The Living Will Envy The Dead (32 page)

The Prophet Zechariah, as we should now call him, was looking for his own angle.  I don’t know if he really believed what he was preaching or not.  The human mind is a wonderful labyrinth of double-think…and you can use religion to justify anything.  It’s wrong to be violent, unless it is in defence of the faith, and if you can convince yourself that what you’re doing is in defence of the faith, you can be violent…and so on, and so on.  You’ll see it all the time in pretty much every religion.  There are always people who use it as an excuse to play their petty little power games.

What Zechariah came up with, according to him, was a sign from God.  There would be an apocalypse just after the Rapture, Satan’s handiwork intended to prevent the human race from realising just how far it had strayed from the ideal of God’s Own Faith – note the capital letters – and converting in time to save themselves.  It was a very intolerant faith.  Anyone else, Christian, Muslim, Jew, Hindu…hell, the Giant Sheep Faith, was going to be damned and burning in hell.  Zechariah foresaw that one day the Rapture would come and he and his people would be left behind on Earth.

You’d think that that wouldn’t be very impressive, right?  If someone is promising eternal salvation, you’d be more interested in that than being told that you’re going to live though seven years of pure hell, suffering all the time.  Zechariah, however, was clever.  They – the pure, the saved – were under a divine obligation to rebuild the world after the apocalypse and invite Jesus Christ down to his kingdom on Earth.  They would be left behind for a purpose.  They would serve God in the best way possible, actually making it possible for His son to manifest on Earth.

Remember what I said about the guilt?  Zechariah’s sermons called to those who believed, deep inside, that they were unworthy of heaven no matter how much they paid and struggled for the faith.  (The radicals were under the impression that they were persecuted in America.  I don’t know why.  They should have looked at Saudi for an example of real Christians being persecuted.)  The man who lusted after another man’s wife, even if he had never touched her, the woman who had wondered what it would be like to make out with another woman, even if she had never given into such temptations, the young boy who looked at porn magazines under his bed…they all felt guilty.  Zechariah called them to believe that they would be given this task and they felt less guilty, not least because Zechariah allowed all kinds of things that most religions frowned upon.

Anyway…they started out in California.  Now, California is – was – the heart of the alternate lifestyle.  I never saw the attraction myself, but you could go there and join a commune, or you could take up with a bunch of witches and declare yourself a sorceress, or…hell, you could do anything.  They worshipped all kinds of gods and entities.  There was a Church of the Heinlein Followers – thou art God – a Church of the Tin Vagabond, a Garden of the Sacred Goddess and, believe it or not, a Giant Sheep religion.  Imagine a faith, any faith, with any kind of rules you like…and I’m pretty sure you won’t think of the most outrageous faith out there.  We even had a guy from Africa who preached that the only way to cure yourself of AIDS was to have sex with a child, the younger the better. 

And why, you might ask, wasn't all of this stopped?  Like I said above, America is a land of religious freedom and we have some problems dealing with the concept that a religion might be too threatening to be allowed to exist.  There might have been grandiose plans put forward by various people to remove every Muslim from America in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, or simply exterminate them wholesale, but no one would have accepted any such plan.  It wasn't easy to move against any religion, or even a much smaller cult, even if there was good reason to believe that they were brainwashing people, or exploiting children.  The child molesting cult managed to jam up the legal process for years before he was finally sent to Death Row.  We just don’t like questioning religion.  It’s not in our nature to do so.

Zechariah fitted right in, at first.  He was articulate, personally charming, and, as I said, he had one hell of a message.  He won hundreds of converts in the first months of his stay in San Francisco, something that almost overbalanced the entire apple cart.  It was a racket and, as he drew more people to him, more of them wanted a share in the proceeds.  They argued with each other – and other similar groups – had a schism into smaller groups, and even had the occasional quiet bloodbath.  Zechariah was investigated, twice, for illegal activities, but the convictions always fell through.  He might have been an offshoot, but the other pre-millennium faiths closed ranks around him.  They couldn’t accept anyone trying to dictate to him, or they might be next to have their faiths questioned by the godless Federal Government.

(The important point to understand about these people is that they were not guided by logic and reason.  To be a believer, and not a leader, in one of those faiths required you to accept things that logic and reason told you weren't so.  Jesus loved everyone, to take, but one example, but he also
apparently
made a special exemption for homosexuals.)

The irony was that when the downfall came, it wasn't through internal dispute or even the government wising up and stamping on the whole fucking lot.  The State Government of California was very anti-gun.  Heaven forbid that law-abiding citizens should have the means to defend themselves against criminals, murderers and the federal government.  Why, they said, without guns, the crime rate in our fair cities would fall like a stone.  They cracked down, sent in their police forces to confiscate hundreds of guns…and Zechariah led his core believers away from the city.  Their belief that the apocalypse was just around the corner required them to keep their guns – he even worked it into his sermons, claiming that the anti-gun laws were Satan’s plot to disarm the believers and foil his holy mission before he could even begin – and so they travelled east to Kentucky.  There, they established their base of operations, using the takings from their sermons to fund it.  They built an entire fortress there, with enough food to keep them going for years and enough guns to stand off an army.  It was, I believe, a source of some major concern to the feds – well, of course – and they were considering doing something about him, but then…

The apocalypse arrived.

It wasn't an asteroid hitting the Earth, or a moment of bad temper on the part of some divine entity, but the nuclear war.  You know what happened to us already, along with some other parts of the world, but for Zechariah…it was the Rapture.  God had taken the believers – apart from his people, of course – up to heaven and now they had to fight to rebuild God’s country.  Sources differ on how many people Zechariah actually had under his direct command – and there’s nothing like a prophecy coming true to add to religious fervour – but he had the largest organised force in the area.  As I had demonstrated myself, mass armies no longer existed, but a few hundred men could dominate the entire area, if they were trained and armed for the task.  Zechariah had the weapons, he had the food and, rather unfairly, he had the refugees as well.

We
hadn’t been able to take in many refugees.  Zechariah had enough food stocks and manpower to take in as many people as he wanted...and brainwash them to his particular cause.  Whatever sense of restraint he’d had had vanished – remember, he’d been ‘proved’ right by the war – and he pushed all common decency to one side.  The refugees, shocked, starving and in search of somewhere safe, were easy meat.  He was a cunning bastard, all right, and a completely ruthless one at that.

The refugees found themselves split up at once.  White men went into one place, women went into another, blacks went into a third and Muslims into a fourth.  The white men got the best treatment and the best food, but were treated as the very lowest levels of the faithful and forced to pray endlessly, pushed forward into becoming what he wanted them to become.  Why not?  Their world had betrayed them and many of them were on the brink of despair.  Repetition, tiny amounts of food and endless prayer broke them down and built them back up again.  They became fanatical believers.

The women received different treatment.  Their role in Zechariah’s faith, as I said, was that of barefoot and pregnant helpmates to their men.  They had to cast their eyes down, never speak to a man without permission and were genuinely treated like dirt.  Anyone can be broken if handled properly and Zechariah was a master at manipulating human minds.  The handful of declared feminists in the camp who tried to fight back were dragged out and brutally raped in front of the other women.  (Rape, too, was permitted in the service of the faith.)  Personally, I think that Zechariah was a bit of a misogynist; he’d probably had a bad experience with a female boss or something along the line and, naturally, decided she’d gotten the job because she had sucked her boss’s cock, or because she was a woman, or…people like that never look at themselves for blame.  They always look at someone else.  Once they were broken, the unmarried women were assigned to the various Brethren of the Elite; after all, a woman had to have a man accountable for her.  They believed that no woman could be trusted to look after herself.

(By this point, I hope you’re feeling rather sick.  That’s how I felt.  They were a disgrace to my country, people who should have been rounded up and dumped somewhere in the middle of the desert, where the vultures could gnaw their bones.)

The blacks, men and women alike, were promptly enslaved.  I don’t know why Zechariah felt that black men were good only to hew wood and draw water, but he did; they were all enslaved.  Resistors received quick and savage punishment.  Male resistors were beaten and then killed in front of the rest.  Female resistors were beaten and raped violently in front of the other women, all of the women.  The resistors ended up being killed off quickly.  Most men and women won’t fight unless there seems to be a chance of victory and Zechariah offered them none.  They believed that they were trapped and helpless.  That very belief kept them enslaved.

And, finally, the Muslims.  They received the worst treatment.  Zechariah’s faith had its origins in very muscular Christianity, a version of the faith that saw Islam as a challenge and a deadly threat.  The Muslim men were killed, one by one, after being offered the chance to accept Jesus Christ into their lives.  The women were raped, of course, and added to the harem.  Need I mention, I wonder, that all of the Brethren of the Elite – his inner circle – and the Warriors of the Lord – his fighters, a name that soon became attached to the entire group – had free access to the harem and any black woman at any time?  It provided their male followers with an incentive to convert and struggle to gain elite status…and, also, a disinclination to rebel.  It’s a trick as old as man himself.  Once you have blood on your own hands, once you’ve done something you know to be wrong, you can’t go back.  You’re committed for life. 

The poor refugee bastards didn’t stand a chance.  Their world had shattered around them and they were on the brink of becoming Zombies.  In that fragile state, it was easy for Zechariah and his priests to break them down, men and women alike, and reshape them into their ideal.  The men had the incentive of better treatment, promotion and access to slave women.  The women had the incentive of being treated kindly – like pets – rather than being raped as punishment for being uppity.  The blacks…well, in any hierarchical society, there
has
to be someone at the bottom, serving as a warning to those above them of the price for failing.  While we’d been struggling to survive, Zechariah had been building his army for conquest.

He started to expand almost at once.  The problem with any kind of pyramid scheme is that it depends on having as many people at the bottom as possible…and, if you’re at the bottom, you want to rise higher.  Other towns, some of which had been trying to save themselves as we had, found themselves trapped in a tidal wave of fanatics, all determined to gain more subjects and raise themselves within the organisation.  They didn’t stand a chance, either.  The Sword of the Lord, Sword of the Lord Michael as he was called, was a canny leader.  I don’t know if he were actually a former military officer.  It wasn't common for the more extreme militias to have actual military personnel, as opposed to posers, and I would like to think that he wasn't, but he was a good officer.  He broke through defence lines, occupied towns, and then the Brethren of the Elite started to convert the town.  Once such a scheme got rolling, was there anything that could actually stop it?

It had happened before.  Alexander the Great had swept across the world.  So too, more practically, had Muhammad.  They’d both reshaped entire sections of world history.  If Zechariah couldn’t be stopped, he might well pick off the remainder of the United States piece by piece, forcing everyone to follow his own version of the faith.  An ambitious man, with all the power of thousands of fanatics behind him, might take the entire ball of wax.  I doubted that there was an organised force that could stop him left on the planet.

And this was what was coming our way.

It’s probably a good thing I didn’t know that at the time.