I am.
If I thought the words “You are” were the most troubling words to hear repeated over and over inside my head, it’s only because I had not yet heard “I am” echoing through my mind.
“I am” the world’s best hope for stopping a war, but I have no army.
“I am” the one who can see pieces of the puzzle, but I can’t put them together.
“I am” Christianity’s best hope for survival, but that hope is fading.
“I am” the new rock on which His Church will continue to be built.
Is it really possible that I’m part of God’s Plan? Or is this just my own ego talking?
I’m thinking and praying in a private spot hidden inside a blackberry thicket. I ran headlong through this thicket a week ago. It was pretty silly, when I think about it. Who was I trying to run away from, anyway? God? The thorns tore me up pretty badly, but it turned out I tore up the thicket too, and created an entry to this spot. Like my world in general, I’ve found a small patch of soft grass - surrounded by sharp thorns.
My thoughts turn to one of the sharpest of those thorns - Henry’s biotoxin - which the media is now calling “The Plague.” Every day we receive an updated world map that shows the progress of the toxin and the number of people killed. The map also shows areas where the Center for World Health is “vaccinating” as they attempt to get ahead of outbreaks. The CWH shipped its first batch of vaccine to Borneo after half of the population was already infected. The vaccine only works if taken before a person is infected, so riots broke out at the airport when the cargo planes landed. Anyone who looked sick was stoned by the crowds to keep them back. Kill teams from the Corps were assigned to protect the vaccine, and they shot hundreds more as they tried to storm the planes.
The reason is no puzzle. The Corps is keeping tight control of the vaccine to ensure it stays out of the hands of Christians who are living off the government grid. We received a report of a family that had walked four days in the jungle to reach a clinic, but were denied doses, and then were arrested for fraud because three of their five children were not on the grid. As far as we know, they weren’t even Christian; they were off-grid simply because they lived in a remote area. The last report said that the entire family was killed by the toxin.
Tight control of the vaccine also allows The Corps to control the level of fear. As the tension eased on Borneo, the plague showed up in Java and Sumatra, and the cycle started all over again. Vaccine had barely arrived in those countries, when Malaysia saw its first cases. Adding to the confusion is the fact that, in rare cases, the vaccine itself causes a high fever that mimics the plague. Several people who had received their dose were killed by mobs before it was figured out.
Why don’t the experts see that this isn’t acting like a disease? It’s acting like a toxin that’s being selectively distributed.
CWH scientists are being heralded as heroes for stemming the death toll, but there’s going to be a lot more death. Henry wants people to take the vaccine without question so the plague will continue to be made to look like an unstoppable wave traveling around the world. Everywhere the disease goes, the vaccine will arrive just in time. There’ll be enough death to keep everyone scared and controlled.
What the maps and numbers can never capture is the faces of those who died, including Amelia.
Their faces, their hopes and dreams, their love. It’s all lost on a map filled with colors and numbers.
After seeing her in a video from Indonesia - where she looked tired and feverish - there has been no more contact with Amelia. There’s been talk of having a memorial service for her, but Martha has been putting it off until we know for sure. Given the mass cremations of the dead, that confirmation may never come.
The only thing that is abundantly clear to me is that I have no clue what to do about any of it. I feel like God has asked me to sit in the middle of a blackberry patch and do nothing - and I don’t know why.
But I will trust in Him.
*****
As I leave my grassy retreat, I put a com into my ear. It automatically connects to Bethany House and reports that the computers are on a code “blue five” lockout.
Intruders inside the house.
I sprint as far as I dare; then move silently through the trees, until I can see the entrance to the east escape tunnel. I’m relieved to see William, who is caring for three house members who have each taken multiple stun gun hits.
“William, what’s going on?” I ask.
“It’s Zip. Half of us were at the training center watching a match, when she and a team stormed the west tunnel. We’ve got them trapped in the command center, but they have hostages. They say they’ll kill them all, if you don’t surrender.”
I already know the answer from the look on his face, but I have to ask anyway.
“Who are the hostages?”
“Martha, Cindi, and Toby,” he replies.
Normally Blake would be second in command at Bethany House, but he’s at Capon Springs today; so my cousin James has stepped up. He has set up covered positions from which to shoot, should Zip attempt to break out; but he’s at the command center door, talking through it to Zip.
“I told you, Zip; Cephas goes off like this sometimes. We don’t know where he is!”
When he sees me, he looks like he’s going to tell them that I’ve arrived, but I motion for him to stay silent. We whisper when I reach him.
“I take it she’s not willing to negotiate,” I say.
“She’s made that quite clear,” he replies.
“What else have you tried?” I ask.
“We tried to reverse the ventilation system to flood the room with a sleeping gas, but they somehow reversed the system and sent it back in our faces. Zip says if I try anything like that again, Cindi is first to die.”
“So storming through this door is the only option left?”
I raise my stun gun.
Why does the world keep putting a gun into my hand?
“It wouldn’t be if Martha had taken my advice and built another way out of the command center,” James replies.
I reach out to the knob of the command center door.
“Don’t try it, Cephas. It can’t be done.”
“Do you have a better plan?”
“No, but the math is simple,” James says. “There are ten of them, all with guns pointed at this door - or at the heads of the hostages. Your stun gun has a maximum fire rate of five shots per second; so even if you could hit all ten targets in under three seconds, they’ll still have time to execute our people.”
“Don’t say ‘our people’ like you’ve never met them. My wife and your sister are two of the hostages,” I say.
“It doesn’t change the math,” James says.
“Then I will. I’ll double my fire rate.”
I grab his stun gun from its holster and kick in the door with a gun in each hand. My first two shots hit Zip and a member of her team, who are indeed holding their guns to the heads of Martha and Cindi. Next down is a man holding a rifle, followed by a woman who shoots and hits the door frame next to me. Number five is hit as he dives for the cover of a table, and six when he raises his gun to shoot Cindi. The next two reveal their positions when they shoot from shadowed spots in the corners. I’m already moving forward, so they miss, but I feel the electric charge race past before I disable them both. Number nine drops his gun and surrenders, and number ten follows suit.
“I knew you could shoot left-handed!” Martha says.
“You also knew I’d do anything necessary to end another training exercise and keep our date tonight.”
“Zip,” who was being played by Misty, gets up from the floor.
“You two do realize that these things still hurt, even on the lowest setting, right?”
“Sorry, Misty. How many times does that make this week? Seven?” I ask.
“You lose both count - and feeling - after three.”
“Thanks everyone,” Martha says. “Be ready to practice a new assault scenario tomorrow.”
“Okay, but you get to be Zip next time,” Misty says.
Martha looks at me.
“You’re mad,” she concludes.
“Why did you run a scenario like that?” I ask.
“You’ve spent a lot of time in the blackberry patch lately. I haven’t told them where you go, but everyone is feeling your absence. I think everyone will be relieved to hear how you handled walking in on the middle of an attack.”
“I mean, why did you run a scenario where there’s a gun to your head?”
She pauses.
“I guess I didn’t think about it. I mean, with the plague hanging over us, don’t we all have guns to our heads?”
“I suppose so.”
I say it solely to end the conversation. What the training scenario really did was reinforce the nagging feeling that I’ll soon be forced to make a choice between what I want for myself, and what God wants for me. If that choice includes hurting Martha, I’m not sure I’ll have the strength to choose God’s Plan.
As the command center returns to normal operations, I look for an empty station I can use - and see, again, that I was too slow. It happens every day. Like a game of musical chairs, I’m the last one standing when the only station available is the one that everyone avoids: Amelia’s old station. The top of the monitor sports a small toy lizard that Amelia flopped there, like it fell asleep. I’m sure it will turn gray with dust before anyone touches it.
As I begin to scan the news, the screen goes dark except for a small blinking icon in the lower corner that looks like a stick with a snake coiled around it. I select it and some sort of code downloads, then prompts me to select the stick again to complete a remote link. I know enough about technology to understand this is some sort of hacking, and that I should purge the new code before anyone can gain remote access. I complete the link anyway.
“Thank God,” Amelia says, as her face comes up on the screen.
She’s wearing an isolation suit, but has the hood off.
“I knew it would be you, Cephas. You’re the only one there who would see the backdoor I wrote into my station for downloading medical texts and not delete it as a hack.”
“You’re alive!” I yell.
Finally, some good news.
Heads come up all over the room at my shout, followed by people crowding around the station.
“Why wouldn’t I be?”
“We got the video you made of the pile of bodies. You looked like you had the plague.”
“I told you I was fine. Whatever it was, it passed in no time. Look, I can only hold this link for a minute; so here’s my report. I’m in Makassar, Indonesia, but you’d think I’m on the set of a horror movie. This entire city is going to be wiped out. My hotel got converted into a hospital, so I’m volunteering as a nurse to collect more samples. I even flirted with a cult hunter who said he’d been vaccinated, and got a blood sample from him.”
“Did you find anything?”
“I’m sure they’re doing this with a genetic toxin, just like Jocie said; but it breaks down too quickly after a patient dies for those samples to be of any use. I ran the cult hunter’s vaccinated DNA through a sequencer to try to locate the artificial sequence that’s designed to counteract the toxin, but the human genome has over three billion base pairs. It’s a needle in a haystack.”
“If you’re working as a nurse, can you get access to the vaccine?”
“They didn’t bring vaccine to Makassar. They set up a perimeter to keep everyone inside; then wrote the city off as a loss. A few people tried to get out early on and were shot. Now the entire island is quarantined and they’re using drones to blow up anyone who attempts to leave by boat. From the roof of the hotel, you can see a dozen or more explode and burn at sea every night.”
“So what’s your next move?” I ask.
“The same as every other Christian. Survive.”
*****
After the call ends, the house erupts into a celebration over Amelia’s survival. I attend for a while; then slip away to pray. I need to praise God and thank Him. I’d like to return to the blackberry patch, but that’s already gotten me into trouble once today; so I’m in our room when Martha finds me.
“I heard you’d slipped out of the party,” Martha says. “I’d hoped you were spending time with the team. They need you.”
“I’m sorry. I guess I felt a little guilty.”
“Guilty?”
“I’d given up hope that we’d ever see Amelia again. I’d stopped praying for her to somehow survive. It’s hard to enjoy a party when you feel like you were faithless.”
“Nobody will ever accuse you of being faithless, Cephas. As far as we’re concerned, you’re the rock that the entire team is built upon,” she replies.
“Tell me, Martha. How can I be His rock in ‘Man’s Garden of Eden?’ When Jesus declared Simon Peter to be His rock, the world was seeking a savior. Peter and the other Apostles touched peoples’ hearts because their hearts were open and yearning to be touched. How can anyone be His rock in a world that barely understands love?”
“I don’t know - but it’s not like Simon Peter knew what he was doing either,” she says. “Sometimes he was a major mess-up. He fell asleep, and then ran at Gethsemane when Jesus was arrested; and then he denied Christ three times.”
“If Jesus is in the habit of picking major mess-ups, then He has the right guy again this time,” I say.
“God doesn’t expect you to be perfect, Cephas. He picked you because you’re you, and so did I.”
She kisses me to drive the point home.
“Do you want me to go back to the party?” I ask.
“It would be good for both you and the team, but that’s not why I came looking for you. We broke through the encryption on the chip that Jocie hid inside the gold cross.”
“Please tell me there’s something useful,” I say.
“There isn’t any scientific information about the toxin or vaccine; but you need to look at it personally.”
“Why? What’s on it?”
“It’s just a few files. It’s everything The Corps collected relating to the tube car accident that killed your parents.”
“My parents? Why would Jocie ask Henry for the files on my parents?”
“I don’t know. I only read a little, but I bet you’ll find some things your Aunt Jennifer never told you.”
*****
As Martha and I approach the command center, we have to wonder if the party for Amelia has moved in there. The entire house has crowded in and everyone is chattering loudly. When we enter, we look to the big screen. Michael somehow escaped the dragnet The Corps placed around all of England, and is now standing in the Mississippi river somewhere outside of New Orleans, baptizing people.
For the moment, Bethany House is able to forget the plague - but not me.
I find a screen in a quiet corner and bring up the information that was hidden inside Jocie’s gold cross. I recognize the smaller document as the official report from the Department of Transportation that was released to the public. I read it a dozen times when I was young, trying to make sense of how my parents were with me one day and gone the next. It’s primarily a detailed engineering document that meanders from one part of a tube car to another, focusing on a design flaw in the lift system that resulted in failure due to excessive parts’ wear. The report concludes that the unprecedented tragedy was accidental, and outlines new protocols to be taken to ensure no similar accidents would occur in the future.
A classified report from the F.B.I. is new to me. It begins with an agonizingly detailed description of the “remains” found at the scene. When the car disintegrated, the people inside were virtually liquefied. Bone fragments, hair, skin and blood were smeared over ten kilometers of tube line. The report notes that some of the victims had few or zero enhancements; so the only way to identify them was through comparison of the liquid remains to the national DNA database.
I look through the list of names, and find the final inventory of my parents’ mortal remains. For each of them, positive identification was made by DNA recovered from hair and blood samples. DNA from each of them was also recovered from skin samples; but in each case the yield was low and had some anomalies which were assumed to be from the cross-contamination of fluids from other victims.
The next part of The Corps report contains a detailed engineering analysis, but focuses on just two parts of the tube car: a stabilizing rod and a sensor that would slow the car down if a problem was detected. Normally, the stabilizing rods are inspected and replaced by maintenance robots as often as weekly. The part The Corps found after the accident was not only old, but had been purposefully weakened to fail as soon as the car exceeded eight hundred miles per hour. The sensor had been sabotaged to continuously send out a signal indicating the stabilizer was operating perfectly.
Despite what was told to the public, The Corps concluded that the ‘accident’ was, in fact, murder. The investigation was closed when The Corps was unable to determine which of the many victims the intended target was. There’s even a comment written by Henry Portman, who was then the Deputy Director for Cultic Affairs. He informed the Director that The Corps had done detailed background checks on each of the victims, and found no evidence that any of them were Christians, or that the sabotage was related to cult activity.
An official lie. Henry knew it was some sort of Christian dispute. Maybe he even found evidence in the debris.
The last file contains Henry’s “eyes only” personal notes that confirm he lied to the Director in his official report. He secretly conducted searches of the victims’ homes and found ample proof that some of the victims were part of a Christian group. Henry was particularly concerned with one woman whose family was connected to his own. She was considered an ardent atheist because her great-grandfather was the scientist who created the genetic toxin technology used in the Final Holy War. The woman’s name was Angela Ralph.
A Christian working in a high security job right under The Corps’ nose? Or a cult hunter spy?
He notes the number of Bibles and religious artifacts observed during the searches, but the only thing The Corps took was from the home of Angela Ralph: a back-up copy of her work in genetic toxins and synthetic virus vaccines.
My parents are also mentioned by name in Henry’s file. The search team found the empty incubator my mother built, and concluded it was used for growing viruses as part of the vaccine research.
So there it is: the proof that mom and dad were conspiring to kill billions.
Henry notes that, in view of the evidence, my parents’ Will was to be declared void and I was to be placed in the custody of my Aunt Jennifer.
Martha walks behind me and gives my shoulders a squeeze.
“That’s the saddest look I’ve seen on your face in a long time,” she says. “Why don’t we get out of here, and go see Bill and Wendy. Maybe planning their wedding will cheer you up.”
“Yeah, let’s go,” I reply.
But I guarantee we won’t be discussing weddings. They have bigger secrets to give up than their secret to a long term relationship. Much bigger.