The REIGN: Out of Tribulation

by Jeffrey McClain Jones

  The central core of opponents to the Jerusalem worshippers had formed out of the parent groups that had attempted to retrieve their children from Palestine. Rodney and Emma had been in town the day that Jason and Renee Cooper returned from their arduous journey to Jerusalem. Along with eleven other parents of missing children from the area, the Coopers had joined a much larger group that filled a Boeing 797 Intercontinental Airliner from Nashville to Ottawa, Canada, to Manchester, England, hop scotching in this fashion all the way to Palestine. It took six separate flights to get there, and five to get back, and the journey cost the desperate parents every piece of gold they could gather.

  Returning to downtown Somerville that bright afternoon, Jason looked like a man who had just survived surgery, pale, weak and drained of all emotions. Renee’s depression had degenerated to total withdrawal from all human contact. She waited in the car while Jason explained to Rodney and Emma what had happened.

  “We made it there, that alone felt like a victory. And it was as crazy as it looks on the videos. These people are brainwashed, completely surrendered to the power of whoever that ruler is in that cursed city, that ‘messiah.’ No one would help us. No one would cooperate. They just kept trying to convince us that our children were better off the way they were. They even told us that our children were no longer like us, but had become like them; these inhuman lunatics, these possessed aliens, or whatever they really are.”

  This rant spent what was left of Jason’s energy. He choked back tears of frustration, like a boy who had been beaten thoroughly by a bully and had emptied everything, except the deep bitterness of defeat. Rodney stood speechless in the face of it.

  Emma shook her head, “Did anybody actually see their child there?” Her tone carried sympathy enough to reach Jason.

  He shook his head. “No one,” he said. “But several of those people that we talked to acknowledged that our kids were there. They told us this story about them being taken up into the sky to meet their messiah and then brought down with him to Jerusalem. But they said that the kids wouldn’t always be there, that they had work to do out in the world.” Jason snorted in derision. “Like my five-year-old, Casey, would be doing any kind of work.” Then he clouded up, tipping toward delirium. “You don’t think they would really put a five-year-old to work?”

  Rodney just lifted his hands slightly, as if to say, “It’s beyond me.” Mostly, Rodney was struggling inside, trying to reconcile this spite-filled indictment with all that he had experienced from the immortals, as he now thought of them. He figured that wherever they came from, or whatever they were, they were unlike him and other mere mortals.

  Finally, Rodney spoke soothingly, “Get some rest, Jason. You look exhausted. We can talk again later, when you’ve had some time to recover.”

  Jason had slipped into the passivity of the exhausted and just nodded mindlessly, heading toward his car.

  Rodney and Emma looked at the bus that had carried the bereaved parents from Nashville. All of the disappointed passengers had drained out onto the street, and the last of them now slowly put one foot in front of the other, until they disappeared from sight.

  As he turned away from the bus, Rodney noticed a curtain move in a second floor window, over the old real estate office on Main Street. Emma noticed it too and looked at Rodney to see what he was thinking

  He turned toward Emma and said, “I thought I recognized someone up in that window. You mind if I take a minute to go knock on the door?”

  Emma grinned simple approval. “Sure and I can go get that stuff from Jay’s,” she told him.

  “Thanks, Dear,” Rodney said, kissing her on the cheek and then heading for the residential door next to the papered-over real estate office. He read the name next to little black button for the doorbell, “Steve Svoboda.” Rodney pushed the button and heard a dim ring upstairs.

  After several seconds, Rodney heard the door at the top of the stairs open and he saw a shadow descend the stairs. A dark vertical band appeared to his left as the window blind moved aside briefly. The two seconds between that and the sound of the bolt sliding hinted at a moment of indecision. When the door opened, the man in the doorway startled Rodney, like seeing the ghost of someone he once knew very well.

  The gaunt, bearded man in his late forties, who stood in the doorway, had the eyes and frame of Rodney’s best boyhood friend, Steve Svoboda, but nothing else fit any part of the catalog of old pictures of his friend that Rodney carried in his mind. This man looked like the empty cover of his friend, what remained only after all life had been squeezed out, like an old aluminum toothpaste tube.

  “Steve?” Rodney greeted him with a question, not about identity but about the missing story.

  Steve nodded. “Rodney.”

  “Hell, what happened to you?” Rodney spouted, tapping both boyhood loyalty and decades of loss.

  Steve stood silent a moment, then said, “You wanna come up?”

  Rodney nodded, slowing himself down and regripping his emotional controls, which had slipped away for a moment. He followed Steve slowly up the stairs. Rodney tried not to look at the way Steve’s pants bagged where his butt should have been, aghast at the skeletal condition of his old friend. When they reached the top of the stairs, Steve opened the door and stood aside, allowing Rodney to enter ahead of him.

  The small, one bedroom, apartment seemed to be asleep, darkness in each room only broken by bars of light piercing between window frames and curtains or shades. The furniture appeared to be over fifty years old, pressed-board tables, plastic and metal chairs, mismatched dishes, cups and glasses scattered on counters and tables.

  “I haven’t had time to really move in yet,” Steve said, noticing Rodney’s brief assessment of the rooms.

  “You just got back?” Rodney asked.

  Steve took a deep breath, as if to help recover from his journey, “Just a few days ago...two weeks actually.” He corrected himself, as if remembering a commitment to tell the truth, the whole truth.

  Seeing him face to face on level ground, Rodney suddenly felt the joy of reuniting with his old friend, whom he had assumed was dead. He smiled and burst out, “Man I thought I’d never see you again. I’m glad you’re back.”

  Steve smiled, relieved to be welcomed, releasing a bit of slack in his emotional line. He laughed. “It’s good to see you’re still around, still the hero of Somerville.”

  Rodney laughed at that phrase coming from Steve, who knew better than anyone how ordinary and unremarkable Rodney really was. “Bummerville,” Rodney said, remembering what Steve used to call the little dead-end town.

  Steve chuckled again. He gestured toward the living room, a small square room, barely more than a passageway between the kitchen, where they stood, and a hallway on the opposite wall. A small, mauve couch hugged one wall, a matching armchair crouched under the front windows and a mass-produced wooden rocking chair stood next to Rodney’s elbow. He took a seat in the rocker.

  “Did I see you with a woman?” Steve asked, as he sat in the armchair, not trying to hide the fact that he had been watching from the window.

  Rodney nodded and smiled broadly, allowing a moment for his soul to say thanks for his greatest blessing. His answer to Steve carried less of that vented exaltation, as he said, “Quite likely. That’s Emma. We’re living out on the old Bailey farm, with her fifteen year old son, Daniel.”

  “Married?” Steve asked.

  “We couldn’t find a preacher,” Rodney said.

  “At least not a sane one,” Steve filled in.

  Rodney’s surprised look inspired more laughter. Even veiled in sunny backlight, it was good to see Steve smile. In spite of his wasted condition, he seemed emotionally well.

  “What about you?” Rodney asked, sobering up in anticipation of the answer. “Family?”

  Steve’s lips pressed tight, he nodded. “I had a wife, down in Florida, and a son. That was some years ago. They’re gone.” His solemn tone echoed past years of de
eper pain and intense mourning, the gravity of those crushing wounds only lingering now.

  “What are you doing these days,” Steve asked. “Carpentry?”

  “Yeah, got a little business going around here. Lots to fix up, and people wanting to expand their places, so they can live together with their friends. People seem lonelier now, maybe ‘cause we lost so many.”

  “Anna and the kids?” Steve asked, circling back toward more sensitive territory.

  “All gone,” Rodney said, with a hitch in his voice, as the memory of Anna’s return to him interrupted the simple answer.

  Steven nodded, hesitating, to allow Rodney to pull past the disruptive emotions, to carry on with an opening conversation between two life-long friends. There would be time for deeper exploration in days to come; they both knew that. From the age of six to the end of high school, Steve and Rodney had developed the sort of rapport enjoyed by twins. They could communicate more between them with fewer words than most married couples.

  A ring at the doorbell interrupted a small silence. Steve stood up and hesitated a second.

  Rodney spoke up. “That’s probably Emma, she knew I would be ringing your doorbell.” The hesitation in Steve’s movement toward the door, came from a momentary blackout, after standing up too quickly. He was every bit as malnourished as he looked.

  Rodney bounced up and led the way to the door, stepping quickly down the stairs to meet Emma. Steve stayed at the top of the stairs, recovering his balance, but anxious to meet the woman that he could sense had made Rodney very happy. In recent years, Steve had grown a heightened empathy for other people, allowing him to enjoy their happiness without conscious effort. As the old bond with Rodney resurfaced, Steve pocketed a share of the new life that Emma and Rodney had stirred in each other.

  Rodney opened the door and briefly told Emma who he had seen in the window, then they both scaled the stairs energetically. Emma could see immediately why their host had stayed at the top of the stairs. Her mothering heart latched onto this hungry soul and she spoke so impulsively that it surprised even her, let alone Rodney. “You should come live with us on the farm,” she said.

  In the stunned silence that followed between Rodney and Emma, Steve could guess that this was uncharacteristic behavior. He recognized the impact of his emaciated state on a woman who was raising a teenage boy, and he smiled politely. Though sudden, the idea appealed to Steve and his face showed it. But Rodney, and even Emma, still had to think about this possibility, before adding anything to the spontaneous invitation.

  “Why don’t you come in,” Steve said, and they complied silently.

  Emma did a better job than Rodney of repressing the desire to survey the humble conditions in which Steven was living. However, from what she did see, she could tell that he actually could use some help getting his life together.

  Rodney and Emma sat on the couch and Steve took the rocking chair this time, making it easier to see his face in the filtered light from the window. At Steve’s prompting, Emma told a bit about herself and how she met Rodney, and they both filled in some details about Daniel, the house and the farm.

  Then Rodney turned it back on Steve. “What happened to you?” he asked, in a tone that demanded the hard truth.

  Steve looked down at his skinny arms and smiled, embarrassed. Then he sobered, took a deep breath and began to tell his story, starting with losing his parents in the pandemic ten years ago. Rodney had known Steve’s parents, was never close to them, but could feel the void of yet another death among the central cast of his childhood. Steve talked about his wife and son surviving the tsunami that killed so many on the East Coast, five years ago, and then spoke of losing them in a raid by troops arresting those who refused the chip.

  “We were living in Atlanta, at the time,” he said, his voice low and steady. “Eileen and Timmy just seemed to disappear in the mayhem that followed the raid. I lost it when I couldn’t find them and I tried to rip right through those big armored soldiers. They knocked me out cold in just a second. When I woke up, I was in a prison hospital, handcuffed to the bed. I wasn’t even fully awake when these two suits came and interrogated me about an article I wrote, criticizing the Dictator.” He took another deep breath.

  “Those same two guys kept at me for days, first in the hospital and then in a holding cell, somewhere in a federal prison in Georgia. They wanted to know all my contacts in the resistance and that kind of stuff. I wasn’t really connected, just an academic with an opinion. But they didn’t believe that.” Again, he stopped to gather strength.

  “Then they started telling me that they had Eileen and Timmy and that they would hurt them if I didn’t cooperate. I never really did know whether this was true or not, so I tried to look like I was cooperating. Basically, I started writing some fiction for them, stories that contained enough facts to make ‘em let up on me and maybe not hurt Eileen and Timmy. And this whole time I’m telling them that if they let me see my wife and boy then I would tell them more. I didn’t want Eileen or Timmy to see me, ‘cause by then I was a real mess, cut up, swollen, looking awful from what they did to me. But I just wanted proof that my family was okay.”

  Steve stopped and looked at Rodney. “And this is where you come into the story,” he said with mock drama. “I’d met Phil Beamer in Atlanta, a couple o’ weeks before the raid, and he had told me you were a military leader in the resistance. He said the government knew about you and had grabbed your wife and kids. We assumed the worst about them. So, after weeks of torture, I figured you were a known enemy of the empire, so I could rat on you.” He looked a Rodney again.

  Rodney had avoided capture several times and had adopted a fight or die attitude toward his enemy, once his family was gone. Steve’s use of his name seemed like a good move, given how public Rodney’s opposition had been already.

  Steve could tell that Rodney was okay with this much of the story, so he went on. “So they asked me how we communicated, and I made up this thing about secure Internet connections the resistance was using. I had no idea what I was talking about, no technical capacity whatever.” He looked at Emma to explain this part, Rodney was already aware of Steve’s antagonism for bits and bytes. “But it seemed to convince them. I suppose there really was something like that out there. I was just constructing fiction that I thought was plausible, just like writing a novel.”

  “After all that, they just threw me in prison, pulling me out for questions once in a while, but mostly leaving me alone, right up until the end. I was in there about two years, when one night I woke up to this exploding sound and there’s this hole in the top of our cell. I was sharing the cell with this Hispanic guy, the nicest guy in the world, real religious. He was the perfect cell mate, always considerate and kind.” Steve laughed here. “I guess the quality of prisoners was much better than before the Dictator took over.”

  “Anyway, I woke up and Pedro is gone. He wasn’t in the cell, and there’s this hole in the ceiling that went right up to the sky. When the dust stopped falling and I could look up, I saw stars through the hole. And this same thing happened in hundreds of cells throughout the prison. That nearly knocked me over the edge. I couldn’t sleep for weeks. That’s actually when I lost most of the weight. It wasn’t just losing Pedro, it was the freakish way it happened. I was blown away.”

  “The holes in the roof obviously made keeping the place secure really complicated. The building looked like Swiss cheese. And when the dust settled, a few hundred prisoners were missing, and not just random prisoners, it was all the Christians. Like Pedro, all the Christians just disappeared the same night, through those holes opened in the ceiling. I had no way to process that at the time.”

  Emma and Rodney had heard similar stories, including those from parents who were missing their children. They had heard of holes ripped in a kid’s bedroom ceiling, right through the roof and the child gone. Rodney also thought of Jason Cooper’s porch roof, and his own kids’ graves.

  Steve contin
ued. “Then the guards started acting really strange, as if they were afraid of something, and they kept leaving. You’d never have the same guard one day from the last. It seemed there was some kind of crisis in Europe, or the Middle East, and the Dictator needed every able-bodied man he could grab. Toward the end of that period, one of the guards confided in me. He was scared. He said he didn’t want to go to the war that was happening overseas. He said guys were being wiped out by the millions. He also warned me to watch out, ‘cause the Dictator was working on a way to force prisoners to go and fight.”

  Rodney interjected here. “I remember that time. We were fighting an insurgent campaign down in Texas, against the Dictator’s friends from Mexico. And the enemy just started abandoning cities and fortifications. We heard that troops were being flown back to the Middle East as fast as they could get ‘em there. I really wanted to know who was kicking up so much trouble to make ‘em all run to reinforce that part of the world.”

  “Yeah,” Steve said, remembering thinking the same thing. “Finally, the guards just disappeared altogether, leaving us locked up there. But several of the remaining prisoners had figured how to get out and were just waiting for their chance. Using the poor repairs on the shattered ceilings, they let the rest of us out. I don’t envy the neighbors, though. Some of those guys really were hardened criminals and all of us just got out and disappeared to wherever.”

  “Atlanta had been an occupied city, of course, so it still had full utilities and everything, but when the Dictator’s people left, they sabotaged everything, burned the whole city. If they couldn’t have it, they didn’t want anyone else to.”

  Rodney said, “They did the same in Des Moines, only there wasn’t much left to sabotage.”

  Steve nodded.

  Rodney asked, “So, they didn’t feed you guys in prison?”

  “Not much, and especially not much that was really edible. They saved the decent food for their people and just gave us moldy bread and rancid fruit or vegetables. I often wondered why they didn’t just put a bullet in each of us and abandon the whole thing. But maybe they were just getting to that stage when it all collapsed.”