The REIGN: Out of Tribulation

by Jeffrey McClain Jones

  Driving to town required more than fuel for his vehicle, it required emotional armor. The burnt out shell of his family home hunkered dejectedly in town and the graves of his children lay in the cemetery behind the Lutheran church. Anna’s body had not been returned to him and he had no idea where she had been buried, if she had been buried. Even more disturbing than this personal past history, were the stories about many of the graves in the town cemeteries being ripped open, as if bombs had been planted in each of them, bombs that reportedly all went off at once. According to the rumors, not all of the graves had been so violently disturbed, but Rodney had not yet found the courage to go and check if his children’s graves were among those that lay open. Part of his reticence grew out of the stories surrounding the day those graves exploded. At least one woman in town reported seeing human figures launching from the cemetery into the sky. Unfortunately, for those who wanted to dismiss such a fantastic story, the woman who saw these sky-bound forms was the respected former mayor of the town. She also claimed to have spoken to others who had seen similar phenomena. All of this happened around the same time as the disappearance of the troops and civil servants working for the Dictator.

  “One hell of a night,” Rodney said to himself, as he drove toward town, thinking about these stories. Maybe today he would check those two graves with his last name on them. Maybe he would even look in at the old house. He felt strangely free to contemplate such soul-stretching adventures.

  On his approach to town, Rodney tried to determine which of the farmhouses along the way still contained occupants. They showed little sign of life, in general, but he knew that other resistance fighters like him, and dozens of refugees, had begun filtering into the area. That influx amounted to nothing like the original population, but a significant increase over the hand-full of survivors that had remained huddled in Somerville through the occupation by the Dictator’s people. Resisters called these folk “the chipsters,” for the ID chips they had imbedded in their bodies, chips that made them easy to verify and easy to track. Refusing to be “chipped” was a crucial turn for rebels like Rodney, who rejected government control and the spiritual acquiescence it implied. No one owned or controlled him, never had, never would. Without the chips, he and his comrades more easily eluded their enemies, as they raided government facilities with which the Dictator attempted to clamp down on the once-free citizens of North America.

  As he slalomed around potholes and shell craters on his way into town, Rodney felt a minor twinge of regret at how much damage the resistance had exacted on their own country. Of course, the various stages of conquest by the Dictator had also taken their toll, including the destruction of the farmhouse that Rodney was making into his new home. The previous occupants had been friends of Rodney, rousted out and interned by U. S. troops cooperating with the Dictator, during the early stages of the occupation, before the open rebellion in which Rodney had played a crucial local role.

  His militant activity had, of course, made Rodney’s wife and children targets. His efforts to hide them had ultimately failed. Anna was captured and imprisoned, along with other people from her church group, while Rodney was down in Texas fighting in one of the great battles of the second war for independence. The following year, his children had been accidental victims of a bombing raid by the occupiers’ air force. An errant missile had destroyed the barn in which they had been hidden by their cousins, not very far from their home in Somerville. Their remains, what could be recovered from the burning crater, had been buried in town before Rodney returned to find the news of his second great loss. He didn’t resent his relatives burying the children without him. Who could know when he would be back home, if he would ever be back home?

  Thinking about all of this had become more frequent and cogent for Rodney in the last few weeks, since that odd night of the exploding graves and the disappearing occupiers. When he thought of the bizarre rumors he had heard, he wondered why the Dictator’s people would blow up so many graves before leaving?

  Rolling down Main Street, Rodney coasted to a stop outside Jay Middleton’s store. Jay’s family had abandoned their dry goods store during the huge volcanic eruption in Yellowstone and again during the darkest days of the occupation. But the building had remained intact and the store was now back in business, with Jay taking full responsibility for it, now that his wife, his father and his brother, had all succumbed to one tragedy or another.

  Jay had been a large, barrel-chested man with a dark red face, just like his father, before the long devastating string of disasters and wars. Now he was more of a raw-boned and gaunt-looking stranger, who had Jay’s eyes and his booming voice, though it boomed much less than it used to when he and Rodney had played football together in high school. Not much of Jay’s dark hair remained and what little he kept had faded to gray streaks across his mottled red skull.

  “Hey, Rodney!” Jay bellowed when he saw his old running back breach the doorway. The inside of the store was all painted John Deere green, as if it was the only color available when someone determined that the walls so desperately needed painting that any color would do.

  “Jay! How’s it hanging?” Rodney replied, more jolly than he expected of himself.

  Stopping short, Jay lapsed into a vacant look and then, upon return from a rare internal inventory, said, “You know, I’m feeling pretty good, considering all of it.” He looked far more serious and introspective than Rodney was accustomed, but then he also looked thinner and much older than Rodney remembered. Jay’s response reflected the years of loss that everyone had experienced. For Jay, it started with his father’s heart attack and death eight years ago, then his brother’s death from the flu, followed by his own arrest for resisting the economic regulations of the new regime. That prompted his wife to leave him, never to return, as the country devolved into civil war. Nothing broke him more, however, than the death of his daughter at the hands of troops loyal to the Dictator. What they had done to her, before shooting her, infuriated Jay so much that he left his store and joined the resistance underground. He didn’t fight in faraway cities, as Rodney had, instead providing supplies for sabotage and assassinations around Somerville. Jay stayed close to home, hoping to exact revenge against the very men who tore his daughter out of his house, while he closed up the store that one regret-filled night.

  No one looked at another’s eyes in Somerville now, without confronting the ghosts of lost children or spouses or parents. Their ghosts, as well as one’s own, co-opted any normal conversation the survivors might intend or attempt. At least that’s how it had been when Rodney returned each time, to find another house burned, another community member missing, another grave filled in the cemetery. Now, however, something seemed to have shifted. Perhaps some of those ghosts had found their rest.

  “So, Pete tells me you have a van you want to get rid of,” Rodney said, pushing into his reason for the visit.

  “It ain’t mine, really,” Jay said. “Somebody just left it here before one of the evacuations and they never came back for it. It don’t even have a registration or anything identifying who left it, so it’s yours for the taking. It’s in my way now, if I’m gonna try to get this old store back in shape.”

  Rodney was looking at the empty shelves, sparse product spread out in single-deep rows to make it look like more. In recent months, Jay’s only source of supply had been foraging in abandoned houses and stores in the area. Rodney felt some admiration for how well his old teammate had done at consolidating limited resources into a place where people could barter and exchange.

  Jay invited Rodney out the back door of the store. The poverty of recent years played out right there in Jay’s employee parking and dumpster area. Instead of the rancid, cluttered poverty of the slums of the nation’s recent past, here was the poverty of an economic and political vacuum. Barrenness and frugality, characteristic of a farm community isolated from both buyers and sellers, added up to a clean parking lot and empty dumpster.

 
; Next to that dumpster, sat a white panel van, the sort that tradesmen had used for decades. As Rodney circled the abandoned vehicle, he recognized one of the innovative compressed-air powered vans he had heard of, but had only seen in pictures and videos. Jay wasn’t familiar with the technology and had assumed it was an electric vehicle lacking a charge. Rodney fiddle around, reading the instructions printed right on the van’s interior, to conclude that all it needed was reconnecting a starter motor to the main engine. Once he had done that, he hit the big green start button next to the steering wheel and the thing came to life, puffing and purring contentedly. The solid rubber tires appeared to be only slightly flattened on the bottom and he expected those would smooth out with some driving.

  Jay was surprised that the van started and looked a little envious that he had so readily given it away, but not enough to scotch his offer. He would benefit as much as anyone from having Rodney back in the carpentry business, buying supplies and restoring the town with a hundred assorted projects.

  “You sure you want to just give this away?” Rodney asked, looking out of the open driver’s window. He turned off the puffing motor.

  “Oh, yeah. It wasn’t ever mine in the first place. It’s yours now.” Jay stood with his hands in the pockets of his jeans.

  Rodney thought a moment. “You suppose people might come back to reclaim their houses and land and stuff?”

  “I think about that,” Jay said. “I even keep a list of stuff I take from abandoned houses, just in case someone does come back and wonders where all their tools and things went.”

  “You’re a good man, Jay,” Rodney said.

  “Ha. Who knows what ‘good’ is anymore?” Jay laughed. Then his mood shifted. “I did some things I thought I’d never do. But I figure I had to do them then. Now I try to be careful to not get lazy about doing bad stuff, when it’s not a desperate situation. You know?”

  Rodney nodded. He knew exactly what Jay meant. He often fell asleep at night with the faces of men he had killed staring him down.

  Just then, a tall, boney woman with pale, copper-colored hair stepped out of Jay’s back door, which he had left ajar. Sara Teller had been a schoolteacher back when the schools functioned, teaching both of Rodney’s kids along the way. When she spotted Rodney with Jay, she slowed down. Sara was on a mission, but let it slip into low gear when she saw that Jay wasn’t alone.

  Jay turned toward Sara and greeted her. “Sara, how ya doin’?”

  “I’m feeling great today, Jay. And yourself?” She smiled, countless lines creasing her pale and freckled cheeks.

  “I’m good, thanks.” Jay stopped there, when he spotted the plastic bag full of shiny objects that Sara held in one hand. “What you got there?”

  “A bag full of miracles,” she said with a sly chuckle.

  “What?” Jay and Rodney replied simultaneously. Rodney had stepped out of the van to greet Sara.

  “Hi Rodney, how are you these days?” Sara asked, turning to greet him.

  “I’m fine, Sara. What is it you have there?” Rodney could see now that the objects were pieces of jewelry.

  Sara held up the bag and the gold and silver sparkled in the pure morning light. “It’s odd bits of jewelry.”

  As she stepped up next to the two men, she held one hand under the bag to allow the pieces to filter into a single layer inside the clean plastic. A clean plastic bag was itself a bit of a miracle in the current economy, and both men silently noted that, but Sara drew their attention away with what she said next.

  “Someone, or something, has been leaving these on my back porch.”

  Again both men responded simultaneously. “What?”

  “I go out in the morning, or the afternoon, or any time at all, and I find a piece of jewelry sitting there on my back porch, just above the top step.”

  Rodney raised his eyebrows and looked at Sara. He hadn’t talked to her in a while and he wondered whether she had lost her handle on reality through the tragic years since.

  Jay, who knew her better, joked. “Aw, you got a secret admirer who’s softenin’ you up.”

  Sara smiled and patted Jay firmly on the shoulder. “You’re the only man for me, Jay. You know that,” she teased. With so many people widowed, the relationships between sexes had seemed tumbled and awkward to Rodney. But just now, he saw a flash of light between these two single, middle-aged neighbors.

  A bit more seriously, Sara continued. “I don’t think any man would be silly enough to bring me one earring one day and another of a different kind the next, or would leave me a diamond engagement ring just lying on the porch?”

  Jay and Rodney both nodded numbly. Her reasoning defied denying, but that left them unanimously bereft of a plausible explanation. Then Sara traded their confusion for consternation, by adding a bit of evidence she had been withholding.

  “What I haven’t told you yet, is that yesterday, when I looked out to see if any new treasure had arrived, I saw a crow drop this ring as he stood on my porch. Then he just flew away, as if his work was done there.”

  Jay itched his nose and scowled. “Sara, are you telling me birds are bringing you jewelry?”

  She just smiled and shrugged slightly.

  This set Rodney spinning around a revolving door, in and out of whether he should tell what happened with the coyote that morning. He stopped the spin, allowing himself to be launched by its momentum into the light of day. Truth seemed a safe place to land.

  “Well, I had a strange thing happen to me this morning that might make this seem a bit more believable...” Rodney trailed off, second guessing his resolve.

  Jay looked at Rodney incredulously. “Yeah, what was that?”

  Rodney found more encouragement in Sara’s ready face, so he ignored Jay and just locked eyes with Sara, as he recounted the tale of the towel and the coyote.

  Clearly, Jay had no slot to fit Rodney’s story into and he just drop out of the conversation, stunned and statuesque.

  Sara laughed. “That’s better than my story,” she said with energy. Rodney sensed that she was getting a charge out of the picture of him bathing out in the open, behind his unfinished house, as much as from the story of the grateful coyote. He hoped she and Jay would get together. They both seemed lonely to him.

  Jay’s loss of momentum in the conversation slowed it to a stop. He turned instead to business, leading Sara into his store to see what she wanted in exchange for some of her treasures. In the process, he struggled internally with the question of just how much jewelry could be worth in their wasted and shell-shocked world.

  Rodney returned to his new van, starting it again. He pulled it around to the front of Jay’s store, behind his mutant PFV. He looked at that armor-plated vehicle, venturing a hope that he might not need it anymore. In peacetime, he would trade armor floorboards for fuel economy and space for his tools. He laughed at the notion of peace breaking out even between the humans and varmints, like the crows and coyotes.

  When he reentered the store, he heard Jay saying, “In the old days you could’ve had everything in the place for the price of this ring, but I’m having a hard time seeing much use for it just now.”

  Rodney didn’t sense any argument from Sara on this point; he could tell they would work out something that benefited both of them. Interrupting their conversation, Rodney got a suggestion from Jay about what to do with the old Powell. Dennis Harper had revived his car lot and junkyard on the other end of Main Street and Rodney agreed it was a good place to unload his old chariot. He said goodbye to Jay and Sara, leaving them to their negotiations.

  Rodney towed the van to Dennis’s lot, but then changed his mind, in a sentimental moment of hesitation. He retained his ownership of both of the vehicles, making a big swinging U-turn across the wide road, with its empty parking lane on both sides. During that turn, his eyes swept past the Lutheran church and he slowed to a stop, parking his little caravan on the side of the road opposite the car lot. He turned off the engine, feeli
ng as if he were pushing himself over a precipice and wondering at his own recklessness. He stepped out of the vehicle and pulled his baseball cap down tighter, his straw-like hair sticking out straighter over his ears. He pursed his lips and pressed forward.

  The church had sustained damage in a bombing attack by government planes. Burn marks around the arched opening, where the stained glass windows had been, had barely faded in two years. A large branch, from an oak tree in the front yard of the church, rested on the high peak of one of the gables of the roof, such that the cross on the steeple rose up out of green and golden leaves, some of the first leaves to change with the late-arriving fall.

  The cemetery lay behind the church, forming a frame around the little back yard, where a scattering of play equipment for small children lay, faded red, yellow and blue, between the tall and tangled weeds. Rodney wondered if anyone still went to church anywhere in that god-forsaken country. But he pulled himself away from this distracting thought, skirting any excuses that might thwart his mission, like bearing down to cut out a splinter in hopes that the pain was worth it.

  As he rounded the red brick church, his first sight of the graves sucked the breath out of his lungs. It was like seeing a ghost after being told by others about it and assuming that everyone else had lost their mind. His real mission was to visit the graves of his two children. He had no need to investigate the absurd stories of exploding graves, but the sight of all those ripped up plots set him wondering if there were enough sane people left in the world.

  These craters looked odd to him. He had seen damage from bombs dropped on all kinds of ground. This didn’t fit that pattern at all. The torn mounds reminded him more of places where a gopher would pop up from its tunneling, as if the graves had been pushed open from the inside.