The Beachhead

by Christopher Mari

  Not knowing about China was one thing. Knowing just a bit about the old world’s technical advancements and not always having the tools to recreate them was an entirely other matter. Cures to so many diseases. Long-distance wireless communications. Nuclear power. Spaceflight. All things human beings had once achieved but could not recreate with their level of technical know-how and lack of raw materials. Instead he found himself puttering around trying to perfect gas-lighting for people who often feared it and lived in a city with wooden water pipes and compost piles in their backyards. Pathetic.

  He glanced at the mantel above the fireplace and spotted the bottle of homemade whiskey given to him by one of his colleagues on his last birthday, then heard the spattering hiss of the coffee. Irish coffee. At least they hadn’t lost knowledge of every creature comfort.

  CHAPTER 5

  In matters that are so obscure and far beyond our vision, we find in Holy Scripture passages which can be interpreted in very different ways without prejudice to the faith we have received. In such cases, we should not rush in headlong and so firmly take our stand on one side that, if further progress in the search for truth justly undermines this position, we too fall with it.

  —Augustine of Hippo

  Petra rapped three times on Grace’s front door. The old woman met her at the threshold after a few moments. She’d been visiting her mentor each morning since the Newcomers’ entrance into the city. The Newcomers’ sudden appearance meant a great change was coming—one that she and Grace, as fellow teachers and spiritual leaders of the community, agreed they must help prepare the people for.

  Grace greeted her wearing a brown shawl over her bony shoulders. She was shivering despite having a good fire already blazing in her fieldstone hearth. Set atop the grill on the fire was Grace’s teakettle, a hand-forged Christmas gift Petra had given her some fifteen years earlier when their relationship was one of teacher and student. The kettle began to whistle at almost the same moment Petra crossed the threshold. Securing her long red hair in a ponytail to keep it from the fire, she lifted the kettle as Grace brought out handmade teacups and a plain breakfast of freshly baked bread, fruit jams, nuts, and cheese. Once places were set at the table nearest the fireplace, the two women bent their heads and folded their hands.

  “Bless us, O Lord,” Grace prayed, “and these thy gifts, which we are about to receive from thy bounty, through Christ our Lord. Amen.”

  “Amen,” Petra repeated, then pulled off her gray cotton turtleneck sweater.

  She knew whenever she visited Grace that she needed to do two things: dress in layers and pack her patience. In addition to Grace keeping her home almost stiflingly warm, she liked to “jaw”—as she called it—for a while before getting to the important matters at hand. It was a pretty common avoidance mechanism used by many Remnants.

  Grace talked about the birth of the twin Abu girls two doors down a week earlier and how their parents, Rotimi and Frances, had invited everyone to the baptism scheduled for that afternoon. She talked about how her houseplants needed so much water because of the heat inside the house. She talked about the Shakespeare sonnets she had read when she woke up at five and the Psalms she had read before going to sleep last night at midnight—then suggested almost as an aside that Petra might want to consider getting her seventh graders started on both. Petra made a mental note of that as Grace picked up a blanket she had been knitting, a beautiful thing composed of rich intricate swirls of warm earth tones, and joked that it was something no one at her age should ever contemplate beginning unless she had a written guarantee from the Big Man Upstairs that she’d live at least another year.

  Jokes about her imminent yet never arriving demise always elicited a wheezy laugh from Grace. Petra just fixed a grin back at her, never comfortable enough with such easy talk of death. While she believed in the afterlife, she had experienced enough death in her forty-nine years of life not to make light of it. Death—the existence of it, the reverence for it, the guilt associated with it among the Remnants who had lived to old age—had clung to her childhood home like a musk. Patrick and Carolyn Rogers had been broken by the death they had witnessed on Earth in the last days. Her parents could never really talk about what had happened, not even with the other adult Remnants. She knew her parents had been married on Earth some years before the Apocalypse, but to this day she had no idea if they had had other children there. Her father had been nearly forty when she was born three years after the Arrival. Those blank years had haunted her, even as a child. Petra was convinced that whenever her parents had looked at her they never saw anything but dead faces that resembled her own.

  Yet her parents’ losses had helped to form and strengthen Petra’s own faith. Whenever they had talked of good things from Earth-of-old, she could see the hand of a loving God at work. And she saw that hand even at the worst times in her own life: when her husband, Sam, and her older son, Christian, long gone, had been lost at sea. She knew the grief should have destroyed her. Yet it hadn’t. God had carried her in her time of grief just as he had her parents. She saw God’s hand now, helping to purify and ready humanity for the new world coming in the days ahead. If her parents could have her and still find purpose, despite witnessing the end of human civilization—maybe even the deaths of their own children—who was she to have doubts?

  “The people aren’t ready,” Grace said, stirring Petra out of her memories. “There is uncertainty in the air. And fear. People who are unsure of what will come next will fight because in changing times they cling to what they already know.” She set her nearly empty teacup on the table. “You need to make them understand, Petra. You need to help us keep the peace.”

  “Me? Wait. Don’t you mean us, Grace?”

  Grace laughed. Her arms were folded across the sunken breasts of her reed-thin chest, the palm of her right hand pressed to her face. “Child, how long do you think I’m going to live? I’m blessed that I’ve lived this long and seen so much. I’ve seen this city built and generations born. And now I’ve seen the Newcomers. But when New Jerusalem descends from heaven like a bride, I’ll already be on the other side. You have to prepare the people, you and those who follow you. All I can do is help you as much as I can for as long as I can.”

  “What’s coming, Grace? We’ve talked about so many things. I see that things are changing—and I feel that they are—but I don’t understand everything. And the timeline in Revelation is, well—”

  Grace laughed again. “Muddled?”

  “Well, yeah.”

  “Think so, huh?” Grace nodded once, twice, as if she had been simply waiting for a question to be asked and now knew it was the time to answer it. “Fair enough. And so it is muddled. That’s why it had so many interpretations before we got here. But I still see prophecy being fulfilled, as many did in the end days. As we all did that first day on the beach when, out of that chaos, all of our children were miraculously returned to us—every single one of them—at the very same instant.”

  Petra took her thick-veined hand, as knotty and as fragile as a dry tree branch, and gave it a gentle squeeze. “Tell me what you see and how you see it.”

  “You Firsters never believe us old-timers when we talk like this.”

  “We do. We’ve never lost faith or had doubts. We just believe in peace more than in walls and standing armies.”

  “Peace will come, in God’s own time. But not without strife.”

  “Tell me. Please.”

  “The one hundred and forty-four thousand survived. And in the years since, we’ve begun to rebuild humanity. We’ve been rewarded with peace among ourselves—and with others,” she said, bumping her chin skyward. “Now a new time is coming. These four—they’re the beginning of what Revelation describes as the pagan resurrection. You heard the Tylers. They’re good people. But they don’t know God. They love knowledge without wisdom and they survived like animals, instinctually—by burying themselves in holes. But they, like all of us, will be raised for judgme
nt. And more will come. Whether this will happen before, during, or after the last great rebellion, I don’t know. But all things will be made new. It has been foretold. And now we’re witnessing it.”

  “How do we—how do I—get the people to understand what’s to come?”

  Grace put the younger woman’s hand between her old ones. “Follow the Apostles. Go out and preach the good news. Gather the believers, and get them to preach as well.”

  Petra thought of her students, her duties. She pictured her desk at home piled with papers. She then thought of John and was glad he was grown. It made it easier to walk away from everything else.

  “When should I start?”

  Grace looked at the light shining through her window. Outside were the first stirrings of the morning—footsteps, greetings, conversations, laughter. “No time like the present.”

  Right on time. Hard not to spot that ramrod-straight posture in this crowd. Always the good soldier. Always on schedule. Always doing what he’s supposed to do, even with his doubts.

  “Uncle Jake?”

  “Sofie.” She held up her cheek for him to kiss. “Good to see you. What’re you doing out this way?”

  “Off to my shift in equipment repair.” She looked at her uncle for a long moment. “Were you just out to the cemetery?”

  He grinned. “Getting pretty regular in my habits, eh?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You ever go out there to see your mom?”

  “Not really. I don’t see much of a point.” She tucked a lock of strawberry-blond hair behind her ear. “So, you’ve heard about what Grace and Petra have been doing lately? Going out and preaching about the Newcomers?”

  “Sure. Why?”

  “Did you know they’re planning on having a big meeting in Central Square tonight?”

  “I’ve heard mention.”

  “And it doesn’t . . . worry you?”

  “Why should it?”

  “Uncle Jake.”

  “They’ve a right to free speech. I think they’re just trying to ease people’s fears. No harm in that.”

  “How’s talking about a possible last rebellion against God easing people’s fears?”

  “Sofie, you know it’s not as simple as that. They’re talking about something that leads to everlasting peace—”

  “Come on, Uncle Jake.”

  “Listen, I have to run. I’ll be by soon to see your girls, and maybe we can talk then, okay?”

  Sofie watched her uncle walk down into the crowded street, his posture back to full attention as he acknowledged hellos from acquaintances with that confident nod of his. A moment later she felt a familiar arm slip around her waist and a pair of lips kiss her cheek. She didn’t turn to face her husband.

  “Got the supplies,” Lee said as he rubbed her back. “Was that your uncle I saw you talking to?”

  “Yes.”

  “Does he know about the glorious revival meeting tonight?”

  “Yup. And, like Dad, he’s doing nothing about it.” Sofie turned to him. “So the question is, what’re you going to do about it, Gordon?”

  That evening, Central Square was filled with hundreds upon hundreds of Remnants and Firsters and Seconds, all standing in various attitudes. Grace and Petra were on a canopied platform that occupied the center of the square. Grace had spoken for much of the time and was now eating and resting at the back of the platform as Petra preached and answered questions shouted out by members of the crowd.

  “You must not give in to doubt or fear,” Petra continued. “Don’t consult such emotions. Push them out. We have all endured great hardships, lost many loved ones. But we have been purified and made stronger by our trials and struggles. A new breed of humanity lives here, divorced from hatred and petty jealousies. We can worship God with clear hearts, knowing we are loved and ready for judgment along with our pagan brothers and sisters who—yes, as we have seen, praise God—have begun to rise from the dead.”

  “Oh really, this is too much!” a voice, not from the platform, said quite loudly. The crowd turned almost in unison to discover Gordon Lee standing against a nearby tree.

  Petra, stunned into silence, stared at him until Grace appeared by her side. Grace leaned over the platform’s edge, balancing herself on her cane, and said in a quiet but firm voice: “If you’re drunk, go home and sober up, my son. We can talk later. There’s no use in your being here now.”

  Smirking and putting a finger aside of his nose, he then wagged it at her. “You’d like it if I were drunk, wouldn’t you? It’d make these people doubt what I have to say. But apart from a glass of wine with dinner, I can assure you I’m quite sober. So I won’t let a little drinking get in the way of my logic—though I do hope my logic will get in the way of these people’s belief in the complete accuracy of your prophecy.”

  Lee then mounted the three steps and stood on the platform just to the left of Petra and Grace. He smiled at them, then turned to the assembly. “My friends, I think it is important—especially among the faithful like ourselves—to question interpretations made by a select few of a specific, shall we say, generational demographic.”

  “No one has ever said you couldn’t,” Grace said clearly enough so that the audience could know a debate was on.

  Lee smiled thinly at her. “True enough. But our own thoughts in such matters are often disregarded unless they agree fully with the ruling generation. But I digress.” He turned back to the crowd. “The point is we just simply don’t have all of the information. And we haven’t ever had all of the information. We have but a handful of books from Earth-of-old. A mere handful. Why this selection, I don’t know. Perhaps this was God’s way of letting us know the true path. Fair enough. I won’t debate the larger point. But we can all agree that all our lives we’ve been told to look back to the Bible for proof that the prophecies about the end times had come, just as it was foretold in Revelation. I’m here to tell you that we’ve been getting only one interpretation of events, just one—their interpretation.” Here he pointed at Grace and Petra. “The Bible, as you all well know, does not present exact dates or clear facts. It also, it must be said, does not spell out destiny through prophecy alone. So let me be clear: no destiny, no clear historical record.”

  He held up pleading hands. “So what’s my point? Friends, some of our other books tell us that dinosaurs once walked the Earth, that all life evolved from lower life-forms. These truths are not in the Bible. They were discovered because men like us devoted their lives to uncovering them one fact at a time. Let us take a cue from them. Let us devote this time to truly understanding humanity’s end and its new beginning here on this planet. Let us decide for ourselves how Revelation speaks to us as individuals—not simply as adherents to an orthodoxy. Let us, in the end, think for ourselves, decide for ourselves what the Newcomers mean.”

  The heat of the crowd, not that long ago fueled by devotion to the prophecies being revealed by Grace and Petra, dissipated, leaving behind a sudden absence of noise. A moment had come and passed. A click. A connection. A change.

  Grace took a step forward and looked at Lee, intently studying him in full view of the audience.

  “Gordon, you talk about evolution as if this is some sort of new revelation.” Her play on words brought up chuckles from the crowd. “We know the Bible cannot be taken literally in that sense. But the Bible is inspired and inerrant, and what it teaches is the truth. Saint Augustine, as you may recall, did not believe that the six days in the creation story were literal days, since it was absurd to imagine mornings and evenings could exist with no sun to have them.”

  “Which just proves my point—that Scripture has more to offer than just your interpretation.”

  “Let me finish. Genesis is the way the creation of life was explained to our ancestors. It says the Lord created the Earth in six days. But who can say how long a day is in God’s eye? And who says that the seventh day of rest isn’t the time between the Lord’s first and second comings? We can
’t—we mustn’t—read everything literally. But the guideposts are still there, markers we must recognize. And I’m telling you that we’re seeing such a marker today!”

  “Because of what Revelation says?”

  “Yes. Because of Revelation,” Grace responded, her puckered chin held high in defiance.

  “Let’s go over what Revelation says exactly, shall we?” He smirked. “The world was destroyed?”

  “Burned out to a pulp,” she said with a lost look in her eyes. “We all saw it. Endless days of suffering. Those not destroyed in the initial attack, which, as Revelation says, burned a third of the Earth, died from the lack of food, plague, the poisoned water, or under the heels of the invading armies. The Orangemen coming down—you can’t imagine it.” She looked at him from under weary eyebrows. “Do we have to go through this?”

  A genuine sense of sorrow passed over Lee’s face. “This must be unpleasant for you. I apologize and will refrain from additional questions in this area. So yes—the Earth was destroyed and the Remnants survived.”

  “Yes, we did. Only later, after we conducted the first census, did we begin to believe we were truly the firstfruits, sealed by God.”

  “Sealed how? On the forehead, according to Revelation?”

  “Again you’re being too literal.”

  “Please bear with me. Weren’t the survivors supposed to be Jewish people?”

  “We are of the twelve spiritual tribes of Israel. We even came down in twelve cargo containers, each holding twelve thousand people. Are some of us Jewish ethnically? Yes. These days it’s likely all of us have some Jewish blood in us somewhere.”

  He wagged his finger at Grace again. “Seems you’re getting off here on a technicality.”

  “And you are using technicalities to undermine inherent truths of our faith. If you had been alive in the last days and during the days after the Arrival, you would not be filled with such—”

  “What, reservation?”