Mr. Williams smiled. Emily liked it when he smiled. In fact, she liked smiles a lot more than she used to, before . . .
Soon Mr. Williams ate his own Twinkie.
“Okay, that’s enough Twinkies,” Sheriff Hill said.
“Are we staying here?” Emily asked Sheriff Hill.
He shook his head no. Emily became very sad. “When will we stop running?” she pleaded. Now the grown-ups all looked at each other funny. After a while, Mr. Williams said, “When we’re in a safe place, Emily. We’re not safe here.”
Emily accepted that answer though it frightened her.
For the first time while inside the store, she heard gunfire.
Chapter Forty-Two
Day Ten
“It is not the dirt you must worry about,” boomed Saint Michael. “It is the fact that you are under Daryl’s body.”
Jocelyn watched in horror from her Inner Temple as she looked at her body, buried alive. Saint Michael taught her she could see her body this way, through the asphalt, concrete, and dirt, if she focused on doing so. They had buried her in an island strip in the parking lot. As Saint Michael had said, she was underneath Daryl’s body.
She looked at herself in the temple mirror. Her astral self was wearing the usual red ritual robe with the hood covering her head. She could see her face, look into her own eyes.
What she saw was panic. She tried to calm down and think clearly, but that proved difficult.
“So what if I can’t get out? What happens to me?”
He shook his large head, looming two feet above hers. “I do not know. I am sorry, Jocelyn, but I do not know everything. I suspect you could survive under there a long time, but I would think eventually your oxygen would run out.”
He paused. She let that sink in.
“And if I get no oxygen,” she reasoned, “my brain cells start to die, and eventually the whole brain would die.”
“That seems the most plausible scenario.”
“So if I can’t push both me and Daryl out of the dirt, I’m dead. Permanently.”
“It would appear so.”
She looked up into his eyes. “You’re a big help,” she said sarcastically.
“I am doing everything I can. I am not the Lord, or even Metatron.”
“What if I were to ask him to help me?”
“Who?” he asked. “The Lord or Metatron?”
“The Lord. He’s the one who wants me to save humanity. Perhaps he can engineer a way to get me to survive.”
“Good luck with that.”
“What do you mean?”
She listened to the cascading waterfall inside her temple. It helped calm her nerves.
“The universe is fragile, Jocelyn. Any change He makes can have disastrous ripple effects. He will be extremely reluctant to make a change, especially if you have not exhausted all of your options yet.”
“Didn’t He give me these powers to begin with? And what other options do I have?”
“He did not give you your powers in the conventional sense. All He did was to create the universe, assign rules for change over time, and then launch it into motion. The only way He can change it is to change the rules. But then that change can ripple throughout space and time. Whole civilizations could be wiped out. In fact, life itself in the universe could be wiped out. All because He did not like how things turned out . . . That is why it was remarkable that He changed the rules for you, that you will not be able to confess your sins to a priest and be forgiven. For two thousand years, since the crucifixion of Jesus Christ, this has been the rule for everyone.”
She thought about the implications of that. Now she was frightened, and a crisis of faith overcame her. “You mean Jesus Christ is no longer my savior?”
“I am afraid not.”
“So what happens to Protestants? Do they go to Hell because they don’t confess to a priest? Maybe I can get into heaven the way they do.” Not that she didn’t want to save humanity, but she wanted the option of forgiveness.
“Forgiveness of sin is . . . complicated. So is the notion of Heaven and Hell. When Protestants pray, they are answered by Metatron. They enter a close relationship with him, and he acts like the priest that absolves their sins. He will not, though, absolve yours, no matter how close you get to him.”
Jocelyn conjured up a chair and plopped down. She put her head in her hands. “What have I gotten myself into?”
“You still have a choice.”
That made her angry. “Oh, yeah? Die, go to Hell, doom humanity to this goddamned . . . virus, or nanobots, or whatever the fuck it is . . . Or work to fix things. Doesn’t sound like much of a choice to me, and you know it.”
She started to cry. This was more than she could take right now. She would die anyway, and then the shit would really hit the fan.
“Many in your position would give up and take their chances in Hell,” Saint Michael said, “because the odds of success are low, and now have become even lower. Why put yourself through all of this? Hell may be easier.”
“Is it?”
“It depends upon which Hell you arrive in. Reincarnation as a human will be rare now and, in all likelihood, short-lived.”
“Fuck God!” she found herself saying. “Fuck you! And fuck Metatron!”
“You would not be going through this if you had not killed those people you mistook for aliens.”
“Fuck you again! Fuck you, a thousand times! I was sick, and you know it. And He knows it.”
“I am merely telling you playing the blame game will not get you anywhere . . . Now, do you wish to try to save humanity, to save everyone from their sins? Or do you wish to die?”
She took a deep breath. She conjured up a fire in her cauldron, burning up some cinnamon incense. Breathing in the smoke helped her to clear her head. “When you put it like that, again, what choice do I have? I want
