The burn rushes through the nylon-polyester blend as soon as his knees hit the sand. The sensation ignites bursts of memories. Random flashes from barefoot summers, chasing birds by the river, hopping in tepid water to soothe scorched soles. The scalding metal pushing under his chin cuts off the mental trip. A nervous tremor shaking the blade nicks a sliver of skin. In the pummelling heat, these red drops run down his throat cool as river drying off him.
Lance had heard a thousand stories about dying. Some he’d gotten firsthand. He knew whenever the brain had time for a final bit of fireworks, it generally delivered.
Death itself had never scared him. He’d figured out early there was little chance of a better future, and that kind of life wasn’t much to lose. In a way, he had come here to find an early exit and a quick release. Maybe getting your head chopped up beat going insane through decades of miserable survival.
Nobody would miss him. Nothing would remain of him. Just an account left unclaimed for the bank to eventually syphon off. A generic letter announcing his demise would be sent to whatever uncaring kin they could find. Somewhere, a bit of data would be added to the black box decision-makers pretended to look into before deciding on a whim.
Whether it could have been different is irrelevant: too late to worry about it now. That’s where the road ends. At least it’s not where he was born, which has to count for something. And this desolate ocean of sand makes for a stunning backdrop to his demise. “Entombed in the cradle of civilisation” sure sounds better than “left to rot in the middle of nowhere”. He chortles, earning himself another notch and more refreshing blood dripping down.
Corporal Lance Gulden had been captured a week before. Routine reckon mission compromised by a local interpreter. His convoy fell in a trap. All it took was a couple armoured units, ten fighters manning half as many rocket launchers, and about 36 seconds. Wasn’t that long ago the home country doled out weapons and personnel like candy. Back then, such a half-baked squad got crushed faster than week-old pastry. These days, eight soldiers patrolling a couple beefed-up cruisers were all the mighty empire could spare.
He had only survived because the rocket blast had shot him clear out the window without it shearing his head off, somehow. Given what they planned to do with it now, it seemed like a big ironic waste of a miracle.
Kneeling here, waiting for a kid to slit his throat while another kid films the whole scene, he gets dizzy. The executioner’s litany of insults is starting to sound strangely melodious. The kid’s grip tightens on the knife, biting deeper into his neck. The pressure is mounting and there can’t —
ONLY I MAY
— the voice booms everywhere around and deep within. It rumbles his ribcage, buzzes his skin all over. A fine mist suddenly cools his necks. Then nothing. The best kind of nothing: the blade seems gone. His captor’s shadow moves: the kid brings his hand up to look at it. It’s so hot and everything makes so little sense, it takes Lance several seconds to realise the machete’s seemingly been sprayed out of existence.
For an instant, the kid filming the scene looks about to check the footage. Really make sure he’s just seen his buddy’s knife sublime in the blink of an eye. The realisation slowly snakes out of his body, popping out as a concise statement on the situation: “Uh?”.
Gulden’s training or simple survival instincts kick in: he jumps on his feet to sock the thwarted executioner in the throat, then lunges for the videographer’s rifle. They’re both too stunned to react.
Rifle in hand, Lance checks them for weapons and notices the one holding the knife also lost his rifle. Now facing the safer side of the barrel, he sits down a few paces away, breathing hard. They all sit in silence, staring blankly ahead, minds furiously trying to make sense of the event.
Once his breath and heartbeat slow down, Gulden gestures for the keys to the beat-up truck they drove in. The camera kid throws them his way, standing up before Gulden even orders him to. His buddy follows. Jail beats certain death.
The nearest base belongs to nominal allies he would normally avoid, but it would be suicide to drive several days alone with two prisoners back to his own. Even ones subdued and shocked enough to keep mumbling the same four syllables over and over again. He doesn’t need a translator to know what that’s about.
Three hours later, their truck gets picked up by a patrol a few clicks away from the allied military outpost. They survive the encounter, which should count as a second miracle: troops around here rarely hesitate to shoot first and shrug later. But the lead officer on patrol picks up on the corporal’s uniform from afar, then speaks enough English to be intrigued by Lance’s story. They make it inside.
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It only takes the base’s commanding officer a few minutes to figure out corporal Gulden has been driven insane by dehydration and near-death stress. Lance is too tired to spare more than a few sentences, and doesn’t care whether they believe him. The major grudgingly takes the camera, vaguely pretending his team will review the footage. He looks relieved when Lance walks out of his office.
They put him in a holding cell significantly more comfortable than the packed pen his captors get thrown in.
***
We’re really all actors. When enough people pressure you to play a part, you give in. When they rave about your performance no matter how inadequate you find it, you start believing.
The bells shaking up Broadway all the way from the West 65th mormon temple to the B’nai Jeshurun congregation 25 blocks up sound almost as overwhelming as the Voice. The procession is taking hours to cross these two kilometres, pushing carefully through a dense crowd. A sea of hand-drawn signs froths around them, many messages displaying rows of crosses, stars and other symbols all neatly nestled into each other.
They all want to get near him. Believers of old faiths and converts to new idols alike, millions rush in to see him. For some he is a chosen one, for others a prophet. Even those seeing only a lucky random winner can’t help envying him. Lance Gulden! The First Saved!
It had a certain ring to it. He was getting used to that.
***
Everything had happened so fast. It made less sense than a dream.
He had spent the day after his brush with death retelling the story in detail. An intelligence unit had been dispatched to interrogate him before his own army could pick him up. They ran a bizarre and boring interview, talking to him as if he’d spoofed the video and the whole story, while obviously not believing any of it could be faked. He could tell they wanted it to be real, no matter how it scared them. He had droned on and on, spending hours trapped in a loop of that particular minute.
Once the spies had satisfied their hunch that Gulden knew nothing, a delegation of bearded soldiers had been allowed to speak with him. Their eyes blazed with hope. They had asked about the great one in the sky. How he sounded. How he felt. Lance had been reluctant to speak. It was deeply weird, sure, overwhelming even, yet it didn’t feel like a divine event. Then again, it was hard to tell what being on the receiving end of a miracle should feel like.
That had seemed to please the soldiers. A boom from the sky, a simple warning, a decisive action: these men relished such clarity. His apparent misunderstanding of the nature of the situation itself lent weight to his testimony. He wasn’t preaching. The facts spoke for themselves.
By the time a friendly unit had reached the gates of the compound to retrieve him, news had come of a second intervention. A would-be kamikaze’s explosive charge had disappeared in a haze half a world away, deep underground, right before blowing up an underground rail carriage. Thirty witnesses, a dozen videos of the brief speech preceding the act, yet no one could make out the voice interrupting the terrorist: the rumble shattered the microphones of recording devices.
On its own, the footage was thus confusing and rather underwhelming, but the testimonies all concurred: there had been eight different nationalities on board, and each person had heard the words spoken in their own language. It was hard to imagine that many random strangers colluding to lie together on a whim. Every person had described a similar voice and the exact same meaning: “only I may”.
These words had already been plastered in capital letters on the screens of every device in the world when another intervention occurred the following day, and the next, and on for a week. Since the neutralised attackers all shared a religion, other churches had taken a victory lap. As if on cue, the subsequent divine call had targeted another type of fundamentalist, one who’d been about to gun down dozens of people in front of a clinic.
Every day after that for weeks, other examples had been made, until each religion had received the same warning. Superior, chosen people discourse quieted down everywhere: god was angry with everyone. No more killing in his name.
Faith-based conflicts sputtered. Believers had to believe: no one was right. So maybe everyone was, so long as they remained peaceful about it. Anyone still claiming divine justification for atrocities found tougher crowds. Candidates stopped showing up. Dying for the cause was one thing, feeling the mighty breath of higher power subjugate you quite another.
***
So, what did I tell you?
Fine. Religion. You said religion.
Told you. All religion.
Come on, not just that. There’s other theories.
Fringe. Won’t matter. They’ll learn the wrong lessons.
You just want them to fail, don’t you?
How dare you? Me? I’m way above that. I do my part. They’re getting their chance, strictly following protocol over here.
But…
Yes, fine. My vanity is tickled when I’m right. I don’t want them to fail: I just know they will.
Because they’re predators? We’ve seen some make it before.
Not that kind of paranoid greedy religious supremacist, you haven’t.
Now you’re just being silly. They’re not like that. Not all of them.
Enough of them are. The ones who force the others. See, I’m being nice. I could have said they’re all letting it happen and helping it along, so they are all like that, actually.
Wow. You really have it in for them, don’t you?
Oh you know, it helps with the boredom to take an active interest, and all that.
I hear you! It’ll be a while until we’ve seen ten generations of them.
FOREVER. That’s how long.
Haha.
So anyway did you sense the latest wave from the Ghabroughztorti? I swear, feeling their sweet, tender blue tendrils pulsing love into the universe really reminds me why we do this.
These guys are just the sweetest, aren’t they? And still so many other interesting friends to discover around here. More than makes up for a meat-sack assignment, hey?
Don’t push it, now.