John R. Little

THE MURDER OF JESUS CHRIST

This book is for Emma and Sammie, who bring me to life every single day.

Author’s Note

For the past few years, people have asked if I would ever write an autobiography. Mostly I’ve laughed at the idea. Who would want to read about my life? As time has gone on, though, I know there’s a very specific time frame that everyone is interested in. In this book, I finally gave in and wrote down those events.

Maybe now the questions will stop.

You might question how I seem to remember dialogue word for word. As you’ll see, I have a very good memory, and if I couldn’t remember the exact words, I sure as hell remember the tone and nature, so how I’ve written things is very close, if not exactly what happened.

I’ve also included some stories for which I wasn’t present. That’s the result of a bit of research, a few phone calls and emails, and so on. It’s as precise as I could make it.

Sometimes I don’t come across as a particularly nice guy. I’ll have to live with that.

For now, it’s good enough that I write the truth about what happened as best I can. Maybe now I’ll be able to sleep without nightmares.

I want to offer my sincere thanks to Warden Alan Richman for providing access to the facilities I needed to write this book.

David Abelman

United States Penitentiary, Leavenworth

Prologue

Jimmy Morano had expected it would be a boring day of monitoring, just one more in a long string of boring days spanning the Christmas season. Nobody else was working on the project, having all put aside their algorithms and computers to enjoy a week (two for some) with families and turkey.

He took a long sip of his cold Starbucks Americano and set it down on his desk.

The only sound was the sweet hum of the bank of computers lining the room.

To be sure, Jimmy never minded being the only one working. It let him catch up on the data stream that seemed endless and infinitely boring. However, there were occasional bursts of interesting bits in the stream that kept all the astronomers on the project fighting for more.

Today was one of those rare days.

Jimmy was twenty-two years old, a recent graduate of Cal Tech, and he had his whole future ahead of him. He had no way of knowing his life was about to be defined by a single moment.

He stared again at the coffee. “Should have sprung for the cappuccino,” he whispered.

His head ached, no doubt a side effect of the partying the night before with Joanna. He didn’t remember much of the night and chalked that up to both the beer and the monotonous routine of their relationship. He knew it was time to move on. She probably knew it, too.

Beep, beep, beep.

Probably another false alarm.

The data stream was fed by seventeen ground-based telescopes scattered around the world, as well as six in Earth’s orbit and two from even farther out. The data was primarily a by-product of whatever else the telescopes were doing. If a scientist in Japan was focused on a new comet near the Orion nebula or an astronomer in Australia was monitoring radio signals from the center of the Milky Way, they did their thing, but whatever they were looking at also fed the Cosmos supercomputer at Cal Tech. All the feeds were combined, and a series of sophisticated programs sifted through the work, looking for patterns.

It was a cheap way to see everything in the known universe without having to build a single telescope.

Beep, beep, beep.

The supercomputer used predictive analytics as well as more basic pattern-matching algorithms, and if it found anything unusual, it notified the guy in charge. Today that guy was Jimmy Morano.

Jimmy picked up the data feed and found that the power of the computer had been pretty much wasted with this anomaly. It was a single observation that triggered the notification, and it came from the Sunset II satellite.

Sunset II was a small satellite that orbited the sun from twenty million miles away. That meant it was close to the sun and allowed it to monitor solar radio activity at a fine level of detail.

Occasionally, though, the satellite would focus its sight on the planets in the solar system, including Earth. Once in a long while, it would aim its receivers at the Moon.

“Holy shit.”

Jimmy stared at the signals and pressed keys to select a summary.

He had six hours of recording available.

Without hesitating, Jimmy sent a standardized email message to his supervisor, copying other researchers in several labs around the world who were also linked to the project.

His headache was forgotten as he watched the dancing sprites on the graph in front of him.

For the past four hours and six minutes, there had been targeted radio waves emitting from the far side of the moon, the side that humans could never see from Earth.

It was obvious from the repetition that the radio signals were not natural, and they certainly were not made by humans.

There was only one possible cause. There were aliens on the far side of the moon.

Part 1—In the Beginning

Chapter 1

In the future, if I ever witness another spaceship blasting off from Cape Canaveral, it’ll still never cease to be an astonishing event.

However, this launch was two hours late, and I had to pee. I tried to ignore the pressure, because once the word was given, I’d only have a few minutes to start taking photos. A little discomfort was nothing I couldn’t manage.

My name is David Abelman and even though I’m sure you’ve heard about me, I should take a minute to introduce myself. I’m a science photographer. I shoot pictures of just about anything, as long as it somehow relates to science.

I’ve been fortunate in my career to have photographed covers for Discover, Natural Geographic, Time, and dozens of other magazines.

Some consider me lucky. I’d be one of those.

The Sagan was two miles away. Far enough that I could barely see the tiny speck of metal reaching up from the ground, majestically pointing to the sky and beyond.

There were five crew members on board the rocket. One of those astronauts was Karen Anderson, about whom you will learn more later. She’s important to this story.

Man, I really had to pee.

“Suck it up, buttercup,” I whispered to myself.

The astronauts might have to go, too, but their space suits would take care of that. Just for a moment, I was jealous of them. I did have an empty Coke bottle from earlier, but even with nobody nearby, it felt like something a teenager might do. I was twenty-five years old, and I’d damn well behave like it.

Unless I couldn’t. I needed to think about something else.

My tripod was set, with my best Canon EOS SLR camera ready to go into action. I own nine cameras, but I only use three for serious business. The EOS was my favorite and my go-to camera when I really needed the shot.

I refreshed the NASA app on my iPhone. It was all splashy and colorful, but the only thing it was showing now was the launch time.

And it was moving again.

5 minutes 15 seconds to launch.

“Finally.”

It’s not unusual to have launch delays. The weather, final systems checks, any of a hundred other things could cause Mission Control to take the safe route and halt the timer temporarily.

Now that time was running again, I felt a familiar queasiness in my stomach.

What if I screwed up?

Nat Geo had commissioned me to cover the launch of the Sagan. They’d paid for me to fly to the Cape, put me up in the best hotel, authorized whatever I wanted for expenses, and a fat ten-thousand-dollar fee. Twice my usual commission.

They wanted this cover badly. So did every other publication. The people on this spaceship were going to meet the aliens on the far side of the moon.

That still sounded so foreign. Aliens. Everyone on Earth knew they were there, but nobody had even the most basic information about them. We didn’t know what they looked like, what they sounded like, if they were living creatures or some kind of machines sent from their home planet. For that matter, we had no idea where their home planet was.

All we knew was that these five astronauts were taking the first step to find them.

This launch reminded everyone of the first voyage of Christopher Columbus leaving Spain to discover the New World.

And somehow, I was lucky enough to be one of the primary photographers.

I smiled, knowing my photos would end up in the history books.

Unless I screwed it up.

My fingers were shaking.

“Take a deep breath,” I told myself. I followed my own instruction and it helped.

2 minutes 43 seconds to launch.

“Good luck, Karen. God bless.” I felt a melancholy pitch in my stomach as I thought of her.

There was some commotion in the distance as some utility vehicles moved farther away from the launch pad.

I looked through the telephoto lens for about the thousandth time to be sure the Sagan was centered. Looking through the camera, the rocket was slim, tall, majestic.

I clicked some practice photos. You never know when pre-launch pictures might be useful.

Before I knew it, I heard, “T minus 30 seconds” booming throughout the area. There were a half-dozen other photographers at the official viewing area, all scattered about. I knew most of them from other projects.

Just then my phone beeped, scaring the crap out of me, which I did not need right at that time. A text message. I ignored it. Whoever it was would have to wait.

“Ten… nine…”

“Game time.”

The countdown continued and then the horizon was smeared out by a blazing explosion that seemed to be as bright as a nuclear blast. Even expected, it still shook me, like the entire launch pad had been destroyed.

When I saw the spaceship rising from the ground and thrusting into space, I realized I had been holding my breath.

Fortunately, my professional reflexes kicked in, and I had already clicked a dozen images by the time my mind clued into things.

Three months earlier, I’d done a photo shoot of the NASA control room. There were thirty men and women monitoring their stations, simulating the launch. That shoot had sold to Discover and was one of my favorites. I was able to capture the tension on the technicians’ faces as they all thought, “What if I screw up?”

At least that’s what I believe they were thinking. Right then, I was hoping they were paying attention to whatever data signals were being routed to them.

That’s when the shock wave hit.

The ground shook, as if a magnitude-6 earthquake was rolling over the area. My tripod shook slightly, but it didn’t matter. The Canon was top of the line, with anti-shake technology that allowed it to continue to focus on the rocket, ignoring the tremors.

What I felt at that point could never be adequately expressed with a camera, but the writer who covered the story later wrote that the immense shock wave from the launch was the most brutal and forceful display of American force she’d ever seen.

I liked that description.

Karen and the other astronauts must have been going through absolute hell as the g-forces crushed them into their seats, while the shock waves made them feel like they were in a blender.

Click, click, click.

“This is NASA Control. The spacecraft Carl Sagan has successfully achieved liftoff and will shortly be injected into Earth orbit.”

I took some last snaps of the diminishing contrails left behind by the ship. It was only a few minutes before the Sagan was out of sight, already a hundred miles offshore over the Atlantic Ocean.

My finger was still clicking, but there was nothing more to see, so I forced myself to stop. The launch had been amazing. I glanced at the counter on the camera to see that I’d taken 153 photos in that tiny period of time.

“I have the best job in the world,” I said. I absolutely believed it.

Sometimes I wished I could be an astronaut, but knew I didn’t have what it takes. This group of five was the best of the best. They had to be, in order to have been chosen as the first group of alien hunters.

A woman named Lucy Tyler was sitting in the Control Room in Houston, probably madly scribbling down notes and impressions of the launch. She would be writing the story my photos would accompany.

Within the next few days, we’d have to merge our perspectives, so that I picked the very best photos to bring out her words.

One more in a long string of great days.

I thought of calling somebody to go for a celebratory drink, but wanted to head home and load the pictures onto my Mac and start working on the storyboards.

That’s when I remembered how badly I needed to pee.

I grinned and loaded my equipment back into my two-year-old silver Toyota Camry, then ran over to the closest building. There were several scattered on the grounds nearby, and I knew this one was primarily an old storage area. There was a bathroom inside.

After relieving myself, I remembered the text that had popped into my iPhone during the launch. I clicked it open.

Please come. Now. It’s time.

I stared at the screen and the euphoria of the day fell off me like icicles melting on the first warm spring day.

It was from my grandmother. My heart sank, knowing exactly what the text signified.

Chapter 2

A hundred miles above David Abelman, The Sagan orbited the Earth, once every ninety minutes.

Karen Anderson was both afraid and ecstatic. It still seemed impossible that she could be flying in a spaceship. A year earlier, she’d been working in her lab, trying to decipher something—anything—from the radio waves emitted on the far side of the moon.

After the ship had entered orbit, she’d released herself from her crash belt and had been floating free in zero gravity for the past hour. Although the sensation was amazing, it was also oddly sickening. Her stomach felt like she was continually in an elevator whose cables had snapped. She’d been told that the ship in orbit was basically falling non-stop around the Earth, but she hadn’t really understood that until now.

The captain, Murray Thomson, and the other NASA crew members on the flight all had duties assigned. They were ignoring her, which was also very much expected.

Karen would have little to do for the next four months. She’d become accustomed to the Skywheel, while more crew arrived and they worked together to assemble the ship to carry Karen and the rest of the crew to the moon.

I’m going to the moon, she thought in awe. How cool is that?

She pushed herself to a window and could see the Earth shining brightly below.

David was down there. Somewhere.

She wondered if she’d be able to see the photos he was taking at some point. After she returned to Earth, for sure, but she would like to see them earlier. Even though they were no longer a couple, she still followed his work whenever she knew about it.

She also wondered if he’d been thinking of her during the launch.

Probably not. He’s too much the professional.

Karen had spent the past two years working on the moon project.

The radio waves that had been intercepted initially seemed to stop shortly afterward. That initial burst had six hours of data. It was a stream of binary, 1s and 0s, that streamed out into space from a relatively tiny crater near the Moon’s south pole but on the far side.

With the limited data stream, Karen and hundreds of other scientists around the world had a wonderful puzzle to solve. Everyone assumed aliens had initiated the broadcast, but nobody knew what it said or why they had sent it.

Karen loved the challenge. The idea of creatures from a faraway planet nestled so close to humanity made her curiosity almost burst.

Another part of her, though, wondered how it could be possible. If God made mankind in His own image, who made the aliens?

It was a passing thought that sometimes woke her at night.

Another: how would the aliens react when she and the rest of the crew landed near the tiny crater Daedalus.

After that initial radio burst, a new satellite was launched and sent to orbit the moon.

It was more finely tuned and scientists quickly realized the radio beacon sent from Daedalus was focused like a tightly-wrapped cone. It had never been noticed before because a receiver had never been in the right place. The new satellite fixed that.

A steady stream of data was captured after that, six hours every day.

It was being sent in the direction of the star Gliese 581, which was assumed to be the home of the aliens.

In the two years since a complete set of data had been tapped, nobody, including Karen, had made the slightest bit of headway in understanding a single word.

“Maybe they’ll talk to us in person, though,” she’d told herself. “Just maybe.”

She’d be one of the first to find out.

Chapter 3

My grandmother’s name was Ariela Abelman. She was ninety-two years old, and her whole life was defined by a single six-month period when she was thirteen.

Everyone called her Mrs. Abelman except me. I called her Grandma or sometimes Ariela. I was one of the few people left who knew she was never a Missus, had never been married, had never even had a serious love interest in her life. That six-month period ruined her for all that.

When I arrived at the hospital, she was a crippled old woman. She lay in her rickety hospital bed, quietly gasping for each breath of precious air, sucking in what little she could.

I knew what to expect, because I’d been here to visit her prior to heading to Cape Canaveral. That didn’t make it any easier, though. Grandma was the one constant in my life, the one person who had loved me, without condition, from the day I was born.

Her eyes were blurry and weepy, not from fear but from the aging that had finally brought her to her final hours.

She was ready to die and to meet her God.

When I entered the room, she didn’t immediately notice me. It took all her energy to concentrate on getting air.

Grandma had told me she’d signed a DNR, so when her body started to fail, nobody would go to any extraordinary measures to keep her alive. She hated the thought of having a machine breathe for her, or having some other contraption extending her life for no purpose.

“When it’s my time, God will take care of me.” I remember her saying that my whole life. She’d already been old by the time I could understand aging and death, and I was fortunate to have had her in my life as long as I did.

That wouldn’t make it easier to say good-bye to her for the last time.

“Grandma?”

She jumped at my voice, but only for a moment.

“David,” she whispered.

She’d known I’d be there, of course. When she texted me earlier in the day, it probably used the last bit of energy she could manage.

How many ninety-two-year-old women can text while on their deathbed? Grandma was nothing if not resourceful. One more of a thousand reasons she meant so much to me.

She stared, same as she always had, making me feel a tinge of embarrassment as I wondered if my hair was combed or if I had a speck of food on a tooth. She was my biggest critic and my biggest supporter.

Ariela. I love the sound of her name. I’ve never known another woman with that name, and perhaps never will. This one was enough. She rocked my life.

“I came as soon as I could. I was in Florida, taking photos of the spaceship blasting off and…”

She nodded. She always knew my schedule as good as I did. She insisted on that.

I thought about telling her more about the lift-off. She always loved to hear about what I was doing. I’d always talk to her about my trips around the world to record whatever important scientific event was happening. I think it made her feel like she was traveling alongside me.

Grandma kept every magazine my work had been published in, which amounted to a large stack in the corner of her small living room.

Her voice was thin, only a pinch above being no sound at all. “I’ll never go home.”

I took her hand and leaned over to kiss her cheek. She smelled like disinfectant.

I hate hospitals. I especially hated Grandma being stuck there to die.

Over the years, she’d told me in bits and pieces about her life. She could remember the tiniest details of everywhere she had lived, from the small basement apartment with her parents in Hungary when she was little, through various other apartments and small houses. She finally bought the house she would live in most of her life—a small bungalow in Minneapolis. It wasn’t much, 1,500 square feet, with two small bedrooms, one of which she used for storage.

She loved it until she got too old to manage the garden in the summer and the snow in winter, at which point she moved into the apartment she had so recently vacated.

“I needed to see you before I die,” she whispered.

I leaned in close so I could hear her better.

She’d lost so much weight that her hand felt like a bird’s claw. She’d never felt ashamed about that, or anything else about her appearance for that matter. She just needed to go to sleep forever.

She blinked to get my face into focus again and tried to smile. She was so tired, though, and before she could say anything more, her eyes drifted shut, and she fell asleep.

****

I stayed in Grandma’s room. The hospital was a horrible place, but she needed to be there. Terrible thoughts crossed my mind, because I wasn’t sure if I hoped she’d pull through and live another day or if she should die quickly and avoid any further pain.

This was the first time I’d experienced death up close. It wouldn’t be the last.

Her face was still tight, her body still fighting the pain while unconscious. It couldn’t help but make me remember what she’d gone though when she was only a young teen. It was like two bookends of horror with her calm life spreading between.

“You’re my whole family,” I said as I held her hand.

The most positive part of my life was about to end, and there wasn’t a damned thing I could do about it.

My mother was Molly Abelman. She died when I was five years old. She’d been forty-four at the time, overweight and lazy, and she’d had a massive heart attack. I remembered the incredible loss, although it had trickled away to almost nothing. Sometimes I look at photos of her, unsure if I remember her, or other times looking at photos.

And I have no memories of my father. None.

My only family for most of my life was Grandma, who bridged the broken link when Molly Abelman died, and she raised me as her own child. That was no small challenge, because she was already seventy-two at the time. She’d been the exact opposite of my mother, fit and healthy, and sometimes it seemed incongruous that she could have ever carved my mother from her own flesh.

Now Grandma was going to leave me, and all I could think about was how she’d taken care of me my whole life.

Her hand was cold. I didn’t know if that was significant or not.

While I sat there, a nurse came in and checked the instruments recording Grandma’s last days. She smiled at me, and I tried to smile back, but my heart wasn’t into it.

I think the nurse was going to tell me something, but she hesitated and then changed her mind. Maybe it would have been, “It won’t be long now,” or “It was good that you could be with her at the end.”

“I love you, Grandma.”

I wanted to lean over and hug her, but she wouldn’t even know I’d done that. I worried about crowding her. It felt like nothing I could do would be the right thing. She looked like death.

Then, with no warning, Grandma’s eyes snapped open, and she smiled. I jumped back and felt my heart pound.

The next thing that happened was impossible. I know it was, but I also know it happened. You can tell me you don’t believe me, and I would totally respect that. Hell, if somebody had told me the same thing, I wouldn’t have believed it, so why should you accept my word?

Grandma smiled more broadly. Then she sat up. That alone would have been a big enough shock, but it was how she sat up that caused the “What the fuck?” moment.

She was weak and her bones brittle and fragile. She had no strength to even hold my hand.

That didn’t stop her. She gave me that big broad smile and then her body swung up from her waist. It was like she had decided to do a sit-up, with the top part of her body swivelling up straight.

Fuck?

When she spoke, her voice was clear and young. She acted and sounded like she was thirty. Her face was still etched with age, but her eyes were bright and her movements graceful.

“David, you must go to my home. Everything is waiting for you on the dining room table.”

For a moment, I couldn’t reply. I wondered if I had fallen asleep and was dreaming, but I knew it was real.

I wanted to talk to her, to shout for joy because she was back to being my surrogate mother again. She laughed a long laugh that made me remember the days when I was a little kid.

I waited too long to say anything, though, and as quickly as she had turned “young,” her eyes fluttered and closed. Her mouth shrunk to a fine old line, and then she fell backward to her bed. She was unconscious again, and I couldn’t help wonder if I’d imagined everything that had happened.

A machine started to whine and beep, and I couldn’t help myself. I stood over her and shook her shoulders, trying to wake her again.

“Grandma! Wake up!”

Two nurses and a doctor rushed into the room and moved me aside while they tried to keep her comfortable.

I wanted to scream at them to help her, but they were only doing what Grandma had told them.

Do Not Resuscitate.

The nurses and doctor exchanged glances and finally the doctor turned to me.

“I’m sorry.”

I crashed down to a chair and started to cry.

Chapter 4

Ariela Abelman had one of the happiest days of her life when she turned ten years old. Her mother gave her a necklace that belonged to her mother.

“This belongs to you now, my sweet angel. You must wear it forever.”

The necklace was silver-colored. Although with rare exceptions she wore it for the next eighty-two years, Ariela never had the necklace checked to see if it was actually silver or some other metal. It never mattered to her. She loved it, and she loved that it was handed down for some vague number of generations.

It was the very next day the Nazis invaded Hungary, or at least the small town of Ashue, where she lived with her parents in a tiny basement apartment.

Julianna, her next door neighbor, was sixteen, and knew everything about the war. She was Ariela’s window into the big wide world. That afternoon, Julianna ran over and hugged her.

“Your family must hide!”

“Why? What’s wrong?”

“The Germans are here. The Nazis. They’ll take you away and kill you!”

Ariela couldn’t comprehend that somebody would want to kill her. That only happened in fairy tales like Snow White and Goldilocks.

“WHY?”

Julianna looked over her shoulder as if she expected to be hauled to justice for talking to her little next-door neighbor.

“Because you’re Jewish.”

“So?”

“They hate the Jews. You need to tell your family to hide.”

Ariela’s parents were not home. She hid in the corner of her bedroom and spent the afternoon crying in fear.

Her mother arrived home a couple hours later and called out, “Grab a bag and pack whatever you can carry!”

“Are the Nazis coming?”

Ariela didn’t know what a Nazi was, but in her mind they were big and scary monsters, like wild bears.

Her mother stared at Ariela and then ran to hug her.

“Very soon.”

They left and met Ariela’s father at a farmhouse south of town.

“Whose house is this?”

“Don’t ask questions,” snapped her father. “They are friends. That’s all that matters.”

Ariela and her parents climbed down a ladder to the basement. The ladder was accessed from a secret trap door covered by a ratty throw rug.

She didn’t leave the hidden basement for three years, never saw sunshine, never saw another human being except for her parents, and found herself thinking she was just some dirty animal trapped in the wilderness by a gang of hunters waiting for her to show herself.

Sometimes she wanted to come out and let them kill her, but most often, she wanted to fight. She wished they would come to her so she could beat the shit out of them. In her mind, that was very possible.

In reality, when the German soldiers found her family, Ariela was under-nourished, scrawny, a zombie who didn’t even know her age. The soldiers herded her and her parents out, making them walk for hours along with a bunch of other people Ariela didn’t know. They marched and marched until she wanted to drop to the ground and let the others walk over her, but somehow her feet kept moving.

When they finally were allowed to stop, they were at a train station. Her eyes brightened. She’d always liked trains, and if they were going for a ride on one, that would be at least one small pleasure.

She looked for the cars with the windows, thinking of sitting comfortably on one of the cushioned seats, like the trains she’d heard about, but she didn’t see any windows.

Instead, these trains only had cars that were big metal boxes. Her family was pushed along and told to get in one.

The train stank of shit and piss and other horrible things. There were no seats. They had to squat on the floor. When the door closed, it was pitch black, and Ariela’s fear came back.

“Mommy?”

“I’m here.”

“Where are they taking us?”

“I don’t know. Try not to worry about it. Everything will be fine.”

Fine. Ariela swirled the word around in her mind, wanting to believe it, but instead she had a sinking feeling that nothing would ever be fine again.

The train rattled and shook, and eventually they arrived in the Auschwitz camp in Poland, where they were crammed into pens that looked like they should house cattle. There were thousands of other people stuck together in the pens, and armed guards watched over them with rifles.

Ariela saw a man try to escape, but it was hopeless, and he was shot to death in front of her.

There were bad rumors about what the guards would do to them at the prison camp, but nobody knew what was going to happen for sure.

Three days after they arrived in the camp, though, Russian soldiers stormed the area, and as fast as Ariela’s ordeal had begun, it was over. They were liberated, and eventually freed.

The Germans had surrendered.

Ariela and her parents were returned to Hungary, but their lives were never the same.

Eventually, she learned that six million Jews were slaughtered by the Germans under the leadership of Adolph Hitler. That was more than two-thirds of all the Jews alive in Europe. They were families, like her own, and it didn’t matter how old the people were. Women and children were killed first, because they had no value.

At Auschwitz, the preferred method was to use Zyklon B gas, which was a pesticide made of hydrogen cyanide. Ariela read how the Jews were stripped naked and told they were being taken for delousing and a shower. They were locked in the gas chambers and the Zyklon B released inside. Horrible shouts and screaming followed as the people suffocated. Then their bodies were hauled to the crematorium and burned.

When she was sixteen years old and found out about the history of the Holocaust, Ariela decided she no longer believed in God. After all, what kind of a God would allow a monster like Hitler to live?

Chapter 5

I stared into Grandma’s apartment from her doorway. I’d just unlocked it and let the door swing open. I half-expected to hear it creak, like I was walking into an ancient tomb, but it glided open without the slightest sound. It was just like her to get rid of any wayward squeaks.

My grandmother, Ariela Adelman, was that most perfect of perfectionists. It wasn’t that she was showing off or felt the need to compete with anyone. It was who she was. I remembered when I grew up that she never sat still to watch The Bachelor or Grey’s Anatomy on TV like some of my friends’ moms. She always worked. She cleaned, she washed dishes, she re-painted her bedroom, she took the garbage out to the dumpster in back when the bag got half-full, she balanced her check book, she walked half a mile each way three times a week to the grocery store, she dusted and vacuumed even when there wasn’t the slightest hint of dirt, and she raised me to be the best child she could.

She wasn’t doing any of that to impress anyone. Nobody visited her. Nobody cared. She only had me.

Now, her apartment was empty, and the silence seemed to roar at me. I hated it. It took me a moment to put my foot forward to get inside, because all I could think of was how I was violating her space.

Silly, I know, but that’s how it felt.

“Ridiculous,” I said to the walls. “You’re dead.”

Didn’t help.

In my mind’s eye, I saw her eyes light up and a broad grin spread across her face.

That contrasted with my last image of her, when her body swung up and she delivered what would be her last words.

“David, you must go to my home. Everything is waiting for you on the dining room table.”

The creepy image of her swinging up that way made me think of an old EC comic book, like Tales From the Crypt, where some forgotten and moldy body crawled out of his grave to chase the unsuspecting teenager.

“Stop that,” I told myself.

Yes, I have a habit of talking to myself when I’m alone. After all, I’m alone a lot. I like being by myself, but I hate the quiet. I’d rather have people think I’m crazy.

Grandma hadn’t had to tell me how to get into her apartment. She’d been living there for almost six years, since shortly after I moved out to live on my own. I was nineteen at the time and already selling photos to major newspapers and magazines.

When I left home, I think she felt abandoned and needed to find a different place to live so that she wouldn’t feel my ghostly presence everywhere. I’m only hypothesizing that, because she would never have said a word that would bring guilt to me. She said she wanted a place with a view.

So, anyhow, I knew she kept a spare key under a fake rock in the tiny garden outside the front door. I closed the door and switched on the lights.

I felt a little guilty, because it was after 9:00 p.m. and Grandma had clearly wanted me to find whatever the heck she’d left me. Unfortunately, there had been a lot of details to work through at the hospital. Not to mention my heart was broken.

Above all else, Miss Ariela Adelman was very Jewish. I knew she’d haunt me for the rest of my life if I screwed up her funeral.

According to Jewish custom, I knew Grandma had to be buried within seventy-two hours of her death, and not on the Sabbath, which ran from Friday evening to Saturday evening.

Today was Wednesday, so the burial had to happen even sooner, before sundown two days from now. I needed to arrange everything with the funeral home as fast as possible. That was just fucking wonderful. Pick out a coffin. Music. Notifications. The service. Was there a specific rabbi who should deliver it? I think my brain overflowed and I don’t remember what I even picked for most of the options. At least I didn’t have to worry about flowers. Jewish funerals didn’t have flowers.

I suspected I’d be the only one attending the service.

Confession time: even though Grandma tried desperately and even though I call myself Jewish, that’s really just a word to me—a word that has few concrete impacts.

I don’t believe in Grandma’s God any more than I believe in the Jesus that Christians follow. I will sneak a pizza with pepperoni or a ham and cheese sandwich, but at least I avoided doing that around her. I did respect her beliefs. I just couldn’t share them.

Grandma was the friendliest person in the world. But she also was afraid of almost everybody.

And who can blame her? Certainly not me.

I almost forgot not to let her be embalmed, but fortunately Jason Sanders, the funeral director, had seen many Jewish burials in his time.

After all the discussions, I sat in my car and cried. I don’t have a clue how long I stayed there, but eventually I blinked and it was twilight. I grabbed some tissues and wiped my eyes and blew my nose and pulled out of the funeral home parking lot to head to Grandma’s apartment.

“What’s here, Grandma?” I called. Of course, I knew she wouldn’t answer me, but there was always a chance somebody else was in her apartment—landlord, distant cousin, who knows?—so, I wanted to announce my presence and not walk in like I owned the place.

Nobody answered my shout.

I thought I could smell her, but that might have been my imagination. I knew I’d soon forget that smell, and that thought made me sad.

People die and then they die again. Grandma had died, and soon her scent would be lost forever. My memories of her would stop assaulting me every second, and eventually I’d only think of her once in a while, then only on special occasions.

Maybe one day, far from now, I’d think of her for the last time. My job takes me around the world. What if I abandoned Minneapolis and lived in Houston or New York? I’d have no obvious reminders of my grandmother, and one day, my last thought of her would be exactly that.

That’s when she’d be truly gone.

I wanted to vow never to let that day come. I would surround myself with reminders. I’d take her alarm clock wherever I moved and think of her as I woke each morning. I’d use the same brand of air freshener she used and I’d go to the synagogue for service each Friday evening.

Well, let’s not get carried away.

When I walked into the main area of the apartment, I could see it was spotless. Of course. She was meticulous about ensuring there was nothing out of place. That drove me batshit crazy when I was a teenager. Now it’s amazing.

In the small kitchen, there wasn’t so much as a single unwashed coffee cup.

The apartment was tiny, only about 900 square feet. I could see everything easily—the kitchen, a small living room, and a nook over on the left that had a long oak table. Grandma used that for fancy dining, which happened just about never-time. The bedrooms were at the far end, beyond a small bathroom.

I looked back at the dining room table, which had several items sitting on it. I hesitated, but then I walked over and pulled out a chair.

The envelope on my left had two words hand-written, clear, no nonsense.

Welcome, David.

In my mind’s eye, I watched her write that, but I was also quite confused. You see, Grandma was in the hospital for eight days. Had she set the table like this before she left? I remember she’d fallen and pressed the emergency call button she wore around her neck.

The ambulance took her to the hospital, and the attendant told me they found her on the floor, exactly where she’d fallen.

So, when did she write the note to me?

“I miss you,” I whispered.

I wished she was sitting across from me at the table, her bright eyes laughing at me, her gray hair pulled back into a shoulder-length ponytail.

She’d say, “Don’t be silly. I’ll always be right with you.”

I glanced up, convinced she was sitting there with me. I nodded, pretending to see her, and then I looked at the other items on the table.

Beside the envelope welcoming me was a file folder that had about a half inch of paper inside. Then there was a hardcover book with odd writing on it.

The next item that caught my attention surprised me. It looked like a hand-drawn family tree.

And finally, the document I had expected to find: her last will and testament. It looked short, only two or three pages.

“You were very prepared,” I said.

“Of course.”

I smiled. “Not that I’d expect anything less of you.”

I thought I heard her chuckle, and that made me smile again. It was the first time I’d smiled since reading her text earlier in the day.

Man, that seems like a million years ago.

Because it was the most visual item on the table, I reached for the family tree.

At the bottom in a small rectangle all by myself: David Colby Abelman. It listed my birthdate.

Above that was a box holding my mother’s name: Molly Ann Abelman with her date of birth and death.

Remember when I said about somebody being truly dead when nobody thinks about them anymore? I felt tears come to my eyes when I realized I hadn’t thought about my own mother in many, many years.

That wasn’t right. But, it was true.

I shook my head to clear my thoughts and looked at the rectangle above my mom’s. Grandma. Ariela Holdman Abelman.

The date of her death was accurately filled in.

“Who added that?”

I glanced over to the invisible ghost across from me. She was silent.

Then it hit me. Grandma must have given all this stuff to somebody to put on the table whenever she died. Whoever that mysterious stranger was would have been directed to fill in the date of her death.

My theory collapsed as soon as I thought of it. I knew with certainty that there was nobody she would have trusted with this. Nobody except me.

In the family tree, it showed Ariela had six brothers and sisters. One sister, Julie, died the same day she was born. I wondered if she was stillborn or if my great grandparents had held her and heard her cry at least once before losing her.

Grandma’s other five siblings all listed 1944 as the year of death, with no specific date. Underneath each was a caption in tiny letters: Murdered at Auschwitz.

Ariela’s parents were both listed in the chart, also with the same note: Murdered at Auschwitz, also sometime in 1944.

Eight of my grandmother’s aunts and uncles were listed on the chart, and they all had the same sad commentary.

This was a tiny slice of my history. On this one sheet, I had thirteen ancestors who had been killed in the Holocaust. I’d never known how the genocide had swept through my own flesh and blood.

The chart fell through my fingers.

They’d all be dead by now, anyhow. Does it matter that they died in the war? That’s the idiotic thought that went through my mind. Of course it mattered. Some of them died when they were little kids.

Of course it mattered.

I grabbed a tissue and blew my nose, then rubbed tears from my eyes.

“This day has been awful.”

“Worse for me than you,” I imagined her saying.

Hard to argue with that.

“You needed to see our family tree. That’s your heritage.”

I nodded but decided not to look any more at the family tree. There was another generation listed above, but I decided I’d look at it later, when I could manage it better. At a glance, at least I could see there were no other deaths at the concentration camp.

“Why don’t you get a drink, David?”

I nodded and went to the refrigerator. There was no milk or anything else that could go bad. The fridge had been totally scrubbed neat.

There were a half dozen Coors Light.

“My beer, Grandma. You really prepared for tonight.”

“Sure did.”

I smiled, thinking I was so close to actually hearing her say those words.

I didn’t want to sit again right away, so I walked around the apartment, almost pacing, wasting time rather than see what else Grandma had left me. Again, to no surprise, her bed was neatly made, and the toilet was clean and bright.

When I grabbed my second beer, I sat down again at the dining room table, and I ripped open the envelope that had my name on it.

Dear David,

It’s time for me to go. Everybody has their own time, and I’m just very grateful to have lasted this long, so don’t feel sorry for me. I certainly don’t.

Earlier today in the hospital I said good-bye to you and asked you to come here. You’re probably wondering how I could have prepared this letter for you after that. Have you thought yet that maybe I had some accomplice who watched everything and then snuck back here to place this letter here? Of course you have.

(And, yes, I did write this letter earlier today.)

The answer is complicated, as all the most interesting things in life are. It’s like your photos. I remember when you published some photos of Jupiter through some telescope or other. It showed the bands of color swirling around the planet, and every time you looked closely, more details arose. More complexity. A chaos of fractals.

Once again, I stared at the empty chair across the table from me. I could hear her voice reciting her letter.

“What the hell does that mean?”

I know you’re the science guy in this family. Everything run by logic and some exact clockwork thought up by Sir Isaac Newton and his cronies. But, David? Science isn’t everything.

There’s an ancient type of magic called Shelljah, which I’m sure you’ve never heard of. Not many people have. It’s Jewish magic, and it’s all but disappeared now, but it was a powerful tool for thousands of years.

That book in front of you? It’s the only text you might ever find that teaches Shelljah. As smart as you are, you may find it hard to understand.

What is it?

Shelljah provides a limited ability to control time. Yes, time.

Don’t give me that look. I’m not crazy.

Shelljah is explained in the book, which if you translated the title would be called “Faith” or perhaps “Belief.” It’s faith in the Lord that allows Shelljah to work.

I used the magic to come back to write you this note when I knew it was my time to die. And, maybe I tidied up a bit, too.

I once turned against the Lord (for a short time), as did many of my generation. Atrocities can shake a person’s faith, at least temporarily. Time, though, moves in very exotic ways. The Shelljah showed me the truth.

In the hospital, I cast a small spell on you as the last gift I can ever give you. This spell will allow you to explore time for a couple of days—only until my burial, when the magic will go away. It’s about all I can do with my diminishing strength, so I hope you enjoy the ability while you have it.

Perhaps one day you’ll read the book and learn to be a Shelljah master yourself.

Thank you. For everything you’ve always done for me.

Good-bye, my sweet grandson.

“Shelljah?”

I wasn’t even sure how to pronounce the unusual word. I picked up the heavy book sitting in the middle of the table. There was a yellow duo-tang binder underneath I hadn’t noticed before. Another surprise.

The book felt old. I’m not sure what that even means, whether it was the weight or the crinkles of the paper as I lifted it, or maybe the slight musty smell. Whatever, I was immediately convinced the book had passed through many decades, maybe centuries. There was a word on the cover that I knew must be Hebrew:

אמונה

“Faith?”

I was worried about damaging the frail book, so I held it on the table while I carefully opened the pages and saw that it was written completely in Hebrew.

I’d never learned to read or write Hebrew. It was one of the few things in life where I know I had disappointed Grandma. She wanted me to learn the Jewish traditions, culture, religion, and philosophies, but none of that interested me when I was a kid. Or now, for that matter. I chose science over religion, any religion. And old Jewish traditions felt like a slice of religion. I wasn’t interested.

The book was hand-written, faded, and ancient. I wondered how it lasted so long. Was it a hundred years old? A thousand? There was nothing I could see to help me know, and I suppose in some ways it didn’t matter. It was a precious gift from my grandmother.

“Where did you get this from, Grandma?”

I couldn’t read any of it, so I closed the book and grabbed another beer from the fridge before looking inside the duo-tang binder.

There I found a forty-page manuscript with the title, “My Life,” written by Ariela Abelman. I flipped quickly through the pages of her autobiography, but didn’t read it in detail. That could wait until after the funeral, when I wouldn’t have hundreds of nit-picks to worry about. I wanted to savor her story when I did read it.

The folder was the last item I hadn’t inspected. I opened it to find a detailed list of Ariela’s finances. It included her most recent bank account statement, the passwords to her online accounts, and a couple dozen bills and other assorted statements.

A cover letter stated that all her bills were paid and current.

Of course they are.

And the last sentence: I cancelled the electricity and cable TV this morning, so you don’t have to worry about those.

Nothing like being prepared.

I looked at her will and was surprised (but maybe not really, because what else was she going to do?) to find that she’d left her estate to me. Taking a quick look at her bank account and other assets, that wouldn’t amount to all that much, but I didn’t care about that. I have a good-paying gig going and have never lacked for anything.

Maybe I’d donate whatever money there was to the Holocaust Museum.

“You’d like that, wouldn’t you, Grandma?”

I could almost feel her pride shining all around me.

Before long, I had finished all six beers she had left for me in the refrigerator, and finished browsing through the items.

Eventually, I realized my eyes were drooping. It was one o’clock in the morning. I fell asleep on the couch, having put aside all flights of fancy regarding time. After all, if nothing else, I was a complete pragmatist, and I didn’t believe in miracles.

Chapter 6

I woke in the middle of the night, needing to pee. I really didn’t want to get up, but what can you do? I went to the bathroom and then checked the time: 4:42 a.m.

Shit.

I was wide awake. I splashed a bit of water on my face and stared in the mirror. The image facing me looked a lot older than my twenty-five years. I could see the first touches of gray in my otherwise brown hair. Not that I was the least bit concerned. I try to take care of myself, but I’m not one who worries about what other people think. If my hair goes gray, it goes gray. If my face starts to sag or any other signs of aging come along, it won’t bother me. I’ll do my best to stay healthy and active, and whatever else happens, happens. I want to be comfortable with who I am.

Some of that includes being the best photographer I’m able to be, and in the back of my mind I felt a ticking clock warning me that I’d soon have to get back to working on the photos I’d taken for the launch of the Sagan.

My deadline to National Geographic wasn’t for another week, but I knew I’d have to take time to review, organize, lighten, check backgrounds, and dozens of other details before I could send in the final choices.

I wanted them to be perfect.

At the same time, Grandma’s funeral took top priority. No question.

That funeral was only a day away.

Not surprisingly, Ariela had organized that as well. I wished I’d seen these notes before talking to the funeral home, but nothing much was different than I had chosen. She left me a (very short) list of people who should be notified of her death along with email addresses for each of them. She’d prepaid for a burial plot, and she’d lined up her pall bearers, the rabbi to perform the service, and all the other details. Later, I would call the funeral director to update him on some of her wishes. Pretty much all that was left was to fire off those few emails, so I took care of that while sipping my first coffee of the day.

The sensation that Grandma was nearby was even stronger. I didn’t believe in life after death, of course, but I do know about the power of the human mind and how it fills in holes that needed to be taken care of. It didn’t bother me at all to talk to empty air and seemingly hear answers.

I wanted that link with her to continue, forever.

“You didn’t have a list of flowers for your service, Grandma.” I don’t know why I said that. I knew the drill.

“Flowers are a complete waste of money. We don’t do flowers. They just get thrown in the garbage after the ceremony.”

I wasn’t sure what to say about that. I knew the “we” referred to Jews, but it always seemed like an odd restriction. I suppose it was wasteful, though.

“So, what’s this thing you wrote me about time?”

“Best to just try it. You won’t believe anything I tell you.”

“Probably true.”

“Definitely true. It would sound like magic because it is magic.”

“So you said. Jewish magic.”

“You got it.”

“Never heard of that.”

“Neither have most people, but that doesn’t make it any less true. How many people know a proton is made of two up quarks and one down quark? Just because it’s not common knowledge doesn’t make it fantasy.”

“Hardly the same thing.”

She didn’t reply to that, making me feel that they were exactly the same thing.

“How would I go about trying it?”

“Concentrate and feel the faith within you. Don’t worry that you think it’s not there. It is. You just hide it. The Shelljah is easily found when you look for it.”

I had no faith at all. Don’t believe in that. I believe in cause and effect. I believe in gravity, and the first law of thermodynamics, and I believe people write their own histories by their actions. I didn’t believe in mysticism.

But I had to try. If my grandmother had given me some weird kind of farewell gift, well, even though it made no sense at all, I had to try it.

I closed my eyes and took a deep breath. I wasn’t quite sure how I was supposed to do this, so I tried to close my mind to everything else.

I’d learned various calming exercises during a photo-shoot in Tibet years ago. They had helped me many times to remove stress. Physiology, not magic.

Eyes closed, thoughts of Ariela moved to the side, no worries, no concerns, just emptiness. Deep breaths, in and out. I thought of the beautiful mountains surrounding Tibet, the peace of the monks, the soft music that had surrounded me there.

I love meditating and made a mental note to not let so much time pass before doing it again. The last time I could remember was when I was going through the tough times with Karen Anderson, who was floating in space, 250 miles above me.

As with everything else, I tried to move my fragmented memories of Karen to the side. Empty my thoughts. Nothing about Karen. Nothing about Grandma. Nothing about death or funerals, nothing about Hebrew magic. Nothing about the photos I had to get to my editor.

Just peace and serenity.

At first, nothing happened. I felt relaxed, like I always did when I meditated, but then I could feel a warmth radiating from deep within my soul. I concentrated on it and felt myself moving toward that invisible heat, as if I was on a Los Angeles beach and some clouds parted to let me feel the warmth of the sunshine raining down on me.

The sensation grew and I was overfilled with a rush of feelings: fear, awe, love, jealousy, anger, and excitement all pinged as they circled around my mind. It was a wild ride of conflicts and enlightenment.

It was all the emotions of my life, mixing together.

“What the hell?”

My eyes were still closed, and I shocked them open to find myself moving backward. I had no conscious feeling of wanting my body to move, but it was, completely, without me helping.

Backward in time as well as space.

There are no words to explain how stunned I was, an observer riding as a passenger in my own body.

I felt myself retracing the steps I had most recently taken, looking at the items Ariela had left, sleeping, waking and drinking and reading the material, and then backing out of her apartment and re-tracing my steps further back in time. I was now thirty-six hours earlier and finding myself in the hospital as she died.

This time, though, she gasped herself awake from death and stared at me with a grin. I knew, even before she said anything, what was going to happen.

“David, you must go to my home. Everything is waiting for you on the dining room table.”

Everything was going at super-speed, so her voice sounded like she’d sucked a helium balloon. I imagined driving a car going too fast and used my mind to press on an invisible brake pedal to stop my traveling.

Time returned to normal.

“Grandma?”

She nodded. “It worked, didn’t it?”

“How is that possible? How can you be alive again?”

“You mean still. I haven’t died yet, but I’m about to. Thank you for taking care of everything. I knew you would.”

“It’s not possible!”

“Of course it is. You’ve just proven that yourself. A scientist who doesn’t trust his own eyes is pretty useless, isn’t he?”

I didn’t know what to say to that. I think my mouth hung open.

“Now you need to hurry,” she said. “In your true time, I’m getting closer to my burial, and you’ll be back to normal. The magic won’t leave my grave. Don’t waste your chance.”

She closed her eyes and took her last breath, again.

I looked for a doctor or nurse, but I knew they would be here in a moment, and there was nothing they could do.

“Good-bye. Again.”

****

I relaxed and felt my consciousness being drawn back to my true time. My body raced forward, pulling me back where I belonged. I allowed myself to spring back, moving a hundred times normal speed.

Occasionally I pushed my imaginary brake and watched as the world slowed to normal speed. I pressed harder and… everybody stopped moving.

“Frozen in time…”

I had been walking down a street near my grandmother’s home. There were a dozen people nearby, and they were all locked into whatever they were doing.

I had pressed the Pause button on my life.

A young woman was talking on her iPhone, her mouth open and a tear falling down her cheek. Her long dark hair was half-blowing in the breeze, but she didn’t care. I wanted to brush the tear away and ask what happened, but I knew if I started time going forward again and asked her, she’d be freaked out and frightened at this strange man who had suddenly appeared out of nowhere. I wanted to, though. I wanted to tell her everything was going to be all right. I wanted to hug her and take her fears and anger and send them flying to the wind.

I could do nothing, though.

An older man leaned on a cane, and it looked like an impossible pose, as if he should fall to the ground any second. I watched him. The man’s eyes were staring directly ahead and his lips were pursed together. The walk was a struggle for him, but he was determined to complete whatever task he had set for himself, pain or no pain.

A car had driven though a puddle and a wave of water was rising from the road. It was going to splash onto a dog walking nearby. The collie was starting to turn its head toward the sound, its mouth open and tongue lolling.

From what I saw, it was like I’d been transported into a wax museum. Part of me wondered how it was remotely possible to stop time like that, but I knew I’d never find the answer to that puzzle, so maybe it was best to put that thought aside for now.

I moved time forward by using my imaginary gas pedal, and everyone started to grind into motion again.

The girl cried, the old man puffed, and the dog barked when it got soaked from the splashed puddle.

Everybody had a story, every day.

I stared but found myself moving along with the other people, moving toward Ariela’s apartment building, where I would find the will, the family tree, and the book of Jewish magic.

I sped time up and raced through everything, and then it felt like I’d hit a sponge wall. Time snapped back to its normal speed.

Looking around me, I knew I was back in true time. I checked my watch. No time at all had passed since I had left.

Chapter 7

A thousand miles to the east of David Abelman, a 19-year-old black girl sat in her bedroom and looked at her reflection in the mirror.

Her name was Erika Sabo.

Erika lived in a small town called Aynsville in upstate New York. Most of the people who lived there thought Aynsville must be the place farthest from any other place in New York State. Not close to Buffalo, let alone the Big Apple, it was hidden away where nobody knew about it.

She had shoulder-length coal-black hair that was frizzy and looked like a bit of a rat’s nest. Only her family and a few close friends knew her hair style was intentional. She liked it that way, and she didn’t give a damn what anybody else thought.

Everything in her life was that way. She felt driven and focused, and nobody could tell her to do something in a way that she didn’t want to. She was of the mind that if somebody didn’t like her as she was, well, that was their loss.

Erika was slim and healthy, and she radiated a wide and infectious smile at all times. Most of the boys in town thought she was beautiful, although they rarely said that out loud.

She herself didn’t care about that. She had bigger things on her mind. That had been true since she was six years old and she found her real history buried deep in her soul. Since then, she’d kept her secrets, but she’d also worked toward fulfilling her destiny.

The Sabos were one of only six black families in Aynsville, but she rarely thought about that or bothered to worry about being different. She was different in too many other ways. Her skin color was a fact about her, the same way her black hair was a fact and the fact that she was five-foot-one. Nobody cared about her hair color or height, and she could never figure out why anybody would care how much pigment her skin happened to carry.

It had only been an issue once.

Erika had a younger brother, Sam, who was now twelve years old. He was quiet and afraid of pretty much everything in his world. That was a bad set of characteristics when the bullies showed up.

Sam’s anxiety and fear was born from his shyness. As he grew older, the shyness mutated into more and more extreme anxieties, almost a pathological fear of conflict of any kind. Erika and her parents were always careful to be calm and loving to him. Home was the only place Sam felt safe.

It was three years earlier, when Sam was nine years old, that he was walking home from school, head down, as if he could ostrich himself enough that nobody else would see him. He walked alone, as always, and the farther he hurried from school and the closer he came to home, the better he felt.

Bad timing fell on him, because Peter Smythe and Jason Chartz were walking behind him, and they were already pissed. They were fifteen, Erika’s age, although she barely knew them. They’d been sent to the principal’s office mid-afternoon for “accidentally” spilling glue in Cindy Jones’s hair. They now owed writing a thousand-word essay each, explaining how their behaviour was wrong. So, they were in shitty moods, and Sam happened to be their first target. They ran to catch up with him, and Sam’s eyes grew wide with fear. This was the worst of all his nightmares.

“Well, lookit the little nigger boy!” said Peter. “What are you afraid of, little nigger?”

To Sam, Peter and Jason looked like giants. He was short for his age, like Erika and their parents, while the two older boys were six years older and easily double his weight.

Sam couldn’t find a way to say a single word or to try to run away. He lowered his head further and closed his eyes, as if he were wishing the whole situation away.

“Hey, you dumb runt!” said Jason. “We’re talking to you. Can’t your dirty little ears hear us?”

That’s when Erika caught up with them.

Jason noticed her running over and nodded toward Peter, catching his eye. The two boys quickly lost interest in Sam. There was a new game in town.

Peter grinned. “Well, if it isn’t another dirty little nigger come to play.”

Erika stopped about five feet from the two bullies.

“Sam, come with me,” she said. She tried to ignore Peter and Jason and took a curved route around them to get to her little brother.

“Hold on, sweet cakes.”

Peter grabbed her shoulder. She turned immediately to glare at him, yanked herself free, and then pushed her arm out as if to smash him away from her.

What happened next was the subject of rumor for months. The only people who really believed it were Peter and Jason, but they were known liars, so whenever they said anything about the incident, everybody they knew would raise an eyebrow with disbelief. After all, it made no sense.

Erika pushed her arm straight out toward Peter, but she didn’t touch him. There was at least a foot of empty space between them.

From Peter’s perspective, she might have looked closer, but he knew for sure that she didn’t touch him. Jason had the clearest view, standing to one side. He knew there was a good twelve inches. That grew to twenty-four in his re-telling.

The separation didn’t help Peter. He went flying into the air, six feet above the ground, and then he crashed into the lawn beyond the sidewalk.

Everybody froze, wondering what the hell had happened. Everybody except Erika.

Peter moaned and pulled himself into a fetal position.

Erika walked over and knelt beside him. “Are you okay?”

He didn’t answer. Instead, he crawled slowly away from her.

“Stay away from me.”

Erika put her hand on his shoulder and whispered, “You don’t have to be afraid of me.”

He continued to crawl for a few seconds but finally stopped. He looked up at her. “How did you do that?”

She shrugged and smiled at him. “Afraid everyone will know a girl could throw you? Just a bit of karate.”

“That wasn’t karate.”

“Well, some other martial art, then.”

He shook his head.

“But it doesn’t matter,” she said. “I can see into your heart, Peter. You’re not a bad person. You just need to stop doing bad things.”

“You hurt my knee.”

Peter tried to stand but his leg collapsed and he cried out in pain.

“Shh…”

Erika smiled at him and put her right hand on his knee.

“Try again.”

He stood, the pain gone. He glanced over at Jason and then back to Erika.

“You’re a witch or something.” His voice no longer sounded fearful. He looked uncertain, but when she kept a smile fixed on her face, he smiled back.

“Or something,” she agreed. After a moment, she added, “Go have a good rest of the day. Sam and I won’t bother you any more.”

Peter could only nod.

“Sam, let’s go home.”

Erika took her brother’s hand and they hurried away.

Chapter 8

I woke up Thursday morning after a deep sleep. I’d had the strangest dream, a vision of myself moving back through time, changing the speed of time, and even stopping it.

“Holy shit.” I snapped my eyes open.

It was real.

I remembered the note from my grandmother and how I’d found the peaceful and tranquil place within myself, enabling me to control time.

Jewish magic.

I’d never heard of Shelljah before, and like everybody else, when that happens, I do the logical thing. I ran a Google search and got zero hits.

“Crap.”

I think this was the only time I’ve ever searched for anything at all that Google didn’t know a damned thing about.

Last night, I’d programmed Grandma’s coffee machine to start a pot brewing at 7:00 a.m. I could smell it now, so I stretched my arms, went to the bathroom to splash water on my face, and then finally poured myself a cup while I sat at the kitchen table.

Then it hit me:

I can go back in time and fix anything I want.

The thought was unbelievable, and it was followed by an equally challenging question.

What would I want to change?

The answer came to me almost immediately, but I was reluctant to actually do it. What if there were unintended consequences? I turned on the television that was sitting on a small table in the corner and flipped it to CNN. I knew they were covering the launch extensively. After all, the aliens were the biggest story in, well, forever. The Sagan was taking the first steps to figuring out the answer to a thousand mysteries.

Where were the aliens from?

Why are they on the far side of the moon?

How long have they been there?

Have they already gone home and left automated transmitters?

What are they transmitting home?

Are they friendly?

What can they teach us?

Were they hostile?

And on and on…

I wasn’t alone about one thing. Everybody I knew felt overwhelmed at times knowing the aliens existed. On the plus side, it did vindicate me regarding some of the arguments I’d had with Karen. After all, if there was a God, and that God created humanity in His own image, how could aliens exist on some distant planet that look very different from us? There was no hint of that in the Bible.

“What if they look the same as us?” Karen would reply.

I laughed at that. Anybody who’s ever studied even a tiny bit of biology knew that a species evolved trillions of miles away would look nothing like humans. What would they look like? Maybe we’d find out soon.

CNN wasn’t showing anything about the Sagan’s trip, though. They were talking about a famine in southern Africa. One more fact that showed there was no God. Why would He let millions of small children starve to death?

Karen always glossed over the facts. Only faith mattered.

We were completely incompatible.

So, why did I feel a hole in my heart?

****

The second time I moved backward in time, I was able to do it much easier, since I knew what feeling I was searching for inside my soul.

Time slowed and then stopped, and using the invisible gear shift in my mind, I switched to reverse. It was easy and natural to see my body start to move backward. I was a passenger again, riding myself. I moved slowly at first and soon found my way back to bed, where I fell asleep and reverse-snored. Then I moved faster and faster, pure acceleration, and my life raced like a movie reel rewound.

I pressed the pedal harder, and raced even faster. The days sped by, a calendar fanning through time. I no longer questioned how such a thing could happen. That didn’t matter anymore. How and Why were just words. What mattered was Karen.

Three months peeled away, then six, and then I screeched to a stop.

“I love summer,” Karen said.

“The best time of the year, for sure.” I was temporarily surprised to hear the words come out of my mouth, but then remembered the conversation. I was back where I’d wished to be.

I was riding right behind my own eyes, able to take control when I wanted, but if I did nothing, my life rolled along as it had originally.

So far, I didn’t want to interrupt things. Karen and I were lying in the grass at Sutherland Park. It was the first hot day of summer, and we both embraced the warmth and our love. There was nothing that needed fixing here.

Having her so close reminded me how much I loved her.

I put my arm out, and Karen crawled closer to me. We rested and touched fingers and smiled and didn’t have to say a word. After a few minutes, I leaned over and kissed her, tasting the love on her tongue. That was me taking control. The first time we experienced this moment, I didn’t do that. It was the best kiss I’d ever had.

I loved re-living this day.

I wondered what would happen if I decided to stay here, not return to my home time. Would that work? Or was there some cosmic law that would make that impossible? There were lots of crazy laws in physics, and although traveling through time felt like magic, I knew it was some kind of scientific phenomenon we hadn’t yet discovered.

Even as I wondered, I could feel a tiny pull, which I understood to be my own true time wanting me back.

You will only have until my burial, Grandma had said.

Were the minutes ticking by at the same speed in my own time as they were here? If so, my time was limited. I would never forgive myself if I missed her funeral.

The first time I had traversed back, I returned to the same instant I had left. I wanted to trust that would happen again. The thought of leaving Karen was impossible.

I wish you’d told me about the Shelljah before this, Grandma.

“Let’s go,” whispered Karen.

We wordlessly got up and started walking back to her apartment. Neither of us needed to say much. We were totally comfortable together.

Except…

I shook that thought aside. My body was walking alongside Karen, and I wanted to pay attention to her, not to what had happened before.

This weekend was the only one recently that we’d had together. Her work at NASA kept her busy almost non-stop, including weekends. She was going into space, a monumental undertaking. The full training took a year, and she had only finished a few months so far.

Part of me wanted to tell her to give it all up and marry me. But, mostly, I wanted her to experience everything in life she could manage, and this was something that almost nobody would ever be able to boast about. She was going alien-hunting.

Earlier that day, Karen had told me all about what they did in training. The physical and mental challenges never seemed to end. I wondered if I would have the stamina to keep going, and I was pretty sure I wouldn’t. I wasn’t proud of that, but I was proud of Karen for pulling it off.

We got to her apartment, and she took me by the hand, leading me to her bedroom.

“I’ve missed you so much,” she said. I kissed her deeply as we sat on the bed. Then I undid her blouse, and she stopped to lift my T-shirt over my head. Within a minute, we were both naked and lying beside each other.

Karen reached down to take my hard penis in her hand, and I couldn’t help moaning with pleasure. It’d been so long…

I lowered her onto her back and kissed her neck softly and gently, then moved to kiss her breasts. Her nipples were erect and waiting for my mouth.

Throughout our lovemaking, I rode the earlier version of my body, remembering every move I’d made, every touch she’d given me, and every bit of love we shared.

It was the best we’d ever had, and the last.

That was what I needed to fix.

****

After we finished making love, we fell asleep, our bodies still tangled together.

Karen held onto my leg, as if to make sure I didn’t leave while she napped. I could feel her fingers on my skin as I fell asleep, and loved it.

After about a half hour, we woke, and I licked my lips. I looked at the girl beside me and marvelled at how beautiful she was and how fortunate I was to have found her again.

The tug of time wanting me back was stronger now.

I had first met Karen at a Starbucks coffee shop while we both were waiting for drinks. I’d ordered a cappuccino and she a mocha macchiato. We stood nearby and while we waited, she received a text.

Later, she told me what it said: Congratulations, Karen. You have been selected.

“Oh my God!”

At the time, of course, I had no clue what was happening. I heard this squealing girl beside me and turned to see if something was wrong. Her mouth hung open in shock, but she didn’t seem unhappy.

“Are you okay?” I asked. I wouldn’t normally get involved, but her open mouth had turned into a wide grin, and she’d looked up and caught my eye. I had to say something.

“It’s…” She shook her head. “Unbelievable.”

“What is?”

She laughed and shook her head again. I don’t believe in love at first sight, but this was awfully close. I needed to find out more about her. She looked close to my age, long black hair, and that infectious smile would haunt me forever.

She held up a finger to say, “Hold on a second,” and texted back to her NASA contact. Totally thrilled!

At that second, Karen knew she was going to the moon.

After she sent the text, she looked up to me as if noticing me for the first time.

“Sometimes everything seems to just work out,” she said.

“Well that sounds like something worth celebrating!”

Later, I told her she’d misunderstood my comment. I meant that she should go celebrate with her friends. She thought I was suggesting the two of us celebrate together.

Best misunderstanding of all time.

“We can grab a table here if you want,” she said.

I have no idea why she agreed to that. It was totally out of character for her to sit with a stranger to have a coffee. Maybe the adrenaline rush of the news, or maybe it was God’s will, if you believe in that kind of thing. Whatever the case, she didn’t question it, and so I didn’t either.

“Sure, I’d like that. My name is David. David Abelman.”

“Karen Anderson.”

She didn’t tell me about the moon trip until we’d been dating for two weeks. Up until then, she said it felt like it was all a dream that could be yanked out from under her at any time.

****

Memories were made from shared lives.

I need to interrupt myself right now before we continue. The thing is, you don’t know me, and I don’t know you. If you were a close friend or somebody else who I’d known my whole life, I wouldn’t need to stop here, but I have no idea who might read my story at some point (and it’s certainly possible it’s nobody at all, in which case this is a little pointless).

My grandmother was Jewish. So was my mother. And in theory, so am I.

In theory? Yes, because I was raised in a Jewish household, learned the various customs and traditions, was taught about Hanukkah and all about lighting the menorah instead of Christmas, observed Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur and the rest, and for many years I was dragged to the local synagogue to listen to Rabbi Pfeiffer tell us all about the things we should know.

Typical Jewish kid, with one difference. None of it stuck.

In all the years I was supposed to be studying Hebrew or learning the Torah, none of it called to me, not even a little bit. Something inside me rebelled at every chance, daydreaming for Rabbi Pfeiffer or yawning by the time the third candle was lit in the winter. All my grandmother’s teachings fell away, shed like rainwater when the sun came out.

What was the sunshine?

Science. That is the religion that called to me. I learned at a young age that the universe was created in the Big Bang about 15.8 billion years ago. There was no creator necessary, just the laws of quantum mechanics and general relativity.

My gods were people like Albert Einstein and Niles Bohr, Edwin Schrodinger and Max Planck, Paul Dirak and Werner Heisenberg, and their lessons stuck to me like glue.

Judaism, Christianity, Islam… I always knew they were all pointless attempts to explain things, but I also knew that real explanations came from understanding the laws of physics.

From the time I was ten, science was my yellow brick road, and taking photographs of science was my life’s goal.

As I’m typing this, I know how foolish this all sounds, so humor me for now. Trust me when I say that my beliefs were as ingrained into me as the Ten Commandments were into Moses.

That doesn’t mean my behaviour was forgivable or even understandable, but I hope it does help you to at least appreciate a little bit of how things unfolded.

I was certainly not immune to being pig-headed, and a bigot on top of that.

****

I touched Karen’s hair and that woke her from her slumber.

“Hi there, sleepy-head,” I said.

She smiled.

A rush of excitement fell through me. It hit me again that I was waking up with Karen, the girl I’d missed so much the past six months. I could feel her skin beneath my fingers and smell her familiar scent. I held her close and wanted to stay that way forever.

“David?”

“Hmm…?”

“You know it’s not long before I start more serious training. I’ll have to be in Houston for that.”

I’d forgotten that, even the me experiencing this for the first time had forgotten. I knew it, of course, but I’d pushed the details to a far corner of my mind, hoping they’d trickle away.

“When?”

“I should be there by the end of July at the latest. So, a couple of weeks… I’ll need to get settled and everything. NASA will help me find an apartment, but I want to get to know the routine and meet the other trainees.”

“I’ll visit as often as I can. I’ve always liked Houston.”

How often would that be? I didn’t know. I did know Houston wasn’t my choice of place to live. Grandma lived near me in Minneapolis, and it was hard to imagine moving elsewhere.

Grandma.

The thought of her living not far from here made me miss her terribly. I could go see her right then. But, of course I was exactly where I wanted to be.

“I want you to pray for me while I’m gone.”

I stared at her. “You know I don’t believe in praying. It’s just hocus pocus.”

“You once told me a story about Niels Bohr. He’s one of your heroes, right?”

I didn’t answer. I knew what she was going to say.

“I probably won’t get this right, but a visitor came to his house and was surprised that he had a horseshoe hung above his door. The visitor said, ‘I thought you didn’t believe in stuff like that.’”

I finished the anecdote for her. “And Bohr answered, ‘I’m told it brings you luck whether you believe in it or not.’”

Karen smiled, and my heart ached.

“So, I need you to pray, whether you believe in it or not. It’s for me, not for you.”

I leaned back, and she surely knew I wasn’t happy. Grandma had long ago stopped trying to convince me of the power of prayer. She knew better. So did Karen.

“I’m going to find a church in Houston,” she said. “I’m going to be making connections within that church, and I’m going to pray and read my Bible every day. I need that security. Otherwise I won’t have the courage to do this.”

“You’re a scientist.”

“Yes.”

“How can you believe in that crap?”

Karen had a Ph.D. in molecular genetics. She was the author of a dozen papers that detailed how evolution had worked its magic on humanity. When aliens were discovered on the far side of the moon, NASA reached out to the top biologists in the country to look for volunteers to join the program. Karen sent in her resume, expecting to be rejected along with a hundred other applicants.

She told me she’d never really thought about actually flying to the moon. That was crazy talk. Until it wasn’t.

“You know what I believe,” she said. “I’ve never hidden that from you.”

“But, it’s different now. Everything is different.”

“No, nothing has changed.”

“There are fucking aliens on the moon! Did your God make them? Doesn’t the Bible say that Earth was created by God for his creations? Did He lie?”

“I don’t pretend to know all the answers, David. You shouldn’t either. We’ve been through this before. I just know what I believe.”

I should have stopped.

I should have learned from the first time around this argument, but I couldn’t help it. The differences between science and religion were so core to my true self, that I couldn’t let it go. It’s one of my least admirable qualities.

“You believe a bunch of nonsense! Why is the Old Testament chock full of miracles, but nobody ever parts the Red Sea or turns water into wine nowadays? Why doesn’t your God just show Himself and convince people like me that He is real? It’d be easy for Him to do, wouldn’t it?”

That was the line I remember most, and I’d now spouted it twice to the girl who meant the world to me, convincing her that in fact she meant very little.

It would have been so easy to just listen to her.

I hadn’t done that. I was as full of anger and loss as the first time we had this fight.

I had always believed in my science, not some kind of magical God who sat on the clouds somewhere with his long white beard, judging people and micro-managing everybody’s movements simultaneously. It was ridiculous to think that nonsense was true in any meaningful sense of the word. Karen was smarter than that.

She shut down, staying quiet. I wasn’t sure if she was thinking about what I’d said, or if she was ready to throw me out. I suddenly wanted to take it all back and to not have her beliefs crushed by me. I was supposed to do it better this time.

My heart sank, because I knew exactly what was going to happen. She was going to say good-bye to me for the last time. We were too incompatible, she’d say, and she couldn’t be with somebody who refused to accept her religion, or at least accept that she believed it to be true and needed it to be a central part of her life.

I didn’t want to live through that farewell again, so I stomped on the imaginary accelerator in my mind, thrusting me forward in time, past the rest of the argument, past my feeble attempts to apologize, past Karen moving to Houston, faster and faster, until I hit my true time.

I was in Grandma’s apartment, and I sat down on her couch, a tear falling down my cheek. I wiped it away and knew I had messed up my chance to fix things with Karen.

Maybe I could take another run at it, moving back in time once more to find her and to not have the same argument. I knew I could do it, but it wasn’t the right thing to do. She was right that we really were incompatible at a very basic level. I’d be lying to her by trying to pretend otherwise, and that wasn’t any way to build a future together.

I glanced up, as if I could see through the ceiling at the spaceship high above, where Karen floated with her crewmates, racing around the globe at 25,000 miles per hour.

Chapter 9

Karen Anderson couldn’t help it. No matter how much NASA had prepared them to meet up with the Skywheel, when the Sagan finally caught up with the orbiting American space station and she could see it from the small cabin window, it amazed her.

She’d seen photos and news clips, of course, but that didn’t prepare her for the majesty of the station.

A decade earlier, the U.S. had decided to no longer continue funding the International Space Station. After its initial launch in 1998, the ISS was the jewel of space, built with the cooperation of Russia, the European Union, and many other nations. The old space station hadn’t aged well, though, and NASA started construction of the Skywheel years ago, rushing the past few years. The discovery of aliens on the moon’s far side had made its completion critical.

This time the U.S. was going at it alone.

“Pretty impressive, isn’t it?” asked Major Murray Thomson. Thomson was the commander of the Sagan. He’d been in space several times before, including once to help bring construction materials for the Skywheel.

“Amazing,” Karen said.

And it was. She looked back and stared again.

The station was a giant wheel, spinning around its central axis at three RPM. With the wheel being seventy-five feet across, that created an artificial gravity on the ring of about one-third that of Earth, twice that of the moon. The Skywheel could hold a crew of 106 people.

Today, there were about fifty on board. Several would be joining Karen on the trip to the moon. They would leave in three months. They needed the time for the technicians to finish constructing the Golden Luna, the ship they would take to the moon.

Until then, the Skywheel would be home.

Karen could see a shadow of her reflection in the window, and that of Major Thomson behind her. She suddenly felt self-conscious about her hair, and she turned and smiled at Thomson and used her hands to brush her hair back behind her shoulders.

“What’s it like on board?” she asked.

Thomson smiled back at her. He was floating in the tight capsule, only a few inches from where she also floated. She’d gotten used to the odd sensation that came with zero gravity and had stopped throwing up, which was a great relief.

They had told her, but she still hadn’t appreciated it, that free-fall feels like you’re falling from a high building, every second of every minute, falling nonstop. The sensation never stopped, but she was grateful it no longer seemed to make her vomit.

“It’s beautiful,” he answered. “Big, bright, and full of every comfort you could ever want. The sleeping quarters are on the rim of the wheel. Very comfy, with gravity pulling you down, so it feels much more natural than here.”

“I’m looking forward to that!” Karen laughed.

“The hub is also very large, but with no gravity. You can push off one edge and float over to the other side. It takes about twenty seconds.”

“What happens if you get stuck in the middle? There’s no way to move.”

Thomson grinned. “You always have some momentum, so eventually you’ll float to the other side.”

Major Thomson had been on the Skywheel for six months on a previous mission. Karen was glad he was going to accompany her to the moon. He had an air of confidence about him that she thought would be needed. One other crewmember would join them, and also two other scientists, to make a total of five travelers leaving the Sagan to live in the Skywheel.

Karen hoped the others were as easy to get along with as Thomson. She smiled again and looked at Thomson’s face, hard and chiseled, but with soft eyes and dimples when he smiled.

Thomson was a war hero, having fought the ground war in Syria. She remembered hearing about how he’d saved several members of his platoon, pulling them from danger without regard for his own safety. He had been on the news a lot back then, and she was a bit star-struck being on the same mission as him now.

“Are you okay, Karen?”

She shook her head and realized she’d been staring down at the deck below as she floated. She tried to shake off the feeling that she was way out of her league. NASA wouldn’t have asked her to come if she wasn’t the right person for the job.

Would they?

“I’m fine,” she answered. “Thanks. I think I might need a rest. It’s been quite a day.”

“Sure. Need a hand to get to your station?”

“No, I’m good.”

She left by pushing herself from a hand grip nearby and swam toward the back of the ship. What she really wanted was her church, but she’d go to her sleeping pod instead and pray in silence.

The sleeping pod looked like a giant car seat. She pulled herself into the pod and wrapped a seat belt and shoulder strap around herself to stop herself from floating away.

Nobody else was napping, but she’d been awake for more than sixteen hours, and she wasn’t needed to operate the ship, so it was no big deal for her to sleep.

She closed her eyes and imagined the Earth spinning below her. It was an even more amazing sight than the Skywheel, the home planet stretching out beneath her. It was easy to make out a hundred different places that she’d seen on maps, but it was completely different viewing it from 250 miles up. The globe seemed to spin visibly below as she’d watched, even though she knew it was her rocketing around the planet. It felt like she wasn’t moving at all and it was the Earth spinning.

Down there somewhere, David Abelman was taking photos.

“Are you thinking of me at all, David?” she wondered aloud.

How could he not think of her, at least occasionally?

It’d been six months since their fight, and Karen still couldn’t help feeling anger at him whenever she thought about it.

To David, science was everything. She knew better.

Science was critical, but no scientist in the world can explain why e = mc2. Nobody knew why quantum mechanics worked or why evolution selects for the members of a species that are most adaptable to change. David couldn’t tell her why an apple falling from a tree uses the same law of gravity that currently pulled on her to send her on her own orbit around the Earth.

Who decided those things, David?

He never had an answer to that, of course. He preferred to think that discovering natural laws was all that was needed. There was no need to explain how the laws were built in the first place.

Karen rubbed her eyes and yawned. God created the laws. What was so ridiculous about that?

Chapter 10

I ate some lunch and thought about what I had left to do before the funeral. Nothing seemed urgent, so I tried to think about memories of Grandma instead.

She was a kind woman, always rushing to get things done. I wondered if that was because of her experience in Auschwitz. That time scarred her for her entire life, especially when she was rescued but so many of her family members weren’t, having already been murdered.

Somehow, though, she not only survived, but she thrived. She had a daughter, my mother, and then she became my own surrogate mother.

She was never married, and once when she was worn to the bone from working all day, she let out one of the few secrets she ever told me.

“Never married, David. Never wanted to.” I must have looked puzzled at her, because she did have a child, of course. “None of your business how things happened, but just know that I loved your mother with all my heart. I loved her as much as I love you, but if it’d been my choice, I never would have borne her.”

“How did it happen, then?”

I think I was about fifteen when I asked her that, and her answer reminded me how little I knew about her life.

“I was raped.”

Those three words were all I ever found out about my heritage, and as soon as she said them, I felt a confusing shame come over me, as if it was somehow my fault. I went to hug her, but she stood and went to the bathroom. She stayed there for more than an hour, and the guilt grew in me, both for how my mother was conceived in the first place and for falling into this conversation with Grandma that was obviously so hard on her.

Even now, a decade later, it weighed on me. I finished my egg salad sandwich (which included Ariela Adelman’s secret ingredients of mustard and a pinch of sugar) while I thought more about my mother.

Her name was Molly. She was a big woman, quite obese. I hate saying that, but it’s true. I’ve seen a couple of photos that Grandma had of her, and she must have been close to 250 pounds.

My mother was another of my grandmother’s secrets, things she didn’t like to talk about. Almost certainly that was partly to do with how she was conceived, but there was something else I never figured out.

I find it odd to call her Mom, so I’m going to call her Molly. She died when I was five years old, and I don’t remember anything about her.

The few other things I know from Grandma: Molly was thirty-nine years old when I was born. She also was never married. Grandma never mentioned any steady boyfriends, so it’s a mystery how Molly got pregnant with me. I hoped it was a happier story than Grandma’s, but I have no idea.

Five years after I was born, Molly Abelman was rushing down the street, with me in tow, rushing to her mother, Ariela. There was urgency to the trip, because Molly was late for work and had to drop me off for the day. Grandma would babysit.

My mother worked at a factory that made automobile tires. I don’t know anything more. I don’t know what job she did there, what the name of the company was, whether she liked what she did or hated it… nothing.

She rushed, though, and… well, it’s not really a surprise, is it? She had a massive heart attack and died on the street.

Every once in a while I try to think back to that event. Why can’t I remember anything about it? Five is old enough to have that burned into my memory forever. At least that’s what should have happened. Now, though, the only images I have of my mother are vague yells and some thumps as she walked through our home.

I don’t remember ever having a hug from her, and one question had bothered me for many years: Did my mother love me?

If she had loved me, surely I would have retained some sense of that, even now. Wouldn’t I? I’d remember her holding me, lying beside me to comfort me if I was sick, playing games or going to the beach together. Why didn’t I remember any of that?

Thinking of it made me realize how little I knew of my entire family history.

Ariela had left me the family tree over on the kitchen table, and once we were past the funeral and the grieving, I planned to research some of my family, starting with my mother. I don’t know why I never googled her name before, but it was time to find out my heritage.

Then I snapped to attention.

Why would I bother searching online for my mother, when all I had to do was go back to when she was still alive?

After all, my dead grandmother was a working time machine.

I closed my eyes and forced myself to relax. It was getting faster each time to find the right way to meditate and find the secret area of my brain that allowed me to use the Shelljah magic.

Soon, I felt the now-familiar experience of taking control of my body as a passenger. I pressed the brake pedal, and time slowed to a halt. Pressing the imaginary reverse pedal moved my body backward, backward, faster and faster. Time travel was a magical science. I had a long journey, and as I concentrated more, my body ended up blitzing into the past, my life an unfocused stream of fractional images, bright and dark flashes, and in my gut I knew how long to keep going, even though I couldn’t really understand a damned thing I was seeing as the years scattered by.

It felt like intuition, knowing the right time to stop, and when I halted travel, the images morphed to real life again.

I felt light, small, almost fragile.

My body hadn’t yet reached its fifth birthday. The consciousness that controlled it was awkward, not always knowing how to do anything. I didn’t interfere, since the shock of being a child was overpowering. I felt both my twenty-five-year-old mind and my four-year-old mind at the same time. The younger self frightened me. I wasn’t sure he had any idea what he was doing.

It didn’t occur to me to look in a mirror to find out what I looked like. I didn’t have to. I was in my own body with my own set of memories and experiences, limited though they were. I’d looked in the mirror every day to brush my teeth, and those experiences were as real as any others. I knew exactly what I looked like because I was that four-year-old.

We were outside, a nice summer day. I had a red rubber ball with a blue stripe circled around it. It was about the size of an orange.

The ball felt clumsy in my hand. I threw it against the side of our home, and when it bounced off, I almost tripped with every step I took to recover the ball again. Over and over, I played the game, because it was one of the few things I could do for fun. I had no friends, because they all laughed at me for having such a fat pig for a mother.

I wanted to hug myself and tell little David everything would turn out all right. Eventually.

My adult self didn’t remember any of this. The memories of my childhood were gone, and even re-living them didn’t help me recall anything.

After about twenty minutes, the younger me grew tired. We were sweating and our T-shirt was wet.

“Oh.”

My younger self was worried, but I didn’t know why. He hung our head in shame and thought about peeing his pants, but thankfully he didn’t.

We were worried about sweating.

Everything was confusing. It was hot, we sweated. So what?

He turned our head to stare at the back door to our home. He was afraid to go in, but he had to find the bathroom or things would be a lot worse.

One step, then slowly, another. Little David kept his head bowed down. I wanted him to lift his head and smile, to realize childhood is a privilege that doesn’t last very long, but he carried a dark cloud around with him.

As much as I wanted to, I didn’t really like my younger self.

He was scared and beaten. It shocked me to realize the “beaten” part wasn’t about him being verbally knocked down. We had been abused physically, too. Many times.

We pushed onward and finally opened the back door. The house smelled like dirty laundry and rotten fruit.

“David.”

“Hello, Mommy. I have to—”

“Come here.”

“I have to pee.”

“I said come here!”

Molly Abelman was sitting on a couch in the living room watching some TV show I didn’t recognize. She had a cigarette hanging from the side of her mouth and three empty beer bottles on the table beside her.

I knew Little David wanted to do anything at all except go to our mother. The only thing that kept him moving forward was knowing what would happen if he disobeyed her.

“Yes, Mommy?”

“You were sweating again.”

“I’m sorry.”

Our legs were weak and Little David couldn’t help himself. He grabbed his crotch with one hand to help relieve the pressure of having to urinate.

“What are you doing grabbing yourself like that?”

“I have to pee.”

“Let go of yourself, right now!”

We reluctantly let go. Little David felt himself getting ready to cry. I tried to force him to raise his head and stand up to the crazy bitch on the couch, but he didn’t want anything to do with that, and I didn’t push hard.

“I need you to get me a beer.”

“Okay.”

We slinked back to the kitchen and found another Coors in the fridge. Once we handed it over, she shook her head and said, “You’re a disgusting pig.”

That was all it took. Little David burst into tears and then ran to the bathroom and slammed the door behind him. He immediately got scared that she would be mad about the slam and he panicked and hid in the corner behind the toilet. He knew there was a good chance she would beat him for that.

He wanted to get out.

To make matters worse, he had peed his pants.

There was no chance avoiding a beating for that.

He cried, and I cried with him.

****

After a few minutes, panic came over us. I knew I should take control of the body and get Little David out of this situation, but I was fighting an overwhelming and confusing anxiety. All I wanted was to get out of there.

So, I did.

With the little sense I retained, I floored my imaginary accelerator, to get me back to my true time as fast as possible.

Life flew by, a steady stream of random images, colors, and sensations. I felt sadness and laughter and love and hate and every other emotion fleeting through my mind like tiny stardust sprites. With each passing glimpse of time, I relaxed. I was safe from my mother.

Then everything went black.

For a long time, there were no sounds bombarding me, no images flashing onto my eyes, no feelings. Darkness. Nothingness.

That’s when I realized what I’d done. In my panic to get away, I’d pressed the reverse pedal in my mind instead of the forward pedal. I’d been traveling younger and younger, and now I was in a time before I’d been born.

As I figured out my mistake, a new set of images lit up my consciousness.

What the hell? I thought. How could that be?

I stopped pressing the pedal and let time slow to normal speed.

Without a second’s hesitation, my mind melded with the body I was riding. It wasn’t mine… but, it was.

My name was James Peller. I was fifty-two years old, a coal miner in West Virginia. It was now 1996, three years before “I” was born.

But the body I was in was mine, just as much as when I’d gone back to see Little David.

James Peller was a gruff man. We knew that and to be honest, we didn’t care. He was married but had few friends. There was Olav and Roger, but we only met them at the local bar to down a few after climbing out of the damned coal mine.

That mine was slowly killing us. Our lungs were filled with black crap and the doctors had given us only a couple more months to live.

Shelby was sitting beside us in a chair, knitting some damned fool thing. Probably another sweater. We kept telling her that we don’t like to wear fucking sweaters, but that didn’t stop her from making yet another one.

She looked old, much older than her forty-four years. Her hair was unkempt, and gray streaks ran through the brown locks. My own hair had thinned, but who gave a shit about that?

All of a sudden we started coughing. It got worse and worse, with us wheezing and waving our arms to try to get air. Shelby rushed to us and hit us with a fist on our back, but it didn’t help.

Maybe it was our time.

We grabbed the bed rails, shaking them, and barely noticed when a doctor ran inside. He put some kind of mask on my mouth and injected me with something.

Sleep took us from the coughing.

When we woke again, we were breathing fine. Shelby was asleep in her chair. The David part of me wondered why she stayed. I knew her life was hell with the James part of me. Fortunately for her, she would be free soon.

I was in a past life.

Living a past life? How’s that work?

Well, sometimes it turns out that science doesn’t have all the answers, yet.

A hundred years ago, no scientists had guessed DNA or genes existed, so they had no real clue how children could inherit blue eyes from their parents, but they took it on faith that the answer would come one day.

Two hundred years ago, the only known electricity was in lightning, which wasn’t very useful. Benjamin Franklin and others figured out how to generate their own electricity.

Science doesn’t have all the answers. Yet.

So, before this day, I would have laughed at people who claimed to remember previous lives. They never had the slightest proof.

Now, I have my own proof that past lives exist.

I didn’t much like the person I once was. James wasn’t nice to anybody, especially the woman who shared his bed; he was a drunken fool, and he was willing to fight anybody at the slightest provocation. He was angry a lot and had been his whole life.

I didn’t want to share this body anymore, so I decided to get out.

Carefully this time, I used the Shelljah to move into the future. I wanted out as quickly as I could, and it wasn’t very long before I was flying into the darkness between my lives.

The bright light when I was born shone briefly before I accelerated through my early years, past my teen troubles, and raced through to finally hit my true time, where I landed with a bit of a thud.

I checked my watch. I’d been gone for no time at all.

Grandma’s funeral was still scheduled for tomorrow.

Chapter 11

Later that evening, I sat in Grandma’s living room staring at some news broadcaster talking about the latest riots in New York City, the most recent battle in the Middle East, an earthquake in China, and a drought hitting Ethiopia the Red Cross was calling the worst disaster in Africa in twenty years.

It was all so depressing. It felt like I was surrounded by bad news, choked by it, and overriding it all was the body of Ariela Abelman, still lying at the funeral home waiting to be buried.

I thought about going to see her, but I knew that if I did I would end up feeling worse. Tomorrow was soon enough. She had planned a typical Jewish closed-casket ceremony. The funeral home had taken her from the hospital, and were preparing the service. If they needed anything, they had my phone number. I’d been clicking my phone to life to check for messages every few minutes, in case I somehow missed the chime of a call. Nothing.

Grandma would have been pleased with how smooth everything was going. Nothing left to chance.

It was so like her to be so precise and organized about her own funeral. As much as she sometimes drove me crazy with her attention to detail, it was a trait that had served her very well over her lifetime.

Somehow, I figured she’d learned those skills as a result of her time in the Nazi concentration camps. I walked to the dining room table and flipped again through all the material she had left me.

I kept being drawn back to the family tree. So much death in our family at the hands of Hitler and his crazies. The victims would have had a terrible death, the Zyklon B gas crawling over them, drowning them. They would try so hard to hold their breaths, but eventually they had to breathe in the poison. They knew they would die, but their bodies demanded something be pulled into their lungs.

I know I spent a lot of time feeling terrible about the six million Jews killed in the gas chambers, not to mention the blacks, the gays, and the many other groups Hitler decided weren’t fit to live.

While browsing through Grandma’s material, though, I also wondered at the book that talked about Shelljah. I couldn’t read a damned word of the Hebrew text, but maybe one day I would learn.

Clearly I needed to find out about Shelljah one way or the other.

I barely believed I had gone to a past life. As much as I wanted to trust that one day science would explain things, it felt more mystical as the twilight rolled over Minneapolis. The darkening of Grandma’s apartment seemed to wash away logic and science, making room for magic and miracles.

“Hogwash,” I said.

I closed the book and a thought hit me: If I had one past life, maybe I had one prior to that one, and one before that, and…

And ideas flooded my mind.

This was time travel in a way that nobody had ever thought of.

“Ariela Abelman, you were hiding such big secrets.”

Then I added, “Or did you even know about past lives? Maybe you never made the mistake I did and zoomed into the wrong direction?”

Across the table from me, I imagined her sitting there, a smug look on her face, challenging me to figure things out for myself.

Well, I doubted I’d ever know unless she left me some more concrete notes in the material I’d now managed to scatter all over the table.

I’d finished the last two beers Grandma had left in the fridge for me. It had been a long day, but I wasn’t tired at all.

Less than twenty-four hours before I would lose the ability to travel in time. Grandma’s burial was going to stop the magic.

I went back to the more comfortable chair in the living room and closed my eyes. It wasn’t long before I found the spot in my mind, and I was again in control of my reality.

With a few questions in my mind—if I was the one going crazy, and whether my plan had any chance of succeeding—I slammed onto the reverse pedal.

Immediately, the world started to rush past me in backward order. I again saw the flashes of light and darkness, the highs and the lows glancing by me.

I pressed harder and harder, and my life was a blur.

Soon, the darkness came and then the different light, the light from my prior life when I was James Peller. Without slowing, I remembered my new life and felt shame at the man I once was.

I tried to ignore Peller and slammed through his life, bits of pain and anger rushing through me like bullets. I never wanted to spend time re-living that life again. I’d already seen more of him than I wanted.

James Peller was born in 1920. When I rammed through that date, all went dark again, this time for a longer period, but then the light came back. I didn’t slow, but immediately knew my name was Louis Larrange, a French fur trader who spent much of his life exploring the northern part of Hudson Bay. The frozen wastelands were lonely but we had made a good living by trapping beavers and otters.

He was only thirty-two when he died, so my flashing through his life was quick.

Then came Peter Buttlesworth, a lawyer in London, England.

Michael Robinson, Benjamin Tosh, Mark Graves. The names and lives flew by faster and faster, as I grew closer to my destination. All my lives were men. All were Jewish. I don’t know why.

The journey lasted for what felt like hours. I grew tired of the names flying through me, each surrounded by a coat of memories I knew in detail, because I had lived every one of their lives.

The truth of past lives only made sense if each of us was actually endowed with a soul.

I didn’t like that thought, but I didn’t have any other explanation. The concept of a soul sounded like religious crap.

Finally, my personal time machine slowed and then halted. I had no way to explain why I stopped where I did, except that however the apparatus worked, it knew which body I needed to travel to in order to meet my demand.

The ground was baked clay. The sun beat down on me like a furnace, and I gasped at the heat. It was unexpected and gruesome.

My body was used to it, though. It moved on its own, looking for a lost sheep.

I was twenty-three and my body was old. In this time, nobody lived a long life. The sun and the work and the lack of food and water and the illnesses with no cure brought everyone an early death.

The valley around me was full of rolling hills to the east and stark landscapes to the west. The sheep was probably going to die.

I was Adlai, son of Asher.

I was a fisherman. My father was a sheep herder, and it was for his lost sheep I was searching. My father was soon to die at the ripe old age of forty-one. We didn’t care much if we actually found the sheep, but I had to do a cursory look. The lost animal was vital to my father, as the few sheep he owned were his only way to make money for food.

My clothing consisted of loose wraps and a cap for my head with rope holding it on, not that there was much wind to tear it away.

The area I stood in was both beautiful and terrifying. I was alone in the middle of nowhere, looking for a sheep I knew I would never find.

Part of me wanted desperately to get back to the river Jordan to fish. Right now, my livelihood was more important than my father’s.

The me that was riding this body soaked in every aspect of this ancient land.

I knew exactly where I was, since my ancient self knew.

I was in biblical Judea, not far from the city of Jericho. The journey I had planned for was starting to unfold along with my singular task: I was going to find Jesus Christ and kill him.

Part 2—The Sixth Commandment

Chapter 12

It didn’t take me any time at all to orient myself. I was Adlai. My memories of the 21st century were vivid but just as vivid were my memories of being a lone wanderer in Judea.

I was angry at my father for losing the damned sheep, but the reality was that he knew I was unlikely to bother hunting for it, at least not very hard. I was born a nomad, and had often left Jericho for months at a time without saying good-bye.

By modern standards, my body was a wreck, and if I appeared in Minneapolis as I currently existed, I would attract stares and gasps. My body was thin, with no obvious muscle tone. Scars covered much of my body, and most of my teeth were gone. I was always in pain from any number of sources, and when I had the chance to eat, I ravished whatever there was, even at the expense of my kin.

I was a very typical wandering Jew.

I wore a simple robe that had started off gray and fresh many years ago but was now full of tatters and looked like crap.

Nobody took a second look at me, though. I was as poor as everybody else.

The river Jordan was my home, and now I took control of our body to start to walk north. The river flowed beside me, a lazy flow of water that seemed to take its own time to wind from the Sea of Galilee in the north down to the Dead Sea a few miles behind me.

“Onward to Nazareth.”

Before I go any further, I need to clarify something. I wasn’t speaking English at all during my time in the distant past. As with all Jews of the time, I spoke the common language of Aramaic.

I expect nobody reading this book is fluent in Aramaic, so I’m going to give you my best English translation of the dialogue.

Even so, it was cool to be able to speak a language that is essentially dead, just as a native would.

Because I was a native.

Within seconds, I was acclimated and no longer thought the temperature particularly hot, no longer thought the rolling hills particularly exotic, and no longer thought my body was a washed-up mess.

Everything was totally normal.

I was half David Abelman and half the wanderer Adlai of Machaerus, a town near the Dead Sea. When I was small, my mother died, and my father took me to live near Jericho. He wanted to leave the memories of his dead wife, who I believe he loved deeply. He has often spoken of her in soft tones, and I wished I could remember more about her.

The whole idea of my mother dying when I was very young seemed to parallel David Abelman’s mother, Molly, dying when he was very young. I filed that away for future consideration but never managed to figure out any reason the two situations had that in common. Just a fluke, I think.

Asher was now old and unable to properly tend his flock of sheep. Soon, I knew he would leave to walk to his homeland, Machaerus, where he would leave this world to join his spiritual father.

It was of no concern to me if I was there when he left. That type of emotional connection wasn’t common in these times. Asher would never consider waiting until I returned, partly because he knew my treks could take me away for long periods, and one day I would leave again, never to return.

He knew I couldn’t be happy if I was rooted to one spot.

Adlai was the perfect ancestor for me. Although, “ancestor” isn’t really the right word for a past life, is it? Maybe “spiritual ancestor,” which sounds awkward. Well, hell, I’m going to stick to ancestor.

We walked north, always keeping an eye on the flow of the Jordan.

The river brought life to Judea, with it’s plentiful fish and the water needed to grow crops and feed livestock.

We had traversed the river at least a half dozen times, and each time, we’d wandered off at points to see the world, such as it was. We’d been to Jerusalem, a much larger city than we were used to, and we had no interest in returning. The Romans were too present, and they could barely stand us lowly Jews. All we were good for was handing over food and other possessions for the precious empire.

No thank you.

My body may have seemed fragile to a modern eye, but in fact it was perfectly built for long walks. Slim, no extra weight, and my mind was full of patience and determination. Once we wanted to go someplace, we went and we arrived. The shortest distance between two points was always found by a nomad.

Our new destination would take time. Several days.

That wasn’t any type of detriment, because I carried my fishing gear, so I could eat, and the river provided my drinking water. I needed nothing else.

God provides for us.

“What?”

I was taken aback when I realized that Adlai was a fierce believer in God, and always had been. Asher had taught him the power of the Lord and Adlai never questioned it.

He knew with absolute certainty that God provided.

It was very odd to have that belief myself, while at the same time knowing the concept of God is ridiculous and infantile.

Nonetheless, we believed.

We kept walking.

Our body didn’t grow weary, and our muscles never cried out for a rest. We would occasionally walk into the Jordan to cleanse our body of sweat and to cool down. A small sip of the cool fresh water rejuvenated our soul.

I couldn’t tell you how far we walked that first day. There were no Fitbits or even a wristwatch. We walked with a known purpose that never wavered.

By evening, we were ready to stop for the night. I estimated we had walked thirty miles or so. We were hungry, but fishing was a task for the morning, and so we lay down and slept.

****

The morning sun brought fresh energy with it, and we woke full of zest for the day.

As always, we prayed before doing anything else:

Shema Yisrael,

Thank you for providing me with life and to be able to enjoy your creations for another day. I know you will always care for me, and for those I care about. I will do your service unfailingly until you bring me home to your table. Amen.

.We stood for a few extra moments of reflection before walking over to the river. The Jordon smelled like life.

I took out my net and started to cast it out upon the water. In less than a dozen tries, I caught a fish I knew was called a musht, but that I might have called tilapia if I were eating it in my favorite Minneapolis restaurant. We cooked the fish and ate it in silence, thanking the Lord for providing.

We bathed in the river before looking to the north and continuing our journey.

Most of the trip, I let Adlai control our body. He was perfectly content to continue walking, even though he had no particular purpose in mind. Walking was the way of his life.

The purpose behind our trip was buried in David Adelman’s mind. That mind—when I use the “I” pronoun—knew exactly what the trip was about.

Not that far to the north in Galilee was the village of Nazareth, and if the Bible was to be believed, the historic Jesus lived there as a teenager right now.

I wondered if I would have the courage to follow through on my plan to kill him.

I didn’t believe Jesus was a supernatural being. I didn’t believe he was the son of God. I didn’t believe he was capable of performing any miracles.

I did believe he lived, though. He was a man who inspired people to follow him, and those followers created Christianity after Jesus was crucified.

Christianity in turn spread to eventually have more than two billion followers.

One of those believers was Adolph Hitler. Hitler murdered six million Jews.

If he himself had been Jewish, there would have been no reason for the genocide. My grandmother would not have suffered the loss of her siblings and other relatives, and she would have had a chance to have a happy life.

Killing Jesus might stop Hitler from killing so many innocent people.

Or maybe not. Maybe he would have found some other reason, but I needed to try. I could use Grandma’s Shelljah time machine to fix her life.

Walking felt therapeutic. One foot in front of the other, again and again. We kept a steady rhythm going, moving ever closer to my goal.

By noon, the sun was shining down with its full power, but it did not bother us. We wore a gray covering on our head, as did all the men from Judea. We did veer a little to the west of the river, because there was heavy vegetation, and the route to the west was easier.

That’s when we saw the dead woman.

From about a hundred feet away, we could see her lying on the ground, collapsed, blood splattered on her robe.

As we got closer, Adlai tried to rush our body, to keep walking past her. I couldn’t let him. He’d seen his share of abandoned women before, and I could feel his need to ignore her, as she was of no value, but my 21st century soul wouldn’t allow us to ignore her.

I stopped and stared.

She was flat on the ground, arms outstretched, her cheek plastered into the sand.

Her eyes were open, but she didn’t move. Her hair was black, as was true of almost all women of the region. Adlai had never seen a blonde woman and would have been shocked if he did.

I hesitated, not knowing what to do. I glanced around to be sure this wasn’t an ambush of some kind, which is why Adlai had wanted to rush past. It could easily be a Roman trick.

But, no. The entire area as far as we could see was empty.

“Hello?”

I leaned down and touched her hand. It was warm, and I could move her fingers easily, so if she really was dead, it hadn’t been for long.

I felt for a pulse, which was an action totally foreign to Adlai. He was surprised to hear the quiet bump of a heartbeat. I was too. She was alive, although I didn’t think she would be for long.

Her robe was white, of course, but there were streaks of blood covering her. I couldn’t see where it had come from.

We shook the woman, and I called to her again. Her eyes didn’t focus, and she didn’t reply.

There were still no other people around to help, not that they would have anyhow. It was clear that it was up to us to help her.

We picked her up in our arms and walked toward the Jordan.

I thought about taking off her robe, to see where the blood had come from, but that would have shocked Adlai to his core.

Adlai had spent some of his teen years in Qumran, a tiny outpost on the Dead Sea. It was where many Essenes lived. The Essenes were a Jewish sect who were very devoted and who later became famous for having written the Dead Sea Scrolls, which contained many writings, including the oldest copies of the Old Testament ever found.

They were a commune of celibates who wanted little to do with women. Adlai had grown to feel that way, and he resisted my attempts to help this unknown woman. I ignored his feelings.

Within a few minutes, we were by the river. We carried her body into the water and lowered her, allowing her to become refreshed. I splashed water onto her face and cupped some to drop into her mouth.

She drank and as I washed her hair back, her eyes fluttered and then focused on me.

The woman was fearful, which wasn’t a big surprise.

“Hello,” I said gently. “You’re going to be fine.”

She looked around as if expecting others to be present. Then, she swallowed and licked her lips. Her face was very pretty, and I realized how much I was enjoying looking at her.

She reminded me of Karen.

For the first time, I wondered if Karen Anderson also had past lives that could have converged with my own.

I almost laughed to think this girl could be carrying Karen’s soul. The chances of that happening were ridiculously small.

“Who are you?” she whispered.

The girl pushed herself from my arms and stood on her own. She wasn’t hurt as badly as she had appeared.

“I am Adlai. Who are you?”

“My name is Shonda.”

“What happened to you?”

Shonda lowered her head. “I am a water-girl, but I disappointed my master.”

“How?”

“I am barren. I was unable to provide him with children, so I am useless to him.”

My memories from Adlai made me believe Shonda’s words, but my David memories made me grow angry that somebody had treated this girl so badly.

“You’re just a girl.”

She stared at me, not knowing how to reply.

“Are you bleeding?” I asked her.

“No. He left me for dead in the desert, marking me with a jug of pig blood, so that everyone would stay away from me. I should be dead.”

Part of me wanted to hug her, to comfort her, and to let her know everything would be okay, but I hesitated. I had no idea what would happen to the girl when we parted ways, and I didn’t want to give her false hope.

“Are you hungry?”

She nodded. I offered her my hand and led her to shore. We found a sheltered area, where she could sit, and then I went back to catch her some food. It wasn’t long before I had another musht. I prepared it for her and she ate it greedily.

I watched, having no idea what to do next.

Chapter 13

Two days later, I met Jesus.

Regardless of my views on religion, and my belief that there’s no such thing as supernatural deities, it was still a gut-wrenching and inspiring moment to meet the man who would inspire billions of people to follow him.

Chapter 14

I got ahead of myself, but I hope you understand. Let me go back a bit.

The day I found Shonda, she was quite weak, even after being in the river and having a couple of fish to eat. There was no reason to rush, and I didn’t want to abandon her, so we stayed where we were and relaxed for the rest of the day.

Shonda told me a bit about her life. She was born in a tiny village where only about a hundred people lived. Her parents took her to Bethel when she was still a child, and they sold her to a man who already had eight other women in his harem. When she was twelve, she was old enough, as far as he was concerned.

She never used the man’s name, and I could feel the hate seeping out as she spoke of him. Hard to blame her, although in my own mind, I thought her parents were really the despicable people in her life.

Now, seven years had passed without Shonda producing a baby. She was deemed useless.

“He was going to kill me by strangling me,” she said. As she told me that, she subconsciously felt her neck, as if trying to reassure herself that she hadn’t been murdered after all.

“I just stared at him, knowing anything I said would only make matters worse. The rest of his harem were there with him, each of which had given him at least one child. The children were hidden away. I don’t know why he even cared about children, because he never spent any time with them. But, he did care. Deeply. He wanted me dead, but he decided not to do it himself.”

I could see tears in her eyes as she told me her story. As far as I could tell, she was a sweet girl, who should have had a happy life. I wanted to kill the fucker who treated her so badly.

“In the end, he said I wasn’t worth his killing me. He called for his protectors and told them to abandon me in the desert and let me die on my own.”

She moved closer to me until her face was only a foot away from my own. She really was a pretty girl.

“And that’s what happened. I walked as long as I could, but then… I don’t know how long I was abandoned before you found me. Now, I belong to you. I will do anything you want, since you own me.”

Adlai had a brief period where he took control of our shared body and he nodded. This was what he naturally expected, and he was looking forward to sharing the nights with her.

He had never been with a woman. The time he had lived with the Essenes taught him that women were to be scorned. When he left the sect, though, he struggled with that and secretly thought about having a woman of his own. Now, one had voluntarily given herself to him.

I put my hands on her cheeks and smiled at her.

“You are free,” I said. “I won’t own you, but you are welcome to travel with me if you wish. If you have some other place you would rather be, that’s fine, too.”

“I have no place and no one.”

“I understand.”

“Please let me come with you.”

We nodded. Adlai wanted to throw her to the ground and fuck her, but I wasn’t allowing any such thing to happen.

“We are going farther up river, to the village of Nazareth.”

“I know of Nazareth.”

“Do you? What do you know of it?”

Shonda seemed uneasy.

“They say…” she said, but then she stopped. Her mouth closed and again, she looked around. She was afraid.

“I will protect you.”

She nodded. “They say the messiah will be there.”

I smiled at her.

“Do you believe them?”

“I want to, but we’ve seen many false messiahs come and go. They all say they are the Chosen One, and they all talk about God’s word and what we must do for Him. They ask for money and for favors.”

“Did your master give them anything?”

She locked eyes with me. “Sometimes he gave them me.”

I wanted to hug her, but I didn’t want to give her mixed signals. She was an abused nineteen-year-old girl who hadn’t had a chance to grow up. All she had been taught was that her body was useful to barter for other things.

“I wish you’d had a different life,” I said.

She nodded. “When the false messiahs were unable to perform the miracles they promised, my master would either throw them out or have them killed. He liked to toy with fakers.”

“And of the one in Nazareth?”

“We heard stories. I don’t believe them any more than I believe the people who begged for money to my master, but some do believe.”

“Did your master believe?”

“I never knew. He was very skeptical, always.”

“What do you know about this messiah in Nazareth? Does he have a name or do you know what he looks like?”

“I know nothing about him.”

We were silent for a moment. That’s when she hugged me. I held her to me and stroked her hair. Then she looked up and her eyes pleaded with me. I only hesitated a moment before kissing her.

Adlai got his wish after all, and we all spent the night sleeping in each other’s arms.

****

The next morning was bright and sunny, and Shonda’s smile was just as bright, so there wasn’t much we could have asked for to make the day start off better.

I let Adlai do his morning prayer, and Shonda nodded her head silently beside us while he did that.

None of us were really hungry, so we started hiking north, getting as much ground under us before the mid-day scorching sun hit us.

Shonda showed no signs of any weakness or fatigue, which surprised me after she’d been abandoned a week earlier.

Sometime that morning or perhaps the afternoon before, we’d left Judea and wandered into Samaria. That brought us closer to my goal, so when I realized we’d crossed some invisible border, I was happy.

The only thing I wanted to be careful of was the memories that Adlai carried of the Samaritans. They’d always been antagonistic to Jews, so it was best to avoid people if we could manage it. Why start an argument if we didn’t need to?

Shonda walked immediately behind me the entire time and didn’t speak. She’d learned her lessons from her bastard master, and I thought of asking her to walk beside me and feel free to talk, but Adlai wasn’t keen on that. He’d have to be the one to stay with Shonda whenever I headed back to the 21st century, so I didn’t want to rock the boat there.

Samaria grew more mountainous the farther we walked. We stayed in the valley, following the river Jordan, but all around us craggy mountain peaks rose high. I wondered how anybody could live here, but of course my science background knew the answer: life fills every part of the Earth, from the highest mountains to the deepest ocean trenches. Life always finds a way.

Mid-morning, we followed a curve in the river, and we found ourselves face to face with a small group of people. There were maybe twenty men, the same number of women, and about a dozen children.

So much for trying to circumvent contact with the Samarians. I didn’t want to look like we were avoiding them, because that might cause a conflict in its own right, so I walked straight to the group and bowed.

“Greetings. My name is Adlai, and this is Shonda.”

We looked at the group, who all looked vaguely puzzled. Their skins were much darker than ours. One man came closer to me, then looked back at the rest of the group as if to ensure he had permission to speak on their behalf. Nobody seemed to object.

At first, he spoke a bit of Arabic. When I didn’t reply, he spoke in broken Aramaic.

“I am Fadel.”

I pointed to the Jordan. “We are following the river.”

He looked where I was pointing.

Shonda finally said something to me, the first words she had spoken on our hike. “You should trade food.”

“Trade?” At first, I wasn’t sure what she meant.

“They have lamb. And bread.”

Shonda pointed at the piles of food that were being protected by several of the men. I could smell the food and all of a sudden, I craved it. I was getting sick of eating fish.

I smiled at her and nodded.

Fadel watched me carefully as I went to the water and took out my fishing gear. Shonda stayed with him, a hostage to show we meant no harm.

It took only about twenty minutes to catch a half dozen fish. I brought them back to Fadel.

“Please accept.”

Fadel gratefully took the fish and carried them back to his group. He spoke in Arabic with several other men, with them all glancing back to us. I’m sure they didn’t trust us, but they wanted to.

After the discussion, one of the women brought us portions of lamb and bread. We gratefully accepted and also took their offer to sit with them for our meal.

As we ate, I wondered why the Jews of Judea were so leery of the Arabs in Samaria.

I remembered the parable of the Good Samaritan from the Bible. A man was beaten and left half dead on the side of the road. A priest came by and then a Levite, which I think was an assistant to the priest. They both walked around the man to avoid him.

Finally, a Samaritan walked by and immediately took the beaten man to his home and nurtured him back to health.

The parable is intended to answer the question, “Who is my neighbor?” which is a follow-up to Jesus’s command for all people to love their neighbors. The Samaritan was the one in the story who truly fulfilled that commandment, even though his people despised Jews.

I’d never appreciated that story until the meal I shared with the Samaritans we met.

After we ate, we said good-bye and started walking again, Shonda behind me.

We managed another fifteen miles that day.

****

The next day, the day I first saw Jesus, we started the morning the same as the two prior ones, praying and walking, stopping to catch fish along the way.

We were now in the area called Galilee.

By mid-afternoon, we reached the Sea of Galilee, a huge lake that was gorgeous and full of tasty fish. At least, Adlai thought it was huge. David had seen the Great Lakes, though, and was less impressed with a lake of which he could see the other side. This was the area where Jesus built his ministry. He preached mainly near the north and western parts of the sea, but we were at the south.

Even though Adlai had insisted we pray from time to time, and I wanted to respect his wishes, I still had no belief that Jesus Christ was any kind of supernatural son of God.

And here I have to say: It really made no difference to my excitement. He was the most famous person in history. We started to walk west. Adlai knew perfectly how to find his way to Nazareth.

The longer we walked, the faster the pace I set.

There was no question that there was a man named Jesus. His lineage was well known, his teachings passed down for many generations, and his crucifixion well documented. You don’t need to trust the Bible on this. There’s other historical documents that discuss all this.

He was real.

And I was close to him.

I hoped.

Jesus was born in Bethlehem, but he grew up in Nazareth. When he was twelve years old, he visited Jerusalem. That’s all the Bible reveals about him until he reached prime teaching age, about thirty, when he formed his ministry.

I really hoped he had stayed with his parents in Nazareth. Most historians thought that was most likely, and that he would learn carpentry or stone-work from his father, Joseph.

We hurried even more as I thought of meeting Joseph and Mary, whose baby had arrived in a manger. Not on Christmas, but perhaps in the spring. Nobody knew exactly when Jesus was really born.

It was late afternoon when we reached Nazareth. The village was very small, with most houses built of stones piled together. There were wooden additions as well, and I wondered how many of them might have been added by Joseph.

We stopped short of entering the village while I tried to estimate its size. I couldn’t be sure, but I thought there might be 500 people or so living there. Surely no more.

As we entered the village, I could see men hard at work doing lots of different chores: herding donkeys, pounding stones, hacking wood with something that looked like an ax.

And it took no time at all to find him.

Even if I hadn’t known there was something special about him, it would have been dead obvious. Nobody could have missed him.

He looked to be about fifteen years old, skinny, which wasn’t unusual because everyone in the village was thin, tall, though, certainly taller than any other man I could see. He was close to six feet, which made him a giant.

We walked closer, slowly. I knew I was staring at him, but I couldn’t help it.

Jesus had changed so many things in the world around him. He had more followers in the 21st century than he would possibly imagine, more churches founded in his name than would seem conceivable, more charities doing more good… and more crimes committed in his name.

He stood out because he was tall, but that wasn’t all.

He smiled, a broad grin, looking right at me. I felt him looking deeply into my soul as we moved closer. I believe everybody who approached him would feel the same.

The single thing that set him aside from everybody else was the color of his eyes.

He had bright blue eyes that almost seemed to glow. Every other person I’d met in the middle east had dark eyes, mostly deep brown.

Nobody had blue eyes.

His long hair was blonde. Not the dark colors of every other person around.

It was almost like a man from Sweden had been teleported to Galilee. His eyes and his smile captured me as nobody else had ever done.

I immediately understood why the people gave him a chance to minister to them. They would be as hypnotized as I was.

As I got closer, he held out his hand and I gratefully held it.

“Welcome,” he said.

I hesitated and then asked, “What is your name?”

“I am Yeshua. I am the one you seek.”

I remembered that Jesus was also called Joshua, and the Aramaic way to pronounce Joshua was Yeshua.

For several seconds, I couldn’t speak. Finally, my partner soul took over. “I am Adlai.”

Chapter 15

Erika Sabo was nineteen years old—no longer a child, but sometimes her mind had fleeting visions of the same fantasies and dreams she had had as a young girl. She would never admit to anybody that she still craved a Disney movie from time to time or that she liked to suck on a strawberry lollipop when she was alone in her room. Nobody needed to know any of that.

Her parents were Eileen and Henry Sabo. They’d both been born in Chicago, and neither liked living in such a massive city. When Eileen got an email asking if she’d be interested in working in Aynsville, New York, she never really thought twice, and much to her great relief, neither did Henry. She was an accountant, and he was a school teacher, both skills quite marketable at the time, so they packed their bags and headed east.

A month after they settled in, Eileen found out she was pregnant, which was very much not in anybody’s plans. She wasn’t a regular church-goer or even discussed her religious beliefs with anybody (such things being her own personal story, and nobody else needed to know), but on one thing she was very clear: If God wanted her to have a child, a child she would have.

“Are you sure?” asked Henry. “We’ve just gotten settled, and we don’t have to do this if we don’t want to.”

She only had to tell him one time, and he never broached the subject again.

However, when Erika was two years old, Henry decided that being a father really wasn’t his thing. When he left, he told Eileen it wasn’t her (which was true, it was Erika), but he wasn’t ready for a family. Both were only twenty-six, and he wanted more out of life.

Eileen didn’t have a lot to suggest to him, and in the end, she realized she wouldn’t miss him at all. They’d outgrown each other, and really, she surprised herself by wishing him well.

The only slight discomfort was that Henry moving back to Chicago meant Eileen and Erika were the only black people who lived in the neighborhood. Oh, there were a few others farther away, way over on the other side of Aynsville, but none nearby.

Eileen didn’t exactly mind that. She wondered if it would affect Erika in some way, as if the divorce would rob her of some sacred birthright.

Two years later, Eileen met Chad Parcher. Chad worked in the same office she did, and one day he shyly asked if she would like to go to dinner.

Eileen had never dated a white man before, but she’d blurted out a “Yes” before her mind managed to even think about that.

A year later, they were married.

Erika was five at the wedding ceremony and was the ring bearer. She grew to love her step-father, especially as phone calls from Henry grew less and less frequent.

By the time she was nineteen, it’d been four years since her natural father had contacted her. Chad was the only Dad that mattered.

Not the only Father, but the only Dad.

Earlier in this book, I kept back a couple details, figuring they fit better here.

Erika had bright blonde streaks of hair mixed randomly in with the coal black of the rest of her hair. People who met her thought she’d done something with dye or a special treatment from a hair stylist to give that appearance. However, that’s not the case. Erika would never do anything to change her appearance, because that reeked of vanity, a sin of which she was clearly not guilty. Some of her hair turned blonde when she hit puberty. She was as surprised as anybody.

Another big change happened at the same time, and this one was much harder to believe. Both Eileen and Chad swear it’s true though. Erika’s eye color changed from the dark brown she’d inherited from Eileen and Henry, and now her eyes were bright blue.

If you saw Erika in sunlight, her gleaming eyes and that magical hair, mixed with the rich bronze of her skin made her a stunning sight, one that couldn’t be forgotten.

She never acted like she was prettier than any other girl when she was in high school, wasn’t vain or pretentious in any way. She didn’t have to be. She was beautiful, smart, and articulate. When she spoke, everybody listened. Erika could gain an audience whenever she chose, just by smiling and calling out to whoever was walking by.

It was a skill that would come in handy when she started to preach.

When she was six years old, Erika realized exactly who she was. It wasn’t a big surprise to her, but her young brain had needed time to process the underlying soul that had inhabited it.

Three months after her sixth birthday, it was like she’d tripped across the information: she was God’s child.

When she was a young teen, that knowledge formed her fundamental nature. If somebody had told her that people’s souls inhabited more than one body as time went on, she would have nodded in agreement. After all, once upon a time she had been Jesus.

She remembered her prior life in great detail. She knew the successes and the failures, and she certainly remembered the agony of the torture and crucifixion. That knowledge was fully-formed in her genetic code, the same as her eye and hair color.

“I will do your bidding, my Father.” That is the phrase she spoke every morning as she awoke. She waited to receive instructions, and until she did so, she would be a normal human girl.

She laughed with her friends, she teased the boys, she loved chocolate ice cream, and she watched YouTube videos. Her real self was always in the back of her mind, but for the first part of her life, she was a typical girl. She liked that.

This was her second life, though, and she looked forward to the day she could show the world who she really was.

Chapter 16

As I walked closer to Yeshua, his overpowering presence became insurmountable. Remember, he was tall. Maybe five feet eleven, maybe even taller than six feet. That might not seem tall in the 21st century, but two thousand years ago, we were a shorter species. Most of the men I saw as I moved closer to Jesus were about five foot five. To them, he was a giant, with blazing eyes, bright hair, and a killer smile.

The kid was a natural.

He continued to stare at me with that huge grin.

Shonda stayed behind me. I wasn’t sure if it was her normal sense of servitude or if she wanted me between her and this stranger as a shield of protection.

“I’m honored to meet you, Yeshua.”

“And why do you seek me?”

Why indeed? I couldn’t very well tell him that I’d hunted him for the past three days to murder him.

“News travels far, and I have heard stories about you. I wanted to see if they were true.”

“Really? What stories? Where did you hear them?”

I changed the subject. “Forgive me for being so rude. May I introduce Shonda to you? She has accompanied me on my journey.”

I gently pulled Shonda from behind me so that she could be beside me.

“It’s indeed a pleasure,” Jesus said.

Shonda tried to smile, but she was afraid. She’d mentioned seeing fake messiahs who had visited her master, and maybe they hadn’t all treated her well. Or maybe she was afraid of becoming a bargaining chip in whatever might happen next.

“Shonda is recovering from an injury, but she was kind to me and has joined me in our journey from Jericho.”

“Jericho? I passed through Jericho on my path to Jerusalem several year ago.”

“You were with your father,” I said. “You went to visit the Temple.”

“You seem to know much about me.”

In fact, that short conversation exhausted everything I knew about Jesus after his birth. The trip to the Temple was well documented. Nothing else concrete was known about his life until he started his ministry on the Sea of Galilee. That wouldn’t happen for another fifteen years.

“I was in Jerusalem at the time,” I said.

He stared at me with a knowing look, and I held his gaze, not wanting to flinch. He knew I was lying, but I had no idea how he knew.

Historians and religious leaders have wondered for millennia what Jesus was doing with his life for all those lost years between his birth and when he started preaching.

Many felt he stayed in Nazareth, which I could now verify, at least for this part of his life. There’d been wild speculation that he’d spent years in India or in Rome or England, but nobody really knew.

Until now.

“Yeshua?”

A woman came from across the dusty street toward us with two young children in tow.

“Yes, Mother.”

I was looking at Mary, who had experienced the virgin birth.

She was rather short, certainly under five feet, wore a full-length yellowing robe that covered her from head to toe, and so all I could really see was her face.

She looked to be about thirty years old, but it was hard to tell for sure. Her forehead was etched with several fat wrinkles, and when she spoke, she had few of her teeth left. None of that was unusual, but somehow I’d expected her to be a beautiful, radiant queen. It felt odd that the mother of Christianity should be so pleasantly ordinary.

“Are you going to introduce me?” she asked.

Jesus smiled and nodded. “My mother can be quite forward. It has gotten her into trouble from time to time.”

“I’m very pleased to meet you,” I said as I bowed to her. “My name is Adlai. This is Shonda. We have traveled from Jericho to meet your son.”

Mary nodded, as if that type of thing happened every day. Maybe it did.

“He is somebody worth knowing,” she said cryptically, “but he still has a job, like everybody else.”

Jesus added, “I have taken over my father’s business.”

“Joseph?”

He nodded. “He died recently, but fortunately he taught me his trade from when I was very young. He trained me as a woodworker. I am busy building fishing boats for the Sea.”

Jesus gently moved the two small children to the front. “I have four brothers and two sisters. These are the two youngest, Judas and Simon.”

I smiled at the two young boys. I hadn’t realized Jesus had any siblings, let alone six.

“You’ll need a place to stay,” said Mary to me. “We don’t really have an inn or anything here. Our village is very small as you can see.”

“We are used to sleeping in the open,” I said. “We are nomads, and our lives are dedicated to wandering. We have no need for walls to sleep in.”

I wasn’t sure Shonda would have characterized herself as a nomad, but she didn’t contradict me.

I turned back to Jesus. “The Sea of Galilee is far from here.”

“Yes, but I build sections here. They are carried by donkey to the water.”

Shonda’s face was lowered, but I could see her trying to catch glimpses of both Jesus and Mary.

Jesus saw it too, which told me how intuitive he was. “Perhaps you would like to join me while I work?” he asked me. “Mother, could you show our little village to Shonda?”

“Of course I could.”

Shonda glanced up and looked at me. I couldn’t tell if she was happy with the idea or hated it.

“I’d love to see your work,” I said. To Shonda, I added, “I won’t be long.”

She nodded and walked away with Mary.

Mary.

The mother of God.

I’d been dying to blurt out to her, “So, did you really think you were a virgin when you got preggers? Come on, you can tell me…” Somehow, I managed to hold in that question. As she walked away, though, I saw her grace, calm demeanor, and confidence. There weren’t many other women visible in the village, but the few I had seen had been meek and almost invisible. I saw why Jesus said she was quite forward.

When I looked back at Jesus, I felt ashamed for my thoughts questioning Mary’s purity. His eyes were like bold sapphires that managed to drill into my mind. In return, I could only feel he was full of gentleness, a person to be trusted, somebody to listen to.

Yes, he was a natural, all right.

“You’ve walked a long way from Jericho.”

“It’s the life I lead.”

He nodded and smiled. We walked from the village center between two stone buildings toward a copse of shrubbery. A path was worn between the bushes. This was a commonly used trail.

After walking a couple hundred yards, the path opened into a clearing. There, I could see a half dozen long narrow pieces of wood.

“The wood is brought here by lumbermen. I create the boats here. They are then transported by others to the Sea.”

He showed me a set of tools he had sitting on a block of stone. He had an axe, a chisel, a small handsaw, and a larger saw. Some other tools were not known to either myself or Adlai, so we had to wait for Jesus to show them to us. I was surprised I recognized any of the tools.

I could see a pile of wooden boards shaped like the bow of a boat. They were lain out on the ground near several piles of rocks. The rocks were each about the size of a softball.

A second pile of rocks was used to weigh down another set of wooden slats. Jesus had taken some slats and twisted them a little. The rocks were used to anchor both ends, so they remained twisted.

He could see me staring at that.

“I wet the wood while it is twisted, so that it weakens temporarily. The rocks hold the wood into its new shape. After seven days of watering and being bent, the shape will hold. These make it easier to create the frame of the boat.

I nodded.

“Would you like some water?”

“Thank you,” I said as he handed me a skin of water. It was fresh by his standards but felt a little oily by ours. I didn’t care. I was thirsty and drank a lot of it.

When I gave back the skin, though, I noticed it was still full.

Jesus grabbed the skin before I could examine it more closely. I decided I had to have been mistaken.

We spent the next couple hours talking and with Jesus showing me how he did his work. By now, it didn’t seem at all strange to be talking to him in a language I had barely heard of before. Sometimes whatever you’re doing becomes normal.

That didn’t change my thinking about why I was in the past.

My own focus was the Holocaust, but I also knew that millions more people had been killed from religious wars. These included the Crusades, the Great Turkish War, the French Wars of Religion, and the Thirty Years War.

Would these people have all died if Christianity hadn’t existed? Maybe. Sometimes religion is a crutch for a land grab or a power-hungry dictator. All I cared about was stopping Hitler from murdering so many people.

That meant I had to kill the kind-hearted teenager who was happily showing me his trade.

I felt sick.

Chapter 17

Colonel Peter Lassiter kept a map of the United States on his desk. It was laminated and on the surface he kept fifteen small green houses and red hotels he’d picked up from a second-hand Monopoly game.

The houses represented the fifteen states where he had ongoing operations.

He was forty-five years old, kept his head shaved bald, and wore a traditional army uniform typical of a colonel. On his chest were several colorful rows of service ribbons and badges. Hanging below those were three medals of honor.

Lassiter absently rubbed his ribbons as he stared at the map on the desk.

Everyone who knew him knew that Lassiter was a complete son of a bitch, and nobody ever gave him grief. Anyone who did wouldn’t be around to do it a second time.

The uniform was not earned. Peter Lassiter had never served in the army or any other branch of the armed forces. Nobody who worked with him knew that, though. He believed in his own power and used the uniform to symbolize it.

Fuck anybody who crossed him.

“Time to close the San Diego operation,” he said. “Pity, I thought it would work out.”

The San Diego operation referred to a teenaged girl he’d kidnapped from Ocean Beach, a handful of miles from his base in California. The girl had been wandering at midnight a week earlier. Jesse Helman, his lead man in the area had texted him:

F teen alone on beach, easy target

Female teens were the ones that had the highest payback, especially ones who seemed to be from a middle class or higher background.

When Helman had taken the girl to the local vault, Lassiter checked her out on the net-cam.

“Nice work, Helman,” he said.

“Thank you, sir.”

The girl was drugged and unconscious. She’d be that way from the kidnapping until she was either freed or killed. Even so, her arms and legs were tightly bound to a bed. She wore only a skimpy purple bikini. She had long blonde hair that was tangled from when she fought her kidnapper.

Before putting her under, Helman had obtained her name and address as well as the email address of her father.

Lindsay Smyth was sixteen years old and would be dead very shortly.

Like many businesses, Lassiter’s profit was in volume. There was no advantage to drawing out any operation. The ransom was either paid or it wasn’t.

The first email was sent within two hours of the kidnapping. The father replied, pleading for his daughter and saying he had no way to raise a million dollars. He didn’t have the resources.

Lassiter didn’t give a shit. Not a single solitary shit. That was his rate, and the email was very clear that good old Dad had seventy-two hours to get the money or the girl would be killed. Time was wasting.

A second reply came six hours later.

I will get the money for you. Please let me see Lindsay so I know she’s still alive. I’ll have to bring the cash to you. Let me know where. Please, don’t hurt my daughter.

When that email had arrived, Lassiter knew the girl would end up dead. The father had called the cops, and they were telling him to arrange a meeting.

That’s not how Lassiter worked. Payment could only be made via bitcoin, a digital currency that could be used without any possibility of tracing the origin of the money. It was easy to use, especially for the father, who worked at Apple as a software engineer.

He sent one last email, re-enforcing the time limit and that payment could only be via bitcoin. He knew it was a waste of time.

His emails went through several anonymous proxy servers. When the FBI tried to trace him, they’d get lost in a spaghetti of locations, mostly in the Middle and Far East. Lassiter enjoyed thinking of them trying to find him.

For the three years he’d been in full operation, they’d never come remotely close.

In that time, his team had abducted forty-six people. Twenty-four of those had the million-dollar ransom paid. The other twenty-two had been killed and discarded.

There were three little plastic hotels on the map right now. San Diego, Cleveland, and Boston. He knew his people in the other twelve cities were scouting for fresh targets.

Clearly, the FBI knew the kidnappings were all related. The initial email he sent was a standard letter with only minor tweaks.

There was no way to stop him. He really did deserve the title of Colonel.

****

And yet… he wanted more.

Colonel Peter Lassiter was already the most successful kidnapper in history. The team was compartmentalized, so nobody who worked for him knew any other person and they knew almost nothing about him. They couldn’t trip across each other because they were all in different cities. When one of his associates finished several jobs in the same place, he moved them to another city. No point taking a chance of any snoopy types seeing the same person near two abductions.

More importantly, none of the operatives knew Lassiter. His team had all been hired anonymously on the dark side of the internet. DarkNet was where all smart criminals lurked, because everything they did there was hidden. Not even Google searched there. Lassiter found and paid his staff (using bitcoin, of course), equipped the local vault, and monitored the whole operation by using the shadowy features of DarkNet.

His associates picked lone wanderers, who were randomly available for them. For each successful kidnapping, they were paid $100,000. It didn’t matter if the ransom was paid or not. Lassiter always paid his staff.

He was untraceable.

But there was no challenge.

Lately, he’d been thinking of trying something bigger, something more exciting, something to get him energized and scared and thrilled.

A movie star?

The spoiled kid whose father ran a Fortune 500 company?

A famous YouTuber?

The options were all out there, but each of them brought significant risks along with the rewards. He only needed to make a single mistake to lead to his downfall.

Decisions, decisions.

For now, he shrugged and sent the text to Jesse Helman.

Terminate her.

Easy peasy. Five minutes later, Lassiter watched Helman appear on the video. He had a gun and casually blew the girls brains out.

Lassiter turned off the feed and took the red hotel away from San Diego, replacing it with a green Monopoly house.

“Time for you to get back hunting, Helman.”

Chapter 18

The sun was starting to set, but I didn’t want the day to end. Nobody in modern history had ever heard Jesus’s words from his own mouth, and it was an opportunity I couldn’t pass up.

The downside was that the more time I spent with him, the more I liked him, which would make my job all that harder.

I finally got up the courage to ask the main question in which I was interested.

“Do you believe you are the son of God?”

It wasn’t because I was ready to be convinced. I wanted to hear what he believed about himself.

“That’s an odd question,” he answered. He stepped a bit closer and locked eyes with me. It felt like he was trying to hypnotize me with those bright blue eyes, especially when the twilight sun bounced off them. He was majestic, no question about that.

For the first time, I wanted to believe.

Jesus looked at me for several moments and then finally added, “You must believe what you must believe. Is it so hard for you to do that?”

“Yes, it is impossible to believe.”

“You need to have faith, Adlai.”

“I believe in what my eyes can see. Can you perform a miracle for me? Maybe make manna fall from the sky, or raise a body from the dead?”

He smiled, as if my request was childish. Maybe it was.

Although I was Jewish, I’d been to Christian church services many times. Sometimes for weddings, sometimes for funerals, and a few times because of dating a girl who wanted me to go to her church with her. I went and pretended to pray at the appropriate times, and I listened to the sermons, and in my own mind I asked who in their right mind would believe that a magical man once came to Earth who could perform miracles, and whose father was God. He could raise people from the dead and do many other things.

Now, don’t get me wrong. Judaism isn’t any better. The Old Testament is full of miracles, too, ones achieved with God’s help. I don’t believe that any more than the mystical stories of Jesus.

Now, though, I was where the Christian stories had originated, and the enormity of that was weighing on me.

“The Lord wants people to trust Him and to love Him, as He loves them,” he said. “Love is based on feelings, on mutual respect, on the relationship that grows between the father and his children.”

He shook his head, and continued.

“Love is not based on analyzing columns of figures and subtracting others. It is not based on evidence. It is based on faith. That is the only way it can work. Do you love the girl with whom you came? Shonda?”

Now it was my turn to smile.

“No. I met her three days ago. She is very nice, and we have enjoyed our time together, but it is too early to call it love.

“I have been in love other times, though,” I added.

And maybe I still am. I wished Karen Anderson had been with me instead of Shonda.

“Do you ask for proof of everything about a girl before you fall in love with her? Is it not more likely you know some things but others you continue to learn as you grow closer?”

“It is not the same.”

“It is exactly the same.”

“You claim to be supernatural. That is a big statement. In my time, a famous scientist once said that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.”

Jesus nodded. “Carl Sagan.”

And that was the moment my heart skipped a beat.

****

Obviously, there was no way in hell that a person living in 11 A.D. could possibly know who Carl Sagan was. He was the most famous astronomer in the late twentieth century, host of a successful TV show, but given that he was born in 1934, well, you can see why the mention of his name shook me.

“How could you possibly know Carl Sagan?” I’m sure my voice cracked as I asked the question.

“I am confused,” Jesus said. “You told me Carl Sagan spoke about extraordinary claims.”

“No, I did not. I said ‘a famous scientist.’ I did not use his name.”

Jesus shrugged. “You can either believe you spoke his name or that I performed a miracle.”

It felt like he was playing a game with me that I didn’t know the rules of. I didn’t feel like doing that anymore, so I moved on.

“Why does God allow bad things to happen to good people?”

I was thinking of the Holocaust, but it feels like there’s an infinite number of examples. Small children who die of cancer, teenage rape victims, wives beaten by their husbands, and on and on. If God was all-powerful and all-knowing, why would He allow this kind of garbage to happen?

“You like to jump to the big questions.”

“Do you have an answer?”

“I do. But, that does not mean I am willing to share it with you. You are very confrontational, and anything I say would fall on deaf ears. I need you to be more open about your thoughts, instead of being so closed-minded.”

“I am not closed-minded.”

“You may believe that, but I know you better, my friend.”

Karen had called me closed-minded.

Once again, I couldn’t help but think about her. If I ever had the chance to tell her I spoke to the biblical Jesus, her mouth would drop open in shock.

Damn, I really did miss her.

I stared at Jesus and said, “You are a nice young man, Yeshua.”

“But?”

“I do not believe what you say.”

He nodded. “I know.”

“Millions of people will be killed because of your ministry.”

“Perhaps millions more will be saved.”

He came closer to me and put his hand on my left shoulder. I wanted to hug him, but I didn’t move.

I wanted to delay, to think of some reason to continue talking. I could ask him about the creation of the universe, about the laws of the Bible, about genetics, about aliens on the moon.

The way Jesus handled himself, I was confident he wouldn’t be fazed by any of my questions. He’d have some clear answer that sounded like it came from his Ph.D. thesis.

What would that get me? Some interesting bits of thought dropped into my hands, for sure. But were they of any value?

I could feel myself clenching my teeth. Jesus was a half foot taller than Adlai, but I was too determined to finish what I’d come here to do, so the height difference meant nothing. We outweighed him by a bit, and my muscles were those of a man who’d lived many more years than this teenager.

I grabbed him by the throat and squeezed.

I’d like to believe I caught him by surprise, but I doubt that. He didn’t jump back in shock. Rather, he carefully grabbed my wrists and tried to pull my arms from him. His attempts were quite feeble.

He tried to lock eyes with me, but I refused to look at him. I squeezed tighter and forced his body down to the ground. He refused to scream, but I could hear him trying to breathe. His nose flared, and he gasped for air, but I squeezed tighter as I forced him to the ground.

He finally fought back with more intensity, hitting me with his hands and trying to hit my face.

I glanced at his eyes. They were bulging and pleading for me to stop.

“Now would be a good time for you to perform a miracle,” I said through gritted teeth.

He hit at me harder. I had him pinned completely on the ground. He was kicking his feet, trying to bounce me off his body, but I had him tightly in my grip.

Beside me was the big rock pile I’d seen earlier. The tools weren’t close by. I had hoped to grab an axe or saw and finish him off, to let him out of his misery, but they were too far away.

“I am sorry,” I whispered.

He stared at me and stopped struggling for a moment, but then started to fight again.

I think in that second, he knew why I had to do this, and I hoped he might forgive me, but time was running short for that.

He bounced his body, shaking me. I reached for the closest rock and smashed his face with it. It was heavy, maybe five pounds, and I felt horrible when I saw the damage. His nose was crushed to bits, and his right eye socket was destroyed. I only had a quick glimpse, but I could no longer see his actual eye.

I closed my own eyes, and in spite of the terrible circumstances and my blindness to God, I whispered, “Lord, please forgive me.”

I didn’t know if it was me or Adlai praying.

The second and third smashes of the rock mutilated the rest of his face. His skull was cracked and I could see brain matter leaking out.

He stopped struggling, and I stopped hitting him.

There was no sound. He wasn’t breathing. His remaining eye seemed to look up to heaven.

I took a big gasp of air, not realizing I had been holding my breath.

The king was dead.

****

My head pounded with the pain of a thousand chisels carving into it. I knelt beside the body of Jesus Christ, staring in disbelief at what I’d done.

He was just a boy.

The pain I felt may have been time twisting and changing shape. The world I had created was nothing like the path that had already been carved out. I knew that. I felt the weight of momentum shifting, destroying the future I’d already experienced. I had no idea what world I’d be traveling back to, but I held onto the single basic fact that was critical to me: Hitler would no longer have a reason to kill six million Jews. My grandmother would live an easier, happier life, and so would so many other people.

I needed to believe my justification.

I half expected Jesus to blink and grin up at me, laughing at my feeble attempt to kill his story.

No such thing happened. His body remained motionless, and I could see it was lifeless. Small bugs already landed on his face and started to feed.

“For God so loved the world that He gave His one and only Son.”

My words felt hollow as I recited one of the most famous verses of the New Testament.

“That whoever believes in Him shall not perish but have eternal life.”

Even a lifelong atheist like me knew John 3:16.

My hands had pounded the life out of Jesus, and that verse no longer rang true.

Christians believed the only way to Heaven was by following Jesus. Part of me almost hoped that there was a grain of truth embedded in the story, so that Jesus himself could find his way back home.

“Good-bye, Yeshua. I wish I had met you under different circumstances.”

I stood and felt a chill in the air. There was a low-lying cloud on the horizon as the sun fell and darkness started to overcome the small village.

I needed time to escape, so I dragged Jesus’s body into an area that was bushier. Nobody would see him unless they searched thoroughly. I used the water from Jesus’s skein to wash most of the blood from my hands.

As I walked back to the center of Nazareth, I tried to put the memory of my actions behind me. Instead, I focused purely on finding Shonda and going back to Jericho.

Was I worried somebody would accuse me of murder? No. Times were very different. There was no police force, no formal judicial system, no prisons. There was the sixth commandment: Thou shalt not kill. The commandments, though, were a moral code, not a legal one.

Anyway, by the time anybody found the teenager’s body, we would be long gone. Adlai would be back living his solitary life, but perhaps now with a companion. Nobody would ever accuse him of anything.

I wanted to stay with the body for some reason. It was a weird connection. I had liked being with Jesus. He was a special person, and it felt like leaving was an even bigger betrayal than the killing.

“I need to go,” I whispered.

Taking small steps, I inched backward and finally turned and walked briskly away. I wanted to get a bit of a start on our hike before it was completely dark.

After a few minutes, I was back in the village. Most people had retired for the day. They worked hard from sunup to sundown, and I knew they were huddled in their bedrooms, aching muscles willing them to sleep. There was little alternative in any case. The only source of lighting they had were candles, which were valuable and not to be wasted.

Standing in the village square was Mary and her youngest child, Simon, who I’d met earlier. He wore the same rags I’d seen him in earlier, but they looked even more pathetic in the twilight.

“Good-bye, Mary. I am glad to have met you.” I nodded to Shonda and she moved to follow me.

“Is Yeshua coming?” asked Mary.

I looked at her, and I think she saw in my eyes what had happened. She seemed to be as intuitive as her famous son.

She put a hand over her mouth and shook her head slowly.

I closed my eyes. I couldn’t stand to see the hurt on her face. Without looking back, I led Shonda out of the village.

We walked in silence for some time, until it was too dark to go any farther. Adlai and Shonda huddled together. I pulled my own consciousness away and let Adlai control our body.

It was time to leave. I found the virtual gas pedal in my mind and pressed it, slowly at first and then faster and faster.

I raced through the rest of Adlai’s life, and I was grateful to see he spent the rest of his days with Shonda by his side. He never met anybody associated with Jesus again, and he died at the ripe old age of forty-three.

The rest of my lives sped by in a blur, because I wanted to get the fuck out of this life. I jammed the accelerator as much as I could, but even so it seemed to take forever until I finally hit the brick wall of my true time and was shocked back to my life as David Abelman.

I blinked in surprise, still in Grandma’s apartment. Her stuff was still on the table as she’d left it for me. Her funeral was still slated for the following day.

Part 3—In His Image

Chapter 19

I didn’t have to consciously search my memory to find out what had happened. I knew it, the same as you know your middle name or what your favorite flavor of ice cream is. When you’ve lived with something your whole life, you don’t get amazed.

If you’re a chocolate fan, you don’t wake up one morning, astounded that you love chocolate. It’s just the way things are.

So, keep that as the backdrop when I tell you I wasn’t at all surprised by any of the changes I’d caused. By killing Jesus, the world unfolded differently, but that new world is the one I had now grown up in.

And the most important thing that changed was something that changed not at all.

Adolph Hitler still murdered millions of Jews. Of course, he didn’t pretend to be a Christian, since the concept no longer existed, but he still hated the Jews. He hated them even more than in his alternate time, because most people on Earth now had no particular religious attachment. Hitler was a madman who was incensed that people could pray to an all-seeing creator, when he felt they should have worshipped him.

He slaughtered them, but instead of the count being six million, he murdered ten million people.

“How could that be?” I was puzzled at first, but then the obvious answer came to me.

People need faith.

At least, a lot of people do. They want to believe there is meaning to their lives, that an all-seeing and all-powerful creator is watching and taking care of them, and they want to believe miracles can happen.

Christians believed in the same God that Jews believe in and the same God that Muslims worship.

Now, with Christianity flushed away, those people of faith still wanted to believe. They became Jews or Muslims. The increased Jewish population in Europe gave Hitler more targets.

I didn’t have to pick up the family tree my Grandma had left me. I knew it showed the same people brutally murdered. I hadn’t helped in the slightest. In fact, I’d made things worse.

It was ironic somehow, that if Jesus had lived, he would have saved four million people from a horrible death in the gas chambers.

“Oh my God…”

It hit me that I had personally been responsible for those additional four million deaths.

I blinked away a tear. Grandma’s upcoming funeral casting a pale shroud over everything, and any remaining optimism in the room was killed by my own guilt.

The room was silent. So silent I thought I could hear the faint echo of my thoughts bouncing lamely off the walls.

I sat in front of all the material Grandma had left me. Nothing was different, although the family tree was printed off a computer instead of hand-drawn. Part of me wondered why that would have changed. I suppose a million things had changed, but most of them were minor. It didn’t take long to think of a few of the bigger ones.

In the alternate time stream, we had a celebration called Christmas. By tradition, that was the anniversary of the birth of Jesus Christ. Everyone would look forward to a giant feast on December 25 each year and people would buy each other gifts. The closest we now have is Winterday, celebrated on the full moon closest to the winter solstice, which gives us a break in the dark cold days.

Another holiday that was celebrated was Easter, which was to commemorate the day Jesus died and then was resurrected. The story was that he was beaten mercilessly and then nailed to a cross, where he was left to suffocate slowly. It was a horrible torture, but he rose from the dead after three days, said his farewell to his supporters, and then went back to Heaven.

I stared at my hands. Instead of dying on the cross, Jesus was murdered… by me. I felt buried by my guilt, which surprised me. I had believed the world would have been better off without a fake messiah preaching to his disciples. The message he sent to the world through his followers was one of love and tolerance and respect, all things in which I personally believed.

And was the world better off? The families of the four million additional people who died in the Holocaust wouldn’t have said so.

The refrigerator had no beer, but I desperately wanted one, so I left the apartment and headed to the nearest grocery store to pick up a twelve-pack.

That night, I polished off four of them, after which my head was heavy. I fell into a dreamless sleep, and didn’t move until the morning.

****

The morning.

To almost everyone in the world, it was just another cool spring day in Minnesota. Not so cold that Minneapolis shut down, not so warm as to be unseasonal. The high would be in the thirties, and the sun was shining bright.

It was a little after ten o’clock when I finally climbed out of bed.

It was the day I would bury my grandmother, a day I would never forget. Not only was it the day we lowered my surrogate mother to be returned to the earth, it was also the day I would lose my very temporary ability to travel in time. She’d warned me that once her body was buried, that was it.

That didn’t bother me at all. The only thing that mattered was losing her.

Suddenly, a thought occurred to me. I could once again go back in time and stop myself from murdering Jesus. I could undo the damage I’d done.

But… when I went back to kill him, there were unintended consequences—four million of them. What if I went back and ended up making things even worse?

No. Time to leave well enough alone.

I showered and pulled out my navy-blue suit from the closet. I only owned two suits, one for summer and one for winter. As a photojournalist, suits were rarely called for.

The Temple of Aaron synagogue was a large and very old building. It was the largest place of Jewish worship in the state, and as per her normal preciseness, Ariela Abelman had pre-arranged the time and the various components of the service with the rabbi.

I arrived at the temple at 1:00, an hour prior to the start of the service. I’m not sure why, but I felt like I should be there. As I mentioned earlier, Ariela was a private person, almost a hermit, and I didn’t know of anybody who would be coming to the service.

Well.

More than a dozen people beat me to the temple and were seated in the pews.

Maybe another service just ending?

“Are you David?”

I turned to find Rabbi Pfeiffer standing beside me. I’d never met him.

“Yes,” I said.

He greeted me with a big smile and a hug. “I’m so sorry about your grandmother. We will all miss her.”

“All?”

“I think you’ll be surprised at the number of people who she touched.”

The rabbi was about sixty years old, wore a fragile-looking pair of glasses, and had a yarmulke perched on the top of his head. He inspired me immediately with his confidence.

He pointed to the women sitting in the main area.

“They all knew her very well.”

“I never knew her to have friends. I lived with her until a few years ago.” I’m sure I sounded as puzzled as I felt.

He nodded. “I’m not surprised.”

“Rabbi?”

“Yes?”

“Do you know of something called the Shelljah?”

“The Shelljah? Where would you have heard of that? It’s a very old word.”

“My grandmother… spoke of it.”

He nodded. “Myth, legend, whatever you want to call it. Sometimes stories get passed down through the generations. At some distant time in the past, maybe the Shelljah was used to scare small children or perhaps just as part of a story-teller’s trade. It was silly, of course. There is no Hebrew magic, let alone the ability to move through time.”

I nodded.

“I need to go say hello,” he said. “Would you like to join me?”

As I looked up to the front of the synagogue, I was suddenly overcome with a powerful sense of loss. I could feel tears forming in my eyes, and I felt weak.

I tried to smile, but that didn’t work so well, so I shook my head and nodded, excusing myself to go to the bathroom.

As I splashed water on my face and took some deep breaths, I wondered how I could hold myself together for the service. Somehow, I had to.

A few minutes later I walked out and into the main chamber of the synagogue. Several other women had joined and were seated.

Who are these people?

By the time the service started, there were more than a hundred people waiting. All were women.

The service itself was professional but caring. Clearly Rabbi Pfeiffer knew my grandmother very well, and he sprinkled his talk with stories of her life.

He didn’t mention her being captured by the Germans during the war and how she barely escaped the fate of so many other Jews.

I wondered why that never came up, until the end of the service. As I was about to leave, I stood and looked at all the women present. They were all ages, with the youngest looking like she was still in high school, the oldest needing a wheelchair and perhaps would be joining Ariela soon.

One of the women across the aisle must have seen me staring. She walked over and put a hand on my arm. She would have been in her forties, the start of gray intruding on her otherwise chestnut hair, a nice smile on her face.

“You must be David.”

I nodded.

“I’m Sarah Cruit. I’m one of the people your grandmother helped.”

“Helped? I’m afraid I don’t know what you mean. Who are all these people?”

“She was the leader of our group. Ariela’s collection of holocaust survivors and their families. As you can see, she was only comfortable with women, but every one of us has spent time in your grandmother’s hands. She would collect us like postage stamps, adding each to her group. She encouraged the older ones to talk about what they’d experienced, and the younger ones to talk about what they remembered about their family members who perished.”

She frowned and then added, “I never knew my own grandparents. They were both gassed. Ariela helped me to place that loss in the context of everything else in my life. It allowed me to love my ancestors, to feel what they felt, to appreciate every little thing about them, and to remember the horrors.”

“She did that with all these people?”

Sarah nodded. “Over time, of course. She wasn’t big on crowds, and more than a few people at a time was hard for her to manage, so we rotated in and out, brought new members to the group, met several times each week, and eventually, she showed us how to carry on when she passed. This group will live on, and we’re all so much better prepared today than we were a couple of years ago.”

“When did she start doing this? I just can’t believe I never knew.”

“She spoke of you often, David. She started this when you moved out of her home. She wanted something to do that would take up the free time she had.”

I stood there like a goose to which somebody was explaining the alphabet. It was hard to imagine Ariela had this whole secret world I never knew about.

“Thank you for telling me this.”

Sarah smiled and walked away. I never saw her or any of the other women again.

Chapter 20

As I sit here now in my prison cell, I often think back to my time with my grandmother, wondering what I could have done differently.

And to close out one part of my story, her statements that the Shelljah would no longer work for me after her burial was, of course, correct. I did try, several times, to be sure, but no luck.

Maybe that was a good thing. My travel to murder Jesus indirectly resulted in millions of people being killed, and I had no desire to make things even worse.

After Ariela’s burial, I spent time closing out her estate and then gradually started to pick up some of the usual freelancing gigs I loved. My photos took on an even deeper meaning for me, because I knew that life was short and getting shorter with every passing day. I didn’t want to grow old and die (or worse, die young) and not leave something behind. A legacy of some kind.

Death leaves a mark on the soul.

Part of me wanted Karen Anderson back. She was still aboard the Skywheel and about to leave Earth orbit for the moon. I watched every bit of news about the mission, but never tried to contact her. She was one of Earth’s emissaries to the aliens, and I didn’t want to distract her.

Besides, we’d proven we weren’t compatible.

Emotionally, that didn’t much matter. I still wanted another chance. Somehow.

It was three months after Grandma’s funeral that I got the email that threw yet another monkey wrench into my odd life. It was from John Questore, the general editor at Time magazine.

David,

This is going to sound a little odd, but I’m totally serious. We need you for this assignment. Nobody else will do. Please phone me ASAP to discuss.

I’m sure you’ve heard about a woman in upstate New York named Erika Sabo. She claims to be the daughter of God, and over the past couple of months, she’s been setting up business, posting sermons on her website, accepting donations, and frankly, the whole thing stinks.

My own personal opinion aside, though, Sabo has never given a formal interview.

Until now. She’s willing to sit down with Carrie Hargrave for an in-depth interview this coming Friday afternoon. She only had one condition: that David Abelman be the photographer who comes with Carrie.

She seems to like your work.

Call me. Now.

John

I almost laughed at the note.

“Well, who wouldn’t want to meet the daughter of God?” I asked myself.

Bullshit and more bullshit.

It was after eleven at night when I’d opened the email. I was tired and cranky.

What the hell.

I grabbed my cell phone and slid over to John Questore in my Contacts and clicked to phone him.

****

After I left a voicemail message, I sat at my computer and looked up Erika Sabo. Somehow, I had missed a lot of news lately.

She was nineteen years old, lived in a small town called Aynsville in New York state, and had started to preach at the local library eight weeks ago. As Questore had said, she told anybody who would listen that God was her father, and she was here to deliver His message.

Or maybe I should say ‘messages,’ because she seemed to have a lot to say.

Her website was www.ErikaSabo.god which certainly was catchy.

Now, I’m not a techie by any means, but even I knew that “god” wasn’t a valid top-level domain name. I typed in the address, though, and it worked. Her website popped up.

I’d have to ask somebody about how that was possible. I’m sure it was a trick of some kind. So, we weren’t dealing with some dummy.

The home page of the site carried a photo of her. She was a pretty black girl with a nice smile and bright blue eyes.

The rest of her site contained dozens of sermons. I didn’t stop to read them. It wouldn’t surprise me to find she could write compelling stories. If she was gaining the attention of Time magazine, she had something special.

As I was browsing, my phone chirped. Questore.

“John!”

“Hey, David. It’s good to hear from you.”

“Ditto. Still smoking stogies? Or has Elaine trained you yet?”

“She’s tried many times, but parts of me aren’t tameable, I guess.”

He laughed and I imagined his wide grin. We’d met several times during my trips to Manhattan, and he always had a wide smile and a cigar in his pocket. I never saw him light one, though.

“So, what’s the scoop on this Sabo woman?” I asked.

“She’s one of a kind, I can tell you that. I’ve listened to a podcast of one of her sermons, and she’s very powerful, and she’s very quickly gained lots of believers.”

“Never known Time to care about charlatans, John.”

There was a long pause at the other end of the phone, and I began to wonder if we’d lost contact. Finally, Questore replied, and I could have sworn I heard awe in his voice. “She might be the real thing.”

Yeah, well. I doubt that, buddy.

“I’m not sure I’m the right photographer for this one, John. You know I’m the science guy, not the religion guy.”

“It’s for the cover. You like doing our covers.”

Yes, yes, I do.

“And she won’t let anyone else do it. This is her first national press interview. She promised us an exclusive, but only if you’re there to shoot it.”

Now, at this point, you’re maybe thinking the same way I was. What were the chances that I had murdered Jesus Christ and find that a new… version?… embodiment? I had no idea what to call her. What were the chances that the messiah would return to Earth and ask for me?

I still called bullshit, but if it was the real deal, was she after revenge?

Impossible.

“David?”

“Just thinking.”

“We’ll double your usual rate.”

“You must really want this thing.”

He paused again and I imagined him taking the cigar out of his shirt pocket and playing with it. “David, just for a minute, consider this might be real.”

“Has she performed any miracles?”

“Don’t think so.”

“Not raised the dead or parted the Red Sea, by any chance?”

“David, I need you to be serious. This could be the story of a lifetime, and that means the photo shoot of a lifetime, too.”

I shook my head, but of course he couldn’t see me. This wasn’t my thing. At all.

“Why does she want me? Time has lots of great photographers.”

“No idea. I asked her, and she laughed and said it wasn’t negotiable.”

“She’s a fake, John. You gotta know that.”

“I’m not asking you to write the story, so you can believe whatever you want. I know you’ll take great pictures regardless. Please, David. I’m asking you as a personal favor.”

I wanted to say no. I really did. But then I remembered the eyes of the boy Jesus staring at me before I stole his final breath by bashing in his head.

“I’m only doing it for the money,” I said.

“I don’t believe you, but it doesn’t matter why. It only matters that you’ll do it.”

“Email whatever information you have. Place, time, whatever. I’ll head out first thing tomorrow.”

I ended the call and started making some rough notes about Sabo. Normally, if I photograph a person, it’s a scientist involved in some recent discovery. I always liked to immerse myself in whatever they were doing, to come to the photo shoot with an eye to making their work personable and connect emotionally to the viewer.

Sabo was naturally photogenic, but I wanted to know what made her tick. Why would she be saying she was the daughter of God?

If I didn’t believe in God, why the heck would I believe in her?

I googled her and found a mix of fact and rumors. The fact portion was limited: her birth announcement, a couple peripheral mentions in stories about her school (apparently, she was top of the class every year of her school career), and a spate of articles recently about her forming her ministry.

She didn’t have a normal synagogue to teach, so her ministry moved around. One week it would be at a school gymnasium, the next at an outdoor baseball field or in a movie theater. The “where” didn’t seem to concern her much. The location of her Friday evening sermon was always flashing on the home page of her site, starting each Thursday evening. Twenty-four hours’ notice for whoever was following her.

Which seemed to be a large number. She had hundreds of people who would go anywhere to hear her lecture.

Then there was the rumor mill. According to the notes on the internet, Erika Sabo was:

1. The daughter of God

2. The spawn of the Devil

3. A miracle worker (no specifics cited)

4. The destroyer of life on Earth

5. A fake

6. The promised messiah of the Bible

Any and all ideas were spread, and it seemed that everybody who lived in New York state had their own truth about Sabo.

I took a few minutes to book an early flight to Albany, and reserved a car. Aynsville was a few hours from the airport. I also booked a hotel room, in case I ended up staying the night. Might be interesting to stay and listen to her speak on Friday.

Chapter 21

Unbeknownst to me, three months earlier, Erika Sabo started to slowly build her ministry.

It started with the small group of people who she’d grown up with and who had already had an inkling that she was one very special girl.

Sam was previously mentioned, Erika’s younger brother, and how he was bullied by a guy named Peter Smythe a few years back. After Erika caused Peter to fly through the air without touching him, Peter changed.

No more bullying, not just with Sam, but with anybody. Peter became quieter, contemplative, and he seemed to spend a lot of time looking at Erika. The quizzical looks he gave her turned over time into admiration when he saw how she always seemed to know the right thing to say or do.

Three months ago, Erika found Peter sitting on the steps of the high school. She smiled and sat down beside him, as if they were best buds.

“I have a job for you,” she said. She smiled at him. They hadn’t spoken since the altercation three years earlier.

“What? What are you talking about?”

“You’re good at building web sites, right? The best in town.”

Peter frowned. “I don’t know. It’s pretty easy. I’m sure lots of other people could help you.”

She beamed her million-watt smile at him and took his hand.

“I don’t want other people. I want you.”

“It’s close to final exams. Maybe in the summer? I don’t have a summer job lined up yet. What kind of web site?”

“Can’t wait for summer. I’m dropping out of school today, and I need you to drop out as well.”

Peter laughed. “Oh, right. Like that would be totally fine with my parents.”

“It might be. If I talk to them.”

One day, I can recount the rest of that story, to show how Erika was able to convince Peter’s mom and dad that it was the right thing for him to quit school.

For now, all that needs to be known is that she did, and Erika had her web designer. Peter also acted as her head of social media. He set up her presence on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Snap Chat.

And one month later, Erika’s online ministry went live.

Peter crafted ads that targeted everybody in Aynsville, and within days, news of Erika Sabo was everywhere in the small town.

Peter was good at techie stuff, but it helped that Erika was able to provide a list of all the social media accounts of people who lived in the town. He had no idea how she’d generated such a list, and he felt no need to ask. Sometimes all you need is faith.

It was the same when she said her web site would be www.ErikaSabo.god, which was ridiculous until it worked.

Peter Smythe was Erika’s first disciple.

****

After having the online ministry for a couple weeks, Erika had gathered several hundred people who would check out her sermons every time she posted them.

It was time to move to an in-person church.

She knew she couldn’t expect everyone who followed her online to show up in person, but she figured some would.

That’s when she started speaking in parks and anywhere else she could.

She called the local movie theater and found that they didn’t start showing their features until after noon on Sundays, so she rented the largest room and had Peter set up a PowerPoint deck he hooked up to the projection system.

In the lobby, the theater staff wouldn’t be around, so Erika set up free coffee and juice, pastries, and a basket of mixed fruit.

The first Sunday, forty-six people showed up. She entranced them by telling them that they were the people she was most excited to meet: God’s chosen followers.

She said publicly for the first time, “I am the daughter of our Lord. The Bible prophesied that one day the Messiah would come to show the way, and now I am here.”

Nobody left the room. How could they? She was a riveting speaker who connected with each and every person in the audience.

Peter hadn’t known she was going to claim to be God’s daughter, but neither was he surprised. Somehow, deep inside himself, it seems he’d known.

Erika’s congregation grew into a fully-formed church almost immediately. It was like she’d been running it for years. Volunteers organized the morning drinks and snacks, while others set up a kid’s section in one of the other theater rooms, so children could play Bible games and learn bits about Erika while their parents sat in the main room.

Her messages were always consistent and heart-warmingly simple. She wanted people to love each other.

Some of her congregation couldn’t help thinking of John Lennon whenever she spoke. His songs were often about love.

At the third Sunday session in the theater, Miles Insa and several other people opened the ceremony with live music. Miles played the keyboard, while other volunteers played guitar, bass, and drums. They played rock gospel songs, which brought the audience to their feet, clapping their hands, singing along with the band. The songs were an introduction for Erika.

Everything went perfectly.

Also that third Sunday, a woman named Chris Spinnie walked into the theater. She was thin, about five foot six, and her hair was matted down and dirty. She hadn’t bathed in some time.

Spinnie’s eyes were laser-focused on the bowl of fruit set up for people to take. There were apples, oranges, and a large bunch of bananas.

She had no interest in the sermon or the crowd of people gathered to wait for the service to start. All she wanted was the food.

“Can I help you?”

Chris stared at the twenty-something guy handing out programs at the theater entrance. “No,” she muttered and walked to the fruit. She greedily grabbed two apples and took a bite from one.

The soup kitchen a couple blocks away never had fruit. Chris was able to get a meal once a day there, but it’d been years since she’d had an apple and a banana.

A woman at the food kitchen had told her about the church that sprang up each Sunday in the movie theater. “And they have snacks. You should check it out.”

Chris had no interest whatsoever in the church. But she sure wanted that fruit.

She wore a light sweater, full of holes, but she didn’t mind. Who would ever care if she wore tatters? Not her.

“Welcome, friend.”

Chris Spinnie turned, wanting to shout, “You don’t know me, and I’m certainly not your friend.”

She hesitated, though, when she saw a young black woman smiling at her.

“Please, take as much as you like.”

Chris glanced at the banana she’d hidden inside her sweater. She felt guilty, like she was stealing it.

“I don’t go to church,” she blurted out.

“It’s okay. Really. My name is Erika, and I’m the pastor here. Please, take more.”

Erika grabbed another two bananas and handed them to Chris. Then she pulled out a plastic grocery bag and placed two apples and three oranges inside. You can have as much as you like.”

“Really?”

“I promise it’s totally fine.”

Erika handed over the bag and pointed at the fruit. “Please add more if you like.”

Chris was suspicious but took a third banana to add to the bag.

“Why would you do that?”

“You need the food.”

“You know I’m a just a worthless heroin addict? I don’t care about your church.”

“God loves all his children.”

“Yeah, right.”

“It’s true. And so do I. Please come back next week and enjoy some more fruit.”

Erika hugged Chris briefly, smiled, and left to talk to other people in the crowd. Chris hurried out and had eaten all the fruit within a few hours.

The following Sunday, she did return to the church. She again helped herself to the fruit and again had a short conversation with Erika, who never tried to convince her to join the service.

The following week, the same thing happened, but Chris decided she wanted to see what this unusual pastor taught in her church.

After listening to the band, she almost lost her courage and ran away. She was in the back row of the theater, surrounded by people who didn’t seem to care that she was a homeless drug addict. They welcomed her and sang along with her.

She knew she stank, but nobody moved away from her.

When Erika took the stage, it seemed like she spent the entire sermon talking to Chris. The story was about how Moses led his millions of Israelites through the desert for forty years, and how their faith eventually led them to the promised land.

“Imagine what it would be like to wander aimlessly for so long. What kind of damage would that do to people? How could they keep going?”

Erika was looking right at Chris. She knew it.

Her words shook Chris deep inside, and she became one of the wanderers, lost in the desert. After all, isn’t that what she’d been doing for the past half-decade? Wandering aimlessly, wasting her life without knowing if she would ever give a shit about a destination?

She’d been a druggie for a decade, and it slowly destroyed whatever bits of humanity she had. She sold her body for money, stole, and even attacked random strangers to steal their money. Any way she could get money for drugs, she would.

She didn’t care about anybody or anything. She had no reason to live, and sometimes spent a lot of time thinking about that. If she was dead, though, she wouldn’t be able to take the heroin she needed.

After the sermon, Chris stayed in her seat. The final prayer brought her to tears, but she didn’t know why. All she knew was that she didn’t want to leave.

“I’m glad you stayed.”

Chris blinked as Erika sat beside her.

“I am too.”

“Let me buy you some lunch.”

Chris knew if she agreed to have lunch, Erika would talk about her poor life choices, how she could choose to stop taking the drugs, stop her criminal acts, make something of her life.

She’d heard the lectures a thousand times and didn’t need to hear it again.

“There’s a steak house next door that I quite like,” said Erika.

Steak.

How long had it been? Chris couldn’t say. She just nodded.

During lunch, Erika talked about things going on in the world and in Aynsville. It was like she wanted to bounce future sermon ideas off Chris. They talked about the weather and sports and local politics.

What they never talked about was Chris’s lifestyle.

At the end of lunch, they went their separate ways.

Two weeks later, Chris went home with Erika to have a home-cooked dinner. Chili. It was breathtakingly good. Chris couldn’t recall ever eating a better meal. For that matter, she couldn’t recall the last time she had a home-cooked meal of any kind. She didn’t like thinking about that.

At one point, Erika left her alone for ten minutes, while she changed clothes.

Chris couldn’t help but snoop around Erika’s apartment and she found a stash of cash in a drawer. She quickly fanned it and guessed there was more than $500. Chris held it and was so close to pocketing the entire amount, but she resisted and put it all back.

She sat in the living room and prayed for strength. It was the first time she’d ever prayed on her own.

When Erika returned, she had a bag full of clothes.

“Here, you can try these on. I hope they fit. But before you do, would you like to take a shower?”

Chris could only nod.

She left that day wearing a new pair of jeans and a light pink T-shirt with a logo from Adidas.

They hugged before Chris left. As she was leaving, she turned and said, “I wanted to steal the money from your drawer. It’s what I do.”

“Did you steal it?”

“No.”

Erika smiled. “Thank you.”

Another two weeks passed, and Chris asked if she could help out on Sunday mornings. She started looking after the coffee urns, making sure there was always enough for anyone who wanted some while they waited for the service to start.

Soon enough, Chris became Erika’s third disciple. She broke free of the drugs, because she was addicted to something else now. It wasn’t easy, but it was necessary. Not to Erika, but to Chris.

Erika smiled every time they saw each other, and Chris still believed every sermon was written especially for her.

Every other person listening on Sunday mornings felt the same thing.

As time went on, Erika gathered other people who she knew were completely loyal to her. By the time I met her, she had nine disciples.

Jesus would have had twelve, had he survived.

Chapter 22

Last night I stopped after I finished writing the last chapter, I re-read everything put down so far, all the good and especially the bad. It was hard to read the bit about smashing in Jesus’s head.

I’m not proud of that.

This is supposed to be an account of my crimes, but just as much an insight into why I’ve done the things I have. I’m trying to be as honest as possible, not trying to sugar-coat my actions.

So, let me spend a few minutes in a digression.

I’m in prison. The author’s note at the beginning of the book mentions my gratitude to the warden, but really, is there anybody on the planet who doesn’t know what I’ve done and what happened to me? Maybe that’s an exaggeration, but not by much.

My mail is screened, but I get dozens of actual letter mail every day. I’m limited in my use of email and my address isn’t public, which is good, because I’m sure I’d drown in notes from total strangers.

Some think I did the right thing, but most think I’m a horrible person who really should have received the death sentence.

I haven’t spoken to any reporters since I’ve been incarcerated.

I haven’t had any visitors, either. Well, that’s not quite true. Karen Anderson comes to visit me. As much as I hated doing it, I once told her to never come back. I’ve done her enough damage, and I didn’t want her to feel obligated to visit me once a month. However, she’s continued to ignore my request, and I’m grateful when she shows up. She’s a good person.

Besides… well, that’s a later part of my story.

Reporters never stop trying to interview me, but I don’t want to favor one media outlet over another. Instead, this book is my attempt to answer the questions they want to ask. And all proceeds from the book go to the Founding Church of Saboism.

So, about me.

I’m a photographer, specializing in science pictures. I love my job, because, well really, there’s nothing better than photography and science. Those are my two favorite topics, and magazines paid me a lot of money to go have fun.

How lucky am I for that?

I was never one for religion. It never came together for me, because it felt like science and religion were on opposite sides of a long-fought battle, and there was no way I was going to abandon my science. I trust science. It all works. So, if science says that the universe came into being from a unbelievably catastrophic explosion, and that expansion took place over a few micro-seconds, and once that was all set in motion, there’s really nothing more to the universe. It’s all explainable.

I chose that over believing some wizard in the sky snapped His fingers one day and imagined the universe into existence.

Science wins. Always.

At least that’s what I thought most of my life.

But stubborn old beliefs can be changed. It just takes the right catalyst.

****

I arrived in Aynsville in the evening and headed to my hotel. I unpacked and set up my laptop, checking the latest headlines from CNN, the New York Times, and the Washington Post. Another stubborn old habit.

Nothing new since I’d left Minneapolis earlier in the day.

Part of me still thought this was a wasted trip. I was here to photograph a nineteen-year-old girl who told people she was God’s daughter.

Maybe that should be capitalized: God’s Daughter.

Either way, I wanted the damned thing to be over with. Carrie Hargrave was doing the interview, and it seemed like a ridiculous waste of my time to photograph it.

But, Time magazine, in the form of John Questore, could be quite convincing. I grabbed a can of Coors Light from the minibar and popped it open. Without really thinking about it, I went to Google Images and typed in Erika Sabo.

“Hello there,” I whispered.

The first photo I saw grabbed my attention. She was clearly a young woman, but her expression was one of solid confidence. She was smiling broadly, and there was no way around it: she was absolutely beautiful.

Would God have created a beautiful black girl to be the Messiah?

Jesus was in his thirties when he started his ministry. Well, he would have been if I hadn’t murdered him.

I was puzzling over the question without even realizing at the time how silly it would sound if somebody spoke the same question out loud to me. God didn’t do any such thing, because there was no such thing as God.

There were hundreds of photos of Sabo online, but they all showed the same powerful face. The face that launched a new religion.

After flipping back to CNN on the laptop, I found I couldn’t get her out of my mind. Part of that was professional curiosity. How would I photograph her to really bring out her inner self? What angle would work best, and what background? I thought about lighting and F-stops, my mind wandering off to layout and design and focus and maybe spiritualism. After all, I needed to present her in a way she was comfortable with.

“Lady God.”

I laughed a bit when I said that, as if it were the funniest thing I’d heard in ages.

Eventually, the room darkened, and I climbed into bed, dreaming my now-standard nightmare of a horribly angry Jesus climbing out of his grave to track me down and torture me to death.

****

The hotel had a free continental breakfast for guests. I toasted a bagel and swiped some cream cheese on it. When I sat in the small restaurant, I saw Carrie Hargrave and waved to her. She smiled and nodded and selected a bran muffin and a croissant to bring over to me.

“Good to see you,” she said.

“You too.” I smiled at her. We’d only worked together a couple times in the past, but the experiences had been good. She was Time’s best interviewer.

Munching on my bagel, I asked, “Got your questions ready?”

She patted her purse. “You betcha.”

Carrie was in her early forties, I guessed, but she still kept her hair neatly pulled back into a tight pony. I imagined her doing the same thing back in high school and every day since.

I’m sure she planned her appearance to seem youthful and invigorating, putting her interview subjects at ease.

And her photographers.

“Do you believe her story?” she asked.

“Of course not. Do you?”

Carrie seemed to hesitate before replying. For a minute, I thought maybe she hadn’t heard me, but then she said, “I want to.”

“Really? The daughter of God?”

“I’ve always believed the Messiah would come one day. The Bible tells us that. Why not now?”

“You believe everything in the Bible?”

Carrie laughed and seemed to take some tension away with it. “Not everything, no. But enough.”

We finished eating in silence. It wasn’t that I was bothered by what she said, more that I just didn’t understand it, and wished I could. Wouldn’t it be nice to believe the whole universe was planned out in detail and that one of the rewards of believing was eternal life in one form or another?

When we left, I called a taxi and we both climbed in the back.

“Good luck,” I said.

“You too! Make people want to read my story!”

“I’ll sure do my best.”

****

We were to meet Erika Sabo at the movie theater where she’d be giving a sermon in a couple hours. It was one of those multiplexes that showed twelve movies in different rooms.

She was waiting by the popcorn machine when we walked in. We were still early enough that none of her parishioners had arrived. She smiled broadly when we came in and rushed over to greet us.

“Miss Hargrave, so nice to meet you.”

Carrie seemed to be tongue-tied, and I can’t say I blamed her. The young woman was shorter than I expected, younger-looking than I expected, but somehow way more captivating. Her eyes were like bright and unavoidable arrows.

Most of her hair was black and kinky, the way many black girls liked it. It reminded me immediately of a halo around her face.

There was a single blonde streak running from the middle of her part down her left side. It was the exact same color as Jesus’s hair.

“And of course, it’s a delight to meet you again, Mr. Abelman.”

“Again? I don’t believe we’ve met before.”

She locked eyes with me and for a moment didn’t say a word. She didn’t have to.

I saw her. More importantly, I saw him.

This was the boy I’d murdered all those years ago.

It was impossible I could know that, but know it I did.

I couldn’t speak. In a split second, I felt like everything I’d ever known was wrong, and that the only thing that mattered was Erika Sabo. I wanted to kneel before her, but I felt light-headed and I knew if I tried, I’d faint.

Her smile widened farther, which I wouldn’t have thought possible.

“You recognize me, don’t you?”

I nodded, not trusting myself to talk.

Carrie finally broke the trance.

“You’ve met before?” She looked back and forth at me and Erika.

I took a deep breath and said, “Years ago. I hadn’t really put it together until now.”

The moment felt like it lasted forever, but then Erika said, “There’s a small office we can use for the interview and photos. Follow me.”

The room was decorated like it was used for kids’ birthday parties. There was a long table in the middle.

Erika apologized for the cramped quarters. “We’re moving into our own building next week. Seating for 800, lots of office space.”

Carrie and I got ourselves set up, and I started taking some initial photos as Carrie started her recorder.

Before she started, she asked, “Is it okay if I call you Erika, or would you prefer Miss Sabo?”

“We’re all friends here, so first names are perfect. Everyone I speak to in my sermons is on a first name basis with me.”

“How many people are you expecting today?”

She shrugged. “It’s growing every week. Last week we had about 150. Maybe 200 today? We use the largest room for the service, with an overflow set up in the room next to it. It’s amazing what you can do with technology today. The live feed shows on the screen in the overflow theater as if I was in both places at once.”

“You’ve only been preaching a short while.”

“I’m happy with the progress we’re making.”

The questions were softballs to get Carrie and Erika into the chat. I moved around the room, capturing photos from different angles. I’d pick the best of them later.

I tried to concentrate on what I was doing and not the turmoil wracking my brain.

I’d never believed in God or in Jesus Christ. But here was the same Jesus I’d killed two thousand years earlier. None of my science training would provide anything close to an explanation.

I checked the exposure on my camera while Carrie continued.

“What’s the subject of the sermon today?”

“I’ll be talking about the Book of Ruth. It’s one of my favorite books of the Bible. A love story of sorts. And a moral obligation that shows God wanting us all to welcome strangers with open arms. You never know what might happen.”

I interrupted. “I’m not familiar with that story.”

“Ruth is a Moabite who came to the promised land and was accepted by the Israelites. She was the great grandmother of David, the greatest of the Israelite kings. And he is my own very distant ancestor.”

Carrie looked up when she said that.

“How can you know that?”

“The Bible promises that the Messiah would be a descendent of David. If you’re dogged enough about following his children, and their children, well, you end up finding me.”

“You claim to be the daughter of God.”

“I know it’s hard for some to believe, but it’s true. I’m here to bring my father’s word to life.”

Carrie hesitated before asking her next question. “Why would God need that?”

“It’s more about why humanity needs it. God is patient and merciful. Sometimes, humanity forgets their history. Sometimes they forget who created them.”

“Most people think you’re a fraud.”

“Yes, that’s right.”

“How do you feel about that?”

“I feel that I have a challenging life ahead of me.”

Once again Erika smiled broadly, as if this was an inside joke.

Then she added, “Winning one person at a time is nice, but it won’t work when there’s seven billion people on Earth. That’s why I need you guys, and that’s why I’m scheduled for an interview on The Tonight Show tomorrow. And that’s why Facebook and Twitter and Instagram and Snapchat and all the other social media platforms are so important. Things change at a ridiculous speed these days. I’m hopeful my word will affect a lot of people, for the better.”

Erika stood and walked around the room. “My father’s word isn’t that complicated. It’s my humble honor to spread it.”

The interview lasted for an hour altogether. Carrie and I stayed to watch the sermon, and I snapped more photos as she talked. I could tell she loved speaking to the crowd, and they loved listening.

Chapter 23

Karen Anderson felt the acceleration push her back into her seat as the Golden Luna pulled away from the Skywheel. Months of preparation had passed, and they were finally on their way to the moon.

The moon, she thought. Who would’ve thunk?

The crew of five were all strapped in, as the computerized navigation system controlled everything. The humans on board had nothing to do except wait and (for Karen at least) to pray.

“Dear Lord,” she whispered with her eyes closed and her head bouncing around as the Luna thrust faster and faster. “Please bless this ship and the crew, and let us find whatever it is you want us to. I have faith in you, and your judgement.”

She hesitated, wanting to add another, more personal thought, but it felt wrong. At this moment, she needed to worry about the mission, not herself.

No matter how hard it was.

“Amen,” she finished.

She opened her eyes and looked ahead to the viewscreen in the front of the ship. Nothing much had changed since their departure, but she knew the Skywheel was already thousands of miles behind them.

It would take a little over two days before they could be inserted into lunar orbit. The last two days that anybody would have to wonder what was happening on the far side of the moon.

The aliens were still broadcasting some indecipherable message back to their home. That much was clear.

The moon was tidally locked to the Earth and had long ago lost its ability to form its own rotation. It now rotated once in approximately twenty-eight days, identical to the time it took to orbit the Earth. As a result, the far side of the moon could never be seen from Earth. Only the dozen Apollo astronauts who flew to the moon fifty years earlier had seen it.

Now, the group of five on board her ship would see it, and three of them would land, if it was possible, to visit the aliens.

She still found it impossible to believe, but she pushed that to the back of her mind. In the preparation leading up to the flight, she’d scanned a thousand ideas of where the aliens came from and what they were doing. But, the truth was that nobody had a clue.

Karen knew nothing about Erika Sabo. Although the internet was available to her, it wasn’t something with which any of the astronauts spent their time. There were way too many other priorities that needed their attention. The mission was costing more than a billion dollars, and they would only get one chance to make it a perfect shot. If they failed, another ship might be available in a year, but it would be staffed with a whole other crew.

She needed this to go perfectly.

And up to now, it had. However, there was a glitch in the process, and she was the only one who knew it.

She tried not to think about it. Instead, she visualized the flight path. The Golden Luna was aimed at where the moon would be in two days. To be more precise, the ship was aimed five hundred miles above the moon’s surface. The moon’s gravity would capture the ship and sling-shot it around and around in an elliptical orbit that would settle down to orbit less than twenty miles above where the alien signal originated. The first few times around, the crew would run detailed scans to find out what was below. Then, a lunar landing module would be released, allowing three of them to float down to the surface.

Only if it appeared safe, of course. There were a lot of things that could cause a mission to abort, primarily if it seemed the aliens were hostile.

Nobody quite knew exactly how they would tell, but everybody believed they would know somehow. Mission Control would make the final decision.

Karen was one of the three astronauts that would glide their way down to the surface. She would meet the aliens.

Except.

Except for the glitch.

“Nobody asked for this,” she said. “Certainly not me.”

She closed her eyes and tried not to let a tear squeeze out of the corner of one of them. She wished she could talk to David, but he was somewhere, maybe a million miles behind her. She’d lost track of where he was after she’d been aboard the Skywheel.

He’d know what to do. He always did.

But I don’t need him, she thought. I can figure this out.

The acceleration continued to push her down into her seat. It would stop soon, when the ship reached its cruising velocity, and then she’d float away, as if the ship were standing still.

At twenty-six, Karen was the youngest person ever to go into space. She wanted others of her generation to be proud of her and to look at her accomplishments to show that you can do anything you set your heart on.

Now, she was going to blow it.

As she thought again of the aliens and what they might look like, the thrust of the engines stopped and as expected, the force no longer held her like super-gravity, and she was floating free.

In the ten months she’d been either training or working on the Skywheel, and now on the Luna, she’d been the subject of countless medical tests. NASA was careful not to let anybody who had any possible issues go to the moon. There was no doctor on board, no hospital, nothing much past a fancy first-aid kit.

Every test showed her to be healthy and ready to blast to the moon.

Every test.

Including the blood test they undertook every month.

She passed with flying colors. On top of that, it’d been that same ten months since she’d been with David. That last argument was the last time they’d slept together.

Which meant it was impossible for her to be pregnant.

Karen had no idea why they had pregnancy tests on board the Luna, but they did. She chalked the first result up as a false positive, but two in a row? And her body was telling her the same thing.

It was impossible. She knew that. Regardless, she had to come to terms with the fetus she was carrying in her womb.

Chapter 24

The next night, Erika was scheduled to go onto The Tonight Show. James Arlender was guest host. I’d heard of Arlender of course. Who hasn’t? He’d grown his reputation and career as a comedian by skewering religion. Any religion. He wasn’t biased against Judaism, but since most Americans were Jewish, that was his target more often than Islam, Hinduism or Buddhism. He was an equal opportunity offender.

I wondered why Erika would have chosen to have her first national television broadcast with him. There were a hundred other hosts who would have made more sense.

“I have to reach my audience,” she said when I asked her. “All my audience. Some of them are fans of his, so he’s got the people I need to talk to.”

By this time, I was convinced she didn’t need anyone’s help to reach an audience, so I shrugged and carried on.

I was still taking photos of her. Earlier that day I’d sorted out the best I had taken as part of the Time interview and emailed them off. I should have been on a plane back to Minnesota.

Part of me already knew I’d never book that flight.

Instead, I kept hanging around her. I took more photos as she answered phone calls, wrote an article for her web site, organized a meeting of her closest advisors and stopping only occasionally for a quick sandwich or a piece of fruit.

Her nine disciples were as busy as she was, and as the day wore on, I realized how much work they’d collectively gotten done during the day. Nine people working their asses off for no payment I was aware of, all because they believed she was the daughter of God.

I believed it, too.

Forty-eight hours earlier, I had basically laughed at the idea, but now I knew it was true. This slight, unprepossessing girl, a black girl from a poor family, the most unlikely of choices, was, without question in my mind, indeed the daughter of God.

God, a being I would have also sworn couldn’t possibly exist.

All from looking into her eyes, and a couple words she’d spoken to me.

She knew me. I knew her. I’d killed her by smashing her head with a rock. She should have hated me, refused to see me, wanted revenge.

Instead she smiled at me with that smile the whole world now recognized, and she accepted me without hesitation into her innermost circle of advisors.

She never said, “Hey, David, wanna work for me?”

She didn’t have to. She knew, and I knew. I was meant to be part of her team.

I was her tenth disciple.

In the late afternoon, she nodded at me, indicating she wanted me to follow her. We silently walked out the door together and into the sunshine. It was in the mid-seventies, a beautiful day for a stroll.

Without knowing what she wanted, I walked with her, not talking. She’d let me know what she wanted in her own time.

Finally, she said, “It’s a beautiful day.”

“Yes,” I agreed.

“You have questions.”

Well, there was the understatement of the year. My mind had been swirling with questions ever since we first met. How was this possible? How could I have been so wrong my whole life? Why did science still seem to trump religion, when I now knew the truth?

I also had bigger questions, the kinds of things that drive people crazy.

How could God allow a monster like Adolph Hitler to exist and to kill ten million innocent Jews? They were His own people, and he sat by idly while they were slaughtered.

And for every Hitler, there were a thousand mini-Hitlers. People who killed without caring about consequences. Men who raped girls before they could even count themselves as teens. Women who abused their husbands with calculating cruelty, robbing them of their humanity. What kind of a God would put up with that shit? Sometimes it seemed like if there was a God, He must be as cruel and sadistic as His worst creations.

Do we have free will? If God knows all, past, present, and future, and he can direct everything to match His desires, we have no free will of our own. If that’s true, what’s the point of even being alive? It’s like the history of humanity was written in a book, and God is slowly turning the pages at his convenience. More, he’s written the damned book from beginning to end.

Why is the Bible stuffed with demonstrations of God performing miracles and talking to everyday people, lifting them up with his voice, but for the past two thousand years, it seems like God has been silenced. No miracles, and the only people who say they hear God are totally nuts by most definitions.

So, yes, I had questions.

But, I blurted out the first thing that came to my mind.

“How can you forgive me for what I did to you?”

Erika smiled. “We love all our children. Nothing you can do will ever change that.”

“We?”

She sat on a bench and pointed, so I sat beside her. I was feeling all kinds of intimidation, but at the same time knew I was totally safe.

“My Father, myself, and the Holy Spirit. We’re the Trinity. Three beings unified into a single God.”

“I don’t get it.”

“I know. You will.”

I wasn’t so sure about that.

“Have you lived forever?”

She nodded. “It’s not so hard to believe. Time never existed before we created it, so before that, without time, there wasn’t the concept of forever, so it wasn’t anything particularly special.”

My science background kicked in when she said that, and I kind of—well, sort of—understood what she was saying. Before the Big Bang that created the universe, everything that existed would have existed only as a figment of a creator’s imagination. We measured time as how long it takes between two different events, like how long it takes for a second hand on a clock to sweep from pointing straight up to pointing to the right. That constituted fifteen seconds. If there were no clocks, nothing to move, nor people to watch things move, does time itself exist?

At the moment, none of that really mattered. My brain was on fire, and my mind seemed to be running in a thousand different directions.

I opened my mouth to ask her another question, or maybe to thank her or to tell her I needed to go to the bathroom. Whatever it was, nothing came out. I couldn’t think straight, and she reached out her hand and took hold of mine.

“It’s a lot to take in.”

I nodded, not able to speak.

She stood and I did the same. She hugged me and I wanted to hug her back, but my body wasn’t really working all that well. I stood there like a dead tree while she hugged me. She didn’t let go, though, and after what seemed like a million years, I put my arms around her and hugged her back.

****

I was in the stage wing, watching when Erika was called out to join James Arlender. In times past, I’d watched some of his HBO specials, and with everyone else, I’d groaned at the jokes when he’d make fun of some group. It didn’t matter to him if it was religion, politics, or race. Anything went with him. Being on The Tonight Show, though, I knew he’d have to cut out the swearing and hopefully treat Erika with a bit of respect.

While I watched her walk out, full of confidence and smiling that jarring smile of hers, I clicked away with my camera. It seemed that, without asking, I was taking on the role of official photographer.

I’m pretty sure that’s how all her closest followers joined her team. They found out what they’d be good at and they did it. No need to ask for permission, no discussion of payment (there was none) or any other type of reimbursement. The church bought food and provided a place to sleep for the staff, and everyone accepted that’s all they needed.

“Welcome, Erika.”

I heard Arlender’s voice loud and clear. He shook Erika’s hand but hesitated first, as if he might try to hug her instead. I’m not sure. Maybe he was just always a bit nervous.

“Thank you.”

They sat on opposite sides of a desk.

I wished Jimmy Fallon wasn’t on vacation.

“So, let’s start with an easy question. You say you’re the daughter of God. That’s the big guy in the sky, right? Presumably God could drop a son or daughter anywhere. Why you? Why in a small town in upstate New York?”

Erika nodded. She’d clearly expected the question.

“You mean why a black girl instead of a white man?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“You don’t have to. But, to answer your question, my father doesn’t care about color or gender or any of the other things you like to poke at. What matters is that this was the right place at the right time.”

“The right place and time for what? To exploit people?”

“To bring the Lord’s message.”

“What message is that?”

“Have you ever read the Bible, Mr. Arlender?”

He shrugged and grinned. “I’m waiting for the movie.”

The audience chuckled. I took some photos of the audience as the interview went on.

“There’s really only two things you need to know.”

“Weren’t there ten commandments? And a bunch of other laws and stuff?”

“I’m glad to hear you know at least that much.”

The audience laughed, and Arlender was taken aback. I think he was expecting Erika to be some wimpy girl he could make fun of and move on to the next guest.

“So, what are these two things you want everyone to know?”

“Love God and love each other.”

“That’s it? Six words is all you got?”

“It’s all I need.”

“Can you perform a miracle for us?”

“I’m not here for parlor tricks, Mr. Arlender.”

Arlender looked to the audience. “Hey, what do you think? Should God’s little girl prove who she says she is? Wouldn’t you like a miracle?”

He waved his arms up and down to rile the people. They started to cheer and stood as if they were going to riot. I snapped more photos. I wasn’t worried about Erika. She could take care of herself. My job was to document it.

She stood and looked to the audience.

“Please be quiet,” she said. Although it would have been easy for everyone to continue cheering, one by one they stopped and sat back in their seats.

“Umm,” Arlender sat back down too. “I hope you’re not going to say that was a miracle.”

“That’s just your audience being polite. I hope they want to hear what I have to say.”

“Why won’t you perform a miracle? The Bible is full of them.”

“The events of the Bible happened a long time ago. Times change, and so do strategies for communication. If I started to levitate, would you believe it was a miracle?”

“Any magician can fake that.”

“Exactly. I’d waste time and just be allowing you reason to reject my message. I’m not here to perform silly stage tricks for you.”

“Well, it’s easy for you to pretend to be some kind of super-being if you don’t have to prove it.”

“If I deliver you a true miracle, would you believe what I say?”

He hesitated and shrugged. “Why not? If you can prove it by doing something no magician can.”

“In that case, watch the skies.”

“What?”

“Tomorrow night. Midnight Eastern time. I know your show is on the air then, but it’s not live, so you can be out looking at the sky.”

“What would I see?”

Erika smiled. “You’ll find out.”

Arlender shrugged. “Sounds pretty non-committal to me. He glanced at a producer who was standing beside me. The producer made a circling motion with his hand. Time to wrap this up.

“Well, thank you for coming, Erika. I don’t believe anything you say, but there’s a sucker born every day, so best of luck to you.”

Erika reached out to shake his hand. He hesitated and finally took her hand.

“Bless you,” she said. She gave the audience one more big smile and left the stage.

Chapter 25

The following day was Sunday. Erika and I woke and I cooked a few pancakes for us to share. She then led me into the media room and turned on the TV at 9:00. We were still getting used to the new church facilities. As usual, she was way ahead of me in understanding what was going to happen.

The first segment of Face the Nation was an interview conducted by Phil Showson. I found the transcript of the interview and copied it here with the approval of NBC.

Showson: Last night, Erika Sabo took to national TV to discuss her beliefs. They were so extraordinary we felt we wanted to hear a different perspective from the two main religions followed through the U.S., so today we’re welcoming Rabbi Nathaniel Cobert from Central Synagogue in New York City and Imam Abdul Naseer from the Islamic Cultural Center of New York. Thank you both for being with us today.

Cobert: Very glad to be here.

Naseer: Always good to be with you, Phil.

Showson: As you both know, a young girl in upstate New York has been claiming that she is the daughter of God. Can you tell us how Judaism and Islam view Ms. Sabo?

Naseer: We cannot always know Allah’s intent, but the girl is very naïve if she thinks the world will accept her story. We believe the prophet Mohammed was the greatest of the messengers of God. There is no need for a supposed daughter.

Cobert: I’d go a step further. Judaism is built on the fundamentals laid down by the Lord in the Bible. There, we see the predictions of a Messiah yet to come, but young Sabo doesn’t fit the prophesies at all.

Showson: In what way?

Cobert: The Messiah is to be a man descended from David, and he will be born in the Holy Land, probably in Bethlehem. Clearly the girl hasn’t done her very basic homework.

Showson: Imam Naseer, does that disqualify her? Is this just some kind of elaborate hoax?

Naseer: I suppose it’s possible for Allah to change his mind about things, but it seems very unlikely. I don’t even know why you’re dignifying this by covering the story.

Showson: Rabbi, is that how you see it?

Cobert: Absolutely. As far as I know, she hasn’t gone so far as to demand people hand over all their possessions, but it wouldn’t surprise me to see something like that soon. We’ve seen many so-called prophets come and go over the years, and they all demand cash. It’s a scam, plain and simple. This might be a new twist, claiming to be the daughter of God, but otherwise, it’s the same old same old.

Showson: She promised a miracle for tonight. What will you say if she can pull it off?

Naseer: I’m sure she can do some kind of gimmick. We’ve had lots of magicians in the past who have performed amazing feats. David Copperfield made his audience believe he made the Statue of Liberty disappear. Sabo probably has some kind of similar trick up her sleeve.

Cobert: Yes, my thoughts exactly. Whatever she does, just ask a professional magician and I’m sure you’ll see they can reproduce whatever it is.

Showson (nodding): Thank you for your time, gentlemen. We’ll all be watching the skies tonight.

Cobert: Thank you.

Naseer: Always a pleasure.

The segment ended and I felt horrible. Erika clicked the television off and turned to me.

“Well,” she said. “What did you think?”

I couldn’t face her. I stared at my shoes, as if they were the most important things in the world. The silence grew but she didn’t say anything more. I felt her staring at me, and I finally said, “They’re right. I never thought of it, but the real messiah needs to match the prophesies in the… Bible.” I’d almost said the Old Testament, rattled by the TV discussion. Before I changed time, there were two parts to the Bible, but now there was only the Old Testament, but it was silly to think of it that way because there was no longer any such thing as the New Testament.

“Really?” Erika continued to stare at me. “You don’t think the prophesies are fulfilled?”

“How could they? You aren’t a man.”

“Oh, ye of little faith.”

She said it with a lilt to her voice and I looked up to see her smiling at me.

“I need you to trust me, David,” she said.

I wanted to, but…

She took my hand in hers.

“The Bible is talking about the messiah’s arrival. He was a little boy born to Mary in Bethlehem. I think you know that prediction came true. After all, you came to find me and you killed me.”

I thought about that. “So, you today… that’s not what the prophesies were about? What about you being a descendent of King David?”

“I am.”

“How?”

“Well, David had a son named Solomon. Solomon had Rehoboam who had Abijah who had Asa who had Jehoshaphat who had Johoram. Do you want me to keep going?”

“You’re saying if we followed all the generations down, we’d find you?”

“You bet.”

“I should know better than to doubt you. But, just humor me and tell me one other thing only God could know.”

“Your grandmother was an amazing woman, who was strong in the Shelljah. With that ancient Hebrew magic, you were able to go back in time and kill me.”

Erika’s face grew softer, the humor gone.

“And,” she added, “the world needs me now more than ever before. And it needs you too.”

“Me? I doubt that.”

She shrugged and smiled again.

“You’ll come to understand. Soon, David. We live in dangerous times. Timing is critical.”

I had no clue what she was talking about. Then she came and hugged me, and I held onto her tightly, almost afraid to let her go.

That night, the threats started.

In retrospect, it seems like an obvious impact from the interview that morning. Within minutes of Face the Nation airing, somebody had already started using #SaboIsFake and by noon it was the top trending topic on both Twitter and Facebook. Later our tech guru traced it back to a single post on Twitter. It was from an obscure rabbi in Kansas City:

Watched the discussion on Face the Nation this morning. Why are we wasting time with this stupid bitch? #SaboIsFake

Harsh, but not nearly as bad as what came later as social media piled onto the Erika bandwagon.

It’s ridiculous to think a black teenager could be the Messiah. Why not say Harry Potter for President? Disgraceful and vulgar. #SaboIsFake

My God doesn’t send false witnesses. If Sabo is out of this world, she’s been sent by Satan, not my God. #SaboIsFake

Disgraceful (not to mention full of shit). There must be laws preventing this kind of cult from starting. This is the United States, not some pathetic third-world despot! #SaboIsFake

A thousand bucks to whoever kills her. #SaboIsFake

As the day wore on, more and more violent tweets showed up, and it was impossible to keep up with them. Thousands of posts discussed assassinating Erika. For the first time, I felt ashamed to be American. Even if people didn’t believe the whole daughter of God thing, what happened to the right to free speech, the right to assemble peacefully, and the right to religious expression?

By mid-afternoon, Twitter was drowning in calls for Erika to be killed. It wouldn’t surprise me if some nut-job decided to take on the challenge.

“We should go,” I said to Erika.

“This is our church, David. We can’t be run out. We’re just getting started.”

“Have you seen what’s going on? You’re public enemy number one.”

“You can’t worry about people who think that way. This is way out of their comfort zone, and they need time to reconsider things.”

“Yeah, but while they’re reconsidering, somebody is going to kill you.”

“There’s a police presence outside. That’s all we need.”

“That’s only two people.”

“Cowards who make silly threats are easily discouraged. We’ll be safe here.”

I looked out the window down to the street below. Everything seemed dangerous. The little old man walking his dog, the new mother rushing somewhere carrying a small baby, two teenaged boys holding hands as they casually went about their way. Nothing was threatening, but everything was.

“Are you sure?”

“Positive. Besides, all the threats are good news.”

I turned and stared at her, seeing that playful smile again.

“Okay,” I said. “I’ll bite. How is it good news?”

“Twenty-four hours ago, maybe one percent of the population knew my name. Now, it’d be tough to find anybody in the country who hasn’t heard it.”

“Any news is good news?”

“They’ll all hear the good news in their own time. In the meantime, they’ve all heard that God is my Father, and that’s a big first step.”

“But they don’t believe it.”

“Not yet. Many of them will change their minds tonight.”

“Midnight.”

“That’s right.”

I knew I wouldn’t get an answer, but I asked anyhow. “What’s going to happen?”

She laughed. “Be patient, and look up to the sky at midnight.”

Chapter 26

Colonel Peter Lassiter had kidnapped his first victim when he was only twenty-one years old. That was more than two decades ago. He remembered his first time fondly. It was an eight-year-old boy who had wandered away from his mother in a busy arcade. It was crowded with teenagers playing the latest games, and the boy (Tommy Karewell, Lassiter remembered) had to go to the bathroom. He was holding his crotch with one hand, ready to burst into tears, when Lassiter saw him.

It wasn’t particularly well-planned. He hadn’t known what his next steps were or certainly the long game, but he saw the boy and something clicked.

“Here, son,” he said with a soft smile. “I’ll help you.”

“I need to go pee real bad!”

“I know. Come with me and we’ll take care of that.”

He held out his hand, continued to smile, and nodded, letting the boy know everything was totally fine.

There was a side door. Lassiter knew that because he’d played in this arcade somewhere around a million times, or at least it seemed like that. He’d been there so many times, he knew he basically blended into the wallpaper, part of the furniture.

“Hurry,” pleaded Tommy.

“This way.”

He led Tommy outside. The door led to a remote back part of the building. Only maintenance people ever used the door.

“This isn’t the bathroom.”

“It’s okay. It’s better than a bathroom.”

Why did he have chloroform in his car? Because he was prepared. He knew the next chapter of his life would need it, and so he was able to knock out the kid easily. Tommy never screamed, even when he must have realized something was horribly wrong.

The ransom demands followed, and that’s when he learned his first lesson. Just because a kid shows up to a birthday party at an arcade, that doesn’t mean his parents have any money.

He killed the kid two days later and buried the body in the woods outside San Diego.

When he finished he took the shovel and smashed it against a nearby tree. “Fuckin’ waste of time.”

He took a second whack at the tree before calming down.

The second kidnapping went much better. That time it was a teenaged boy wandering the beach. Lassiter saw the styled hair, the expensive ripped jeans, the leather backpack, and the guitar he had strung around his neck. He might have looked like a wanderer, but he came from money.

Lassiter waited, walking in the shallow water, until the boy got closer.

“Hey, Bud! Got a light?” Lassiter held out an unlit joint.

The teen almost walked right by, but the joint was calling to him. He shrugged and walked over to Lassiter.

“You sharing?”

“If you have a light.”

The boy kicked off his sandals and set the guitar down on the sand. He dug into his backpack, and while he was doing that Lassiter walked to him and put a rope around his neck, pulling tightly.

The teen dropped his backpack and tried to pull the rope away from his neck, but it was no use. Lassiter pulled as hard as he could, and after a minute or so, the victim stopped struggling. Lassiter dropped him on the sand and took one last look around. As he expected, there was nobody on the beach to be seen. There was a reason he chose this isolated location.

The boy’s name was Jason Anderson, and sure enough, his parents were loaded. They quickly paid the $100,000 ransom, but Lassiter was worried because the boy could tell the cops what he looked like and how he’d picked him up.

So, Lassiter killed Jason Anderson, and learned his second lesson. None of the victims could be allowed to see him or know anything about his operation.

He used the $100,000 as seed money to set up what would eventually become his kidnapping empire. Within three years, before his 25th birthday, he found the formula he needed. That’s when he’d set up his base and hired the best staff he could to do the dirty work for him. They never met him, and they didn’t care. As long as they got their cut from each kidnapping, they didn’t even want to know the boss.

The formula had worked well for the past fifteen years. One of his staff would take the victim and keep them locked up in the local vault. They were totally sedated the whole time, so they couldn’t say anything about who was involved or where they were kept. The ransom asked for a million bucks, to be paid by bitcoin, and after two days, the victim was either released or killed.

Magic.

The formula could be repeated endlessly across the country.

Now, though, Colonel Peter Lassiter wanted more. There was money in his scheme but no particular excitement anymore.

Today, he was making a list (and he chuckled as he thought of checking it twice, as if he were the reverse Santa Claus).

There were four names remaining on the list. He was trying to work out who the best victim would be. There were a lot of factors. Who had the worst protection? Who could actually get the most ransom money? How would he do the kidnapping? Could he even find their schedule to work out the best opportunity?

Of course, he could. That last one was a given.

At the top of the list was Taylor Swift. She had more money than God, it seemed, and she was the most famous person on his hit list. He already had her schedule for the next week printed, and there was a key point where she would be flying in a private plane from LaGuardia to LAX. That would be perfect.

The second person was Giles Hamilton, who had invented an app for smartphones that allowed security access for all devices in your home, connecting through the electrical grid to cheap devices (sold separately) that monitored everything. He was worth well over a billion dollars. The downside was that few people knew his name. Not much glitz there.

The next was a top Hollywood actress. Lassiter didn’t watch many movies, so he didn’t recognize her name. She would be easier, but she didn’t have deep pockets like Swift.

And the last name was Erika Sabo. The more he stared at the names, the more his eye was drawn to hers.

Little security, publicly available information about her scheduling, and her church probably had tons of money rolling in. Lots of positives. The only negative was that she wasn’t as well known as the others, so the publicity may not be as widespread.

Not as exciting.

But, maybe exciting enough.

He googled her again, to find photos of her from every angle. Every day there seemed to be tons more images. Her name was spreading. Her appearance on The Tonight Show the prior evening had increased her name recognition ten-fold. Maybe that would continue to happen, especially if the parlor trick she’d planned for tonight panned out. Like everyone else, he had no idea why she wanted people to look outside at midnight, but he’d be doing just that. If it was a good trick, her value would skyrocket.

But, Taylor Swift was already a superstar…

Decisions, decisions.

Like everything else Lassiter did, though, he knew that somewhere in his sub-conscious, the decision had already been made. He stared again at Sabo’s name and smiled.

Chapter 27

The day started off the same as any other. Nobody talked about it being anything special. I checked the photos I’d taken the day before and selected a grouping that would work well. I was cataloging everything Erika did with photos, and every day had way too many pictures to use them all. I uploaded fifty or so and reluctantly deleted the rest. I suppose there could be a case for keeping them, as part of some comprehensive record of every bite she took or every laugh she shared with her team.

Screw it. I chose the ones I thought best represented Erika’s day without overdoing it.

What would today bring? None of us knew. I think if anyone would have known it would have been Chris Spinnie. Over the past couple months, she’d grown especially close to Erika. I knew Erika used Chris as a sounding board for new ideas.

This time, though, Chris just shook her head when I asked.

“Nope,” she said. “Got no idea.”

I looked hopefully at Erika’s other closest followers, but nobody seemed to have a clue.

Our Lady God was good at keeping secrets.

We knew only what she’d said in the interviews… something was going to happen at midnight, and we were all to be outdoors at that time to watch it.

Tonight was a full moon. Other than that, I wasn’t aware of anything special. It was a warm spring day, and the temperature would still be quite nice, in the low fifties, and it was going to be clear skies. I wondered if Erika had arranged that, but it was most likely a coincidence.

Or maybe not. The thing about Erika is that none of us really saw her do anything that looked like a miracle. Maybe she’d cleared the skies for us tonight. How would we ever know?

That was one of the reasons she gave for not doing any public miracles. If it was something small, like making the weather nice, how could she prove it was her? If it was something closer to home for somebody, like curing somebody’s illness, the skeptics would say the patient was in on it and had never been sick in the first place. Anything that couldn’t be immediately explained would be challenged by magicians, who would then try to duplicate whatever she did.

She didn’t want that kind of nonsense. In interviews, she’d say miracles weren’t necessary. “What is necessary is faith.” That was her best-known comment, and she’d delivered it a hundred times since coming out to the public.

This time, though, she’d promised a miracle. Every newspaper in the country and every news site on the internet carried the commitment. Most of them claimed it was a hoax, and cited examples of magicians like Houdini or David Blaine who seemed to perform miracles. They were tricks. In the country’s eyes, Erika was already a fraud.

At 10:00, Erika came out of her study and nodded at me. I walked over to her.

“Morning,” I said.

“It’s gonna be a good day.”

“Any special shots you want?”

“You’ll know what to get. You always do.”

Erika always complimented her staff, which was surprisingly good at motivating us.

She picked out a banana and slowly peeled it. “You want to ask me something?”

I felt guilty, and maybe I looked it. I think, sometimes, I felt overwhelmed by reverence. Being in the presence of somebody you know for a fact is a supernatural creature is overwhelming. I sometimes felt my body shake in disbelief. No, not disbelief, because I did believe. It was more like being crushed by the truth. And even after all this time, I was intimidated by her, wanting to ask her questions but afraid she’d think I was an idiot.

Well, no time like the present, especially when she’d invited me.

My mind went to my grandmother. Ariela Abelman was still the person who I was the closest to. Even though she’d died four months earlier, I thought of her every day. I thought of her ordeal as a child, being sent to the Nazi extermination camps, and how she only lived by the fluke of having Russian troops happen to arrive at the right time.

“Why does God allow evil people to live?” I stared at Erika, as if challenging her. “Why allow Adolph Hitler to be born?”

She nodded and took a bite of her banana before replying.

“Ever since we created people, there were two concepts the Lord wanted humanity to experience. Trust and love. In order to trust people, they had to have free will, the ability to make their own decisions, not what God wanted for them. We wanted people to live their own lives, not the life my father would have created for them. It was the right choice.”

“How does that answer my question?”

“God created evolution. That meant living things could strive to their best possible selves. Animals evolved to better suit their environment, and so did humans. Sometimes evolution creates better traits, and sometimes not so much. The good traits carry on, while the bad get weeded out.”

I nodded. I was the science guy. I knew how evolution worked.

“A child is born. Maybe he has a defective gene. Maybe he just lives in a bad environment and learns that to survive, he can’t play nicely with others. Maybe he just makes bad choices through his life, even if those choices lead him to run a corrupt government.”

She stopped for another bite of banana, and I grabbed one to join her.

“We don’t decide who’s making the right choices or the wrong choices. We love all people. That’s the second aspect we wanted humans to experience: honest love for one another and for God.”

“How’s that turned out?”

“Overall, not so bad, but not great. If we were marking a test, we’d give humans a C+ for love. It’s crazy when you know you only have a very short life span, and you don’t take advantage of the positives you’re provided.”

“My grandmother wasn’t given all that many positives. She had dozens of relatives who died in the gas chambers. You can’t tell me God loved Hitler.”

“I can. Because he did. God loves all his children, even if they hurt Him. He hates what Hitler did, despises it, but every human is one of His creations. He loves all of you, and He wants you to all, one day, reciprocate that love. It’s not a lot to ask.”

I wasn’t so sure of that.

She hugged me and kissed my cheek. “You have a lot to learn. Fortunately, you have time.”

I think about what Erika told me a lot. I have nothing but time here in prison, and she was right about one thing. I have a lot to learn. Even after being so close to Erika right to the end, I still feel I barely scratched the surface of understanding her message. I never could believe God could love purely evil people, but then I certainly believe Erika was serious when she told me that.

Lots to think about.

The rest of the day was uneventful. Erika spent much of her time secluded. I knew she was working on her next webcast, but it almost seemed like she was hiding.

What if the event at midnight was a flop? The internet would crucify her.

At 11:45 p.m., we all went outside. Without any prior plan, we formed a semi-circle around Erika, surrounding her with our hopes and prayers.

Part of me knew this was going to be a huge failure. I wanted to tell her to call the whole damned thing off. But, like all the other nine of her disciples, we stood silent, hoping for something to happen.

The full moon cast shadows from us all.

I wore a light jacket. It wasn’t cold. It was as beautiful a night as you could ask for. The lights from the church were all turned off. Only nature lightened the yard.

Nobody spoke. Somewhere in the distance, I thought I could hear a bullfrog, but it might have been my imagination.

Erika got down on her knees and looked up.

We followed her. Again, nobody spoke. We all fell to our knees.

I was in the middle behind her, so I couldn’t see her face at all.

Everything was silent. I wanted to keep checking my watch, but I held out. I would know when midnight arrived.

I did have my camera ready to pull up, whenever I saw whatever it was.

I’d never voluntarily prayed in my life. Even after being one of Erika Sabo’s disciples, I never did. I served her, I followed her, I wanted to do right by her, but praying really wasn’t my thing.

Until then.

I closed my eyes and silently asked God to help her.

When I opened my eyes, I blinked, and then the sky burst into fire.

It was like the fourth of July. Starwheels of explosive lights crossed the sky, a million shooting stars blasting above us, each only living a fraction of a second. There were so many streaks of light, I had to squint. It was like looking into the sun.

There was no meteor shower that should have happened that night. And certainly, no meteor shower in history had ever been so bright and totally sky-encompassing.

Over the years, I’d photographed many showers, so I was familiar with what they looked like. This was the mother of all meteor showers, the sky filled with bright streaks while not a sound was heard.

At the time, I had no clue how long the show lasted. A minute? Five minutes? Whatever it was, everyone on the lawn behind our church was captivated, mesmerized, totally transfixed on Erika Sabo’s miracle.

Finally, she lifted her arms up in the air, and the light show stopped as suddenly as it had begun.

My eyes were full of tears, and I wiped them away. It was much darker than it was earlier, and for a second, I thought my pupils had contracted due to the massive fireworks we’d witnessed.

But, no.

My eyes were fine. It wasn’t anything to do with them. It was dark because above us there were only the stars providing us with light.

The moon was gone.

Part 4—The Shadow of Death

Chapter 28

Yes, the moon disappeared that night. It wasn’t invisible, as if that would somehow be any more explainable. It was gone.

I remember looking up and somehow the information wasn’t adding up. My brain couldn’t comprehend what my eyes were telling me. I think everybody else felt the same way. There was no “Ooh, where’s the moon?” or anybody saying, “I know what happened!” There was only silence.

Some of the folks around me left to go inside. They figured they’d find out what happened in the morning, I guess. I didn’t leave.

Eventually, I found myself alone, staring up at the stars. I knew what I was looking at was not possible. I looked around, and even Erika had left.

I felt more alone than I’d ever felt before. My rock had always been science. Even though I knew Erika really was the daughter of God, the majesty and the power of that relationship still felt unbelievable. Until then she was a paper God, who knew things that she couldn’t have known any other way.

Moving the moon. That was a whole different story. The mass of the moon is 80,000,000,000,000,000,000 tons. Not something you can hide very easily.

I reluctantly went inside at about 2:00 a.m. I walked to the kitchen and sat alone, opening my phone and flipping to CNN. Of course, the only story worth talking about was the moon and Erika Sabo.

They were a bunch of talking heads.

I flipped to the New York Times website and found they’d already posted an open letter from the National Academy of Science. I asked their permission to copy the letter here.

At midnight, Eastern Standard Time, on the morning of Adar 23, witnesses around the globe watched the moon disappear. This was after a short meteor shower of unknown origin occurred.

Analysis has been ongoing since that time, and this note is to summarize what we know so far. The following facts have been verified and are not in dispute:

► The moon disappeared visually.

► Gravitational analysis has shown that the moon is not invisible. It is no longer there.

► The moon was not destroyed. Any such action would have caused an immense amount of debris to rain down on the Earth, which did not happen. No debris of any kind was detected.

► The Earth’s orbit around the sun did not change, as the motion of the Earth around the sun does not depend on the mass of the Earth/moon system, only the sun’s mass.

► However, since there was a full moon, the Earth was very slightly shifted toward the sun. Now that has moved the Earth closer to the Sun, about 1,000 miles. This has been measured.

► A much larger expected impact is related to the conservation of angular momentum. When the moon disappeared, its angular momentum had to be transferred somewhere, either directly to the Earth or to its revolution around the sun. This would cause extensive and immediate catastrophic results, which did not occur. We can not currently explain why.

► Finally, we expect long-term impacts due to the tides no longer occurring. Tides are primarily due to the moon. Ocean tides support incredibly diverse ecosystems in the intertidal regions, which in turn support a great deal of the ocean’s biodiversity. We need to monitor the impacts to these areas.

► Significant meteor showers are annual events, happening at the same time every year. The one that preceded the disappearance has never occurred before. In addition, meteor showers do not last only three minutes as this one did. They typically run for several days, waxing and then waning in the count of shooting stars visible.

The Academy is unable to explain the events described above. We believe the laws of science have been modified in some fashion, but we are unable to definitively say what caused that shift.

We continue to look for a rational explanation, but currently, we have none.

I suppose there wasn’t anything particularly surprising in the information, but even so I pored over every word, reading it over and over.

The sun rose a little after 6:00 a.m., and I hadn’t slept. I wondered how many people were like me, so amazed that sleep seemed unimportant.

It was around that time that my thoughts turned to a different direction: Karen Anderson. I couldn’t believe it had taken me so long to think about her.

Karen was aboard the Golden Luna, which was racing towards a moon that no longer existed.

“How are you doing, Karen…?”

I thought she was probably scared. Who wouldn’t be? Surely they had instruments aboard ship that would tell them that the target of their mission no longer existed.

I did a bit of googling, and it didn’t take long to find a minor news story at the bottom of CNN.com.

Golden Luna Also Vanished

The spacecraft Golden Luna, which has been gliding toward the moon for the past two days disappeared from NASA tracking at the same time the moon disappeared.

James Elson, mission spokesman at NASA said they had no idea what had happened and were checking their tracking, monitoring, and communications systems, in case the vanished ship was simply a technical glitch. Elson was not optimistic, because all monitoring equipment had a double failsafe built in. It was unlikely that all three systems experienced the same failure at the same time the moon vanished.

It is likely that the Luna has gone wherever the moon went.

“Oh my God…”

The comment left my mouth before I even thought about it. It was ironic that God did indeed seem to be the cause of the vanishings.

“Karen, where did you go?”

Was she still alive?

It felt doubtful. It didn’t feel like the ship had been transported to a safe haven. It felt like it had been destroyed, as if it had never existed in the first place.

“David?”

I jumped at the sound of my name. It was Chris Spinnie. She walked up behind me and put a hand on my shoulder.

“You look very pale. Are you okay?”

“Just a lot to take in, you know?”

She nodded and smiled. “I think it’s hit everyone in one way or another. I felt—I don’t know—maybe vindicated? Like the belief I felt deep inside me turned out to be true, and no matter how much I knew the truth, it still surprised me.”

I nodded.

“You should get some sleep,” she said.

I must have looked like shit for her to notice. I smiled back and decided she was likely right. I needed to turn off my mind. I went to my cot, pulled a blanket over my head, and quickly fell into a deep dreamless sleep.

****

I slept through the whole morning.

When I woke, I could hear a bird chirping. At first I thought it must be a remnant of some vague dream, but I blinked and yawned, and the bird was still chirping when I sat up.

It was a blue jay. It was perched on the cot next to me, the one that Miles Insa usually slept in. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a blue jay up close before. It seemed to be equally puzzled with me.

Erika walked in and the bird flew up to sit on her shoulder. She gave it an air kiss, as if it were a pet she’d trained for years. Nothing about Erika Sabo surprised me anymore.

“You’re awake.”

I couldn’t help but stare at her. I hadn’t seen her since she made the moon disappear. She really was the daughter of God, and I was somehow privileged enough to be part of her team.

“I was up all night.”

“I know.”

“Of course you do.”

She laughed like that was the funniest thing she’d ever heard.

Erika tilted her head toward the door. I followed her out of the sleeping area and over to the main office portion of the church. The others were all hanging out there, doing whatever they did each day to help the mission. Most of them had glum looks on their faces.

“What’s wrong?”

“They’re worried. There’s been some backlash on social media.”

“Like what?”

“Everyone has an opinion. Some of them aren’t exactly what we’d like.”

I found a desk and headed to Twitter. It was Erika’s widest channel of communication, and I surfed through some of the comments.

She’s not God. She’s the devil.

I watched the fake Erika Sabo’s supposed miracle. I’m sure it’s just a trick. She should be locked up for fraud!

That black girl is not my God.

She’s Satan! Don’t trust her!

The comments rolled up, hundreds, thousands of them, many of them incredibly racist or ignorant. She’d proven herself but so many people didn’t want to believe her.

If this was a couple hundred years ago, there would be a mob outside with pitchforks ready to lynch her. Now, the assault was virtual, but the underlying antagonism was the same.

No wonder everybody was looking so depressed. Oh, there were some positive tweets as well, heartwarming comments by people who saw the truth, but most were awful.

“You must be disappointed,” I said.

Erika shrugged. “We have work to do.”

I stood and gave her a hug, as if that would make her feel better. Actually, I think that it was really to make me feel better.

To be sure, I sat back down and checked Facebook, and then Instagram. All of Erika’s social media accounts were showing the same abuse.

The news wasn’t much better. CNN.com was covering the massive backlash, almost seeming to forget what they were reporting on a handful of hours earlier. The miracle was old news now, and they’d moved on to help string up Erika as part of the aftermath.

Chapter 29

Three weeks passed, and the changing winds of public opinion meant there were days where the news was all about “Of course this proves God exists. Anyone who thinks otherwise is just being stupid.” On other days, the talking heads on the various news shows were the naysayers who were sure that Erika was a fraud, even if they didn’t quite know how the moon disappeared.

In general, there were three schools of thought for this:

1. Pure magic, the kind that any other magician could do if they set their minds to it. Sometimes, what seems like a miracle is simply misdirection, skillfully applied. This option ignored the scientific evidence about the Earth shifting in its orbit around the sun. That was another form of magical deceit, likely easily explainable once other magicians put their minds to it.

2. The moon hadn’t disappeared at all. In fact, it never existed. What Erika had done was to perform a global hypnotism, convincing everyone that the Earth had previously had a moon but now didn’t. As hypnosis acts go, this was quite impressive, but it certainly didn’t mean anything physical had actually moved as much as a centimeter.

3. Popular with the Flat Earth Society, the moon simply had set faster than normal and has stayed beneath the horizon ever since. This was nothing to be alarmed about and nothing magical.

There was one other theory, one that didn’t make it as much to the talk shows: Erika was indeed a supernatural entity, but clearly, she was sent by Satan, not by God. The unspoken evidence was her dark skin. God’s child would obviously be Caucasian.

I wondered how Erika never lost her temper whenever this garbage found its way to her. She would nod or shrug as if it was nothing personal.

Even I knew it was entirely personal.

Erika worked on her five-minute sermons and the additional information on her web site.

Then, on an otherwise totally normal day, she came to me and said, “We have to go. We’re addressing the United Nations General Assembly at 4:00 this afternoon.”

“We are?”

She laughed. “Well, I am. You’re coming to take photos. Peter is coming to record it and post it online.”

“You don’t seem nervous.”

“I’m not. I have a message they need to hear. It’s a good message, and I hope they learn something.”

At noon, a helicopter landed in the parking lot. Security had been notified, so the area around had been cleared. We climbed up and strapped ourselves in. Thirty minutes later, we landed on the U.N. helipad.

In all my time photographing important scientific achievements, I’d never managed to find a reason to go inside the United Nations Headquarters building. Even though I was walking beside God’s daughter, the building somehow affected me as much as Erika did, and I felt like an unimportant pawn in a cosmic chess game.

When the time came, Erika stood at the lectern and gazed out at the audience. There was no sound inside the large auditorium. Every eye was staring at her, and each face wore either raptured interest or hateful disdain. There was little chance for middle ground.

There are 193 countries that belong to the United Nations. I had to look that up. All 193 nations had their representative sitting in the assembly. Most had earbuds with wires drooping down. Erika’s voice would be simultaneously translated by an army in the floor below the main hall.

“Mr. Secretary General, thank you for inviting me to talk to you.

“Ambassadors to the world, I come before you with a message of hope, of faith, and of the profound opportunity you each have to save the people of your own nation.”

She paused and looked out.

That’s when I noticed a remarkable thing. All the ambassadors removed their earbuds. It wasn’t because they didn’t want to hear. Quite the contrary, they didn’t need a translation. Whether their native tongue was Spanish, Chinese, Arabic, or dozens of other languages, they each could hear Erika talking to them directly. Most of the naysayers lost their look of disdain and stared instead in puzzlement.

How could she speak fifty different languages, with each language directed only to the people who wanted that language? I, of course, heard her in English.

I later was told that not only did she speak Portuguese to the Portuguese ambassador, that person heard a different dialect than the Portuguese heard by the Brazilian ambassador. Languages change in distant countries. Even more surprising, each visitor saw Erika’s mouth move in exactly the right manner for the words they heard.

As I listened to her speak, I was only partly aware of the miracle she was performing right in front of me, and once again I felt like a small insect compared to her majesty.

She continued. “All of you represent your own nation, and I am also an ambassador to all of you. I represent the Lord, my father, and I am here on a mission of hope and excitement.

“My father wants to ask his children for only two things. He wants you to love Him and he wants you to love each other.

“Seems pretty easy, doesn’t it?” Erika smiled and about half the audience couldn’t help but smile back at her. She was beaming with charisma, and she took the opportunity to move out from behind the lectern and walk slowly around the stage. As far as I could tell, she didn’t have a microphone. It didn’t matter. Her voice carried out over the speakers as loud as when she spoke into the mic.

“As I look out at all of you, I see the reflections of your people. I see pools of kindness and gentle natures, I see love and respect.” She paused, locking eyes with a few of the assembly members. “I also see hate and corruption and jealousy and greed and fear. Fear from your people against their own government.”

I watched Erika as she stared at one of the people in the audience. She was sending a clear message to whoever it was. From my vantage point, I wasn’t sure who she was looking at. I think the stare made a number of people uncomfortable.

She finally continued. “Each of you also brings with you a balance of your people who follow my father. Some of you are full of faith, even if your nation is supposedly run by a secular government. God has noticed.

“Others of you are at the other end of the spectrum, crippled hypocrites who have no faith at all while professing that same faith to your people.”

Nobody whispered. They all stared at Erika, and I had a feeling this was the only time in the U.N.’s history that the general assembly was so quiet.

She walked down one of the aisles, glancing around at everyone. The ambassador from Israel reached out to touch her hand as she passed.

“You owe it to your nation to stop hating one another. You all have your land and your resources, and the Lord will help you if you simply ask him to do so. Our God is a good God who wants to have a relationship with you.

“But you must love your enemies. Put down your weapons. Help those in need, and start to enjoy the life our father has given you.

“These are not very difficult asks.

“If I put myself in your place, I might ask, WIIFM? What’s in it for me?

“The answer is easy. Peace is better than war. Love is better than hate. Faith is better than fear. Each one of you can make so much difference to your country. Go back and help your people. Tell them the Lord is listening and wants them to experience joy. Tell them the path to eternal life is to love the Lord and to love each other.

“It’s really very simple.”

Erika had come full circle and was back behind the lectern.

And then a surprise. She asked, “Would anyone like to ask me any questions?”

Immediately, there was a dozen questions or comments called out to her in just as many languages. It was a hot mess of noise. Not surprisingly, Erika heard each one and answered the questions asked. I won’t list everything she said here. The speech is easy to find on YouTube. Her initial talk was what should have changed everyone who listened.

Of course, things are never that easy.

Chapter 30

Another week passed, and I began to realize how much I missed the moon. Crazy, right? But it’s been in the sky my whole life, and as a science photographer, I’d aimed my camera at the moon hundreds of times, sometimes for practice, sometimes to wonder at how big and orange it looked when it was near the horizon, sometimes to focus in on one of the craters or the seas visible from Earth.

I’d had a framed print of the Sea of Tranquility hanging on my bedroom wall when I was a teenager. I stared at that photo for what seemed like hours, imagining Neil Armstrong and Edwin Aldrin walking around there, a quarter of a million miles above my head.

So, the moon and I, we had a strong relationship, and, yes, I missed it.

I also have deliberately avoided one other aspect of the disappearance: the loss of Karen Anderson. She deserved me to talk about that in a more direct fashion.

Here it is.

I’ll admit she wasn’t the first thing on my mind when the moon disappeared in front of my eyes, but it wasn’t that much later, when I read the article on CNN stating the Golden Luna had vanished along with the moon.

At that precise moment, I think my heart broke.

I hadn’t spoken to Karen since she moved to Houston for her training at NASA. I don’t miss the irony that we parted after that big fight we had when I couldn’t accept her religious views, particularly that God existed.

The same instant that proved she was right was the instant she was taken away from me much more permanently, or at least it seemed like that at the time.

I didn’t want to admit how sorry I was that I had let her go without apologizing to her. Even if Erika hadn’t come along, I should have tried to accept her strong religious feelings. Why was it so important to me that she drop it?

I don’t have a good answer for that. Stubbornness? Arrogance?

In the weeks since she vanished and I was convinced she was dead, I never asked Erika about her. I couldn’t stand to hear her possible answer that the Luna was gone forever. If I didn’t ask her, there was a chance Karen might someday return.

If that day happened, I promised God I would be a more understanding boyfriend for her. That was an easy promise to make.

Each night, as I crawled into my cot and tried to sleep, visions of Karen came to me. I welcomed them at the same time I felt haunted. Closed eyes allowed Karen to visit me, misty memories of our times together bringing joy and sadness at the same time.

I loved her, and I wanted her back with me.

****

Then came the afternoon Erika was a guest on a podcast organized by the National Academy of Science.

I won’t list all the items they discussed on that podcast, because they’re mostly scientific, and to be honest I doubt many are interested. Anyone can check Erika’s site in the podcast section, and find it easily enough.

****

I’ve been avoiding a topic because it’s not something I’m proud of. In fact, I find it shameful. I didn’t want to cloud views of events so far in this book, but there’s another aspect of this story.

Beating Jesus Christ to death as a teenager was a bloody mess, horrific to have done, but I had to describe it as it happened. That, too, is part of Erika’s story, and it deserved to be told.

I imagine many thinking, “How could you have possibly been so cruel? It’s horrible, and most people couldn’t have gone through with it.”

I agree.

How was I able to do that? To get there, I need to backtrack to my childhood.

Ariela encouraged my playing sports. It was a way she felt I could fit in with the other kids in the neighborhood, which was sometimes difficult because I was a bit of an oddball. I loved science and wasn’t one of the “cool kids.” I was scrawny and short, and my geek-spirit tended to make me the brunt of cruel jokes that kids play on each other.

Sports would help that, so my grandmother thought. Growing up in Minnesota, the winters were bitterly cold, and the neighborhood kids played a lot of hockey. In the summer, it was mostly baseball with a bit of football later in the summer.

When I turned twelve years old, Ariela decided it was time. So, that summer I played pickup baseball. I played third base for reasons long since forgotten.

Every game, I ended up in a fist fight.

Maybe it was the stress or the competitiveness, or maybe the adrenaline rush that comes with playing sports, but every game, I’d end up losing my temper and starting a fight.

I always lost, and that summer I wore home many black eyes and a few loose teeth. After all, I was twenty pounds lighter and six inches shorter than some of the kids I attacked.

In winter it was even worse because hockey players carry wooden sticks, so we were always armed. Losing my temper was even easier in hockey because of accidental (or sometimes not) body checks or other physical events that triggered me to lose my temper. Again, the fights left their toll, and I soon lost the privilege of playing hockey altogether.

Probably a good thing.

My point is, I had a horrible temper, and when I lost it, I was an awful kid. I didn’t care about consequences, didn’t care how much I hurt another person, didn’t care about the damage to my own body.

Dropping sports meant fewer opportunities to lose my temper, but sometimes I’d get some kind of adrenaline rush from another source, whether it was based on watching a scary movie or worried about Grandma being late home one day. There were those occasional excuses when I’d act out, breaking things or otherwise hurting those I cared about.

By the time I was in my late teens, I was able to control my emotions more, and the outbursts of violence turned more and more rare.

Then they stopped.

Believe me when I say I don’t miss those days. I felt more in control and fitting more into mainstream society.

There were two times, though, when I lost control.

The second time was when I was bashing in Jesus’s head. It was the first fight I’d had since those long-ago days when hockey took control from me. I found myself hitting Jesus harder and harder and wanting nothing more than to keep on shattering his skull and pulping his brain. I had lost control and didn’t stop until his head was a pulpy mess.

It was hard to look at Erika Sabo sometimes, knowing she was the one I had murdered so brutally.

The first time I lost my temper recently, though, is the part of my story of which I’m most ashamed. Regardless of the other things I’ve done and may be judged for, this is (in my mind) the worst thing I’ve ever done.

****

Karen Anderson was going to leave for Houston to join the training camp for her lunar journey.

This was the highlight of her career, and she was overwhelmed by the thought of going to the moon to greet the aliens.

She wanted me to pray for her. That’s when we got into that big fight because I thought religion was nonsense, and I didn’t care that religion was the backbone of her whole life.

We argued and… well, I lost my temper. I lost control and found myself grabbing her shoulders and shaking her. Hard. She bounced around in my arms like a ragdoll and cried out, begging me to stop.

Somehow, her scream was able to find its way to my normal self, and I stopped, aghast.

She fell to the floor, and I dropped down to see if she was okay.

“Leave me alone!”

That cry and the look of fear in her eyes totally destroyed me. I had been abusing the one living person who loved me.

I sat a couple feet from her, stunned, not even able to apologize, while she slowly climbed to her feet and ran.

She left for Houston a couple days later, and I’d been too ashamed to even call her. I couldn’t face the hate she must have felt for me.

The horrible temper I’d thought I’d left behind had let me know it was still there, maybe forever—a ticking time bomb I’d pushed away but was now back.

****

29.53 days after its disappearance, the moon popped back into existence. Erika once again was showing her power, and along with the moon, so returned the Golden Luna.

I’d once again have a chance to apologize to Karen Anderson.

Chapter 31

Some people say Erika got what she deserved that day. She never paid much attention to security, and to be honest, none of the rest of us did, either. We were all people who’d been pretty fortunate in life never to have run across violence, except for the occasional fist fight as a teen.

That day, we all grew up.

Except maybe Erika herself, because she never would accept that evil could ever win anything, and every day was an opportunity for her to spread her message to whoever was around her, however they got there.

You had to look around her to see the homeless people who became part of her core team, or the ex-prostitute who kept track of her booking schedule, or the average everyday John Q. Public who formed the foundation of her ministry. She didn’t care what had happened before or the circumstances that befell a person. She only cared about treating every person with respect and love.

Sometimes I’d wonder how she did it, asking questions: Have you ever crossed the street because there was a beggar ahead harassing pedestrians? Have you walked through a dark parking lot and feared somebody might jump out to rob you? Have you ever thought badly of a person because they made a stupid mistake or had to break the law because of the circumstances in which they found themselves?

Erika knew all these things, of course. She never let them interfere with how she treated each and every person she met.

It worked well for her most days.

That day, though, I wondered if the lack of security at the church was going to end her fledgling ministry before it really could fly.

Most of the events of this day were never released to the public until now. That was Erika’s choice.

The morning started off routinely, reviewing the notes Erika had left me for the day. It included stops at two food banks and a sermon at an open-air theater in downtown Aynsville. The theater sat 12,000 people and was the largest arena in the town. I expected it to be full to capacity, because the entire populace supported Erika. They were proud Aynsville was her home, and they wanted to show the world that pride.

I knew the theater, of course, and I was sitting in the planning room sketching out ideas of where I could get the best photos. In the room with me were Erika and Chris Spinnie, the once-homeless drug addict whose sole focus in life now was to help Erika.

When the door opened behind me, I never heard it. I did hear Chris calling out, “Hey, who are you guys?” but even that didn’t cause me any concern. We had people wandering in to the planning room all the time, because Erika never wanted to have any doors keep her from her congregation.

I saw Erika smile briefly, as she likely expected an eager fan, perhaps newly convinced of her messages.

Instead, five men rushed in from the doorway and ran toward us.

Two went for Erika, two for me, and the last one to Chris.

I was totally confused. Nobody ever came to the church to cause trouble, and having those men (all more than six feet tall and huge) grab us and then… I felt something stabbing my mid-section. I had a brief glimpse of a hypodermic needle and then my vision turned cloudy, and I couldn’t balance myself anymore.

Everything went blank before I could issue a single call for help.

****

The first sensation when I woke was enormous pressure on my chest. It was hard to breathe and for a minute I wondered if I was having a heart attack. It was like a vice squeezing me.

I tried to shake my body, but I couldn’t move my arms. I couldn’t scream for help because something kept my mouth closed.

Panic started to set in. I opened my eyes but my vision was bleary, as if I were looking through a quartz crystal. Nothing made sense. I shook my head and blinked until I could see.

I was still panicking, but by then I was able to piece together what was happening.

There was duct tape tightly wrapped around my face. No chance I could make any noise. I was breathing thinly through my nose, and every breath felt like a struggle.

Ropes tied me to a chair. They were wrapped so tightly, I could barely take in air. It was like a gorilla was sitting on my chest.

What the fuck?

I was in a dark room, but I couldn’t tell if that was from low lighting or if it was night-time.

Erika was to my right, also bound in an identical fashion. She was awake and nodded to me. She must have been awake much longer; she seemed to have passed the panic stage and looked totally calm.

To my left, Chris Spinnie sat, also tied up in the same fashion. She was unconscious. Or dead. I couldn’t tell which.

I couldn’t see anyone else, so at that point I had no idea who had taken us. Even with the two women with me, I felt fear wash over me, and I panicked again, straining without any success against the ropes. All it did was make my breathing more difficult.

After a couple fruitless minutes, I stopped and tried to catch my breath. It occurred to me then that the reason Erika looked calm was that she was forcing herself to relax. I tried to do the same, closing my eyes and trying to think of something peaceful. I thought of an evening I had shared with Karen Anderson. We were sitting on the beach and gazing out to where the sun was setting, halfway below the water.

It was one of the last moments I could recall where I was truly happy.

I calmed myself and re-opened my eyes.

“Welcome back, buddy.”

The voice was from behind me. I couldn’t see whoever it was, but the voice was deep, and my mind wandered to a vision of a professional wrestler.

The truth was much worse.

The man walked slowly between Erika and me, and I got my first glimpse of Colonel Peter Lassiter.

He was tall, maybe six foot three, about forty years old, completely bald, and he looked like he could crush me in his bare hands without breaking a sweat.

He was dressed in a uniform. Very dark blue jacket and pants, a brass U.S. pin on each lapel, and a series of decorations covering his chest. There were a couple of other pins above the decorations, but I had no idea what they signified.

He smiled, a wide grin that told me two things. First, he was enjoying keeping us captive, and second, he had no intention of ever letting us go. He wouldn’t have let us see his face if that were the case.

He carried some kind of military cap in his hands.

“I’ve already introduced myself to Miss Sabo, so let me update you, Mister Abelman. I am Colonel Peter Lassiter, and I am your worst nightmare.”

Then he laughed, a full body laugh, bending over at the waist because he thought he was so fucking funny.

“We’re going to be good friends.”

I had my doubts about that.

“Behind you are four of my friends. They are all armed with M-15s, and they’d just as soon kill you as anything else, because they’re very nervous about this operation and they’d be happy it was over.

“Understand?”

I couldn’t talk, and I didn’t want to surrender any of the remaining dignity I had by acknowledging what he was saying, so I stared straight ahead.

That’s when he reared back and smashed my left cheek with his fist. I thought he was going to knock off my head, literally. Blood ran down my face and dripped from my chin. It was the worst pain I’d felt in my life, and part of me hoped his henchmen would shoot me and finish this whole thing.

Whatever this whole thing was.

Clearly Erika was the target. Chris and I were peripheral figures who happened to be in the room when they kidnapped her.

Lassiter grabbed my chin and lifted it so I was staring at him.

“You fucking will answer me when I ask a question. Do you understand?”

I nodded.

“Good. We hear each other.”

He started to laugh again, as loudly as he had earlier. “Well, maybe I don’t actually hear you, but you know what I mean.”

I nodded again, not knowing if he wanted a reply, but not willing to take a chance.

“Good boy, buddy.”

I glanced over at Chris. She hadn’t moved at all.

Erika still sat quietly, not reacting.

Later, I wondered why she didn’t roll her eyes or whatever she does and make a miracle happen. I thought she could free us by willing it.

She told me that’s not how it works. She’s totally human, the same as me or Chris or anybody else. She isn’t a magician. All she has is her faith, and when she prays to her Father, the Lord, He always rewards her. Faith was the miracle, not hand-waving.

God would do what God would do. She knew it would be the right thing. So far, that didn’t include freeing her from her captors.

Lassiter moved a few feet away, halfway between Erika and me.

“The thing is, and this is new for you, Ms. Sabo, the reason you’re here is to make me a lot of money.”

He paused, as if this were somehow an amazing secret we would never have imagined ourselves.

“The Founding Church of Saboism is taking in money hand over fist. I gotta hand it to you, Ms. Sabo, you have one hell of a gig going on. My guys estimate you have donations of about $40 million every week. The money goes into a bank and according to you, it’ll be used to further spread the word of God.

“Is that about right?”

I could see Erika nod. It made me wonder if she’d been beaten before I awoke.

“Good. We’re on the same page, then.”

She nodded again.

“So, here’s the thing. You need to have $100 million transferred from your bank to a numbered account in Grand Cayman. I’ll give you the account number when you need it. From there, a series of automated transactions will occur, switching the money into untraceable cryptocurrencies that will be funneled around the world a few times before coming home to roost.”

The more Lassiter spoke, the more I saw in his face that he was single-minded, and nothing was going to stop him from getting the money.

Certainly not me. Probably not Erika.

But, I had more faith in Erika than he did. I didn’t know why, but I knew she was capable of getting us out of there.

I hoped.

Chapter 32

While Erika, Chris, and I were trapped by Colonel Lassiter, the Reverse Miracle happened.

It was after midnight in Asia. Indonesia, Laos, Thailand, and Russia all had clear skies, the same way the east coast of the United States had twenty-nine and a half days earlier.

In the U.S., bright sunshine stopped anybody from noticing the miracle, but the news spread far and wide.

The moon was back.

Thousands of people posted on Facebook and Twitter, along with lesser known social media outlets.

In America, CNN broke the news within minutes. A shaking reporter, who had never been called on before, shouted over Skype to the central news desk and held his jittery camera up to the sky, in case viewers didn’t believe the story.

“The moon literally just popped back in the sky!” he shouted. “By coincidence, I was walking outside my apartment and happened to be looking in that general direction, and, poof, there it was!”

He continued to hold up his camera, proving the moon was back and hadn’t disappeared again.

Within hours, the National Academy of Science released another press article.

Telescopes and other instruments have confirmed that the Moon has returned to its rightful place in its orbit around Earth.

The re-appearance comes exactly one lunar month after it disappeared, so it has appeared in the same position from which it vanished. A lunar month is 29.5306 days. Although we are still confirming, it is believed this is exactly how long the Moon was missing.

At the moment, there continues to be no scientific explanation for the original disappearance, nor for that of the Moon’s return.

The NAS will continue to research this phenomenon, but it is likely to be some time before we have any concrete theories.

However, all of us want to welcome the Moon back. We missed her.

When the moon reappeared, the word most often used was that it “popped” back into existence. There was no associated sound, but even people who didn’t happen to be staring up immediately noticed the bright light cast from the moon, and they were stunned to see Earth’s only natural satellite hanging majestically in the sky.

As the Earth slowly turned on its axis, more and more people were able to see the full moon rise in the eastern sky. Most people were shocked to see the moon back in its familiar place. Because they were looking for the moon, having heard the news, when it did arise, the moon was huge and bright. It seemed much larger than it normally appeared because of the proximity to the horizon.

The questions started immediately.

Did Lady God make the moon come back?

How did she do it?

Why did she bring it back?

And the question that every reporter in New York state was asking: Where exactly was Erika Sabo?

For the first time in many months, the girl who was the self-described daughter of God had vanished herself. Rumors started that she had either been called back to Heaven or she proved she was a fraud, somehow hiding the moon for a month.

The ridiculous nature of that last rumor didn’t stop it from being a trending topic on Facebook.

Even her closest disciples claimed to have no idea where she was.

The nineteen-year-old black girl from upstate New York had vanished.

****

Aboard the spacecraft Golden Luna, Karen Anderson heard the alarm from the central navigation module. It was a high-pitched chirping sound she only recognized from the intense training sessions the crew had gone through. Everyone had to be able to understand and interpret problems, in case the commander was ill or worse.

Habit kicked in and she grabbed the handrails and pulled her way through the center of the ship toward the front section.

“Murray?”

“Here.”

Murray Thomson sat in the primary command seat. He was staring at the displays in front of him, but he wasn’t doing anything.

“What’s the problem?”

As she asked that, a couple of other crew members reached the area as well. They all floated in zero-g, looking like synchronized swimmers.

“Parallax change.”

The flight engineer, Jose Monteiro, said, “That’s ridiculous. Must be a problem in diagnostics.”

“I’ve forced a double check using the redundant scope. Same answer.”

Murray leaned forward to read something on the display, shook his head and turned to face the growing crowd who had joined him.

“Apparently we’ve just travelled forty-nine million miles.”

After a moment, Jose broke the silence. “Again, that’s ridiculous. Like, over how long?”

“Instantaneously, by the looks of it.”

“It’s got to be a mistake.”

“No shit.”

Jose climbed into the co-navigator seat and clicked through menus. Everybody, including Murray, stared at him.

Karen remembered vaguely of a test on parallax shift in training, but even at the time, they were told it was impossible to trigger it. If it happened—which it wouldn’t—it would be a computer error the redundant systems would rectify.

She looked out the thick window on the right side. Below them, she could see the Earth in the distance. It looked to be exactly where it was last time she checked, a couple hours ago. No indication the ship had moved anywhere, except slightly farther away from the home planet on the way to the moon.

Jose stopped tapping the screen and stared at the results. By his expression, Karen could tell he had found the same situation that Murray had.

Forty-nine million miles. That’s halfway from the Earth to the Sun, but they hadn’t left Earth, so that meant they’d gone, what, sideways? That seemed as impossible as anything else.

That’s when they received a call from NASA Headquarters.

When Murray acknowledged the call, Karen heard an excited voice, “Oh my God, you’re back!”

That’s when they found out they’d vanished more than twenty-nine days earlier. They hadn’t experienced as much as a second’s loss, but they’d apparently been gone somewhere for the past month.

Not surprisingly, this was difficult news to accept.

When they found out all the details, and then found out Erika Sabo had taken credit for the vanishing, Karen went back to her sleeping area, away from the others. She had no interest in sleeping. She just needed time and space to think.

God had performed a miracle. Or had He?

Chapter 33

I don’t know how long we sat strapped to the chairs as prisoners of Colonel Lassiter. He seemed to have a lot of patience, just leaving us alone and wandering behind us for quite a while, even though both Erika and I were conscious.

At one point, I had to urinate. I tried to hold on as long as I could, but after a few hours (I think), I couldn’t hold it anymore, and I had to let go. I glanced over at Erika, totally embarrassed, but she didn’t seem to notice.

A lot of emotions ran through me in that short eternity while we were sitting there. Mostly, I was afraid. I knew Lassiter wouldn’t let us leave alive. He wore a determined expression on his face, and I had no doubt he wouldn’t hesitate when it was time to get rid of us. It made me wonder why he bothered keeping Chris and me alive. We weren’t the valuable ones. Maybe he’d use us as leverage to get to Erika? I couldn’t think of any other reason to hold onto us.

On top of the fear, though, was frustration at not being able to help free us, a sense of loss, because this felt like the end of the line for the Church of Saboism. Anxiety, anger, and even boredom covered me like a shroud of emotions.

“Unnn…”

It took me a moment to realize Chris was gaining consciousness.

She mumbled and blinked, trying to lift her head from her chest, but it bounced around as if it were a basketball balanced on an index finger. Her body jerked as she tried futilely to get free of the ropes binding her to the chair.

“Chris, don’t struggle.” Erika’s strong voice soothed Chris immediately, and she stopped exerting her energy in a losing cause.

That’s when I noticed the duct tape that had held Erika’s mouth shut was gone.

She smiled at me as if we shared a secret.

“Have faith in the Lord,” she said.

As unlikely as it seemed, I felt that was good advice, and I closed my eyes and silently prayed for God to help us get out of the situation alive, or at least for Erika to be safe if all three of us couldn’t be.

“We’ve been kidnapped by somebody named Colonel Peter Lassiter,” Erika said to Chris. “He’s going to ask for one hundred million dollars in ransom.”

Chris’s eyes opened wide, and I imagined her asking where in God’s name that kind of money could possibly come from.

I knew the answer, knew the church’s finances were in extraordinary shape. Erika planned for the money to finance her worldwide movement, with churches to be built in every city in every country on every continent. Her vision was to have places for her followers to meet, wherever they were. It would take a lot more than the money the church had already raised, but the vision was astonishing, and I believed she would succeed.

Erika’s sole mission was to encourage every person on Earth to form a relationship with God and also with each other. She wanted there to be peace and happiness. Everywhere.

How could anybody not want to help her with that goal?

I fell asleep at one point. It couldn’t have been for long, and when I woke, Colonel Lassiter was in front of me.

“Welcome back, Sleeping Beauty. I was about to dump a pot of water on your head to wake you. It’s time to get this party going!”

Chris was awake and so was Erika.

“So, here’s the plan.”

Lassiter moved closer to Erika and smiled at her.

“You’re the only one who matters, so you can either agree right away or you can watch while I torture your friends. I really don’t care either way.”

“It’s not too late for you to repent,” Erika said. “God loves you. You have tremendous talents and can use them to help carry His word.”

“Yeah, well that’s not going to happen.”

Erika closed her eyes, and I knew she was praying.

“Pay attention!”

She continued to whisper with her eyes closed. Lassiter closed his fist and punched her in the head as hard as he could. She cried out in pain. Her head lolled on her neck, and blood fell from at least two cuts on her forehead.

I struggled in vain to get loose, but there was no chance. The ropes still constricted and barely let me breathe, let alone move any part of my body.

“Stupid cunt!” He grabbed her chin. “Pay fucking attention!”

Erika looked at Lassiter, but there was no fear in her eyes, no anger. What I saw there was pity.

“Good.” He pointed two fingers at his eyes and then at Erika. “Pay attention.”

He hadn’t commented on the missing duct tape. I don’t know if he asked about it while I was asleep or if he forgot she should have had it on her mouth. I was guessing God made him forget, but that’s a hunch.

It looked like Lassiter was going to say something else, but he stopped in mid-breath. His mouth closed, and he clenched his jaw.

“Uggh…”

He fell to his knees, and then used one arm to stop himself from collapsing. His other hand clutched his chest and he panted.

I think we all had the same reaction. We wanted to find a way to help him, but of course we were all tied up.

Lassiter gasped for breath and glanced behind us. His cronies were not coming to his aid.

“Pray,” said Erika.

Lassiter grunted and looked down, as if the solution to his attack was sitting on the floor in front of him. Then he fell over, grunted one more time and then was still and silent.

Behind me, I heard some shuffling and then loud footsteps. The rats were fleeing the sinking ship.

I never did ask Erika if she caused the massive heart attack that killed Lassiter. Maybe it was his time, but part of me doubts it. I think Erika, or maybe God himself, decided this was not the right time for Erika’s crusade to end.

As I was wondering that, I heard Erika stand. The ropes that had bound her were gone.

So were the ones holding me and Chris. We were free, and the ropes had disappeared, perhaps to wherever the moon had gone.

By instinct, I moved to where Lassiter was lying and checked his pulse. Nothing. I felt I should say “Good riddance,” but that’s not what I was feeling at all. I had been thinking how he’d wasted his life, and he should have taken Erika up on her plea for him to repent.

Chris, Erika, and I hugged each other.

“We need to call the police,” I said.

“No,” Erika replied.

I looked at Chris, puzzled. I think we were both wondering about the alternative.

Erika showed us.

She kneeled beside Lassiter and put her left hand on his face. She closed her eyes and seemed to be concentrating on her hand. It all seemed very odd, even though I had a rough idea of what she was trying to do. This seemed to be a day for miracles.

It didn’t take long.

After about a minute, I watched as Lassiter’s eyes opened.

“Welcome back,” Erika said.

He blinked and slowly pushed himself up, so he was in a sitting position beside her. For several minutes, he didn’t move. Rather he just stared at Erika.

Finally, he said, “I was dead.”

Erika nodded.

Lassiter looked at me and Chris. “You saw that, right? I didn’t just imagine it?”

Chris nodded. “You were dead.”

“I checked your pulse,” I added.

I felt tense, ready to protect myself or the girls if he attacked. Lassiter had no qualms about killing us all.

He was breathing heavily, and I wondered what he was planning on doing. I had no idea where my cell phone was, but something told me Erika didn’t want the police involved anyhow.

“It was horrible,” he said. “How long was I gone?”

“Only a few minutes.”

“It felt like days. I was somewhere else. I can’t describe it. It was—” He shook his head, not wanting to talk about it.

Sweat dropped from his forehead. He stared at Erika, and after a moment, I could barely hear him when he whispered, “I haven’t believed in God in a long time. I haven’t been to any religious service since I was forced to when my parents took me.” He slowly managed to get to his feet. “You really are God’s daughter.”

Erika nodded and smiled at him.

He shook his head. “All this time… I’ve been so wrong about everything.”

“It’s not too late to change. My father loves you.”

A tear rolled down his left cheek.

“How are you feeling?” Erika asked.

“As fit as I’ve ever felt.”

“Well, then, let’s go back to the church. We have a lot of work to do.”

Before that day, Erika had ten disciples. Now she had eleven.

Chapter 34

It took some time for the crew of the Golden Luna to get their minds around the fact that they’d somehow disappeared into some unknown space and that they were now back. The ship itself seemed unharmed, and it continued to speed along at a little over three thousand miles per hour toward the moon.

However, little things were bothering them. They now needed to apply a course correction because they were heading toward the moon at a different angle than they were originally. The ship was also lower on fuel than it should have been by a substantial amount. It didn’t take long to realize that if they kept with the original plan of circling the moon and taking a shuttle down to the surface, they wouldn’t have enough fuel to return to Earth.

After hours of consultation with Mission Control, the abort decision was made.

The crew wouldn’t be meeting any aliens this trip.

The engineers on Earth uploaded a new trajectory, that would have the Luna make a small correction, aiming it close to the surface of the moon, using it as a slingshot to accelerate the ship, and send it back toward Earth.

The manoeuvre worked perfectly. When they were at the closest point, they were within a hundred miles of the surface, but not close to the alien base, so they didn’t see anything unusual. Regardless, Karen Anderson stared down at the craters below her in wonder. She knew this would be the only time she’d find herself this close to any heavenly body, and she soaked in the experience.

At one point, she felt a twitch in her belly, and she touched it. She thought it was too early to feel the baby kicking, but she wasn’t sure.

She still hadn’t told anybody she was pregnant. It was still completely impossible, but it seemed this was a voyage of impossibilities, so what was one more?

She closed her eyes and prayed, asking the Lord for safe passage home for everyone, including the un-named baby inside her. Even though she knew it was impossible, the idea of having a child was growing on her.

“Mary,” she whispered. I’m going to name you Mary. Somehow Karen knew the baby would be a girl. She couldn’t have explained how she knew that. She just did. It felt right.

On the voyage home, Karen had almost three days of nothingness. She spent part of her time looking out the viewports at the receding moon and the growing homeland. She was surprised how excited she felt at the thought of being back home.

Mostly, though, she read through various media stories trying to get caught up on Earthly events. The past few months had been spent working tirelessly on training. There was no more training to do, and now she wanted nothing more than to be home.

Hopefully with David Abelman.

She hadn’t heard from David since she’d left Earth, and she was surprised to learn from the media that he had joined the troop following Erika Sabo.

The girl who claimed to be the daughter of God.

Karen read as much as she could about the young girl with the huge story. Was it possible?

She didn’t think anybody could want the story to be true more than she did. She’d been a follower of the Lord her whole life. She remembered every detail of her Bat Mitzvah, the ritual, the celebration, the feeling that she was now an adult, even at thirteen, responsible for her own understanding of Jewish tradition, laws, ethics, and certainly for her own actions.

She took that rite of passage seriously, and her spirituality had always been the most important part of herself. Karen needed that in a partner, and she’d not found it with David. Now, though…

Karen scanned through the various photos of Erika that David had published in newspapers and magazines. There was an honesty about the pictures that captivated her.

The girl, though, not so much.

While surfing through the information she could find, she found herself on the Church of Saboism website, www.ErikaSabo.god and stared at the image of the girl looking back at her.

Sabo was smiling brightly, her eyes dark pools and captivating. She overflowed with charisma and confidence, and that alone probably explained part of her success in establishing her new so-called religion.

Across the top of the screen was a series of options for her to choose. Not surprisingly the first was labelled Donate.

“No thank you.”

Other buttons were My Story, 5-Minute Sermons, Photo Gallery, Upcoming Events, and Contact.

Karen clicked on 5-Minute Sermons and a list of choices popped up. She scrolled down them and was surprised to find at least a hundred of the mini-sermons.

“Busy girl.”

One title caught her eye: Saboism for the Young at Heart. On a whim, she clicked on it. She had the choice of audio, text, or full video. She chose the video and the monitor flexed to bring Erika Sabo into full focus. Her voice was strong and clear.

Whenever I speak to an audience at a high school or any other event for young people, I’m struck by the passion and the yearning everybody listening brings forward. But, there’s always one overriding sentiment that hangs in the air: WIIFM?

WIIFM is an acronym my mother taught me a long time ago, and it’s perfect for the youth of today. It stands for What’s In It For Me?

That sounds like a horribly selfish thought, doesn’t it? But that’s not the way I see it. I see young people who have a million options in front of them. I see teenagers who have immense choice for a future career and for a future family. I see youth who want change in our horrible political arena, who want to enjoy life and to bring the best things about humanity to the fore.

I see our best generation, a generation of people who don’t take shit from anybody, who calls it like it is, and who isn’t afraid to walk away from anything that wastes their precious time.

So, if you have that mindset, why should you listen to me? After all, until a few months ago you never heard of me. Some people believe who I am, and others just want me to go crawl back under whatever rock I emerged from.

If you’re the kind of person with a thousand choices ahead of you, with the future waiting for you, with no time to waste on bullshit, you might look at me and ask: What’s in it for me?

To be clear, I’m not only talking about those of you under the age of twenty. Anybody can be young. It’s a matter of how you think, not how creaky your bones are!

People with old thinking are caught up in their lives. They don’t like to change. Anything! They don’t like to change the TV shows they watch, they don’t like to change the roast chicken they eat every damned Sunday, and they don’t like to change their religious views. Hell, I’m not sure they even like to change their underwear.

I’m not talking to those people. That would be a waste of my time.

Change is for the young, and the young at heart, who are willing to look at new information and grow with it. I want you to fight for yourself! Don’t listen to your parents or your grandparents, because they’re stuck in an age that no longer exists. You know that. Since you heard that the daughter of God Himself has come to Earth, you know that nothing will ever be the same.

That’s just a fact.

Fight. Don’t accept the way things have always been!

On the screen, Erika Sabo stopped to let her viewers absorb what she’d said so far. Karen wondered how much of her promised five minutes had been used so far.

So, why Saboism? Why believe me?

Why not stick with your parents’ Judaism?

In the Bible, early on, Jacob had a dream about a staircase leading up to Heaven. When he awoke, he was troubled, unsure what he should learn from the dream. It was clearly a prophetic vision, and at first he didn’t want to know what it meant.

We know. They taught it to you in school, right?

The dream showed Jacob that he had the right and the obligation to lead the Chosen People, the people of Israel, the Jewish nation. My father even changed his name to Israel, as a constant reminder of what he was to do.

Let’s take a quick detour, back even earlier in time, to Adam and Eve. In this, the first human drama in the Bible, we find that sin entered the world. The serpent tempted our first people, and they chose to take a different path than they should have. They chose to eat from the tree of knowledge of good and evil.

(That’s quite a name for a tree. My Father always had a good sense of humor.)

Since that day, sin has been passed down through every human generation. You, yes you, carry sin within you.

I am God’s daughter. I say that proudly and clearly. I am here to show you how to cast your own sins away, so you can enter the Kingdom of Heaven. By following me, you enter into a loving relationship with my Father, and you can find your way to eternal peace.

I am the new stairway to heaven.

So, WIIFM? Eternal life. Nobody else is going to promise you that.

Karen Anderson closed her browser and then closed her eyes. She needed sleep, but she doubted it would come for her.

On a whim, she opened her email program and typed a name she hadn’t typed for many months: David Abelman. She needed to warn him. This wasn’t the daughter of God. Whoever she was, she was sent by Satan. David needed to get away from her. She wrote a pleading email, warning him to escape while he could.

After she hit Send, she lay down and once more closed her eyes. She wasn’t expecting a good sleep.

Chapter 35

That email was delivered, and I saw it later that day. I stared at it in disbelief, almost starting to laugh, which I probably would have done six months earlier.

I was also puzzled. Karen was the most religious person I’d ever known, and I would have thought she’d be both amazed and thrilled to know the long-promised Messiah was here.

Of course, I emailed her back almost immediately, telling her some of the things I’d seen Erika do.

The Golden Luna reunited with the Skywheel a couple days later, and it was another month before she caught a shuttle back to Earth.

I was watching her travels from afar, wondering what she was thinking. She didn’t answer my email, which could mean she was still on a different wavelength than me, or it could mean she didn’t think about me at all, or maybe she was too busy with the logistics of whatever she had to do while finding her way back home.

Regardless, all I knew is that her silence felt deafening. I wanted her back. The more I thought about her, the more I wanted her back not just on Earth, but back with me.

We’d had a wonderful relationship together, except for when we were arguing about religion. Now, it felt like we would be on the same side of that discussion, and things would be perfect for us.

Unless we’d changed places, and it was her who was going to argue against Saboism.

Maybe we would work through that, but damn it, I wanted her by my side, working with Erika, not against her.

I imagined Karen and I travelling to spread Erika’s word. Hell, that was probably silly since Erika only travelled a short distance. She spread her word on the internet, through her website, her social media connections, her YouTube channel and, of course, media interviews.

Old style of travel wasn’t important. Communication was.

Regardless, I liked the romantic notion of Karen and I travelling to spread the word. In real life, that might mean a lot of typing on keyboards, but we’d put our heads together to work as a team, single-minded.

No idea if that was in the cards or not.

What was she thinking?

I really missed hearing her voice.

****

Finally, I saw a clip of her on CNN.com as she climbed out of the shuttle and waved to the camera. She spent another three days with NASA, debriefing whatever it was she could tell them about the mission. It seemed to me there wasn’t much she could say, since their craft had zipped around the moon without any sign of the aliens.

Like everyone else, I wondered what they were there for, but it seemed it would be some time before we got any answers. So far, they remained a mystery.

I’d left emails for Karen, along with several voicemails on her phone.

Finally, I woke on a warm summer morning and found a cryptic text from her: On my way to you. Hope I’m welcome.

I immediately texted back: Wonderful news. I can’t wait to see you!

I added the address of the church where she’d be able to find me. A couple hours later she texted back a happy face.

That day, I was as nervous as I had been in high school before asking a girl to the prom.

It was Tuesday, and Erika didn’t have any media interviews planned or anything else I needed to photograph. I ate breakfast and found her in the main part of the church, sitting in a pew. She was praying.

When she opened her eyes, she turned her head to look right at me. As usual, her ability to detect what was going on around her continued to surprise me. She smiled and waved me over.

“Good morning, David.”

I nodded. “Morning.”

“I won’t need you today. You take care of her.”

With anybody else, I’d be shocked and wonder how she could possibly know what was on my mind. With Erika, that happened all the time. Disconcerting, but no longer surprising.

“I’ve missed Karen.”

“I know. She’s a good woman. Go be with her.”

A rush of gratitude fell over me, and I pulled Erika to me and gave her a hug.

“I won’t be long.”

“I know.”

****

I was waiting outside when she arrived. It was a warm sunny day, and I had to squint to see her shiny VW bug. She climbed out and a wide smile grew on her face. That was a huge sense of relief.

We ran to each other and fell into each other’s arms, as if we’d never been apart. I held her tightly, and then we kissed, a long passionate kiss that told each of us how much we’d missed the other.

I knew tears were falling down my cheeks, but I didn’t care. All that mattered was having Karen back.

Her hand held mine, and I didn’t want to ever let it go again.

When we were finally able to pull apart, I said, “I’ve missed you more than I can ever say.”

She nodded. “Me too.”

“Let’s go sit. I want to hear all about your flight.”

She let me lead her inside, and I took her to a small conference room we used for some of our planning. It had a couple of large stained-glass windows that let in a lot of light.

We sat on a couch. There were several soft chairs scattered around, but I wanted to be right next to her.

“I kept checking the news about you, wondering how things were going. It’s still hard to believe you went to the moon.”

“Bit of a wasted trip, though. Still, nobody knows what happened to us.”

“Erika Sabo knows,” I said. “She’s not talking about it, though. I’m just glad you came back safely.”

Karen licked her lips, and I realized she might be thirsty. There was a refrigerator at the back of the room, so I got us two bottles of water.

“It’s so weird. We didn’t feel the disappearance at all. We didn’t know anything happened until the computers started sending out alarms.”

I took a drink of water.

“You wanted to warn me about Erika.”

“David, there’s no reason to believe her story. God’s daughter? Really?”

“You need to meet her. She is who she says she is.”

“How can you possibly know that?”

How to answer? How could I tell her how the world was before? Before I went back in time and murdered the teenaged Jesus. How could I tell her that I stared into his eyes before I killed him and that Erika wore those same eyes now? How could she believe she was the only person on Earth besides me who knew exactly what happened?

Even forgetting that, though, surely she had to believe Erika was supernatural when she could make the moon disappear. And Karen herself, for that matter.

“I just know. I think it’ll take a while for me to explain.”

“You can start now, can’t you?”

I shook my head and held tightly onto her hand. I couldn’t lose her again.

“Why don’t you believe her?” I asked. “You’re a true follower of scripture, the most focused Jew I know.”

She shook her head as if I were an idiot. “It’s because of the Bible.”

“What do you mean?”

“I believe the Bible is the direct word of God.”

I nodded. Although she hadn’t been so blunt before, I certainly wasn’t surprised she felt that way.

It occurred to me that I didn’t know very much about the Bible. Given recent events, I planned to change that. I needed to read Erika’s history.

“There are a lot of prophesies scattered throughout the Bible,” Karen said. “Lots in the book of Isaiah, but in many other places, too. A very large amount of the book is dedicated to prophets.”

“Okay, how does that matter now?”

“There were lots of prophesies about the Messiah. Some are hard to interpret, but if you’re patient, you can see the whole life of the Messiah laid out in pieces, from his birth through his life as a teacher, and finally to his death by crucifixion.”

I was silent. I was pretty sure I knew where Karen was going with her comments.

“You see, some of the prophesies are much clearer, though. Three items in particular.

“First, the Messiah would be male.

“Second, he would be born in Bethlehem. That’s a town nobody’s ever heard of, in Israel.

“And third, his mother would be a virgin.”

The facts as she laid them out were familiar, although I didn’t know the Bible foretold Jesus’s birth in that detail.

Karen continued, “I believe the Bible. These facts are unquestionably true. So, when I look at Erika Sabo, she is not male. Her official biography on her website makes it clear she was born in Aynsville, New York. And, though I haven’t seen her comment on this, I have very large doubts that her mother was a virgin.”

She frowned. “You see, there’s no way Erika Sabo could be the Messiah. I don’t know what or who she really is, but she can’t be the daughter of God.”

****

It took a moment for me to take in Karen’s words. I tried to think of some way to make her change her thinking. Anything but the truth.

I wanted to tell her to trust me, but that wasn’t going to fly. There was only one thing to do. I had to tell her what really happened.

“The thing is… all you talked about happened,” I said.

“I think I’d know.”

“Please. Let me tell you what I know. It’s going to be very hard for you to believe, but I promise you on every good thing we ever had that it’s the truth.”

She didn’t react, but she seemed to relax a bit. Maybe she knew this was going to take a while.

“I’m not sure how to start. Maybe think of a parallel universe or something, a place where things are very close to our own universe, but where some things were different. Imagine in that universe a child was born in Bethlehem, exactly as you stated, 2,000 years ago. That child was named Jesus, and he was the Son of God.”

Karen was listening, but she wasn’t believing it. Of course not. She would have known.

“That child grew up to be the most famous person in history. A new religion grew from a dozen disciples to billions of followers around the world. In that alternate universe, you were a Christian, along with so many other Americans. I wasn’t.”

I felt my face redden with shame at that admission, which was odd because it was the least of all my sins.

I won’t re-tell the whole story here. You’ve read it. But over the next two hours, I talked about how my grandmother had died and left me the gift of Shelljah, allowing me to travel back through my previous lives, back to when my soul inhabited a body owned by Adlai. I talked about the journey to Galilee and finally meeting Jesus and his family.

As I recited the story, I realized every step of the journey had been etched into my soul.

I cried out as I told Karen the horrible thing I’d done: crushed the teenaged Messiah with a rock, snuffing the life out of him.

I couldn’t help myself as I finished the story of his death. I fell into her, full of shame and horrible guilt, but at the same time knowing I’d been acting with good intentions that were horribly wrong.

Tears fell down my cheeks, and I had to stop talking, while I cried a long time. Nobody in the world knew my story other than Erika, and she only knew because she lived through it, too. I hadn’t mentioned anything to anybody, because there was nobody I could talk to. It occurred to me then that Karen was the only true friend I’d ever had. She was the only person to whom I could tell the truth.

Finally, I lifted my head and was able to finish the story. I told her about coming back to the present day, which was almost the same as the time I’d left but oddly different. There was no Christianity, and now Erika Sabo had returned. Not as the first appearance of the Messiah, but as the second.

“I don’t think the Bible mentioned her second coming,” I finished.

By this time, she’d been listening to my whole story, and she hadn’t said a word, but she’d continued to hold onto my hand the entire time. I was grateful for that.

When she spoke, her voice was soft and tender. “What a horrible thing,” she said. “I can’t imagine holding that inside yourself.”

She pulled me to her and held me close. I closed my eyes and gave thanks to God and Erika, for having Karen listen to my story.

****

Some time passed. I don’t know how much, even when I think back and try to recreate the discussion in my mind. I remember at some point that I regained some semblance of sanity and locked eyes with Karen. I didn’t know what to expect for the long-term, but for now, she believed me. That was the first thing I needed.

“I’d like you to meet Erika,” I said.

She nodded. “I’d like that very much.”

I took her hand and we walked through the church to the back office, where I suspected we’d find Erika. When we walked in, she looked up from whatever she was working on and smiled. She hurried over to meet us and held out her hand to Karen.

“It’s good to finally meet you,” she said.

If Karen was surprised at the wording, she didn’t show it. She took Erika’s hand and held it. “I can’t believe I’m meeting you.”

Erika shrugged. “I know, but don’t worry. Everything will work out.”

They were still holding hands. Erika finally broke that and hugged Karen. Karen seemed shocked, and I knew she was overwhelmed. How often in your life does something so extraordinary happen as meeting the daughter of the creator of the universe?

“Why are you here?” I could barely hear Karen, her voice almost a whisper.

“What do you mean?”

“You were here before.” She looked over at me, as if asking for permission to talk. I nodded. “You were here 2,000 years ago, and you… died.”

“Yes.”

“Why are you back now? Are you here to punish us?”

“Punish? No, quite the opposite. I’m here because humanity is spreading beyond Earth. You are one of the people closest to that. It’s an amazing time for the world, and I want to help everybody gain a stronger tie to the Lord. Everyone needs that, and it’s what my father wants.”

“Are you staying forever?”

Erika pulled back from Karen, and then it was her turn to look over at me. She hesitated. At the time I had no idea why. I found out a month later.

Erika pursed her lips, and for once she seemed reluctant to speak. I’d never seen her challenged to find the right words before.

“Nothing is forever on Earth, only in Heaven.”

“Can I help you?”

“You bet! That’s why you’re here.”

Karen bowed her head. “I actually came because I wanted to warn David to stay away from you. I thought—”

“I know.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I understand. I forgive you for what you thought.”

Karen raised her face to look at Erika. They stared at each other for an uncomfortably long period of time. It was like they were in telepathic communication.

“You need to know one other thing,” Erika finally said. She looked at me then.

Karen nodded. “What?”

“It’s about the baby you carry.”

“Excuse me?” I couldn’t help interrupting. Baby? What the hell?

I stared at Karen’s belly, but nothing looked unusual. If she was pregnant, she wasn’t far along. I felt a sinking feeling, though.

“How did you know?” asked Karen.

“There’s little I don’t know if I want to. But, in this case, you had a little bit of help.”

Erika turned to speak to me. “You don’t need to be jealous. Karen was not with another man.”

“Then how could she be pregnant?”

“The Holy Spirit visited her.”

She turned back to Karen. “You were not with another man, correct?”

Karen nodded.

“When the baby is born, you must name her Mary. When you get curious enough, you should take a DNA test, and you’ll discover that the baby’s father is David.”

Ha-what?

“How can that be?” I blurted out. “I haven’t seen Karen in a year.”

“Nevertheless, you are the father. Biologically speaking. You can thank God in your prayers tonight.”

I didn’t know how to react. I stared at Karen as if she were some weird animal in an exotic zoo.

Fortunately, she wasn’t as freaked out as I was. She smiled at me, that huge grin I remember so well, and that made me realize how much I loved her.

I always have.

We kissed and hugged and somehow started to laugh.

By the time we separated and looked around, Erika was gone.

But now she had her twelfth disciple. I was pretty sure that would be it. Her circle was complete.

Chapter 36

The summer seemed to go by in a flash. We were all busy doing whatever we could to get Erika’s voice in front of as many people as possible.

As time went on, I began to realize she had a very clear vision with the twelve she chose as her disciples. Every one of us fit a different niche. We had different stories, different audiences, different voices, all which seemed to combine to have the widest possible reach.

In my case, I’d already had an audience of people who liked my photographs. I wouldn’t go as far as to call them fans, but there were certainly thousands of people who looked for my work and sought out magazines with my photos on the cover. Tens of thousands more at least recognized my name.

Karen had a similar following, not just for her recent fame as an astronaut, but she had a reasonable number of people who knew the work she’d done before.

Chris Spinnie may not have had a built-in platform before meeting Erika, but the story she told of her life as a junkie and how she turned her entire purpose around resonated with a group of people none of the rest of us could reach.

Even Colonel Lassiter had an underground fame and people who would listen to him.

The twelve of us were unique but fit together to cover the vast number of people who still hadn’t paid attention to what Erika Sabo had to say.

During that lightning-fast summer, something really unusual happened.

When Karen returned from her flight to the moon, unsuccessful in the goal of seeking out the aliens on the far side, everyone expected NASA to quickly put another mission together to follow in the Luna’s flight path.

A week followed, and then a month, and we were soon into the dog days of summer. It occurred to me then that I hadn’t heard a single word about a follow-up flight. Neither had Karen.

When I mentioned this to anybody, I got the oddest reply. It was always something like this:

“Hey, have you heard any news about another trip to the moon?”

“The moon?”

“You know, to find the aliens?”

Usually at this point, whoever I was talking to would look at me with a puzzled expression on their face. Finally, they’d remember. “Oh, right, I think I remember something about aliens. On the moon? Sure, that’s right. Whatever happened with that?”

Before I could answer, though, the person would change the subject.

At first, I thought I was talking to maybe the only few people in the world who weren’t mesmerized by the whole thing. I mean, aliens on the moon?

It was the news story of a generation. Of course, Erika making that same moon vanish was the story of a millennia.

I kept asking. Whoever I’d meet, I’d hear the same thing. They’d have a blank expression, and then they’d eventually recall something vague but no details.

Nobody really remembered the aliens. Nobody really remembered the flight. They remembered Karen as an astronaut on the Skywheel, but they couldn’t say what she was up there for.

In my work talking about Erika, I had occasion to be part of interviews for the BBC in England as well as a half-dozen other countries. I took the opportunity to ask every person I encountered.

It seemed like the whole planet had collective amnesia. Nobody remembered the aliens. Not even NASA. It turned out they were concentrating on unmanned missions to the far planets, because there might be the building blocks of life out in those faraway reaches.

Ignoring the known life, right next door.

I only knew of three people who clearly remembered the mission to find the aliens: me, Karen, and of course, Erika.

Erika remembered it, but she wouldn’t talk to me about it. When I asked her, her face would cloud over. It was a subject she clearly didn’t want to discuss.

Why?

And how could that collective amnesia happen?

There seemed to be only two possible choices.

Either Erika had clouded everyone’s memories, or the aliens had.

I didn’t know which alternative was scarier, but I didn’t like either one.

****

During that summer, I reignited my love for Karen Anderson. We spent every spare minute together, talking, catching up on the time we missed, making love, trying to make sense of the weird set of circumstances that had brought us back together.

I could see the baby starting to poke her way around Karen’s belly, and by the end of the summer, it was clear to anybody who had any sense of their surroundings that Karen was pregnant.

We pretended there was nothing unusual about the baby, and really, nobody ever questioned things. We were a couple in every sense of the word, devoted to each other, and even though we hadn’t exactly committed to marriage, that was a clear event in our future as well.

So we thought.

Also through the latter part of the summer, Erika spent less time in public, more time in her own space. I know she liked to spend her private time praying and writing her sermons, but those sermons showed up on her website less and less frequently.

By the time she’d posted 300 of her 5-minute sermons, I think she was running out of steam. Somehow she’d managed to avoid duplication, so 300 different topics was an extensive and broad discussion of her thoughts.

It all boiled down to two things: people needed to love God, and they needed to love each other.

Her message wasn’t complex. But the ways she talked to her audiences was laser-focused. She was our rabbi—our teacher—and we could spend the rest of our days re-listening to what she wanted us to learn.

I know one thing bothered her a lot. For the past several months, surveys showed that she was no longer gaining large numbers of new converts. Estimates were around a hundred million Saboites.

She wanted to reach all ten billion people on the planet, but she was stuck at 1% of that number.

I remembered back before I murdered Jesus, that in the parallel universe where he thrived, there were 2.2 billion Christians.

Why couldn’t Erika get the same followers?

I think she knew, but nobody else knew. Erika was a smart girl, and she was always miles ahead of us in her thinking.

On the first day of autumn, she called her twelve disciples together and said she wanted to have a nice dinner with us all. We were thrilled with that idea, because it seemed like she’d been more and more distant from us. We all treated this as a reason to celebrate.

It was a warm evening, in the mid-seventies, and we collected at Gavin’s Choice, a small restaurant on the outskirts of Aynsville. Erika had arranged for us to have the entire restaurant, not that many others could have been seated anyhow. The place only had seating for about twenty people.

Gavin’s Choice was known for seafood, and when Erika ordered grilled tilapia, we all jumped on the bandwagon and called out the same dish.

Tilapia.

A vision of my trip living back in Galilee in the time of Jesus came over me. We had musht, the local fish from the Jordan river. Today, we call that fish tilapia.

I turned to Erika, “Are you remembering something?”

She smiled and playfully punched me in the shoulder. So, I don’t know.

What I do know is that the meal was marvelous. We had the fish, a Cobb salad, grilled asparagus, and some lovely red wine.

Lots of laughter, chatter, and praises to God.

I sat next to Erika, and Karen was on my other side. My two favorite people.

It was one of the happiest meals I’d ever had.

When the food was eaten, Erika stood.

“A toast,” she said.

We all raised our glasses, intent on hearing what she wanted to toast.

“It’s been my amazing gift to return to you all. I love each and every one of you, and I want you to always remember you are charged with taking my voice wherever you go.”

She paused and gave us one of her widest smiles.

“Soon, we must part, and you must be my apostles. I need you to tell my story.”

A sudden coldness swept over us. None of us knew what she was talking about.

Erika closed her eyes and then nodded. “One of you knows what must be done.”

She glanced up to the roof, and I knew she was looking for help from God. I don’t think any help came to her, because now she looked frail and afraid. Her eyes watered.

Down the table, I heard Chris. She tried to call to Erika, but her voice was feeble. “Am I the one?”

If Erika heard her, she didn’t answer.

“The only thing that matters is spreading the good word. You all know it. You must help me.

“And now, I toast all of you. Thank you for being my loyal crew.”

Then she glanced at me. We locked eyes, and a tear fell from one of hers. I wanted to hug her, but I was in as much shock as everyone else.

She had just given us some kind of farewell speech.

Erika broke the trance by clinking my glass with hers. That got everybody whispering and clinking their own glasses, albeit quite reluctantly. Nobody wanted to believe Erika was somehow going to leave us.

It was only later that night, when I was drifting off to sleep, that I realized why she’d given me that special look, why she’d drawn attention to me when she said one of us knew what had to be done.

The silence around me seemed to starve me of air, and I sat up in bed. I realized I knew exactly what she meant.

Chapter 37

The next morning, I drove to the airport and booked the earliest flight I could to Minneapolis. The flight left at 11:00 a.m. and landed a little after 1:00 p.m. As we descended, I stared out the window and tried to take in the whole city at one time. It’d been six months since I left there to join Erika. Somehow, it seemed much shorter, and I had to think back to everything that had happened to convince myself it really was that long.

After deplaning, I caught a taxi and headed to my grandmother’s place.

The memory of Ariela Abelman covered me like a warm blanket. The place was still the way she left it. Clean, neat, almost spartan.

I had picked up a six-pack of beer on the way. I popped one now.

“Here’s to you, Grandma!”

The beer went down smoothly. That was something else I hadn’t experienced in six months.

Grandma’s home was dead silent. I resisted the urge to turn on the television or otherwise find music. Ariela deserved the quiet.

The packages she had left me were still on the table. The family tree, the documents, and most importantly the description of Shelljah and how it would allow me to move backward in time. I thought of how ridiculous that sounded the first time I read it, but of course, like everything else Grandma had taught me, it was the truth.

I still didn’t know if my travel back to Galilee had helped or hurt the world. Probably hurt. I’d gone back to murder Jesus for what seemed like perfectly good reasons, but the six million Jews I tried to save ended up all dying along with an extra four million.

How could that be a win?

Christianity was now replaced by Saboism, but there were far fewer converts.

Erika herself seemed to recognize the difficulty in spreading her word. The only consolation was that it took Christianity a few hundred years to fully develop, so maybe my hopes were too extreme.

“I hope you know what you’re doing, Erika.”

Then I thought I heard an answering voice. My grandmother’s voice. I smiled as I could hear her saying, “Of course she knows what she’s doing. She’s God’s daughter, and she speaks for Him, doesn’t she?”

“Yes, she does.”

“Well then. That should be enough.”

Yes, it should.

“I miss you, Grandma. I wish you were still here with me.”

“I’ll always be with you, David.”

I smiled, wishing it was truly her voice. My thoughts would have to suffice for now.

****

Later that day, the doorbell rang. I opened it to see a smiling real estate agent.

She thrust out her hand and I took it to shake. Before she even said a word, I could tell she was full of enthusiasm. That’s good. I wanted to be around positive people right then.

“David, I’m Gwen Singleton. We spoke on the phone earlier.”

I nodded and smiled. “Please come in.”

She rushed past me as if she were late for an appointment. In fact, she was ten minutes early.

“It’s my late grandmother’s place,” I said.

Gwen walked quickly around the kitchen, stopping to stare at the appliances. They were old.

“I’m not interested in replacing them or doing any other upgrades. It’s a sell-as-it-is kind of thing.”

“You’ll definitely get top dollar if you wanted to consider—”

“No.”

She turned to stare at me, and for the first time, I saw her standing still and relaxed. She was about forty years old, white-blond-colored short hair. Pretty, I suppose, but all business.

“I certainly understand.”

“Do you?”

“I—well, I don’t know the exact circumstances, of course, but other clients have been busy and not interested in upgrades. Sometimes, it doesn’t take much, though, to really bring out the character of a place. Just a few touches would—”

“Please stop.” I held out my hand to reinforce my words. She nodded and smiled.

“Of course.”

“I won’t be here. I will sign whatever papers you want me to, to give you sole ability to act on my behalf. I just want the house sold as soon as possible.”

“I can do that.”

I gave Gwen a short tour through the place, which didn’t take long. Then I told her the rest of my plan, including that all proceeds were to be donated to the Founding Church of Saboism. By then, if she was surprised, she no longer showed it.

****

The drive to the airport in my rented car seemed to take forever. Of course, I wasn’t in any hurry. It would be my last visit to Minneapolis, and I wanted to enjoy it.

The midnight flight to New York City landed a little after 2:00 a.m. I retrieved my Camry from the parkade and drove in silence back to Aynsville.

I slept like a dead man and didn’t wake until 10:30 in the morning.

After a short shower, I grabbed a coffee from the main eatery and toasted a bagel.

I couldn’t think of any other reason to delay, so I walked around looking for Erika. I found her in the small garden in the back of the church. She was sitting on a beautiful stone bench. When she saw me, she looked up and forced herself to smile.

“I’ve been expecting you,” she said. Her voice was soft, tinny, almost a ghost.

I sat beside her, and we locked eyes. We both knew why I had come to see her.

“How are you doing?” I asked. Silly question, I know.

“As well as I could be.”

“Any regrets?”

She paused and considered before replying. “I came here to fight Satan, sin, and death. I’ll be rejoining my father after conquering all three, so no, no regrets.”

I leaned over and hugged her. I knew I was stalling. I took a deep breath, and Erika closed her eyes.

My hands found her neck and started to squeeze.

Erika tried to stay still, but she started to shake. Her eyes opened and stared at me.

I squeezed harder and then harder still. She somehow was still able to get a small amount of breath. Finally, she started to panic. All of a sudden she was a flurry of fighting. She hit me and tried to pull away. I didn’t let go, using the panic as a way to gain more strength and squeeze harder still.

Her eyes seemed to bulge out of their sockets.

I hated that it was taking so long and I was making her suffer. She tried to kick me but couldn’t get enough leverage to do anything serious. That’s when she reached out and pushed a thumb into my left eye.

I called out in pain and shook my head. I must have loosened my hold on her, because I heard her gasp. Damn.

Tears flowed down my face. I didn’t know at the time if it was from the pain she’d caused or for the horrible thing I was doing to a woman I loved.

Either way, I wanted this to be over.

Finally, I took a different tactic. I pushed her down rapidly, so she was lying on the bench. Then I grabbed her head and smashed it on the hard rock of the seat. She cried out in pain, but she still fought with her hands and tried to climb away.

The second time her head smashed onto the stone, I heard a loud crack. The third time, the sound was more muted, softer.

Erika stopped fighting.

I smashed her skull one last time.

The whole bench seemed to be covered with her blood, a flood of it. I knew she was dead; I turned to the side and threw up.

The whole thing had felt like it’d taken hours, but I’m sure in reality it’d only been a couple minutes.

A couple of minutes that changed the world.

Saboism had had a great start, but the movement needed more. It needed a martyr.

More importantly, it needed the ladder to heaven that Erika had promised she would be. All humans would be forgiven of their sins and find their way to heaven if they would only believe in Erika Sabo. Her blood was humanity’s route to salvation.

The courtyard was deadly quiet.

I grabbed my phone from my pocket and called 911.

“I just murdered Erika Sabo.”

After I said the words, I was overcome with guilt, and I dropped to the ground, quietly letting my head rest on Erika’s leg. I cried until the police came to take me away.

Epilogue

I’m near the end of my story. I hope putting it down into a logical sequence has helped paint the bigger story.

When I was arrested, I was taken to a jail cell in Albany because of security concerns with holding me in the tiny police station in Aynsville. I was arraigned the following morning and I pleaded guilty immediately. I was assigned a court appointed attorney, because I’d donated every last cent I had to the church.

The trial made international headlines, but it was over quickly. I was the only witness. I told my story, some of what I’ve outlined here, but I downplayed the business about the alternate universe where a religion called Christianity once existed. My lawyer told me I wouldn’t be doing myself any favors with that fairy tale and to stick with my journey with Erika. This book is the first time I’ve told the entire story about that.

I was sentenced to life in prison with no possibility of parole at Leavenworth, which is where I’ve lived for the past two years.

During my time in the Albany jail, the last of Erika’s miracles happened.

She appeared in my cell.

At first, I thought my mind was destroyed from the stress of the murder. I’d been depressed and despondent, wondering how I could have murdered the daughter of God.

Why was I even allowed to do it? Why didn’t Erika (or God) stop me?

I had the same question about when I murdered Jesus, and every once in a while, I’d have this creeping feeling run through me that maybe this whole damned thing was a hallucination and that I was as crazy as a shithouse rat.

I murdered Erika on a Friday. The other disciples have started calling this Good Friday, by which I was both surprised and delighted. It’s catching on.

She appeared to me on the following Sunday morning. I woke with bleary eyes, my mouth dry, and a long stretch of thousands of similar days yet to come.

“Hello, David.”

I jumped at her voice, more so when I saw her standing in front of my cot.

“Erika?”

It made no sense that she was there. She was dead. That didn’t matter. I rushed to her and held her close, needing to prove to myself that she wasn’t a ghost. She was real, and I wanted to never ever let her go.

After a few moments standing there, I could feel her reluctantly separating from me.

“You did good,” she said. “I am on my way back to my father now. You helped to finish my mission.”

“But, you’re not dead anymore. You can stay here. We still need you to teach us.”

“No, you don’t need me anymore. You have an archive of 301 of my 5-minute sermons. That’s all I have to teach, and my loyal apostles will spread the word from here. We’ve allowed millions of people to find their way to Heaven and taught them to enter a relationship with our Lord. That’s been quite an achievement.”

That wasn’t what I wanted to hear, but it seemed that it was the best I was going to get.

“How can I help spread your word? I’ll be in prison the rest of my life.”

“You’ll find a way.”

With that, she kissed my cheek, squeezed my hand, and said, “Farewell, my friend.”

She disappeared.

****

Erika Sabo visited all twelve of her disciples before ascending to Heaven. Most of them have told their version of the story one way or another.

After she left, I realized she’d said there were 301 of her sermons, not 300.

It took me three months before I was given the privilege of watching the sermon she dropped into her library after her death. It talked about joining her in Heaven and summarized that we all need to love God and love each other. It was a farewell video but with an upbeat message: You too can live forever.

Since the murder, Erika’s followers have spread far and wide. They use a simple symbol of a concrete bench, replacing the cross used by Christianity. I like the simplicity of it:

My prison life has been fairly uneventful. Karen Anderson visits me occasionally, and she has brought our daughter, Mary, to see me several times. I don’t know if that’s a good thing or not. Would it be better if she didn’t know her father was in prison for murder?

I never did understand why Erika gave Karen the pregnancy, let alone why she chose me to be Mary’s father. I have a feeling this is a very special child, but only time will tell.

There is one other loose end in my story. The aliens on the moon. Why are they there? Why can’t most people seem to even remember their existence? And what are they waiting for?

I don’t have any answers, but I have a feeling they are important questions.

See you on the other side.

THE END (For now)

Glossary

Jesus (aka Jesus Christ): The first incarnation of Erika Sabo. He lived about 2,000 years ago, and prior to the events of this book, he lived in several towns now part of Israel: Bethlehem, Nazareth, Jerusalem, among others. He stated he was the Son of God, and preached by using parables that would appeal to the common person. He also taught that people should love one another without exception. He was crucified when in his early thirties, but his followers continued to speak his lessons, eventually forming a vast world-wide religion.

Christianity: The religion that was based on the teachings of Jesus Christ. Prior to the events of this book, more than 2.2 billion people professed to follow this religion.

Christmas: A holiday on December 25 each year, that represented the birth of Jesus. (His real birthday was undetermined.) This is close in timing to Winterday, which we celebrate on December 15.

Mary: The mother of Jesus Christ. She stated that she was a virgin when she became pregnant with the son of God.

Joseph: The father of Jesus Christ. He was originally very upset when he discovered Mary was pregnant (since they had not had sexual relations). However, an angel appeared to him and explained that Mary had indeed been impregnated by the Lord. He was a carpenter and became Jesus’s earthly father until he died at a young age.

The Bible: In the alternate world, The Bible had two parts. The earlier was called the Old Testament and was the primary religious source for Jewish people. This was also the first half of the Christian story. The second part was called the New Testament and was the story of Jesus’s life and death. This section was excised when I murdered Jesus, so the current Bible consists only of the Old Testament (although it is not called that, of course).

Afterword (by the real author)

When I first thought about writing this novel, I wanted it to be a book that Christian believers and non-believers alike would love. That balance presented a challenge that grabbed me and ensured I was always on my toes.

I couldn’t have written The Murder of Jesus Christ without help, and I’d like to acknowledge some of the folks who helped me along the way.

In chapter 27, Erika Sabo pulls off her most incredible feat, making the moon disappear. In my first draft I included details of what I thought that would do to Earth, but I wasn’t positive I was right. I contacted Dr. Adiv Paradise at the University of Toronto. He in turn pulled in Professor Diana Valencia (also from the University of Toronto) and J.J. Zanazzi, a brilliant grad student at Cornell University who works on tidal effects on exoplanets.

They provided a detailed exploration of my question which was astonishing, thoughtful, and surprising. Not only did they show I was completely off base with my own assumptions, they brought up many, many details that could never have occurred to me. Some of their work found its way into the final version, and I am grateful to them all.

On the religion side of things, I also have two special people to thank.

Pastor Darrell Bierman (of River City Church in Cambridge, Ontario) and Pastor Roy Robbins (of Christ Lutheran Church in Chino, California) both listened intently to my original thoughts for the novel, and both strongly encouraged me to write it down. During the planning phase, I asked many, many questions of both, and both were kind enough to provide thoughtful answers to them. In addition, I’ve listened to Darrell give hundreds of sermons, all which collectively informed my views.

It’s odd to list a bibliography in works of fiction, but in this case I thought it might be useful for me to list some of the books I read as part of my research. You may or may not be interested in them, but either way, it’ll give you a sense of where some of my background information came from.

The Holy Bible, NLT (New Living Translation Version), Biblica Publications, 1996.

BibleGateway.com, a vital reference allowing you to instantly locate anything in the Bible.

The Bible for Dummies, Jeffrey Geoghegan and Michael Homan, John Wiley and Sons, 2003.

Asimov’s Guide to the Bible, Isaac Asimov, Doubleday, 1968. A massive two-volume analysis of historical and cultural aspects of the Bible.

The Dead Sea Scrolls, Life Books, 2017.

Finding Jesus, by David Gibson and Michael McKinley, St. Martins’ Press, 2015. A series of discussions on some of the artifacts found by archeologists from Jesus’s era.

Jesus and the Apostles, National Geographic Books, 2014.

Jesus and the Origins of Christianity, National Geographic Books, 2017.

Killing Jesus, by Bill O’Reilly and Martin Dugard, St. Martin’s Press, 2013. This is a detailed account of Jesus’s life and death.

The Life of Jesus, Time Life Books, 2017.

The Real Jesus, National Geographic Magazine, December 2017.

The Shack, by Wm. Paul Young, Windblown Media, 2007. This is the only work of fiction on this list. This book helped show me how a novel could appeal to all readers.

The Story, Zondervan Publications. This is an easy-to-read summary of the main story of the Bible.

The Story: Getting to the Heart of God’s Story, Randy Frazee, Zondervan Publications. This is the participant’s guide to the main book. Frazee also has created a series of videos that help clarify the words of the Bible.

All the people and sources above are experts in their fields, but at the end of the day, I had to decide what found its way into the book. In some cases, I simplified concepts, and I totally ignored others that would have overcomplicated what I was aiming for. Any omissions or errors in the novel are my own, not the people advising me.

One other point I want to make. I didn’t intend to create a detailed alternative world that would exist without Jesus having preached 2,000 years ago. I took many, many shortcuts, assuming much of the world would remain the same. This is clearly not accurate, but I wasn’t aiming for that. I wanted to tell a good story, not describe a complete alternate history. I’ll leave that to another writer with different interests than me.

It’s no exaggeration to say I couldn’t have written this novel without the encouragement and feedback from my number one fan, my beautiful and thoughtful wife, Fatima Monteiro.

Thanks are due to my pre-readers who helped iron out errors: Lisa Rath, David Solow, Tod Clark, David M. Wilson, and Michael Bailey. I am very grateful.

It was fabulous to get the Bad Moon Books team together again. My sincere gratitude to Roy Robbins, Cesar Puch, and Jamie La Chance. And, I can’t miss thanking Tomislav Tikulin for the amazing cover!

And, finally, thank you to everybody who picked up this book and read it. Whatever your religious views might be, I hope you found something in the novel to enjoy.

John R. Little

Cemetery Dance Publications

Be sure to visit CemeteryDance.com for more information about all of our great horror and suspense eBooks, along with our collectible signed Limited Edition hardcovers and our award-winning magazine.

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Copyright

Cemetery Dance Publications

Baltimore, MD

2020

Copyright © 2020 by John R. Little

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

Cemetery Dance Publications

132-B Industry Lane, Unit #7

Forest Hill, MD 21050

http://www.cemeterydance.com

The characters and events in this book are fictitious.

Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

ISBN-13: 978-1-58767-782-3

Front Cover Artwork © 2020 by Tomislav Tikulin

Front Cover Design © 2020 by Lynne Hansen

Digital Design by Dan Hocker

Content

John R. Little
THE MURDER OF JESUS CHRIST

Author’s Note

Prologue

Part 1—In the Beginning

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Part 2—The Sixth Commandment

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Part 3—In His Image

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Part 4—The Shadow of Death

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Epilogue

Glossary

Afterword (by the real author)

Cemetery Dance Publications

Copyright