Christopher Moore - Lamb - The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal

“Arrest him!” Justus commanded, but his soldiers were equally stunned by the resurrection of their cohort.

“Now that I think of it,” the dead soldier said, “I do remember being stabbed.”

No outlet from the crowd, Jeremiah turned toward his accuser and drew a blade from under his shirt. This seemed to snap the other soldiers out of their trance, and they began advancing on the killer from different angles, swords drawn.

At the sight of the blade, everyone had moved away from the killer, leaving him isolated with no path open but toward us.

“No master but God!” he shouted, then three quick steps and he leapt toward us, his knife raised. I dove on top of Maggie and Joshua, hoping to shield them, but even as I waited for the sharp pain between my shoulder blades, I heard the killer scream, then a grunt, then a protracted moan that ran out of air with a pathetic squeal.

I rolled over to see Gaius Justus Gallicus with his short sword sunk to the hilt in the solar plexus of Jeremiah. The killer had dropped his knife and was standing there looking at the Roman’s sword hand, looking somewhat offended by it. He sank to his knees. Justus yanked his sword free, then wiped the blade on Jeremiah’s shirt before stepping back and letting the killer fall forward.

“That was him,” the dead soldier said. “Bastard kilt me.” He fell forward next to his killer and lay still.

“Much better than last time, Josh,” I said.

“Yes, much better,” Maggie said. “Walking and talking. You had him going.”

“I felt good, confident, but it was a team effort,” Joshua said. “I couldn’t have done it without everyone giving it their all, including God.”

I felt something sharp against my cheek. With the tip of his sword, Justus guided my gaze to Apollo’s stone penis, which lay in the dirt next to the two corpses. “And do you want to explain how that happened?”

“The pox?” I ventured.

“The pox can do that,” Maggie said. “Can rot it right off.”

“How do you know that?” Joshua asked her.

“Just guessing. I’m sure glad that’s all over.”

Justus let his sword fall to his side with a sigh. “Go home. All of you. By order of Gaius Justus Gallicus, under-commander of the Sixth Legion, commander of the Third and Fourth Centuries, under authority of Emperor Tiberius and the Roman Empire, you are all commanded to go home and perpetrate no weird shit until I have gotten well drunk and had several days to sleep it off.”

“So you’re going to release Joseph?” Maggie asked.

“He’s at the barracks. Go get him and take him home.”

“Amen,” said Joshua.

“Semper fido,” I added in Latin.

Joshua’s little brother Judah, who was seven by then, ran around the Roman barracks screaming “Let my people go! Let my people go!” until he was hoarse. (Judah had decided early on that he was going to be Moses when he grew up, only this time Moses would get to enter the promised land—on a pony.) As it turned out, Joseph had been waiting for us at the Venus Gate. He looked a little confused, but otherwise unharmed.

“They say that a dead man spoke,” Joseph said.

Mary was ecstatic. “Yes, and walked. He pointed out his murderer, then he died again.”

“Sorry,” Joshua said, “I tried to make him live on, but he only lasted a minute.”

Joseph frowned. “Did everyone see what you did, Joshua?”

“They didn’t know it was my doing, but they saw it.”

“I distracted everyone with one of my excellent dirges,” I said.

“You can’t risk yourself like that,” Joseph said to Joshua. “It’s not the time yet.”

“If not to save my father, when?”

“I’m not your father.” Joseph smiled.

“Yes you are.” Joshua hung his head.

“But I’m not the boss of you.” Joseph’s smile widened to a grin.

“No, I guess not,” Joshua said.

“You needn’t have worried, Joseph,” I said. “If the Romans had killed you I would have taken good care of Mary and the children.”

Maggie punched me in the arm.

“Good to know,” Joseph said.

On the road to Nazareth, I got to walk with Maggie a few paces behind Joseph and his family. Maggie’s family was so distraught over what had happened to Jeremiah that they didn’t even notice she wasn’t with them.

“He’s much stronger than he was the last time,” Maggie said.

“Don’t worry, he’ll be a mess tomorrow: ‘Oh, what did I do wrong. Oh, my faith wasn’t strong enough. Oh, I am not worthy of my task.’ He’ll be impossible to be around for a week or so. We’ll be lucky if he stops praying long enough to eat.”

“You shouldn’t make fun of him. He’s trying very hard.”

“Easy for you to say, you won’t have to hang out with the village idiot until Josh gets over this.”

“But aren’t you touched by who he is? What he is?”

“What good would that do me? If I was basking in the light of his holiness all of the time, how would I take care of him? Who would do all of his lying and cheating for him? Even Josh can’t think about what he is all of the time, Maggie.”

“I think about him all of the time. I pray for him all of the time.”

“Really? Do you ever pray for me?”

“I mentioned you in my prayers, once.”

“You did? How?”

“I asked God to help you not to be such a doofus, so you could watch over Joshua.”

“You meant doofus in an attractive way, right?”

“Of course.”

And the angel said, “What prophet has this written? For in this book is foretold all the events which shall come to pass in the next week in the land of Days of Our Lives and All My Children.”

And I said to the angel, “You fabulously feebleminded bundle of feathers, there’s no prophet involved. They know what is going to happen because they write it all down in advance for the actors to perform.”

“So it is written, so it shall be done,” said the angel.

I crossed the room and sat on the edge of the bed next to Raziel. His gaze never wavered from his Soap Opera Digest. I pushed the magazine down so the angel had to look me in the face.

“Raziel, do you remember the time before mankind, the time when there were only the heavenly host and the Lord?”

“Yes, those were the best of times. Except for the war, of course. But other than that, yes, wonderful times.”

“And you angels were as strong and beautiful as divine imagination, your voices sang praise for the Lord and his glory to the ends of the universe, and yet the Lord saw fit to create us, mankind, weak, twisted, and profane, right?”

“That’s when it all started to go downhill, if you ask me,” Raziel said.

“Well, do you know why the Lord decided to create us?”

“No. Ours is not to question the Will.”

“Because you are all dumbfucks, that’s why. You’re as mindless as the machinery of the stars. Angels are just pretty insects. Days of Our Lives is a show, Raziel, a play. It’s not real, get it?”

“No.”

And he didn’t. I’ve learned that there’s a tradition in this time of telling funny stories about the stupidity of people with yellow hair. Guess where that started.

I think that we all expected everything to go back to normal after the killer was found, but it seemed that the Romans were much more concerned with the extermination of the Sicarii then they were with a single resurrection. To be fair, I have to say that resurrections weren’t that uncommon in those days. As I mentioned, we Jews were quick to get our dead into the ground, and with speed, there’s bound to be errors. Occasionally some poor soul would fall unconscious during a fever and wake to find himself being wrapped in linen and prepared for the grave. But funerals were a nice way to get the family together, and there was always a fine meal afterward, so no one really complained, except perhaps those people who didn’t wake before they were buried, and if they complained—well, I’m sure God heard them. (It paid to be a light sleeper, in my time.) So, impressed as they might have been with the walking dead, the next day the Romans began to round up suspected conspirators. The men in Maggie’s family were hauled off to Sepphoris at dawn.