Persecution: God's Other Children. Book 2

by Rob Mclean

  “Go home Godhead,” a different voice called out. “This is our party.”

  “You can all party in Hell,” Zeke yelled back at the crowd. The sudden change in the crowd had taken Zeke by surprise. John couldn’t help but smile. It did a lot to help him to believe that maybe there might be a just and fair God after all.

  Someone threw a balled up wad of rubbish. Zeke ducked, but it was followed by a soft-drink can. Zeke was splashed with sticky sugary drink when he blocked it with his forearm. Others in the crowd laughed and jeered.

  “Feed him to the lions,” someone called out and the crowd laughed and heckled.

  John frowned and shook his head. He could see that the crowd had turned and were getting worked up. Zeke’s attitude was not helping. Marcus and Akeem were doing their best to keep the crowd and Zeke apart, but while they held the crowd back, Zeke yelled from behind.

  “What’s with this guy?” Grace asked. “First he fronts the four of us and now he’s ready to take on the whole crowd.”

  “He probably thinks he’s got God on his side,” John said.

  “That and a good lawyer,” Grace said for John’s benefit, “and now he thinks he’s bulletproof.”

  “Maybe we should put it to the test and leave him to it?”

  Grace ignored him and called for support. Some security personnel nearby had already noticed the disturbance and were already on their way, but John saw many more BlackSky staff converging from all around the park.

  John followed Grace and with a shake of his head, stepped in to help. “I can’t believe we’re trying to save this loser’s skin,” he said as he joined his shield to those of Marcus and Akeem and added his strength to hold back the increasingly agitated crowd.

  “We’re maintaining order,” she called out as much to John as to Zeke as she pulled him away from the confrontation.

  “I don’t need your help.” Zeke spat at her as he shook off her hold.

  “It’s for your own safety,” she said grabbing his arm. She went to grab his other arm and bring them together to hand-cuff him, but Zeke twisted about and slithered out of her hold. He reversed the hold and had Grace in a wrist lock before she could register what had happened.

  John watched while he strained against the press of people. He saw Grace wince as Zeke applied pressure to her bent wrist. With her free hand she drew her baton, but Zeke twisted her arm behind her back.

  “Love to stay and play,” he said, then pushed her forwards. He swept his foot under her as he pushed, sending her falling heavily on her front. John watched helplessly as he scampered away faster than a prairie rabbit.

  Grace groaned, rolled over and sat up, rubbing her wrist. The BlackSky security that arrived added their strength to the phalanx of shields that surrounded Grace. The crowd jeered and taunted as they watched their quarry disappear into the crowd. Their cries changed into celebratory cheers and self congratulatory high-fives at having driven off the interloper.

  John helped Grace to her feet and ordered his staff to stand down.

  “Did you see that?” Grace was still rubbing her sore wrist. “He knows some moves.”

  John peered in the direction that Zeke had run, but he could not be seen. “I suppose we could track him with surveillance cameras, but he hasn’t done anything, has he?”

  “Besides breaking my wrist, you mean?”

  “Yeah, there’s that,” John said, still staring out over the crowd. He saw some girl throw Zeke’s orange hoodie through the air. Someone else then threw it towards the lake. He had discarded it as part of his getaway. Some homeless person would be wearing it tomorrow. “But what was he doing here?”

  “He came to have a shot at you, to provoke you,” Grace poked him in the chest to emphasise her point. John saw that she was poking him with Zeke’s phone.

  “Hey, you got his phone. Good work.”

  “He’s not the only one with some slick moves,” Grace grinned.

  “Might help us work out what he was doing here.”

  “He’s obviously cut up over you stealing his girl, so he’s here to stir up trouble with you.”

  “But in a bright orange hoodie? Do you think he was wanting to be noticed?”

  “Who knows? Everyone in this town’s an attention whore.”

  “Sure, but how’d he know I’d be here today?”

  “Do you think he got lucky, or maybe his old girlfriend told him?”

  John tried to remember if he had told Angela about this job. He thought he had, but he couldn’t be sure, they talked about a lot of things…

  Their thoughts were interrupted by Kurt, one of Grace’s squad. He came running over, breathless under his heavy black body-armour. “Boss, you have to see this.”

  He turned and without waiting for them, led them to an open topped trash bin that had been hastily roped off. When John and Grace arrived, Kurt explained that a vagrant had been fishing in the bin and found a suspicious looking package. After all the other terrorist attacks, he wasn’t taking any chances.

  They cordoned off the area and moved the crowd back while they waited for the bomb squad to arrive.

  Grace scrolled through Zeke’s phone. She scratched her head and handed the phone to John.

  “It hasn’t any numbers in it,” she said. “No call history, received calls, texts, nothing, still got the plastic on the screen. Looks like it’s never been used.”

  “Nothing to link Zeke to this phone,” John said, handing it back.

  “Except we saw it was his.”

  “We’d be considered hostile witnesses,” John shrugged. “Besides, he could always say he found it.”

  Grace started to protest, but John cut her off. “If this package in the bin thing turns out to be significant, we’ll turn in the phone, but I bet they find that the sim card was wiped and came from a stolen phone.”

  “Do you think he’d be up for something like that?” Grace frowned. “It’s one thing to protest, but to kill innocent people…”

  “They’re not innocent. Not from his way of thinking. They’re, I mean, we are all Godless abominations. We don’t rate the same in his world.”

  “Do you think so?” John could see from her troubled expression that Grace was struggling, just as he had, to see the world as the righteous did.

  “It’s us and them; the saved and the damned, the sheep and the goats,” John shrugged and shook his head in disgust. “At least that’s how he sees it.”

  “Well at least we know where he lives,” Grace slipped the phone into one of her many pockets. “Maybe you should ask your new girlfriend if she thinks her ex would be up for mass murder?”

  “Yeah, I will.”

  “And if she let him know you would be here today.”

  John’s frown deepened. “Yeah, that and a few more questions besides.”

  Chapter 22

  Angela skipped down the stairs to answer the home phone in the hallway, calling out to her mother that she would get it.

  The late morning sun shone through the window surrounding the front door, reflecting on the polished floorboards to bathe the hallway in a warm glow.

  To her surprise, it was John. He wasn’t supposed to call on the home phone, not if they wanted a private conversation.

  “Hi, what’s going on? Forgotten my cell-phone number?”

  “Nah, didn’t want you to get a brain tumour.”

  Clarice had always been against using cell-phones for that reason, but Angela suspected that it was more likely that she couldn’t listen to her conversations from the other phone in her bedroom. She wasn’t at all surprised when she then heard the ‘click’ of the other phone being picked up.

  “So thoughtful.” Angela had explained all about her mother’s eavesdropping to John, so she knew that he was having a dig. He couldn’t understand why she tolerated her mother’s ways, but he didn’t understand that her protectiveness came from love.

  “There’s a few things I have to ask you,” he said getting suddenly
serious.

  “Um, sure. You want to talk now?”

  “Probably not. Are we still good for tonight?”

  There was an engagement party for one of her church girlfriends that she and Zeke had been invited to long before she and Zeke had split. Angela still wanted to go and was happy to find that John was willing to go with her. “Sure, but Christy says she and Aaron can pick me up. We can meet you there.”

  She heard John grumble something, but agreed that it would save time and fuel.

  “Okay, see you then,” she said, trying to sound cheerful.

  “Sure,” he said, and then hung up. Angela found his short call strange. He usually sounded happy to hear from her, telling her that he missed her and was looking forward to being with her again. Maybe it was because he knew her mother was listening that he sounded distant, but she couldn’t help but to feel something was troubling him. It occurred to her that somehow she had come to care how he felt.

  She hadn’t heard from Zeke since God knows when. It showed how much he cared. She knew that unless Zeke came around soon, she could easily forget about him forever.

  Her thoughts turned to John and the impossibility of a relationship with him. His lack of faith, his dreadful mother, his relationship with his boss. Despite all that, she imagined running away with him from everything and just the two of them living a happily married life. A nice home, maybe on a bit of land and eventually a couple of kids – definitely not just one, she couldn’t inflict that sort of loneliness on anyone. She would have three at least, she thought with a nod.

  Clarice bustled past, dispelling her thoughts. “Who was it?” she asked as she disappeared into the kitchen. Angela suspected her mother found it easier to pretend ignorance from a room away.

  Angela followed behind. “I’m sure you could guess.”

  Clarice was busying herself getting the midday meal started, but she stopped to glare at her daughter. “I haven’t got time for your silly games. Just tell me who it was.”

  Angela sighed and feigned disappointment to hide her irritation. “It was John.”

  “And what did he want?” Clarice went back to her lunch preparation, getting things out of the pantry.

  Angela frowned. “He said he had questions he wanted to ask me.”

  “He couldn’t ask them over the phone?”

  Angela gave her mother a look of disbelief. “Maybe he couldn’t talk just now, you know, maybe he wanted to talk privately?”

  Clarice stood with the pantry door open, a bag of potatoes hanging in her hand. “Whatever do you mean?” her words a smooth blend of innocence tempered with an underlying challenge.

  Angela returned her mother’s look with a guileless smile. She knew just how far to push her mother and she knew she was at the limit. Angela was happy that her mother understood that her habit of eavesdropping was known and therefore a waste of time and effort.

  “Maybe he couldn’t talk because he was at work,” she shrugged as if she didn’t care, but added, “or something like that.”

  “Probably wants to find a way to worm his way out of his pledge,” Clarice shot a probing look at her daughter.

  “No, nothing like that,” Angela said. She had expected a worldly guy like him to have struggled with a chastity vow, but to her pleasant surprise, he had been the more insistent on keeping it. She wondered about his motivation. It gave her a warm happy glow inside to think that it was driven by his absolute devotion to her, but there was just enough of her mother’s cynicism to question it.

  “They’re all the same,” Clarice scowled. “Especially at your age, only after one thing…”

  “No. There’s been no problems there. He’s been the good one.” She gave her mother a knowing grin, hoping to allay her fears.

  “Well there will be sooner or later,” Clarice said, ignoring her daughter’s attempts to lighten her mood. “Unless he’s got someone else. I wouldn’t put it past him.”

  “No mom, there’s no-one else.”

  “or he has some other way of finding release.”

  “I…, I wouldn’t know. We haven’t talked about that sort of thing.”

  “He didn’t promise anything about that, did he? Of course he wouldn’t. Mind you,” Clarice prattled on as she peeled the potatoes. “A promise from the worldly means nothing, not without the fear of God behind it.”

  Angela said nothing. She knew it was pointless engaging her mother in a debate on some subjects and this was one of them. To do so would only push her further into her ‘zone’ and only invited a prolonged ranting lecture.

  “What you don’t understand,” Clarice said as she covered the potatoes she had put in a saucepan with water, “is that for whatever reason God cursed all men with lustful urges. They can’t help it; it’s just the way they were made. They’re weak and it’s up to us, their women, to help them control themselves. Otherwise, they can be led into a life of sin and debauchery.” She waved a fork in Angela’s face to emphasise her point.

  Angela frowned and took a step back. “So you’re saying that John and Zeke are essentially the same, both slaves to their, um…”

  “Their animal natures, yes,” she said with an emphatic nod, happy that her daughter understood.

  She went back to preparing the food and spoke without looking up at Angela. “Except that Ezekiel has accepted Jesus into his life and so has the chance to be influenced by the grace of God. And that’s why, if you know what’s best for you, you won’t be marrying this John fellow.”

  Angela looked at her harsh little mother and wondered if she had ever felt the way Angela felt now. Had she ever longed to be touched, to be kissed? Had she ever craved to be held and loved, to be as one with someone?

  She shook her head at the thought. She knew her mother had once been young and pretty, but where had the mean spirit come from? Had it always been there, or was it something that came with getting old?

  “It must have been a miracle that I was ever born,” Angela said, a thought spoken aloud.

  Her mother blushed, and then unexpectedly smiled. She put her hand on Angela’s arm. “Your father wasn’t always old and sick, you know.”

  Angela said nothing. Instead she just bit her lip and nodded.

  *

  Aaron and Christy pulled up out front a little late. Angela had hoped to escape before they came to the door. She knew her mother wouldn’t like them.

  Angela sat with her father listening to the news on the radio - something about disease outbreaks amongst the survivors and rescuers in the ruins of Cairo.

  “Could’ve seen that coming.” Her father shook his head. “Some people just can’t get a break.”

  “Yes dear,” her mother replied distractedly. To her they were only foreigners and she had other things on her mind. She had planted herself by the front window and was watching the outside world. She had the pleasure of announcing the arrival of Christy and Aaron. “Are these the people giving you a lift tonight?”

  Angela groaned as she went over to the window. She frowned at her mother and her obtrusive surveillance.

  “Yes. You’ve met Christy before, remember?” She tried to pull the curtain closed, but her mother brushed her hand away.

  “Where is it you’re going? She’s dressed like a harlot.”

  “An engagement party, mom.” She left the comment about Christy’s dress alone. She looked fabulous in a pair of white, stretchy, cotton tights and a gold shimmering tank top that hung flatteringly from her slim figure. Angela felt underdressed by comparison, in her denim, over the knee skirt and stilettos.

  “Who’s the scruff sniffing around after her?” Her mother’s face wrinkled as she scrutinised the couple.

  “That’s Aaron.” Angela could understand her mother’s instant disapproval of him. She had felt the same way when she had first met him too. Angela reached across and shut the curtains firmly. “But we don’t judge a book by its cover, do we?”

  “No, but you can tell right away if it’s fic
tion.”

  Angela rolled her eyes and gave her mother a perfunctory kiss on the cheek. “They’re both Christians okay?” she said as she walked over to kiss her father goodbye.

  “Take care,” was all he said as he hugged her.

  Today was not a good day for him. He had been in pain and they had been forced to call the community nurse.

  “Will you be okay?” Angela felt guilty at going out enjoying herself while leaving him in this state.

  “I’ll be fine.” He waved her away.

  Angela knew it was a lie, but it was sweet of him to say so and by doing so, allow her to go.

  “Thanks,” she said and gave him another hug.

  A knock at the door made her suddenly rush to gather up her things. She barely beat her mother to the door. With a quick flurry of reassurances to her mother, she slipped out the door and breathed a sigh of relief as she closed it behind her.

  *

  Angela had known Elizabeth Fontaine since meeting her at youth summer camp when they were sixteen. They had shared a dormitory with lots of other girls, but she and Liz had hit it off from the start.

  One of the first activities at summer camp was a group sharing. The groups were sorted by age. Angela was in a small group of kids including Libby and amongst a dozen others, a guy with a cute smile, a mass of carefully unkempt straw coloured hair and a load of self-assurance to match. Angela remembered him from kid’s church many years ago as a loud, bossy kid, but it seemed that he had grown to be a quietly assured, stylish young man. She felt her eyes were repeatedly drawn to him and his lean tight physique. When he caught her looking, he flashed a smile that made her whole body glow.

  Suddenly it was her turn to introduce herself and share her journey with Christ with the group. She stammered and blushed as she felt his undivided attention upon her. Her life sounded plain and uninteresting to her own ears, but she was flattered that he listened attentively through the whole thing.

  When Angela had finished, Libby whispered to her that his name was Zeke and that he was trouble. The thought of all the trouble she and Zeke could get up to made her miss most of the next few testimonies, but her attention returned when it was Zeke’s turn.