The Dead Will Rise First

Prologue

They are scratching and pounding at the door. My head throbs and I know it is only a matter of time until they get in.

They are Neighbors. These ones outside, not my neighbors, but somebody’s and they want to hurt me. It’s difficult to describe them. Imagine if something happened, something that could strip away everything good from people. What would be left? These Neighbors, as I call them, are reduced to such a state, and with every shred of goodness removed, only the raw evil unfettered people are capable of remains. Some kill, some rape, some crave power, some want only to see the world burn.

So you know, you are probably reading the words of a dead man. I imagine these will be the last words I ever write. I can’t be sure yet, but at the moment it looks as if I will die in this cold, empty room, and that knowledge has made me want to leave something behind. As I sit here in this tornado cellar, so many scenes from my life come back. The pounding above me continues as the Neighbors try to get in and kill me, but I remember. I write now by the light of glow sticks and, here in this damp, dark cellar, all of life becomes so clear. I know who I am. I know what life is about. And I am going to tell you everything.

The hundreds of books I’ve read in my life are all stories of great deeds and mighty valor, every man trying to show that in this banal existence called life, he had found meaning, and life was real to him. Everyone wants something to set them apart and, at the end of all things, to know that life was worth living.

The truth is we can find that purpose only in each other. We find that nothing in life has meaning if it cannot be shared and all we truly want is to connect to another human being...and to not be forgotten.

Sitting here in near darkness, with a pounding at the door--seemingly a metronome counting down the last beats of my life--I find that I want the same thing. I want to be remembered, and I know that it is because of the people I knew that life had meaning worth remembering. And so it is that I take up this pen and boldly stamp out: I was here. We were all here. This is our story. This is how we lived, and how we died.

Chapter 1

Day -1

On the day before the world ended, I sat in church. It was Sunday and like all Sundays I had been dragged up early and taken to the service. By the time the singing ended and the pastor started his sermon I already wished to escape. My mouth stuck in the corners in that way it gets when water is only just outside the door but you can’t get up and get it. I hoped for communion juice.

My eyes wandered: cross on the wall, stain glass window to my right, lint coming off the pews...what else? Nothing. There never was much to look at in church.

The time when I had enjoyed church had long past. I guess I’d always known I was different, but by 12 I’d found out just how not okay being different really was. I tried to change. I tried. Eventually after years sitting in church knowing that God hated me, and if the man sitting next to me in the pew knew he would too, well, that made church an uncomfortable place to be.

My mom sat beside me but didn’t know the war that raged within me. I had to keep it to myself. For her sake and mine. When Jake, my older brother, told my parents he was an atheist they were crushed. Besides, this wasn’t the same; I didn’t suffer from a lack of faith. I believed. I believed that God existed and hated him for it.

Hell, church was boring. The boy a few pews up and to the right wasn’t though. Wasn’t really sure who he was but for the last half hour I’d imagined all sorts of things I wanted to do to him. I adjusted the Bible across my lap and wondered if God would give the pastor some revelation from Heaven and call me out for my dirty thoughts in church. I worried about that every week. Never happened. Seemed like we were just about to wrap up for the day though.

I stared holes into pastor Bentham’s head as his Bible reading droned on.

The Lord will come like a thief in the night. While people are saying peace and safety, destruction will fall upon them.

I smirked at the urgency in the pastor’s voice, talking as though God would come back at any moment. He was right about one thing though: God was a thief.

For the Lord himself will come down from Heaven with a loud command, with the voice of the archangel and the trumpet call of God, and the dead in Christ will rise first.

Funny how Jake seemed fine when he didn’t believe in God at all and I was upset because I did. Perhaps there is no suffering if you don’t believe. Maybe religion is only comfortable if you think that God is good.

After that, we who are still alive and are left will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air.

I knew better than this pastor did. I hadn’t loved God for a long time; it had simply taken this long for me to realize that I was better off without him at all.

Let us close in prayer. Our father, we love you and praise you for who you are, the pastor said in a voice he reserved for talking to God in front of other people.

Not all of us, I said under my breath.

You are great and merciful.

Ha, I replied.

We eagerly await the day you will return for us--

I think I’ll pass and wait for something better.

--and give us the new bodies you’ve promised us; Lord you know this one I’ve got is awfully old and tired.

Please dear, heavenly, merciful, gracious, Lord, I prayed, give my pastor a stroke because he is whining with no right to be.

***

Within seconds of the pastor’s final word every person in the church stood and headed for the door. In the final moments of every final prayer there is a tension so strong it’s almost tactile. Excuse me, some overweight man said as he shuffled down the row. We, apparently, had taken too long to move out of line. After all, the best tables at the best restaurants fill up early on Sundays. It is, well was, funny how many people came to church but really were only interested in lunch.

That’s not to say that I wasn’t in this group, of course. It wasn’t long before we also were queuing at the restaurant. The place boomed with the sounds of life: a baby crying, people talking, silverware clinking on a hundred plates. The hostess looked to be eighteen or nineteen and was far more annoying than anyone I had ever met. Right this way folks, she said as she led us to a booth in the back of the restaurant.

***

Okay wait. Stop. I don’t want to write about this. I don’t have time to write about this. Take your mind out of what I am saying because it isn’t important. Screw the restaurant and forget the hostess. I felt comfortable. I slipped into writing just like I do when I am at home trying to write a book, but this isn’t quite the same, is it? This isn’t fiction. This is my life. The world has ended. Given the circumstance and the uncertain amount of time I have left to live and write, I think traditional conventions can give way to more practical concerns.

From now on I skip the non-important parts. Let me get back to my biography. Call me Scheherazade and let me tell you this story so that I may live a while longer.

***

Once home from church, the only important thing I did was write. I’d wanted to be a novelist for years, but more than that, writing for me was an escape, an escape from boredom. Like reading, except that the story went where I wanted it to. When writing I could do anything. I could fly if that was my ambition. With simple letters real life disappeared, and I emerged into a world of my own creation. It’s something I needed after sitting in church, after hating myself because of it.

After this paragraph comes the story I wrote that night. I re-create it partially because I must leave something behind. The thought of dying and the earth having nothing but my corpse to show I ever lived is unacceptable. Mostly it’s included because it will show up again. Imagining this dream world helped me to cope with my own world falling apart over the last few weeks. This is how it read.

***

World Enough and Time, part 1

by TJ

My name is Cody. I survived a car crash when I was sixteen years old that paralyzed me from the waist down. I raced a friend off a light and crashed into a pylon under a bridge. My friend tried to pass me as we went under it, and I swerved to block him but lost control. The physical pain was not that bad, but the emotional pain tore me apart.

I felt a pressure rising within me, day after day. Rising to a point at which something inside had to break (when life hurts so much, eventually a person simply ceases to be the person they had been before). Every day I thought a person couldn’t possibly go through everything I did and not explode.

Then one day I did. I fell on the ground when I was trying to get from the wheelchair to the seat in the shower. I lay on the ground half in, half out of the shower, water masking the tears streaming down my face. I was a broken kid. I didn’t want to live anymore and I was determined not to. I closed my eyes and my head exploded.

A thousand lights burst behind my eyes and, when I opened them, I found that I was in a car. Not only was I in a car, but I drove, and feeling coursed through my legs. I heard a revving engine and looked over to see my friend, Greg, next to me at a light.

This was it. The moment life changed for me. The one stupid thing that cost me everything. There was no way I was going to race. If I had known the future I never would have done it.

I revved the engine.

I told myself I wouldn’t do it.

I revved it again.

The outcome of the race was decided. I was not going to do it again in a million years.

The light turned green and we took off.

No way to stop myself. Everything was playing out just the way it had before. I willed myself to stop. I tried to make my foot pull off the gas but it pushed even harder. Greg drove slightly ahead of me but I was gaining. I hit eighty miles an hour in a fifty-five and still accelerated. Our cars were neck and neck...eighty-five miles an hour. I pulled ahead slightly, and then in front of me loomed the bridge.

Half a mile out.

Thirty seconds or less, time to quit. I couldn’t. Greg wasn’t quitting either. Twenty seconds. I pushed the car up to ninety and passed in front of Greg. Ten seconds. Greg pulled to the side and gained position for the pass. I gripped the wheel, preparing to cut him off, closed my eyes, screamed because this is where it happened, and then let him go by. We sailed through the bridge unharmed.

I was paralyzed for three years, but have never been paralyzed. I remember the wreck that never happened. As time has gone forward, and backward of course, I learned to control my ability. I can do whatever I want. To change the present, I alter what I did in the past. There are some limits, like being unable to go into the future, or into the past before I was born, but I can alter any event that occurred in my life. I have righted many wrongs before they were ever wrong.

Now, I am twenty-eight and do not work. I won the lottery--three mega millions in a row--and have not needed money since. So, what do I do with my time? I pick up the paper or I watch the news and change what I did the day before to help someone. Sometimes I will look up bad things that happened even when I was as young as, say five, and go back and fix everything. My cousin drowned when we were seven years old at a family reunion. The great thing is nobody remembers it, not even her.

This is my story. This is the story of someone who doesn’t have to play by the rules. This is the story of someone who can bend time.

So what am I going to do today? I don’t know. The only thing I can tell you is what I am going to do yesterday.

Chapter 2

Day 1

I had fallen asleep at the computer that night writing Cody’s story and woke in the morning to my mother telling me to get ready for school.

Your brother should be here when you get home, she said as I walked into the bathroom.

K, I replied, eyeing my reflection in the mirror. I really didn’t look too bad that morning.

Oh, and TJ.

Yeah.

Happy Birthday, I love you a dozen Labradors today.

I couldn’t help smiling and replying, I love you one hundred triceratops.

I knew it was lame to do, but she was my mom, and I really did love her more than one hundred triceratops. We had been doing stuff like that since I was a kid.

I brushed my teeth quickly and grabbed my straight razor. Time saved in brushing quickly would be lost here, but it was worth it. The way I saw it there were two types of people in the world: straight razor people and safety razor people. Most fell into the latter category, and well, I didn’t like most. This particular razor had special significance to me. It had been my grandfather’s.

I used the strop to warm up the blade and then grabbed the soap, worked it into lather, and applied it to my face. With five minutes of skilled work I was done, and yes, a bit more of a bad ass than most. I looked at my reflection and raised the blade to my throat, touching it right under the indention my Adams apple made. Considered it in a non-serious fashion, as most teenagers at times do, and then put the blade down. The boy staring back was handsome enough, chiseled features, hair down to his eyebrows, and eyes that looked like they belonged to a rebel. Funny, I didn’t know yet that to be a rebel you have to be willing to lose everything.

I jumped into the shower and slumped into the shower seat. The hot water poured over my body for a couple of minutes. I squeezed my eyes shut and pretended to be Cody. I imagined that when my eyes opened I would sit behind the wheel of a car. I would be able to control time too and maybe life wouldn’t be so tedious. I opened my eyes and saw the same blue tile and grey grout I saw every morning. Boring. The greatest sin is to be boring. The greatest evil, to be bored.

I reached out, turned off the water, and grabbed a towel. (one should always know where one’s towel is) Clean enough. After drying, it was just a matter of throwing on some clothes and then rushing downstairs for a quick breakfast. My mom and dad were talking about something--something they obviously didn’t want me to know--and stopped when I came in. They had a surprise party planned and, yes, I already knew about it. I grabbed some pop tarts, told my parents I loved them, and then drove to school.

Now, spare me a quick aside. I realize that I have the power under this pen of platonic self-conception. I could tell you I was anyone and you would believe it, but I refrain. Mark Twain once wrote about the difficulty in writing honestly when writing about oneself, but I do not feel the same way. For me, to tell the truth now is relief, it’s freedom. That said, you may think of me as Gatsby if you like, because in high school I created myself.

At school, I was the straight A student, the jock, the ladies’ man. I was who I was supposed to be, but no one really knew me. I’m a little ashamed to write that. None of it seems to matter now, but back then I couldn’t have imagined really being myself. I was so afraid of what everyone would think. If I could go back and do it again everyone would know the real me.

This school I found myself obliged to attend was small and Christian, with students who attended for largely one of two reasons.

This first group is the happy bunch of teenage punks I found myself in. Our parents thought that sending us to a Christian school would save our mortal souls. After all, when the school had a chapel everyday what parent could have known that little Sally and Johnny used the baptismal for a lay and the clock tower to toke up?

The second group consisted of the kids who couldn’t make it at regular school. Probably ten people in my class were these types. The parents of these kids thought that their little weirdoes would be accepted by us nice Christian kids. And the truth is, they were. We were, the first group that is, rather a kind bunch despite lacking in other Christian virtues.

I played football and baseball, smoked pot and read books, played guitar and dreamed about the future--typical kid stuff. The only real difference between my school and a public school was that at our school we knew we were sinners.

That morning I did the same as I had every