Mormons were one of the few groups ready for the end of the world, that being part of their belief structure and all. Soon as the Storms hit they circled up and closed off everything from Provo to Salt Lake. I’ll bet you a silver note they even got plumbing and electricity up there.”
The Reverend rubbed his hands together and turned his face to the night.
“South Utah militias weren’t nothing but non-Mormons. Found themselves excluded pretty quick. I’m surprised they only got put down a couple months ago.” The Reverend chuckled to himself. “I know all about Utah. I was in Las Vegas when Utah military regulars gave me this face.”
The Reverend took his blindfold off and turned his face back to Terence and Lead. His eyes were a milky white and without pupils.
“We were in Vegas,” Terence said.
“Everyone was in Vegas, or a part of it,” the Reverend replied and tied the cloth back over his eyes.
“Every man comes from his past, and often enough our lives cross paths. The world we live in was forged by the Storms, but the men who live today, those men are defined by what happened in Vegas, and I am no different.”
Christ Church of Equality was based in a walled-off compound outside of Rancho Cucamonga, California. Reverend Richard Bell’s flock numbered one-hundred thirty, but he only really counted fifty-three. They were the producers, the money-makers, the rest of the flock were just breeders and relations. The producers canvassed six days a week, spreading the holy word and collecting the holy dollar. They brought the funds; Reverend Bell converted the funds into food, guns, boats, cars, homes, land, necessities for his flock, and luxuries for himself.
In his heart, Reverend Bell was an atheist, a man of worldly possessions and lusts, but his words told a story quite contrary. He preached God’s love to the flock and they were happy to serve. They found order and purpose in the compound. Bell rationalized that he was providing a service, fulfilling a need to sheep who repaid him in labor and wealth. He rationalized it as being no different from any other business or religion. Anyway, the Reverend hadn’t started the Church of Equality; he had inherited it from his father, who had proclaimed Bell the next Messiah.
Every evening Bell preached to his flock. He followed his father’s model. He spoke of the horrors of the modern world, he spoke of murder and theft and rape and war. He also made up stories; conspiracies of the government and how powers behind powers were trying to control the flock or destroy them. The flock readily believed, for it is easy to believe the horrors of the world when they are listed in volume. It is easy to find the world frightening and without redemption and even unimportant men can believe they are center-stage to world-wide conspiracy, for every man is the central character of his own story, and holds the weight of that importance. Men of belief find it easy to believe, right or wrong.
Bell followed his horror stories with words of God’s will and love. He spoke of God’s decency to man, how Jesus preached equality and forgiveness, and how the flock will hold themselves separate from humanity until the world fully acknowledges equality and love for fellow men and women.
“My themes were simple. The world is bad, the government is bad, we are good; you are safe with us.”
The Reverend smiled again.
“I made so much money. The compound capacity was three-hundred, and I owned it free and clear. My dad built it with his first followers. The canvassers were told the money was to cover our expenses, with the rest going to help charitable causes furthering equality. I kept the money. The beauty of the church was that the outside world was as bad as I claimed. There was no real convincing required. Most of our members came to us from low and middle class neighborhoods of Barstow and Los Angeles. They had seen riots and violence.
After a similar church in New Mexico got torched by the old Federal government, we invested in guns and a first rate surveillance system.
I don’t have to tell you what happened next. Everyone knows this part. One day it started raining and it never stopped. The cities flooded, homes and hills slid off into the ocean, waves pummeled the buildings. Men and women fled the coast in droves.
It was funny to me, ironic if you think about it. I rationalized gun and food hoarding to my flock by hinting that end times were near, never expecting that the end times were actually upon us.
My dad once told me that people need convincing, and the end of the world is the best convincer.
He said, ‘Son, people are only going to follow what they fear or love, and by God we can give them both.’
So I had guns and I had food, and I had medical supplies, not because I needed them, but because I wanted my flock to think we needed them. And then the fucking apocalypse happens!”
Reverend Greek clapped his hands together.
“I didn’t know whether to shit or go blind, as they used to say.”
The waterline on the coast rose and tornadoes chased tsunamis through Los Angeles. The National Guard did their best in rallying the hordes of survivors. They raided supermarkets and gas stations for food and supplies. The soldiers pulled back to Orange County and set up tent hospitals and refugee villages above the waterline, but then most of the guardsmen were pulled away to repel the Mexicans near San Diego and Calexico. Everywhere was descending to chaos and the nation’s protectors were spread thin. Los Angeles and the surrounding suburbs went lawless in the course of about twelve days.
“There were about eight million people in the greater Los Angeles area and something like thirty percent of it was completely underwater. A lot of people died in the Storms, but there were survivors trapped under the waterline, too.
Elders in my flock suggested that we use my boat to hunt for people marooned on their roof tops and apartment buildings, to do God’s work in a real and tangible way, to act like Christians. For the first time since I was thirteen, I actually thought maybe there was a God and he was playing his hand. That maybe it was a good time to start acting outside of self-interest, just in case.
So I left with the stronger men of my flock, the long-distance canvassers. We loaded up a van with rifles, ropes, food, and first aid supplies and hitched my boat to it. We launched at the waterline. Huntington was like an all-access marina. You should have seen my craft, a beautiful sixty foot fisher with all the bells and whistles.
We spotted our first castaways about a half mile in, poor folk on their rooftops, half dead from exposure and dehydration. The water stank like sewage and oil, which was a large part of it. The top layer glistened oil rainbows in the sun.
At our third rescue a fat blond guy in a wife beater pulled a .38 and demanded we jump ship, like he was a pirate or something. Before I could get a word out, Jericho Ericson, one of my flock, put two 30-06 rounds in the guy’s chest. The stranger spun and sprayed and hit the water. The funny thing was nobody flinched. Not my flock, not the castaways we’d just taken aboard, no one. Everyone was sort of numb, like nothing could surprise us after the days of storms.
We went through the day like that. We filled the boat. We ferried the castaways back to Huntington. They waded through the filthy shallow water up to our van, where the flock was waiting to taxi them to the compound. Order was easy to keep, the flock had guns, and the refugees didn’t.
Out on the water we saw other boats rescuing folks, same as us. You wouldn’t believe it. Row boats, yachts, wave runners, fishing craft. Whatever was not destroyed in the tsunamis or storms. At one point I saw a yacht, a full-on luxury craft, with a famous movie star. Can’t remember his name, he played a cop in all those action movies, not the disgraced governor but the other one. And there he went, pitching in with the rest of us. Sometimes we saw people too far gone for help, people dried out and waiting to die. Jericho shot and killed three more men that day. He had developed a knack, I guess.
For me, it was a long day of work in contrast to what had been a pretty soft life. I refueled the boat at the van, set back out, and the boat filled up in an hour or so. The whole thing was like spitting in the ocean. I saved all the people I could, but before turning back I saw thousands more, laid out on their rooftops. They moaned and called for help, some fired shots at the boat, some shot flares into the sky, but there was just too many of them. I remember one family refused to get on board, said that they would rather wait for a military rescue operation to
