Godsent

by Richard Burton

  Everywhere, he encouraged people to look for what united them with their fellow humans, rather than what divided them. He spoke of love, of forgiveness, of kindness and compassion. He spoke of the need to transcend the barriers of race, of religion, of nationality, and of gender. He told people that they had the power to change the world if they would only realize it. If they would only wake up to it.

  And just as importantly, or even more so, he listened. He listened to the ones that nobody else listened to: the mentally ill, the desperately sick, the very old, the very young. He listened without judgment, with an open heart. And people poured their hearts out to him without reserve.

  Some people recognized him, or thought they did. “Are you Ethan?” they asked. “Are you the one who calls himself the Son of man?”

  If asked directly, he didn’t deny it. He would admit his identity with a smile and go on with what he had been saying . . . or try to. But sometimes that was no longer possible. Sometimes, once people knew who he was, or even just suspected it, they changed. They pressed him for miracles, beseeching him to heal this one, to raise that one from the dead. Some tried to bribe him. Others to threaten him. And then there were those who saw him as the enemy. Men and women so locked into the tenets of their own faith, or lack of faith, that they attacked him, tried to hurt him, to kill him. When that happened, he didn’t lash back. He didn’t even try to defend himself. As he had done at the compound in Phoenix, he simply vanished. He went elsewhere and began again.

  At least he didn’t have to worry about Kate. Three days ago, just two days after Ethan had vanished, Papa Jim had flown Kate, along with her bodyguards, to a small Caribbean island in the Grand Caymans that he had purchased years ago as a vacation spot and tax shelter, a place to bring politicians and businessmen for wining and dining away from the prying eyes of the press, and also a bolt hole if he ever needed it. He’d kept the security there top-of-the-line and had even installed the new AEGIS system, of which he was so proud. Ethan was sure that Kate would be safe there.

  Yesterday Ethan had been in Mexico City. The day before that, Tokyo. Today, Saturday, it was New York City. He had come to Times Square to take the pulse of the city, to walk its teeming thoroughfares and talk with its citizens and the tourists who flocked there from all over the world.

  In Times Square, the only difference between night and day was that the night was brighter, splashed with garish colors from theater marquees and video billboards, stories tall, on which movie trailers, television shows, sports highlights, commercials, and news updates played continuously in an endless outpouring of information that seemed strangely divorced from the human figures scurrying below, as if their true audience lay elsewhere. Ethan was wandering at random, letting the currents and eddies of the noisy, hot, crowded streets carry him where they would, stopping from time to time to talk with the people streaming into and out of movie complexes, theaters, restaurants, shops, and bars, or, like him, roaming the streets with no destination in mind, just soaking up the atmosphere. He lingered at the tables of sidewalk vendors and caricature artists, paused to watch street performers and musicians playing instruments or rapping along to ancient boom boxes.

  It was just past eleven, still early. The Saturday night energy suffusing the streets had not yet reached its peak, or even close to it; it seemed to Ethan that the nervous, edgy energy was barely under control, like a campfire flickering within a ring of stones that lacked only a breeze to leap its boundaries and spark a wider conflagration. Police and munchies patrolled to make certain that not even a single ember escaped. Yet their presence only intensified the sense of dangerous immanence freighting the air, honing its already-sharp edge, making it more threatening. Ethan wondered if his own emotions were feeding off those of the crowd, or if, on the contrary, the crowd was picking up on his unease, magnifying it back to him in some kind of feedback loop. Not even in Miami, where the crowd had come a breath away from tipping into a full-scale riot, had Ethan felt so apprehensive and twitchy. If I had a spider-sense, he thought, it would be tingling right now. Had the Congregation found him? Were its agents preparing to strike? He knew from experience that they wouldn’t shy away from civilian casualties; he felt they would be capable of taking out the whole city in order to get to him. He wouldn’t let that happen, but he preferred to avoid a confrontation.

  He had just about decided to leave when it happened.

  A kind of gasp went up from what must have been thousands of throats. Then an unnatural stillness descended, as if everyone in Times Square had simultaneously stopped moving, stopped talking, stopped breathing. In that hush of humanity, the sounds of the city seemed louder and harsher than ever in Ethan’s ears: the honking of horns, the blare of sirens, the bleating of car alarms, the music from car stereos, the thunder and rumble of subway trains. Everyone around him was looking up; following their gazes, he saw upon the famous news ticker at the very heart of Times Square a message that left him reeling inside, shock spreading through him as if from the impact of an assassin’s bullet.

  MAGGIE RICHARDSON DEAD IN APPARENT SUICIDE

  Time stopped, or seemed to. He understood the individual words, but he couldn’t parse them into any kind of meaning that made sense. They were words that didn’t belong together. To see them in a sentence was physically painful, a brutal violation of the underlying grammar of the world.

  The video screens were showing images of Maggie, outtakes from the interview with Rita Rodriguez and from other interviews. There was something grotesque about the sight of that beautiful face blown up to gigantic size, seeming to float overhead like the disembodied visage of a deity. Ethan tore his eyes away, feeling as if the movement had torn his heart right down the middle. But then every movement he made, however small, every breath he took, however shallow, lacerated his heart with fresh pain. Maggie was gone. Dead. He could feel it now, her absence from the world.

  Ethan staggered blindly through the crowd, sobbing openly, without shame or even awareness. But he was not alone in that. Many in the crowd were weeping. Others were praying aloud for Maggie’s soul. There were shouts of anger, curses, many of them directed against Ethan, blaming him for her death. Accusing him of driving her to it.

  But none of those recriminations were more bitter than the ones Ethan directed against himself. Why hadn’t he seen this coming? He’d been so sure that Kate was in danger that he’d all but forgotten about Maggie. He’d been congratulating himself for feeling guilty about how he’d treated her, parading that guilt around as though it were a badge of honor, a testament to his humanity, but in the end, when she’d needed him most, when he might actually have done something positive to atone for his guilt, he’d turned away. He’d left her to the ministrations of Father Steerpike, the unctuous priest who’d glommed on to her back in Olathe, a man Papa Jim had informed him was a Congregation agent.

  A new thought took hold of him. Had Maggie been murdered?

  Would even the Congregation sink as low as that?

  But supposing they had, did that make his own guilt any less?

  It was all irredeemably vile. His own behavior and that of everyone else, the whole human race, appeared so ugly to him then that the only remedy seemed to be utter annihilation, scouring the species from existence without mercy, like a plague of cockroaches. All the ugly and shameful things he’d witnessed in his travels expanded inside him like a nuclear cloud, blotting out all the good he’d seen. Only the evil remained, darkly radiant as a corrupted soul. What use, in such a world, to bring a body back from the dead, to snatch a soul from one hell only to restore it to another? Or, worse, to rob a soul of Heaven in exchange for more hell on Earth? Whether she had died by her own hand or the hand of another, Maggie was in Heaven now, with Lisa and Gordon, of that Ethan had no doubt. She was better off there.

  “Hey. Hey, you!”

  Ethan blinked. He hadn’t been paying attention to his surroundings. But now he found himself looking into the eyes of a beefy Hisp
anic man with a thin mustache, a nose ring, and a smart tattoo of a fierce-looking eagle on one cheek that flapped its wings tirelessly as it migrated across his face—a style favored by Marine Corps veterans who had fought in Iran.

  “I know you. I seen your face before. You’re him, ain’t you? You’re Ethan.”

  Ethan shook his head and pushed past him. He needed to get out, get away. But how could he escape from himself?

  “Yeah, I reconnize you,” came the same voice, persistent, the man pacing next to him. “You’re Ethan all right!”

  Again, Ethan shook his head. He increased his pace through the crowd. People had started to stare.

  The man grabbed him by the arm and spun him around. He was strong. And angry. Ethan glimpsed a reflection of distant fires in his eyes, like oil wells burning on the horizon. “I ast you a question, man! Don’t you be runnin’ out on me like you ran out on her. Go on, tell me again to my face that you ain’t Ethan.”

  A profound weariness settled over him. What was the point of denying it? What was the point of anything anymore? Maggie was dead. And he had as good as killed her. “All right,” he said quietly, looking the man in the eye, watching as the flames there danced higher, as though fueled by his words. “I’m Ethan. What about it?”

  “Just this,” he answered, and hit him.

  The punch wasn’t powerful, but it was unexpected, and it sent Ethan to the sidewalk. As he struggled to his feet, the right side of his face stinging from the blow, the man who had struck him began to shout, “Yo, I got Ethan here! I got that second Son of a bitch right here!”

  Ethan felt himself shoved roughly from behind; he stumbled to his knees. Looking up, he saw hundreds of faces glaring down at him, in their eyes the same fires of hate that he’d seen in the eyes of the man who’d hit him. As he watched in horror, the flames spread, leaping from person to person to kindle anew behind fresh pairs of eyes. Above them all, Maggie’s huge eyes gazed down from dozens of video screens, and they, too, were burning. Ethan realized that he was seeing something unnatural, diabolical, the possession of an entire crowd of people. He’d forgotten that he had other enemies in the world besides the Congregation. Older and more powerful enemies, chief among them the angel whose infinite vanity and ambition had caused him to be cast down from the heights of Heaven, a fallen star burning still with fires of envy and malice that would not be extinguished until the end of time.

  “Murderer,” a woman hissed at him.

  “Antichrist!” spat a man.

  Ethan shook his head, trying to think clearly. The concentration of hate and evil was smothering him like noxious smoke from a fire. It attacked him where he was weakest, adding to his guilt and remorse, weighing so heavily upon him that he couldn’t summon the will to simply spirit himself away. It was as though he had been hobbled. He couldn’t call upon the powers of the Son of man. He was defenseless. For the first time in almost ten years, since that day he had lain bound and gagged in the bathtub filled with icy cold water, waiting for his killer to appear, Ethan knew the numbing touch of terror.

  He forced himself to his feet despite it.

  The crowd let him stand, but moved in closer, tightening the ring around him. Another hush had fallen, like that which had greeted the news of Maggie’s death, only this one was not born of shock and sorrow. This was a hush of ill intent, malicious and threatening.

  Ethan raised his hands. They were trembling. “Don’t do this,” he said.

  “Why don’t you save yourself if you’re the Son of God?” sneered the Hispanic man who’d first recognized him.

  “That poor girl was right,” said a middle-aged black woman in a business suit who stood beside the Hispanic man, clutching her purse to her chest. “He’s nothing but a fraud!”

  Ethan felt warm spittle strike his cheek. Then something hard, like a bottle, hit his shoulder from behind, sending him staggering forward. With a collective gasp, the crowd fell back as if he were carrying the Ebola virus, parting before him as people drew away in panic. Ethan glimpsed an opening to the street, where cars and buses sat idling at a red light. Without thinking, he leaped into the gap.

  A single cry went up from the crowd as he moved. It was somewhere between a moan and a sigh, as though he had given them a signal that they had been waiting for all their lives without knowing it, freeing them from the awful burden of being human.

  Howling, they came after him. Whatever residual instinct had made them fearful of his touch was gone, burned away. They were a mob now. He ran, trying vainly to dodge the punches and kicks that rained down from all sides. Buffeted, bruised, bleeding, he nearly fell half a dozen times, but whenever he stumbled and was about to go down, someone in the crowd would reach out to steady him and push him roughly on. They were toying with him, forcing him to run a gauntlet.

  Ethan’s heart was pounding. Blood and sweat stung his eyes, leaving him half blinded. The coppery taste of blood was in his mouth. He thought that if only he could have even a second in which to gather himself, he could concentrate enough to will himself away. Or perhaps even purge the crowd of the evil that had possessed it. But that second never came. Instead, the evil continued to spread, engulfing more and more people, until Ethan was no longer the only target of its wrath. Like the flames with which it manifested itself in the eyes of its victims, it was all appetite and would spread to the very limit of what fuel was there to sustain it, until it burned itself out. Which it would inevitably do . . . but not yet. Now other fights erupted, mini-riots within the larger bedlam, the munchies and police officers joining right in. Ethan heard the sounds of shattering glass, of gunfire. It was as if Times Square had turned into a war zone. Or something worse, more savage and primitive, a vast arena in which blood was spilled for its own sake.

  Though he had not been possessed by the flames of bloodlust, an oppressive sense of hopelessness had settled over Ethan’s soul and clung there grimly. What had begun as sorrow for Maggie, and a keen awareness of his guilt in her death, had swelled into a self-loathing that burst its bounds and found a new object in the people around him. Why had he thought they were worthy of being saved? Look how easily they had surrendered to senseless violence and bloodshed, to the madness of hate! The ancient fire that raged so fiercely, so gleefully, in them now hadn’t so much possessed them as been invited in. They had thrown open the doors to it. And if it flared so brightly, wasn’t that because it had found plenty of fuel and a hospitable hearth? Swept along in the aimless surge of the crowd, Ethan could barely summon the will to defend himself. He had given up all thought of escape. He didn’t deserve to escape. Nobody did.

  Finally a blow struck him down, and this time there were no hands to pull him back to his feet and send him stumbling on. Ethan curled tight, instinctively trying to shield his head and body from the trampling and kicking feet of the mob. He felt no pain. His only thought was that soon he would be with Maggie.

  Then, out of nowhere, he felt a space open up around him. Opening his eyes with difficulty, he saw a blurry figure stoop and lift him. A young black man in the garb of a priest. The crowd parted around the priest like water flowing around a stone.

  So this is how it ends, Ethan thought with grim satisfaction.

  The Congregation had found him at last.

  Papa Jim watched the images of the riot play out on the flat-screen TV mounted on his office wall. There was no order to it at all, just a swarm of humanity gone mad, like an ant colony turned against itself. He’d seen worse, but not in the United States. Not in New York City. The speed with which it had happened was uncanny. No more than fifteen minutes had elapsed since the first hints of trouble. In that brief time, all authority had collapsed within a ten-block radius of Times Square. Now anarchy reigned. Even the police and munchies had succumbed to the siren song of wanton death and destruction. Reinforcements had been summoned but hadn’t yet arrived in sufficient numbers to make a difference. Dozens of fires were burning, illuminating scenes that seemed better suited
to the Dark Ages than to the twenty-first fucking century. It was as if everyone in the area had been infected with a viral agent that turned them into the equivalent of Viking berserkers.

  He was shocked, and it took a lot to shock Papa Jim.

  The rioting had begun almost immediately after the news of Maggie Richardson’s death had flashed from every news ticker and video screen in Times Square. That, too, had shocked Papa Jim. He hadn’t expected the Congregation to kill the girl. Not yet, anyway. He was still trying to get details, using his law enforcement connections, but he had no doubt that they had killed her, or driven her to kill herself, which amounted to the same thing. Father Steerpike, the priest and Congregation agent who had attached himself to Maggie like a bloodsucking vampire, had issued a statement claiming that she’d taken an overdose of sleeping pills. He’d asked people to pray for her soul and had cast the ultimate blame on Ethan. All in all, thought Papa Jim, it was a shoddy piece of work however you looked at it, a waste of a potential bargaining chip. Papa Jim hated waste. It offended him. The Congregation was slipping. They could use some new leadership.

  But what interested Papa Jim right now was the riot. Or what lay behind the riot. For even though the latest polls showed that a sizable majority of the American people had sympathy for Maggie, and a not-insignificant minority believed her charges against Ethan, Papa Jim didn’t believe for one minute that the news of her suicide, under normal circumstances, could have triggered this kind of response. Not in a million years.

  Which meant circumstances weren’t normal.

  And that, to Papa Jim, meant Ethan.

  Somehow, his great-grandson was at the center of the riot. Papa Jim was sure of it. He felt it in his bones. And what’s more, AEGIS agreed. Its real-time analysis of the data streams surrounding the event indicated a 99.99 percent chance that Ethan had been present at the outset of the riot. There was a 93.76 percent chance that he was still there. AEGIS had even provided a list of GPS coordinates corresponding to his most likely position.