Persecution: God's Other Children. Book 2

by Rob Mclean

Angela couldn’t say if that was true. Their time together had been all good-time, care-free fun, right up until the alien arrived. It’s easy to be nice when you’re getting everything you want. It’s only when things get tough that someone’s true nature comes out.

  “He wouldn’t do that,” Angela said, but her voice sounded hollow.

  “So you don’t know where he was this afternoon then?”

  “No. Why should I? I don’t see him anymore. Like you said, he’s my ex.”

  “Can you find out?”

  “How?”

  “You could ask his sister, you know, Chelsea?”

  “That wouldn’t be weird, would it?”

  “How do you mean?”

  “I mean, if Zeke found out I had been asking after him, he might think…”

  “I don’t care what he thinks. You don’t have any feelings for him, so what does it matter what he thinks?”

  Angela paused for a moment to think. She had spent so many years with Zeke, and built up so many plans featuring him as the good husband, the head of their future household, in the traditional Christian way. Couldn’t John see that she couldn’t just throw all that away? She still had the dream, but if Zeke wasn’t in it, she didn’t see John filling the part properly either.

  “It would be simpler if he didn’t get the wrong idea, that’s all I’m trying to say.”

  “Too bad if he did.” John sounded gruff, or perhaps just tired.

  Angela figured that he would have been at work all day and now was at the hospital with Jarred. He would be tired, hungry and angry, but still, she felt he was being unreasonable and demanding.

  “And what if Zeke did do it?” she asked. “What then? What would you do, go around and beat him up?”

  There was a pause as John thought things through.

  “No, probably not,” he conceded grudgingly, “Not that I wouldn’t like to, but it’s not worth my job. Might get him charged, or at least a restraining order.”

  Angela remembered the threat of legal action Zeke’s parents had made over how John had assaulted Zeke the night she was drugged at the nightclub. There was also the matter of her father shooting at Zeke…

  “Look,” John interrupted her thoughts. “Are you really moving away?”

  “I don’t know. I can’t really say. Dad wants to, but mom doesn’t. She sounds like she’s got to go with him because, he’s like, the head of the house.”

  “You sure?”

  “It’s a Christian thing, okay?”

  “Well, you could have fooled me.”

  “Yeah, well, it looks like we will have to move at some stage. Don’t know when. Probably wait until we see if the church moves.”

  “For real?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I…” John started to say, but fell silent. Angela could almost hear him thinking things through. “I’d like to go with you, but…”

  Angela didn’t need him to say it. She could work it out for herself. There was his job. She supposed he could always find some sort of work wherever he went. There’d be a big need for security forces wherever they went, but then there was his family. His brother needed his financial support to get through his course and he was looking after his needy mother as well. If he moved to a religious area, then his old money wouldn’t work within the new U.N.

  “But you can’t leave your family.”

  “They need me. If I can send them money somehow…”

  “It won’t work. Don’t you see? It’s decision time. We’re being forced to choose. They want to consolidate their power and they’re making you commit to them or live in the wilderness with us.”

  “I was going to say that it will take some time for me to arrange things so I can go with you.”

  “Oh…” Angela couldn’t help the surprise coming out in her voice. “You’d leave your family to be with me?”

  “Yeah, of course.” He sounded a little hurt and offended. “It’s ‘bout time they all grew up a bit.”

  “There’d be no coming back, you know.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Once you move to a religious area, they won’t let you back.”

  “No, it would be just like living in a different state, or a different country with different money. They’d still let you come back on a tourist visa or something.”

  Angela shook her head, even though he couldn’t see her. “No. If I’m right, and the alien really is the AntiChrist, then the religious will be rounded up and kept in the prescribed areas, like big prison camps.”

  “And if you’re wrong, you’ll be allowed to travel freely.”

  “That won’t happen.”

  “I’m counting on it,” John said. “How else will I be able to keep hounding my family?”

  “No, you don’t get it. I can’t ask you to move if you don’t understand what’s at stake here.”

  “I don’t think I’m the delusional one here…”

  “Ha, so you think I’m delusional, but you want to be with me? How is that a basis for a relationship?”

  “Well, I think that when you find out you’re wrong, you’ll be mature and sensible enough to accept it gracefully.”

  “And how about you? How will your smug pride handle it when you find out I’m right?”

  “What? That some supernatural being, posing as a friendly alien is conniving to weed out everyone who believes in God?”

  “No more fanciful than accepting that an alien is doing the same thing?”

  “They say our religions are man-made things that just don’t work in their bigger universe.”

  “There is no bigger universe.” Angela persisted. “It’s all a trick played on us by the biggest trickster.”

  “There’s a spaceship hanging over Beijing that says different.”

  “No, it’s not real. It’s a mind-trick.”

  “Millions of people have seen it with their own eyes.”

  “Not Christian people…”

  “So you’re saying that if you’re not Christian, you can be deceived by the Devil?”

  “Yes, believing in Christ gives you protection.”

  “That’s crazy,” John said. He sounded as frustrated and angry as she felt. It was as if they were yelling at each other across a great windswept chasm.

  It was then, with a sudden clarity, she could see that there was no chance that he would ever be the type of man she wanted him to be. She saw that there was little point in going on.

  “Look, I want to say thank-you for looking after me that night I was drugged and you have been really nice to me since,” she hesitated for a moment, but her head told her it was the right thing to do. “I don’t see how we can go on seeing each other…”

  “What?”

  “I don’t want you to call me anymore…” Angela could feel her throat tightening as she spoke.

  “But it is crazy…”

  “Goodbye,” she said and hung up.

  Then the tears came.

  She cried as much for her lost relationship as she did for his lost soul.

  Chapter 36

  Ling brushed coal dust from her orange prison jumpsuit. She had on her oldest, tattiest outfit to visit Michelle, the American banana girl, but she hated getting it, or anything else dirty.

  She remembered the filth and stench of this abandoned coal mine, where they kept their most recalcitrant prisoners. Her heart rate jumped at the vivid and terrifying memories from her own time spent here.

  ‘Be her new best friend,’ the captain had said, and so, now she was trudging through a filthy, wet, slippery tunnel to play ‘friend’ to the object of her master’s fascination.

  The coal dust smeared into a tarry streak that the prison soap would never completely remove, but she consoled herself that unlike other prisoners, she had other jumpsuits to wear. She just hoped that this visit would be worth the effort and discomfort, but she had her doubts.

  ‘I am nothing,’ Ling reminded herself as she tried to put on the right p
ersona. To help with the charade, they had made sure that her real friends had been kept away.

  Water dripped from the walls and hissed and popped on the light-bulbs that had just been turned on for her visit. Her army-issue boots were heavy and uncomfortable, and would soon be soaked, as she tried to skirt the pools of dank, oily water, but she was glad she had worn them.

  Ling stole along the passageway as quietly as she could, but it was the light that made the prisoners cry and whimper within their cells. The reek of their soiled bodies wafted from their cells as they stirred.

  She had to have the lights on. She couldn’t bear to be in the dark anymore. Not down here.

  She would have been grateful for any sort of light when she was last here. The darkness had been absolute. In the long absence of any light, her mind had produced its own images. Unfortunately, those visions were harrowing, tormented glimpses of a hell that still haunted her in the quiet, small hours, or in the rare times when she found herself alone.

  These were hallucinations that her mind had conjured up to fill the sensory void, she had rationally told herself afterwards, but if those vile creations had come from her own mind, she didn’t find it very reassuring. It had been made all the worse by the voices and the things they had taunted her with.

  Maybe they were hallucinations too, but the pain and bruises were real. She just couldn’t tell if it had been real or she had imagined it all. Her mind had wandered so often during that long dark time… No, she corrected herself, it had gone completely. But where it had gone and what it things it had encountered… She didn’t want to think about it.

  ‘But,’ Ling wondered, ‘how does she do it?’

  The American girl’s friends had said that an angel had visited her in these cells last time. Surely there was no such thing. It must have been a delusion, brought about by the sensory deprivation, but why had her own visions been so different?

  The door to Michelle’s cell had a clipboard hung outside with her prison number on it. Ling dutifully signed it, noting that there hadn’t been anyone here for over a day.

  Out of habit, Ling was about to knock, but she withdrew her hand and instead turned the key in the lock. The metallic clank sounded loud and harsh. It would rouse her and bring her mind back from where-ever it had escaped to find refuge. Would she want to be back? Would she thank Ling for it?

  “Close your eyes,” Ling warned. “Put your hand over your eyes as well. I am going to turn on the lights in your cell.” Even though she had longed for the light, she remembered all too well being incapacitated by the eye-watering, stabbing, blinding pain it had brought.

  “Who is it?” The American girl’s voice was barely more than a dry whisper.

  “A friend,” Ling said, trying not to let her voice sound harsh. Didn’t the pinyin recognise her voice? “Are you ready?”

  She was answered by a weak snort of derision.

  Ling opened the door, letting the light from the passageway spill into the room. What she saw took her breath away.

  The American girl was manacled to the wall. Her arms hung from iron cuffs that had chaffed her skin away at the wrists. Congealed blood had marked dark lines down her pale, bare arms. Her eyes were squeezed tightly shut against the light from the passageway.

  Ling stifled a cry as she rushed across to her, while fumbling for the key.

  “How could…” Ling began to say, dismayed at the Captain’s cruelty, but stopped herself. She knew the Captain was only interested in the end result, not the way it was achieved. Instead she opened the iron cuffs and helped the American girl lower herself to the floor.

  “You bring all this on yourself with your stubbornness,” Ling chided as she massaged the circulation back into the girl’s arms.

  “Water?”

  Ling found a jug of fetid water that had been placed on a little wooden table tantalizingly out of the prisoner’s reach. It looked like it had been scooped from the oily puddles in the passageway, but the American girl drank it down readily.

  “Thank you,” Michelle said after she had drunk her fill.

  Ling studied the American girl as she stretched and flexed her thin arms. She splashed her face and washed herself as best she could. She winced at every slow, cramped and stiff movement she made. Although the prisoner eyed the open door often, Ling had no doubts that she was in no condition to make an escape.

  “What do you want?” Michelle asked as she rubbed her wrists.

  “I don’t know why you do this to yourself,” Ling said, indicating the girl’s emaciated frame. “You could make things so much easier if you were more…”

  “Compliant?”

  “Agreeable.”

  “I’ll not deny Christ.”

  “Why not? Peter did three times and he’s still a saint.”

  By the blank look Ling saw on Michelle’s face, she could tell that the American girl had not considered this before.

  “It’s not as if He doesn’t know what’s in your heart,” Ling gave a dismissive shrug. “But I guess that’s your choice.”

  “Did she send you?”

  “Yes,” Ling admitted. “To try to talk some sense into you.”

  “Good cop, bad cop eh?”

  “Something like that,” Ling said unzipping her jumpsuit front to bring out a ‘smuggled’ parcel. “See, I’ve brought you something.”

  Ling produced a dozen rice cakes and laid them on the wooden table. Michelle eyed them warily.

  “What’s wrong with you?” Ling demanded when her gift wasn’t pounced upon. Ling snatched a rice cake and made a show of eating it. “See? It’s not like they’re poisoned.”

  “I don’t want them,” Michelle said turning her head away so she didn’t have to look at them.

  “What? Are you crazy? There’s nothing of you,” Ling stopped herself. Her eyes narrowed. “Are you on some sort of hunger strike?”

  “No, it’s just…”

  Ling remembered something about how fasting helped mystics get closer to their spiritual side. There was even references to it in the Bible. She wondered if this was how the American girl got to have an angelic visitor? Ling decided not to press the matter. Best not to show her hand by letting the pinyin know of her curiosity.

  “No matter,” Ling said picking up another rice cake and inspecting it on both sides before putting it back. “I thought you might like to know what’s going on up there in the real world.”

  “What does she want to fill my head with now?” Michelle kept her gaze away from the offending food towards the light of the passageway.

  “Actually, I think she had almost forgotten about you,” Ling lied casually. “With all the things going on, I doubt you would have crossed her mind if I hadn’t reminded her.”

  “Why would you do that?”

  “I’m not as evil as you might think,” Ling’s tight smile didn’t reach to her eyes. “I have to admit I have to admire your strength, your will power.”

  Michelle turned from the light of the passageway to give Ling a disbelieving look.

  “No, really, it takes great courage to do what you’re doing.” Ling thought she saw the pinyin’s features soften at the praise. “Either that or great stupidity. I can’t decide which.”

  The American girl’s face quickly hardened again, her lips pressed thin before she turned to stare out the passageway.

  Ling ignored her ire and continued blithely. “It’s just that with the way things are going, I don’t think this prison will be around for much longer.”

  Michelle’s head snapped around. “What do you mean?”

  “Oh, now the referendum’s over and China is officially religion free, they will probably close this place and ship us all off to some God-forsaken, third-world, religious country.”

  “You’re making this up…” Michelle said, but Ling had her full attention now.

  “Somewhere like Yemen, or Somalia…” Ling’s eyes twinkled as she played with the pinyin, “or maybe Alabama.”


  “No,” Michelle said, her eyes widened at the thought of possibilities.

  “I’m sure a simple word in the right ear…”

  Michelle frowned. “I’m not going to renounce Christ.”

  Ling shook her head and gave her a look of pity. “Of course not. If you did that, you wouldn’t be religious, would you?”

  “Then what do you want? What do I have to do?”

  “You could try apologising for a start…”

  “What for? I’ve done nothing wrong.”

  “…with humility and grace. All good Christian virtues.”

  “Ha! You, of all people, lecturing me about Christian virtues.”

  Ling smiled sweetly and restrained the urge to drive her elbow through the pinyin’s face. “Turning the other cheek- that’s another one you might want to work on.”

  Michelle growled silently.

  “I’m not saying you have to grovel,” Ling appealed to her in a gentler tone. “Just don’t be so openly defiant.” Ling shrugged. “Otherwise they have to react and show everyone who’s in charge.”

  The American girl said nothing, but Ling took her lack of argument as a sign that she was thinking about what she had been told.

  “Just tell the guards that you want to apologise…”

  Michelle opened her mouth to protest, but Ling cut her off with her raised hand.

  “For everything, from being disruptive to being a Christian.”

  “But…”

  “Just remember that God knows what’s really in your heart.”

  The American girl frowned and nodded. After a moment’s thought, she asked, “But what about you? Are you going to stay?”

  “Stay?” Ling closed her eyes to help her keep her emotions under control, but her breathing quickened. She hadn’t really considered that she might leave this place. ‘Too busy doing the bidding of others,’ she answered silently. ‘I am nothing.’

  “You are still one of us,” the American girl said. “One of the religious. You could come to the U.S. too.”

  Ling felt a smile form across her face as she toyed with the idea for a moment. The thought of escaping from the twisted, needy Captain and of freedom far away was appealing on so many levels, but she quickly put the foolish notions aside.