Pressure (Book 1): Fall

by Thomson, Jeff

  But politicians, being the self-serving assholes they’d been throughout human history, couldn’t let something as simple as impossibility stop them from trying, and so the unintended consequence of regulating the impossible, was that responsible, non-drunken idiot gun owners were forced to put up with a body politic trying to restrict their rights, and make them pay for the actions of the stupid and the crazy. It wasn’t fair. It wasn’t right, in Charlie’s considered opinion - although he did think the screening process for gun ownership could be better. But what the fuck did he know?

  None of this mattered to him as his tired mind and body negotiated the last few miles toward the diesel-smelling oasis where he could finally shut down. He was hungry, and dreamed of a good steak. He wouldn’t get one, he knew, because the only food available would be some fast form of grease, but it never hurt to dream.

  Just then, he was dreaming of a world where people actually knew how to drive. In his world - the real world - however, that was not the case, and so he braked and downshifted and constantly checked his mirrors to ensure some suicidal dipshit didn’t ignore the Law of Gross Tonnage (If it’s bigger than you, stay out of its way) and suddenly decide to turn themselves into a speed bump.

  He had just traversed the overpass to his exit when the truck gave a terrific lurch. What the fuck? He thought, struggling to keep from fish-tailing into somebody’s Subaru. He downshifted again and darted his gaze to the driver’s side mirror. The cars behind him were gone. So was the overpass.

  4

  Church of the Eternal Savior

  Boise, Idaho

  “...He makes His sun to rise on the evil and the good. He sends rain upon the heads of the just and the unjust,” Reverend Jericho said into the microphone. “Matthew told us that: Chapter Five, Verse Forty-Five.” He was standing on the stage at the Church of the Universal Savior, in front of a crowd of almost twenty-five hundred people. The radio broadcast was going out to seventy-three stations (and growing), six days a week.

  Even God took one day off. Jericho’s was Saturday. This was Wednesday.

  “Now, we use that to explain why bad things happen to good people,” he continued. “But inside that explanation is a warning.”

  “Yes!” the crowd intoned. Whether they knew what the Hell he was driving at was a question Thomas never bothered to ask. He knew that saying something was a warning would get just such a reaction. And he further knew that the reaction would spark whatever it was inside their easily-manipulated brains that caused them to seek out someone to blame. Was it wrong for him to give them that someone? Or to profit from it?

  He fed them the preamble. “There’s an old saying that one bad apple can spoil the whole bunch.”

  “Yes!” they shouted.

  “And we got us a whole bunch of bad apples in this great country.”

  “Yes!”

  Thomas knew this was what they wanted to hear - needed to hear. Their bad or miserable lives weren’t their fault. When things went wrong or when life didn’t turn out as they planned, there had to be somebody else to blame. They didn’t need to take responsibility. On top of everything else, on top of the misery, and disappointment, and dashed dreams, to have to accept that it was - in reality - a pile of shit of their own making was just too tough to bear, and so they needed to know where to point their fingers.

  All of human religion - or at least the Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity and Islam), of which Christianity was the only one that mattered, the only one that was right and true and worth a damn - at least in their minds - was based on the singular fact that people were scared shitless: of death or the unknown, or the dark, or the possibility that the bill for their own misdeeds would soon come due. It had always been this way. And shit-scared people want two things from their God: absolution and someone else to blame.

  “Homosexuals, and drug addicts, and murderers, and rapists of women.” He went down the list of usual suspects, each one punctuated by a chorus of Yes. “Abortionists (Yes) and perverts (Yes) and the ACLU (Yes) and fuzzy-headed, meddling Liberals (Yes) who want to control you and destroy the sanctity of Christmas and tell you how to worship your God!” Yes! Yes! Yes!

  In preparing for this latest (and greatest) con, Thomas had done his homework. Before entering into any new operation, he always researched his intended subject - whether it be stock futures or real estate, or gold mines in South America, it always paid to at least sound like he knew what he was talking about. He needed to seem plausible - for long enough to bring the rubes home and get them to open their wallets and trust funds and bank accounts, and empty them into his waiting, eager hands. And no con had ever needed the air of plausibility like religion.

  Walking the walk was easy. There were enough religious gasbags on TV to give him a sense of the movement and mannerisms expected of the character. But to talk the talk, he needed to study the history of the Christian religion, and that study taught him one essential fact: the people in charge had rigged the system from the very beginning.

  He really had to hand it to them. Since Homo Sapiens crawled out of their caves and started to build towns and villages and great cities, it had always been about power: who had it, how to get it from them, and how to keep it. But when it all started, there were too many gods - some of them women - and the power was too spread out, too diffused, with too many options. This God controlled that, that God controlled this, and the other gods controlled other things. But it was too chaotic. It needed to be centralized. They needed One God in whom to place all the marbles.

  And that worked well - for a while. But the Jews screwed up by creating too goddamned many rules. You couldn’t eat that. You could eat this, but only if it was prepared in a special way, and you couldn’t eat it on Tuesday - unless it fell during this or that time of year. You had to wash in just the right way, and wear the right clothes, made from the right cloth. They had rules for this, rules for that, rules for every goddamned thing, to the point where a person couldn’t even get out of fucking bed without pissing off the Big Guy. It was no way to run a circus, that much was certain.

  There needed to be a fall guy - someone to accept the blame when people failed to obey all those rules, someone to tell them it was okay if they didn’t get it right all the time. And so Jesus was born.

  He said to chuck all those rules, keep the Ten Commandments, which made sense and had been tried and tested and approved by acclimation. Add in the Beatitudes, put forth in the first great media event in history: the Sermon on the Mount, and tell everyone to just be nice to each other and mind their own business.

  Well, that made too much damned sense, and so Jesus had to be killed. Too bad, so sad. But then they were left with his body of work. The man was dead, but his Common Sense ideas lived on, and small groups kept meeting in secret to tell each other that yes, it was a good idea to be nice to each other.

  Problem with that was there wasn’t any way to squeeze power from that kind of thinking. It left people to their own devices, so long as they weren’t assholes, which meant there really wasn’t any room or need for a ruling class. Couldn’t have that, so they started rounding up the Christians and killing them in interesting and violent ways.

  But this only served to drive them further underground, while at the same time making other, normal people, not in the ruling class, feel sorry for them. This in turn, created support for them, and in true grass roots fashion, as time went on, the movement swelled and grew and coalesced into a force strong enough to threaten the ruling class, who suddenly found themselves greatly outnumbered.

  Well, if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em, as the saying went, even way back when. And so the ruling class did - but they went about it in such a way as to make sure that when the dust finally settled, they’d be back in charge, running the show. They rigged the system.

  By then, however, a few hundred years had gone by and people were used to the idea of being nice to each other, and minding their own business, and choosing for th
emselves how to be, helped along by their personal relationship with God - whom they still needed, because they were still afraid, and there were still so many things they didn’t understand, and they still, when you came right down to it, didn’t want to have to accept responsibility for their own actions.

  So the biggest leader of the time, Constantine, took matters into his own hands and massaged what had been written by those people over those centuries, eliminated most of it by calling it heresy, and keeping only those things that told the basic story, but supported the idea that there needed to be someone in charge. It was a work of genius, in Thomas’ opinion.

  The New Testament was supposed to be about Jesus, but most of its actual text was about Paul, and told the story of how he set up the church, and how he thought it should be run, which supported the idea that men should be in charge, and that the further you went up the ladder, the more power rested in the hands of a very few people. They put forth the idea that the only way you could get to Heaven was through Jesus and the only way to get to Jesus was through the church, and the only way to get through the church was to go through the priests. The ruling class was then large and back in charge, and perfectly ready and willing to tell the huddled masses whom to blame - which always happened to be someone other than themselves.

  .“And it’s these bad apples that are going to ruin our beloved country, because God is saying to us Get them in line before I turn the rain to thunder!” The crowd went wild.

  And so here Thomas now was, in charge of his very own church, with the people hanging on his every word, saying Yes, and Amen, and Praise God, Praise Jesus to every word he uttered. They were primed. They were ready. They were eager to open their wallets.

  And why not? He gave them what they wanted. Of course he did. After all, he was their Beacon of God.

  Time to bring it on home.

  He was about to set the hook, reel them in and really bring the roof down when Mother Nature beat him to it.

  5

  Las Vegas, Nevada

  Mary Elizabeth Campbell (AKA Jake’s Mom) was 56 years old. She vacillated between hating this fact, being amused by it, and not caring one way or the other. More often than not, she was the only one who paid any attention. Jake certainly didn’t.

  Standing five-three or so and weighing maybe a buck-twenty-five soaking wet, her body was short, lean, and fit. Her bright green eyes sparkled behind black-framed rectangular glasses, perched upon a nose that sat in the middle of a thoroughly freckled face, with tiny laugh-lines at the corners of her eyes and lips, which she hated and Jake loved. That night, she wore jeans and an old blue tee-shirt with a cartoon helicopter on the front. The shirt exposed her acquiescence to vanity. She had gotten a boob job.

  The last thing Jake ever wanted to notice was the size of his mother’s boobs, but that didn’t make him blind. When, on a Wednesday, she’d had small breasts, and then when he’d seen her again the following Saturday, she’d had larger ones that couldn’t be explained away by a Wonder Bra, he noticed. He hadn’t said anything about it. Ever. Whether this was just a matter of being polite, or the fact that he simply refused to think about his mom’s tits, he neither knew, nor cared. But he had noticed.

  Her hair (at the moment) sported three different colors: mostly auburn, with blond highlights and touches of purple here and there. She colored it to hide the ever-increasing encroachment of grey. Its short crop framed the face of someone who smiled easily. This is not to say her face couldn’t just as easily let someone know her displeasure - the reality of which he was at that moment all-too aware.

  “You need to quit smoking.”

  “Yes,” he agreed, both because she was right and because not doing so would have been pointless. She was on a roll.

  This was an old argument. The Coast Guard had made the same argument back during his poster child days, saying he should serve as a better example to the rank and file. He’d ignored them then, just as he was ignoring his mother now.

  And the reason? He simply didn’t care. It wasn’t a death wish, precisely. He wasn’t prone to extreme sports that may or may not get him killed, and he wasn’t suicidal (most of the time), but something deep down inside him just couldn’t seem to care whether he lived or died. He supposed he should analyze this, find some professional to shrink-wrap him into mental health, but he just didn’t care enough about that, either. And so he committed slow suicide, one cigarette at a time.

  “It’s a filthy, disgusting habit…”

  “Yes.”

  “…that costs way too much money…”

  “Yes.”

  “…and is going to kill you…”

  “Yes.”

  “…if I don’t do it first.”

  “All-righty then,” Jake replied. “What brought on this latest homicidal tendency?” He asked her that because every now and then, what she was actually pissed about wasn’t what she was saying. His mother, the walking dichotomy: a painfully direct, cut through the crap kind of person, who could (when it suited her) obfuscate with the best of them.

  “Smoking is bad for you,” she mumbled, knowing Jake had her number.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Shut up,” she replied. This was always her answer when she wanted to avoid whatever they were discussing.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Change of subject,” she deflected, not looking him in the eye (and confirming his suspicion). “Are you all packed?”

  “Ah ha!” Now he knew what was going on. “This is about going home tomorrow, isn’t it?”

  “Shut up.”

  They were both scheduled to fly out in the morning to spend Christmas with the family a little ways west of Crater Lake, at Uncle Ian’s house in the bustling metropolis of Gunter’s Gap, Oregon (population twenty-five hundred or so in summer and six hundred fifty in winter), where Jake’s uncle, her brother, served as town mayor.

  She and her brother had been born and raised there. Jake had been born there, shortly before the two of them moved away for good. But they always went back, and every time they did, it was like flipping a switch inside her independent, strong-willed, stubborn brain and whammo, she was right back to being the baby sister again.

  Their mother died when Jake’s mother was in grade school and Ian was a freshman in high school. And their father - well - their father had just kind of been there, going through the motions of paying the bills and keeping a roof over their heads. Whether from a lack of energy or interest or due to the fact he was missing whatever made a good parent, in the end, it didn’t really make any difference. The result was the same: two kids with minimal adult influence.

  And so Mary had looked to her big brother for the father-type stuff she lacked. And Ian (according to Jake’s Mom) had taken full advantage of it, poking and prodding at her, meddling in her life, controlling it, in spite of knowing nothing about being a girl, and thus, giving new meaning to the word overprotective. Or so she thought, anyway.

  “Mom . . . You know I love you, right?”

  “I suppose,” she said, to which Jake replied by beaning her with a dinner roll. They were sitting at the oval wooden table that took up about a third of her kitchen, with dinner having progressed from the gobbling to the nibbling stage. A small and ancient thirteen-inch color TV sat muted at one end.

  “When are you gonna pull your head out and realize Uncle Ian loves you?”

  “Then why does he make me feel like a loser?”

  “No, you make you feel like a loser,” he countered. “You’ve convinced yourself you are, and so you twist every single minutely negative thing he says to fit your delusion.”

  “I’ll pass on the psychoanalysis, thank you very much, Sigmund Fraud.”

  This was an old argument. Inevitable, he supposed, when your mother is a walking dichotomy.

  Mary was a nurse, and a damned good one. She specialized in Emergency Medicine: the Trauma Unit, the E. R., even flying in the helicopter and scraping people off the highway. And whil
e he knew she loved him, he also knew that if he were ever standing between her and someone whose life she was trying to save, she would run straight through his ass like one of the bulls at Pamplona. At the same time, however, she had this underlying layer of poor self-confidence that absolutely did not fit with the hard-charging, take no prisoners or bullshit, confident nurse exterior. He adored her for it.

  But that didn’t stop him from giving her shit.

  “Truth hurts, doesn’t it?” he teased. “You’re bound and determined to make this seem far worse than it is.”

  “I feel like a redheaded stepchild when I’m around him,” she whined, dropping her face into her hands with a frustrated sigh.

  “You are kind of a redhead,” Jake observed. “And blonde and purple.” She returned the dinner roll to the vicinity of his breastbone, but he carried on undaunted. “But you are not a stepchild. You are a very strong, very dedicated, very skilled pain in the ass, whom I happen to adore. So don’t make me have to kill you. We’re going, you know we’re going and you know you love your brother, so pull your head out and stop whining, ‘cause I don’t want to have to listen to it for the entire holiday.”

  “Talk to the paw,” she replied, holding up her hand, ever the dog person. As if on cue, her four-year-old golden retriever, Miss Molly Noodle, trotted into the kitchen to present herself to anyone willing to give her a good petting. As she was in Jake’s proximity, the honor fell to him.

  “Look at it this way,” he began, giving the dog a two-handed scratch behind the ears. “You’d do anything to keep Molly safe, right?”