The REIGN: Out of Tribulation

by Jeffrey McClain Jones

  Rodney greeted Herman when he swung through the glass front door and caught the General staring at something on his computer screen. Herman’s assistant cleared her throat theatrically and the General looked up to weakly return Rodney’s greeting.

  “Oh, hello, Rodney,” Herman said, clearly preoccupied.

  “You wanted to see me?” Rodney asked, genuinely wondering whether that had changed.

  Herman took a deep breath and stood up. “Of course, I wanted to see you, sorry for the distraction. I’m just trying to make sense of instructions from Pittsburgh. This is what I wanted to see you about.” He motioned to the chair in front of his desk and sat back down.

  Herman wore reading glasses, a rarity in those days of laser surgery and miraculous healings. He was also one of the rare balding men Rodney knew. A mixture of African and European heritage, Herman wore his black hair military short, but wore a mustache that would not have met regulations in earlier military cultures. He was a thick man, thick neck, thick shoulders and arms, and a somewhat thick temperament, reminding Rodney of a bulldog.

  “You ever been to the Sioux Falls area?” Herman asked Rodney, as he sat down.

  “No, never been to South Dakota. I suppose it’s one of the few states I haven’t seen. Pretty odd, I guess,” Rodney said.

  “Yeah, it was never high on my list of places to go,” Herman said. “But I have to send someone up there to take a look, maybe just an aerial tour. And I was hoping you’d be available this weekend.”

  Rodney raised his eyebrows. “What are we looking for?”

  Herman sat back, dropping the pen he had been holding and clapping both hands on the arms of his big swivel chair. “We’re hearing about a new enclave of resisters building up southeast of Sioux Falls, near what used to be called Rock Valley. Jerusalem won’t give us much information on what’s up there, but they’ve had to rescue a couple of utility workers who got too close this past month. One of ‘em even had to have his hand reattached. Battle axe. Did you ever think we’d be dealing with battle axes injuries?”

  Rodney took a deep breath. “Well, I guess that’s what you use when guns don’t work anymore. They’re going more low tech. We saw things like that in the uprising around Omaha a couple of years ago.”

  The General nodded. “Anyway, I want you to take a look and assess what they’ve got going, a tactical evaluation and all. Can you go in the next couple of days?”

  Rodney nodded. As a senior officer in a military organization that had reinvented itself during the Reign, he knew he could discuss and negotiate, but he still liked the old-fashioned notion of following orders.

  “Yes, Sir. Flying out of Des Moines?” he asked.

  “No, I can send a chopper to your place to get you. Saturday?”

  “Yes, Sir.”

  Saturday morning, standing on his driveway, awaiting the arrival of the helicopter, Rodney spoke to Joshua about his new tutor.

  “You were right, Dad. Working with Theresa is totally beyond what I imagined. I was thinking too small. She can teach me so much, and her gender doesn’t have to be an issue at all. She’s amazing. If I can just catch one percent of what she knows, I’ll be way ahead.”

  Any father would have taken heart at that opening. “You were right, Dad.” But Rodney collected more encouragement from the evidence that his boy would be in good hands and would absorb all he could from his new mentor, a woman who had lived separate from modern culture, but who understood the modern world far more completely than any living mortal.

  “That’s great, Josh. Going in with an open mind helped a lot. I’m glad you were up to the challenge.”

  The sound of the approaching helicopter shortened the conversation that Rodney wanted to have with Joshua, but the important communication had passed between them before the whirling rotors drowned out their voices. Rodney hugged his son, waved to Emma and Betsy who were watching from the porch, and boarded the chopper.

  On board sat Lieutenant Henry Grant, an earnest young guardsman that Rodney had met once before. The pilot saluted Rodney silently. Lieutenant Grant started a stream of chatter as soon as Rodney put on his headset. During the hour and a half flight, the Lieutenant filled in all that he knew about the settlement called Humanity, the first time Rodney had heard of its renaming. Rodney asked a few questions, but felt that he was getting more than enough information from Lieutenant Grant, who seemed more fascinated with facts than concerned about significance, not sorting the trivial from the essential.

  They flew over Sioux City, a recovering community on the Missouri River, and followed the Big Sioux River until they had nearly reached the former town of Rock Valley. The first thing that caught Rodney’s eye, was a shape carved into a field west of town. It had been covered with crushed limestone, which shown bright against the green grass. Until the chopper passed to the south of the image, he didn’t recognize the shape of a human hand with one finger raised. That long middle finger communicated a universal message, one clearly designed to offend someone flying over the settlement. Rodney suspected that the artists intended this message for flying immortals, rather than old soldiers in helicopters. When they reached the east side of the town, the other hand, bearing the same salute, greeted them.

  Lieutenant Grant smiled at Rodney, as if to say, “What do you expect from these people?”

  Rodney just nodded and surveyed the community. Upon first assessment, the town appeared abandoned, a mere shell of a human habitation. However, the left and right insults, so grandly constructed at fifty feet long, encouraged him to look more closely. They spotted the glint of binoculars, as someone on the ground returned the curiosity. Curiosity wouldn’t hurt anyone in this case, unlike more vulnerable helicopter rides during the war, when the ominous threat of surface-to-air missiles inspired even the agnostic to pray.

  Rodney noticed someone emerging from the cover of some trees. As thick as they were, those trees could not have been completely concealing the man in a yellow shirt before they saw him.

  “Tunnels,” Rodney said.

  Lieutenant Grant strained to see some sign of a tunnel, but those trees concealed the entrance well. Rodney suspected that the community took advantage of some of the infrastructure of the former town, while augmenting it with underground passages to conceal their numbers and activities.

  From the east of town, the chopper swung around toward the south. Rodney spotted the movement of what looked like dozens of people. He pointed and the pilot nodded, targeting that movement. Within ten seconds, they were close enough to see the last few children, out of dozens, scramble into grass and shrubs along a fence line. As they flew over, Rodney spied one little girl lying on her stomach next to a small bush, with her legs sticking out in the open. A few seconds later, an adult crawled over to the little girl and pulled her under heavier cover.

  Children, perhaps on a field trip of some sort, out in the open and unable to find cover quickly enough to completely avoid detection, reminded Rodney of the simple humanity of the resisters. He, for one, could not see them as enemies.

  Rodney thought about how the loss of their children twenty years before drove most of the adults in these communities to abandon the developing government and economy. He thought also about the likelihood that these escapees would increase their numbers the natural way, by birth and indoctrination. Isolated people groups, forming a self-contained culture, would grow and deepen their resistance to the Reign. Where would that lead? To a parallel culture, a separate world within a world?

  After two more passes over the area, Rodney signaled for the pilot to take them back home.

  As they turned toward the south, out of the corner of his eye, Rodney thought he saw someone hanging in the sky, watching them turn to leave, hovering over the settlement called Humanity. When he turned his head that direction he saw nothing. He started to ask the Lieutenant if he had seen anything, but decided to keep it to himself. Of course, the immortals were watching, watching Humanity and watching the f
eeble efforts of the National Guard. Rodney didn’t mind being watched by them, but he wondered what they thought of his little flying tour.

  Flying toward home in silence, Rodney watched fallow farmland passing below and looked forward to getting home, where he would be unconcerned about the immortals’ opinion of his actions and unconcerned about the resisters building a counterculture under an abandoned town.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  “I don’t care what anyone thinks about it, I know it happened and it’s made a big difference in my life,” said the woman with fog gray hair and black-rimmed, blue eyes. “You can’t deny that I was shaking like my mother did and now I’m still as can be.” The man next to her, slightly older, short-cropped dark hair, in the style he kept from his prime years before the war, nodded solemnly. He looked at his wife’s smallish hands and remembered the difficulty she used to have buttoning her own shirt, as her tremors advanced.

  “Oh I don’t deny you got healed, we’ve all seen it done. We’ve all experienced it even,” Pete Wasser said, looking around at the faces attracted to this vigorous conversation.

  Rodney stepped through the door into his favorite café and stopped still when he realized that he had walked into something. Steve bumped up against his friend who put on the brakes more abruptly than he expected. He looked over Rodney’s shoulder and caught Pete’s eye.

  “Hey Steve, Rodney, you guys believe this? This lady says a mortal, a regular woman, healed her of her Parkinson’s tremors,” Pete said, filling them in and roping them into the conversation all at once.

  Steve raised his eyebrows, located the stranger in the middle of the crowd, and in the middle of the controversy, and liked her instantly. She wore the look of someone who told the truth and drew more comfort from that confidence than from hope of converting doubters.

  Rodney shifted into politician mode, feeling exposed. He stretched out his hand and introduced himself. “Hi, Rodney Stippleman,” he said simply, shaking first the woman’s hand and then her husband’s.

  Steve added his name to the mix less formally but got the handshakes, as well. The two newcomers squeezed into a table by the back wall and Steve asked for the story. “So what happened?”

  The woman introduced herself. “I’m Carmen Garland and this is my husband Harold. We come from Wisconsin now, but we used to live in Naperville, outside of Chicago, before the war. Now we live in a town called Delavan, just north of the Illinois border, closer to Lake Michigan than Iowa. We know a woman that’s lived there about as long as us and the other refugees from the cities. She’s just a regular woman, as you say, a good neighbor and a good mother to her three kids. She lost a couple of kids to the immortals on Invasion Day, but she’s not one of those that’s bitter about it. She’s seen her kids since and knows they’re good and happy.”

  Carmen looked around, feeling a bit uncomfortable talking to so many folks at once. This conversation had started with a castoff comment to the waitress, Nan; and Pete overheard. To calm her nerves, Carmen looked at Rodney and Steve when she spoke, feeling acceptance in their eyes and seeing their arrival as the reason for restarting her story.

  “When her oldest boy got sick from food poisoning, and nearly died, one of the immortals came and healed him, practically raising him from the dead. Well, when they were all talking afterward, done with all the thanks and such, she asks this immortal woman can anyone do this healing, even mortals. And she says ‘yes.’ This woman—Brenda is her name—hears this and she thinks she’d like that for herself, so she starts trying it each time one of her kids gets a scrape or such. Eventually she starts to get some good results, with her kids that is, and with her husband’s sore knee, I think it was.” Carmen looked at Harold for confirmation. He wasn’t sure, but didn’t want to hinder her momentum, so he nodded slightly.

  “One day, Brenda and her whole family were taking a trip to visit some relatives in Michigan and they got around the tip of the Lake and their electric van loses power all of the sudden, so they end up parked on the side of the road, around where Gary, Indiana used to be. A couple stopped to help them out and she sees that the guy has just cut himself recently and has a bandage wrapped around two fingers. After he helps ‘em get the power restored to the van, she offers to heal this guy’s cut. This is the first time she tried this on someone outside the family, but she’s feeling real friendly toward these people and figures it’s worth a try. He gets healed, you know, and she gets this boost of confidence. That made her anxious to try some more with her relatives in Michigan, where she heals her cousin’s boy of asthma symptoms and another person of some kind of strained muscle or something.”

  “Well, after they came back to Delavan, she tells this to her neighbor, who asks her to heal a neck ache she’s had a couple of days, not enough to bother one of the immortals with, but annoying just the same. And what do you know, it works.” Carmen took a sip of her coffee to lubricate her throat a bit.

  “So I have these tremors, my mother had them too, some form of Parkinson’s that’s not so bad. I never felt it was bad enough to go to a healer. When I seen Brenda at the food co-op in town, and heard her talking about what’s been happening with people getting healed, well I just went up to her and asked about my tremors. And she says she’d be willing to give it a try. She’s holding her youngest, a two-year-old girl, in her arms and doesn’t even bother to put her down, but she just puts her one hand over my two hands and gets quiet. Later she told me she just prays silently and then waits to see if something happens. I didn’t know the part about praying, but I guess I might have let her try it anyway even if I had known. I’ve never been a praying person, you see,” she said, as if describing her ethnicity or place of birth.

  “All this to say, my tremors just stopped and now my hands are as steady as a surgeon’s.” She held both hands out to show the evidence.

  Pete piped in. “So you’re going around telling about this woman now?”

  Carmen laughed. “Oh, no. We’re just here on business. Harold had some consulting work in Iowa City and another job in Omaha. We were just passing through, sorta taking our time to see how the country has recovered since the war.”

  Rodney caught Carmen’s eye and asked, “Does this woman think other mortals can do this same kind of healing?”

  “As far as I know, no one else is doing it, but Brenda insists there’s nothing so different about her. She was just willing to give it at try,” Carmen said.

  Steve followed with a question. “Did the immortal woman who told her it was possible, do anything to make it happen for your friend?”

  Carmen shrugged her shoulders, her lips pursed thoughtfully. “I don’t remember hearing anything particular, just answered her question that it was possible.”

  Rodney told this story at the dinner table that night, Joshua, Emma, Miranda and Jamie all listening intently.

  Joshua responded first. “Theresa says that the image of God resides in all humans, not just the immortals. She says this is more than just some kind of vague similarity, but real divine DNA that’s inside all of us. This healing woman just shows what’s possible,” he said, with the fervor familiar to parents of young adults who are beginning to strengthen their grasp on the world around them.

  Emma looked at Joshua, not yet perturbed by the frequency with which her son started sentences with the phrase, “Theresa says.” But she wondered how this could all be true. Like most of the mortals living on the Earth in those days, she had not been a church-going person and knew little that would qualify as theology.

  “Are you saying that we could do these things too, even though we aren’t immortals?” Emma asked.

  “The immortals are just humans who’ve achieved their purpose to be God’s reflection on the Earth,” Joshua said, obviously quoting Theresa, but self-conscious of how often he did that.

  Rodney interjected. “Otherwise it wouldn’t make any sense for Josh to be mentored by one of the immortals, right? What they are is what we’re supp
osed to be.”

  “So, we get to be like them, what, when we die?” Miranda asked.

  “Depending on our loyalty to the King,” Joshua said, “yes.”

  “What about the resisters then?” his sister said.

  Joshua raised his eyebrows and shrugged a bit.

  “I heard about a girl living with the exiles in Minnesota, that got an infected appendix. They refused to let the immortals heal her,” Miranda said.

  “You think that really happened?” Jamie asked, truly concerned.

  “I’m afraid so,” Rodney said. He had heard about such refusals and expected it from the hard-core rebels. What he hadn’t figured out yet, was when the immortals would accept that refusal and when they would override the will of the parents.

  The most startling story that Rodney had been able to confirm, involved a family in Colorado. When an eight-year-old girl contracted a complex infection, and very high fever, the parents refused to allow the immortals to heal her. The people sent from Jerusalem to take care of the girl waited for the girl to reach the verge of death before they intervened, against the parents’ will. The daughter recovered completely, of course, but she had to be rescued the next day, when the parents agreed with the leader of their community that she should be killed.

  What Rodney had heard, though not confirmed by the immortals, was that the girl had to be removed from the community and taken to Jerusalem. That sort of intervention would do nothing to calm the fire of resistance, of course. He finally spoke up, after a moment to remember the story.