Jaspre Bark - Dawn Over Doomsday

"Anna," said Linda. "Do you know what you're saying?"

"Yes Mistress Linda I do. I have spent all my life asking God to reveal my purpose in life. The folk of my community were good folk, gentle, honest and true. But as you have pointed out Mr Greaves, it was not easy growing up as the only Native American within the whole community. My momma and poppa never told me how I came to live with them. As you might imagine matters of birth and conception weren't spoken about much by my people. Every attempt was made to keep our minds and our bodies from sinning. What my momma did tell me was that she was sure God singled me out for a special purpose. From the moment she held me in her arms she said that she knew this to be true. She knew it with as much conviction as she knew that the sun would rise the next day, that her name was Sarah Bontraeger and the Lord Jesus Christ died so that we might be redeemed from all our sin. I was often teased as a little girl by the other children because I was so different, because no-one knew who my grandparents were. If you went back two generations, more or less everyone in the community could trace their kin back to ties with everyone else's. It was a point of pride for most of them.

"Sometimes when the teasing got too much for me, I ran and hid and cried. I would call out to Jesus to help me, to give me his comfort and to show me the special purpose he had for me. Once in a while I would feel his hand on my shoulder. I would know then, in these moments, what my Momma had always told me was true. He did have something special in store for me and when the time was right he would reveal it to me. I have been through trying times of late and I have fallen in with bad people, present company excluded. Yet my strength, my rod and my comfort still has always been my belief that I have a special purpose in God. This is my purpose to join with this evil plague and to turn it to God's will."

"No Anna," said Greaves. "It is not evil. It is just a collection of self-replicating micro-organisms. It has no purpose, no intent and no will. Not until it joins with you."

"With respect Mr Greaves," said Anna. "You have not felt its call. It is evil alright, and I must pray with all my heart for strength, so that I may do the right thing when the time comes."

"You are just full of surprises," said Linda. "You don't say nothing for days, then you come out with a big speech like that."

"Yes mistress Linda," said Anna. "I hope I have not bored you with my story. In fact my throat is dry and I would like some water if you wouldn't mind."

Cortez got up and fetched her a drink. "I was not bored at all by your story," he said. "If you don't mind. I should like to hear more."

"What would you like know Mr Cortez?"

"I am curious as to how you ended up in the house of sin where we found you?"

"Ah yes, there," said Anna and she stared into the distance.

"If it is too distressing we do not have to talk of it."

"No, no, that's alright. I think, for the sake of my own sanity, I sometimes believe that all happened to a different person. I have changed so much since I left the community. Since I met you all. I believe I have even begun to talk differently."

"Yeah," said Linda, "I'd noticed that. We'll have you cussing and spitting on the floor yet."

"That may take a while Mistress Linda," said Anna with a smile. "When The Cull came – I believe that's what you call it isn't it? – it came early to my community. Some of us took sick and died within days. It was only a few at first. We tried praying, of course, but for once God didn't seem to heed our words. Then more and more of us fell. We thought we had brought the wrath of the Lord down on our heads. There was much lamentation and self reproach, we begged God for a sign to tell us what we had done wrong, to show us how to put it right. But nothing came. There was much despair in those last days as our loved ones and all the people we had grown up with died before our eyes. We sent parties to the outside world to bring us help but none of them returned. Then there was only a handful of us left at this point, locked away in our own homes with what few provisions we had left. Momma and poppa were two of the last to go. I buried them in our back yard and I cried for days. There wasn't anyone else I could turn to for help. There were dead bodies everywhere and all our cemeteries had run out of space. I tended to the last of my brothers and sisters in the community, tried to make their last hours as comfortable as I could. Then there was just me."

Anna paused for a minute, drank some more water and took a deep breath. "You have to understand that the community was my whole world. I knew of no other life outside of it. My world had ended along with the lives of everyone I knew. The outside world was a complete mystery to me. The Amish way of life has not changed in two hundred years. Even though there was no-one left in the whole settlement I was still afraid to leave. I confess I even prayed to God to take me too, so I could join my community in heaven. "

"So what happened?" said Linda, "How did you end up leaving?"

"I was starving and delirious and suddenly I felt Jesus by my side. I knew that he wanted me to live and to leave the settlement. Only in the outside world could he reveal his purpose to me. So I collected a few possession and I set off to the nearest town. Nothing could have prepared me for what I came across."

"I imagine it would be like travelling forward two hundred years in time," said Greaves. "Or visiting another planet that was far more technologically advanced."

Anna looked at him with a puzzled expression. "Once again you must excuse me Mr Greaves but I haven't the faintest idea what you are talking about."

"Never mind. Please continue."

"I walked for days. My feet were sore and I rubbed up some awful blisters, then a man pulled up in one of them horseless buggies. The noise and the smell it made. He offered me a lift. He had heard on his… radiator, I think he called it. No, wait that's not right…"

"Radio," said Linda.

"Yes, thank you Mistress Linda. He had heard on his radio that there were people alive in the city and that there was help to be had there. He was awful kind to me, fed me and looked after me, but he died soon after we arrived in Harrisburg. The plague took him too. I was mighty sad about this. I had no idea how to fend for myself in the city. I was scared all the time and people just kept dying. The corpses were rotting by the roadsides. The smell was everywhere."

"They were bad times for us all," said Cortez.

"I was captured by a gang of men. Scavs they called themselves. They sold me and several other poor girls to the Neo-Clergy. I thought I was safe in the hands of men of God, but their faith was nothing like the faith I knew. They kept me prisoner for a long while. Then one of them said I was too old to be used for my blood, even though I was a Red Indian. I do not understand what he meant though."

"John-Paul Rohare Baptiste, the founder of the Neo-Clergy, is said to have stayed alive through transfusion," said Greaves. "That's when you take someone else's blood and put it in your body. He did this to children allegedly, thousands were taken."

"Oh," said Anna. "Anyway, eventually they sold me to Mr Edwards. I don't know how long I was there. I went inside myself. I pretended that none of it was happening to me. It was not my body that was being violated and shamed. I was somewhere else. But so was Jesus. I prayed often to him, pleaded with him. Surely this was not the purpose he had in mind for me. Then you came for me. I thought you had come to kill me. That's what happened to the girls they were done with. But I was wrong. Then, just after the night that I spent with Mistress Linda on the hillside, Jesus came to me. Though I was fallen and shamed, he came to me like he came to Mary Magdalen. And finally he revealed his purpose."