Persecution: God's Other Children. Book 2

by Rob Mclean

  “Isn’t that in Israel?” John’s geography wasn’t his strong suit.

  “Yes,” She gave him a patronising pat on the arm. “It’s a holy city for all three Abrahamic religions, but it’s been Jewish for a long time now.”

  “So they have the same religious book, except for a couple of updates,” John counted on his fingers. “They share the same Holy city and they come from the same part of the world and they used to live happily together.” He held out four fingers. “And now they look like they’re putting on a united front against the alien, all on account of their religious beliefs.”

  Angela leaned back and gave him a ‘yeah, well what else would you expect?’ look.

  “My enemy’s enemy is my friend,” John misquoted something he had heard in some long-forgotten war movie.

  She nodded with agreement. She wore a long cotton patterned dress with a short sleeved white t-shirt underneath. Sandals and a plain silver crucifix around her neck finished off her conservative look. No doubt her mother had overseen her attire, but the dress was tight fitting around the waist and the way it showed her figure was unavoidable. Having seen so many women at nightclubs and beaches wearing far less, his imagination had no trouble guessing what lay beneath.

  If his face betrayed his thoughts, she gave him no indication that she noticed. Instead, she held up a finger and continued with her thoughts. “The President would personally be most likely to support the fight against the Anti-Christ, but can’t because she doesn’t have the political backing from Congress or even enough of her own party.”

  John nodded his agreement. “Jarred tells me that the on-line polls are saying that support for the Alien is high in the U.S. The feeling against Iran is also high, as it is across other Western nations.”

  “Yeah, so it would be political suicide if she did what she believed was the morally right thing to do.”

  John grinned. “Politicians have been saying that for ages.”

  Angela rewarded him with another of her radiant smiles. “Besides,” she added, “that would put us in the same bucket as Iran and all those other countries.”

  “And we wouldn’t want that, would we?” John pulled her in close. She twisted as he drew her near and nestled her back against his chest. His arms enveloped her, hugging her firmly as he drank in her essence. She responded by snuggling in closer.

  “I don’t know,” she tilted her head to the side, exposing the nape of her neck. “I’d like to visit some of those countries.”

  “Visit maybe, but not live there.”

  He brushed back her soft hair and traced a line down her neck. The smell of her hair and the perfume on her skin filled his head. He pressed his lips to her skin and felt her whole body quiver in response. She pulled away.

  “Sorry,” he murmured.

  She half-turned her head and whispered in a low and guilty voice, “No, I kinda liked it.” She reached back, drew his face closer and kissed him quickly. “But not here, not now.”

  He grunted a form of agreement and tried to continue their conversation, if only to show her that he was in control of his desires. “But what if you’re all wrong about the Anti-Christ thing? What if he really is an envoy from an alien civilization that came to help us, but we just tried to nuke them?”

  “If we’re wrong and the Envoy is who he says he is…” Angela’s voice trailed off as she considered the possibilities.

  “Then you’d have nothing to worry about.” Clarice said. She had appeared silently, dish-cloth in hand and stood behind their lounge. John wondered how long she had been standing there and how much she had seen. He suspected that she had been listening to their conversation from the kitchen the whole time and he wondered just how much she had over-heard.

  “We’d all live our short pointless lives and die a cold final death on some God-forsaken planet somewhere out there,” She waved her thin arm towards the ceiling. “But that’s not what’s happening here. These are the days of Elijah. There are no such things as aliens. We are Gods only divine creation and this ‘envoy’ is the Devil incarnate.”

  Angela nodded in agreement. “Either way, we just have to pray and trust that God will deliver us.”

  “Who’s God?” John asked, although he knew it was provoking trouble. “Yours or the Alien’s God?”

  “Aren’t they the same?” Angela asked.

  “Don’t be foolish child,” her mother chided with a stern frown. “That would be like saying that the Muslim or Hindu Gods are the same as ours.”

  “Aren’t they?” John asked. He tried to cover his antagonism with a bland innocent expression, but he felt that her fixed views needed to be challenged.

  Clarice gave him an icy stare. He could see her taking a measured breath through a clenched jaw before answering. “I just hope and pray that one day you will see that there is only one true God and that these distractions,” she pointed to the Envoy’s image on the television, “only serve to lead us away from His glory.”

  John wanted to point out that if the alien was real, then the very existence of intelligent alien life showed that their religion and all the other Earthly religions to be parochial, man-made and now totally redundant.

  ‘But is it worth it?’ his father’s voice whispered in his ear.

  John had his mouth open and was trying to work out how to put all these thoughts into words that wouldn’t be too offensive, when his phone chimed. The interruption helped him to decide to hold his tongue, preferring to avoid losing the most valuable thing in his world. Instead he checked the message on his phone.

  When he read it, his face paled and his mouth fell open.

  “What is it?” Angela asked.

  “It’s Jarred,” John said. His eyes were glazed over and his thoughts were far away. “He says Beijing is going off-scale.”

  Chapter 4

  Later that same evening, John returned home to find Jarred on the lounge with his laptop in front of him, the television news on in the background and the remote at his side.

  “Find anything?” John asked as he threw his keys on the kitchen bench.

  “Not a thing,” Jarred replied without looking up. “But we don’t really expect to for a while yet. The timing’s not precise; we only got a few hours warning when the alien arrived, but for the nuking of Cairo, we had a couple of days notice. It doesn’t make much sense right now, but the more events we get, who knows? Our timing might get better.”

  “The brown stuff will really hit the fan if someone decides to nuke Beijing,” John said, fixing himself an orange juice.

  “Our study partners running the R.N.G. in Beijing know what their readings mean. They must have passed on their information to their government because they’ve been threatening to go all medieval on anyone who might be thinking about it. They’re not mentioning anyone in particular, but they renounced Iran again and reminded all their nuclear armed neighbours of their willingness to retaliate in full. It could easily get ugly – big time.” Jarred looked up from his laptop. “Hey, do you think we should go shopping again?”

  “Sure, if it helps you sleep.”

  “Oh, I sleep just fine,” Jarred went back to his search engines. John saw that he had over a dozen windows open on his computer. “A clear conscience and fatalistic attitude.”

  “Well, I don’t.” John grabbed the remote and flicked through the channels as he made himself comfortable in the recliner.

  “M.S.B.?” Jarred asked with a cheeky grin.

  John rolled his eyes. “I know I shouldn’t ask, but…”

  “Massive sperm build-up.” Jarred’s smile widened.

  John shook his head. He figured that he must be hanging with Angela and her folks too much because his brother’s bawdy taunt sounded off. “No, no problems there.”

  “Really? How do you manage that? Did you have a bilateral testicle-ectomy?”

  John just shook his head again.

  “I mean as well as the chastity vow.” Jarred was really relishing
the opportunity to stir up his brother.

  John hesitated momentarily, weighing up if he should confide in his brother or not. ‘Tell him,’ his father’s voice urged softly within his skull. It was the nudge he needed to make the decision.

  John took a deep breath before saying, “I’ve been having these dreams…”

  “Wet dreams? Of course,” Jarred grin stretched wide as he nodded to himself. “A natural consequence of unnatural abstinence.”

  John began to regret saying anything. Normally his father’s voice was a sure guide. “Look, you don’t need to go telling anyone. Okay?”

  “Oh sure, I’d imagine that Angela would probably call it off if she knew you were dreaming about her like that.”

  John said nothing, but it did make him wonder how young, healthy men, Christian or not could possibly manage to stay celibate if even their dreams counted against them.

  “It was with her, wasn’t it?”

  John hated the way that his brother’s sharp mind zeroed in on his evasion. When he didn’t answer again, it didn’t surprise him that Jarred soon worked it out.

  “It wasn’t, was it?” Jarred sat up straight and bounced. “Who was it?” Then without waiting for an answer he fired off a long list of celebrities, actresses and singers, most of whom had some link to the sci-fi scene.

  “No, they’re all your dream girls.” It was John’s turn to grin.

  “Was it Nat?” Jarred’s eyes narrowed.

  “No.” The grin soured from John’s face.

  “Hey, sorry man. I didn’t mean…”

  John waved away his brother’s apology. He knew him well enough to know that getting the right answer was more important than any feelings John might still have about his dead girlfriend.

  “No, it was with Eloise.” Then seeing Jarred’s blank look, he added, “my boss.”

  “Ah, the dominant powerful woman fantasy,” Jarred nodded as though it was something he was very familiar with. “I don’t know her. Is she hot?”

  “Oh yes, very. But it isn’t just a dream. She want’s me to father a child for her, for real.”

  Jarred’s mouth fell open. “No way!”

  “That’s right, no way.” John snorted. “I wouldn’t do it with her. She just wants a kid to add to everything else she’s got. Just another box ticked on her selfish ‘to do’ list. She doesn’t even want the kid to know his father. What sort of life would that be?”

  “Probably one of privilege, wealth and opportunity, I’d say.” Jarred shrugged.

  John frowned. “We’ll it ain’t happening. She can’t force me, can she?”

  “Only in your dreams, right?” Jarred then laughed at his own joke.

  John felt his mood lighten as well. He gave his brother a half grin and shook his head. “But there are stranger dreams that I’ve been having.”

  “The psychiatrist is in.” Jarred declared and to John’s surprise, Jarred expression became serious. He closed his laptop and muted the television.

  John then went on to tell Jarred all about the recurring dreams about the ‘woman in yellow’ How in his first dream she was hunted and shot, but didn’t die. She then appeared in another dream at a train station as he was herding the religious people into cattle carriages before she started glowing brighter and brighter before going nova and exploding, then finally, in the latest dream how she had claimed that she was Angela’s Guardian Angel before turning into Eloise.

  After a thoughtful pause, Jarred replied, “Theories about the purpose and meaning of dreams vary, but some say there are several kinds of dreams.” He counted off one finger. “Firstly there are the stress related dreams; where your mind goes over the things that are worrying you. These might be those where you are running away from something that’s chasing you, but you are too afraid to look back. Or you are trying to do something, but it all keeps going wrong.”

  “Been there,” John said.

  Jarred counted off a second finger. “Then there’s those where you’ve come across something new during the day, like a new book with an engrossing story-line, or a movie you’ve just watched, or in my case, something at uni that’s got me stumped. These are the problem-solving dreams, sort of related to the stress dreams, but where your mind keeps working all through the night on problems that need to be solved.”

  “Yeah, every time I get a new video-game, I have dreams about it.”

  Jarred gave his brother a pitying look. “The Tetris Effect, I guess that counts.”

  “Hey, it might not be the Grand Unifying Theory, but it was important to me at the time.”

  “Okay,” Jarred waved away his brother’s objections and held up a third finger. “Then there are the lucid dreams…”

  “Lucid?”

  “The ones where you are aware that you’re dreaming and have some input into how they unfold.”

  “That’s the ones I was talking about,” John said, jabbing his finger at his brother.

  “Some mystics say that they come about when your soul leaves your body and travels in the astral…”

  “The what?”

  Jarred shrugged. “The astral plane is supposed to be the spiritual level of existence that most closely matches our own Earthly, physical existence. Above that are the ethereal and then the various levels of Heaven culminating with Nirvana or Godhead or whatever. Below are the deeper circles of Hell.”

  “So you’re saying that my spirit actually left my body and met up with Angela’s guardian angel?”

  “No, that’s just one theory. The current scientific explanation, put simply, is that your dream or REM sleep cycle is overlapping with the wakeful cycle. You end up with the awareness that you are dreaming and so can do things in the dream. Buddhists have known about it since the eighth century.”

  “How do you know all that stuff?”

  “I don’t know, just things I picked up before starting work with the Human Consciousness Project.”

  “Cool, so maybe I’ve met up with Angela’s guardian angel and now she’s testing me.” John liked the thought of that. He felt he would be up to any challenge.

  Jarred shook his head. “I don’t know about all that guardian angel stuff. After all, there are more people alive now than have ever died in the whole history of mankind. There simply wouldn’t be enough dead people to go around.”

  “Maybe not everyone has one,” John ventured.

  “Yeah, well that would explain why some people behave like they do.”

  “Like they don’t have a conscience?”

  “Are you trying to say they’re the same thing? They’re both internal voices, but one is from you and the other would be from an outside source.” Jarred tugged absently at his ear while he gave the idea some thought. “The only way to prove it is if it gave you some information that you didn’t already know. Lottery numbers, for example.”

  “But, money is the root of all evil, remember?” John wagged his finger as he picked up the T.V. remote. “So I don’t think angels will help us there.”

  “Probably not, but it would be fairly conclusive proof.”

  John nodded his agreement. He flicked through the channels absently, his mind still on their conversation. He preferred to think that he had actually met Angela’s guardian angel and that his dreams meant something other than idle wish fulfilment.

  Suddenly, he remembered part of his last dream. “To live is to dream…” he said, then frowned. He couldn’t remember the rest of what she had said.

  “And to die is to awaken.” Jarred finished it for him.

  “Whoa, man,” John thrust the remote at his brother. “That’s it. That’s what she said to me in the last dream.”

  “The guardian angel dream woman told you that?” Jarred raised his eyebrows as John nodded enthusiastically. “It’s a Hopi Indian saying,” Jarred continued, “but I wouldn’t have thought you’d have known that.”

  “I don’t.” John frowned as his expression changed from eager to flustered. Well, I mean, I
didn’t.”

  Jarred gave him a condescending wave. “What you mean is that you don’t think you knew it, but you must have heard it before and just forgotten. It would still be there in your sub-conscious. Your dream mind accessed it and now your conscious mind sees it as ‘new’ information.”

  John’s shoulders slumped. A crestfallen expression crossed his face. Jarred’s logic was inescapable, but still he didn’t want to believe it was all only a dream.

  “Of course there are millions of cases where people claim to have had prophetic dreams,” Jarred continued oblivious to John’s turmoil. “But again, they are mostly undocumented, subjective experiences that can’t be reproduced under laboratory conditions.”

  “But what about the ones that do come true, don’t they count?”

  Jarred shook his head and gave his brother another pitying look. “If you get enough people making all sorts of predictions, then statistically, there will be a few hits. You can’t hold them up as proof and ignore all the ones that were wrong.”

  “So you don’t believe in any of this spiritual stuff?

  “Oh, the Bible is full of prophetic dreams and there is a huge cross-cultural belief in an after-life of sorts. Who knows? There might be something more to life – that’s what we’re hoping to discover with the Human Consciousness project, but until then, until it is proven otherwise, we’re basically ‘castles made of sand’, to quote the great Jimi Hendrix.”

  “You think we’re just meat and when we die, that’s it?”

  “At this stage, yes. Don’t you?”

  “I don’t know…”

  “Oh come on. There’s no real, reproducible proof of any sort of after-life. Or if there is, then it is all being kept from us in some sort of cosmic cover-up. Besides, Occam’s razor says that there probably isn’t.

  “Occam’s what?”

  “William Occam was a philosopher and he basically said that the simpler explanation is often the best. So rather than saying that there is an after-life and that God or whoever doesn’t want us to know about it, for whatever reason, it is easier just to say that there is none. Besides, it’s what our alien friends seem to be telling us.”