The Sword of Saint Michael
Page 28
It had been hard to keep up with the grown-ups. It was as if they forgot she was a child. Which was good, in a way.
Her father would definitely be proud.
But she desperately didn’t want to die.
Or become a zombie. It occurred to her that one might be worse than the other, but she didn’t give that much thought. Following the grown-ups was the right thing to do, and she hoped they cared for her enough to keep her alive.
She wondered if this running would ever stop. I’ll be running forever.
Sheriff Hill and Mr. Williams whispered to each other. It looked like they were arguing. When they finished, Mr. Williams went alone toward the supermarket. Sheriff Hill held the gun and kept turning around as if he was expecting a bad man. Emily shrunk down beside Janice. She didn’t want to see more bad men.
But she didn’t cry. She didn’t scream. Her father would be proud.
She missed Mr. Scoggins, her savior, her Prince Charming.
Mr. Williams came back. He whispered something to Sheriff Hill and went back to the supermarket entrance. Glass shattered before he came back. They waited.
And waited. And waited.
“I’m hungry,” Emily said aloud. Sheriff Hill shook his head at her and put his finger on his lips. That meant to be quiet.
In fact, she was starving. She hoped they’d get some food at this one. But Emily didn’t understand the delay. Aren’t they hungry? She hadn’t had dinner yet.
Gunfire sounded in the distance. After a very long time, the grown-ups went to the store together. Sheriff Hill carried her when they walked through the broken window.
Now they had some food. Emily found the Twinkies and tried to get one open but couldn’t. She asked Mr. Williams to open it for her, but he told her she shouldn’t be eating that junk.
But Sheriff Hill came to her rescue. “Dammit, Alexander, let the girl have her goddamned Twinkies. Here honey, let me open it for you.” He winked at her. “And bring me one, too.”
“We don’t have time for this,” Mr. Williams said. “I’ve got a re-usable shopping bag here. We need to fill it up. Janice is filling up the other one.”
She and Sheriff Hill both ate a Twinkie, and the sheriff smiled. “C’mon Alexander, you know you want one. Mmm, mmm,” he said, stuffing his face.
Emily giggled.
“Just like Mom used to make,” Sheriff Hill added. Now Emily laughed out loud. Silly man. Mothers don’t make Twinkies. Little elves do. Everyone knows that.
Mr. Williams smiled. Emily liked it when he smiled. In fact, she liked smiles a lot more than she used to, before . . .
Soon Mr. Williams ate his own Twinkie.
“Okay, that’s enough Twinkies,” Sheriff Hill said.
“Are we staying here?” Emily asked Sheriff Hill.
He shook his head no. Emily became very sad. “When will we stop running?” she pleaded. Now the grown-ups all looked at each other funny. After a while, Mr. Williams said, “When we’re in a safe place, Emily. We’re not safe here.”
Emily accepted that answer though it frightened her.
For the first time while inside the store, she heard gunfire.
Chapter Forty-Two
Day Ten
“It is not the dirt you must worry about,” boomed Saint Michael. “It is the fact that you are under Daryl’s body.”
Jocelyn watched in horror from her Inner Temple as she looked at her body, buried alive. Saint Michael taught her she could see her body this way, through the asphalt, concrete, and dirt, if she focused on doing so. They had buried her in an island strip in the parking lot. As Saint Michael had said, she was underneath Daryl’s body.
She looked at herself in the temple mirror. Her astral self was wearing the usual red ritual robe with the hood covering her head. She could see her face, look into her own eyes.
What she saw was panic. She tried to calm down and think clearly, but that proved difficult.
“So what if I can’t get out? What happens to me?”
He shook his large head, looming two feet above hers. “I do not know. I am sorry, Jocelyn, but I do not know everything. I suspect you could survive under there a long time, but I would think eventually your oxygen would run out.”
He paused. She let that sink in.
“And if I get no oxygen,” she reasoned, “my brain cells start to die, and eventually the whole brain would die.”
“That seems the most plausible scenario.”
“So if I can’t push both me and Daryl out of the dirt, I’m dead. Permanently.”
“It would appear so.”
She looked up into his eyes. “You’re a big help,” she said sarcastically.
“I am doing everything I can. I am not the Lord, or even Metatron.”
“What if I were to ask him to help me?”
“Who?” he asked. “The Lord or Metatron?”
“The Lord. He’s the one who wants me to save humanity. Perhaps he can engineer a way to get me to survive.”
“Good luck with that.”
“What do you mean?”
She listened to the cascading waterfall inside her temple. It helped calm her nerves.
“The universe is fragile, Jocelyn. Any change He makes can have disastrous ripple effects. He will be extremely reluctant to make a change, especially if you have not exhausted all of your options yet.”
“Didn’t He give me these powers to begin with? And what other options do I have?”
“He did not give you your powers in the conventional sense. All He did was to create the universe, assign rules for change over time, and then launch it into motion. The only way He can change it is to change the rules. But then that change can ripple throughout space and time. Whole civilizations could be wiped out. In fact, life itself in the universe could be wiped out. All because He did not like how things turned out . . . That is why it was remarkable that He changed the rules for you, that you will not be able to confess your sins to a priest and be forgiven. For two thousand years, since the crucifixion of Jesus Christ, this has been the rule for everyone.”
She thought about the implications of that. Now she was frightened, and a crisis of faith overcame her. “You mean Jesus Christ is no longer my savior?”
“I am afraid not.”
“So what happens to Protestants? Do they go to Hell because they don’t confess to a priest? Maybe I can get into heaven the way they do.” Not that she didn’t want to save humanity, but she wanted the option of forgiveness.
“Forgiveness of sin is . . . complicated. So is the notion of Heaven and Hell. When Protestants pray, they are answered by Metatron. They enter a close relationship with him, and he acts like the priest that absolves their sins. He will not, though, absolve yours, no matter how close you get to him.”
Jocelyn conjured up a chair and plopped down. She put her head in her hands. “What have I gotten myself into?”
“You still have a choice.”
That made her angry. “Oh, yeah? Die, go to Hell, doom humanity to this goddamned . . . virus, or nanobots, or whatever the fuck it is . . . Or work to fix things. Doesn’t sound like much of a choice to me, and you know it.”
She started to cry. This was more than she could take right now. She would die anyway, and then the shit would really hit the fan.
“Many in your position would give up and take their chances in Hell,” Saint Michael said, “because the odds of success are low, and now have become even lower. Why put yourself through all of this? Hell may be easier.”
“Is it?”
“It depends upon which Hell you arrive in. Reincarnation as a human will be rare now and, in all likelihood, short-lived.”
“Fuck God!” she found herself saying. “Fuck you! And fuck Metatron!”
“You would not be going through this if you had not killed those people you mistook for aliens.”
“Fuck you again! Fuck you, a thousand times! I was sick, and you know it. And He knows it.”
&n
bsp; “I am merely telling you playing the blame game will not get you anywhere . . . Now, do you wish to try to save humanity, to save everyone from their sins? Or do you wish to die?”
She took a deep breath. She conjured up a fire in her cauldron, burning up some cinnamon incense. Breathing in the smoke helped her to clear her head. “When you put it like that, again, what choice do I have? I want to save humanity, why do you insist on coercing me into something I already want to do?”
“It is insurance in case your Will falters. If you look at it from your point of view, I suppose you have no choice, because it is not in your nature to back down from a fight, even if it is almost hopeless.”
“Thanks for the encouragement.”
“It is my job to help you. I do you a disservice if I do not spell it all out for you. You must make an informed decision.”
She took a deep breath, letting the incense get into her lungs. On the exhale, she began to feel much better.
“So . . . Any tips on how to get out of this predicament I find myself in?”
Jocelyn embarked on a shamanic journey to find someone who could help her, but it was a long shot.
She chose the center door on the fifth floor of her Inner Temple to be her journey portal. She took an elevator to that floor and walked on the balcony to the door. Then she opened the door that swung toward her, and inside was a gray mist. Nervous, she steeled herself and walked through.
The mist dissipated around Jocelyn, and she found herself on a road that curved to the left. Houses, spread apart by large several-acre wooded lots, lined the sides of the road. To the left, mountains sprang up behind the houses, and to the right a downslope led to the valley. While she didn’t view Beaver Park Market, she instinctively knew it was in the valley, nonetheless.
The half-moon, low in the sky to her right, shined on the road, and the houses nestled on it. She realized she had projected her astral self onto the material plane (the physical world) on an actual road while her body laid in the shallow grave.
Although she had never used astral projection before—part of her future training—her grandfather had told her the rules. She could travel through matter but not touch it, and so she didn’t stand on the asphalt as much as float on its surface. While astral-projecting, nothing she encountered on the material plane could physically harm her.
A thin cord attached her astral self to her aura—an egg-shaped glowing light surrounding her material body (right now in the grave). Her cord was her guide back to her body, and she could make it visible, translucent or opaque, on command.
I call upon the Holy Spirit and Saint Michael to guide me to the person who can help me. Praise be the Lord. She made the sign of the cross.
The aura of the house up the street came into view. Yes, houses have auras. In fact, everything has an aura, including parts of things. Thus, each floor of the house has an aura. Each window has an aura, each window pane has an aura, etc. The fact is, everything in existence, everything you can call a thing, has a personality, and each thing has an aura.
And the orange-colored aura of the house—a rustic-looking log home, but very large with lots of glass windows—called to her. She guessed it must be about four to six thousand square feet. A house this near the ski resort, and this large, must be worth several million dollars. Or at least used to be. She traveled to the house and broke the plane of the aura. A cord, similar to the one which held her to her body, undulated and attached itself to her. She drifted toward the house, the front door broken open, detached from its top hinge. She drifted into the house, following the cord. It led her into the basement, through a heavy metal door with a five-spoked handle, into a room. Although dark inside, the cord connected to an aura that illuminated an elderly man asleep on a bed.
An elderly man might help her? Well, beggars can’t be choosers.
Clarence Whitman was having his brains eaten while still alive.
Clarence realized he was dreaming and tried to wake up several times but to no avail, all while something fed on his brains. In his dream he started to scream. “Help! Help! Help!” But no one came to help. He continued to scream, each time louder than before. After many screams, he became aware of his surroundings, that he was in his bed in his safe room. He took a deep breath, sat up, and put on the electric camp light next to his bed—and there was a woman standing in his room, looking at him, the kitchenette and bathroom door behind her. He retrieved his glasses from the nightstand and put them on.
A woman. In his safe room. Where no one, no zombies, no humans, no one could get into.
Half-asleep, still in a frightened dream state, he screamed again. While panicking, he yelled, “Who the hell are you?” She seemed to be of slightly taller than medium height for a woman. She wore filthy clothes, and dirt covered her from head to toe. She had straight black hair with bangs.
But she didn’t say it out loud. Instead, she thought it at him.
“Oh my god, I’m still dreaming!”
Her lips were synchronized with the thoughts entering his mind, but she made no sound. He turned around and grabbed the shotgun from on the wall over his bed, pointing it at her.
He didn’t feel like he was dreaming. Yet apparitions were not real. If he wasn’t dreaming, then the woman was lying. “Again, who the hell are you?”
“Really? You look like you’re here.” He kept the gun pointed at her. Now he was out of his dream state and felt the folds of the blankets under his butt.
“Well, you got that right.”
“You mean where you’re outside your body . . . Holy shit, is that real?”
He nodded. He wanted to see what she had in store for him, his curiosity probably getting the better of him.
She took her arm and moved it through her body as if neither one was actually there. Then she ran her arm through the end of the bed. Both times he couldn’t see the arm while obscured by what it was inside of.
One thing was sure: she wasn’t real in the normal sense. But telepathy, astral projection . . . It was all too much to grasp. He looked over at his wind-up mechanical clock—a couple minutes before 7 p.m.
“What do you want?” he asked, still suspicious of her intentions, regardless of who or what she was.
His eyes narrowed. “You came to me, you came to my house, my safe room, yet you don’t know who I am?”
“I’m Clarence, Clarence Whitman.”
Clarence noticed the apparition—Jocelyn—stood right in front of his stack of food buckets, filled with pouches of dried food. With hot water they were quite tasty, and without they weren’t half-bad. He was afraid she was right and if he fired, he’d destroy a lot of his food, so he put the gun down onto the bed.
“So zombies still overwhelm the world like the TV news showed prior to wigging out? I don’t
dare leave here?”
“Oh? Where did they go?”
Clarence sighed. “Hell, no, this isn’t the End Times, at least it better not be. But if it is, someone will cure this plague. God wouldn’t allow Christ to come back to . . . to this.”
“Plagues? Yes. Almost complete destruction of the species? No. Someone will cure us eventually.”
“LDS.”
“Michael? He’s the only canonized archangel.”
“Buried alive? Oh, my goodness, that’s why you are so dirty.”
She nodded.
Clarence glanced over at a picture of his wife. What question would she ask at a time like this? “What’s in it for me?”
She paused for a few seconds.
“I’ve been lonely ever since my wife died of Alzheimer’s. I don’t need companionship.”
“Interacting will only get me killed. My books can give me some semblance of a life here until someone finds a cure.”
“If you can heal yourself, why can’t you get out of the grave?”