by Jason Mott
“It’s okay,” Harold said. “It’ll be over soon. People are just scared. Scared and frustrated.” His eyes began to burn and he felt a tickle in his throat. “Close your eyes and try to hold your breath,” Harold said.
“Why?” Jacob asked.
“Just do what I told you to, son,” Harold replied, his voice full of anger only to mask the fear. He looked around for somewhere he could take them, somewhere they would be safe, but he feared what might happen if one of the soldiers mistook them for one of the rioters. That’s what it was, after all, a riot. Something he never would have believed could happen here, something that only happened on television in crowded cities where too many people had been wronged.
The smell of tear gas grew stronger. It stung bad. His nose was beginning to run and he couldn’t help but cough. “Daddy?” Jacob said, frightened.
“It’s okay,” Harold said. “It’s nothing to be afraid of. It’ll be okay.” He looked around the corner of the truck behind which they were hiding. A wide, fat pillar of marshmallow-white smoke was billowing out of the school and rising into the morning sky. The sound of fighting had begun to quiet, though. Mostly there was only the sound of dozens of people coughing. Now and then, inside the cloud, someone could be heard crying.
People emerged from the smoke, walking blindly, their arms extended in front of them as they coughed. The soldiers stayed just outside the reach of the smoke, seemingly content to let it do the legwork of settling everyone down.
“It’s almost over,” Harold said. He caught sight of Marvin Parker. He was on his belly on the ground. His gas mask had been removed.
He didn’t look at all the way Harold remembered him. Yes, he was still tall and pale and thin, with deep-set wrinkles around his eyes and that fire-red hair of his, but he looked harder, colder. He was even grinning as they cuffed his wrists behind his back. “This isn’t over,” he shouted, his face tight and cruel, his eyes watering from the tear gas.
“Dear Lord,” Mrs. Stone repeated yet again. She clutched at Harold’s arm. “What’s gotten into people?” she asked.
“It’ll be okay,” Harold replied. “I’ll keep us safe.” He searched his memory, reviewed all that he knew—or thought he knew—about Marvin Parker. None of it—apart from the fact that Marvin used to be a bit of a boxer once—made this moment make sense.
“Where did Fred Green get to?” Harold wondered aloud, his eyes searching. But he did not find him.
* * *
Pastor Peters’s wife rarely interrupted him once he cordoned himself off in his study. Unless he invited her in to help him with a particular point in the writing, she kept her distance and let him do what he needed to create his sermons. But now there was a very upset old woman at the door begging to speak with her pastor.
The pastor’s wife led Lucille through the house slowly, holding her by the hand as they went, with Lucille leaning her weight on the small woman. “You’re so sweet,” Lucille said, moving slower than she wanted to. In her free hand she clutched her worn leather Bible. Its pages were beginning to tear. The spine was broken. The front cover was torn and soiled. It looked exhausted now, much like its owner.
“I need a blessing, Pastor,” Lucille said when she was seated in his study and his small, nameless wife had left.
Lucille dabbed her brow with a handkerchief and pawed at the cover of her Bible as if it might give her luck. “I’m lost,” she said. “Lost and wandering the wilderness of a questioning soul!”
The pastor smiled. “That’s very eloquent,” he said, hoping he did not sound as condescending as he thought he did.
“It’s just the truth of things,” Lucille said. She dabbed the corners of her eyes with the handkerchief and sniffled. The tears would be coming soon.
“What’s the matter, Lucille?”
“Everything,” she said. Her voice caught in her throat. She grunted to clear it. “The whole world’s gone and lost their minds. People can just come and take folks from a home like prisoners. They even knocked the damned door off its hinges, Pastor. Took me an hour to fix it back. Who does a thing like that? It’s the End Times, Pastor! God help us all.”
“Now, Ms. Lucille. I never thought of you as the end-of-the-world type.”
“Neither did I, but look around you. Look at how things have become. It’s just horrible. It makes me believe that maybe Satan isn’t to blame for our current condition, not the way they say, at least. Maybe he never even came into the garden. Maybe Adam and Eve plucked the fruit all on their own and then chose to throw the blame on Satan. Would have never even thought such a thing was possible before. But now, after seeing the way things are…”
She let her sentence fade.
“Can I get you something to drink, Ms. Lucille?”
“Who can drink at a time like this?” she replied. Then: “Well, I suppose I could use a glass of tea.”
The pastor clapped his large hands together. “Now that’s what I like to hear.”
When he returned with her tea, she was much calmer. She had finally released her Bible and placed it on the table next to her chair. Her hands were in her lap and her eyes less puffy and less red than they had been.
“Here you go,” the pastor said.
“Thank you.” She sipped. “How’s your wife? She seems distracted.”
“She’s just a little concerned about things, is all.”
“Well, there’s plenty to be concerned about.”
“Like the End Times?” He smiled.
She sighed. “They’ve been locked up in that place for weeks now.”
The pastor nodded. “You’ve been able to visit them, haven’t you?”
“Early on, I could visit them every day. I took them food and washed their clothes and made sure my son knew his mother loved him and hadn’t forgotten him. It was bad, but it was at least bearable back then. But now…now things have gotten abhorrent.”
“I heard that they weren’t allowing visitations anymore,” Pastor Peters said.
“They’re not. Not since even before they took over the town. I never would have imagined they could cut off a whole town like that. Never would have imagined it in my entire life. But I guess just because I can’t imagine something doesn’t mean it can’t happen—that’s the solipsist’s flaw! The truth of things is right out there. All you have to do is open the door and there it is, all of it, everything I can’t imagine, right there for you to reach out and shake hands with.” Her voice broke.
The pastor sat forward in his chair. “You make it sound like it’s all your fault, Ms. Lucille.”
“How could it be my fault?” she said. “What could I have done to make any of this possible? Did I make the world the way it is? Did I make people small and timid like they are? Did I make people jealous and violent and envious? Did I do any of that?” Her hands were shaking again. “Did I?”
Pastor Peters took her hand and patted it. “Of course you didn’t. Now, when’s the last time you spoke with Harold and Jacob? How are they?”
“How are they? They’re prisoners. How should they be?” She dabbed her eyes and threw her Bible to the floor and stood and began walking back and forth in front of the pastor. “There has to be a pattern to this. There has to be some kind of plan. Doesn’t there, Pastor?”
“I hope so,” the pastor said gingerly.
She huffed. “You young preachers. Didn’t anyone teach you to give your flock the illusion that you had all the answers?”
The pastor laughed. “I’ve given up on illusions these days,” he said.
“I just don’t know what to do about anything.”
“Things will change,” he said. “That’s all I’m genuinely sure of. But how that change will come and what that change will be is beyond me.”
Lucille picked up her Bible. “Then what do we do?” she asked.
“We do what we can.”
* * *
For a very long time Lucille sat and said nothing. She only stared down at her
Bible and thought to herself about what the pastor had said and what it meant for her to “do what she could.” She had always been the type to do as she was told, and the Bible had been the best at telling her what to do in the situations of her life. It told her how to behave as a child. It told her how to behave when she was done with childish things and blossoming into adolescence. Admittedly, she’d had trouble listening to what it had to say and had engaged in certain behaviors that, while not explicitly forbidden by the Bible, were most definitely frowned upon. But they had been good times and, all in all, had caused no lasting harm to anyone, including herself.
After marriage, her Bible had still been there and was full of answers. Answers on how to be a good wife, though some parts of that she’d had to pick and choose from. There were some parts of the rules for a wife that just didn’t make sense in this day and age. Frankly, Lucille had thought, they probably didn’t make much sense back in biblical times, either. And if she’d acted the way those women in the Bible acted…well, let’s just say that the world would be a quite different place, and Harold, most likely, would have drunk and smoked and ate himself into an early grave and not been here to see the miracle of his son returning from the dead.
Jacob. That was the focus of it. That was what all of her tears were about. They were killing the Returned now. Killing them just to be rid of them.
It wasn’t happening everywhere, but it was happening.
There had been reports of it coming in on the television for over a week now. Some countries—countries notorious for their brutality—had begun killing them on sight. Killing them and burning the bodies as if they were diseased, somehow contagious. Every evening now, more and more reports were coming, more pictures and videos and web broadcasts.
Just this morning Lucille had come downstairs—her lonely footfalls drifting through the dark, empty house—to find the television in the living room switched on and whispering to the empty room. She wasn’t sure how it had been left on. She was certain she’d turned it off before bed. But she wasn’t above admitting that she might have been mistaken. She was a seventy-three-year-old woman now, and such things as thinking you’d turned something off when you actually had not weren’t above possibility.
It was early still, and a bald-headed black man with a thin, perfectly manicured mustache mumbled something in a low voice. Over the man’s shoulder, in the studio behind him, Lucille could see people buzzing about. They were all young-looking, all dressed in white shirts and conservatively colored ties. They were probably the up-and-comers, Lucille thought. All of them hoping to one day come out of the background and take the bald-headed man’s seat.
She turned up the volume and sat on the couch and listened to what the man had to say, even though she knew she would not care for it.
“Good morning,” the man on the television said, apparently returning to the beginning of whatever cycle he was trapped in. “Our top story today coming out of Romania, where the government has ruled that the Returned are not inherently afforded civil rights, declaring that they are simply ‘unique’ and therefore not subject to the same protections as others.”
Lucille sighed. She could not think of what else she could do.
The television cut away from the bald-headed black newscaster and turned to what Lucille assumed was Romania. A pale, gaunt-looking Returned man was being led from his home by a pair of soldiers. The soldiers were clean-shaven and thin, with small features and a certain gait of awkwardness, as if they were still too young to fully understand how the mechanics of their bodies worked.
“The fate of the children…” Lucille said to the empty house. Her chest tightened as the thought of the Wilsons and of Jacob and Harold came rushing in to fill the emptiness of the house. Her hands trembled and the television became a blurry haze. This confused her for a moment, and then she felt the tears trailing down her cheeks and pooling at the corners of her mouth.
Somewhere along the line—though she was not quite sure when exactly—she had promised herself that she wouldn’t let herself be brought to tears by any of this. She was too old for tears, she felt. There reached a point in a lifetime when everything that could be done to make a person cry should have come and gone. And while she still felt things, she didn’t care for crying—maybe she had just spent too many years with Harold, whom she had never seen cry. Not once.
But now it was too late. She was crying and there was nothing to be done about it and, for the first time in a great many years, she felt alive.
The newscaster carried on over the images of the man being handcuffed and placed in the back of a large military truck alongside other Returned. “No word yet from NATO, the UN or the Bureau of the Returned on Romania’s initiative yet, but while the official comments from other governments have been slim, those comments have been split equally between those who favor the Romanian initiative and others who believe the government’s actions violate basic human rights.”
Lucille shook her head, her face still wet with tears. “The fate of the children…” she repeated.
It wasn’t just confined to “those other countries.” Not at all. Right here in America it was happening. Those damned fools, the True Living Movement, had spread, cropped up in all manner of offshoot from one side of the country to the other. For the most part, they did nothing but mouth off about things. But, now and again, someone turned up dead and some group that claimed to be “standing up for the living” claimed responsibility.
It had happened in Arcadia, though no one talked about it. Some Returned foreigner found dead in a ditch along the highway. Killed by a 30-06 rifle shot.
Everything seemed to be falling apart with each passing day. And all Lucille could think of was Jacob.
Poor, poor Jacob.
* * *
After Lucille was gone and his wife had finally drifted off to sleep, Pastor Peters sat alone in his study rereading the letter he’d received from the Bureau of the Returned.
In the interest of public safety, Elizabeth Pinch, and all other Returned in that particular part of Mississippi, was being held at the facility in Meridian. The letter gave very few details apart from that. It only went on to reassure the pastor that the Returned were all being treated in a manner befitting the situation and that all human rights were being expressly upheld. It all sounded very formal and proper, in a bureaucratic type of way.
Outside his study the house was quiet. Only the rhythmic, heavy clicking of his wife’s old grandfather clock at the end of the hallway. It had been a gift from her father—a gift given only a few short months before his cancer would take him. She had grown up with the sound of that great, old clock thumping rhythmically through the nights of her childhood. When she and her husband first got married, she was so unsettled by the missing drumming of the clock that they’d been forced to purchase a metronome to count the time away or else she couldn’t sleep.
The pastor walked out into the hallway and stood in front of the clock. It was just over six feet tall and ornately carved. The pendulum was as large as a fist. It clucked back and forth as smoothly as if the clock had only just been crafted and was not, in actuality, over a hundred years old.
It was the closest thing her family had to an heirloom. When her father died she’d fought viciously with her sisters and brother—not about the cost of the funeral or what to do with their father’s home, land or meager savings, but rather about the grandfather clock. To this day the relationship between the siblings was strained on account of that clock.
But where was their father now? Pastor Peters wondered.
He had noticed how much more care his wife had given the grandfather clock since the Returned started showing up. It smelled of cleaning oil and polish.
The pastor left the old clock and continued on through the house. He went into the living room and stood for a while looking at things, cataloging them to his memory.
The table in the center of the room they had found during their long move from Missi
ssippi. The couch they’d picked out while on a church visit to Wilmington. Not nearly as far away as Tennessee, but it was one of the few purchases they had both agreed on. It was patterned in blue and white—“Carolina Blue!” the salesman had declared with pride—with alternating blue and white piping along the cushions. The arms curled outward and the pillows were large and soft and plentiful.
It was the complete opposite of the table she’d picked up in Tennessee. He’d hated that table when they first came across it. It was too skinny and the wood was too dark and the trim was flat. It just wasn’t worthwhile, he felt.
Pastor Peters walked the living room, picking up any of his books that were piled together in places they did not belong. He did this slowly and carefully, wiping off each book as he handled it. Then he slid it into its place on the bookshelf. Now and then he cracked the cover of one and slipped a finger between its pages and rubbed back and forth, taking in the scent and the texture for himself, as if he might never see another book again, as if the inevitable march of time had finally won.
This cleaning went on for a very long time, though the pastor did not realize it just then. It was only when the crickets were beginning to quiet outside and, far out somewhere in the world, there came the sound of a dog barking at the coming sun.
He had waited too long.
But in spite of his mistake—in spite of his fear—he moved quietly and slowly through the house.
First he went to his study and retrieved the letter from the Bureau of the Returned. Then he took his notebook and, yes, his Bible. He loaded them all into the messenger bag his wife bought for him last Christmas.
Then he went and retrieved his bag of clothes from behind the computer desk. He’d packed the bag only the day before—his wife did the laundry all the time. She would have noticed the clothes missing from his closet if he’d packed too soon. And he wanted to leave with as little trouble as possible, as cowardly as that was.
The pastor crept through the house and out the front door and placed the clothes and the messenger bag in the backseat of his car. The sun was finding its home in the sky now. It sat just beyond the trees, but definitely up, and rising higher by the second.