by J O'Keith
As I stumbled into puberty and my teenage years I finally learnt what they were doing and for a while couldn’t look them in the eye. But once my mother scolded James for telling me about the birds and the bees before I was ready, she came to me and explained everything. How that it was only through that act that I came into being and how they hoped to give me a brother or sister, that now more than ever, it was essential that more children were born into our camp, no matter how many complications that would bring.
She also explained that it was essential that such a bond was shared between a man and woman under two conditions: the must be in love and they must be married. She explained that one day I would meet the man of my dreams and start a family. But during the next few years I would go through some physical changes and have urges that were simply tests laid out for me by the Lord to test my faith and mental strength. I wish my mother was still here, to tell that I never wavered in the face of temptation, that I have yet to share myself with a man and will not do so until I can meet the conditions she set out for me.
For some reason, no child was born during that time in the tunnels. As the years passed conspiracy theories spread through the camp, ranging from our supplies being contaminated with some sort of pregnancy prevention medicine to God being so saddened by our plight that he wouldn’t allow us to bring a child into those tunnels. We would encounter the same problem on the uninhabited island, but I never told my fellow islanders that the same problem existed in the tunnels because it would have, it would have caused a lot of grief as many of my friends would have seen it as a sign that the end was nigh for our faith. Now that I sit alone in this cell, alone as the very last Christian on Earth, I wonder if they would have been right.
When we used to walk in those tunnels, one of the few things outside our faith and our desire to save Christianity that kept us going was how people would re-tell our story. Was the beginning of the Great War the start of the Book of Revelations (that was my father’s favourite book in the Bible) or were we starting a Brand New Testament? If we were to survive and rebuild the Church of Christ what would future generations say about those difficult times we went through? Would we become saints, martyrs; was this the most important time of our faith since the Lord’s resurrection?
Robert encouraged us children to keep diaries of our experiences in the tunnel as they would prove to be indispensable documents of our time in the tunnels. Unfortunately, we lost them all in the explosion on the boat. And while I hope this will fall into the hands of someone of Christian faith or considering being born again, I am fully aware that there is as much chance of that happening as there is of me surviving beyond tomorrow.
Yet I refuse to give up hope, I refuse allow my faith to yield to the forces that have gathered up against me. What matters most is the final act. Everything that comes before that final confrontation is just progress, for better or worse. Tomorrow is my final act, our final act, but I’m convinced our Great Lord has one final trick up his sleeve. Whether I live to see his wrath against the Godless is inconsequential, I don’t need proof, I know, I have always known. But they, they will be in for the shock of their lives. I just know it.
Joan said something really interesting to me once. She said that part of her wished that she believed in the Lord. When I asked her why, she told me that she could see that our Christian’s faith gave us strength unobtainable for those without God’s guidance. That when you believed in nothing beyond this life, that it was harder to find a moral centre, let alone have the faith to endure the hardships we went through. If the roles were ever reversed, she was certain that her kind would not have survived a week in those tunnels.
I’m losing myself in writing down about my past, with each memory I recollect a ton of recollections come flooding back that I haven’t thought about or relived for years. But I need to be careful because I want to tell you as much of my story as I can before I am taken to meet my death, so I better return to that hospital bed where I was left alone by Thomas.
When I woke up the next morning I was blinded by the glorious light that shone upon my face from the window in front of me. To me, the light represented the love of all of the loved ones I had lost on that ship, and they were covering me in a force field to protect me during my time with the enemy. To think that such a thing of glory, natural light, pure light, was now wasted on those who tried to explain away every thing of beauty that you gave this world my Lord, filled me with an anger at that moment that I had not known during my time in the tunnels.
My hospital room was fairly high up and all I could see around me were these eyesores littering the skyline, streams of smoke suffocating certain streams of sunlight as they built their Towers of Babylon that had no purpose but to perpetuate their industrial military complex.
I felt such guilt sleeping in that bed, it was the only period of my life when I have slept in such an artificial contraption. Even in this jail cell, I choose to sleep on the floor rather than on their bed. Because sure, the bed was comfortable, but at what cost had I achieved this artificial sense of ease?
I was not about to be swayed by the material things which had corrupted these pagans. Even in this cell, they have provided me with a mattress, but I choose to sleep on the floor. I am no more or less than the creatures God provided us humans to shepherd. The guards can snigger and poke fun at me all they want, but my faith endures all insult and scorn.
Of all the non-believers I encountered, the nurses in that hospital were by far the most kind I had met, apart from Joan. During that morning I cried for what must have been hours and they did their best to console me despite the fact I refused to speak a word to them. Never have I been more tempted then I was at that point to try and convert these kind and compassionate people whose life’s work was to care of the sick and vulnerable. Jesus would most certainly have approved of their work and I am sure that they are among the few who will be spared a hellacious welcome in the afterlife.
During that time, it did occur to me that Thomas may have been a real A.P.D. agent. Perhaps the reason he was on the dock was to set the trigger to blow up the ship and was going to hand me into the authorities as soon I was in better condition. But then why did he save me and not allow me to die on the ship with the others? And how did he know the secret S.C.S. phrase?
Still, I refused to put my life in the hands of anyone outside of my community, so I came up with a back-up plan, albeit a not very good one. I stole one of the syringes from a nurse’s pocket and would use it as a weapon in case he or anyone else tried any funny business.
Thomas would later tell me that I was in a hospital in a city called New York. He was shocked when he learnt that I’d never heard of the place, but when we were in the tunnels the elders made a pact that they would never tell us about happenings in the world above. They thought that such talk could demoralise the whole camp, so they refrained from discussing the specifics of what lied above.
So whenever one of us youngsters would ask them a question about the world above, they would tell us it didn’t matter so long as it was in the hands of the Godless. They said it enough times that we no longer cared to think of what treasures lay above us – they meant nothing unless they were in the hands of us Christians.
My departure from the hospital was sudden. I lay there for three days, by the final day I was convinced Thomas had been killed, captured or converted. But then sirens blared in every corner of my ear drums as a nurse told me jump up from my bed and head to the nearest fire exit. I had no idea what a fire exit was so I just followed her and ran down what seemed like a never ending flights of stairs.
As we neared the ground floor, a team of men dressed in A.P.D. uniforms flocked into the stairwell like a swarm of bees and began arresting everyone, even the doctors and nurses.
In that split-second I had a decision to make. I could run back up their stairs, give away my true identity and end up dead or allow myself to be arrested, interrogated and end up dead anyway.
&nbs
p; Goodness me did I wish I hadn’t been such a lemming, I wish I had remained upstairs or at least stole a gun, one syringe wasn’t going to prove any help. Yet the closer they got the calmer I became, as opposed to all the idiots who were screaming like spoiled children all around me, even grown men.
Those are the moments where you learn about the true integrity of your faith. It is all well and good to hypothesise about a Godless afterlife with your friend and then reject it, but to believe in the heat of the moment that despite the insurmountable odds that lie ahead of you, despite your imminent death being a certainty, you remain certain that your number isn’t up yet and remain calmer than silence, that is when you know what your faith is made of.
And what do you know, the person who cuffed me and took me away in a long machine they call a car was Thomas and he was accompanied by his fellow double agent Jude.
When Thomas cuffed me he whispered in my left ear:
“Don’t hush a word till I say so.”
The only thing stranger than sitting in this machine that moved really fast was trying to work out why Robert didn’t bring any of these down into the tunnels. I guess there were lots of holes and there were long stretches where we had to walk through raw sewage and these big piles of metal would have got stuck, but boy could we saved a lot of time with a number of these.
After I got over the wonder of the car I started to look all round me. All I saw was lifelessness. Now that I could see these tall living spaces close up they looked even more silly, they all looked the same and were in horribly rigid shapes. But more importantly, all the people walking in this city looked so forlorn, so miserable. Even though I only got a passing glance at these people, their faces all wore the same expressionless-ness, few people walked together and they weren’t talking to one another. They all had phones in their hands and headphones in their ears as they drifted by my sight.
Why were we so afraid of these people, I thought. They are divided, selfish and lonely. Maybe that is why those in power are so scared of Christianity and all the other mighty religions. If given a choice, most sensible people would surely choose faith and community over this isolated and mundane existence.
We used to laugh so much in those tunnels. Someone was always telling a funny story, or making a silly face – doing something to ensure we took our mind off the smell of death and the precarious position we found ourselves in. Even after a lengthy shootout with A.P.D. agents, we would find a way to entertain ourselves and on the rare occasion where we ran out of things to laugh about we would say a communal prayer to the Lord Almighty and my word could you feel the human electricity generated in those tunnels.
Soon, we came to a long bridge that was taking us out of the city. There were A.P.D. agents everywhere, but because of the car we were in we were able to pass through without suspicion. Now this was an extremely impressive piece of engineering. Down in the tunnels, we once had to build a ten metre bridge to get across a treacherous piece of sewage that was filled with excrement and was at least twenty metres deep – it took us six weeks and we lost three members of our community as the bridge gave way right at the end.
Only after seeing this bridge did it dawn on me how difficult it would be to elude the A.P.D. If they had the resources and manpower to build something so impressive (I had assumed those tall buildings were pretty easy to put together) then they were in a far stronger position then we were ever likely to be in now that there were so few of us remaining. They had all the guns, all the weapons, all the machinery man had ever built. But they remained Godless, faithless, so there remained the narrowest opportunity to defeat them.
Robert once told me that Jesus had said that there was more chance of a camel passing through the eye of a needle than there was of a rich man reaching heaven. Well, I’d re-interpret that saying and replace the second half of the sentence with our chances of preserving our religion and race. But it was still something; hope remained, as it still does.
Once we crossed the bridge there was nothing but barren land. It looked like the tunnels, except with a lot more space and air. And my word the sunlight was the prettiest thing I have ever seen. Unimpeded by the concrete jungle, it flourished, drenching every inch of dirt with God’s glorious light.
I’d never seen anything like it before – the only light I’d known was the artificial torches we used to navigate through our tunnels. In the later years, our short supply of batteries meant we often went days without any light whatsoever. But at that moment, when we crossed the bridge and I saw that blinding light cover the surface of the earth, I felt Jesus’ love and most importantly his forgiveness. Someday soon, the world would recognise that without his love we are nothing.
There was a time before Jesus, a time before Jesus sacrificed himself to forgive our sins and open a gateway to heaven so that we may know of eternity and salvation. Who knows, maybe the Lord has come to Earth many times, and each time the world has eventually forgotten his love and deserted him and then our Great Saviour has returned to remind humanity of the way, his way.
It has probably happened before but I pray it never happens again. Because I know that we can get it right, if we build a world on the back of Jesus’ teaching we will never be alone. Just thinking about such a kingdom fills my soul with unparalleled hope because it would mean everything we have lost and sacrificed will have been worth it.
We continued heading away from the bridge when I saw my first aeroplane fly above me. It was so fast I only saw it for a few seconds, but I was certain that wherever it had taken off from would be our eventual destination.
From when I was old enough to talk, I had seen drawings of aeroplanes and heard the endless chatter among the elders of trying to find one so we could escape. It was the fastest way to escape America. For some reason that I still cannot understand, they chose to tell us about planes but not about cars. Maybe they thought bringing up cars would make us wish we lived above the surface, but surely such knowledge would have helped us plot our escape? But as I soon learnt during my time on the uninhabited island, it is easy to judge any decision with the benefit of hindsight. Sometimes, we fail to recognise our biggest flaws, which in turn lead to us making irreparable damage to ourselves and those that we love.
If we had stuck to our original route rather than leaving the tunnels in New Jersey, our backup plan was to hijack a plane and leave this Godless island for good. Robert knew of several remote islands where we could land the plane which were not under the control of the A.P.D. and the Atheists, and it was from there he planned to begin the fight-back. Even while ensuring every minute detail was taken care of for the tunnels, he knew all too well that these were a means to an end and that we had to have a plan beyond survival cos of if that’s your all we were trying to do, we were dead already.
Seeing that first plane was like seeing an impossible dream come true right in front of your eyes. If any of the tunnels are still standing, you will find drawings of aeroplanes everywhere. When on guard, many of us would battle the boredom by drawing gigantic aeroplanes across the tunnel walls and imagine how glorious it would feel to finally escape the living hell we were constantly enduring.
So when you combine the joy of seeing the sun’s unfiltered light with my first aeroplane sighting, it was the happiest I had been since the blowing up off the ship. I started laughing with all my heart, and that’s when the mach car Thomas was driving suddenly stopped. He and Jude rushed out of the car and grabbed me from behind. Just as I noticed two drones hovering around me he shot in the chest.
What did I feel in that brief second when I was certain I had been betrayed and killed? I felt nothing; instead, I prayed for Thomas and then saw the contours of my parents’ faces. Thomas tells me that I let off the faintest of smiles as I fell to the ground and they stuffed my body into the trunk of the car.
What I didn’t know was that they had driven me deep into A.P.D. territory – their global headquarters were now based where the J.F.K. airport once stood. Earlie
r that day, Thomas had finally learnt of the tracking devices placed on all Christians. He, Jude and I had been born after the date these devices were placed upon our fellow believers. In fact, the few Christian survivors he knew of were all born past that date, and that had been his reason for following that line of investigation, and thus eventually stumbling upon the horrible truth.
Thomas was given a promotion after the death of my community upon the ship. I can only admit this now, but I think that at the precise moment he told me of this news, I found myself unable to forgive him for not arriving half an hour earlier to save us all.
It may explain much of my foolishness upon the island, but that can all come out later. I found out the hard way how hard it is to forgive, but I swear upon my soul that I have forgiven Thomas completely. The truth is, he did little wrong, but it is deeply disturbing how helpful creating a scapegoat can be.
On receiving this promotion, he was given clearance to the information that revealed the truth about the tracking devices. One of the reasons the A.P.D. had been so pleased with the destruction of the ship was that they had got rid of the many youngsters who had been in our community.
The A.P.D. had incorrectly assumed that their draconian laws had enabled them to wipe out all those of faith above ground. They believed that we were the final group of religious folk and that with our collective deaths came the end of that phase of the genocide. They knew we were in New Jersey because they had tapped the phone call my father had made to his old friend, they could have eliminated us at any point while we were above ground in New Jersey. But they wanted to wait for us all to be in one place, as they feared some of us youngsters may escape if they tried to bomb us or shoot us down, and then it would become much harder to find us.