Back in 1974, in Waynesboro, Virginia, some drunks had broken that knee because they didn’t like his looks. The fracture wasn’t serious. It was common among athletes, dancers, climbers—and victims of angry drunks. Most people were good as new in a few weeks. (Praise the Lord, amen, hallelujah!) However, a few found that their broken knee reliably predicted changes in the weather. They could forecast that a lovely spring day would turn into a stormy night.
Reverend Greene’s case was slightly different. After five long weeks in the county hospital, he was finally discharged. Back out on the street, his knee started to throb. The pain was mild at first, but it got worse as the time went by until he thought it was going to explode. He wondered if he should go back to the hospital.
And then all hell broke loose.
One day, he was walking down the street when two masked men ran out of a jewelry store, firing shots left and right. The store’s earsplitting alarm was going off, drowning out any other sound. An old man chased after them, clutching a shotgun big enough to hunt large game in Africa. Probably the owner, Greene thought. The robbers had held him at gunpoint during the robbery, but the guy had found a way to activate the alarm.
“Get back here, you sons of bitches!” The man planted himself in the middle of the street and shouted at the top of his lungs. He jerked the rifle up to his shoulder and aimed at the fleeing robbers. “No one fucks with me!”
The shotgun’s recoil threw the old man back several feet, but he raised it and fired again. Bright-red blood bloomed like a flower across the back of one of the robbers, and he collapsed on the ground. The other robber turned and took aim at the old man. His .38 looked like a toy compared to the jeweler’s shotgun, but at that range, size didn’t matter. The first bullet pierced the old man’s side; the second bullet went through his right eye, killing him instantly. In a final reflexive gesture, the jeweler’s index finger pulled the trigger even though its owner was dead. The shot sent the old man’s limp body flying backward as the robber’s head turned to jelly and splattered in every direction.
The whole thing only lasted ten or twelve seconds. The street got very still, except for the wailing alarm. The smell of gunpowder, blood, and shit hung in the air. Greene had flattened himself against a wall during the shooting. As he backed away from the bodies, he heard police sirens in the distance.
Then it dawned on him: his knee had stopped hurting. It felt good as new.
Greene didn’t give it much thought until the next week. His knee was throbbing again as he sat in a coffee shop, pondering what to do with the last twenty-seven dollars in his pocket. Just then a dump truck ran a red light right in front of him, crushing a Chevrolet and the family of five inside it. Everyone was killed, including the truck driver.
And just like that, his damn knee stopped throbbing. The deaths he witnessed seemed to soothe it.
At first he told himself it was just a grim coincidence. But the same thing happened again and again, no matter where he was or what he was doing. The pain started out dull and pulsating, then grew until it was searing. Sometimes the pain went away when he left the place where it had started. When he consulted the newspapers or watched TV the next day, he’d learn that the place had been the scene of a bloody accident or crime after he left.
Other times, morbid curiosity got the better of him. When the throbbing started, he’d follow his macabre knee, guided by the pain the way sonar guides a bat. When he reached a spot where the pain got really bad, he’d hide and wait. Something always happened.
Over the next thirty-five years, he witnessed fifteen car wrecks, nineteen murders, an accidental decapitation, and two rapes that ended in death. To his surprise, he enjoyed every one of those tragedies, though he never admitted it—not even to God.
As the years went by, Reverend Greene developed a strange image of himself. He came to believe that his visions were a gift from the Lord (Praise His name forever, amen, hallelujah).
He could sense the presence of evil. More importantly, he could anticipate evil. In his mind, that qualified him as a prophet, one of the Lord’s chosen few. If he could prophesy the coming of evil, didn’t that make him the Lord’s mouthpiece, announcing the inevitable arrival of the Antichrist?
Greene had been an itinerant preacher in the South since he was a teenager. The seventh son of barely literate farmers from Alabama, Greene never went to college. He set out to preach the word of God because he thought he felt the call. More likely he was fleeing his alcoholic father, who beat him, and his mother, who was schizophrenic. His words were stirring, but his knowledge of Scripture left a lot to be desired. That was a drawback for an itinerant preacher in the Bible Belt, where evangelical Christianity had deep roots and influenced every aspect of daily life.
But after the injury to his knee and the tragedies that the pain foretold, his sermons changed radically. Now he saw himself as the harbinger of the Apocalypse—and that changed everything. His obsessive message reached a fever pitch. The Lord would punish the sins of His wayward children. Those who lacked piety or were sodomists, Democrats, blacks, Jews, Mexicans, Muslims, Communists, or anyone who listened to rap music all fit into the huge cauldron where Greene cooked up his sermons. In the eyes of the Lord, anything that deviated from the tried and true principles of the old South was offensive. The Lord (Praise His name forever, hallelujah, amen!) was enraged and would soon unleash His righteous anger.
One day, the pain in Greene’s knee became rhythmic and intense in a way he’d never experienced. He assumed an especially awful crime was about to take place. He waited for a few days, but nothing happened. Yet the throbbing got stronger. He downed Vicodin like candy, but the pain didn’t stop. When he couldn’t take it anymore, he decided he didn’t want to witness whatever horror that throbbing foretold. In the middle of the night, he took down the tent where he preached his sermons, loaded it in his camper, and fled farther south.
Even then, the pain followed him like a faithful dog. For fifteen days, no matter where he went, the pain stuck to him the way dog shit sticks to a shoe. Disoriented, almost delirious, Greene instinctively drove on. If he’d listened to something other than Christian radio stations, he’d have learned that a pandemic was spreading around the world and that it had landed in America. When Reverend Greene reached Gulfport, Mississippi, he had no clue that the Apocalypse he thought he was destined to proclaim had already started two weeks earlier. What he did learn was something else again.
His knee stopped throbbing. The pain disappeared completely.
That had to mean something, but so much was going on in Gulfport, he couldn’t figure out what. The National Guard was evacuating all residents to a Safe Zone in nearby Biloxi. Two-thirds of Gulfport’s inhabitants had already fled; the rest were rushing around, packing up their belongings. When Greene drove his old camper down Main Street, hardly anyone noticed him. But Greene saw it all very clearly. That was what he was destined for, what he’d been waiting for all those years. The End of Days was upon them, but he knew where the Righteous could take shelter. He knew where they’d be safe from the wrath of the Lord—where the pain couldn’t reach him.
Greene immediately set up his tent on the road between Gulfport and Biloxi, and as he mounted his pulpit, a current of energy shook his body like an electric shock. For the first time in all those years, he felt the call of the Lord burning inside him. Not even the muscles he’d used to set up the tent were sore.
“Listen to me, good people of Gulfport! Don’t run away. You have nothing to fear! The Lord has sanctified this place and the plague will not come here!”