The Good Slave (2 page)

“NO!”
 
The little slave screamed hysterically as the wriggling claw slowly descended toward his belly.
 
He begged, “Stop!
 
Don’t!
 
I’m sorry!
 
I’m
sorry
!”

“Sorry for
what
?”

“I’m sorry you’re such an ugly old woman pig!”

“That
does
it!”

Phoebus let out a high-pitched scream as the hand lowered toward his belly.

Now Stephen started laughing, too.

“I’m not even
touching
you yet!”

“It tickles anyway!”

“That’s impossible!”

“No!” the little slave screamed as the wriggling fingertips slowly descended lower and lower and lower.
 
“Stop, Stephen!
 
STOP
!”

Phoebus smiled as the tips of his shoes scraped across the floor.

The courtroom was abuzz with hushed conversations about the forthcoming verdict.
 
Laughter erupted somewhere behind him when someone said
acquittal
.
 
Phoebus didn’t understand exactly what that was, but Master Josef had instructed all his slaves to pray for one because it would set Stephen free.
 
And so Phoebus prayed for an acquittal, good slave that he was.

The little slave hated those wretched people behind him laughing at his family’s misfortune.
 
He clenched his eyes shut, clasped his hands tight and prayed to God and the Lord Jesus with all his might for the miracle of an acquittal that would bring an end to this nightmare and make them all happy again.

“Amen,” he whispered so faintly that his lips would have had to have been pressed against someone’s ears for them to hear him.

It had been more than two hours since Master Josef’s lawyer phoned that the jury was about to return its verdict.
 
They were just about to order lunch, but it skipped instead and now Phoebus was starving.
 
He forgot himself and turned around to look at the giant golden clock above the doors at the back of the courtroom: one-thirty.

An elderly couple sitting behind him stared in wide-eyed disbelief when he made eye contact with them.
 
The little slave whipped himself back around and slouched deep into the pew.

“Impertinent little imp,” the elderly man snapped.

“Needs a good whipping,” the elderly woman sniffed.

Master Josef sitting next to him hadn’t even noticed.
 
Phoebus was used to people being mean to him, especially in this courthouse, and was already thinking about Stephen again.
 
A guilty verdict would mean death, an unbearable thought for the little slave.

He cautiously
raised his head to sneak a peek at the front of the courtroom.
 
The jury box was still empty, of course.
 
Stephen sat at the defense table directly in front of them, wearing the standard prison-issued pink jumpsuit.
 
The state had shorn his long blond hair down to a sun-starved, mousy brown stubble on his pale scalp.
 
He was so much thinner now than on the night of his arrest months before, even thinner than at the beginning of the trial.
 
The little slave couldn’t see the bruises on Stephen’s face, but he knew they were there.
 
His master’s son hung his head low and his spine stretched the thin skin at the mergence of his neck and back.

Criminals in America, convicts and suspects, were legally obligated to follow the same rules and laws that governed slaves: look down at all times—
A good slave’s gaze is always down and earthbound
—to display humbleness and humility; do not speak unless spoken to; never protest or complain; always walk behind one’s betters, namely anyone who was not a slave or slaves of higher rank.
 
And most importantly—obey, obey, obey.
 
Stephen, who had been born and raised in the privileged world of parasites, the socioeconomic elite who infested every nook and edict of the Church-State like God’s own avenging locusts—gated communities, mountains of money, world travel, expensive private schools, hobbing with the most exclusive of knobs—had never learned humility or submission despite (as a result of?) being the son of a famous televangelist.

Phoebus’ heart broke.
 
His master’s son was so pale.
 
His hands were cuffed behind his back, his feet shackled to the table leg.
 
Sometimes he limped when he entered courtroom and shuffled across the floor like an old man, not even stretching the shackles to their limit.
 
(
A prisoner’s suffering
, it was said,
is good for society’s soul
.)
 
He no longer stood upright, a posture the media—all tabloids—had described as arrogant false modesty.
 
Daily they wrote tripe such as
The rampageous hubris of Josef Messinjure’s only begotten son, the abhorrent Stephen Messinjure, led the once mighty and powerful Man of God’s downfall of Biblical proportions
.
 
Master Josef said the articles were rubbish and stopped reading them long ago.

“Phoebus!” Master Josef snapped under his breath when he caught his little slave staring at the front of the room.
 
The boy immediately dropped his gaze back to the floor.
 
He had’t sat still for fifteen seconds before started swinging his legs again, but Master gently pressed his large, soft hand on Phoebus’ thigh to make him stop.

My poor, poor master
, thought the little slave.

Chapter Three

The Party of God

Josef Messinjure had once been a mighty and powerful Man of God.
 
The most famous televangelist in America, in fact, and decades-long host of
Walking With Jesus
.
 
Compared to his thirty-year rise to fame, his star had crashed faster than the speed of light soon after he began promoting the idea of a second political party.

He’d been wrong thirty years before, he said, about the Party of God—the POG (pee-oh-gee)—being the one and only true party.
 
He stood behind his brass-trimmed, cheery wood pulpit on a darkened stage, bathed in a single pool of light, a large but simple, unpolished cross made of cypress and cedar appeared to be magically suspended in midair (thanks to instant CGI erasure of the wires holding it) high above and slightly behind him.
 
“A second, thoroughly Christian political party would offer alternate, and perhaps even better, solutions to America’s struggles with sin and crime and corruption.”
 
Many believe the corruption part was an attack, as direct or indirect as you cared to interpret it, on the POG itself.

In a former life, however, the preacher had sung a far different tune.

Three decades before a brash, young Rev. Messinjure had stood on a brightly lit stage and prophesied from behind a simple pine podium, “Only through a
single
political party can we hope to come together in peace and end all suffering in this great land we call America!”

Some of the chorus members behind him punctuated his point with a mighty “Amen!”

The Rev. Messinjure always wore a black suit back then, which matched his still natural black hair, his favorite maroon silk tie, and a lapel pin in the shape of the simple Christian fish, which the POG had coopted as its party logo:

“Think about it,” he’d told his coast-to-coast congregation.
 
“The Party of God.
 
Of
God
.
 
I am profoundly humbled to be a member of the one true party blessed by our Creator.
 
For how could the Almighty not bestow his grace upon those who serve Him with such humility?
 
There is no democracy or republic in Heaven, and there should be none on Earth.
 
God decides all, and as God’s messengers it is our sacred duty to ensure that His will be done.
 
We must eradicate deviants and nonbelievers, and return the descendants of Ham to their rightful place of subservience, for that is the will of God!”

He would always pause dramatically long to build anticipation for whatever came out of his mouth next.

He smiled and said, “Just you wait, my fellow Christians.
 
When peace and prosperity reign throughout the land, we will welcome our rebellious brethren back into the fold with open arms, and love them and forgive them, for God is nothing if not merciful.
 
Our Lord’s warm embrace await all who repent.”

He was speaking of the anti-POG protestors, of course, but cruel punishment was the only thing that awaited such heretics.
 
Repentance didn’t matter.
 
Nor conversion nor supplication.
 
Many were beaten into submission before being sold into slavery.
 
Their leaders were they first to be publicly executed to serve as an example of what happens to those who dare defy the laws of God and the laws of the POG—officially one and the same.

Even for the humblest, kindest, most subservient free citizens, however, the United Christian States of America had never come close to the Heaven on Earth the Church-State had promised.
 
Most people were poor now, and totally controlled, their every move under the constant surveillance of security cameras everywhere.

Josef Messinjure, his son and his slaves had it pretty good, though.
 
He was a celebrity highly valued by—and useful to—the POG.
 
They lived in the lovely gated community of Nine Verges amongst beautifully landscaped lawns and colorful flowerbeds.
 
Tall cypress trees camouflaged a twenty-foot high, three-foot thick cinderblock
muraille
bulwarking the entire community.
 
The wall was topped with alternate long and short metal spikes—black, electrified, and each sprouting hundreds of vicious, needle-sharp thorns.
 
The structure was attractively stuccoed on the interior but the exterior was left ugly and bare to discourage would-be miscreants.

Although Josef Messinjure still lived in his lovely mansion, the halcyon days of playing public prophet were over for the televangelist.
 
These days he wasn’t praised, but daily mocked and ridiculed.
 
The Church-State media, which is to say
all
media, made sure of it.

The young Rev. Messinjure had lobbied for the first public executions since Rainey Bethea had swung in Kentucky a century before.
 
But the older, though not necessarily wiser, Josef Messinjure couldn’t bear the thought of his own only son—his only
child
—swinging at the end of a rope.

Or worse.

So the old man had recanted, but too late.
 
Not that there is ever an “in time” for turncoats.
 
His fate was sealed as soon as he spoke out for the first time.
 
His and his son’s and his slaves’ and countless others whose lives would be inalterably affective both negatively and positively (for nature hates a vacuum, especially in the world of televangelism) by the veteran preacher’s epiphanic political change of heart.

What a fool he had been.
 
He was an old man now, not a young revolutionary.
 
He had always known he was nothing more than a useful party puppet, not a decision-maker.
 
He was a political follower, not a leader.
 
Despite his celebrity, in the end Josef Messinjure was just another obedient lapdog blinded into thinking he was something more by his own ego, which had been ceaselessly stroked by gushing toadies both within the party and without for too many years.
 
The arrest of his son on trumped-up charges of homosexuality was meant not to simply embarrass the televangelist, but to break him and shut him up for good, and it worked.
 
But still, an example had to be set.