Robert Liparulo - The 13 th tribe

The sound pierced Jagger’s head, but it wasn’t crushing-tearing-colliding metal, shattering glass, or rupturing tires; it was screams, louder than physically possible, extending longer than the lives of the family producing them, melding with his own pointless Nooooo!

They were gone. All of them. Just like that.

Except for him. In the car, he was conscious. His left arm was smashed and pinned between the hard folds of the dashboard, which had accordioned as the front end crumpled into the passenger compartment. He was drenched in blood-not all of it, not even most of it, his own.

Jagger the Observer blinked tears out of his eyes and stared at the demolished Highlander. Smoke and steam-lighted by a single burning headlamp, angled upward-roiled over the demolished front end. Tiny squares of glass glinted like jewels on the blacktop. Blood leaked from the car onto the road, mixing with oil, gasoline, radiator fluid.

In reality, it had taken two hours and the Jaws of Life to extricate the van’s driver from the wreckage, and almost as long to remove Jagger as he drifted in and out of consciousness. Each time he revived he heard screaming, and prayed it was coming from the Bransfords.

Scream, he thought. Scream because you’re alive.

He’d learned later that the van’s driver had made all the noise, in agony from a shattered femur and cracked sternum.

It didn’t go down that way in Jagger’s dream. In this realm the man pushed open his door and stepped out. He saw Jagger and smiled-the same smile he had tried to hide from the cameras as he left the courtroom three months after the crash, a free man. A nurse had botched the blood test, using an alcohol-based swab to clean his skin before inserting the syringe. State law required a nonalcohol-based swab, in the mistaken assumption that the wrong swab would produce inaccurate results. Despite having a blood-alcohol level of. 17-more than twice the legal limit-the D.A. had no choice but to dismiss the charges.

“Do it,” a gravelly voice said beside Jagger.

He turned to see Mark standing there. Half of his face was gone, and glass peppered the other side like freckles. Smoke coiled out of a hole in his skull. One shoulder drooped as though his arm started at the base of his neck. His chest was caved in, his shirt pushed in with it, clinging to broken ribs. The crater was the size and shape of a steering wheel. At the bottom, over his breastbone, blood seeped through the material. It formed the Toyota logo, then spread into an indistinguishable mass. He glared at Jagger, then rolled a lidless eye toward the drunk driver. “Do it,” he repeated.

Jagger felt weight in his hands and realized he was holding an M240 belt-fed machine gun, the pride of the Rangers in Iraq. He looked up at the driver, who was facing him now, holding his palms up as if to say, Whatcha gonna do?

“Shoot him,” Mark’s corpse said. “For me, for Cyndi, for Robby, for Brianna.” He nudged Jagger’s shoulder with bloody fingers.

Jagger hefted the weapon and took aim.

“Come on, man, you know he deserves it,” the corpse said and nudged him again and again, making it impossible for Jagger to lock onto the drunk. Over the gun’s wavering sights the guy started laughing. Then he broke up and disappeared.

Jagger’s eyes snapped open. A spear of light cut across the ceiling over his head. He groaned and squeezed his eyes tight. Always the same nightmare… leaving him grieved and angry and frustrated.

Mark’s corpse nudged him again, and he jumped, rolling in bed to face the monster come to life.

Tyler was hunched beside the bed, shaking him. His lips formed the word Dad?

Jagger reached to his ear and pulled out a bullet-shaped wedge of foam. The loud clanging of a woden scmantron in the monastery’s bell tower rushed in, waking him as surely as a splash of cold water. There was no need to look at the clock; the tolling sounded every morning at 4:15, calling the monks to matins, the first service of the day.

“Tyler,” he said, “what is it?”

“The gonging woke me.”

Jagger craned to see Beth. She shifted and murmured quietly, but remained asleep. He rolled back and put his hand on his son’s shoulder. “Where are your earplugs?”

“I can’t sleep with them. All I hear is my heartbeat, filling my head.”

“Better than waking up this early.”

Tyler frowned. The boy had something on his mind.

Jagger propped himself up on an elbow. “What are you thinking, son?”

Although it was the dominant building within the monastery walls, the Church of the Transfiguration was small by modern standards. Built between 542 and 551, it was designed as a place of worship for the monks, not the public. Within, its marble, gold, and rare art could buy Trump Tower with a few million to spare.

Jagger quietly pulled open one of the heavy cypress doors, which had hung at the basilica’s entrance since it was new. He held it for Tyler, who stopped to gaze up at the inscription overhead. It was too dark to see the Greek words; still, Tyler recited from memory: “This is the gate to the Lord; the righteous shall enter into it.” As rambunctious as he was, the boy accorded the monastery a deference Jagger found hard to muster. It may have come from talking to the monks, or from his mother’s awe of the place’s venerable traditions and sites, but Jagger didn’t think so. He suspected it came from someplace more primal, someplace at the heart of Christ’s admonition to “become like little children.”

The righteous shall enter.

He almost said, Maybe I should wait outside, but he didn’t think his son would appreciate the joke.

Tyler smiled at him and stepped inside. Jagger followed and eased the door closed. The service had started. Across the nave’s floor of intricately patterned tiles, a monk stood at a lectern, chanting a prayer. The language was lost on Jagger-Byzantine Greek, he had learned-but its singsongy cadence and the reverence in which it was delivered instantly calmed the remnants of the nightmare’s emotions.

Jagger followed Tyler into the dark nave. The only light came from a lantern above the praying monk. They found a wooden bench against a wall and sat. Slowly, monks in black robes lowered brass lamps suspended from the ceiling, lit them, and raised them again. The lamps turned and swung, filling the room with an undulating amber glow. The chains and chandeliers, granite columns, and ornately decorated walls seemed to pulse with life. Above the altar, mounted to a beam that spanned the room, hung a massive gold-painted crucifix-upon which Christ appeared to be gasping for breath. As the lamps settled, Christ’s breathing slowed and stopped. Jagger felt, simultaneously, a shiver along his spine and a warmth filling his chest.

The monk at the lectern finished and backed away. Another monk stepped up and began chanting a passage from a leather-bound book the size of a gravestone. Moving as stealthily as shadows, monks roamed the church, stopping at icons to light candles and pray. A monk appeared from one of the nine tiny chapels that lined the sides and back of the church, waving a smoking lantern. The smell of lilacs and charred timber filled the room.

The fifteen-centuries-old structure… the religious relics from every century since… the strange combination of majestic splendor and subdued humility… the ancient words and bowed servants: at that moment, the church felt like a bit of heaven on earth, like one of the mansions Jesus promised to prepare for his saints. It wasn’t hard to imagine God himself setting this place here, at the base of the mountain on which he spoke to Moses.

Jagger felt like a trespasser. It wasn’t that he didn’t believe in God; he had spent too many years studying the Word, praying with Beth, attending church to completely reject the idea of the Almighty. He just wasn’t so sure he liked God, wasn’t so sure God liked him… or any of his creations. Intellectually, he understood what C. S. Lewis called the “problem of pain” as it related to reconciling human suffering with a loving God. He grasped the concept of Isaiah 55:8: For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways. That is, humans don’t establish the standards of what is right. And Jagger would have argued God’s position-until it had leapt off the pages of theological and Christian-living books and gouged out his heart. He felt bloodied and beaten, left for dead in a ditch, the glassy eyes of the Bransfords glaring at him.