“Doesn’t seem likely,” he said. Then, apparently finished playing dead, he curled up on his side. I watched him until he fell asleep.
That’s how it went until the night, one week after she’d dumped him, when he broke routine. I’d just turned out the lights when he said, “I get five questions.”
“What?”
“Before I go to sleep, I get to ask five questions.”
“Says who?”
There was no answer, and so I knew who.
“Why now?” I said. “All of a sudden?”
“I was waiting until I had the right questions.”
That didn’t sound promising. “I don’t think so,” I said.
“I’m willing to negotiate.”
“Negotiate what?”
“Questions,” he said. “How about four?”
“How about zero.”
“Three questions.”
“No questions.”
“You’re really bad at negotiating,” he said.
“That’s a matter of opinion.”
That was when, for the first time since he’d set foot on the compound, he burst into tears. Burst like a clogged pipe, ten years of misery spraying out of him in a gusher, and even in the dark I could read his fury, that his pathetic little body had betrayed him. I remembered that, trying to survive the battle zone, dodging artillery fire between the kid you were and the man you were supposed to be. The world screamed at you to grow up, your zits and your twitchy dick agreed it was about time, but you were still afraid of the dark, you still slept with that old teddy bear, you still wanted your mommy.
Maybe you always wanted your mommy.
“Okay. Three questions.”
And that right there was my mistake.
“Do you really get messages from God?”
“I do.”
“How?”
“It varies. Sometimes I read His intent in the signs. Sometimes He’s got something more direct he wants to say, and He talks to me in my dreams.”
“Why you?”
I shrugged. “Why not me? I didn’t ask for the responsibility, I’ll tell you that much. It’s no picnic, devoting your life to the word of the Lord. You’d be surprised how many people don’t want to hear it.”
“How do you know it’s really God? That you’re not just hearing voices or something?”
“That’s four questions. Good night.”
“Does God hate us?”
“God loves us. We’re all his children.”
“And you have to love your children.”
“That’s the rule.”
“That wasn’t a question.”
“Got it. Thanks for clarifying.”
“If he loves us, why would he kill us?”
“Everyone dies, kid. It’s not punishment; it’s human nature.”
“No, I mean, why would he kill all of us. Jessie Babbage says the world is going to end. In eight months and twenty days.”
“That another question?”
“The question is: Is it true, the world is ending?”
I won’t pretend I felt good about it, but there was no other way. The kid had shown no sign he’d inherited his mother’s proclivity for bullshit, and I couldn’t show my hand without risking he’d spread the good news like a virus. “It really is.”
There was a long silence, long enough to make me nervous.
“What do you think of that?” I said.
“I think it explains a lot.”
“How’s it going to end?”
“You mean, specifically?”
“Yeah. Nuclear war? Asteroid strike? Global warming? I read online about a giant volcano that might explode and kill us all. Also there could be a plague. Or some kind of alien invasion, but that’s not statistically likely. Did your dreams say which it is?”
“God’s a little hazy on the details,” I said. “But the Bible’s got a lot to say on the subject, if you’re interested.” I wasn’t about to give him the whole Beast rising from a lake of fire sermon—let the Children take care of that.
“What will we do? When it happens?”
“We’ll go to heaven with the rest of the righteous people,” I said. “Nothing for you to worry about.”
“You don’t even know me. How do you know I’m righteous?”
“Fair point.”
After that, the kid started having nightmares. And maybe I was partly responsible, but what kid doesn’t have nightmares? Anyway, these particular nightmares? Gold. Because he told the Children about them, and the Children took them to heart, figuring any kid of mine having visions of the apocalypse must be getting his info straight from the horse’s mouth. Purse strings started to loosen. No one wanted to be counted among the sinners when the big day came. Maybe I helped it along a bit, encouraging all that talk of divine visitation, but it’s not like I was forcing the dreams on him.
I just put them to good use.
“If we know when the world is going to end, shouldn’t we be doing something about it? Like, warning people? Or doing something to save ourselves?”
“That sounds like three questions.”
“It’s one,” he said. “Multi-part.”
“Uh huh.”
“So?”
“So we don’t have to worry about it, because God’s going to save us, and whoever else he wants. That’s the whole point.”
“But don’t they say God helps those who help themselves?”
“Where’d you’d you hear that?” It wasn’t one of my favorites. Operations like mine didn’t tend to thrive on a philosophy of self-reliance and personal accountability.
“The internet.”
It killed me, the way people said that now, like they used to say “the Bible.” Or “TV.” As if it were Truth.
“I don’t think the end of the world is one of those help-yourself situations,” I said.
“But what if you’re wrong?”
He wouldn’t let it drop. He wouldn’t keep it to himself, either, and before I knew it, the Children were buzzing with the prospect of preservation. The kid was a natural, only ten years old but already better than I was at talking people around to his way of looking at things. I’d taught them to be open to persuasion, and they were model students, repeating the kid’s questions and arguments and internet-supplied statistics about asteroid impacts like a bunch of ventriloquist dummies. I did my best, pointed out that righteousness was all about faith and faith was all about accepting your fate and waiting for God to intercede, and that’s when the kid—who had apparently taken my suggestion on the Bible-reading front—brought in Noah. Before I know it, we’re building a damn ark.
Metaphorically, that is.
It turned out you could order anything on the internet, including whatever supplies you might need to survive in a post-apocalyptic wasteland. Canned food, wilderness gear, medical equipment, solar panels, ammunition—lots of ammunition. The kid spent hours at the computer, doing research, making lists, and then, like a Dickensian miracle, the wallets opened wide, even the tightest of wads. Sure, the Children had given lip service to buying the prophecy, but with the kid channeling their energy into survival scenarios, they felt it in their bones. Judgment Day. End times. No reason to save up for retirement when doom was on the horizon, and so they threw their credit cards at him, and anything left over after the bottled water and campfire stoves? That was mine. The kid, I realized pretty quickly, was like a money laundering shop for bullshit. I fed in my lies, he spit out a pretty good simulacrum of truth.
It wasn’t enough to gather supplies, the kid said. We needed a place to store them—a place we’d be safe from the ravaging hordes, not to mention the Horsemen and the Beast, though the specter of these had been overshadowed by the kid’s visions of power grid failure and food hoarders. We needed to move off the grid, and Clark Jeffries—who, in the duration of our acquaintanceship had never once gifted anything that could be lent—violated his cardinal rule and dipped into the principal. The kid had befriended a bunch of doomsday kooks online, one of whom must have believed in cash even more than he believed in magnetic pole reversal, because he was only too happy to trade his kook compound for a couple million of Jeffries’ hard-earned bucks. And this time, the deeds went to the church, along with the rest of his savings. There it was, my retirement account: Fully funded.