Rohare Baptiste, and his crew of evangelising loudmouths.
That day the broadcast was stronger than usual – the signal more pronounced, the flickering of the screen less intrusive – and the gathering was determined to eke every last iota of information and holiness out of it that they could get.
'The miracle' They wittered around me. 'He's going to do it! He's going to do it!'
Oh yeah…
The Miracle.
He performed 'The Miracle' maybe once a month. We'd all seen it before. Even so a little thrill went through the crowd; the fortifying knowledge that their faith was not only being reaffirmed, but positively vindicated. They saw this shit as proof of the Abbot's divinity, and despite all my carefully-polished cynicism I couldn't help but be a little impressed. Oh, yeah, the routine was full of holes, any number of cheats and camera-tricks to muddle the results, but still… It was something about the faces of all the people on-screen, marvelling and gasping in astonishment. You could fool the camera, maybe, but it was a hell of a lot harder to fool the geeks in the studio.
'Hallelujah!' shouted one of the guys in the crowd. Probably a Clergy plant.
It began like it always began, with the announcer bringing two smiling young acolytes into frame. Both were under 18 – a girl and a boy – either so utterly indoctrinated into the church that their beaming smiles were natural symbols of their contentment, or so doped out of their skulls that they didn't care at all. They wore the same dull grey cassocks as everyone around them, with one notable exception; they each lacked a left sleeve, exposing their bare arms to the shoulder.
'Brother James, Brother Tilda.' The announcer introduced them with a smile and a swagger, leading them to a white desk inside the same old dusky studio. Three Petri dishes sat waiting, empty, next to a sophisticated microscope with a cable-drenched camera affixed to its viewing column.
The announcer smiled at the camera, mumbled a prayer with his eyes closed, then pulled a trio of sealed hypodermic needles out of a recess in his cloak.
The crowd shivered again.
'Both these fine young acolytes of the Rediscovered Dawn – bless their souls, lordah! – got 'emselves blood type 'O-negative'. Same as us all, brothers and sisters! Same as everyone alive on this good green earth, created and Culled by Him Above!'
He jabbed a needle into the girl's arm, drawing out a puddle of blood with practiced speed. He then thanked the girl, made the sign of the cross between her and himself, and waved her out of the camera's frame. The syringe was emptied into the first Petri dish, and the whole process repeated with 'Brother James.'
'Now,' said the preacher, placing a tiny swab of Tilda's blood on a glass slide beneath the microscope and brandishing the syringe containing James's like an old West sharpshooter. 'Since both these wonderful sons and daughters of Je-sus have the same blood types, it's no trouble at all to mix 'em together.' He smiled ironically. 'All you doubters out there – that ain't faith, people, that's science!'
The crowd laughed on cue.
The image shifted to a microscope view. A uniform expanse of red blobs, so tightly-packed together on a field of bright light that they could almost be mistaken for a solid block. Red blood cells.
The tip of the needle shunted into view like a clumsy freight-train, skimming layers of Tilda's blood aside in its haste. I wondered abstractly if there was some deliberate rationale behind choosing acolytes of different genders; some discreetly sexual overtone in the public mixing of their blood.
Maybe I just had sex on the brain. It'd been a while.
John's blood streamed down the needle and oozed into the patch of cells already cramping the screen. Without a pulse to meld them together there was little natural movement, but again the needle whisked back and forth, blending like an artist on a palette.
'Same as before,' the preacher said. 'No change, y'see? No reaction. No rejection. Both the same kinda blood.'
Cut back to the smirking preacher, only now he had a guest. Seated and frail in a chair beside him, looking even less healthy – more zombified – than usual, was John-Paul Rohare Baptiste, filled with quiet serenity or incontinent senility, depending on your view.
The crowd around me – predictably – went nuts.
The preacher bent down, fussed, muttered prayers, kissed the old git's robes, and eventually got the hell on with it and stuck a needle in the withered skin of the 'Human Prune's' arm. There were a few artfully displayed bruises clustered in the same area where the poor dear soul had undergone previous tests, making the audience cluck and sigh in sympathy at his selfless suffering. They all looked like makeup to me.
Whatever the truth, the preacher was eventually successful in drawing-off a spoonful or two of the holy man's divine fluids, and quickly returned to the microscope, syringe in hand.
The needle slid into the silent mixture of the acolytes' blood and immediately disgorged its own cargo, a slick of ruby covering over the rest.
The effect was almost immediate.
The cells intermixed. Knots formed. Colours darkened. Like some glue-smeared retraction, the whole bloody morass shrunk-down together, accreting and clinging, separating into dark nodules. It was like watching something perfectly transparent held over a flame warp and ruck into sharp new angles, forming nodes.
'What y'all are seeing,' the preacher said, 'is called clumpin'. It's what happens when you put the wrong kinda blood into someone. Now, all us O-negs, back before the Holy Wrath of Him On High – Hallelujah! – delivered The Cull upon our miserable sinner's world, you coulda' given our blood to just about any Tom, Dick or Harry. You do it slow enough, you get no reaction at all. Universal donor, brothers and sisters! Amen!
'But you try introducing something else into an O-neg system, it's gonna react. It's gonna get to clumpin'.'
Cut back to the preacher. Face serious, now, all fire and brimstone, sweat prickling on his brow.
' 'And I heard a great voice'', he hissed, ' 'out of the temple, saying to the Seven Angels, 'go your ways, and pour out the vials of the wrath of God upon the earth!'
' 'And the first went, and poured out his vial upon the earth; and there fell a noisome and grievous sore upon the men which had the mark of the beast; and upon them which worshipped his image!''
The preacher wiped his brow, as if he'd been overcome then released from some powerful trance. I stifled a yawn.
'Revelations!' He yelled. 'Revelations 16, one and two! The prophet foresees the wrath of God, claiming to death and damnation all them miserable sinners and heathens he's marked! Marked on the inside, brothers and sisters! Marked in their very blood!'
He took a deep breath, and in the pause I glanced across the crowd beside me. None of them could stand still; quivering, hopping from foot to foot, shivering in elation.
'Brothers and sisters,' the preacher said, 'the righteous Cull swept across creation and took from us the means to pursue our iniquities, our selfish agendas, our unholy wars. It took away our great numbers, our great technologies, our great civilisations – ha! Amen! – and left us only with our spirit and our faith. He spared only those without the mark – the O-negs – and all others have perished! Science tells it! The Lord-ah explains it!'
Extreme close-up.
'All were Culled – except one! One great man, whose purity was so great, whose vision so intense, whose strength was so indomitable, that he withstood the mark placed upon his vile family of sinners, that he bore the pain of his ancestry with cheek turned, and was spared, alone in all the world, by the Lord on high!'
A crash-zoom, crude and old fashioned, but just right for the intensity of the moment; slinking away from the preacher and straight onto John-Paul's face.
Smiling. Beaming.
Crowd goes wild!
I let myself out at the back of the warehouse whilst the cheers were still echoing about.
He should be dead, the old shit. He should have choked and died.
Oh, fuck, I know, it could easily be a fake. Who's to say they're cutting to that same microscope as the one in the studio? Who's to say it's not someone else's blood in the syringe? But I've seen the cockups, when the blood of the acolytes react weirdly because of this or that blood disease, or some other unusual condition. I've seen the
