The REIGN: Out of Tribulation

by Jeffrey McClain Jones

  At the appointed time, Steve spoke into the microphone at the head table, toasting his old friend and the new wife with whom Rodney had been so gloriously blessed.

  “I didn’t used to believe in redemption, in the possibility that good could come out of destruction and loss,” Steve began. “But I think that all of us gathered here.” He looked around at the immortals as well as those seated at the tables, “know something more about the reality of redemption. My friend Rodney is, with the rest of us, proof of this hopeful truth. Life, especially as we have come to experience it in this new era, is full of second chances.” He glanced at Marney, who sat next to his empty seat at the head table. “So, I propose this toast, to the happy and blessed couple, and to all of us, that we make the most of this great second chance that we’ve been given; and that we love fully, trust freely and give back with all our might. Salute!”

  A great cheer followed the toast and then came the usual tinkling of glasses for the couple to kiss, which Rodney gladly obliged. Eventually it was Rodney’s turn to speak.

  “Thank you all for honoring us by celebrating this wedding with us. It’s so great to see this town alive and well once again.” He had to wait for a whoop and cheers to die down, after this. “For that I am thankful to all of you who stuck it out through the tough times and to you who’ve been sent to help us rebuild.” He looked at several of the immortals attending to his words. “And most of all, we all owe our gratitude to the King of Kings, who has allowed all of us to benefit from his goodness and mercy and, as Steve said, has given us this grand second chance. Salute!”

  Again, the crowd cheered and more dancing began. Emma, then Sara and then Phil, spoke briefly at the microphone, but only briefly, due to the pent up energy that accumulated when the music and dancing stopped.

  More food arrived in a half a dozen trucks from Alban, a small town to the west, where word of the celebration had spread. A couple of dozen people from that neighboring community expanded the party, as did many more Somerville residents who didn’t attend the wedding. The formalities over, the rest of the day opened up for dancing, conversation, eating and drinking.

  Jay and Sara stood in the late afternoon sun, sipping punch, recovering from a vigorous dance, and chatting with a couple that they didn’t recognize.

  “So, are you two married?” Sara asked, a bit unguarded in the buzz of the festivities.

  The couple looked at each other and laughed. “No, we don’t marry,” said the handsome young man, a mischievous sparkle in his blue eyes.

  Jay wrinkled his brow, trying to figure out what the joke was, but Sara didn’t seem to notice. “Well, I’m hoping to talk this guy into it, now that there’s a preacher in town,” she said, teasing.

  Jay rolled his eyes very tolerantly, merely pretending to be annoyed.

  “You should do it,” said the beautiful young woman, a tall and slender blonde with glowing, pale skin.

  Sara turned it back on her. “Well if we should, why not you?”

  “Because we don’t marry,” the girl said. She and her companion exchanged a look that asked, “How long will it take her to get it?”

  Sara was not her usual sharp self, having enjoyed a generous share of the punch, but she detected something in the strange couple that told her to sober up and concentrate. Then she figured it out.

  “Wait, you two are not from around here, are you? If you know what I mean,” said Sara.

  Jay, who had already figured out that the two were immortals, looked at Sara and said, “Not from around here? Yeah, that’s what it is.” He laughed at her unhinged state, but then he turned to the curious point.

  “So you’re together, like a couple, but you don’t marry?” he asked them.

  “Well, we’re not really a couple, the way you mean that,” said the man. “We love each other, but not in the way you think of it. Everything is new for us and everything has changed. We don’t need love the way we did before our transformation. Now we have perfect intimacy with the King, and perfect intimacy with each other, and with millions of our brothers and sisters.”

  Jay, who had also been patronizing the punch, could only take a fraction of that in. He just stared at them.

  Sara said, “Oh, I get it, you don’t have sex, but you have true intimacy without sex.”

  The man and woman both laughed. “Sure, that’s a good way to look at it,” said the woman. “Marriage is good for you while you’re on this side of mortality. It gives you a chance to experience true intimacy with one person. We think marriage is a good idea for you, that’s why we came to celebrate this wedding.”

  “Beside the fact that we just love parties,” said the man with a laugh.

  Jay stumbled away, looking for a place to sit down. He had too much to think about.

  After another round of dancing, Rodney and Emma plopped into their seats again, feeling the weight of the momentous day, well before sunset. They had arranged for Daniel to stay with Steve in town that night and they had planned a trip to a small private resort, which had recently reopened. Rodney wanted to be sure to leave before they both lacked the energy for the hour-long drive to their honeymoon suite, but he feared he had already passed that point.

  Phil saw the tired couple looking at each other, asking wordless questions about what they had left to spend that day.

  “I would like to drive you to your resort tonight,” he said.

  Rodney looked at him as if he didn’t comprehend, but Phil waited for it to register.

  Emma gathered the beauty of the offer. “So, you could drive us there in the van and then you could just pop back here in a second.”

  Phil smiled. “No, not really,” he said. “It doesn’t take a whole second.” He punctuated his joke with a laugh.

  Rodney smiled. “That would be wonderful.”

  Phil nodded. “Well, you say your goodbyes and I’ll be ready for you.”

  The couple thanked him and stood up together, looking around for Steve and for Sara, and others, they needed to thank. It took fifteen minutes to talk to everyone they could find, including hugs and kisses for Daniel and promises to pick him up in three days.

  As arranged, Phil stood by the van, awaiting the new couple, as dozens of guests accompanied Emma and Rodney to the decorated vehicle. They could tell that Daniel had taken part in the decoration when they saw a discarded hand and foot from an old robot tied to the rear bumper, along with some noisier discarded objects. Phil seemed to notice none of it, content to play his part as wedding chauffeur, a role no preacher had ever played, as far as anyone there could remember.

  During that ride, Rodney started to think about getting a more family appropriate vehicle. The new mother-to-be eventually fell asleep with her head on her new husband’s shoulder. Rodney used the opportunity to interview Phil, prompting him to tell his life story.

  “So what did you do in your life before?” Rodney asked softly, so as not to wake Emma

  Phil responded in a low, even tone. “I was a pastor.”

  “I guess I figured that,” Rodney said.

  “Actually, it’s pretty unusual for one of us to get the same kind of work we did in our life before. But I didn’t really understand what it was all about the first time around. I was trying to do it all in my own power, under my own control, or at least my illusion of control. Now I get a chance to enjoy it for what it was always supposed to be.”

  “When did you join the King?” Rodney asked, trying to speak Phil’s language.

  “I died about four years ago and got my free pass to Heaven,” he said, with a content smile.

  “Were you married before?”

  “Yes, I was. She outlived me by two years.”

  “What’s she doing now?”

  “I don’t actually know. I’ve seen her in Jerusalem, but we haven’t talked about that.”

  “How is that? Are you two, like separated?”

  “Separated? Well, in a manner of speaking, yes, but not because of any kind o
f marital conflict. There can be no conflict among us now, though that’s not how it was before, of course.”

  “But you’re not with her any more, clearly.”

  “Well, it’s not so much that I’m not with her, rather it’s that we’re all together with the King and together with all the host of his followers,” he explained, patiently. “We can’t know everything or everyone and we only know what we have to, in order to do our work. The rest is just enjoying being with the King.”

  “That looks like a wild party in Jerusalem, from what I’ve seen on the Internet.”

  Phil laughed and then quieted himself, when Emma moved. “Yes, that’s a good description of it,” he said softly.

  Eventually, they turned up a narrow county road, past the sign advertising the resort. Rodney stirred Emma a bit, to allow her to wake up before they actually arrived at their destination. The dark of the summer night had conquered the county road. Rodney felt especially safe riding with Phil at the wheel, as they gyrated over the invisible bumps in the poorly patched road.

  “I’ll report this little road, to make sure they get it resurfaced,” Phil said, in a sort of note-to-self tone.

  Rodney smiled at Phil, then looked at Emma’s sleepy eyes. She hugged him and nestled into his neck.

  “Are we there yet?” she said.

  “Almost,” said Rodney.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Only Rodney could see the evidence of Emma’s pregnancy. He saw the very subtle change in her figure, but also claimed to see, “a promise in her eyes.” Emma looked skeptically at him when he said this during their honeymoon, but Rodney didn’t withdraw the assessment, even though he couldn’t explain it.

  When they returned to the farm, with Daniel and Chip in the back of the van, Socks greeted them by the front porch, accompanied by a slightly smaller coyote, which they all assumed was a female. When Daniel approached the newcomer, he had to stop and turn Chip off, because the female seemed intimidated by the two-legged creature that looked like a human but smelled like something else. As he drew close enough to pet Socks’ friend, Daniel thought he saw something.

  “Mom,” he said to Emma, who was pulling her bags out of the van. “Does this female look pregnant to you?”

  Emma looked at the coyote and then asked, “Why do you ask me?”

  Rodney joked. “Oh, females know these things, don’t let her kid you, Daniel.”

  Emma fessed up. “I guess she does look like she could be pregnant.”

  “I told you,” Rodney said surreptitiously to Daniel. He set down his bag and squatted next to the female coyote, waited for her to sniff his hand and then petted her. “Yeah, she looks pregnant. I guess Socks has been busy.”

  When he picked up his bag and headed for the house, Rodney’s mobile phone rang. He shifted one bag to his left hand and fished his phone out of his pocket, answering as he reached the front door. He stepped aside to let Emma by, as he listened to Pete on the other end of the connection. Emma stopped, once inside the screen door and looked for Rodney’s reaction. It was grim.

  “I’m on my way,” he said and then hung up.

  Emma’s eyes asked the question.

  Rodney said, “Jason Cooper killed himself.”

  Emma opened the screen door for him and Rodney deposited his bags in the foyer. She stared at him, speechless.

  “We’re gonna arrange for a real sheriff soon,” he said, heading back out the door. He stopped when he saw the shock on Emma’s face, kissed her on the cheek and said, “I’ll call as soon as I can tell how long I’ll be.”

  Of course, Emma knew of Rodney’s de facto role as Sheriff of Somerville, but they hadn’t had to face anyone’s death since they had met. She stood watching him leave, absorbing the task ahead of him and observing the way he seemed so neutral about it.

  Daniel finished petting Socks and his friend, started Chip back up and headed in the house with his robot following. He stopped next to his mother, disturbed by the look on her face. “What’s the matter?”

  “Rodney had to go into town to deal with a suicide,” she said.

  Daniel turned and watched as Rodney started the van, waved to them, turned around and headed back down the driveway.

  Rodney had seen so many people die and had seen so many corpses, that he couldn’t count them all. Trying to count them, however, added a buffer between him and the pain of loss. Objectifying Jason Cooper as a number in a list of fatalities offered a moment of relief from carrying the weight of yet another death.

  He hadn’t really known Jason well, only interacting with him a few times over the last few months and much less before that. But, to Rodney, this death marked a significant turn. So much of what he had experienced since the end of the war, and the installment of the new King, had set like concrete in his mind, forming the new paradigm on top of the crumbled bits of what he had known for over forty years of living on Earth. Death, like war and sickness, had seemed to be vanquished, until now.

  Jason had answered an unspoken question in Rodney’s soul, not just his mind. They really were still mortal. With the rapid response of the immortals to protect them from attack, as he had seen now at least twice, and with the immortal’s ability to heal any injury or sickness, Rodney had begun to wonder if people would still die. He had assumed that old age would catch him at some point and would drive him to his grave eventually, but even that had lost its certainty, in light of freedom from sickness and new life sprouting in the womb of a barren woman.

  Jason Cooper had answered all of that for Rodney. Then he stopped himself. Pete had said that Jason had stabbed himself in the neck with a knife and had died before anyone could get to him. But couldn’t the immortals just revive him, bring him back to life the way they were brought back to life?

  Rodney turned off Main Street toward the Cooper’s house. Renee had been away, according to neighbors, which meant Rodney didn’t have to face the grieving widow, the hardest thing of all.

  The EMT vehicle blocked the driveway to Jason and Renee’s house, Pete had parked his car on the street. Rodney parked behind him. He put on a baseball hat from behind his driver’s seat, feeling the need to cover his eyes and looking for a more official appearance. He had no uniform, no Sheriff’s badge or hat.

  Pete stood in the doorway, propping the screen door with his right hand, as he awaited Rodney’s arrival. He looked tired and frustrated.

  “How was the honeymoon?” he asked Rodney.

  “It was nice.”

  “They have that resort all put back together?” Pete asked.

  “Yeah, it was perfect. Not many customers yet, you should take Jenny out there before word gets out. It’s great.”

  Rodney wiped his feet on the mat and then entered the house. He suspected that it was his imagination that made the house feel like death, but there it hung in the air, like smoke from an extinguished candle, a reminder of what had been, evidence of what had passed within these walls.

  “Any sign of the immortals?” Rodney asked Pete.

  “I was wondering about them myself,” Pete said. “You think we should call that postal service woman, or have someone go get Phil?”

  “Maybe Phil,” Rodney said.

  Pete nodded. Looking toward the bedroom, he said, “He’s been dead for several hours.”

  Rodney had stepped down the hallway far enough to see the EMT guys sitting on chairs and on the bed in the master bedroom. They stood up when they saw him.

  “Can you get Phil?” Rodney asked Pete.

  “I’ll call someone to let him know,” Pete replied, taking out his phone and heading for the living room.

  Rodney motioned for the EMTs to relax, but one remained standing, nodding toward the bathroom. Rodney stepped into the bedroom, turned to his left, and stepped into the bathroom. Most of the blood had dripped into the bathtub, as if Jason was being careful not to make too much of a mess. He lay with his head hanging over the edge of the tub, his right arm draped inside, that hand loos
ely holding a knife that rested against the bottom of the tub. A stream of dark red ran from his hand to the drain. Jason’s face was bluish and his eyes still open. Rodney closed the dead man’s eyes, as he had so many times before, on battlefields from Syria to Texas.

  “Who found him?” Rodney asked.

  One of the EMTs raised his hand and stood up from the bed. He offered his hand, “Gerry Palmer,” he said. He was a pale young man with brown, short hair and gray-blue eyes. He reminded Rodney of so many young recruits he had met in the army.

  “He wasn’t at the station for the last two days, wasn’t answering the phone,” Gerry said. “So the Lieutenant sent me over to see if he was okay. The front door was unlocked. I called, but no one answered, of course.” He hesitated, his face distorting with intense frustration. “It couldn’t have been six hours before I came over. What if the Lieutenant had sent me first thing this morning? He would still be alive.”

  Rodney nodded, he recognized the grip of regret, the desperate hopeless tease of a “what if.” He patted Gerry on the shoulder, standing there in the doorway of the bathroom. The smell of blood started to get to him, so he stepped out into the bedroom for a moment, looking at the other three EMTs. Just then a siren swelled as it neared the house and Rodney looked out the window, as the Fire Department commander’s car pulled into a space behind Rodney’s van.

  Gerry explained. “Lieutenant had to deal with a kitchen fire, so he couldn’t come when we first called.”

  Rodney nodded, glad for an excuse to walk back down the short hallway to the living room. There he met Mitch Wilkinson. Mitch stopped, took Rodney’s hand for a moment but forgot to shake it, just standing there staring. “It’s real? I mean, he really did it?”

  Rodney pursed his lips and looked Mitch in the eyes. He remembered a day when he thought Mitch had given in and taken the RFID chip from the Dictator’s people. He remembered the sinking feeling when he heard that Mitch had caved and then recalled the relief when he saw Mitch later that day, saw him smile and wink, proud to have outsmarted the government minders who were watching the Fire Department. That cheeky triumph didn’t last long and soon Mitch had to disappear into the countryside.