Authors: Shawn Hopkins
“Get out here!” he screamed again.
“No, you come in here. Come in out of the rain, and let us serve you.”
Scott didn’t know what Ralston was doing, but the soldiers were clearly growing anxious.
Ralston looked over to his brothers and sisters in the faith, met each one of their tear-filled eyes with a look of encouragement and understanding. “I love you all,” he said.
“Ralston, they’re going to shoot you,” Scott whispered from behind him.
But he ignored him. “‘Behold, I stand at the door and knock, if any man hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in to him and sup with him, and he with me.’ My dear soldiers, repent of your sin—”
The report of weapons firing silenced him, and the stunned community watched in slow motion as he and Scott fell backwards, their bodies twitching in response to the foreign objects that were entering them.
The smoke from the soldiers’ guns lingered longer than the deafening silence that had settled over the forest. And then the soldiers started yelling orders, the time for stunned grief over.
Scott began moving beneath Ralston, trying to get out from under him.
But Ralston whispered a strict, “Stay still,” into his ear.
So Scott stayed still, feeling blood flow down his neck and beneath his jacket. He didn’t move at all as the soldiers began marching the people off into the woods, toward waiting vehicles.
And then came silence.
“I think it’s okay now, Dan,” he said.
No response.
“Dan.”
Again, nothing.
He tried moving beneath him and could immediately tell that his body was limp, unresponsive to his squirming.
Oh no.
Finally getting out from beneath him, he turned him over.
His eyes were closed. No pulse. And then Scott saw his chest and stomach, how they had been shredded into hamburger. Scott looked down at himself, suddenly amazed that none of the rounds made it through to him. At that range, with those weapons, he should’ve been full of holes too. But the blood that had flowed down his neck belonged to Ralston alone.
He sacrificed himself for me
...
Scott shuffled backwards until he came up against a wall. He sat staring at Ralston’s bleeding body. He sat there for an hour before finally reaching for the Bible that lay sprawled open on the floor beside him. There was a bookmark in it, a verse in red print underlined. It read,
And fear not them which kill the body, but are not able to kill the soul; but rather fear Him which is able to destroy both soul and body in hell.
And right there, sitting next to a dead man he met just the day before, in an empty commune in the middle of nowhere, all of his walls came crumbling down.
NO MORE SECRETS
Why do the heathen rage, and the people imagine a vain thing? The kings of the earth set themselves, and the rulers take counsel together, against the Lord, and against his anointed… He that sitteth in the heavens shall laugh: the Lord shall have them in derision. Then shall He speak unto them in His wrath, and vex them in His sore displeasure.
—Psalm 2:1-2, 4-5
T
he sun shone through the green-needled canopy in rays of misty light, melting snow wherever it touched. The mountains surrounding the area were silent and still, as they were every day and had been for a very long time.
As Jennifer watched a few of her neighbors set out from the longhouse on a morning fishing trip, she smiled and waved to them before folding her arms against her chest, helping the bear-skin coat fight the cold away from her body. Turning, she lifted the flap to the wigwam behind her and ducked back inside.
Though hesitant at first, she had come to love the way of life here. It was an existence so different than anything her westernized worldview (formed by commercialism, materialism, and ultimately depression) could have prepared her for. But the natives had accepted her as one of their own, and she quickly adjusted to the simpler life. And so far, this little corner of the Canadian wilderness had yet to be touched by the NAU, or any other element of the emerging New World Order. Sometimes she even forgot about the horrors taking place in the world beyond the mountains, about the esoteric conspiracy she’d read about in the books Joshua had left in her jacket pocket along with the mysterious ring.
The
ring. The Ring of Solomon.
She approached a figure sitting on the floor beside a small fire, the smoke it expelled drifting up through the hole in the ceiling of the simple abode. Placing her hands on his shoulders, she asked, “How is he?”
Joshua Cavanaugh turned his attention from the newborn baby cradled in his arms and looked up to his wife. “Sleeping.”
She sat down beside him, resting her head on his shoulder and setting her gaze down on Edward Daniel Cavanaugh, their son.
They’d been here for almost a year now, living among the indigenous peoples in relative peace and quiet. No one had come looking for them or the ring yet, which was a concern they took very often to prayer.
After Joshua left Daniel’s body and the deserted commune behind, he’d made his way back to his house in Vermont to get the duffle bag of cash and false identities he’d left in Jamaica State Park. Because his house was owned and occupied by one of his other false identities, he didn’t think anyone would’ve been able to connect him to it. But he’d been wrong. When he crossed the threshold and entered the house, there were people there waiting for him. People with guns.
The Mossad.
And Jennifer was with them.
Apparently, at some point when he was sleeping in the commune, Malachi had injected a transponder beneath his skin. The Israeli agent knew he’d survived the assault on the commune and soon figured out that he was heading back to Vermont. So they had just made themselves comfortable in his home, waiting for his return. Of course, it wasn’t just a neighborly act of kindness through which Malachi was seeking to rejoin husband and wife. No, he wanted the ring, and as far as he knew, Joshua still had it. He planned on making an exchange, the ring for Jennifer. But Joshua didn’t have the ring, which was evident after a strip search. Because Jennifer had since read the books hidden in her jacket, she had come to understand that the ring was best left undiscovered and so kept her possession of it a secret. Malachi and his men left Vermont frustrated and without the ring. Joshua told them it was probably lying on the ground somewhere in the commune. As for he and Jennifer, they finally made good on his escape plan to Canada.
He handed baby Edward to her and reached beside him for Ralston’s Bible, turning to the book of Jeremiah.
With the holy book opened on his lap, he retrieved the ring from his pocket.
Jennifer looked at her husband, awe-filled at how much he’d changed this past year. The Book in his lap had finally freed him from his past, the words Ralston had shared with him ringing true. She leaned in close, always fascinated by what was about to happen.
Turning the ring over in his hand, Joshua’s mind turned with it, wondering again about the deception the secret societies had planned for it. Did they have a plan B? Would NASA still come up with an extraterrestrial hoax via some other means? Placing the ring on the open page of Jeremiah’s text, light from the fire shone through the ring’s lens and fell onto the English words. The illuminated words, however, suddenly appeared raised, hovering over the page like some kind of three dimensional hologram. Only the words floating through the air weren’t the words of the prophet, at least not as they appeared on the page in English, but were actually rearrangements of the letters the inspired prophet had used.
“What does it say this time?” Jennifer asked, trying to make sense of the shining display.
That the ring worked to rearrange an English translation of Jeremiah’s work seemed impossible. But there it was. A single sentence hovering in mid-air, words chosen from the page and miraculously assembled into a single sentence. “It says, ‘Surely I am coming quickly.’”
She smiled at the thought of it, squeezing their child tighter in her grasp as Joshua kissed her on the forehead.
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