Emma nodded, passing her hand over her forehead to dispel unseen stray hairs. She looked toward the house, as Rodney approached, with a curious smile on his face. He had seen the visitor from a distance, but had kept to his work on the attic, content that Emma was the one the woman wanted to see. Now he gently chuckled at the looks on Emma’s and Daniel’s faces.
“Interesting visitor?” he said.
“You could say that,” Emma said, still rooted to the same spot.
“She blasted off like a rocket,” Daniel said, trying to reconcile what he had just seen with all of his previous experience of nearly fifteen years.
Lilly’s appearance and help, as well as her dramatic exit, revived the discussion about who these people really were. Over a chicken dinner, Rodney, Emma and Daniel revisited the options they had been offered. The capabilities, and even the physical appearance, of the strangers, allowed for no ordinary explanation. These were not regular people, not even regular people possessing advanced technology. They all agreed on that. They then had only to consider the two remaining options, aliens or resurrected saints.
“If I felt like they were deceptive, or sneaky, or something, then I could easily discount their own explanation of who they are,” Rodney said. “If they were harming anyone, or imposing their order forcefully on us, then I wouldn’t trust them. But they haven’t done any of that,” he noted. Then he concluded, “So I have to assume that they are who they say they are.”
Daniel, who grew up with a father that liked a good discussion and who welcomed contrary views, offered an alternative explanation. “But, what if they are aliens that are really clever, and who know this whole story of Jesus, and him coming back to Earth, and they’re using that to get people to follow them?”
Rodney nodded and smiled. “You’re a smart kid,” he said spontaneously. “We gotta get you in school as soon as there is one.”
They all three agreed that they couldn’t rule out Daniel’s explanation, but that they were all inclined to believe the religious explanation, so far.
“We’ll look for signs that they’re just manipulating people by using the religious story. But, until we find strong evidence in that direction, we just have to believe what they say,” Emma said.
Daniel was not eating his chicken. He stuck the meat on his plate with his fork a few times, but kept loading on more bread and vegetables and eating those. Rodney was about to launch into the question of what it would mean if Jesus was really ruling everything from Jerusalem, when he was distracted by Daniel’s behavior.
“What’s the matter? You don’t like the chicken?” he asked, more curious than reprimanding.
Daniel made a face and said, “I just can’t bring myself to eat it.” He looked at it, poked it again and then looked at his mom, with plaintive eyes.
Emma shrugged. “I’m not gonna make you eat it.”
“You didn’t even taste it,” Rodney said, still curious.
“It’s not that it’s bad chicken.” Daniel hesitated. “I’m just thinking about whether I feel okay about eating animals at all.”
“Well, your cousins were vegetarians, back in Illinois, even when they were little kids. Maybe it runs in the family,” Emma said. She hadn’t eaten much of the chicken either.
Rodney felt like an ancient barbarian. He had no trouble eating that chicken. On the other hand, he had no compulsion to persuade anyone else to eat it. He just raised his eyebrows and said, “Well, let me know if it really bothers you if I eat it and I’ll start sneaking out to the barn to get my meat fix.”
Daniel and Emma laughed, assuring him that they weren’t as hardcore as all that.
“So who’s gonna stay up all night to see if these elves show up to plow the garden?” Rodney was joking, since he had to go into town early the next day, to rebuild a porch for a young couple.
Daniel, of course, seriously considered the possibility. Then he said, “I’ll just keep Socks close to me in my room and I bet he’ll wake me up when they arrive.” Daniel’s bedroom, on the second floor, looked over the garden, as well as the barn and the scrub-covered fields beyond. He would have a perfect view of the covert farming operation.
The next morning, Daniel woke after dawn to the sound of Rodney getting himself breakfast in the kitchen. With no livestock, and no school or regular work, the new family had gotten into the habit of sleeping until seven or so. It was a bit earlier than that, but the morning sun had risen high enough to reveal a fully plowed garden.
Daniel looked at Socks. “Some guard dog you are.”
Socks whined lightly, sensing a rebuke. Daniel smiled and made it up to his furry friend with lots of scratching and kind words.
Downstairs, after breakfast, Rodney kissed Emma goodbye and waved to Daniel, on his way to the van. He carried his lunch bucket and his tool belt. In the early morning chill, he wore a lined flannel shirt over his usual t-shirt and carpenter’s pants, a pair of five-year-old work boots on his feet.
His drive presented neither obstacles nor surprises and the half-cloudy, half-sunny morning, gave him that high pressure system feeling again, though it didn’t seem to Rodney that barometric pressure was the cause of the lift he was enjoying.
Once he hit Main Street, he drove almost the full length of Somerville, from south to north. At the north end of town, just off Main Street, a cluster of ten-year-old houses, under some older trees, remained standing after the war. The war had damaged dozens of those houses, however, and Rodney pulled up in front of a single story, light blue house, with a large oak tree in the front yard. Builders who managed to construct new houses without removing old trees, kept Rodney hopeful that humanity could still produce some measure of common sense.
The house belonged to Jason and Renee Cooper, a young couple married less than ten years, who had moved to Somerville just before the war against the Dictator. Rodney had never really gotten to know them, being gone much of the time they had lived there, but he had heard that they were looking for a carpenter and he had talked with Jason a few days before. As the only professional fire fighter in the county, Jason oversaw the volunteer fire district, which had survived throughout the war, in spite of pressure from the Dictator’s local government. The volunteer fire-fighting force, as a locally managed interest, became associated closely with the resistance. It was in that coalition, that Rodney had seen Jason over the past few years, even if he had not gotten to know the younger man.
Careful not to slam the van door too hard, in the quiet residential neighborhood, Rodney walked up to the house empty-handed. To reach the front door, he had to climb a temporary, four-step stairway, to a two-foot by four-foot landing. He had helped Jason install it when they first spoke. Jason had already cleared away the wreckage of the old porch, with the help of some fellow fire fighters.
Rodney remembered that Renee and Jason had two children, as he knocked on the front door. He waited for an answer, wondering if he would hear little feet padding to see who was there. But Renee answered the door. She stood nearly six feet tall, with heavy arms and legs, a long neck, and long brown hair that she had braided. Her eyes, a warm brown color, looked sad to Rodney, but he didn’t know if this was her emotional condition, or just the normal shape of her eyes.
Renee greeted him. “Hello, Rodney. Thanks for getting here early. We’re anxious to get started on this...” and then she broke off, as if she had suddenly forgotten the reason for her urgency.
Rodney spoke into the silence of her apparent confusion. “I can get started right away; I just wanted to make sure everybody was awake, so I can make a little bit of noise. I’ll hold off on the power tools, until after eight,” he said.
“Jason is up and out already,” Renee said. “He has some inspections. He’s trying to get back to normal.”
That last comment also seemed unfinished, or needed to be unpacked, but Rodney wasn’t one to probe. He just smiled tightly and nodded, then turned and walked down the steps. Renee watched him for a few seconds and
then left the screen door, disappearing into the morning darkness of the house.
Using a tablet computer, on which he had recorded the measurements for the new porch and had drawn a three dimensional design, Rodney re-measured and marked the area for the concrete steps and the wooden deck. He had developed a fondness for the sound of feet on a wooden porch, as a child, his own home and both of his grandparents’ homes, all built in the days when a wooden porch with railings, and perhaps a rocking chair or swing, introduced the very notion of home. He thought a sizeable wooden porch with railings and decorative trim, would transform this little home from housing-development-average to hometown-charming. Jason and Renee had agreed.
Rodney worked all morning, digging, pounding stakes and measuring again. He had completed the basic framework when Jason pulled into the driveway. Jason drove a pickup truck with a severely dented front end. With streaks of red and white paint on the bumper, it looked as if he had rammed a barricade once. Rodney stopped working, wiped some sweat from his forehead and replaced his baseball cap on his head, waiting for Jason to meet him. The two men shook hands, once Rodney removed a glove.
Jason, a tall and sturdy man of about thirty, with wheat colored hair that stood up like an old horsehair brush, had the look of a northern European sailor, harking back to his ancestors, who had crossed the Atlantic two hundred years before.
“How ya doin’ Rodney? How’s it goin’?” Jason asked, subdued as usual.
“It’s fine. No problems,” Rodney said. He reached for a water bottle and looked at what he had done. He took a sip.
“Time to get back to normal life,” Jason said, sounding as if he was pulling himself up to his feet, after being laid out for a while.
“We’re all hopin’ to do that,” Rodney said.
Jason nodded. Rodney could tell he was thinking about something other than the porch.
Finally, Jason approached the subject that was troubling him. “You lost kids in the war?” he asked.
Rodney nodded once. “Yes,” he said simply.
“Us too,” said Jason. “Though, we don’t even know what happened. We don’t even know if it was the war.”
“How’s that?” Rodney asked.
Jason considered his answer for a moment, trying to sort through the maze of anxious fears, to the part of the story he knew for sure. Apparently, there wasn’t much to find there.
“They were here until last October,” Jason said. “Then, around the time that the Dictator’s people all disappeared, so did my son and daughter.” He took a deep breath, looking at the porch. “We looked everywhere for them, asked everyone still living around here and never found any sign, just other people also missing their kids.”
Rodney could sense that the rebuilding of the porch signified more than repairing damage from the war, it meant returning to life without children. That was a big load to put on one porch.
The subdued desperation weighing Jason down split open, and the grieving father broke out of the containment he had maintained with Rodney, until then. “You see, the kids were sitting out on the porch that night and when they disappeared the old overhang was busted to pieces. Renee and I were inside, I had just run in to get them something to drink. It was late and we were gonna get them ready for bed, but...” Here Jason seemed to run out of emotional fuel and just coasted for a few seconds.
Then he started up again. “I saw some video from what’s going on in Jerusalem these days,” he said, pausing to see if Rodney knew what he was talking about.
Rodney nodded, not knowing whether this was a change of topic.
Jason stepped up to his point, “One strange thing about that huge crowd is how many children are there, literally hundreds of thousands of children of all sorts.”
The connection between the missing children and the crowds of children in Jerusalem had appeared in one narrow corridor of Rodney’s mind, but had not ventured into the light of day, until now. Normally, Rodney would be careful about such conjecture with someone he barely knew, but his own broken father’s heart had absorbed some of the heat of Jason’s grief, and he didn’t have the energy to slow the expanding speculation.
Jason continued, a rhythm of desperation rising. “I just keep running into people looking for their kids and then I see these news videos of crowds of kids in Jerusalem. I don’t know what that means, it just makes me wonder.”
Jason saw Rodney’s tablet computer. “Is it connected to the Internet?” he asked.
Rodney checked. After three tries, he found a signal strong enough that he could hit one of those news Web sites. He tapped on a recent video from Jerusalem. He was thinking to himself how odd it was that these videos would be the focus of so many news pages, over so much time, but he just watched the video with Jason, holding back any commentary.
This video had been filmed from a low-impact helicopter that was able to get relatively close to the crowd, without causing unbearable noise or wind pressure. The reporters were able to fly around the crowd and ascend for a broader scaled picture. Rodney had never seen the crowd at such a wide angle. There were more people than he ever could have imagined in one city at one time. The reporter was saying the crowd numbered at least several hundred million. From high altitude, it reminded Rodney of a hive of bees, a nearly infinite hive of bees.
During one of the fly-bys at lower altitude, Jason pointed to the children. Great knots of kids swayed, danced and ran around in circles together, with no obvious adult supervision. This playful display of so many children amplified the lack of children around them and drove deep the feeling of loss to which Jason had already succumbed.
Jason looked at Rodney, a flare of obsession rising in his eyes. “Did they take them? Are my children there with these fanatics?”
Rodney just shook his head absently, more focused on Jason’s rising angst, than on the question of what was happening in Jerusalem. Jason had started momentum that he could not stop.
“I’m gonna show this to Renee,” he said. “There’s gotta be a connection.”
Rodney didn’t say anything, just watching Jason carry his computer into the house. Apparently, Jason didn’t yet have a working computer of his own. Rodney followed Jason into the house. It wasn’t the computer that Rodney was concerned about, of course, rather the furor that he could see building inside of Jason.
“Renee, Renee, come and see this.” Jason called from the living room.
Renee had already started from the bedroom, when she heard the door close, speeding up at the urgency in Jason’s voice and then slowing her pace as she saw Rodney behind her husband, with a concerned look on his face. Jason fiddled with the computer to get the video to restart. The moving images filled the twelve-inch screen and he held it up for her to see.
“This is what’s happening in Jerusalem. It’s been going on for months,” he said, gathering his wife into his downhill careen.
Renee looked at Jason, then at Rodney and then back at the video, trying to understand what she was seeing. “Is that people?” she asked.
Then, before Jason could answer, the camera zoomed in to the point where she could better comprehend the crowd of people dancing and singing energetically. Then the children filled the screen, as the camera swept across the faces of deliriously happy revelers.
“Who are they?” she asked. “What are they celebrating?”
Rodney could see that Jason had set something rolling that would swallow up the sad and hopeless couple, he watched as they lunged desperately for hope.
In the days that followed, Jason spent all of his money buying computers, getting connected to the Internet, searching for a way to fly to Jerusalem and stirring up others who had lost children.
Rodney consoled himself with the notion that he couldn’t have discouraged an obsession as intense as the one Jason had built, even if he had tried at that early stage. He quit work on the porch, of course, it wouldn’t have provided the forlorn parents with all that they had hoped anyway.
&nb
sp; CHAPTER ELEVEN
Spring flourished in late February on the little farm. Small, green shoots dotted the garden from end to end. The wire fence that Emma placed around her future food supply, reflected her lack of faith in Lilly’s persuasive power over the rabbits. She did have to admit, however, that she hadn’t seen any signs of the rabbits testing the fence for weaknesses.
Both Rodney and Emma actively looked for work, but Rodney insisted that tending that large garden had to count for at least half-time work for Emma. She had done bookkeeping for the farm in Illinois, and then in other small offices, to earn extra income in her past. With the economy still in limbo, there wasn’t much demand for bookkeepers yet.
The absence of banks hindered a return to economic normality. To some extent, this reflected the deep, and abiding, distrust in the banking system that most survivors had developed during the reign of the Dictator. He consolidated his power, and exercised control over failing global economies, from his position at the top of a major international banking system and, under his rule, the banks superseded national governments, hiring their own police and army, and manipulating monetary markets to bring down heads of state. Reinventing the banking system remained low on the priority list of most people, because of this hard-earned distrust.
As both of the adults worked around the farm—Rodney on the house and Emma in the garden—Daniel helped where required. But they could tell that his youthful ambitions pulled him away from hammering and painting, and from hoeing and watering. They spoke privately about what to do to stimulate the bored young man, as his fifteenth birthday approached.
The next time Rodney was in town he talked to Jay, to get some information, and then he returned to the farm with a proposal for Daniel.
“Remember New Year’s Eve, when Jay and Sara told about the house with all the cowboy dolls in it?” Rodney asked Daniel at lunch, while Emma listened.
“Sure,” Daniel said, without hesitation. “They said there was even one of those animatronic robots in cowboy clothes.”
The REIGN: Out of Tribulation Page 17
