And the Meek Shall Inherit (Harbinger of Change Book 2)

by Timothy Jon Reynolds

  Matt did get in one word edge-wise when he steered Adam to the topic of Pablo Manuel. He did this for a reason, a sort of test. Adam got very serious with his answer about Pablo, “He was a madman, but he was brilliant, too.” Then a sentence emanated from this guy that Matt just knew had to come out, the course of his day demanded it. It just added to the preponderance of evidence that was hanging in front of him since the day he screamed it to both Vera and Pablo, “There has to be a better way to deliver a message from God!”

  Such a simple sentence yet it was torturing Matt. This Adam saw it, too. He probably drove around all day and listened to NPR, or some other form of informative radio. He’s the “everyman,” and quite clearly he was able to come to the same conclusion as Matt, it was not rocket science. Adam looked at Matt and metaphorically threw a bucket of cold water on him by proclaiming about Pablo, “Surely there had to be a better way to accomplish his goals.”

  Matt sat back, putting his mind to the possibilities while Adam changed topics to Chinese drivers after one just cut them off. The confused Asian American driver couldn’t figure out what he did wrong, and Adam was all too happy to tell him. Matt’s mind was whimsically distracted watching this show. All too quickly they arrived at the funeral home and Matt declined Adam’s offer to see him inside. Instead he took the man’s cell phone number and told him he would call him when he needed to be picked up. Matt used the brim of his cap to keep Adam from gaining a profile.

  He walked into the mortuary thinking he would have some solitary time with Vera until he put her into the earth. He removed the bothersome eye patch as he was already crying when he entered, and tears were running under it down his cheek. No one was in the entrance to see or hear his pain though, and he was thankful for it as he wanted to be alone.

  The inside of the place looked exactly like one would expect it to, fancy and depressing. He heard voices off to the right. The place was cavernous and every step he took sounded like a horse clomping through a library. The polished floor was a good half a football field long and there was a row of Greek looking columns on either side, each holding an arrangement of flowers. In between two of the columns was a double door that had lights and hushed voices coming out of it.

  Maybe they were hosting two wakes? It was a big place, but he saw no other door open. He walked in only to discover something he would never have imagined. He now had a lot of colleagues that cared. Sarah was the first to greet him, and she took his arm, letting him know he wasn’t going to do this alone.

  It was going to be her at his side today, seeing as Jan would not be able to support him here (Ray believed it detrimental to both). He gladly took her arm and headed to his seat, a tear running down his cheek and falling unnoticed to the floor.

  There were at least thirty people in attendance, and amidst the confusion he hadn’t even noticed the casket. Matt looked up and lost control of his emotions. Sarah patted him, “It’s okay, Matt, just let it out, no one is expecting you to talk, we’re just here to support you.”

  Sobbing, he sat up and said, “No, if you people want to attend here and be here with me, then you can listen to who she was.” At first he was talking to Sarah, but he got louder as he stood. He moved toward the mic stand and addressed the crowd in general, “She was a complex person,” he wiped the tears off with his sleeve. “First she was abandoned on the streets and suffered the kind of poverty you or I will never know. Then she was a horribly treated sex slave for most of her life.”

  He was handed a box of tissue and took time to try to compose himself, “from the age of ten actually” and he paused to let the true ramifications of that sink in. “Pablo freed her and showed her kindness, but as we know, only to fill her head with his ideology and brainwash her into doing the things she did in the name of God.

  “He trained her and sent her here, but not of her own accord, she was brainwashed by him. Then our justice system broke down, as she was the victim of a horrible rape at our hands.” That brought a shame on the room, even though no one there did anything personally to her.

  “He even hypnotized her, but that’s not where he did his brainwashing. The brainwashing happened with him convincing her of his direct relationship with God. Over time, she believed in his ‘Divine Status.’ The Vera I knew was capable of great compassion and ruthless heartlessness, all in the same breath. She had to be, as her life was quite literally a nightmare. She would wake in the night after reliving her childhood horrors and just tremble and scream into the night—horrors even hypnosis couldn’t make go away while she slept. It was gut-wrenching to see anyone in such internal agony, and yet I endured it night after night. As much as I loved her, her life ended when she made the wrong choice. She was in her moment of truth and she stuck by her convictions over love. As did I.”

  That sentence hung. Everyone in the room perceived that Matt’s last sentence carried with it all the collective understanding that he killed Vera and his unborn child for his Country, and he now had to live with that reality. Matt continued, “Above all else, she was the most beautiful woman I’ve ever known. I spent two years learning to love her, and now I have a lifetime to try to forget all that has happened and make peace with myself.

  “In the middle of all this I realized, even though she was a killer, she was also an innocent. I’ll miss her, and I know that in another time and place, we would have been one of the World’s Great loves . . .”

  He had been in kind of a trance when he blurted all that out, and when he focused his eyes he saw that there wasn’t a dry eye in the room. He had meandered over to her during his speech and was now holding her hand. He turned and thanked them for supporting him and he let them know, “I’ve been alone for a very long time. Thank you for being here for me.”

  He seemed to have more to say, but couldn’t find the words, then he just broke down, crumpling right in place. They helped him to his feet, and after getting him to his seat, Ray decided that they should have the funeral home bring the casket to the gravesite right away so they could conclude the funeral and Matt could begin to move on.

  It was just as excruciating at the burial site, and at least twice Matt burst out and wailed heavily. Every inch the casket dropped, his voice hit a new warble. He felt every inch as if someone were killing him one inch at a time. Then she was gone. The earth had her and he was left to pick up the pieces. Sarah held Matt, as he jerked with every shovel-full of dirt thrown. He wouldn’t leave until it was completely done.

  Sarah couldn’t help but think that the guy sure was a mess, and she drifted to the day she was at Ken Beck’s funeral. She felt the exact opposite of Matt, though. They couldn’t bury that monster fast enough as she was sure he was going to pop out of that casket and reclaim his life. Sarah had to endure his family reaching out to her because apparently the only name he’d ever used in talking with them about work was hers.

  She’d had to feign sympathy, but inside she was so torn, half of her felt like jumping on the casket and start punching and clawing. The other half of her was terrified that somehow this was an Agency ruse, and he wasn’t really dead. She knew he was dead though, as she saw the body. Everyone told her, “No,” but he was her feigned mentor after all, and she had the right to see the body. With half a head that fucker wasn’t going to be popping out of any caskets.

  Still, that funeral was the hardest thing she’d ever gone through and now she was at the second. This one was based off of true empathy though, as she could feel Matt’s pain. The poor man really killed someone he was deeply in love with, and Sarah wondered if Matt would ever be okay again? Some people never recover from something like this. Their minds just can’t handle it. Ray came over to them and told Matt, “It’s time to go.”

  It took both Ray and Sarah to physically help to get him into the limo. He slid in and the next thing Matt knew, he was waking up in bed the next morning, Adam Brooks talking the last thing he remembered. The day had passed. And now another will. He knew the routine. Then at som
e point he was supposed to recover.

  He plodded along like that and suddenly it had been a week and he was scheduled to finally reunite with his wife in the following week. He and Ray had been working on how that should come about, and he seemed to be on the right path. The funeral was a lot harder than he thought it would be, the finality of losing Vera still crushing him inside.

  The med team kept asking about his dreams and Matt told them he doesn’t remember them, but that was a lie. Every night he was tortured by his dreams and every day he was eaten alive by guilt. Matt knew time was supposed to heal all wounds, but this might be the exception. He couldn’t undo what had been done. Albeit he killed the Ant Hill with no remorse, Vera and Pablo were not bad people, not really. And Pablo’s idea was right, just delivered wrong.

  There was one other thing that was bothering him and he knew that the stress, guilt, and a bunch of other factors were magnifying it, but it still happened and he couldn’t pretend it didn’t—for all he wanted to. Matt had replayed it in his head a thousand times since it happened. He fell asleep the other night into a dream like no other—a dream in which God revealed Himself, and showed him that Pablo and Vera were not bad children, just misguided. It really was one of those ironies that he’d always seemed to find in life. No matter the joy he’d received, there always had to be the downside. In this dream he had proof of Holy Existence.

  Unfortunately, he was the only witness as this incident occurred in his head. In his dream, he was back at the compound, but this time he was a free floating orb that could see every angle. He watched himself inside this vision from many perspectives—like a movie being produced and he was a poltergeist around the set. In the dream, he saw when they finally sedated him and he followed the rescue team as they helped him to the helicopter. From his Orb’s perspective, Matt recalled looking up at the majestic wonder that was the Andes as his dream-self was loaded into the chopper and flown off.

  Inside his dream he had this amazing feeling wash over him that continued in his conscious self. Ironically, it was a feeling that everything was going to be okay, a feeling of inner peace and contentment. He had a kind of moment, experiencing the natural wonder of things and God’s relation to them and himself.

  Matt was not ready for the feelings he was having after he awoke. Pablo carried hubris unlike any man he had ever met. There was no “leap of faith” for Pablo Manuel, he conversed with God directly and every action he took was done with the confidence of that relationship being real. Until the end of course—there was that.

  He then realized that the events he was dreaming about had actually happened when they brought him out of the compound. Although he was in a stupefied state from the sedatives, he remembered having this same random thought as they were bringing him to the rescue chopper, and it just popped into his head, how beautiful.

  Back at the compound he went through something that should have sucked all the joy out of him, yet when brought before the splendor of God’s Creation—in the form of the Andes—he still had to acknowledge that “God is Great,” at a time when nothing else was. Maybe that was the lesson. God before all other things.

  Of all the ways God could have chosen to speak to Matt, it had to be one shrouded in ambiguity, but also one that tested his faith, as it felt unshakably real. After the helicopter took his dream self away, Matt’s orb was left looking in awe of God’s wonder. Right then and there God spoke to Matt in his dream. A cloud appeared over the Andes and in a scene he’s sure to have seen a thousand times in the movies, the cloud began to speak in a very godly voice.

  The irony for Matt was there was nothing tangible, just this dismissible dream that could have been a combination of the worst experience he’d ever had and the drugs they gave him, or either. Regardless, God made it clear that Vera and Pablo were in fact bringing His Word to the world, and now the burden was on him.

  If Matt wanted his place in Heaven, then “he” would have to take up Pablo’s plight and make what God was trying to accomplish happen. Matt was now, “The Harbinger of Change.” Those were the words given to him in the dream, and those were the words Pablo said God had used with him in his vision.

  Matt kept trying to rationalize it away—mostly as thoughts Pablo created, or maybe the man subliminally planted them in his head, as nothing was beyond Pablo’s capability. Pablo was, after all, the smartest person who ever lived. Maybe he was doing this shit to him from the grave.

  More realistically, rather than believe he was having visions from God, Matt concluded these dreams were a combination of guilt and Pablo’s idealism that the genius was able to slowly manipulate into his head. There had been many a night Matt listened to the Prophet Pablo, amazing Vera and himself with tales of his many adventures in the world while making this all happen. Of course, he masked the stories as benign business adventures so Matt would not catch on.

  On more than one occasion he remembered the cervezas flowing and himself getting really caught up in it. Not that Pablo ever drank or revealed what was really going on; he did not. Pablo was always able to tell his stories so as to not reveal his true agenda to Matt, but still intrigue. Pablo never disappointed them, telling tales too incredible to entertain as real. Until now that was.

  Now it all seemed very possible, and his friend in the limo had delivered another of God’s Messages that kept getting sent to him.

  First, it was the orderly that came to collect the linens. He delivered the same message, but in a different way. Matt was lying on the bed when the TV show he was watching started talking about Pablo. The forty-something orderly said mostly to himself, “It’s a shame about those two, could have worked out so different.”

  It didn’t dawn on Matt at the time, but when he reflected, he’d realized the man referred to both Pablo and Vera in his statement, yet the news stories hardly mentioned Nancy Chavez anymore. Once Pablo made himself known, all eyes were on him. The orderly’s comment would not be the only one though.

  Then came the nurse that checked his vitals every morning. Her comment arose from a magazine that he had on his nightstand. It was a Time magazine and its cover was “Is America Really Safe?” Her comment upon seeing the magazine was, “You know, it’s strange, but I never felt personally threatened. I think what they were trying to do might have been successful if they tried it another way. Not trying to ram it down people’s throats the way they did, killing people and all, that’s never an answer.” Then she and her message were gone, almost like she wasn’t even talking to him, almost like he wasn’t even there.

  Different people kept telling him to continue the Sheep’s work, but each in a different way and each indicating he should change tactics. He kept asking for an answer to this very same query to Pablo that day, although the fact he had a gun trained on Pablo probably precluded him from getting the right answer. Was there another way to enact massive change while maintaining your humanity?

  For sure, Matt knew that Pablo’s biggest failure was that he stopped putting value on every human life. He allowed himself to declare some people expendable for the overall betterment of mankind, which he even said it in his first speech as the “Jesuit Sheep.”

  Could it be that’s why God placed me there, to stop His misguided child? Pablo could not be reasoned with, as he believed he was delivering the Word of God. But apparently he went about it in the wrong way. If all things were Divine, then Pablo did not succeed because he disobeyed the Word of the Lord to satiate his personal need for revenge.

  Matt could see how that could happen to someone who went through what Pablo had gone through, but one could reason that the minute one started to nuke people and claim the innocent as necessary losses, one could also reason that one had gone a bit mad. Apparently God concurred. Matt wasn’t much into ideology, but one thing was for sure, he’d always believed that if you were killing in the name of your god, then you were way off base.

  God was not going to ask one of his children to kill anyone, as killing was done thro
ugh free will, and unfortunately, he now knew this all too well. He had always believed and steadied his mind to the fact that if he were ever to kill anyone, that it would have to be to save his life or the life of another. Matt operated strictly by the personal moral policy—that he could only take a life in those situations.

  Now it was being put to him in his dreams, either by his own mind or by God’s will, that he was the one that was peerless, for he never had temptation to push the button. Pablo, the misguided child, had been replaced, and Matt needed to find a new way to bring God’s Will to the Earth. Apparently he was to be the one to either save the world or behold its demise—he was really not sure which one it is at this point.

  Of course Matt knew he was trying to spin all this in his head to avoid taking a stand. He thought about all the capabilities of the man that held the world at bay. Maybe every night he slept in that compound a subliminal tape played and set all this up in his head. Using this rationalization tactic, Matt had nearly gotten the idea out of his head, when it happened.

  One morning he felt like seeing the sun so he peeled the curtains back in his room to reveal a semi-cloudy day, the wind barely kicking a leaf around on the poplar tree growing right outside his hospital window. He went back and lay on the bed, looking at the tree, its leaves shuffling ever so slightly. Then he saw it! It can’t be, but there it was. Really?

  He tried to rationalize it away, but it was there, no denying it, there was a perfect outline of a rabbit in the tree leaves and it was staring right at him. He kept hoping the slight wind would shuffle it into another shape, but no. He got up and it disappeared, you had to be sitting right where he was to be able to see it. Its detail gave him goose bumps. It was almost as if Edward Scissorhands cut this out, it was that perfect. Why a rabbit though? And then he had the epiphany. The Sheep and the Rabbit were the “Meek of this Earth.” The rabbit was food for a wide variety of predators.