The REIGN: Out of Tribulation

by Jeffrey McClain Jones

  “What you doin’ here, Rodney?” Chester asked.

  Rodney started to catch his breath. “I was just stopping in to see how you’re doing,” he said, truthfully enough. “The place looks abandoned, so I just took a look around to see if I could figure out if you were still living here.”

  Chester stood up, spat again and wiped sweat off his forehead, lifting his hat slightly in the process.

  “Why did you run?” Rodney asked him.

  “Hell, I panicked when I seen you.” Chester pulled his hat off and wiped sweat off of his thin hair and glistening pate.

  “You’re sneaking in and out of your own place?” Rodney asked.

  Chester took a deep breath, apparently trying to decide how much he still trusted Rodney. Since the last time Rodney had been at his house, Chester knew that he had sold-out to cooperate with the new government. With that, the tenuous trust between them suffered a fatal blow.

  “I can do what I please with my own place,” Chester said. “You ain’t even Sheriff any more, they elected a new one.”

  Rodney shook his head. “I’m just here to see how you’re doin’, not in an official capacity.”

  “Well, then let me be. I gotta get in and out in a hurry. You just go about your business,” Chester said, spitting one more time.

  Rodney said no more, he just turned and headed for his car. Chester had always been tricky to deal with and Rodney wasn’t surprised that he had turned against him for getting involved with the Jerusalem government. The old hermit had no interest in being cooperative with any sort of government and the immortals had done nothing to convert him.

  Rodney looked at the tips of his fingers that had been restored, rubbing them with his thumb, remembering the sensation when the young girl from Jerusalem healed him. They had done plenty to convert him.

  With this thought still echoing in his head, his mobile phone rang. He used voice activation to answer the phone while he turned the van around in front of Chester’s house.

  “Hello, this is Rodney,” he said.

  “Rod, Daniel is on his way to the clinic in town, Tina is driving him,” said Emma’s distraught voice. “He crashed on his scooter, and I think his leg may be broken. He scraped it up really bad,” she said.

  “Okay, honey. Are you and Joshua okay?” Rodney said.

  “We’re fine. Marney’s here. It’s Daniel I’m worried about.”

  “I’m on my way to the clinic.”

  “Thank you, Dear.”

  “Love you,” said Rodney.

  “I love you,” said Emma, and they hung up.

  In five minutes, Rodney reached Main Street. He hadn’t seen the new clinic in town, but had heard about it and knew approximately where it was. After driving around a couple of blocks, he pulled to the side of the road and called Warren Kline to ask where the clinic was located. Warren answered, directing Rodney to a house three blocks from where he had parked.

  When he arrived at the small parking lot, which had replaced a bombed out house, he saw two vehicles parked there, including his own sedan. He pulled in next to a small electric car and jumped from his van, trotting to the clinic entrance. His haste was less inspired by concern for Daniel, than by a desire to see the actual process of Daniel getting healed. Now that he had become confident in the immortals’ healing powers, he simply wanted to watch them work.

  Through the electronic sliding door and into the reception area, he hurried. There he found the reception desk empty, but he could hear voices to his right, through a door that looked like one he would expect in a doctor’s office. The house had been significantly renovated to accommodate the health facility. He wondered briefly who had done the work. Then he called out, “Hello. I’m here to check on Daniel Parsons,” he said, hoping for an invitation to the patient rooms.

  “Come on back, Rodney,” said an unfamiliar voice from behind the door.

  Without hesitating, he pushed through the heavy, wooden door and looked around momentarily before a stout African-American woman stepped out of a room two doors down.

  “Hurry up and you can watch,” she said, gesturing for him to follow her.

  Rodney pulled his mobile device from his pocket as he entered the room. There he saw Daniel laying on the patient’s table with Tina next to him and two strangers, who seemed to be there simply to watch.

  The woman who had invited him in began waving her hand over the extreme road rash on Daniel’s leg. From Daniel’s attitude, Rodney could tell that she had already numbed the pain. Rodney hit the video button on his camera and filmed as the ground up skin began to recover, filling over the thousand tiny tears and reducing the swelling that Rodney hadn’t even noticed under the terrible scrape.

  “The bone was fractured slightly,” the healer said, as she continued to move her hand back and forth over the injury.

  Looking away just briefly, Rodney felt that he had missed part of the process; the skin was healing so quickly. Within a minute, the leg looked completely well. The woman continued to move her hand back and forth over the leg for a few more seconds and then stopped.

  “All done,” she said cheerfully, though not dramatically. “Did you get it?” she asked Rodney.

  He looked at his device and checked the video, thinking it would be fun to show Emma. The recording was good.

  He smiled and said, “Success. I got it.”

  Everyone in the office crowded around to see the video on the little five-inch screen, even though they had all seen it full-size in real time. Even the recording evoked exclamations. Rodney was not the only one fascinated with the healing power of the immortals.

  When they had watched the video twice, the little huddle broke up.

  Rodney addressed the healer. “So are you opening clinics all over the world like this?”

  “Yes, we are,” she said. “Our folks, working on a wide variety of things, were getting numerous requests for healing, so we thought it would be good to make it easier for people to find a place to go, rather than having to chase down someone who might be in Jerusalem at the moment, or busy working on something who knows where.”

  “That’s a great idea,” Rodney said. He hesitated briefly. “I don’t know your name.”

  “I’m Leticia,” said the healer. “You can call me Letty.”

  Rodney shook her hand, this time welcoming the usual tingle that came from touching one of the immortals.

  “You know why that happens?” Letty asked him.

  “You mean the tingle?”

  “Yes.”

  “No, I guess I don’t know.”

  The pleasant looking little woman tilted her head slightly, relishing the reality behind what she was about to say. “You see, we have been purified so that we can contain the essence of God within ourselves, far more than when we were mortals,” she said. “Even in these temporary bodies, God exists in pure form. When you touch me, you touch God. And there’s no way you can touch God without feeling it.”

  Tina had been listening. “Do you feel it, then?” she asked Letty.

  “Oh, yes. I feel it all the time. It’s the presence of God that heals you. God created you in the beginning and God recreates you when you’re healed.”

  Another patient entered the reception area, grasping her belly. The receptionist, a mortal who had been one of the two spectators in the healing room, ushered the woman to one of the open patient rooms.

  Rodney asked Letty quickly, “How many patients do you see in a day?”

  Letty turned to follow the new patient, but answered over her shoulder. “There are three of us that cover twenty-four hours a day. We see a couple dozen or more each day.” She waved a silent goodbye to him, as she turned her attention to the woman in pain.

  Rodney joined Tina and Daniel out in the sunlight, where he found Daniel still patting his leg where his pants had been shredded and stained with blood.

  Feeling his role as father for a moment, Rodney said, “You gonna be more careful on that scooter?”<
br />
  Daniel looked at him, a little mischief in his eyes. “I don’t know, I was thinking of setting a new world record for jumping a scooter over school busses.”

  Rodney gave him a stern look, visibly resisting the joke.

  Daniel looked a little bit repentant and said, “I know, I’ll be more careful. But it sure does take away the incentive to be careful if they can just fix me up like that.” He snapped his fingers.

  Tina scowled at him, “Are you forgetting how much pain you were in? You were crying like a baby.”

  Firmly put in his place, Daniel grinned sheepishly at both Tina and Rodney.

  Rodney threw his arm around Daniel’s shoulders and walked him toward the sedan, which Tina had used to drive him there. “Repeat after me, I will be more careful when I ride my scooter.”

  Daniel dutifully repeated the line.

  Rodney continued. “So I don’t scare my mother to death and cry like a baby in front of my girlfriend.”

  Daniel elbowed Rodney in the chest and protested, refusing to repeat this part of his vow.

  Rodney and Tina both laughed with him.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  “Have you seen this?” Steve asked Rodney, turning his mobile computer so Rodney could see the screen.

  The still photo of a man in his thirties, with a dark beard, sat under the title, “Armageddon Survivor Tells His Story.”

  Steve and Rodney met at their usual café for lunch on a Saturday and this time Steve had arrived early, sipping coffee while checking the news on the Internet. There he found this story.

  Rodney shook his head, in answer to Steve’s question. “No, what is it?”

  “This guy says he was with the Dictator’s army in Palestine when the King and his forces wiped them out. Apparently, he was part of one of the local Palestinian militias, and not a regular member of the Asian or European armies that the Dictator shipped in for that final battle, meaning he wasn’t ever implanted with a chip. That’s how he accounts for his survival.”

  “That and the fact that he didn’t get his head chopped off,” Rodney said.

  Steve didn’t react to the joke. “He says everyone with a chip was executed, even after the battle ended. They spared him at that point.”

  Rodney dug deep, he had been avoiding this topic for quite a while. “So you believe that the King really slaughtered millions of people, even billions of people just ‘cause they had the chip?”

  Steve shrugged slightly. “That seems to be what the Book of Revelations, in the Bible, predicted and what all the witnesses say actually happened.”

  Steve clicked on the video and let it run, the man in the video spoke Arabic and a voice-over provided the translation.

  “We were clearly defeated. All of our weapons had become useless and the followers of the Christ had supernatural powers. They struck us down without even touching us. Men and women fell on my left and on my right, without a shot fired or even without a sword stroke,” the translation ran. “We knew we had to surrender, there was no way to defeat them. When we did throw down our weapons, the soldiers of the King forcefully separated us according to the ones with the computer chips in them and those without. They seemed to know who had this chip and who didn’t, without the use of any electronic device that I could see.”

  Steve looked at Rodney, deciding to allow the video to keep running based on the look on Rodney’s face.

  “I heard men in many languages pleading for mercy, but they were beheaded quickly, their blood running into trenches dug by magical powers. I didn’t see any kind of earth moving equipment, just a few men with swords, dressed in shining clothes, which made them seem like they came from another world,” the soldier declared.

  “When they reached me, they did not push me, or in any way threaten to harm me. One of them spoke to me in my language, though he did not seem to be a Palestinian or even an Arab, and he told me to leave the battlefield, to go back to my family and live a peaceful life. He was a great warrior who looked terrifying, but who spoke gently to me, so I took his words as my guide. My wife was waiting for me when I got home in Gaza and she told me that the children had disappeared one night while I was away,” his voice broke slightly.

  The statement continued, “I know that these warriors are far greater than humans and, if they wanted to make our children become like them, who am I to oppose them? I could do nothing anyway. My wife and I were upset that our children were gone, but now we know this is the will of God and we have nothing to say against it.”

  Steve stopped the video. “I’ve been looking into this with my students, trying to sort through some questions one of them introduced with an essay for class. We’ve gone at this outside of school, as well, trying to fill in our own recent history and trying to synch it up with what the Bible says. It’s been a pretty stunning experience.”

  “You still talking to God every day?” Rodney asked.

  Steve looked a little confused. “Why do you ask that?”

  Rodney pursed his lips, assessing the answer to that question. “I guess I’m curious how this fits with the God that you talk to. Is he the kind of God who beheads unarmed enemies?”

  Steve thought for a moment. “I have been talking with God and Marney and I are spending time every night with the video feed of the worship around the throne, even experimenting with singing and dancing a little. It’s really freeing for both of us to allow each other to take some chances with that.” He hesitated, as if straightening out his course, back to the question. “I’ve been thinking, here we are trying to overcome our inhibitions, questioning things, struggling to believe things that have pretty much been validated by dozens of miracles that we’ve seen with our own eyes; and there they are. Those worshippers in Jerusalem are the true believers. You know what they’re like when you meet them, more powerful and intelligent than any people you ever met. These same people just throw themselves into hours and hours of completely uninhibited worship, free from all doubt and self-consciousness,” he said, pausing to drink some water. “They’re like a higher species than us and they’re just the servants, the children. I can understand what this guy in the video is saying. We can’t challenge them; we can’t defeat them. And I’m thinking now, we have no reason to question them, much less to question the judgment of their King.”

  Rodney looked doubtful but lost for words.

  Steve said, “So what if his execution of billions of people doesn’t fit our ideas about how he should act? Do we really know so much more than he does about how to be God?”

  Nodding slightly, Rodney said, “This is me at the end of forty-eight years of being my own god, thinking anybody who wants to take over that job has to do it the way I did, only better at it than me.”

  Steve smiled. “I know exactly what you mean,” he said.

  After lunch, Rodney drove home to take care of Joshua, while Emma took a break and went into town. He was sitting on the couch with Joshua asleep in his arms, staring out the window, deep in thought, when Emma drove up the lane to the house. Through the window he could tell that she was upset about something, her head down and brow furrowed.

  When Emma entered the front door she turned toward the living room and stopped in front of her husband and baby. She remained silent, smiling with one corner of her mouth at the sight of those two on the couch. Rodney felt a bit guilty, knowing that he sat there lost in thought, instead of enjoying holding his sleeping boy, feeling less the idyllic father than the scene depicted for Emma.

  As the charm of the domestic picture faded, Emma’s angst returned to her face. Rodney slowly stood up and walked carefully, to allow Joshua to remain asleep. The carpenter’s big hands gently settled the ten-pound boy into his crib next to the bed in the master bedroom. Joshua squirmed for one second and then settled to sleep again, making small sucking motions with his delicate, pink lips.

  Back in the living room, Rodney finally asked, “What is it, dear?”

  Emma motioned for Rodney to follow
her and took a seat on the couch. He slid in close and looked hard at her face, trying to remember if he had ever seen her this upset, apart from major injuries to Daniel.

  “I saw Sara in town,” she said. “She didn’t mean to tell me, but she let it slip that she and Jay aren’t together anymore.” Emma paused, ramping up to the most disturbing news. She looked into Rodney’s eyes and said, “She’s seeing Pete instead.”

  Rodney stared a second, “Pete?” he said. “Pete Wasser?”

  Emma nodded.

  “What d’you mean ‘seeing Pete’? You don’t mean having an affair?”

  Again, she nodded.

  Rodney swore, then sat silent, while a dozen heartbeats counted off in erratic time. He swore again. “She told you this?”

  “She didn’t mean to at first, but then I could tell she was dying to tell someone, as if she needed somebody to know it and still like her.”

  Rodney scowled at that interpretation, but said nothing, feeling too mad to trust himself to speak. He shook his head and then looked at Emma, assessing her reaction and waiting for her to say more.

  “I’m thinking about Jenny,” said Emma.

  “Yeah,” said Rodney.

  Reaching for an explanation, Emma asked, “Was there any sign of this during your meetings last year, during the trip to Pittsburgh?”

  “Nothing,” Rodney said. “I didn’t see anything. I doubt it started that far back.”

  Rodney allowed his anger to boil up again. “Damn Pete. I voted for him to be mayor. What does he think he’s doing?”

  Emma didn’t critique the non sequitur in Rodney’s venting. She shared his disgust with his old friend, but identified more with Sara and still felt the subtle nausea of her confiding revelation.

  Perhaps out of desperation, Rodney thought out loud. “I wonder what the immortals think about this kind of thing. I mean, I’m sure they don’t approve, but do they stop us from doing bad stuff, will they intervene in any way?”

  Emma remembered something she had read about on the Internet. “They’re setting up courts with judges, but I doubt they get into things like this. Do you think?”