Struck

by Jennifer Bosworth

  Parker

  I crumpled the note into a ball and hurled it against the mirror above Parker’s dresser. I wanted to scream.

  “They’re gone,” I said when I returned to where Jeremy waited in the living room. “Parker joined the Seekers. My mom …” I thought of how Mom had been that morning, the way she said, Goodbye, Mia, with such finality.

  I knew exactly where she had gone.

  Jeremy took a step toward me and stopped. Two more strides and he could have reached out and touched me, and I really, really wanted him to touch me right then. I wanted the comfort of his warmth. I wanted it more than anything.

  But he stayed where he was.

  “I have to go get my mom and bring her home,” I told him.

  “You know where she is?” he said, and I nodded.

  “She went to the White Tent.”

  I headed for the door, but Jeremy didn’t move. “Come on,” I told him. “It’s almost midnight. We have to go now.”

  “Mia … what if your mom doesn’t want to leave?”

  I held up my hands. I didn’t have an answer. “Are you coming or not?”

  He ran a hand over his mouth, looking at the floor. “I’ll go with you, but …” He looked me up and down. “We’ll have to change clothes first.”

  Jeremy had brought his leather satchel inside so it wouldn’t be stolen by the Displaced. He went to Parker’s room to change. Apparently he’d packed some necessities in case I agreed to leave town with him, and his white jeans were among them.

  I had always avoided wearing white, even before the Followers made it my least favorite absence of color. I worried that the red of the lightning scars might show through pale-colored clothes. Mom had a pair of white jeans that fit me well enough, and I found a thick white turtleneck in the bottom of one of her drawers, something she hadn’t worn in years, since the last time she went skiing. With no white gloves available, I had no choice but to stick with my usual black.

  When I was dressed, I knocked on Parker’s closed bedroom door. There was no response, so I opened it.

  “Jeremy, are you—oh—”

  Jeremy’s back was to me, and he was naked to the waist. My eyes roamed up his body, over his long, lean back. Then he pulled on a long-sleeved white shirt, and buttoned it.

  He turned to me. His eyes scanned me up and down, and mine did the same to him.

  “Good thing you bought those white jeans,” I said.

  He nodded. I thought he might ask why I didn’t take off my black gloves, but if he had questions, he kept them to himself.

  33

  BONFIRES BLAZED AT intervals along the beach, firelight turning the walls of the White Tent an eerie pumpkin color. Hundreds of figures in white streamed like a river of milk over the sand toward it.

  “We get in and out without drawing attention to ourselves, okay?” Jeremy said in a voice only I could hear. “If we find your mom, it’s important that you don’t make a scene.”

  “When,” I said. “Not if. I know she’s here.”

  He stopped walking and faced me. “I’m serious, Mia. We have to be careful.”

  I narrowed my eyes at him. “You act like you’ve been here before.”

  “I’ve heard things, that’s all.”

  We stepped from asphalt onto sand. My feet sank to the ankles. Followers kicked off their shoes and went barefoot, and the filthy, almost feral-seeming citizens of Tentville swooped in like buzzards, snatched up the shoes, and scurried away with them.

  Despite how uneasy I was surrounded by so many hundreds of Followers, I felt safer among them than I would have if I’d been wearing my normal clothes. Beach dwellers flanked the river of Followers, shouting curses at them, throwing fistfuls of sand in their faces.

  I kept my head bowed and stayed close to Jeremy. We were nearly to the White Tent when I felt a hand grip my arm and yank me away from the procession. I found myself face to face with a wild-eyed man who reeked of sour sweat and campfire smoke. His skin was so grimy it was gray, but salted with gritty white dots of sand.

  I tried to pull away from him, but he held me tight by the arms. His fingernails needed trimming. I felt them digging through my sleeves.

  “Give your false prophet a message for me,” the man said into my face. “Tell him Jesus befriended the whores and the thieves and the sinners. Tell him his Old Testament God is dead. God doesn’t punish the wicked and save the righteous. God is love!”

  “Let her go,” Jeremy said calmly, stepping up beside me.

  For a moment the man only gripped tighter. “God is love,” he whispered. “Tell the false prophet God is love.” Then the fight went out of him and he released me, leaving smudges of fingerprint on my white sleeves.

  “False prophet,” the man muttered to himself as he wandered away. “False God.”

  Jeremy guided me back into line. “You okay?”

  “Yeah,” I said, shaky.

  We came to the flap that served as a doorway into Prophet’s White Tent. Two Followers stood on either side, speaking to each person before offering admission.

  “Have you accepted the Word of Rance Ridley Prophet as the Word of God?” one of them, a man with a squeaky clean-shaven scalp and a Cro-Magnon brow asked me.

  I glanced nervously at Jeremy. “Y-yes,” I said, stumbling over the word.

  “Yes,” Jeremy said with more confidence. “We both have.”

  Cro-Magnon smiled warmly, swept the flap aside and allowed us in. “Welcome, Brother. Sister.”

  We stepped inside the Tent, and my heart sank into my stomach. There had to be five hundred people inside, and more arriving every second.

  I stood on tiptoes, scanning the crowd. TV crews were scattered throughout the tent, some of their cameras trained on the stage, some of them conducting interviews with members of the congregation. The whole place hummed with the energy of a beehive. The dank heat created by so many bodies made my white clothes cling to my skin like plastic wrap.

  There was a high stage set up in the center of the tent, like a boxing ring without ropes. Several microphones on stands were lined up across the stage. Prophet was currently nowhere to be seen, but the male half of the twin-set was up on the platform, leading the crowd in a rousing hymn that sounded more like a battle march than an ode to God. Piano music was coming from somewhere, though I couldn’t see the piano or the player.

  I searched the he-twin’s face for bruises, thinking he ought to have a black eye or a split lip or something after the brawl at the Rove. Nothing. His skin was miraculously pristine, like Mr. Kale’s after I’d fried his palms.

  “Let’s circle around the perimeter of the tent,” Jeremy suggested. “If we don’t find her, we’ll move in closer to the stage.”

  We had to fight for every step, our shoes sinking into the sand and the tent growing more packed with each passing second, everyone pushing toward the stage. It took us what seemed like an hour and a few dozen sets of crunched toes to make our way around the perimeter. There were so many faces, so many people dressed in white, they started to blur together into one giant cloudlike mass.

  We delved farther into the crowd. But as soon as we got within twenty feet of the stage, we hit a solid wall of bodies. We could go no farther without prying the Followers apart.

  I cursed in frustration, and a dozen eyes turned to glare at me with disapproval. “Sorry,” I muttered.

  “You promised you wouldn’t draw attention to us,” Jeremy hissed in my ear.

  At that moment the music stopped, and the he-twin onstage announced that the “program” was about to begin.

  “We’re not going to find her like this,” Jeremy said. “We should go back to your house and wait. She has to come home eventually.”

  I stepped away from him, irritated by his suggestion. “If you want to leave, go ahead. Disappear on me again. You’re good at that.” I didn’t mean it. The last thing I wanted was for Jeremy to leave me here alone.

  “Mia—” He reached f
or me, but knowing what would happen if he touched me, I took another step back. At that moment the crowd surged like a rising tide and closed around me, and the next thing I knew, Jeremy was gone, an impenetrable wall of people between us. I stood on tiptoes, searching for him, but I only saw strangers.

  Then a muffled tapping sound came through the speakers. Someone cleared his throat.

  I turned toward the stage and saw a man standing in the center … a man with long, thick, perfectly white hair, and eyes the color of fog.

  Prophet.

  The he-twin flanked him on one side, and the she-twin took her place opposite him. Where were the rest of Prophet’s adopted children? I wondered. Would the twelfth make an appearance at this revival? It was a special night. According to Prophet, the world wouldn’t be around after tomorrow.

  Prophet smiled and held blindly to the microphone as he leaned forward to speak.

  “Brothers and sisters,” he said in a voice both gentle and authoritative; soothing and chilling. “I welcome you at this dark hour, and I call on you, the righteous, to bring light where there is none. To shine with the glory our God has bestowed upon you. Such light as yours makes the darkness seem a fragile thing. So let us shine! Let us bring not a single hour of light, but a whole night of it, on this, our last night on earth!”

  A cheer rose from the crowd like a thousand birds screaming into flight. I clapped my hands over my ears and held them there until the noise tapered off. When I lowered them, Prophet was speaking again.

  “Some of you came here tonight seeking comfort,” he said. “Some of you wish to be healed, or want merely to stand shoulder to shoulder with like-minded people. Some of you want to be told that everything is going to turn out fine. That this wretched world of ours will heal itself.”

  Prophet closed his filmy eyes for a moment and breathed deeply. The sound of his breath was wind coming through the speakers.

  He opened his eyes again and turned in a slow circle, as though to look on the faces of every person in the crowd. I wondered what Prophet saw when he looked around him. Blurry angels, or nothing more than a murky haze?

  People closed their eyes when Prophet’s gaze fell on their section, some clasping hands over their hearts, linking fingers in prayer, muttering to themselves. Tears landed on cheeks. Sobs startled the silence.

  When Prophet turned to my section, his eyes seemed to bore right into mine, and I found I wanted to lower my gaze. Wanted to, but wouldn’t. There was nothing to be afraid of. I was just one more indistinct shape among many.

  “I wish I could tell you the things you want to hear,” Prophet went on, still turning in his slow circle, the twins turning with him, like they were on the same axis. “But I am merely a conduit for God’s words, and I’m afraid God has other plans for this world. Our earth has been wounded by hate. By sin. By carelessness and greed and apathy. The wound has remained untended too long. Infection has set in, and now there is only one solution: amputation.”

  There was a collective sucking in and holding of breath from the crowd. In the silence that followed, Prophet’s voice resounded.

  “Rest assured, though, brothers and sisters, God knows who is on His side and who is against Him. God is with us tonight, and He knows each of your faces. He knows that you have chosen His way and chosen wisely. Fear not, for it is always darkest before the dawn. At this moment, things are very dark, in the world at large, but especially here, in the so-called City of Angels. City of Angels …” He shook his head, sounding disgusted. “There may be angels still in this city, but they are the minority. Demons have the power here. Hell-A, I’ve heard people call this place, and how right they are. This is hell, where the demons manufacture their poison and distribute it through the world by satellite, by television and theater, by Internet. The evil begins here, brothers and sisters, but it will begin to end here. A storm is coming! A storm like no other. The earth will be shaken, and the sun will be as ash, the moon as blood. The stars of heaven will fall unto the earth, and every mountain and island shall be moved out of their places. So sayeth the Lord!”

  Prophet clasped hands with the twins and thrust their arms into the air, making an M of limbs, and they did seem to shine with some sort of light. I didn’t want to see it, but it surrounded them like a halo. Another deafening cry of approval went up from the Followers, but this time I didn’t bother to cover my ears. I felt numb. Immobile.

  “God has spoken to me, brothers and sisters!” Prophet boomed into the microphone, trying to be heard over the uproar of cheering and clapping. The crowd began to quiet down when they heard his voice, hundreds of people shushing hundreds of other people, which was almost as loud as their cheering. Prophet lowered his arms and the arms of the twins, but he continued to grasp their hands tightly at his sides. “God has spoken to me,” he said again, more quietly this time. “He has told me His plan, and it is great, and it is terrible. But He has also said He would protect those of you who come to Him to be saved. I tell you God is present in this place tonight. He is here to offer His blessing and His protection to those who will surrender to Him with their hearts and minds open. Will you surrender to Him?”

  “Yes!” the crowd roared.

  “Then let the first of you come up onto the stage to surrender and receive His blessing!”

  Arms waved in the air, like overgrown blades of grass in a hurricane wind. Figures cut through the field of arms. I recognized a face, two, three I’d seen on The Hour of Light and at the Rove … the Apostles, moving among the Followers, choosing supplicants not already in white and leading them toward the stage. The crowd parted to let them through.

  The twins led a man up onto the platform. Even from a distance, I could see the man’s lips and eyelids were crusted with the sores that came with earthquake fever, and his posture sagged, as though his bones were made of something less substantial than a normal person’s.

  “Are you ready to surrender and be saved?” Prophet asked him.

  The man nodded vigorously and fell to his knees before Prophet, sobbing. “My wife died in the earthquake,” he cried. “She was everything to me. I can’t live like this! I can’t live without her!”

  Prophet palmed the man’s forehead, and the man jolted as though he’d been defibrillated.

  “Your wife has been accepted into the kingdom of heaven,” Prophet said. “And you will join her someday, but not today. God needs you here, to stand on His battlefield and fight. You are saved, Brother.”

  Prophet removed his hand and the man rose, trembling, eyes large and shining. The twins led him off the stage, and another set of Apostles received him. My eyes stayed on the man’s face. Something about it had changed.

  The man wiped at his tears, and I blinked, not sure if I was really seeing what I thought I was seeing. The scabs came loose from his eyes and fluttered to the ground, as though they’d been no more than stage makeup glued onto his face. That had to be it. But the sores around his lips … they seemed lighter, like they were disappearing, drying up.

  “Music,” Prophet called. “Let us sing! Let us rejoice in the glory of God’s Light!”

  The unseen piano player began the first notes of a familiar tune, and then the whole crowd was singing and swaying as a pregnant woman was hauled up onto the stage, her distended stomach extending in front of her like a handshake.

  “I’m going to be an unwed mother,” she announced into the microphone, cheeks crimson with shame. “I’ve been a sinner my whole life. I don’t want my child to suffer for my sins. Please, Prophet, give him your blessing. Give him God’s blessing.”

  Prophet laid his hands on the pregnant woman’s stomach. She flung back her head and convulsed, crying out in ecstasy.

  My stomach felt like it was on an elevator, rising toward my throat. I swallowed and swallowed, but it wouldn’t go back down. I wanted to get out, but the crowd pressed in around me, and my mom was here somewhere. I couldn’t leave without her. Couldn’t leave her here with these crazy peop
le, no matter how much she wanted to be among them.

  I began searching the crowd again. I was the only one in the White Tent without my eyes glued to the stage.

  Then I saw out of the corner of my eye the next supplicant the Apostles were bringing onto the platform, and the blood began to pound so loudly in my ears it drowned out everything else.

  The man making his way up the short flight of steps nearly had to be carried, though not against his will. He was injured. He should have been in a hospital. In a burn ward.

  He should have been dead.

  The Dealer’s face was warped on one side, like a melted candle, more raw red tissue than actual skin. His wounds seeped, a constant flow of sap-colored liquid, running down the scorched flesh, soaking the yellowing bandages that wrapped his shoulders and torso.

  After the crowd’s collective gasp at the sight of the Dealer’s ruined face, a new silence, deeper than ever, settled around us like a blanket.

  But Prophet couldn’t see the Dealer. He approached the man as he would any other supplicant who came to him.

  “Why have you come to me, Brother?” Prophet asked. “Do you wish to surrender your soul to God?”

  “I …” the Dealer began, and even producing that one letter caused him to moan in agony. “I was told you could heal me,” he finished in a rush that made him writhe, and then sob so pathetically that even I, who knew the circumstances surrounding his injury, had to pity him.

  Prophet approached the Dealer. “I offer healing to my Followers, yes. But you are not one of my Followers, are you?”

  “N–n–no,” the Dealer sobbed.

  Prophet turned away. “I can do nothing for you, then.”

  “Wait! I will surrender my soul to God anything just heal me please heal me!” Another windfall of words that, this time, left the Dealer too racked with pain to even sob. Only a sound like a muted scream made it past his bared teeth.