing line, eh, Charlie? You murdered two, there were no chance that the family was going to allow a third, was there?’ Sullivan said the gun now at Charlie’s head. ‘As soon as you and the good sister there, involved a reporter from the New York Post, I put two and two together. They used you, Fitch. To trap Frederik Spannocs, except, they didn’t know that Spannocs was a servant of the state, like themselves. Not on the wrong side — for there isn’t one — but on another, eh, Charlie boy. Now just you ease yourself back in the reporters’ gallery.’ Charlie did as he was bid. Sullivan lowered his revolver.

  Hamilton stared at Charlie. Charlie shrugged. At the end of the day, Sullivan, wasn’t a million miles away from being right.

  AG-MX-960, as good as its word, held its own. It was a remarkable piece of kit (he had to admit that) but had no place in this world — not now, not ever. This was science too far. It had been his intent to destroy it. And those around the Presidential table to let it have its way. A strange part of him decided that if God had been levelled by man’s science it was for Him to either accept it or put more science between them. He’d always thought that. Why else was the mystery of Creation so elusive with consideration of science being currently where it’s at? But, if that is what He intended, He’d better get a move on! This Entity, whatever side, was either protecting the demigod from the Angel, or?

  People were dying out there!

  Spannocs’ tried desperately to disenfranchise himself from his once comfortable host. Except nothing was happening. He was being subjected to 3×10‾¹³ of gamma rays and it was burning him up.

  * * *

  Hamilton was concentrating on his job, firing off frame after frame from his camera. Annie, standing next to him, speaking into a digital recorder. Charlie noticed that some wag had the audacity to hang a notice over AG-MX-960: God’s Representative On Earth Brought To You With The Compliments Of The Order Of The Most Divine Third Circle. (Oh, my God!) And they’ve a corporate camera crew in to capture the event. No doubt hoping to play Fox and CNN up against each other for the early evening slot. All that needed to be added, he thought now, Sponsored by Coca Cola and McDonald’s; and it would have been farce complete. They didn’t, just left it at Google. (Not much smaller mercies!) The world hanging by a thread, and here were these lunatics opening Pandora’s casket with the arrogant contempt of self-appointed stewardship.

  That same corporate film crew were the first to make a run for it, knocking aside Sullivan, leaving a trail of wires and transformers from their own equipment. Hamilton stopped photographing, and Annie, lost recorded sound to frequency off scale. The Angel was on the move away from the Entity and Spannocs floating away from the pair of them in a breeze of encapsulated celestial light now. Considering her next move?

  The film crew sensing something seriously dangerous about to happen were in no mood to hang around any longer than they had to in spite of Georgos’s protestations that they’d no need to worry. They didn’t believe him.

 
; Before Charlie could stop her, Annie walked forward and pulled one of the connections from the Entity. What was she doing? He screamed at Hamilton to stop her. Hamilton grabbed her and pulled her away. But it was too late.

  A darkness fell over the hangar like heavy duty black velvet the size of the entire universe and Charlie knew, knew ... that what they purported to believe as the Resurrectionist: this Entity, was not one and the same that these idiots had been pursuing since Christ’s crucifixion, but another angel ... as her. The Resurrectionist was to be bigger than man’s imagination could ever get its head around — which would be no surprise to anyone with a modicum of intelligence and knowledge looking to the size of the universe. They were gone in a light ball! The both of them. Into another world. But which?

  Into a world of turmoil. Hamilton saw a world of chaos and disorder; where the ingredients for the recipe for the creation of a life and its potential for good and ill are but a thin line; where the chef of His interpretation of dimension can spoon his mixtures of particle matter to create His own unique life form adjusted to his experimental whim. All juxtaposed with a smidgen of a time shift far enough apart not to spill into the other. Except just occasionally, very occasionally, once in a 10,000,000,000 human year time span, a saucepan boils over and a cabbage thinks itself king!

  He watched Annie smile the smile that only she could and the metamorphosis of her to Angel took place before his eyes. Semi-consciousness took him into its state and he dreamed back into the hangar. Standing where he had pulled her from the Entity. She now standing with the Entity, a cable trailing from her hand. To the left of her, his own self. Beside them both, the shimmer of a man, he couldn’t be sure, with the look of understanding on its face smiled at her, then gone Charlie’s Angel with it. She collapsed into Hamilton’s arms.

  He was in her same dream, which of course, was an impossibility.

  * * *

  My own resurrection began and ended, for me at least, in the same ball of light and I am standing next to Frank Weinberg. I am exhibiting no emotion, partly because none was apparent from him, and expecting some old magic from yours truly. But I had to admit; it was as if he had never gone away. That is, he greeted me, with a resumé of New York’s corruption trial during the Judge Seaburg inquiries into the Hon. James Walker. All a fair and accurate account. Except he couldn’t answer any of my questions further than what he had known up to the time of his death. In fact, he didn’t make any of the usual comments that one old friend would make to another. Just the phrase: How’s the future, Sergeant? Not to miss a trick I asked him how the past was? And he told me! And I told him. But, his was more interesting. He wasn’t alive, not exactly, not in the sense of the word we understand; but a damn good dream would cover it. I had come to the conclusion since, that he might be data re-running. I couldn’t describe it any better than that. Now convinced that after death there is a life, which encapsulates the spirit at the time of parting — with no seeing of what is to become. Which might be just as well for peace of mind in an afterlife. My theorising of life after death being played out before me in this way was sobering. I hope that what I had experienced wasn’t wrong: that it was all just a dream, might be too much. Let that be a lesson to me: don’t think too deeply about death again, philosophising is a depressing state of the mind, and what I know now, or think I do, there’s no need of it.

  * * *

  ‘You can get up now, Marco Giuseppi, you’re under arrest.’ It had been a long time since they had last met in the physical and he would now enjoy the moment.

  ‘Charlie! Look out.’ It was Director Nathaniel Johnson’s voice. But he heeded too late.

  Sullivan came up behind him and dropped a box over Charlie’s head that pushed down hard on to the top of his skull. He couldn’t move. He heard the movement of a clock winder taking up the tension of a coiled spring into a tight circle. With nothing more than a hair trigger holding the explosive coil, Sullivan slowly put pressure on it. ‘Goodbye, Charlie, soon to be ex-FBI Agent, O’Hare, nice to have worked with you these past 90 years—’

  ‘Stop it, stop him, Hamilton.’ Annie said.

  Charlie, gun half in and half out of his shoulder holster, fired haphazardly in panic.

  The shot shook Giuseppi into action. Seeing what Sullivan was about he was at Charlie’s side. He took hold of Sullivan’s head, ‘I want only for your forgiveness, Sergeant O’Hare, and I’ll go to Hell with no more.’

  ‘Georgos shoot him. He’s got my head! Now!’ Sullivan was yelling.

  Georgos was in no position to shoot anyone. The bullet from Charlie’s gun had struck him, and he had staggered, hand over a blooded shirt, beneath a white, bloodstained coat, and fell collapsing over the keyboard of the console computer sending the last of a stream of data into the system, while Marco Giuseppi, imagining the words of forgiveness from Charlie, ripped the head, shoulders, and arms off Daniel Sullivan clean to his breast bone in one action taking the spring coiled death mask off Charlie’s head. The whole bloody mess that was Daniel Sullivan in two halves, laid at Charlie’s feet, holding a box that was vibrating so fast it took the top of his torso a full six feet across the floor and away from his lower body until the spring relaxed; Georgos at the same moment fell away from the console collapsed over him that would require a dna test to blood separate the two men. But to Charlie, his neck red with the exertion of pulling that death trap from his head, they would need to be quick. For Marco Giuseppi had turned to dust and it was that, that now mingled with the blood, drying it, contaminating any such test.

  * * *

  Whether the Entity came back through the wall, clicking in some kind of thank you for what they had done, or, had made a mistake in its direction, before disappearing through the wall, Charlie could only guess at. But understanding basic physics in regard to anti-matter and flammable substances guessed what was to happen next. AG-MX-960 had caught alight and there was fuel enough to blow the place to smithereens. He screamed, Everybody out. Hamilton grabbed Annie Carter’s hand and ran. Charlie ran to the computer console, kicked the bloodied body of Georgos out the way, pulled the plug off the external hard drive, put it in his case, ran and dived out through the door after them into the arctic wastes of Kodiak Island. Still running he chased down Hamilton and Annie the three diving straight into the door of the Sikorsky. Marines with the other helicopters were already half up. The pilot, seeing the first explosion take the roof off the hangar, didn’t need a second invitation to lift off. The mighty rotors, one after the other, began their circles of power, and gently at first, lifted from the snow, turned its cockpit towards the ground and accelerated forward with as much lift as it dare without stalling and was away before the second explosion blew the entire site back to its natural state.

  ‘Anyone see, what became of Director Nathaniel

  Johnson—?’ Annie asked above the noise of the Sikorsky, looking first at Charlie, then Hamilton.

  PART THREE

  CHAPTER 32 – 1997

  Sister Annie Carter, Carmelite nun, special envoy to Pope John-Paul, special advisor to the United Nations’ Ecumenical Society of World Religions, and special agent with the FBI, headed the party across the tarmac of Kennedy Airport. Wearing the cloth of her order, cigarette dangling from her lips, brief case in her hand, laptop in the same hand, cellular phone to her ear and speaking a conversation to the caller clearly not of a ‘have you had a nice holiday’ nature; was on another mission. This was damage limitation of the highest order from the man that was St. Peter’s representative on earth to followers of a religion that numbered a billion souls. And she, with her career in likely ruins, was having none of it, her disagreement excommunicable to the mind of the man that knew he was playing a royal flush against a full house.

  Hamilton Fitch had the look of a worried man.

  ‘About your affair.... With my mother?’

  Charlie had a look of cheek on his face. ‘Don’t worry, son. You’re still kosher.’

  Ar
nie Z. Weinberg born of a Jewish mother and father was halakhically himself a Jew — not circumcised — but still Jewish. No longer a full participant to his faith. Although, he’d argued with Charlie, that he could not possibly have the precept of a faith if he didn’t have one. Charlie used to Irish mentality, studied him greatly, but still furrowed his brow. He would have to come back to that one, he thought at the time. He wasn’t going to have to now; the man had looked into Pandora’s Box and seen his future.

  The grandmother that had raised him had often referred to the cemetery where David was buried as Bet ha-Hayyim (House of Life). When he had asked what she had meant by that, she had replied that one day he would understand. He had not understood her whispering: Long life at his father’s gravestone. And he never did get around to asking her what she had meant, he didn’t have to, as he got older he learnt that it is an important part of a practising Jew’s faith. But like the rest of the faith, he would have little time for. But now, having seen his father, and his grandfather, in the flesh, so to speak, he was going to have to come to terms with something.

  Hamilton asked Charlie what Annie already guessed to be true.

  ‘She was trying to take out Satan. And she had come close. She couldn’t rest knowing that her daughter had been subjected to abuse — as others. Satan is a creation of God and is an essential part of life as He. Can’t have one without the other. Hard as it is. Equilibrium, you understand. She had to be stopped. Her resurrection, well— She’s at peace now. Simple as that—’