Contents
Copyright
Dedication
Title Page
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Join the Collective
One Last Thing...
Bonus
About the Author
Copyright © 2016 H. Claire Taylor
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the author.
www.hclairetaylor.com
H. Claire Taylor
[email protected]
DEDICATION
Thanks be to my critique group, my beta readers, the CTF, my saintly husband, my religious friends who can laugh at zealotry, my atheist friends who don’t equate faith with ignorance, my confused agnostic friends, and, of course, the Almighty Comedian.
0 A.G.C.
In the beginning, Jimmy had been so sure. There’d been no doubt in his mind that what he’d dreamed was more than just a dream; it was a conversation with Jesus himself. All Jimmy had to do was write it down as soon as he awoke, make a few tweaks here and there for dramatic effect, and so it was as the Good Lord intended. His prophecy. The Gospel according to Jimmy Dean. Or rather, the Gospel according to John Sonville, which was the alias he’d smartly adopted after the Utah fiasco. It was a shame that once the prophecy came to pass, no one but hordes of sinners would be around to remember that it was Jimmy who had been chosen by Jesus himself.
But as the days then weeks then months had moved along and Jimmy had built up his modest flock of rosy-cheeked, perky-breasted Texan girls—obviously the only ones worthy of following him into the great Kingdom of Heaven—the hill of certainty upon which he’d build his church started to look more and more like it might just be grassed-over landfill.
And now he sat in the temple of his own making—well, someone else had built the barn, but he’d done most of the redecoration including the placement of plywood across the hay barrels to create pews that faced his chair at front and center—and surveyed his youthful, beautiful flock, doubt crept in more than ever. What if this did just turn out to be Utah all over again? Was it possible that his dream about Jesus hadn’t been more than that: a dream?
Just nerves, that’s all. And who wouldn’t be nervous, staring down the barrel of the apocalypse? Courage, don’t fail me now!
The electric fans he’d placed around the barn, most of which he’d aimed at his designated seat, did little to combat the sweltering summer heat that persisted even then, in the dead of night. If God was truly merciful, He’d have a few dozen pitchers of icy sweet tea waiting for when Jimmy and his flock arrived. Maybe some whiskey, too.
He took a deep breath, closing his eyes and blocking out the sight of his creation to allow his mind to focus on something other than refreshing beverages and the doe-eyed girls waiting for … well, waiting for anything, any small morsel of wisdom or divinity, from him. He could’ve scratched his balls and they would have tried to understand what it meant about Heaven and Hell. Not for the first time, he thanked God for granting him such a classically handsome nose, trustworthy eyes, silky-soft facial hair, and a naturally slim frame. He would have credited the latter to growing up on a farm, except he’d ditched the farm and hopped a train east from Birmingham first chance he got, which, turned out, was a lot sooner than he’d expected. Nothing like puberty on the open road to help turn a boy into a man, he always said.
After ten months of human-only habitation in the barn, the smell of manure was generally not more than a slight tickle in the nostrils, but when Jimmy shut his eyes, the musty smell rose to the forefront of his mind, eliminating all other thoughts. It was what he imagined meditation might feel like, except without all the inherent godlessness.
He could hear the girls fidgeting anxiously around him, but they didn’t speak to one another. Managing to get a group of teenaged girls to sit quietly and not gossip was perhaps the greatest miracle of this entire Heavenly undertaking, rivaling even Jesus’s initial appearance in Jimmy’s dream.
“Pastor Sonville.”
Jimmy opened his eyes to find Emily standing just a few feet in front of his large wooden chair in the center of the makeshift amphitheater of plywood-and-hay pews. Peeking out from just behind Emily was her sister, younger by three years, a freshman in high school and perhaps still a few months away from the clutches of puberty.
He smiled gently at sweet, sweet Emily. She’d tested his restraint the most of all God’s Virgins and had proven herself to be quite the maven. He credited the size of his following mostly to Emily’s naturally persuasive abilities. She would be the first wife he would take in the afterlife. And with her staring so trustingly at him like that, the afterlife couldn’t come soon enough. “Yes, daughter?”
“Samantha wants to know if the End will hurt. I told her it wouldn’t, but she doesn’t listen. Would you tell her like you told me?”
Jimmy nodded slowly and took a deep breath, filling his chest with the stale barn air and trying to savor it, since it would (hopefully) be one of the last breaths he took on this earth. As he stood confidently from his chair, Emily and Samantha stepped back—Emily in deference, Samantha perhaps in fear. So Jimmy smiled down at her to show there was nothing to fear. Well, besides the apocalypse.
Once her hesitancy appeared to subside, he bent down till he was eye-level with the worried little girl and took both of her hands into one of his, and with his other hand lifted her chin with a crooked finger so that she met his gaze. “The End will be a purification more pleasant than anything you can imagine.” He let those words sink in for a moment and congratulated himself, not for the first time, on this little detail he’d concocted toward the beginning of this particular religious undertaking. “It’ll feel like a fire building inside you, starting just below your belly, building, building, getting warmer, more intense. That’s God’s mercy burning you up. Then you’ll start to feel like you can’t contain all of the mercy that He’s thrusting into you for your loyalty to Him, and your body will feel like it’s going to explode as pulses of His energy surge up your spine, making your toes curl, your back arch”—he glanced over at Emily to find that her face was even rosier than usual and her nostrils flared as she fidgeted and shifted on her heels—“the intensity with which His love is thrust into your heart might make you scream, but only because it feels so good and pure. And then suddenly it’s all over. Poof!” He dotted her nose with his finger. “You’re in Heaven with only the people in this barn by your side.”
Samantha nodded minutely, her eyebrows raised high, her mouth dangling slightly open as she processed the information. “So it hurts?”
Jimmy rolled his eyes. With the clock this close to midnight and the anxiety inside him gathering like a storm, he lacked the patience needed to keep reassuring everyone. He stood up and returned to his chair. “Yes, but it’s a good kind of hurt.” He sat and draped his arms over the armrests, wrapping his fingers around the soft, carved wood.
“What about my friends who aren’t in this barn?” Samantha asked. “What if I want them to be in Heaven, too?”
He shrugged his shoulders curtly. “They missed the boat. They’re going to burn in Hell for all eternity.” He ignored Samantha’s horrified gasp and let his eyes wander over the shiny hair of his blossoming followers until his attention was drawn to the clock on the wall. Only then did he realize that it might have been a smart, albei
t subconscious, decision to place the clock behind the pews so that only he could see it from his position, while the girls all faced away. Eleven fifty-six. Not long now. His stomach burned.
God, fill me up with Your grace. I could use a little reassurance that this thing’s actually going to happen.
There was no reply, not even anything that could be interpreted as a sign. He really didn’t want to have to move across the country again. After Utah, he’d promised himself he would settle down somewhere. Elbow, Texas, had seemed as good a place as any—remote, friendly, God-fearing. He never should have let himself get sucked into the business of religious leadership again. Somehow, leading a flock was both his greatest strength as well as his greatest weakness. It was all about the story, really. He was great at creating a story, or at least he was great at creating the beginning and middle of a story. The end was always more difficult. Jesus hadn’t mentioned anything about an ending in the dream, either. So Jimmy was forced to surmise, and the apocalypse seemed as good a finale as any other.
Maybe recalling the dream again would help reassure him …
He was in bed in Utah, two particularly desirable ewes of his previous flock on either side of him, fulfilling wishes he’d long held but never acted upon. And then Jesus crashed the scene. There was the part where Jesus introduced himself, assured Jimmy that, yes, he was Arab, and then it all got a little fuzzy from there, but Jimmy was sure that July seventh had been of some importance in the message. Something about a new dawn for earth. Well, if Jesus was going to be cryptic, what choice did Jimmy have but to fill in the details? So that’s what he did.
New dawn for the world was clearly the apocalypse, right? That seemed obvious enough. Or at least it’d seemed obvious enough in the ten months between when Jimmy woke up in a cold sweat and when he’d amassed his flock of young, pretty things into the barn for the final countdown (fingers crossed!).
Jesus? You there? Grant me a sign that this is going to happen. Anything helps.
He waited for a surge of confidence. It didn’t come. That was unfortunate. But he knew what would cheer him up. “God’s Virgins. Gather round.”
The young women, mostly upperclassmen from Elbow High School, knew that was their cue. Earlier that morning, as he enjoyed what he hoped would be his last sausage and egg breakfast ever, he’d counted in his head twenty girls who would show up in the barn later that night. But now that he looked around, there seemed to be only eighteen. Who was missing? He wracked his memory, running through the list chronologically from who he’d recruited first to who in his flock has joined most recently. Ah, Kimber and Misty, that’s who was missing. Their parents always were a little too suspicious of his youth group. And now those poor girls would be the ones to pay for it by missing the one-way boxcar to Heaven. Maybe. Assuming he’d been correct in his interpretation. No matter. Eighteen was still plenty of God’s Virgins for him to enjoy in the afterlife. As time ticked down toward midnight, Jimmy’s impatience grew.
“Come closer and pray with me.” The teens gathered round, got as close to Jimmy as they could so that each could rest a hand on him to soak up his Divine Promise. He closed his eyes and felt a chill run down his spine when one of his ewes rested a palm on his inner thigh.
Thank you, God, for blessing me with this responsibility.
“Pray with me, ladies.”
At eleven fifty-eight on July sixth, they bowed their heads.
“Lord Almighty, the one who grants our prayers, who speaks to me through our savior Jesus Christ, this is Your prophet coming to You with my flock. They thank You for giving them such a kind, generous, tender leader. This humble servant of Yours will not falter in his responsibility of guiding Your virgins up to Heaven and showing them Your rock-solid mercy in the hereafter. Please, Lord Father, take these young ladies up into Your arms and reward them for being such good servants of Your word. And of my word. Amen.”
The girls echoed the amen.
“Keep your heads bowed, now.” He looked at the clock. Eleven fifty-nine. The flow of uncertainty was increasing more by the minute, and he wondered if the dam would give way. Prayer hadn’t helped to calm him. The seconds ticked down. “God’s Virgins, you must all hold hands in a circle in the center of the room. Then, uh, close your eyes. Most importantly, resist the temptation to put your hands on my body.” The girls removed their hands from him and created a circle, as instructed, though it was clear to Jimmy that they were unsure where in the teachings this practice originated.
“Eyes shut,” he said again. “Keep them shut tight. When the end comes, God will shine down a light so bright that it will feel like Hellfire in your eye sockets if your eyes aren’t completely closed.”
That did the trick. And once the girls all held their eyes shut tightly, he stood from his chair as quietly as he could.
“Only a few more seconds, everyone,” he said before he tiptoed toward the barn doors. “Pray as hard as you can. So hard. Spread yourself wide for God’s mercy.”
When he glanced up at the clock on the wall and saw all the hands align at midnight, he held his breath for the length of a couple seconds. But nothing happened and he was immediately glad of a few things. First, he was glad he hadn’t splurged on the large grandfather clock he’d had his eye on the week before, the one that chimed ominously at every hour. Second, he was glad he hadn’t prematurely indulged in any of his Heaven fantasies, since it was clear the girls weren’t going anywhere soon and he hadn’t bothered to look up the age of consent in these parts. But mostly he was glad he hadn’t sold his truck.
No one else in the barn had realized that midnight came and left and was totally uneventful. Then a thought struck him that gave him pause. Maybe the clock on the wall was fast. He pulled his cell phone from his pocket and checked on there. Shit. The clock on the wall was wrong, but only because it was two minutes behind. So he was just flat out wrong about the apocalypse. Well, live and learn, he supposed. But what about the dream?
It was just a dream, you dumb ass. Just like in Utah.
That was unfortunate, really. One of his few strengths was organizing people, gathering them to him, and unless he was going to get into politics, which just seemed intolerably sleazy to him, the best use of his talents was to start a church. He’d been wrong before, sure, but the dream with Jesus and the ewes had seemed different somehow—more real. But it didn’t matter now. It was obvious that unless God functioned on Mountain or Pacific time, the apocalypse wasn’t coming tonight, which meant he needed to skedaddle before these girls went and spilled everything to their parents.
He opened the barn door only a foot, just enough for his slender body to slip through the space and escape into the uneventful night air. He had to get gone, and soon. The question was, where to?
He couldn’t go back to his rundown apartment—not that he really wanted to—because parents would be looking for him before long. He needed to get out of Elbow, probably even out of Texas. His instincts told him to head east—way east—not just away from Elbow, but farther away from Hatch, Utah, too. But he couldn’t stand easterners with their lack of hospitality and hearty dose of suspicion. Just plain unpleasant to be around, and ungodly to boot.
Maybe he could head north, up into Oklahoma and then on into Nebraska.
And do what? Freeze to death?
He didn’t know anyone he could squat with in either of those states either, and he wasn’t ready to plant new roots again. And Utah’s cold had been harsh enough.
He sighed resignedly when he thought of Hank. Hank owed him big time from their younger, more reckless days. It was unfortunate that Hank was near Carlsbad, though, because that meant heading back toward Utah, but Jimmy figured New Mexico was about as good of a place to be on the lam as any, considering how few people there gave two hoots about anyone else, so long as they were left alone themselves.
He made it to his pickup truck, climbed in quickly but quietly and started the engine. As he threw the truck into drive an
d began pulling away down the dirty road, he glanced in his rearview mirror and saw the first of the girls who had wandered out of the barn bathed in the red of his taillights. They ambled around slowly like sleepwalkers as they watched Jimmy leave.
Eh, they’d figure it all out soon enough. They were all fairly smart girls, and resilient. Probably.
Once his now-former flock could no longer be seen wandering pathetically in the rearview mirror, his mind drifted back to the Jesus dream. Now that he knew it was just a dream, parts of it started to make a little more sense. Of course Jesus wouldn’t appear to him in a dream. That seemed like a backdoor way into someone’s mind, and if Jesus was who the Bible made him out to be, he could just show up at Jimmy’s doorstep and start barking orders.
And then there were the instructions that Jesus had given him. “If you build it, she will come.” It did seem strange that Jesus’s message would rip off Field of Dreams only a few hours after Jimmy had watched it for the first time. That sounded more like something his simple, mortal brain would do. And now that he was really deconstructing it, the odds seemed high that he’d simply interpreted that phrase to mean exactly what he wanted it to mean. What was the age for consent in Texas anyway? Sixteen? That seemed a little low, but that’s what it was in Utah, and Texas wasn’t much different in its way of thinking. Seventeen, tops. Didn’t matter. He’d never crossed the line, so the sheriffs or rangers or marshals or whoever the hell covered that had nothing on him. He’d thought about crossing the line, sure, but never actually done it. Jimmy was nothing if not a man of moral fortitude.
The dark country roads leading out of Elbow, Texas, were in desperate need of some maintenance. His Tacoma bobbed up and down as it rolled over one pothole after another in a rhythm that was almost but not quite relaxing, like when he was a young boy being bounced on his pastor’s knee. He could still see, quite vividly, the face of Pastor Heathrow staring down at him. A related memory knocked from behind a padlocked door in his mind, but Jimmy decided to ignore it like he always did, and a moment later the truck hit a real doozy of a pothole and the jolt rattled Jimmy’s skull and made him curse. No way that hadn’t done at least a little damage to his front axel.
The Beginning (Jessica Christ Book 1) Page 1
