by Rob Mclean
John nodded. “Everyone knew, so why all the drama?”
“It’s hypocrisy,” Geoff agreed, “but that’s the way it is. In religious circles, women are either a princess or a prostitute, a saint or a slut. There is no in between.”
“But…”
Geoff silenced him with a wave of his withered hand. “It doesn’t happen with boys. Young men like Zeke can sow their wild oats all day long - and hope for crop failure – with no stigma.”
“No wonder so many people voted against religion.”
“No-one’s saying religion’s all good,” Geoff snorted. “But as far as Angela’s concerned, I’m sure you’d rather everyone thought of her as a princess, right?”
“Sure,” John said. “But just because she’s not, you know…”
“A virgin?”
“Yeah, well that doesn’t mean she’s no good anymore.”
Geoff patted him on the arm. “Son, those fancy liberal notions are light-years from where most church goers are at.”
John nodded. “So I stuffed up big time.”
“That’s for sure. Now you have to go out there and apologise.” Geoff pointed his bony finger to the car-park.
John found the women standing next to his car. Maddie waved and hopped from one foot to the other when she saw her brother coming. Unlike the other two, she was happy to see him. Angela was on her phone but still managed to look unhappy.
She ended her call and was putting her phone away as John and her father approached.
“I’ve called a cab,” she announced.
“What for?” John asked. He couldn’t believe she was that upset with him.
By way of an answer she gave the car tyre a nudge with her foot. Someone had slashed the tyre and it sat on the wheel rims.
John swore under his breath. Who else but Zeke would do that? John decided to not let it get to him, at least not to let anyone see that it was. Instead, he put on a smile. “Not to worry. I have a spare.”
“You got four spares, son?” Geoff asked.
“Wha…?” John saw then that all his tyres were the same. “That slimy little shit. I’ll kill him.”
“It wasn’t Zeke,” Angela said coolly.
John turned on her. “How do you know? Of course it was him. Who else would do this?”
“I know you’d like it to be him. It’d give you an excuse to hurt him, but he didn’t do it.” Angela spoke with such calm certainty that John wondered for a moment if she hadn’t done it herself.
“How can you defend him like that? What sort of a hold does he have on you?”
Angela just shook her head and gave him a pitying look as she swept her hand to indicate the car next to them.
The tyres on that car had been slashed as well and as he looked further towards the street, he could see more of the cars had been vandalised. People stood silently by their disabled vehicles, some were on their phones, but most just stood huddled in frightened clusters.
“Unless he did this to everyone, I don’t think Zeke’s to blame.”
John seethed silently. How could he, a security specialist have not seen it? He realised that he had been focussed on nothing but Angela and, he conceded, the cars closest to the church were spared. The ones further away weren’t.
“We’re being persecuted,” Clarice said. “And it’s only the start. They want us gone.”
“They?”
“The heathens,” Clarice waved her spindly finger about in a wide arc to encompass the whole city. “The worldly.” Her finger zeroed in on John. “The condemned.”
“Yeah,” John brushed her hand away. His eyes narrowed. “Love you too.”
“Don’t sass me.” Clarice met his stare. “You’re a lost soul too if you don’t have Jesus with you.”
John didn’t want to argue with her, he knew it’d be pointless. The only one he wanted with him was Angela. That was all he was worried about.
“If you say so.” He gave Angela an imploring look. Normally she would intervene and save him from her mother’s tirades, but she had so far said nothing.
“If they want us to go,” Maddie asked, her face frowning with concentration, “then why did they break our car?”
“They’re just dumb, bad people,” Angela said, giving her a hug. “Don’t you worry about them. Your big brother will look after you.”
Maddie beamed at John.
“Now why don’t you sit in the car?” Angela opened the car door for Maddie to get in. “Your brother and I have to have a talk.”
John nodded and ushered Maddie into the car. He had a few things to say too, but didn’t like Angela’s tone.
“Let’s walk,” she said to John, then to her parents, “We’ll only be a few minutes.”
“We’ll be fine, dear,” her mother answered, squinting at John.
Angela led John away, out of the hearing of her parents. Her forehead pressed her brows and her lips pouted, giving her a beauty a stern edge.
“Look,” John decided it best to get in early with his apology. “I’m really sorry about what I said back there. I wasn’t thinking. I was being a real jerk…”
Angela cut him off with a raised palm. “Yes, I know.” She sighed as she studied her feet. “I know, you know and everyone knows that I’m not the pure, vestal virgin that everyone thinks I should be.”
“That doesn’t matter to me.” John hoped she could hear the truth in his words. “And it shouldn’t matter to them. I mean, it’s not their business, right?”
“It doesn’t matter that much to you because after your last girlfriend, everything else would seem tame.”
“No,” John said automatically, but he had to admit that she had a point. At least part of the attraction of Angela was because, as Aaron had said, these girls were clean.
“I am so glad we have the purity pledge.” She still spoke to the ground as they walked. “I would hate to have found out about your… history afterwards.”
John blinked as he suddenly realised that she saw him as soiled. He had never thought of himself as tainted from being with Natalie.
“Hey, there’s nothing wrong with me. I could get some blood work done to prove it.” Then he added, “We should both get some tests done before anything happens between us.”
“Oh, there’s no chance I’ve got anything,” she said, suddenly looking up and meeting his eye with a fierce stare. “We kept ourselves pure.”
“How do you know what he’s done? He’s the guy who drugged you when he thought the world was ending. Who knows what he had in mind.”
“It wasn’t him.” Angela looked away. “He didn’t do it.”
“Sure, okay, whatever.” John didn’t want to talk about Zeke. He admired her loyalty, but it irked him how it was Zeke she was defending. “If the blood work comes back okay, then I’m all good and whatever I did with Nat is history.”
“I’m not just talking about diseases.” She gave him a sorrowful frown as she shook her head. “There’s the moral thing too.”
“How do you mean?”
“I mean how can you be with someone who did that sort of thing for a living?”
“No. I didn’t want her to. I tried to get her to stop…”
“And there’s your job,” Angela cut him off again. “For whatever reason, the alien or the AntiChrist – whatever you call him, wants all us Christians put away. You’re working for them, those people who want to close our churches and drive us out of our homes and cleanse us from this city like a stain.”
“It’s just a job.” He said through gritted teeth.
“No, it isn’t.” She sounded tired, as if she had given up trying to make him understand. “You’re not a Christian, so you probably didn’t realise there was a moral decision to be made. You see it as just a job, much like your ex, Natalie thought hers was.”
“That’s different.”
“Is it? Without moral direction, what stops you from doing anything you want?” She shot him a look. “Like your boss?�
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John frowned as he studied her. Was this what it was all about? Was she jealous? At length he said, “Knowing what the right thing to do isn’t something exclusive to Christians, you know.”
“And there’s that too.” Angela shook her head ruefully. “Even without all the other problems, there is always that hurdle.”
“You’re saying we can’t be together unless I become a Christian?”
“No, I mean, normally I wouldn’t, at least not so soon,” she stopped and turned to face him. “It’s just that with everything that’s happening with the world, well, it makes the question more important.”
John could see her point. The country, in fact, the whole world was being divided up into those who believed and those who didn’t. Even if he hadn’t met Angela, the current schism would impact on his life in many other ways.
“Look,” John said, taking her hands in his. To his relief, she didn’t pull away. “I could say I believed, even though I don’t, if it meant we could be together.”
“No.” She withdrew her hands and spun away. “You don’t get it, do you?”
“Obviously not.” John felt her rejection deep in his soul.
“Our relationship is nothing compared with the relationship you have with God.”
“God and I get along just fine.”
“No, the only way you can have a relationship with God is through his son, Jesus.”
Crazy, John thought, but she was serious about it. Serious to the point of ending their relationship, if not now, then at some stage in the future, if he didn’t proclaim his belief.
“What am I supposed to do?” John spat, letting her hear his frustration. “I can’t say I believe in something I don’t…”
“That would be wrong.”
“But I don’t want to lose you.”
Angela shrugged. “I guess that’s for you and God to work out.” She turned around and started back to the car.
They said nothing on the way back. John’s mind kept trying to get around his dilemma, but he could see no solution. He only felt his frustration grow.
When they reached the car, he saw that the first of the cabs had arrived. Having stormed out of the church, Angela was one of the first to have discovered the vandalism and so, one of the cabs was for her.
“We’re going now,” she said to John as she helped her father into the cab.
“I’ll have to call a tow-truck or something,” John replied, wishing he had done that before his little walk with Angela. “So can I see you again?”
Angela closed the cab door on her parents and walked over to John. She put her arms around him and hugged him tight. “I don’t know if that’s a good idea.”
“No?”
“I really like you…”
“Like?”
“I know I could love you…” He could see the honesty in her eyes.
“But?”
She gave him and small smile of understanding. “But I don’t want to get any more involved if we’re only going to have to end it later.”
“I see.” John nodded.
“I know that sounds manipulative and I really don’t want you to commit to anything you don’t truly believe in…”
“Not even to be with you?”
“Especially not.” She stood back and ran her hands down his arms.
“So where does that leave us?” John’s head spun as he tried to grasp what he thought she was saying.
“I don’t know.” Angela looked genuinely unsure as she gave Maddie a goodbye hug. She told Maddie how glad she was that she had come to church today.
“When will I see you again?” Maddie asked.
“I don’t know.” She gave John a quick look before adding, “Depends.”
John felt a flash of anger. Despite her denials, she definitely was being manipulative. “Depends if Zeke rings,” he heard himself say.
John saw his anger mirrored momentarily in her face, but she took a breath to compose herself before replying.
“Zeke is never going to call. It’s not about him,” she said as she climbed into the cab. “It’s about you.”
Chapter 31
John watched from the front passenger seat, through the heavily tinted windows of the transport van, as his squads arrived for the pre-dawn raid on the first church on his list.
Following the referendum, and in what John thought was a premature show of fealty to the new United Nations and the alien emissary, the state of California had decided to enforce the new world order.
A long list had been made of all the churches, mosques, synagogues and temples that were within the jurisdiction of the vast majority of the state that had accepted the alien’s offer. There had been land swap deals hammered out with the counties across the former United States that had rejected the offer. Largely the swaps had been accepted, but there were stubborn groups of previous owners and tenants who had declined to accept the new reality and move on, and now had to be evicted more persuasively.
This church was not on the historically significant, protected list. It stood as an ugly 1960’s, brick and concrete construct, with aluminium windows and tiled roof. Except for the beat-up, east L.A. excuses for trees, it wasn’t a lot different from Angela’s church, but hers wasn’t on any of his lists as yet.
He had tried to put her out of his mind, along with the things she had said, but her words kept reverberating in his head. Despite that, he still couldn’t tell how she felt towards him now.
It had only been a couple of days since the weekend that he had taken his half-sister, Maddie, to Angela’s church. She had really enjoyed it. Like him, she loved the singing, although she didn’t know the words and couldn’t keep up with the words on the screen, she had hummed along happily. Angela had seemed genuinely happy that he had brought Maddie along, unlike the last time he had brought his brother to that engagement party.
John smiled as he remembered how Maddie had squealed with delight and had run to throw herself at Angela when she spied her in the crowd. He couldn’t blame her; he felt much the same way too whenever he saw her, maybe without the squealing though.
He could only hope she felt the same about him. But what if she didn’t?
He shook his head to clear away those thoughts and to refocus on the events now unfolding.
Today, as his squads arrived, they found a small group of protesters camped on the grounds. They had set up tents days before and had been living on site, anticipating the eventual eviction.
People were stumbling out of sleeping bags, sleepy eyed and yawning to stare at his squads spilling out of the vans and trucks. Dressed in pyjamas, track suits and t-shirts, they looked soft and vulnerable next to his people in their black bullet-proof vests, heavy boots and riot shields.
They didn’t anticipate the protesters to carry any guns, but in L.A. it was always a possibility, and his squads were armed for such a contingency. It made the civilians look even more overwhelmed.
Despite this, many were already on their phones. They were, no doubt calling up friends, letting everyone, including the media, know that it was on. John saw that some were holding video cameras or their phones up to record the event.
He mentally rehearsed the official script he had been given, painfully aware that any departure from the correct protocol could result in the operation being challenged in court. That would cost the company time and money, not to mention the bad publicity.
Marcus cut his mental rehearsals short. “Boss, the buses aren’t here.”
John cursed silently as he looked around to find that Marcus was right. The buses they needed to take the protesters away hadn’t arrived.
“Check with head office.” John checked his watch. “They should be here by now,” he growled. Their surprise arrival had been for nothing without the buses. “We can’t do much till then.”
John saw that the detention vans for the more unco-operative were already here, but that had been his responsibility. The buses were being outsourced
through head office. In the meantime, his squads formed up in the street in front of the church as more of the protesters appeared from their tents.
After a few minutes of waiting for the buses, John heard firstly, then saw, car after car arrive to unload more of the parishioners. He figured these reinforcements were in response to the flurry of phone calls the campers had made soon after his squads had shown up. They had nowhere to park, with his vans taking up most of the parking spaces, so many of them simply parked in the middle of the road, forming their own blockade.
As they waited for the buses to arrive, John watched a lone man come forward to speak. He was an older, black man, heavy set, with greying temples.
“Who’s in charge here?” John heard him ask the first squaddie he encountered.
John stepped forward to meet him and introduced himself, offering his hand. John towered over the man in his combat boots, black riot gear and shield, but despite this the man showed nothing but a calm indignation.
“Father Jackson Montgomery Jones,” he said taking off his gloves. John took off his as well and shook the Father’s hand firmly. Callouses worn smooth felt warm within his grasp. John wondered if welcoming handshakes was something they taught in seminary school. His own hand felt cold by comparison.
“Pleasure to meet you sir,” John said.
“Can’t say the same.”
John nodded. He reminded himself not to take it personally. “I’m sure you know why we’re here today…” John began.
“Yeah. I know,” Father Jones waved him down. “That fool gov’ment wants us gone.”
“That’s basically it, I guess.”
“Well, you’ll understand that we’re none too happy ‘bout it.”
“Yes sir.” John nodded.
“And that we don’t want no trouble.”
“No sir, and neither do we.”
“But you understand that we can’t just up and walk away jus’ cause you’ll be asking nice.”
“Yes sir, but I have my orders…”
“I’m sure you do,” Father Jones frowned. “You’re just the hired help, doin’ what them high ups want.”