SEX REBELS OF JESUSLAND, mini-chapter 154

(Note: We're getting near the end of this experiment in blogging a novel as a serial. Have you been following the story? If you have, let me know -- and tell me what you think. I have a few others I'd like to blog as serials if anyone has liked this one.)

154. THE DISCOVERY.

Heaven is a hard floor. He came to. He was alone. He was not dead. Or maybe he was, but he was still conscious. Was he lying in his grave? He looked up. He remembered, with shame, shitting himself. But he was clean. He was washed and dressed. There was no smell. The door was open. He heard voices. He walked towards them. He entered studio A, the big one, where Scarlet lay with a snake curling out of her. He saw the painted backdrop first. A blue screen, against which they could shoot any background and marry it with any foreground they shot against it. There were three crosses standing against the blue screen. They were empty.

In front of the crosses lay three beds. There were three people sleeping on them. Jeremiah, Hagar and Eve. Peacefully. Alive.

There were voices next door.

He walked up to Eve. There was blood on her chin. It smelled of grease paint. She was made up in a mask of suffering. It was all fake. As were Jeremiah and Hagar. The crucifixion was a fake. The news was a fake. The Men of the Gospel had made it all up. He walked towards the noise. There was a door, half-open. He looked behind it. Ezra was there. With another man. The man was Joshua Grant. His head was on his shoulders. He looked very alive. Very unbeheaded.

Joshua caught his eye.

“Oh, hello, Adam. Come in.”

Ezra turned his head. Adam could see shock in his eyes, but his face had the habitual Ezra calm.

“How are you, Adam?” Joshua smiled warmly at Adam. His eyes twinkled. “So nice to see you. How did you enjoy your initiation? That bogus beheading is a harsh ceremony. I remember it only too clearly myself. The Men of the Gospel believe one is not fit to join them until one has experienced the fear of death. They do not mind how one behaves in the face of death as long as one experiences the fear of it. You were rather brave, asking me to show my face. They do not mind if you collapse in fear. Or if you shit yourself. That’s the whole idea. Total humiliation. Before you can be a Man of the Gospel, a maximum ruler, you must know utter fear, and experience total humiliation. That’s the basis of the best initiation ceremonies.”

He smiled at Adam, and then smiled at Ezra. Joshua and Ezra looked as though they had made some kind of deal with each other. Ezra still looked a little twitchy, though. Adam knew him well enough to see that.

Joshua resumed talking. “What do you think of our latest event, Adam? I flew in from the Habitat of the Happy Beheaded to oversee it. The event of events. The one we’ve been planning since the Reformation started. Our crowning achievement.”

“The Crucifixion?”

“Yes. Finally we’ve got what we want. Our own symbolic ground zero. We can start fresh. We can make up our own religion now. We can write the new script for the nation. We can put in it everything we want. Untainted by history. History is dead, because we are writing it fresh. Isn’t that stupendous? We are very happy about this. It has all worked out fabulously.”

Ezra had fully regained his composure. Joshua continued.

“Don’t you think it was a nice touch, Adam, how we feigned speechlessness at the onset of the event, how we allowed a pause of our own surprise before we started spinning our new history about what we had staged? We even staged our own confusion. God is in the details. You can’t make a new reality until you take care of every little detail. The truth is careful, hard work. This greatest of TV reality shows required careful planning.”

“What will happen now?”

“The next video will show them dead, and then we will reorder society according to our wishes. We will create our own history. We are as Gods now. We are God himself. We are making the USUC over in our own image. We are at creation. We are the creationists. Not academically, but for real, in practice.”

“Adam.”

A voice behind them. It was Eve. She had woken up. He turned around. “What’s going on?” She looked different. “I feel very groggy.”

She looked at the three men, as if she were only now taking them in. Her gaze stopped at Joshua.

“Mr. Grant. You’re alive. You’ve got your head back.”

“I never lost it, Eve. It was a performance, like yours, except I knew what was going on, I wasn’t drugged like you.”

“We had to drug you for your performance,” said Ezra, somewhat apologetically.

“What performance?”

“You’ve been in a video shown on TV. The crucifixion of Jeremiah Luther, with you and Hagar the Child Molester as the two criminals crucified on either side of him. The latest video from the Brotherhood.”

“Why?”

Joshua smiled again. He looked like a man who had seen the Promised Land. “We have created our own seminal event. Jeremiah Luther is now the New Christ. We will show his death, and yours. It will give us the opportunity we’ve always wanted, to write history anew. We’re starting from Ground Zero. Now we can re-order society in a new vacuum. We can establish new norms of Behavior. We can create exactly what we want to. It’s so exciting. The whole idea of history has been handed to us as a blank slate. It’s all up for grabs. Ours. Oh, the debates we’re having about how to rewrite history, about how to make it new, about how to order time and truth itself. Before this, all we did was fill in the pointillist details. Now we can paint with a big brush.”

“More power than anybody has ever had, isn’t it?” said Eve.

“Exactly. We are at last free of history. Free of our own history. I want you to join us, Eve. We need another woman besides Esther among the Men of the Gospel. You too, Adam, you’ve gone through your beheading. You can help create the new world with us.”

Adam smiled. But he did not want to join them. He wanted to kill them. Now he knew the object of his revenge: these people. These fakers. These creators. These people who had pulled the wool over the world’s eyes. These diabolical overseers. Had they staged 9/11, too? Maybe they had, maybe they hadn’t. Had they bombed Washington? Who knows? Maybe they had, maybe they hadn’t, but they had used the deaths of those people, they had used the death of the first love of his life, Sarah, her ashes, to construct a new world, their world driven by fear, terror of the mind, of which this fake crucifixion was their latest media coup. They had fought the terrorists, but they had become them. They were the enemy. It was upon them that his rage should now focus. What could he do?

“I have to go the bathroom,” he said.

“You know where it is,” said Ezra. “Come back quickly. You don’t want to miss any detail of the new society. You don’t want miss out on making your contribution.”

“After we stage the death of Jeremiah,” said Joshua, “we’re all flying back to the Habitat of the Happy Beheaded to invent the ideal religion for the perfectly ordered society.”

“The Habitat of the Happy Beheaded?” asked Eve.

“Our sanctuary. Where the Men of the Gospel live. It’s also called the Garden of Eden, but we have our own pet name for it amongst ourselves. The Habitat of the Happy Beheaded. This is where all the dead martyrs of our cause live, all the survivors of our faked martyr deaths.”

Adam walked straight to the armory. He chose three machine pistols, checked that they were loaded, and then picked up two gas masks. As an afterthought, he picked out two bulletproof vests. Then he walked through to the landing strip, and checked the gas tank – full -- of a two-seater powered parachute.

Then he walked back to the office. Quietly, so they wouldn't hear him, or suspect anything.