The Sixth Station (48 page)

As suddenly as it started, the earthquake stopped, although the morning sky was dark as night. The town was deserted—many bodies lay scattered around the parking lot in front of the church. Some had been crushed by boulders that had flown off the mountainside, while others, I could see, had been shot dead.

It was a scene out of Armageddon, and I still had no idea of what really had happened outside of this earthquake-ravaged town. A massive downpour began, complete with lightning and deafening thunder rolling off the mountain, which literally looked as if it were cracking apart.

I took out Sadowski’s phone just for the light and began climbing up toward Grethe’s house, using the phone as a flashlight. I still don’t know why I went up. The rain, the brambles, the fallen rocks, and the mudslides made climbing nearly impossible, but somehow I was forced onward.

Alazais climbed down. And you’re impelled to climb up. Why? Go back down—not up!

I began to hear cries from somewhere on the mountain, but I had no idea from where exactly, and still I climbed upward. I could barely see in front of me, let alone see anything in my peripheral vision.

The cuts I’d sustained climbing through the broken window—which hadn’t even registered at the time—were now bleeding quite heavily. Still, I kept climbing, crawling, climbing up. To what, I had no idea.

When I was perhaps one-quarter of the way up, I heard a woman’s voice.
“Sorella, vieni, vieni con noi. Qui è la sicurezza che cercate.”

I saw nothing but felt a wet hand reach out and pull me in. I instinctively jumped back but was stopped by someone immediately behind me on the muddy trail.

Another hand reached out and handed me a cup of water.
“Sorella, vieni, vieni con noi. Qui è la sicurezza che cercate,”
the woman said once again.

I was led inside a small cave on the mountainside, in which perhaps fifty survivors sat huddled around a fire. Torches and flashlights lit up the interior, and I was taken aback at how odd it was to see fashionably dressed Italians huddled around a campfire in a cave. Jaded New Yorker to the end, I guess.

When I’d finished my water and had been given a blanket to wrap around myself, a woman in a veiled burqa approached. She took both of my hands in hers as she knelt down beside me, weeping softly. I could see her bright blue eyes blazing in the firelight.

The woman unhooked her veil and I saw the face. Il Vettore, the middle-aged face of little Theotokos Bienheureux. Clearly she had been expecting me.

“They killed my boy today,” she groaned, waving her hands around to indicate the destruction. “Did they think it wouldn’t happen? Did they think they could kill the seed of Jesus with no consequences?”

She put her head in my lap and I stroked her. “But what happened? I thought he was going to go free or at least be retried because of the testimony of Judge Bagayoko.”

“Yes. That was supposed to be, but it never came to be. I knew at His
birth
that I would witness His death.”

“How did he die? I know nothing about it.”

“They brought Him shackled into the General Assembly room. Again,” she said, disgust filling her voice. “When the new chief judge, Alberto Sant’Angelo, brought the court to order, Reverend Bill Teddy Smythe rose from his wheelchair in the front row, rushed my son, and shot Him dead!”

She too began softly keening that “ululu” sound. “I knew He would die, but I watched Him die; it was broadcast all over the world. My son. My little brown baby. The kindest, gentlest, finest man I have ever known.”

I was astounded. “He managed to sneak a gun through the tightest security in the world?”

She looked at me. Even though we were only a few years apart, she seemed so much older—even with her Ralph Lauren WASP-ish freckled face.

“How is that possible?”

“Because they wanted it to happen. All the power in the world was frightened of one small man who preached goodness.”

“And Bill Teddy? Is he in prison?”

“Rioters outside the United Nations gates somehow—mysteriously, they want us to believe—were able to break through all barricades, all the heavily armed security forces, all of it. These so-called rioters rushed the chamber and whisked the reverend away. Just before the earthquake, we saw it on a laptop—the son of Satan, killing the Son of the Son of God. He was uplifted on the shoulders of his liberators. ‘The slayer of Satan,’ these ignoramuses cried out. He is being saluted as the hero.”

“I am so sorry.”

“So am I. I somehow, even though I knew He would end as His Father ended—executed—I naively always thought somewhere in my heart that my love could save Him. And then when you surfaced, when He kissed you, I thought you would be the one.”

“I’m sorry I couldn’t save your son,” I answered and pulled the tattered Veil from my pocket, handing it back to its rightful owner.

She stared at it. A nearly two-thousand-year-old portrait of her Son. She cradled the cloth to her chest as if it were a living thing.

Then: “Thank you for this.”

“I know it’s not much.…”

“Today you were in a war against evil. Nobody won. But this,” she said, lifting the cloth and kissing it, “means we can continue to bring the light—”

“You mean, the proof?”

“No, that I’m afraid even you couldn’t bring us. You see, what we needed was my son’s DNA in order to prove that He was indeed the Son of the Son.”

I had failed. There
was
no proof.

She got up and came back with a blanket, and we could hear boulders falling around the cave and down the mountainside, but she didn’t appear to be frightened.

“God will show us the way,” she said, reading my thoughts.

When I laid down on the wet floor of the cave, I felt the puffy envelope that was still in my jeans pocket. I sat back up and pulled it out and opened it up. It was a standard-sized sheet of paper and a square cut from my tattered old Gap scarf sealed in a tiny plastic envelope. It was roughly the same size as the Veil.

In some idiotic fantasy, I’d somehow thought that Pantera had written me a love letter or something equally ridiculous. But it just looked like some kind of mathematical formulas. I called to il Vettore in the dark. “Madam. I just remembered, Yusef gave me this paper,” I said, embarrassed about having loved the same man as she had.

She came over, and although she didn’t have to, she said, “He was a kind and understanding husband to me. But I always wanted to give my life to the Father of my Son.”

“I’m sorry?”

“God,” she said. “
I
was born to serve God. And you, my lovely friend, were born to save the Son of the Son of God.”

“I’m afraid I wasn’t up to the task.”

“You know, thirty-four years ago I was plucked out of my regular American teenage life. I was scared and angry and lonely. But I didn’t have a choice because I was chosen. Now it’s your turn.”

“Huh?”

“
You’ve
been called by God,” she said.

I remembered telling Sadowski,
Next time God chooses up sides, can I be the one left on the bench?
Now I felt awed by what had happened to me, to the world.

I handed her the paper Pantera had given me. She held a flashlight up to the pages and tried to make out the equations in the half-light. She called over an old man, who held the flashlight, read it, then took his glasses off, cleaned them, and read it again.

They looked at one another, he whispered something to her, and I could see shock mixed with something akin to joy spread over her face.

“What is it?”

“It’s the laboratory test results from your scarf,” she said, her blue eyes finally dancing with joy in the firelight.

I didn’t ask how she knew it had been from my scarf—but nothing surprised me any longer.

“The DNA, which I am more than sure will match the DNA on the Veil, holds the imprint of the life of
Jesus
—and of my son.”

She handed me the paper as though I’d understand what the
hell
she was showing me.

“I’m sorry, but what do these numbers mean?”

“Ms. Russo,” the old man said, waving the paper and holding the envelope with the small bit of scarf, “this proves that Demiel ben Yusef is the Son of the Son of God.”

“I’m sorry? How can you know this? I mean, it doesn’t say, ‘This is God’s DNA’ on the laboratory results, I’m sure.”

“Hardly!” He laughed and spun me around. If he were younger I swear he would have lifted me off my feet. “The DNA sample from your scarf? It contains only
twenty-four
chromosomes per cell.”

“And that means—what?”

“It means Demiel and Jesus only had one parent—God.”

“Again, I have no idea what you’re saying…”

“Every
human
being, you see, has forty-six chromosomes per cell,” he answered. I could see the tears once more springing into Theo’s eyes, but this time they were tears of joy.

She took up the explanation then, excitement overcoming her reserve. “What Dr. Litano is saying is that my son, as I know and now the world will know, was
not
conceived from man—but from
God.
He has only
one set
of chromosomes per cell. A human
being
—even a human
clone
—is made up of twenty-three
pairs
of chromosomes, or forty-six chromosomes per cell. Demiel’s cells only had twenty-four chromosomes, total.”

“But half would be twenty-three, not twenty-four—no?”

“Ahhh, even the Son of God needs a gender-determinant chromosome,” the old man answered. “The extra chromosome is what made—makes—her son a male. The Son of God has but one parent.”

With that she lifted the piece of white Gap scarf, held it up, and kissed it.

“The second execution yields the second veil of miracles,” she declared.

With that she pounded her chest softly and once more began the “ululu” lamentation, which reverberated around the walls of the cave.

And it was as beautiful a sound as I’d ever heard: It was as beautiful as the muezzins calling the faithful to prayer in Istanbul; the Mormon Tabernacle Choir singing in Salt Lake City; carolers outside my parents’ Long Island house on Christmas Eve; the voice of the cantor on the Friday night that Donald and I attended services at the temple in Rome. They were all the glorious sounds of eternity—when the sweet sound of God is the only sound you hear.

Yes, that
was
me, the jaded agnostic, speaking.

I didn’t try to go to sleep and instead turned on my tablet and began to write. I included it all—the written and spoken testimony of everyone involved—as you have just read. When I was done, three days later, I turned the old leather “Selçuk diary” back to il Vettore to keep. It rightfully belonged to her as the only surviving member of the Great Experiment.

I wrote a much-abbreviated news story. The earthquake had ravaged everything on the mountain, but I was able to make my way back down to the shattered village after I’d finished.

First thing I did was check the roll of the dead that the Red Cross had compiled. “We think everyone has been accounted for,” the man in charge told me.

I read and reread every name. There was no Yusef Pantera, or Edward, Edouard, or Ed or even Eddie Gibbon—yes, I had finally made the connection that he’d been the one who had probably sent me those Italian e-mails.

“Are you sure about that?” I asked.

“We think so. But there’s a tent set up to treat the injured,” he said, pointing to the Red Cross tent that had been erected in the town square.

I rushed over and walked the long aisles of the tent. He wasn’t there.

What the hell? I saw him die.

The Red Cross mobile truck had a wireless signal, so I logged in, attached my story, and sent it to Dona, whom I prayed was still alive in the war zone that had become the United Nations Plaza. Then I sent holographic photos and the laboratory results to Donald, who was, I knew, too slick to die.

Within an hour, both the story and the proof were blasted around the world.

God bless the news media. Even when the world is collapsing, it still seems to figure out how to exist,
and
to report on the end of the world.

The Standard
online edition gave my story the front “page.”

Me, who had been fired. Me, the accused killer.

This time
The Standard
ran my story intact, with a headline that screamed:
THE
NEWEST
TESTAMENT,
with this byline: By Alessandra Russo (aka Alazais Roussel).

The subhead was tabloid, baby, all the way:
PROPHET OR NUT JOB?

But you know all that already.

E
PILOGUE

Manoppello, Italy

Immediately after the assassination of Demiel ben Yusef, the epidemic of plagues, superviruses, and natural disasters that had been sweeping the planet escalated, as did the warring.

There is too much misery and too many real killers roaming the planet looting and carpetbagging for the authorities to worry about one reporter; a few dead, probably fake Interpol assassins; and one beloved but very sly priest.

Still I have to clear my name. More important, I want to be with my family. It’s time to make my way back to the states any way that I can. It won’t be easy. Not much is working in these mountains these days.

I’m really concerned that I haven’t been able to contact my parents. Donald went out to their house in Freeport, Long Island, for me, but found that it had been boarded up. The upper dormer (my old bedroom seven thousand years ago) was caved in. Freeport, and a few other towns on the South Shore of Long Island, had been hit by a tornado. My hope (belief) is that they fled to safety.

My brother and his family are totally off the radar, too. I hope to God that they are all safe together, but I’m wracked with worry. I can only pray that they haven’t, God forbid, been targeted because of me.