“Welcome to the END TIMES, my brothers and sisters!” he shouted. “The final act of the great play! Judgment Day! When thesinners are cast down to burn in the lake of fire, and the faithful travel up to join God in heaven, and all good Christianswill know the pure joy of his presence.
“Our job in all of that is simple, my friends. If we avoid wickedness and help guide our fellows to righteousness, we’ll getto see that Judgment Day show from the best seats in the whole darned arena. The skybox, in the truest sense! We’ll get calledup early, in body and spirit, when that trumpet sounds at the Rapture. And I will SEE YOU ALL THERE! That’s one journey we’llmake TOGETHER!”
The audience erupted into cheers and hosannas and hallelujahs. Of course they did. Branson was reminding them they were betterthan everyone else.
Jonas hated himself for thinking something so cynical, but ideas like that came to him constantly now.
If Branson was a fraud, then he was a fraud. Everyone was a fraud.
Almost everyone, he thought.
Jonas glanced at his phone, feeling the temptation to check his e-mail. The phone was set to chime whenever a new messagecame in, so he knew there hadn’t been anything new since he last checked—but still.
Instead, he turned back to the stack of papers on his desk—correspondence from the Detectives for Christ initiative Bransonhad started up some time back as a grassroots effort to track down the Oracle’s identity. The project had been wildly successful—atleast from a purely participatory perspective. Every one of the Ministry’s faithful from Topeka to Tallahassee was peepingin their neighbors’ windows looking for the evil Oracle.
And in a surprising twist, the vast majority of the Detectives did, in fact, find their quarry.
Or they were fairly certain they had, and wanted to tell Branson about their discovery, and asked for his guidance on howto handle the situation. Every day, a mountain of correspondence poured into the offices of the Branson Ministry—e-mail, handwrittenletters, packages, phone calls. Jonas had been tasked with coordinating the effort to deal with the deluge.
Initially, Jonas had assigned one intern to go through the materials the Ministry’s congregation sent in—the “leads,” as theyhad inevitably become known. Now, there were three, each pulling twelve-hour days parsing through the endless chaff, lookingfor even the tiniest bit of wheat.
Most of it was simple to handle—like an e-mail from a woman convinced that the lucky win on Bingo Night by “that dirty cheaterDoris Hanson” meant that poor Mrs. Hanson was quite obviously the Oracle.
But some of it was not so obviously misguided, and Jonas needed to review those communications to see if they might containan actual clue to the Oracle’s identity. The interns weren’t supposed to send leads up the chain to Jonas unless somethinglooked quite promising—but none of them wanted to be accused of missing something important, so they ended up sending muchmore to his desk than they should.
Hence, the stack of paperwork on Jonas’ desk, and the reason he was watching the reverend’s sermon through a monitor on hisdesk as opposed to standing backstage watching it live.
Once, being so far from Hosiah Branson’s presence would have bothered Jonas immensely. Now, though, he didn’t mind all thatmuch. The farther the better, in fact.
“You all know the signs,” Branson said through the monitor, lifting a solemn hand out toward his audience. “The comet Wormwoodappearing in the skies, the Antichrist slouching his terrible, oozing way toward Bethlehem, the seas of blood, all the rest.But I ask you to think for one moment. The words of the Book of Revelation were set down almost two thousand years ago bythe good Apostle John. He was imprisoned on the island of Patmos, waiting for the end of his life, when God sent him a visionof how it would all go down.
“It seems to me that God perhaps showed Saint John things he didn’t quite understand. This was a long time ago, after all.John did his level best to explain what he saw, to give us God’s message, but what if he simply didn’t have the words forit?
“You know what happened five days ago. The world went dark. The power went out, and our machines failed us. Death was visitedon all the lands of the earth. Tens of thousands have died in the last few days, in every country. In fact, I can feel thatsome of you in this very room, and those watching me from your homes, have lost people in this crisis. For that I offer youmy deepest sympathy and my assurances that you will see your loved ones again—soon.”
Hosiah paused and bowed his head. He removed a crystal-white handkerchief from his lapel pocket and ran it across his perfectlydry brow before continuing.
Do I hate him? Jonas thought. I might. I really might.
Jonas picked up the next sheet of paper from the stack. “Dear Reverund,” it began. He sighed heavily and started to plow throughthe theories of one Donny Winston, from North Carolina. Donny seemed to favor tying the Oracle by his ankles to the back ofhis pickup and dragging him through the streets from town to town, making stops for him to be stoned by the good God-fearingfolk along the way. “Like they done with St. Paul,” Donny concluded, failing to realize that the people doing the stoningin that instance were not generally seen to be the heroes of the story.
He slashed a large red X across the page with a pen conveniently placed for the purpose and set it into an out-box, atop the other rejected leads.
“It is not only death that concerns us today,” Branson went on. “It is also war. You’ve heard of the terrible fighting onthe plains of Central Asia, in Qandustan. Our Christian brothers have been forced to defend themselves against the Muslims,who took the opportunity offered by the dark days to invade. And the Philippines, that good, God-fearing country, torn asunderby rioting and fear as the military pulled power from their president. And of course, our own soldiers in the
