he walked through the old folks home and the church.
do you know what that means?
hE walked past the rubberneckers on route 19. hE sat in the passenger side of each and every car. whispering. rubbing up against people like two sticks making fire.
you all stopped dying.
do you know what that means?
hE had been in solitary confinement for two thousand years. watching. waiting. testing the fence until hE found this night. this boy. for one moment, hE brought all of the pieces of hImself together. from the middle east where the next shot of the endless war was just fired, through europe and africa to this little out-of-the-way no-one-would-ever-notice town in pennsylvania. the perfect place to hide hIs back door. hE hadn’t done this in decades. hE looked up at the heavens through hIs eye. past the blue moon lying there like a ball of yarn for a lion. hE stared at his Father hiding Himself inside one hundred billion stars. the one hundred billion people who had lived and died. hE always lost the people to his Father. hE always lost the people to those stars. they could be taken away from hIm when they died. because goD is a murderer, daDdy.
but you all stopped dying.
do you know what that really means?
it means that the frogs will live.
boiling.
forEVEr.
that’s all eternity is
just the absence of death
and soon, i will be tHere
to make you all understand
that hell has come to earth
all it needs now is its kIng
hE was so close. hE knew it. hE would get out. out of the woods. out of the shadows. out of the creeps up and down a person’s neck. this was hiS chance to finally look god’s children in the eye and introduce hImself to all of them. hE would take over hIs Father’s little blue planet. hE would rip the blue right out of hIs Father’s fucking eyes. those eyes filled with clouds. and all hE needed to do was make it possible for a small group of people to die.
christopher and everyone he loved.
all around town, hE walked, spreading hIs word like the flu by every means available. a whisper. a hint. a forgotten dream. a family’s touch, the fear that keeps the old awake at night. the anger that haunts the middle aged. and slowly, over the past several months, through the very milk that emily bertovich’s father had spent a fortune to turn into hope of his daughter’s return.
only hE knew she never would.
all over town, people had memories and heard whispers from loved ones long dead. those who were touched by christopher shook it off. to them, it was a strange little whisper or a terrifying warning. but to everyone else, the whisper grew and grew until it was screaming in their ears. the thing they could all blame. the reason they were unhappy. the reason their lives never worked. finally, something made sense. finally, something explained all of the problems of the world. this was the answer to all of their prayers. the people finally admitted to each other out loud…they didn’t know why…they just knew what had to be done to finally make heaven on earth…
“We have to kill that little boy Christopher and everyone who gets in our way. Because he is the enemy. This is a war. And good guys win wars.”
hE smiled so wide that hE almost ran out of baby teeth.
Part VI
Run foR Your Life
Chapter 106
beEp.
Christopher opened his eyes.
He blinked through the harsh fluorescent light. He strained to see where he was. His eyes found a life-support machine breathing for him. In and out. Up and down.
Beep.
The sound came to him. And with it, the pain. All of the power he’d felt on the imaginary side came crashing into his body like the break of a wave. He had never known such agony. He felt like he had been hit with a car—because he had. His eyes were sore as if he hadn’t used them since the car accident—because he hadn’t. His eyes had been closed. He had been lying in a hospital bed, unconscious. He had come close to death, but he was still alive. For now.
Beep.
Christopher took a hard swallow. His throat felt like sandpaper. The breathing tube pushed cold air down his throat like hard plastic vomit. He had to get this breathing tube out. He looked around the room for help, but all he could see was the