CHAPTER 13

Aaron Roberts stood with two hundred other members of the Family—Jasper Sewell’s affectionate nickname for his congregation members—watching as Jackson, Mississippi, burned to the ground.

The Family stood at the large wall of windows along the south side of the New Life Bible Church’s sanctuary, staring out at the crowds fighting in the middle of Manship Street. Faces were lit by wild-eyed desperation and blank, unknowable vacancy. In the distance, towering black columns of greasy smoke rose into a gray, overcast sky like angry tornadoes. There were bodies in the street, and the infected were tearing people apart right in front of the church. Aaron could see wrecked cars and dead cops and rivers of blood flowing into the gutters. The air was full of distant sirens and screams and the roar of buildings on fire.

He thought maybe he was going to be sick.

No one spoke, and that was perhaps the scariest thing of all. He swallowed hard and happened to glance down at his watch. It was thirteen minutes past four. Only an hour had gone by since Jasper brought them all together and warned them this was coming. They had seen it on the news. They had all watched the quarantine collapse and the hordes of the infected spreading across the maps behind the newscaster’s head like ripples in a pond. Jasper, in the white choirmaster’s robe he always wore when preaching, had climbed down from his pulpit, his microphone in his hand, and sat on the steps.

“The form of the plague is new,” he told them, and let his words hang in the air before them like the promise that all would be explained shortly. Surprisingly, it wasn’t his pulpit voice he was using. It was the calm, kind voice he used when he talked to you man to man, the two of you sitting next to one another on the couch, talking about church business. Hearing him speak that way, the entire congregation grew silent—not even the babies cried. You could feel it in the air. Jasper was starting to work his spell.

“The form of the plague is new,” he said, “but God’s message is the same as when he spoke through Jeremiah of the destruction of Jerusalem. ‘And I will smite the inhabitants of this city, both man and beast,’ he said. ‘They shall die of a great pestilence.’ Look around you folks. Can any of you doubt the prophecy of those words? Do you not see it right outside your door? We are on the verge of something here, my brothers and my sisters, my children. Things are happening. There is a ring of hatred and conspiracy tightening around us all. There are people out there who want to take away the good thing we have in here. We will not let them do that. We will stand strong in our faith and our love, and we will resist the advances of those who would betray us and make us compromise our faith. I will not let this good thing disappear.”

And of course they had all answered with a great and resounding yes that prompted Jasper to close his eyes and hang his head to his chest, nodding slowly.

It had been a powerful moment, and Aaron, sitting there in the front row, had felt his wife, Kate, squeeze his hand in fear. He heard her sobbing.

He squeezed back. Their eyes met. She whispered, “Aaron, I’m so scared.”

Aaron was about to tell her that he was too, when suddenly Jasper was there, standing by her side. His hand was on her shoulder, and his fingers were long and slender and delicate, yet undeniably strong.

“What did you say, Kate?”

She looked startled.

“It’s okay,” he told her. “Tell me what you said just now.”

“I said I was scared,” she said, though it came out as a muffled whisper spoken into her chest, for she always had a hard time meeting Jasper’s gaze.

Jasper didn’t speak right away. He cupped her chin in his palm and gently lifted her face to his, holding her with his eyes.

He put the microphone up to her mouth and waited.

She leaned forward into the microphone, the way people do when they’re not used to speaking publicly.

“I said I was scared,” she repeated.

Jasper smiled at her, then took a few steps back. He scanned the Family, all of them caught up now by the man’s dazzling presence and the good feelings that seemed to radiate off him like heat waves off the summer pavement. Then he raised the microphone to his lips and said, “Sister Kate is scared, people. How many of you are scared, too?”

There were murmurs all around.

“It’s okay,” he said. “We tell nothing but the truth here. How many of you are scared like our Sister Kate?”

The murmurs became voices. A few members of the Family spoke out. Sister LaShawnda, a heavyset black woman in her early sixties who was sitting in the row behind Aaron, stood up, her right hand raised high over her head as she begged Jasper to save her.

Jasper came to her. He raised his hand to hers, and the old white choir robe sagged down to his elbow, showing the starched and sweat-stained shirtsleeve beneath. It was hot in the church. He locked his fingers together with LaShawnda’s and eased her hand down. Then he leaned close to her and kissed her on the cheek.

She melted, and if the pew hadn’t been right beneath her, she almost certainly would have fallen to the floor.

He said, “You asked for me to save you.”

“Yes,” she pleaded.

“I will do that. If you need me to be your friend, I will be your friend. If you need me to be your brother or your father or your husband, I will be those things for you. If you need me to be your Jesus, I will even do that for you. Because I love you. I love all of you.”

He took a deep breath and scanned the Family once more, seeming to pause on every face and take the measure of the soul within.

“It is okay to be scared. There is nothing wrong with that. Look outside. These are scary times. But let me tell you something about being afraid. God gave you fear for a reason. He gave you fear to wake up your common sense. It is His way of pressing the button that makes you realize you must act. And act is what we shall do.”

He walked back to his pulpit, pausing to touch Kate on the shoulder and give her a reassuring smile.

“In a short while, we will move to the buses Brother Aaron has managed to acquire for us.” He nodded to Aaron. Aaron nodded back, the pride of being recognized like this swelling him up inside. “Make yourselves ready. In a short while, we will listen to the warning of Jeremiah. We will leave Jerusalem. Be ready, my brothers and sisters. Be ready.”

And with that, Jasper turned and walked back to his office, leaving Aaron to organize the others with a closing prayer and a hymn.

That was an hour ago.

Now, Aaron stood at the church’s front windows with the rest of the Family and watched the world consume itself in a fit of fire and the gnashing of infected teeth. He looked down the line of windows. Most of the two hundred people here had been active members of Reverend Jasper Sewell’s New Life Bible Church for at least a year. There were a few new faces—some who had come in off the street when things started to get really bad outside—but nobody that Aaron, as Jasper’s second in command, didn’t recognize, and it grieved him to see the Family so frightened.

Aaron put his hands on his wife’s shoulders. Kate touched her cheek to the back of his hand and leaned against him. He felt the warmth of her body where her skin touched his. He felt her full head of brown hair thick against his chin. She was a slender, delicate woman, forty-four years old, and still pretty in an honest, unassuming way. She wore very little makeup. Her clothes were off the rack at Wal-Mart, nothing fancy. She had a high forehead that was lightly dusted with freckles. Her cheekbones were distinct, giving her face an almond-shaped taper down to the point of her chin. It was a feature she had given to their only child, Thomas. Aaron studied her features now, and as he touched her, his hands seemed like clumsy bear paws next to the graceful lines of her face.

She was trembling. When she turned her face up to his, her eyes were shining with tears.

“All of it’s gone,” she said.

She meant their life together, their house, their two cars, all the material things.

“That stuff can be replaced,” he said. “We’re here now. Our son is safe. That’s all that counts.”

She nodded.

“How much longer do you think we’ll be here, Aaron?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “I’ve been wondering about that myself.”

He looked down the row of faces at the window and he wondered why they all kept looking at the destruction. It was so painful to watch. Why then continue to stare at it?

“I’m going back to see Jasper,” he said. “I’ll ask him how much longer.”

Aaron gave her a kiss and went back to Jasper’s office.

He knocked on the open door and waited for Jasper to say it was all right for him to come in.

Jasper was sitting with his back to the door, his hands cupped together under his chin, his slender fingers stroking his cheeks. Aaron could see Jasper was sucking his cheeks in and out, his fingers pressing so hard against his face that the skin turned white, and he recognized the gesture. The man carried so much in his mind. He bore so many troubles. On the desk between them was a stack of paperwork. Aaron recognized the word “subpoena” at the heading of one piece of paper, and he understood. The troubles were starting again. Though he couldn’t read what was written on those pages, he knew they would contain the same old accusations of tax code violations and deceptive practices that had plagued them back when the church was little more than a cheap storefront on the poor, and almost entirely black, Lee Street.

“The United States government is an enemy of the conscientious religious man,” Jasper once told him. “They call us radicals—and maybe we are. We live in a community where all our brothers and sisters are equal. There is no racism here. And they can’t stand that about us. They are seeking to destroy this church through their Internal Revenue Service and their tax code violations and their subpoenas.”

He’d slammed his fist down on the stack of paperwork on his desk and stared hard at Aaron as the echo of the blow faded away.

Aaron had kept quiet, waiting for guidance.

“You see the truth of it, don’t you, Aaron?”

Aaron nodded. He understood a great deal. He and Kate and their son had been with Jasper when he was still a weekend preacher who had to steal time away from his daytime job as a Chevrolet salesman to talk to them about how to live God’s life in the real world. They had been with him when he first started to build his congregation among the poor, the blacks, the disaffected college liberals. Even then, his message had been one of hope and power. Things didn’t have to stay the same, he said. The world could be changed into something good.

That appealed to Aaron, that message of hope through conviction, peace through political activism. As Jasper’s church grew, and the Family got larger and more politically active, Jasper told Aaron his vision for what the church should be. He wanted it to be all-inclusive, something for everybody. If you wanted faith healing, Jasper would give it to you. If you wanted a church that practiced good works in the community, Jasper would give that to you. If you needed a more cerebral church, one that appealed to the intellect, Jasper could do that, too.

Aaron shared that belief all the way down to his toes. He saw why it was necessary for them to collect information cards from people during their first visit to the church. He understood why it was necessary to go to the homes of those visitors and go through their garbage and their mail and even break into their homes and get personal information on them that might be used when they came back for a second visit. When those people did come back, Jasper would call them out, and using the information that Aaron and a few other trusted lieutenants had gathered during their forays, he would preach to them on a personal level that could only be achieved by someone who knew their very soul. Aaron saw no deception in that. There was no malicious intent. Jasper used the information Aaron gathered for him to save people’s souls. His was a higher purpose, one with its own morality.

“You do see that, Aaron,” Jasper said then, his fist still grinding down on the subpoena on his desk. “I know you do. You understand that we are besieged. The government is like a pack of wild dogs nipping at us from every angle. We are surrounded. We are persecuted. We are plagued by their accusations because they see that we are of one mind and one soul and one glorious purpose. I will not let them dissolve this church, Aaron. I will never let that happen. We will die before that happens.”

Aaron stood before him then in much the way as he had stood all those years ago before a much younger but no less committed Jasper, firm in his belief that the man was holding the evil of the world and its governments at bay.

Jasper’s white choir robe was hanging on the coatrack just inside the door like always. It seemed to sag tiredly off the hook, as though all the shine and glory had gone out of it now that it no longer covered the shoulders of a great man, a prophet.

“Jasper?” Aaron said.

Jasper swiveled around in his chair. His pale blue eyes seemed tired.

“What is it, Aaron?”

Aaron hated himself then for bringing his worries to Jasper. The man clearly had enough of his own without having to calm the fears of one of his faithful, a man who had seen the genuine miracles done here in the past and should know better than to be afraid. If Jasper said they were going to be fine, they were going to be fine.

“What is it, Aaron?” Jasper said again.

“Nothing, Jasper. I’m sorry to bother you.”

“You’re not bothering me, Aaron. How are the others doing?”

“They’re scared, Jasper. Things are looking bad outside. People are getting torn apart right in front of the church.”

Jasper nodded slowly, then rose to his feet.

“Well, come along, Aaron. Let’s see how bad things have become.”

Aaron stood aside and let Jasper lead the way back to the sanctuary. A few members of the Family turned when they heard Jasper behind them and then the whole room erupted with voices.

Jasper calmed them with a casual wave of his hand.

He didn’t respond to the questions thrown at him. Instead, he walked to the windows and looked out. It was a gray afternoon with rain threatening in the west. The sky was full of roiling black smoke. People were running between wrecked cars. A cop with a military rifle was firing into a crowd of the infected. There were bodies in the street and in the grass, and with every shot, the cop added more bodies to the wreckage.

But the cop was surrounded, fighting a losing battle. One of the infected managed to grab him from behind and pull him down. The cop screamed out in pain, a horrible, echoing ululation that sent waves of prickled gooseflesh up Aaron’s arms.

The infected swarmed him.

A few moments later, the screaming stopped.

Jasper sighed sadly. He was about to turn away when one of the Family members farther down the row of windows cried out.

Everyone turned and looked where the woman was pointing.

At the edge of the parking lot, near a wrecked Volvo station wagon with its driver’s-side door hanging open, was a woman huddled down into a ball, her arms thrown over a little girl, who looked to be maybe two or three years old.

The infected were everywhere around them.

Somebody in the crowd next to Aaron groaned.

Aaron turned to Jasper, but was surprised to see that Jasper was moving away from him, headed for the front doors.

“Jasper?”

Jasper didn’t answer, and before any of them could say anything to stop him, he was walking through the doors and out into the parking lot.

“No!” somebody screamed.

The cry was echoed up and down the row of windows as the Family pressed forward to see what was happening.

Outside, Jasper was strolling calmly across the parking lot. An infected man—most of whose right foot had been chewed off and was trailing a thick, clotted trail of blood—was walking toward Jasper.

It seemed they were on a collision course, and yet Jasper made no effort to change direction and go around the infected man, and likewise the infected man made no effort to raise his hands to grab Jasper.

They walked right by each other, passing with less than two feet between them, and suddenly the whole Family fell silent.

A few of them looked noticeably surprised.

Aaron could only shake his head, a smile forming at the corners of his mouth as Jasper casually strode through the crowd of zombies, untouched, and came up right behind the woman and the little girl.

Jasper put his hand on the woman’s shoulder. She looked up at him, her face streaked with tears.

Jasper held out his hand to her, palm up, that irresistible smile of his urging her to take his hand.

She did.

He helped her stand. He reached down and picked up the little girl, and she threw her arms around his neck.

Then he led the woman and her child back to the church and through the front doors. For a moment, the Family was too stunned by what they had seen to move or speak. Jasper stood before them, the woman at his side and the child in his arms, and the very air around him seemed to shimmer with a white light that was as pure as a miracle. They all stared at him dumbly, and then, as a body, they all rushed forward, wanting to press against the warmth he was giving off.

He put the little girl down and with another wave of his hand silenced the questions on everybody’s lips.

“Sister Kate,” he said to Aaron’s wife. “I’d like you to help this young woman and her child with their needs.”

He turned to Aaron.

“Organize the Family and board the buses. We’ll be leaving in a few minutes.”

“Absolutely,” Aaron said.

Then Jasper spoke to everyone at once, and his voice was the strong, clear, resounding one he reserved for the pulpit.

“Gather your things together,” he said. “I want you to follow Brother Aaron’s instructions as we move to the buses. Our time has come. God has given us this sign and it is up to us to obey it. We are leaving Jerusalem. Let us not waste the daylight.”

And with that, he strode through the crowd, brushing against the hands that reached forward to touch him as he went back to his office.

When he was out of sight, the Family turned to Aaron, waiting for instructions.