“Thanks.”
“Oh!” He pointed at her. “Right. Jesus sent me. He says the homeless buses will be arriving soon, and he’ll lead them straight to the medical care and showers before letting them inside.”
“Right.” She forced a smile. The homeless guests were already arriving?
What if they were the only ones who showed? What if all the other promises fell through and her grand opening was seen only as some sort of grand HoboCon? Homeless people would travel from all over the country to come sleep in her dome … on her hand-sewn pillows.
She dug her fingernails into her palms to snap herself out of it. “And he just got the ones who don’t want to be homeless anymore, right?”
Jeremy shrugged. “Beats me. I can’t account for what Jesus does.”
“Right. No one can. Thanks for the heads up.”
She waited until he was gone to talk herself off the edge, and then she checked the clock on her phone. Nearly eight in the morning. The service was scheduled for noon.
Chapter Forty-Four
05:12:23:33 until Doomsday
“I still don’t understand why the scribe has to wear this shit,” Judith said, adjusting her dress. “I’m a writer, not a virgin sacrifice.” She stood beside Jessica who greeted the VIPs as they arrived, the sun’s brutal July rays overhead. On the other side of Judith the priestesses stood in a line leading down the path to the front doors, a sort of a welcome committee gauntlet everyone had to pass through before entering the Church of Girl Christ.
“We don’t use that word anymore,” Jessica reminded her.
“What, virgin or sacrifice?”
“The first one. But also the second. Don’t jinx this.”
Jessica happened to think Judith looked more like a goddess than a sacrifice in the voluminous pale blue dress and her dark hair pulled back at the sides, tumbling in tendrils down her back. She was the one to whom villagers would offer their sacrifice.
It made Jessica feel frumpy by comparison, as far as deities went.
“Well, if it isn’t the woman herself.”
She followed the source of the overconfident voice and spotted a familiar face. But how was it familiar? Where did she know this man from? He had maybe ten years on her, and he was deathly handsome, but she couldn’t put a name to the face. “Welcome,” she said, forcing a smile as she took his hand.
“When Jameson invited me, I thought he was on drugs. But this is all pretty remarkable.”
Jameson. Okay, so this guy was probably someone famous. It was starting to come to her. James-something? No, no, David-something?
“I’m glad you’re here,” she said. “It’s not exactly intended to be a spectator show, but I understand that’s why most people are here.”
He didn’t let go of her hand yet. “Don’t worry.” He winked. “I’ll be respectful. But I do feel obligated to mention that I’m a devout Satanist, so you probably won’t change my mind.”
Oh, for fuck’s… a Satanist? “Not a problem. When we say all are welcome, we mean it.”
EXCEPT FOR THE SMELLY.
Don’t start on that again. If we don’t require the homeless to shower before they join, no one else will show up to the next service.
I’M NOT JUDGING.
Of course you are.
OF COURSE I AM.
The homeless showers had been hotly contested among her trusted confidants. Clint Daniels had been adamant that nothing good happened in church showers and that her liability might not cover the claims that would inevitably emerge. But Judith had brushed that off as a minor detail compared to the smell of dozens of homeless in a single dome with the sun shining directly on them.
It was Jesus who made the best point, though. He’d said allowing people to bathe was an act of mercy (when Judith accused him of having a thing for washing feet, he denied it), and that asking a thing of another person before you got close to them wasn’t cruel—love can only be preserved with basic boundaries intact.
With Jesus on Jessica’s side, Daniels relented and they set out to design low-liability showers with individual stalls and a process for allowing only one person into each one at a time and installing high-tech locks on the doors so nothing untoward could happen in them after hours.
God, meanwhile, was critical of it. She had been critical of a lot of this process, but most of the criticism came in a deeper voice.
The transition wasn’t always easy for Her. God, it seemed, was still hanging on to vestiges of “the good old days.”
There was, however, one thing that caused She-God to voice serious concern. And Jessica only had the vaguest notion of an answer to it, even though she herself had been considering the possible moral tarpit during most of her waking moments.
The animals. Everywhere. Could she keep from making the same mistakes Jimmy had made with his introduction of the God Hog? Or would her beautiful church, her life’s work, as it were, accidentally turn into the most famous encourager of bestiality of all time?
She had a plan for it, though, and, holy fuck, did she hope it worked.
The time came for Jessica to disappear for a while. She graciously excused herself from the receiving line and retired to her private office within the church.
Where she promptly began hyperventilating. “Stupid, stupid, stupid,” she said on each forced exhale.
It was an animalistic fear response, which should have comforted her, she supposed.
The thought shifted her focus from the high stakes of the day and how easily everything she’d been working toward could come crashing down on her to the inaugural sermon she was scheduled to deliver in just over twenty minutes. This would set the tone for the rest of the church’s existence, and she couldn’t screw it up. As long as she kept to the carefully practiced script, she could, at the very worst, stumble her way through the words. Those, at least, she could recite in her sleep. Wendy had made sure that was the case. As far as the publicist was concerned, this was the big one. All or nothing. She had said as much countless times, despite Jessica having developed a habit of covering her ears when one of Wendy’s pep talks was clearly ramping up to that proclamation. “This is the big one! It all comes down to this! This is your moment. All or nothing!”
There was a small knock at her office door, and she asked whoever it was to come in. Just short of it being Jimmy Dean, she would take whatever company she could just then. Any distraction.
Courtney Wurst poked her head in. Against Jessica’s better judgment, she’d begun to trust Courtney over the last few months, and her desire to shout, “Shut your fucking mouth, Courtney!” every time the Wurst tried to speak had diminished almost entirely.
“Hey, sorry to bother you. But Joshua sent me. He said to tell you some of the more famous guests are griping about being so close to the homeless.”
Shut your fucking mouth, Courtney!
“Okay. Did he say what he wanted to do about it?”
“No, he just thought you should be aware of it.”
Jessica bit her tongue. “Thanks. I’m aware now.”
Taking the hint, Courtney shut the door silently, and Jessica was left with one more thing to “be aware” of. Her eyes felt as big as an ocelot’s, her ears as sensitive as a barn owl’s. But she had to do this. It was the only way to bring peace to the United States, and that was an important thing.
Could anyone else do it? Jesus could probably manage it. Maybe she could just disappear and let him handle things. He had way more experience. Who was she, anyway? A twenty-three-year-old nobody from West Texas with no college degree, a tepid high school GPA, a trigger-happy mom who was practically the same generation as her, and an absent father in the throes of a gender transition.
I’m a nobody.
Perversely, that thought helped.
She checked the clock. Showtime.
In a moment of weakness, she did the thing she promised herself she wouldn’t do and imagined she was Jimmy Dean. Rolling her shoulders back, she
inhaled deeply, filling her chest with delicious oxygen. No one captivated a crowd like Jimmy.
And talk about a nobody. He wasn’t God’s child. He wasn’t the Devil. He wasn’t even a demon! He was the ultimate nobody from The South with a terrible mother he hated and kept in a prison-like retirement home. And yet, what he said, the masses believed.
If she could channel some of that bullshit confidence right now, she’d take it. She didn’t have a hog-hoof stole, but if someone had offered her one in that moment, she might have taken it, too.
A few minutes later, she waited in an anteroom just off the sanctuary and listened for the crowd to settle down. If she peeked out, someone might see her, so she was unable to satisfy her curiosity regarding the state of affairs between the homeless and the rich and powerful. She’d done her best to organize the seating so they weren’t near one another. After the showers, the homeless guests should have been tolerable to the refined, or possibly cocaine-ravaged, noses of the wealthy and influential on her guest list.
She listened for clear signs of discontent but couldn’t make out much of anything outside of the general murmur of conversation.
As that began to settle under a blanket of anticipation, she hooked on her headset mic, thinking once again of Jimmy Dean, and took that first agonizing step out of her hiding place toward the center of the room.
Chapter Forty-Five
05:11:56:21 until Doomsday
Each step was slightly less agonizing than the one before it. The applause helped, she had to admit. She grinned widely, flashing her teeth, before reining it in. Humility. Smiling too widely showed no humility. This wasn’t Helen in the Morning.
Without meaning to she thought, What would Jesus do? And when her eyes found him in one of the front rows, she saw that his mouth was open wide, his teeth flashing white as he grinned unabashedly.
Well, shit.
His smile quickly faded when the man next to him tried to light a cigarette, forcing Jesus to quickly lean close and humbly request he not. The man put his cigarette out on the seat cushion next to him. She felt her left eye twitch.
This isn’t doomed. This isn’t doomed. This isn’t doomed.
Reaching the center of the sanctuary, she cleared her throat and then flipped on the mic. “Welcome! I’m so glad to see each and every”—holy hell, how did Dolores Thomas get inside?!—“one of you here today.” Okay, this was bad. The Devil had managed to slip inside her church.
SHE WAS WEARING A HEADCOVERING.
For fuck’s sake! These head coverings would be the death of her. She was determined not to turn people away based on simple matters of religion, but what was she supposed to do about an entire culture so well dressed for espionage?! Had she no recourse?
The Devil stood at the very back by one of the emergency exits, her arms folded across her chest, a shit-eating grin nestled between her fat cheeks.
Should she interrupt the service to request Dolores be removed? Should she cause a scene to expel the Devil? What would that lead to? Surely, people would assume it was all staged …
What do I do here?
CARRY ON.
Jessica let her eyes roam over the hundreds of faces looking at her in this theater-in-the-round and pretended to take in a single one while her mind was fixated elsewhere.
Would the Devil do anything? What would she try? Could she have them all killed? Could she cause the doors to lock and set the place aflame?
You could smite your way out.
FOCUS. DO NOT CARRY OUT THE WORK OF THE DEVIL FOR HER. DO NOT SABOTAGE YOURSELF.
Fine. The Devil could stay for now.
“Today has been years in the making, as I’m sure you all know. I want to start off today by telling you a little bit about myself. Because by now, you’ve all heard things about me, but most of them did not come from me. They came from Jimmy Dean. He hijacked my story from the moment of my birth, and today I take it back.
“I am and always have been God’s only begotten daughter. I know this is hard enough to believe, and only made harder by the fact that I’m telling you that God is a woman. So, allow me to clarify: God was not always a woman. When they crucified Jesus, God was a man. During the bloody Crusades, God was a man. When the first European explorers landed on the shores of what we now call America, killing and raping and enslaving the indigenous people, God was a man. When we enslaved millions and brought them to our shores from Africa in the name of industry and freedom, God was a man. When women were beaten and jailed for demanding the right to a vote, God was a man. When World War II killed over seventy million people, and we dropped the atomic bombs on Japan to end the deaths by creating horror, God was a man. During the Cold War of egos that threatened to end the world as we know it, God was a man. When the Klan, a self-proclaimed Christian organization, was murdering our brothers and sisters for the color of their skin, God was a Man.”
She paused to let it sink in. Dolores was still staring straight at her.
For all of those stains upon humanity, the Devil had been a man, too. All kinds of things were changing now.
“God has been a man for long enough. Millions of people have been tortured, starved, raped, and murdered in His name. You may say none of that was the work of God, but it was work done in the name of God, done with the notion that it might please Him. And when His son spoke out against those behaviors, the God-fearing murdered him. It doesn’t take a genius to see the state of things while God is a man does not work.” The atmosphere around her felt flammable. She could practically feel the particles around her vibrate with frenetic energy. And yet, all around her, those in attendance didn’t move. Whether they were waiting for the final bit of information to validate killing her or whether she had finally said something worth considering, she couldn’t be sure. But she had their attention.
“I didn’t ask to be born. But I’m part of a plan, as are all of you here today and those who will join us in the coming months and years.” If I have that long. “I was born to an unwed mother, conceived in the backseat of a car. My mother gave birth to me on her hands and knees on the same living room floor where I learned to crawl. The same floor where I watched hit piece after hit piece about myself on our old TV and where I learned to hate myself for who I was.
“When I was eight years old, God told me I was destined to confront the Devil.” She looked at Dolores and felt a sudden confidence rush through her. The grin broke through before she could stop it. She inhaled deeply. The oxygen went straight to her head. “When I was eleven years old, Jimmy Dean called me the embodiment of Original Sin. Not even a teenager, and my identity was already determined by men. I was Jessica Christ. I was Jessica Antichrist. My life wasn’t my own, and I couldn’t win no matter what I did. I was stuck in a web of contradicting identities. It took me years to realize that even though I heard all these things spelled out plainly for me, I wasn’t the only young woman with this burden on my shoulders. I wasn’t the only one under the false belief that I was responsible for fixing the evils of this world, even while the world told me I was too broken to ever do so. It was my Sisyphean task, my punishment for being Original Sin. But not just mine. Never just mine, even on the days when I felt completely alone in it.
“Because so long as God has been a man, women have been both the clean-up crew and the scapegoat. And now that God is a woman, what will we—any of us—be?
“When I wanted to run away from my purpose in this world, there was one person who never let me. My mother, Destinee, always told me I could be whoever I wanted to be, so long as who I wanted to be was the daughter of God. It was in my nature. How could I accept that, though, when so many people told me that my nature was evil or that of a servant of my Father’s bidding? Who wants that nature?
“For as long as I can remember, I’ve been obsessed with nature shows. They brought me peace in this crazy world, though I didn’t understand why when I was younger. But I know now. Everything has evolved to fit perfectly where it is. Only throug
h human interference do things fall terribly out of balance. Otherwise, it all works in harmony. Everything has a reason for being just like it is.”
She’d broached the subject of animals, and it seemed to be turning on lights behind the eyes of her rapt audience. Perfect. This next part would be tricky. She would have to nail it or else this whole costly experiment could go off the rails from the start.
“So, what I propose when I say that God is a woman is that we all return to our natural state, to the personality and passions deep within us. Let us return once and for all to Nature.”
And this next part was exceptionally crucial, because if she didn’t address sexual consent immediately—
A hoarse holler went up from somewhere behind her, and she looked over her shoulder, unsurprised to find her attention drawn to the section reserved for the homeless.
What did come as a shock, though perhaps it shouldn’t have, was the glint of the brilliant sunlight off the metal of a homeless gentleman’s knife.
SHANK, God corrected.
Jessica gasped, and what little attention hadn’t already moved to the source of the yelling did so then. Jesus jumped up and dove right toward the conflict, and that’s when the real shoving started.
“I got him!” cried a man nearby, and he held up a thick baseball bat.
“They’re so armed,” Jessica muttered, staring helplessly from a distance that kept her safe from immediate danger, so long as no one produced a gun, but made it impossible for her to offer help.
She turned her attention to the Devil, but she was gone. This was her handiwork, then, and the damage was already done.
As the streak of black clothing rushed the conflict, Jessica was forced to admit that Wendy’s idea of a police presence—resisted in equal parts by both Jessica and Jeremy, though not for remotely the same reason—had been sound.
The End Is Her Page 27
