The REIGN: Out of Tribulation

by Jeffrey McClain Jones

  Rodney tossed his baseball cap onto the passenger seat and ran his hand through his hair, after stepping out of the van in front of the building supply store. Once again, Hyo greeted him at the door before he even reached the handle. Was the Korean watching for customers at the door, or did he have some other way of knowing that someone had parked in front? The mixture of suspicion and trust that Rodney felt for Hyo and Young seemed to stir daily, without tipping the balance heavily one way or the other.

  “Hello, Rodney,” said Hyo with his usual untainted smile. Rodney noted that the Korean remembered to call him by his first name, a sign of good salesmanship, at least.

  Rodney nodded and returned the greeting, shaking Hyo’s hand and following him into the store. For the first time, Rodney connected a tingling sensation that ran up his arm to shaking hands with one of the Koreans. Before, he had just set it aside as a nerve problem, or something, which he might have to pay attention to if it persisted.

  Hyo walked to the far end of the show room saying, “I want you to look at the floor boards we found for you.”

  That was fast, thought Rodney. It had taken him a week to gather enough decking for the first floor and floorboards were really a luxury item that he had hoped would fit onto their long-term acquisition list. But there they were, exactly what he was looking for and new ones, not the worn, reclaimed wood he had expected.

  “Where did you find these so fast?”

  Hyo smiled, pleased to see Rodney’s surprise. “There was a freight car that had been stalled for months within thirty miles of here. It was full of this type of floor board and still wrapped against the weather. Otherwise, it would certainly have taken us longer.”

  The stack of wood was not enough for the first floor, but more than enough for the space Emma was using as her room. Rodney asked, “So there’s more?”

  “Yes, this is really just a sample to show you. We can have the rest delivered to your house by next week.”

  “Wow, you guys are good. How did you find out about the freight car?”

  “Networking,” Hyo said. He seemed pleased but not proud, like someone who knew he had done a job well, a job that he was expected to do well.

  The emergency economy, which thrived outside the control of the Dictator, had followed the old common law guideline that possession is ninety percent of ownership, although that number had perhaps climbed more toward ninety-nine percent. Thus, Rodney didn’t question that part of the transaction. There remained one very important question, however.

  “How much would such a delivery cost me?”

  Hyo’s smile turned into a straight line, perhaps the bottom line. Then he revived his smile, as if its disappearance had been a sort of teasing game.

  “No cost to you.”

  Rodney stared, trying to figure out the meaning of those words, assuming that the face value could not be their real meaning. Rodney heard a small noise from the back room and, once again, Young joined them. This filled in a few more seconds for Rodney to formulate the restatement of his question.

  “What...“he faltered.

  Young bailed him out. “We will of course ask you to sign a life contract with us and we will take any offspring you produce.”

  The phrase “at a loss” doesn’t begin to encompass what Rodney was feeling then. In days long gone by, he would have joked with a friend about signing away rights to future offspring. During the desperate days of disaster and dictatorship, however, such joking was inconceivable. Now, with so many questions about who these two men were and who they worked for, Rodney couldn’t believe they were joking with him like this.

  Hyo saw Rodney’s confusion and grew more serious, as serious as a man with a permanent smile can be. “Rodney, the whole world is under new management. There is a new ruler and a whole new economy.” He motioned to the stack of floorboards. “You tell us when you want it delivered and we will give you two stories worth of floorboards.”

  By this point, Rodney had lost hold of his agenda for following up on the things Hyo and Young had said the previous day. Each day contained new surprises, and Rodney was still spinning from his first meeting with these two strangers.

  Overloaded and unhinged, Rodney retreated. Without saying any­thing more, he turned to the door and swung out into the sunshine, climbing into his van, as the two Koreans watched from the doorway. They looked concerned, both of their smiles temporarily put on hold.

  Rodney’s retreat took him no further than Pete’s house. Parking in front of the post office, he switched off the van and opened the door. Simultaneously, the post office door swung open and out stepped a stunning looking woman with olive skin and jet-black hair. She appeared to be around fifty, at first glance, but her skin was pure and unwrinkled, and her movements were smooth and easy. Except for Anna’s appearance in the middle of the night, Rodney had never seen a more beautiful woman. She looked at him, nodded, and then crossed the street, without a glance in either direction to check for traffic.

  Rodney stood staring after her, when he heard Pete’s voice from behind him. “You ever seen anything like her before?”

  Rodney shook his head without a word.

  “She said she was here to help get my electrical and communications systems back up and running.” Pete recited this, his voice matching perfectly Rodney’s own feeling of being in a trance.

  Rodney turned and looked at Pete. Jenny stood behind him, her hand on his shoulder, looking over Pete’s light blue shirt into Rodney’s eyes. He had never seen her looking so intimidated, not even during the starkest and most dangerous days of the resistance.

  Rodney motioned in the direction of the mysterious woman and asked, “Do you think she’s connected with the Koreans at the building supply?”

  His eyebrows raised, but the rest of his body frozen, Pete said, “I wouldn’t be surprised.”

  Finally, too curious to avoid the question, Rodney asked Jenny, “What’s wrong?”

  Jenny was silent, a very rare response from the gregarious woman. She glanced at Rodney. In that look, he saw much deeper into Jenny’s soul than he had in over twenty years of knowing her. For the first time, he glimpsed an opening in the façade that he had always known as Jenny, and he wondered about this real Jenny, behind the façade. But Pete drew his attention back.

  “She was almost not human, you know,” Pete said, sounding more metaphysical than Rodney expected of him. “And she had this wicked scar along her throat, like someone had sliced her open, execution style. It wasn’t ugly thoug...”

  Jenny clouded up and closed down. She turned and walked back inside.

  “What happened?” Rodney asked.

  Pete looked at him, missing his normal energy. “She told us that the Postal Service is being revived. She was just surveying the place for utilities and such,” he said, still sounding half-asleep.

  “That’s good, then,” Rodney said.

  “Huh.” Pete reacted to Rodney’s elevated tone. “Yeah, of course, that’s good news. I still have a job, I guess.”

  Rodney still searched for what had shaken Jenny and Pete so badly. “So what’s got you so spooked?”

  Pete looked hard at Rodney now, as if more fully awake, but much more serious than he usually was during peacetime. He finally told his story:

  “When she came in the door she startled Jenny and me. Jenny stood up real fast and banged her head on the corner of the cabinet, next to my desk. She was bleeding really bad.” Pete’s eyes turned vacant as he replayed the scene for himself. “And this woman just walks over and puts her hand on Jenny’s head, while I’m scramblin’ around to get something to stop the blood. And, quick as that, the bleeding stopped.” He paused there for emphasis. “And when Jenny and me went looking for the cut, we couldn’t find anything. She had blood all over her hair and on her hands and down her neck and there was no cut to be found.”

  Rodney stared, trying to catch up to what Pete was telling him. “You mean this woman just made the cut go away, by
touching it?”

  Pete nodded. “Yep. And then, while we’re mopping blood and looking for this cut, this woman just cheerfully tells us about the Postal Service as if nothing happened.” Pete shook his head at the thought of it again. “I wouldn’t have believed any of it if I hadn’t seen it for myself.”

  Rodney wasn’t sure he believed it. “So then she just walks out the door as I’m coming to see you?”

  “Well, not directly. First she stopped and gave me her pager number and gave me this cell phone, which works, by the way, and told me to page her whenever I need anything. And I’m thinking this whole time, she hasn’t once said ‘U.S. Postal Service’ just ‘Postal Service.’ So, I asked her about that, and she said, ‘The U.S. is just a small part of the world that we’re involved with.’ Or something like that.”

  Rodney cocked his head slightly. “At least she acknowledged that there is a U.S. The last crew kept telling us the that U.S. was lost for good.”

  Finally feeling breathing room to remember what he had come to speak to Pete about, Rodney said, “I was coming to ask what you know about those Korean guys at the building supply store, ‘cause they’re at least as unbelievable as your lady visitor.”

  Pete shrugged slightly. “I met ‘em, but I haven’t seen ‘em heal nobody or anything.”

  “Well, me and Emma saw one of ‘em transport himself instantly from the store to my house and back. And I mean instantly.”

  Now it was Pete’s turn to stare, while he tried to attach himself to what Rodney was saying. “Transport?”

  “Transport, teleport, whatever you wanta call it. One second he’s with me at his store, the next second he’s at my house, Emma and Daniel see him pop out of thin air, and then he’s back at the store with me. He brought me my hat to prove he made the trip.”

  “Your hat?”

  Rodney was strangely relieved to see someone else struggling with the unbelievable, finding in it some affirmation of his own sanity.

  CHAPTER SIX

  West of Somerville, about three miles up a winding gravel road, across a bridge that consisted of one shaky lane and no railings, lived Chester Butler. During the war against the Dictator, Rodney had encountered Chester many times; usually having to bail him out of a jam of his own construction, by challenging government troops at a roadblock, kidnapping a census taker, or firing at a tax collector. Chester lived alone with five hound dogs, his wife having died during the first pandemic flu that killed millions in North America.

  Chester had been a progressive politician as a young man, active in party politics in Iowa. As he aged, and the world of his youth began to crumple beneath the accumulating weight of natural disasters, Chester became more cantankerous and libertarian. By the time he lost Helen, his wife of thirty years, he had come to embody the back woods anti-government extremist, just in time to direct his stinging ire at the Dictator. Once a pacifist, Chester turned to violence to express his disdain for the all-encompassing world regime.

  As far as Rodney was concerned, the most amazing thing about Chester Butler was that he survived the revolt. Even in war and facing a global power, luck played a role, along with the fact that Chester’s eccentricity often prevented officials from taking him seriously. Rodney took Chester seriously. He had seen the damage the man could do with dynamite and shotgun shells, weapons that reinforced his image as a local nut, rather than a serious insurgent.

  In the peaceful aftermath of the overthrow of the Dictator, Rodney had forgotten completely about Chester, until one early afternoon when Pete came speeding up the gravel road to Rodney’s new house. Rodney and Daniel were raising walls when Pete arrived, Daniel holding and Rodney pounding with a good old-fashioned hammer, not enough electricity available yet for his nail gun.

  Pete’s electric SUV skidded to a stop, Pete yelling before he even opened the car door.

  “Rodney! Rod, we need your hel.” Pete shouted, in an emergency tone familiar to Rodney.

  At just that moment, Rodney and Daniel were both in awkward positions, so that when Daniel turned to see Pete, he lost his grip on the frame of two-by-fours. Rodney, seeing the wall waver and tip toward Daniel, lunged to catch it, but in doing so managed to throw Daniel completely off balance. The boy spun off the first floor decking and fell onto the pile of floorboards stacked beside the house. He tried to catch himself with both hands, but his left hand twisted under him, suffering the force of the fall without protecting him.

  Pete cursed when he saw what happened, feeling responsible for the accident. Emma screamed when she saw the painful end of Daniel’s fall, as well as Rodney’s straining, slow-motion release of the wall, once Daniel was clear. Rodney twisted his left wrist and bruised his leg, but was not seriously injured. Daniel, on the other hand, writhed in pain where he lay next to the house. He made a whining and moaning sound that sent Socks into a howl. The animal, who had been dozing in the shade, woke to Pete’s shouting and then witnessed the boy’s fall.

  Rodney scrambled over the tumbled wall, stepping quickly between studs, arriving at Daniel’s side just before both Emma and Pete. Pete swore again and apologized repeatedly, cursing himself for being in such a panic. Rodney and Emma ignored Pete, helping Daniel to lie back on a bare patch of dirt, while lifting his wounded arm clear of his body. Emma held the arm above Daniel’s chest where drops of blood began to dot his light blue t-shirt. At first glance, one could see that the arm was broken; a gash near his elbow would also need stitches.

  In a flash, Rodney revisited a question he had been pondering in calmer moments. For months, there had been no doctor, or medical professionals of any kind, in Somerville. The closest thing to emergency medical help had been a retired nurse who disappeared around the time the graves were torn open. Pete was thinking about the same thing, racking his brain for where to take Daniel.

  During the resistance, Rodney had done some first aid in battle situations, but, even in the harshest of times, such aid was only a temporary solution, intended to hold until they could reach a physician. Thinking in these terms, Rodney went to look for rags for a tourniquet and sticks for a splint. When he came back, he saw Pete on that cell phone which he had received from the Postal Service woman.

  “Who you calling?” Rodney asked, kneeling down to help Emma with bandaging and splinting. Daniel squirmed and groaned, but forced himself not to cry or scream, when they touched his mangled hand.

  Pete held the phone to his ear, something he hadn’t done in a year or so. “I’m leaving my number on that Postal lady’s pager,” he explained. “She did something to make Jenny’s cut disappear. Maybe she can help Daniel. I can’t think of anywhere there’s a doctor within an hour of here.”

  Emma stayed focused on Daniel, cleaning dirt off the cut, wrapping it in a way that would close the skin as much as possible, and tying a tourniquet above his elbow. She said nothing to Rodney or to Pete, content to let them work out the medical options. Rodney had told her Pete’s story about Jenny’s disappearing cut and Emma was desperate enough to give that option a try.

  Pete entered his number on the phone, when prompted, and then disconnected. “Kinda good to hear a phone that works, even if it just tells me to leave a message,” he said. About ten seconds after he said that, his phone rang. He held it up and looked at it like it was some sort of animated idol, the silent god finally speaking to him. Rodney and Emma stared, and even Daniel stopped squirming. It had been a long time since any of them had heard a phone ring.

  Pete answered. “Hello, this is Pete. Yes, thanks for calling me back so fast. Hey, we have a medical situation here and I wonder if you can help us in some way, like you did when my wife cut her head.” He listened a few seconds and then said, “I’m not at home. I’m at a friend’s house east of town, down county highway thirty-seven two miles and north on Higgins road just a couple hundred yards.” Again he listened. Rodney glanced up at him and saw a strange look on Pete’s face.

  Pete answered the woman on the phone. “Yeah, sure
, that’s fine with me, if you’re sure they can help.” He paused for the answer. Then he said, “A thirteen-year-old boy with a broken hand and a severe cut.” Daniel squirmed more at this description of his injuries, but was distracted from that by the fact that Pete underestimated his age. After listening a bit more, Pete finally said, “Thanks, thanks for your help,” and he hung up.

  Emma and Rodney helped Daniel to sit up. Emma got him some water from a plastic bottle he had been using. As Emma capped the water bottle, and Daniel took his last swallow, two young teenagers suddenly appeared around the corner of the house. In spite of herself, Emma released a short scream, Rodney stood up suddenly and Pete whirled around.

  A blonde girl, about thirteen, and a boy, about fifteen years old, with close-cropped light brown hair, approached quickly. When the boy saw the vigilance of the adults, he raised his hands shoulder high and said, “Whoa, we come in peace.” He grinned at his own humor and the girl held three fingers over her lips to conceal her amused smile.

  Pete overcame his annoyance and asked, “Are you here to help with the injured boy?”

  The girl spoke up. “Yes, Kristiyana sent us.”

  Pete had forgotten the postal administrator’s name, but he recognized it when the girl spoke. He gave a nod and a relieved smile.

  “My name is Ellie,” said the girl.

  “And I’m James,” said the boy.

  The adults briefly offered their names and exchanged quick handshakes, then Emma asked, “I don’t mean to be rude, but how can you help Daniel?” Though she had accepted that the help Pete had called would not be a conventional doctor or paramedic, she had at least assumed it would be an adult.