He will return, Pastor William’s soft tones rolling out over the pulpit like thunder a long way off, thunder you knew was riding in on the wings of a storm coming right your way. They said he’d trained at one of the South Carolina megachurches before he got his ministry, and in the teeth of the gale he blew, you could well believe it. He will return, and how’s that going be, you ask yourselves. Well, I’ll tell you, friends, I’ll tell you, building now to a roar, it ain’t going be no cluster hugging happy clapping day like them niggers always singing on about. No sir, the day of His return ain’t gonna be no party, ain’t gonna be no picnic and skipping road right up to paradise for you all. When Jesus comes again, He will come in judgement, and that judgement going to be hard, hard on man and woman and child, hard on us all, because we are all sinners and that sin, that dreadful black sin gotta be paid out once and for all. Look in your hearts, my friends, look in your hearts and find that black sin there and pray you can cut it out of you before judgement because if you don’t then the Lord will, and the Lord don’t use no anaesthetic when He operates on your soul.
There was a story Scott remembered from the End Times comics, Volume III, Issue 137, The Triumph In Babylon. Coat wrapped, the Saviour stalks the mirrorglass canyons of New York with a long navy Colt on one hip and a billy club in his hand fashioned from the sweat and bloodstained wood of the cross he died on. He kicks in the frosted glass door of a coffee franchise off Wall Street and beats seven shades of damnation out of the money-changers gathered there. Painted, black-stockinged lady brokers twisting prostrate at his feet, red licked lips parted in horror and abandonment, thighs exposed under short, whorish skirts. Fat big-nosed men in suits braying and panicking, trying to get away from the scything club. Blood and waxed coffee carton cups flying, screams. The capitalised crunch of broken bones.
Judgement!
Scott touched the bandage around his head again, figured maybe he’d got off lightly after all.
In the truck, staring at the gaunt, sleeping face, he’d leaned across and whispered to Ren:
‘Is it really Him?’
She’d given him a strange look. ‘Who’d you think it is?’
‘Him, Jesus. The Lord, come again.’ He swallowed, wet his lips. ‘Is this, are we living in the, you know, the End Times?’
No response. She’d just looked at him curiously and told him to rest, he was going to need his strength. Thinking back, he guessed he must probably have sounded delirious with the concussion.
And then the doctor, and other helpers along the way. People Ren seemed to know well. A change of trucks, a house and a soft bed on the outskirts of a town whose name he never saw. Another long, bone-jarring night in an all-terrain vehicle and tipping out at dawn on the airfield’s deserted expanse.
And then the waiting.
He tried to make himself useful. He tidied up after Ren and the stranger, put their bags and bedrolls straight every morning – and, oddly, glimpsed in amongst Ren’s gear a Bible and a sheaf of curling hardcopy from Republican ministry download sites, some of which he knew well himself; he closed the bag gently and didn’t look again. He wasn’t nosy by nature, but it made him frown all the same. He put it out of his mind as much as he could. Instead, he put together a table and three dining places out of pieces of junk he found lying around in the control tower block and the hangars. He discovered a wrecked and wingless Cessna in one hangar corner, half-heartedly draped in thick plastic sheeting which he cut up and made into hanging curtains for a couple of the toilet cubicles and the showers. He took care of the food. The supplies the all-terrain driver had left them were mostly pull-tab autoheating, but he did his best to make meals out of what there was, carried them up to the other two in the tower when they showed no sign of coming down to eat. Tried not to stare at the stranger. He took the painkillers the doctor had given him sparingly and he prayed, diligently, every time he ate or slept. In an odd way, he felt better about life than he had in months.
‘Won’t be much longer now.’
He started. When night fell, the quiet in the derelict building seemed to deepen somehow, and Ren’s voice jumped him like a gunshot. He looked up and saw her standing in the doorway that led through to the tower stairs. Light from the last red gold leavings of the sunset outside meshed with the bluish glow of the camping lamps he’d lit, picked up a gleam in her eyes and along the teeth of the zip fastener on the ancient leather jacket she wore.
‘What you doing?’
‘Praying.’ Half defiant, because he’d certainly not noticed her doing it in the last few days.
She nodded. Moved into the room and folded herself down onto her sleeping bag with unconscious grace.
‘We need to talk,’ she said, and he thought she sounded weary. ‘Why don’t you come over here.’
He nearly jumped again. ‘What for?’
‘I won’t bite you, Scott.’
‘I, uh, I know that. I can hear you from here though.’
‘Maybe you can. But I’d rather we didn’t have to shout. Now come over here.’
Tight-lipped, he got up from his own bedroll and walked over to hers. She nodded to her left and he squatted awkwardly beside her, not quite sitting down. Her scent washed over him, faintly unclean with desert sweat – he thought she hadn’t showered since early the day before. She looked into his face and he felt the same old flip in his chest. She nodded upward, towards the ceiling and the tower above.
‘You know who that is up there,’ she murmured. ‘Don’t you.’
Exhilaration sloshed in his guts, chased up and met the feeling she’d made under his ribs. He managed a jerky nod of his own.
‘It is, isn’t it.’
‘Yeah, it is.’ She sighed. ‘This is difficult for me, Scott. I grew up in a big family that had some Christians in it, but I wasn’t one of them. My religious experience is… very different to yours. Where I’m from, we accepted that other beliefs were possible, but we always thought they were just other ways of looking at the same truths we believed in. Less accurate, less enlightened paths. I never thought that maybe our truth would be the less enlightened one, that the Christians would be the ones who got it right. That,’ she shook her head. ‘I never considered that.’
He felt a warm, protective affection for her surge up inside, like flames. He reached out and took her hand where it lay in her lap, squeezed gently.
‘It’s okay,’ he said. ‘You were true in your beliefs. That’s what counts.’
‘I mean, you have to believe what you see with your own eyes, Scott. Right?’ Her eyes held his. ‘You have to believe what you’re told when nothing else makes any sense, right?’
He drew a deep breath. ‘This makes perfect sense to me, Carmen.’
‘Yeah, well here’s the thing, and I don’t know if there’s anything in your Bible that covers this, because it certainly isn’t what I was taught about the final cycle. He says’ – another upward tilt of her eyes – ‘that he’s come early, that it’s not time yet and he has to gather his strength. He has work to do here, but his enemies are out there and they’re still strong. And that means we have to protect him until it is time. He’s chosen us, Scott. Sorted us from the, uh, the—’
‘The chaff?’
‘Yeah, the chaff. You saw what he did with Nocera and Ward? They were servants of the darkness, Scott. I see that now. I mean, I never liked Nocera, and Ward, well, I thought he was okay but—’