Mark Stone - The Judas Line

And there it was, resting in the center of my palm like a spider’s egg-sack, pregnant with untold malignant possibilities. Not wanting to drag the whole macabre thing out, I teased open the puckered opening and poured the contents into my other hand.

Coins. Silver. The size of American nickels.

Thirty of them.

“Holy shit!” I gasped, dropping the papers. In the other bed Jude snored softly, content in his sleep. Quickly I crossed myself and silently apologized to the Lord for my cussing.

Thirty pieces of silver, the same thirty pieces that had been used to bribe Judas into betraying Jesus? Had to be! According to Jude (oh the irony!), Judas was the son of Satan, an Anti-Christ borntooppose Christ, and that would certainly explain the Silver as an evil artifact. The story of Christ painted Judas as one of the most infamous characters in history.

According to Matthew 27:3-10, Judas had returned the money and committed suicide by hanging himself. In the Acts of the Apostles, he’d used the money to buy a field, but he fell and burst asunder like an overripe melon. That field was known thereafter as Akeldama, the Field of Blood.

Obviously, if Jude was correct (and I had little reason to doubt him, considering all that I had experienced in last few days), then his ancestor had not died shortly after the crucifixion, but instead had founded a dynasty of assassins and power brokers whose main goal was to foster the Anti-Christ.

My brain hurt.

So much information, so little time. If I were a drinking man, I’d be three sheets to the wind already. Smiling ruefully, I envisioned the members of my Ranger chalk in Iran and what they would say. “Suck it up, Soldier,” quickly came to mind. So suck it up I did, gathering the pages of the memoir and taking up the thread of the story.

?

Each silver coin shone in the soft light of Julian’s office, perfect and unblemished, yet roughly cast and stamped. A likeness of a man adorned one side while an eagle stood on the left side of the reverse, right foot on what appeared to be a ship’s ram with a palm frond behind. If I remembered correctly, it was the type of coin called a Half Shekel, a Temple Tax Coin.

Cold. Very cold. Almost cold enough to sear my palm, and greasy, sliding effortlessly over one another as if they were magnets with the same polarity. Quickly, before they could spill to the floor, I clamped my other hand over them, trapping them in the cave of my palms.

A hammer-blow to my brain rocked me backwards. Pain, pain like nothing else I had ever felt. Pain I couldn’t describe because it had no frame of reference in my world. Burning, drowning, disemboweling, impaling. All these and yet none of them; maybe it was a new elemental, a Pain elemental and I was experiencing the Primal.

On and on for days it lasted, searing my mind with acid and fire, robbing me of all other senses. Blind and deaf I lived in a world of unending agony, of flesh slowly being stripped from bone and nerves sliced with razors of fire, no end to the suffering in sight. If a knife had been put in my hand I wouldn’t have known how to use it, so lost was I in that universe of anguish.

When it finally stopped, I fell to my knees and sobbed with relief. Over. I didn’t care about the tears that fell to the floor, nor the snot that dribbled down over my lips and chin, I just reveled in the near orgasmic feeling of no more pain.

The first Word slid foully, sinuously into my mind like a snake, or a curl of smoke from a campfire that catches you unaware, accompanied by a feeling that my brain had been invaded by maggots. “Hate” was the Word that settled in for a visit and a cup of whatever my brain was offering. With that Word I could set brothers, lovers, anybody to fighting, exaggerating the smallest imaginary insult. “Hate” was the first Word the Silver had for me.

Next came “Enslave.” Bend others to my own ends, strip them of all free will and make them wholly mine, body and soul.

“Plague.” Cholera, smallpox, Ebola, you name it; I had it all in one little Word.

More and more Words tumbled into my poor head. Thirty of them, one for each itty-bitty coin that jangled in my hands. With those Words I could become the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse on steroids, Ragnarok squared, Armageddon on a stick and pass the ketchup, please. There was nothing that could be kept from me, nothing I couldn’t do.

With those Words, I could end the world right then and there.

It was then that I began to doubt the Voice. Doubt Julian.

Maybe I wasn’t made of sterner stuff, but as the Words clamored like an unholy choir in my mind, I began to be afraid. The Words were not just baleful magic at my disposal, but a power that not only hated the world but hated me as well and would discard me like a candy wrapper when its purpose was served.

Two thousand years earlier the Voice had promised his only son Judah (only in the Greek is he called Judas) that there would be born unto his line the Redeemer, the one who would topple the Lying God from his Throne and set the world to rights. That Redeemer would rule the world and all would be perfect.

Blah, blah, blah.

I knew then, with utter certainty, that it would be the Patron, the Voice-not the Redeemer-who would rule. Just as the Voice had entered Judah all those years ago to rid the world of the Lying God’s son, the Voice would enter the Redeemer, but this time, unlike two thousand years ago, that possession would be permanent.

Perhaps it was the gift of prophesy, or clairvoyance, some prescient notion, but I knew that the Voice would tear the Redeemer’s soul from the moorings of his body and fling it to the farthest corners of the Abyss.

And I knew, without a doubt, with the acquisition of all thirty of the Words, that I would be the Redeemer.

I would be the Anti-Christ.

There are times in your life when you have an ‘oh no!’ moment, usually in a microsecond before something bad happens, like a car crash. You say ‘oh no!’ then wham, your brand new Lexus introduces itself to a tree at forty miles an hour.

For me, my first ‘oh no!’ moment was when I realized someone was actually trying to kill me my second day in Iraq. A 7.62 mm slug whizzed past my ear at 2,346 feet per second, upsetting my whole outlook on life.

Finding out that Jude had the potential to become one of the greatest evils that had ever walked the earth was my third ‘oh no!’ moment and definitely the worst.

More “oh no!” moments awaited me before our journey’s end.

Time for prayer.

Jude

“You have that look on your face,” I observed as I finished packing the duffel.

Mike thinks he can look innocent, but his poker face is almost as bad as mine. “What look?”

“The look that says ‘I just found out that my buddy Jude was destined to become Satan’s puppet on earth.’ ”

He sighed, shoulders slumping. “You have to admit, it’s a lot to swallow,” he mumbled, not looking at me.

“Yeah, I wasn’t bursting with joy when it first occurred to me, Mike. Believe me, it isn’t easy to cope when all you believed has been stripped away in an instant. At least you’ve had the benefit of a couple of days of prep, man.”

He grabbed the keys to our beater truck from the side table. “Still, Jude, it’s a load, a big load, to handle. I feel like I should hate and revile you, but I still love you. Despite all that I have learned.” Tears clogged his throat and I knew a conflict of Catholic dogma and personal feelings raged within him.

So I did the only thing I could think of, the only thing I could do. I grabbed him in a big bear hug and held on as if he was my only port in a storm.