by J O'Keith
“It’ll be like Noah’s ark all over again.”
“Exactly, what I’d give to get my hands on a copy of the Bible.
“But I can’t lie - there’s a good chance that even if we make it to Indonesia they’ll bomb us out of existence. We just gotta hope they self-destruct sooner rather than later, and my brief time with a higher security clearance tells me that’s a real possibility.”
The quiet roar of an engine neared us as we turned round to see Jude, with a huge smile across his face, riding a beige Jeep towards us.
“It’s raining miracles – Jude! – where d’yu find this beauty?”
“When I got to a small town on this side of the island it looked like everything was destroyed, but there was a big house a few miles east that was surrounded by high rise walls. I found a spot that hadn’t been pounded by lava and climbed over.”
“Any survivors?” I asked.
“Property was deserted, but I found this and a sports car, this looked a lot more useful. There was also a fridge full of food – most of which had gone off – but there were some big steaks which I’ve thrown in the back of the Jeep which we can eat to our heart’s content once we get to the over side.
“By God the fresh air feels like heaven on Earth.”
“Didn’t you guys ever get outside New York to experience the American wild life?”
“They’re knocking it all down to make more houses and sports stadiums.”
“Yep, in the world of the Atheists your high priest is your state’s quarterback and God is a football coach.” Thomas said, with such bitterness that he spat out the last half of the sentence.
“Hop in guys. The sooner we find out if we’ve got any jet fuel the better.”
I’ll never forget that drive. We didn’t speak a single word as we drove over terrain that had been decimated by lava for a brief while before we were back in paradise a little later. It felt like we were crossing between heaven and hell with each transition, and each time we saw the lush greenery of an unharmed hilltop I felt our collective strength grow.
It’s the closest I’ve come to feeling like God was speaking directly to me. As we drove through a particularly dangerous area, where we burst a tyre and were eternally grateful there was a spare one in the back, we looked around and all we could see was destruction and darkness. But after what seemed liked the longest time, we stumbled upon a small pocket of wildlife, with trees filled with exotic birds and the prettiest plants.
In the years, no, in the decades ahead, we may feel like there is no hope and nothing but desolation. But somewhere in the great beyond lies the divine, and whether we come across this in heaven or after we outlasted our nemeses the Atheists, hope will always remain. And so long as we remain true to our faith and our Christian values, great things lay in store for us.
Even now, as I sit alone in this cell and face the probable extinction of my faith on Earth tomorrow morning, in a corner of my soul there is a glimmer of light that refuses to be blinded by the looming darkness.
How long we were in that car, I cannot remember, but I do know that we did not speak a word as we absorbed the peculiar, haunting but sublime landscape that lay before us.
And just after sunset came pure, unfiltered joy. At the corner of my left eye I saw a large wooden cross inside of a large building. The roof had been blown off, but within the breath of a second I knew that I was in the presence of a Church.
To this day, I can recount every little detail of the roofless Church; the stain glass window depicting a woman I suspected was Mary, the mother of Christ. The pulpit with two broken white candles on either side of it, the small pipe organ which had all its black keys removed. But no description of my surroundings could come close to describe what I felt when I entered God’s place of worship.
After my first footstep onto the white marble floor covered with puddles of ash, tears flooded from my eyes. I felt the love of my parents, my friends and my leaders float above me as if they were a force field that would protect me regardless of what happened next. It was the same force field I felt when I woke to the sunlight in the hospital in New York and it has never left me, and despite there being a million to one shot that I will live beyond tomorrow, I have hope. I believe.
I know I keep repeating this point, but it is for a reason. Like Peter, I am hovering upon the water but I cannot afford to be distracted by the treacherous winds that could plunge me to my death. I bear the burden of being the last Christian on Earth, and I refuse to allow this weight to pull me into an abyss. My faith allows me to tap into a limitless, divine energy supply that can overcome the strength of billions of Godless people.
And as I wiped away the tears that soaked my cheekbones, I noticed that Thomas and Jude were also crying uncontrollably. They had been under the impression that all religious buildings had been destroyed long before they consigned all the major religious texts to the history books, so for them this Church was the ultimate miracle. Thomas would retell the story countless times when we lived on the uninhabited island of Samosir and it never failed to rouse the spirits of our people. He’d never tell the others that he wept without abandon; in fact, that it is one of the few times I saw Thomas’s vulnerability. At that moment I saw how much he loved Jesus, how much he loved God, and that his deepest happiness derived from our Lord.
Before I knelt down and prayed to the Almighty, I knew what we had to do:
“We’re not leaving here until we rebuild the roof.”
I had expected the boys to kick up a fuss and talk their way out of it, citing the fact that we needed to leave here as soon as we could to ensure the A.P.D. didn’t us. But they simply nodded and knelt before our Lord.
The Church was our nuclear weapon, it was our home, and it was our everything. Somehow, a group of Christians had found a way to defy the Atheists in the most audacious manner possible. I am sure they realised that it was so much more than a place of worship or even a symbol of hope. It was an irrevocable sign that God’s will can be deferred but it cannot be extinguished. After that, there was an inevitability to our safe passage to Samosir, to the recreation of a Christian kingdom. Well, at least that’s what we thought.
Before even looking for jet fuel, we began working out how we could build a new roof for the Church. Unfortunately, the Church had been built in the middle of nowhere and there were no buildings, let alone building materials, in the surrounding area. That very night, Jude drove to the Northern side of the island to see if he could find any tools to help us with our rebuilding efforts.
Thomas and I were too excited to sleep. We spent half the night looking for a Bible, we even went as far as to search the surrounding area for anything resembling a passage from the Bible on top of it, but we found nothing.
I’m sorry to rush this part of the story but I have just felt the glow of sunrise in my jail cell and have realised that I only have a few more hours before I hand this diary over. God willing I will be able to tell you, whoever you are, more about this seminal moment if I live beyond today.
The reason I’ve spent so much time focusing on this brief moment in my life is because it was the most miraculous, most hopeful period of my life. And despite spend the majority of my life in the tunnels and later on Samosir, it is the memory of this journey that I return to most, as it is filled with the most hope. And so long as I can feed of the strength of those glorious days, I will always believe.
The short version of the story of the rebuilding of the Church is that it took us two weeks to build a thatch roof on top it. I have no idea whether it is still in place, whether the entire Church is still standing. What I do know is that it was one of the most humbling experiences of my life.
Jude and Thomas took it in turns to drive to the Northern side of the island to bring over tools and food. Much to our disappointment, we were unable to find any people on the island. We had known that the island had been evacuated after the volcano’s explosion, but we had hoped that the people who had built
this Church would have stayed behind. We were desperate to know how they had kept the Church a secret, but we were never to find an answer.
We did find a small airport and plenty of jet fuel though, enough for ten return journeys to Samosir. Although I only spent half a day on the Northern island, with its deserted buildings, it still felt infinitely more homely and pleasant than New York. And I believe that is because people of faith lived in this community. The architecture, flowers and surroundings were touched with an affection that was sorely lacking in the concrete jungle I encountered in America. Now I am not saying that we need to live in a world where there are only people of faith, far from it. Several people on Samosir initially thought this way.
What I believe is that society is a far healthier place when there is a diversity of beliefs; trying to wipe out a way of thinking is as stupid as it is destructive, as futile as it is genocidal. You can wipe out every religious person on Earth and destroy the memory of God, but several generations later someone will find the rationale for the existence of God, and religion will once again come to play a significant part in society and culture.
So long as there are men the concept of God will never disappear. The yearning, the realisation that there is something far greater than the world around us will survive so long as we inhabit this planet. This is what the A.P.D. fail to see, it is what will lead to their eventual downfall, whether it is next year or in a thousand years time. The good and the righteous will always find away. Darkness must eventually give way for light.
Leaving Faial Island was more difficult than we had anticipated. Sometimes I think things would have been so different, if it had been just me, Thomas and Jude, we would have made it; I wouldn’t be alone now, perhaps. But surely they would have scanned the island sooner rather than later, and then I wouldn’t have been able to make it even this far.
The only thing we had left to do before leaving was destroying Thomas’ plane. First, Thomas moved it so that it was much nearer the sea, then he covered it with gasoline before setting it alight. Seeing such a large object set on fire was ghastly, it looked as if it was one of Satan’s weapons waiting to attack one of Heaven’s cities. The fire enveloped the plane with such speed, it reminded me how quickly evil can spread and how I wished my parents’ generation had done more to stop the Atheists.
Given Thomas and Jude’s less than adequate flying skills, we were lucky that for the most part the plane would be doing most of the work for the remainder of the journey. Had we lost Jude’s plane, it would have been very difficult to get to Samosir because Thomas’ plane was an older model that would have not allowed us to plot a route manually without switching off the auto-pilot mode.
Much to our surprise, we didn’t encounter a single A.P.D. plane on our long journey. As we neared the Cape of Good Hope, Thomas thought that the reason we’d avoided any trouble was because those in power in New York had used our stealing of their planes to start a war with the South Asian Atheists. Jude said that if this was the case we’d meet a wall of resistance as we neared Indonesia because South Asia could be at war with America.
We had an inflatable raft at the back of the plane that we had always been planning to use, so I suggested that we could get off the plane near Australia and then use our raft to get to Samosir. This was the first time I learnt how little general knowledge or common sense I had about the world above the tunnels, as the boys explained to me how we had more chance of getting through 1,000 enemy planes than surviving in the threatening waters of the Indian Ocean.
Thomas was furious at himself for not considering this possibility before we took off, because he would then have made us re-paint the plane or something else drastic to make it clear our plane wasn’t from the A.P.D’s American fleet. We’d kept the plane as it was because we hoped that the A.P.D. would mistake it for just another plane in the American fleet, but now there was a good chance that what had been our greatest asset was in fact our biggest liability.
Thomas was a very intense person. The majority of the time this was a great quality, but in situations like this it could cause panic to spread like wildfire.
As he began cursing himself, I reminded him that his whole theory was based on an assumption that we couldn’t confirm. And even if they were at war, they were probably using their respective nuclear weapons as a deterrent. If they weren’t, the only planes in use would be too slow to keep up with our plane.
Thomas let out a heavy sigh of relief at this point and pulled out a silver coin from his pocket.
“Heads or tails?” He asked me.
“Tails.”
The coin landed on heads. Thomas glanced over at Jude with a look of such deep and immediate sadness, I knew that something was deeply wrong, that unwittingly my call had decided something of great importance.
“What’s going on? Why did we...”
“Should we tell her Thomas?”
“We’re keeping secrets now?” I asked.
“From the day we went undercover with the A.P.D. we’ve been planning all sorts of scenarios that would give us Christians a shot of starting again, away from their watchful eye. We knew the most opportune moment for escaping America would come at the most unlikely hour, so when I stopped from you from boarding that ship with all your friends and family members, even if we tried to escape at that very moment, we would have had plenty of options.
“So when we picked you up from the hospital, when we took you out of the car and shot you with J.U.D.A.S. and then escaped, the plan wasn’t as spontaneous as you would think. If it was, there’s no way in hell we would have made it this far.
“And now that we’re coming to our final destination on this particular journey, we also have a plan in place for how we get that inflatable raft into the water and get into it.”
“Wait, you can’t...”
“Just hear me out blue eyes.
“It’s not just because of the raft that we have to follow through with our plan. We need to get rid of this plane, make it look like we died flying over the ocean.”
“Why can’t we set fire to it like we did with your plane on the Azores?”
“Cos there needs to be a body inside, that way they’ll never come looking for us, and we need it to be far enough from Samosir that they’ll never follow us there but close enough to the island that the two of us left in the raft will make it there alive.”
“So, so what you’re telling me is that when I called tails I sentenced one of you two to your death? And so one of you is gonna kill yourself? Christians don’t do suicide.”
“These are extraordinary circumstances, there are less than a hundred of us left, by the time we get to the island we’ll be lucky if there are forty of us. Whichever one of us flies this plane into the water dies a martyr.”
“I’ll do it.”
“But you don’t know how to fly a plane.”
“I don’t think I need to know how to pilot a plane if I’m flying it into the ocean. And I can’t believe that you wouldn’t consult me about this on Faial Island.”
“We knew you’d offer to fly the plane.” Jude intervened.
“Or is it cos I’m a girl? Huh, is that it? What, you think I’m not strong enough to follow through? Do you know how many A.P.D. agents I took out in those tunnels? All our best marksman were women.”
“No no no, that’s not it at all. Look, lets say you fly that plane into the water and its down to me and Jude, lets say that we’re the only two who make it to Samosir. Then what?” I had no response to his reasoning because he was right. I was the one who’d suggested back on the Azores that we stay there and start a community, we all knew what that meant but didn’t have any emotional energy to spend on the ramifications of what starting a community actually meant. I wish we’d been more mature and talked about it now as things could have been so different.
“If there’d have been two girls and only one guy, the same logic would apply. It has nothing to do with your gender or your perceived leve
l of bravery; we know your miles tougher than us. No way I’d have made it in those tunnels. Heck, no human being should ever have had to go through that level of humiliation, I hope you realise that.” Thomas continued.
I held back my tears and asked,
“So who?” Was all I could muster as I felt a large lump in my throat steal my voice. Jude raised his hand while giving off the most radiant smile I’ve ever seen.
There are brief moments in our life that we catalogue and memorise, moments that can we return to and remind ourselves of the goodness of humanity during even the darkest of hours. That timeless smile is one I have returned to time and again. This man was hours away from giving his life for his beliefs, with no guarantee that his actions would make an iota of difference, but he smiled as if he had seen the love of his life for the first time, as if he’d seen his first sunset.
And he did it for us, because he understood that if he showed even a glimmer a sadness, even a hint of hesitation, it would haunt Thomas and me for the rest of our lives, introduce an element of doubt where there could be none.
I could tell you the details of how an inexperienced pilot succeeded in getting both of us into the raft, the last words he told me or what I felt as I saw his plane fly northwards and descend into the sea. But there are some moments in my life I need to keep to myself. Because just as there are moments that we treasure and return to for hope, there are also periods in our life we cannot revisit because they are too painful to relive, too raw to rekindle in our minds.
Sometimes, when I look back on the sequence of events that led me from the hospital to Samosir, statistically I am sure there was a one in a million chance of all the various events working in our favour to allow us to get to the island. But make it we did, and I know, I just know that the Almighty was at the very least watching over us as we made our incredible journey from New York to Samosir in Indonesia via the Azores Islands.
Yet I still wish that we didn’t have to lose Jude. Thomas and I carried a great deal of guilt for the remainder of our time together; Thomas, because he felt it should have been him and me because it was my coin toss that sealed poor Jude’s fate. If Jude had been any less brave and stoic this guilt would have consumed us, but we knew that we could not let our great friend, now a Christian martyr, die in vain.