by Trevor Zaple
“Please,” he whimpered, and then bit his tongue. He wouldn’t let them drive him to begging. He refused to go out like that.
A hand ripped the tie off of his eyes and he blinked rapidly, his eyes feeling burned by even the small amount of light given off by the hard, glittering half-moon. He was on the roof of the former university residence, and the stars littered the sky above him, thousands of pinprick holes shining through a field of velvet black. He remembered not being able to see as many stars, even a year ago. They seemed to be everywhere, and they made him feel strangely claustrophobic. He looked away and saw the other person whom had been dragged up onto this roof. It was Jacob, he saw, a beaten, submissive Jacob with deep bruising and cuts crisscrossing his face. He looked over at that same moment, saw Richard’s face, and spat.
“What do they have you up here for?” he asked, his voice incredulous. “You’re one of them!” Richard started, feeling confused.
“Shut up, koulangyet manman’w,” the man behind Richard told Jacob. He realized with a growing sense of unreality that it was Chris. “This isn’t the place for a coco santi to drop shit from their mouths”.
Jacob darted forward on his knees and was brought down with a kick to the side of the head, delivered by one of the men standing near to him. The man’s face came into the light as he did so and Richard realized that it was another member of the conspiracy. He stared around, his mouth agape. As he got a good look at everyone on the roof (seven or eight in all) he saw that they were all members of his conspiracy.
“Bambaclaat,” Jacob gasped from where he had fallen. “Whore-fucker”. He spat, and it shone red in the moonlight. “You’ll all hang for this”.
“Probably,” Chris admitted. “You won’t live to see it, though”. He stepped around Richard so that he was standing in front of him.
“Have they caught up yet?” he asked, directing the question at one of the other men on the roof.
“They just have, yeah,” a man with a deep, gravelly voice replied. “They just entered the front doors”.
“Good”. Chris paused. Then, in a much quieter voice, he spoke to Richard.
“This is our only chance, Richard. It should have been easier. It should have been you. So, let’s try this again”.
“They’re coming up the stairs,” another voice said urgently. This voice seemed reedy, scared. Richard bowed his head, confused and unable to process any of the sensory details that were filtering into his brain.
“Let’s do this,” Chris said to this bulletin. He walked to Jacob’s side and kicked the fallen man squarely in the ribs. There was a muffled groan from the man’s prone position. The man whom had kicked Jacob in the face squatted on the opposite side of him.
The clatter of boots on the stairs below became much louder and within a moment the hatch squealed open. Richard twisted his head and saw a large number of black robed men coming bubbling up from the stairwell. Chris and the other man waited until there were a large number of them through the hatch, and then they hauled Jacob to the side of the roof. Many of the black robes shouted warnings to stop, but Chris and the other man paid them no mind. Jacob was thrown over the side of the building and he uttered a long scream. A few moments later there was a damp thump from the plaza below.
A split-second after the sound of Jacob’s last, Richard was overrun by men in black. They swarmed him, throwing him to the ground and wrestling him into a submissive position. A rag was put to his face and he knew no more.
When he awoke he was in the small utility classroom that he’d been kept in before receiving his new name. He blinked, his vision blurred and refusing to unblur. His entire body felt like a mass of ugly bruises, and some of his teeth felt loose in their sockets. There was blood on his hands, and after feeling around his scalp gingerly he realized that his head was cut in three places. He winced and wiped his fingers on his filthy grey robe. His head ached abominably and he wished that someone would just decapitate him.
After an hour there was a shuffle at the door. It swung open and admitted four men: two in black robes, and two in clean-looking white robes. He recognized the two white robes, of course, and he saw with sick amusement that one of the black-robed men was Alexander, one of the men that had escorted him from purgatory what seemed like a lifetime ago. All of them seemed agitated; the white-robed men in particular looked as though they would rather be anywhere else.
“Just grab him,” one of them said, “make sure you get him cleaned up. Bentley will have all of our heads if we present him looking like that”.
“Can we not just strangle him and tell Bentley that he died suddenly?” the other white-robe asked. Brother Alexander shook his head.
“Brother Bentley has made his wishes quite clear in this matter,” the man said, his voice as cold as the grave. “Any attempt to circumvent his wishes will be dealt with accordingly”.
The two white-robed men glared at Alexander for a moment and then wilted. Alexander and the other black-robe grabbed Richard by his elbows and hauled him to his feet.
“Come on,” Alexander said, rough but neutral. “We’ve got a lot to do”.
They led him away towards another room that was quickly emptied out. He was sat down and for the next twenty minutes he underwent a bizarre sort of makeover. His face was washed, his cuts were treated, he was given a new grey robe, and his hair and beard were trimmed to a much more even level. This procedure was undertaken by a man and a woman that Richard recognized as other grey robes. Their faces were frightened, although their hands were nothing if not competent. When they finished, Alexander and the other black robe looked him over critically.
“It will have to do,” Alexander said doubtfully, and dismissed the two grey robes. “We’re running late”. They grabbed Richard by the elbows once again and led him away. He was taken, with no accommodations for screaming muscles, into the basement and then on into a low-ceilinged, cramped room that might have once been a locker room. He was dumped unceremoniously into the middle of this room and left alone; Alexander and the other man left through the door that they came in by. Darkness swung over him and he was blind in pitch blackness.
Muted footsteps rumbled overhead; the community was being herded into the bench seating, or so it sounded to Richard. Dust settled down on him, and he shifted uncomfortably. He heard a voice mumbling on from above; the layering of floor served to cut out any understanding of the words. Presently there came the sound of footfalls on the stairs just outside of the locker room. The door swung open and light flooded in, blinding Richard temporarily. After his eyes adjusted, he saw that he had been joined by the same pair of white robes from before, the ones that had casually suggested murdering him. He went cold all over but forced himself to wait to see where the situation led.
“Come on, then,” one of them muttered, and their soft, clammy hands gently took his arms and brought him to his feet. They stood off from Richard awkwardly, waiting for him to do something. Richard stared from one to the other and one of them gestured grandly with a swing of his hand, as if to say right this way, your highness. The scowl on his face belied the sarcasm. Richard shrugged and walked past them into the stairwell. They had been given ample opportunity to kill him; they weren’t going to stab him in the back walking up the stairs now.
He was brought out at the top of the stairs into the much brighter, much more expansive confines of the gymnasium. He shielded his eyes to cut the excess light and saw that they had gathered what appeared to be the entire community into the gym. The place was packed tightly with grey-robed people, with the black robes forming a human barricade six deep against them. They stood between the crowd and the wide stage that took up most of one wall in the gym. On that stage stood the rest of Bentley’s inner council, and a line of twelve men kneeling at the edge of the stage in front of them. They were kneeling with their heads bowed but he knew them. The last one on the right was Chris.
Bentley was walking back and forth across the street like an old tel
evangelist. He was shouting a mixture of brimstone and bible quotes, gesticulating wildly with his hands as he did so. The grey-robed crowd watched in silence, their faces carefully set into sober, neutral expressions. Richard was brought up onto the stage and placed in the shadowy corner behind everyone. His two escorts told him to stay where he was and left him to join with the rest of their number. Bentley kept preaching as they did this; he seemed enraptured with his own speech, letting the essential rhythm of his voice rise and fall with masterful strokes. Richard could not concentrate on the actual words that Bentley was saying, but he was spellbound by the way it was being said.
Bentley began to gesture towards the men kneeling at the edge of the stage and this was when Richard began to pay attention.
“Before you are those who attempt to poison and destroy you! Brothers and sisters, here are twelve men whom have committed the mortal sin of murder, and a more treacherously dark murder you will never find, no matter how long you search! These men have not only plotted against our great enterprise here, not only turned their minds and souls from the Lord, they have even gone so far as to callously beat my apostle, the saintly Brother Jacob, and throw him from a roof to his death! There is no earthly punishment that can bring justice to these men! None at all! Only the divine hand of the Lord can properly judge these men! We must commend them unto God! Hallelujah!”
“HALLELUJAH!” the crowd responded. Richard felt his skin crawl. Bentley seemed to feed off of the crowd response.
“These men have committed vile acts against the entire community. There are twelve of them, and there are twelve of our great apostles, leaders all. Therefore, each apostle shall take a gun and bring the earthly chapter of one of these sinful fools to a close”.
One of the white robes stepped forward, a police-issue Sig Sauer in his hand. Richard watched numbly as the man stepped forward, pressed the barrel of the .40 calibre gun against the back of the kneeling prisoner’s skull, and squeeze the trigger. The report was deafening, and the conspirator’s brains flew out of the hole that had been blown out of the other side of his head. The newly dead man pitched forward and fell into the empty strip in front of the stage with a wet thud.
This pattern repeated itself down the line. Each of the white robes stepped forward with a gun, placed it against the back of the head, and executed one of the prisoners. The line of Richard’s fellow conspirators diminished in ritual fashion, and Richard began to feel a hard knot of queasiness grip the empty bile of his stomach. At last the line of white robed men finished and there was only Chris left, kneeling alone on the far end of the stage. The man had not moved throughout the entire ordeal, from what Richard had observed. Bentley held his hands up and spoke again.
“Brothers and sisters! The death of Brother Jacob has left a vacancy on our holiest of councils. Yet, even through our newfound grief, the Lord has planted the seeds of strength. For when it was discovered that our late, lamented fellow was murdered on that fateful night, he was to only be the first of two. That other, brothers and sisters, is a man whom I have known from the first moment that the Lord brought him into our path”.
Richard looked up intently, his eyes burning. A chill ran down his spine; it felt like a finger bone running raw down his exposed vertebrae.
“Brothers and sisters, he is a man whom has rejected temptation in everything, a man in whom the Lord has seen fit to bless a silver tongue in His service. This is a man whom I had previously sought guidance from the Lord on, to bring him into our holy councils and thereby gain his wisdom and insight. The Lord saw fit to give us Brother Jacob instead, although He called poor Jacob home so shortly after”.
Richard shook, not caring who saw him. One of the white-robed men walked towards him, a wide, sarcastic grin plastered across his old-boy golfer’s face. In the man’s outstretched hand he held a police .40, held by the grip with the muzzle pointed downwards. Richard had a wild vision of grabbing the gun and using it to blow the shit-eating bastard’s head off in spectacularly messy fashion. In reality, he simply took the gun, kept his face composed, and waited.
“He is a man whom the Lord himself has called a saint-in-waiting! God has called you, Brother Isaiah! God wishes you to be an integral piece in His great plan! Step forward and send this deluded sinner into His everlasting love!”
Richard walked forward uncertainly, feeling a sudden shyness break over him. He had never been good with public performance, and he was not entirely sure if he had any sort of control over this situation at all. He simply stepped forward until he was standing behind Chris. Chris did not move, to look around at him or otherwise. There was a deep silence from the crowd.
“Seal this pact between yourself and the Lord, Brother Isaiah! Send this sinner to his final judgement and take your place at my side as a fellow shepherd of our mutual flock!”
Richard felt like laughing and the idea was so absurd he ended up crying instead. He grinned, sobbed, and tried to keep it quiet. Tears ran thick rivulets down his cheeks. He extended his hand and was not surprised to see it trembling severely. He locked his wrist and steadied his hand through sheer force of will. He pressed the muzzle of the gun to the back of Chris’ head, feeling the resistance of the man’s skull impede it. Still the man did not move. Richard rested the muzzle against the dense mass of Chris’ hair. He closed his eyes. The room was completely silent. He refused to look. In his mind’s eye he could see the entire gymnasium staring at him, analyzing him, weighing him. Waiting upon him. Stringing him up in judgement. He tried to imagine Chris’ face. He found that he couldn’t. He’d blurred the man’s face out of his mind completely. He realized then that he’d already made his decision. He swallowed hard, mouthed a mute apology, and squeezed the trigger hesitantly. The viper in his hand jumped and spat. The report was very loud.
TEN
Being a member of the white-robed inner elite of the community was, if anything, even more nerve-wracking than being a member of a conspiracy dedicated to standing against it. Richard would often look back during this period of his life to the time even a few weeks before and feel envious of that Richard.
He was in the inner council but none of the other council members trusted him. The caveat to this, the sole thing that protected his life, was the support that he had from Brother Bentley himself. The man ruled over the white robes with an iron fist and Richard was first amongst all of them in their estimation. Richard did what he could to cultivate this; he stepped up the god rhetoric in his speech and drew on all of the skills he’d cultivated as a sales manager in his previous life. God was the product this time around, that was the only difference to him. The religious pepper he spiced his conversations with seemed to grind itself out of his mind with smooth ease. He found a thick, expensive-looking bible and read it feverishly, memorizing passages to make himself sound as biblically learned as he possibly could. He had never read the book before, and found himself entranced with some of the stories; they had been internalized by so many other storytellers over the centuries that it was as though reading them were like slipping on a well-worn, favourite pair of jeans. He was too much of a hard-headed realist to consider taking any of it for fact, but he was very interested in some of what the New Testament said between the lines. Upon reflection, he realized that most of the people who had professed to follow in Christ’s teachings were apparently completely clueless as to what he’d said and done. Brother Bentley and his cult were, of course, no exception. Richard thought that Bentley himself likely believed in what he was saying and attempting to do, but also knew that the cognitive dissonance required to marry his actions with biblical scripture meant that the man was in all likelihood insane.
This was not the only clue that Richard had to Bentley’s madness. Once he was forced to spend nearly every day in the man’s presence, he realized that it was actually quite easy to tell. The Bentley that appeared before the public and the Bentley that stewed in private were two very different individuals. The public Bentley was calm, confid
ent, and a sweeping orator. He was a man of vision, mad though it might seem, and could impart that vision in such a way that it had held the community together in those early days before the man had forged his own private army to keep order. The private Bentley was an incoherent, mumbling mess, a man given to hour-long rants that made less and less sense as Richard got to know him better. He would start off his speeches to his inner council with clarity, but would quickly descend into strange, fragmented sentences that made reference to people and places that Richard was only vaguely sure might have once existed. At times he would end his speeches with five or ten minutes of pure gibberish. His fellow white-robes would praise this as speech granted directly from God, but they would look at each other with pained expressions as they did so. From his position as an outsider, Richard saw that the other white-robes shared a great number of these pained expressions amongst themselves.
It was not just Bentley’s degrading mental condition that was causing them concern, either. The conspiracy that Richard had recently been a part of was considered destroyed, but it still lingered in their minds. He overheard whispered conversations about members of the community that the white-robes suspected; none of the names sounded familiar to Richard, but he knew that it might not mean anything. The conspiracy could have expanded again, or it could have collapsed entirely. He had no way of finding out. Carolyn might have carried information to and from such a group, but she refused to speak to him. It hurt him more than he would admit to himself; she was the comfort-mistress and confidant of the white-robes, but not of Richard. The others would receive whispers in their ears, slow smiles, and deferential treatment; Richard himself would receive disgusted looks and frozen body language. The one time that he had tried to outright speak to her he had received a look of such pure hatred that he did not try again for a considerable amount of time.