I, Judas Page 13

  “So that, my friends, is how the book that is the basis of your belief system came into being. It is rather amazing that one person started it all. I can assure you that the…what’s the word? Ah yes, buzz. Jesus certainly knew how to create it. He was perhaps the greatest buzz maker of all time.”

  “You’re speaking of our Lord,” DiSalvo said.

  “He was my friend,” Judas shot back.

  “And you betrayed him,” DiSalvo argued.

  “I did my part of the plan,” Judas said. “If I had not gone to the Pharisees, would we even be sitting here having this discussion? Would there have been the crucifixion—as horrible as it was, it was necessary—and the resurrection and the ascension? Of course not. Would there even be Christianity?”

  “But you had free will,” DiSalvo said triumphantly. “Just as you told us. God didn’t make you do that. You had a choice.”

  “Yes, I had a choice,” Judas acknowledged. “And I made the right one, although sometimes I wonder.”

  “Wonder about what?” Gates asked.

  “Wonder if I did the right thing,” Judas said. “And not in the way you think. Jesus and I agreed—yes, we agreed—” he emphasized, cutting off DiSalvo—“that I had to turn him in for the next step of the plan to proceed.

  “I’m talking long-term effects,” Judas said. “Here we are two thousand years later, and how much has man developed?”

  “What are you talking about?” DiSalvo demanded. “The Christian Church is larger and stronger than ever and—”

  “I’m not talking about the damn church,” Judas snapped. “I’m talking about people.” He rubbed his forehead as if he had a headache. “All right, you want truth.” He paused suddenly, as a native dressed in just a loincloth and carrying a war club came scurrying out of the jungle. The man whispered something to Judas, pointing back anxiously at the way he’d come.

  Judas nodded and dismissed the man with some quick orders. The man ran to the others gathered around, and within thirty seconds they had disappeared into the jungle.

  “What’s going on?” Gates demanded.

  “Visitors,” Judas said.

  Gates grabbed his MP-5, as did DiSalvo. Just in time as two mercenaries broke out of the jungle, their own weapons at the ready.

  “Drop them!” Gates yelled.

  The two men halted, but didn’t lower their weapons. “What the bloody hell is going on?” one of them yelled. He nodded his head up toward the Intruder. “What is that thing?”

  Judas sighed. “You’re interrupting, and that is most rude.” He held up a black stone and it emitted a red glow. The two mercenaries froze in place.

  “What did you do to them?” Gates asked.

  “They’ll be fine,” Judas said, lowering the stone.

  “What is that thing?” DiSalvo demanded. “How did you do that?”

  Judas laughed. “You’re worried about this trivial thing?” He held up the stone once more. “I’ve been alive for over two thousand years, you don’t think I can pull off some special things? This used to be Jesus’s by the way.”

  “It’s a machine?” Gates asked.

  “I couldn’t explain to you what it is. It was given to Jesus by the Father, and he passed it on to me before he was taken away.”

  “What will happen to them?” Angelique asked, nodding toward the mercenaries.

  “Nothing,” Judas said. “Unless a tree falls on them. They won’t remember anything that happens around them when they’re in that state. I’ll release them later. When everything has been resolved.” He turned away from the frozen men. “I’ll give you some truth.

  “I’ve mentioned this but I don’t think you heard me. Both sides are wrong. You represent the Brotherhood. And there is the Illuminati. Yes, I’ve run into their agents in the past. How do you think you found me here? Because one of the Illuminati—yes, your enemy—found me here many years ago. And he wrote a damn book about it. Too many people writing too many things in my opinion, and your people got a hold of it.”

  “Burton,” Angelique said.

  Judas nodded. “Yes. But that’s getting way too far ahead in the story.” He closed his eyes. “Okay, the beginning. The beginning of this world at least. This is where your Bible starts and would have you believe it all starts. But Genesis one, verse one, is where you have to start asking questions. Does the beginning as indicated there mean the beginning of the entire physical universe? Or the beginning of this local group of galaxies we live in? Or just the beginning of this galaxy, the Milky Way? Or the beginning of the Solar System, or just the beginning here on Earth?”

  Judas did not give any of them time for an answer as he pressed on. “Creationists argue this first question. So right away, we have five possible paths of ‘truth.’ Then we move on to the six days, the Biblical Creation Week. Some squirm out of whether the world could really have been made in six days by saying a God-day and a man-day might be vastly different. A lot of this depends on translation of Hebrew words, and not just the words, but the tenses of the translations. Tricky stuff to say the least. Which I am also not going to get into here, because although we have some time—” Judas glanced up at the glowing Intruder—“we don’t have that much time. And there are more important things for me to tell you before you make your decisions.”

  “What decisions?” Gates demanded. He thumped his hand on the table. “We came to kill you, and you have gained the upper hand. What decisions do we have?”

  “Did you come to kill me?” Judas asked, but he was staring at DiSalvo. He switched his gaze to Gates. “And did you? Is that in your true heart, Captain Gates?”

  Gates gripped the edge of the table, his knuckles white.

  “If I do indeed have the upper hand,” Judas said, “then I have a captive audience, so you must listen. I could put you in stasis like them, but then you wouldn’t hear a word I’m saying and it’s necessary for you to hear.

  “The marginal entries in older Bibles allows for six thousand and three years between Creation Week and the recent turn of the millennium. More recent calculations by modern biblical scholars say the Flood occurred in thirty-four-oh-two B.C., and total the age of our present world at around five thousand, four hundred years old. So, you’ve got plus or minus a thousand years to play with if you’re a creationist. One of those who believe man existed side by side with the dinosaurs.

  “But early and contemporary Christians weren’t the only ones trying to get a handle on the age of the world. Plato in fourth century B.C. said the Great Flood occurred two hundred million years prior to his time. A rather large difference from the Bible.

  “The Babylonian scholar Berossus who lived in third century B.C. put the world’s creation at two million, one hundred forty-eight thousand, three hundred and twenty-three B.C. Pretty damn specific, don’t you think? I’m not exactly sure what he or Plato based their numbers on.

  “Applonius of Egypt wasn’t so expansive—he said the world at his time, in second century B.C., was only around one hundred and fifty thousand years old. On the other edge of the world, the Hindus manuscripts written in first century A.D. say the world exists in repeating cycles of four point three-two billions years, each containing one thousand and four point-three-two million year sub-cycles. Pretty sophisticated stuff there.”

  The three ‘guests’ were now just staring at Judas, caught up in his words.

  “The Chinese,” Judas continued, “also thought of the world in terms of cycles and sub-cycles. The mathematician I-Sing in eighth century A.D. placed the beginning of the newest cycle, the one he was occupying, at almost one hundred million B.C. Of course, since he wasn’t aware of the western calendar he had to use the Chinese calendar, which doesn’t revolve around Jesus. You know the Bible is rather Western-world-centered.”

  “Now the evolutionists, the scientists, the Illuminati—you know, the guys you hate—they say, based on their empirical scientific evidence, that the world has existed for four point-five-six billio
n years, and supported life for only a relatively short six hundred million years. Relative to four and a half billion years that is.”

  Judas paused as if something occurred to him. “You know, it’s not just length of time, but how you view time that’s important. Note that the Hindu and Chinese view time as cyclical while we in the west tend to view it as linear. That simple difference in outlook on time makes a fundamental difference at the core of one’s outlook. Even your Rapture is part of linear thinking—there was a beginning and there will be an end—the Alpha and the Omega. But there is no beginning or end in a circle. How does the Rapture play into a circle?”

  Judas placed his hands on the table and leaned back slightly as he regarded his visitors. “So, who of all these people is right? I mean even you Christians can’t really agree. And you base your numbers on what was written by people in the Testaments, so we’d have to make the assumption that this writing was fact, and literary license was not taken. And I can assure you, having personally known some of the writers and many of the events, that literary license was indeed taken.”

  “It doesn’t matter how old the world is,” Angelique said. “It matters that God made it and blessed us with his Son.”

  “Quite honestly,” Judas said, “I don’t know how old the world is either. Also, I don’t know if or how or when God made it. Because even if the scientists are right, something had to start it all way back all those billions of years. But I will tell you something I do know. Something Jesus told me that his Father had told him. About the Garden of Eden.”

  For the first time since the three had stumbled out of the jungle, they seemed to forget about their surroundings and the Intruder looming overhead, and were totally focused on Judas and his words.

  Judas put his elbows on the table and pressed his hands together. “First, I am sorry, but the world is not five or six thousand years old. There is enough empirical evidence out there that I have to side with the scientists on this one. And I have to side with what Jesus told me a little under two thousand years ago—information that scientists are only now beginning to uncover.

  “About seventy-one thousand years ago a very large volcano erupted. What is now called Mount Toba on the island of Sumatra. It was the greatest eruption in the past one hundred thousand years on Earth. Many times larger than Krakatoa in eighteen eighty-three, or Tambora in eighteen sixteen, which caused the year without summer. I remember it quite well. The latter produced twenty cubic kilometers of ash.

  “Toba produced over eight hundred cubic kilometers. Forty times that of Tambora. So much ash spewed so violently that its deposit was spread around the entire world. The plume had to have reached higher than thirty kilometers, well into the stratosphere for the emissions to entirely circle the globe.

  “While the heavy ash fell to Earth relatively quickly, in three to six months, the sulphuric acid haze would have stayed suspended in the upper atmosphere for years. This haze would have been highly reflective, keeping the sun’s rays from being as strong. The average surface temperature plummeted well over ten degrees around the world for several years.”

  Judas was speaking quietly, laying the information out matter-of-factly.

  “The effects were devastating. Most of the world was deforested, famine for all creatures was widespread, and most critically, the human race was almost wiped out. The interesting thing,” Judas said, “is that this, what Jesus told me so long ago, was recently confirmed not by archeologists or historians but by genetic engineers.”

  “What?” Gates was confused. “I don’t understand.”

  Judas explained. “Genetic engineers have been mapping the human genome, trying to understand mankind’s past in this way. They’ve discovered that it appears that every human on the planet today is descended from a relatively small gene pool of only about ten thousand people. They call it the ‘Human Population Bottleneck Theory.’ They theorize that at some point in our history, the human race was on the verge of extinction with only ten thousand people left alive. The math is a bit complicated and it involves the amount of mutation in the mitochondrial genome—” Judas paused and smiled—“which confuses me, too. Suffice it to say this is something that was only uncovered in the last ten years. The math and science are very solid.”

  “But you said Jesus told you of this,” Angelique noted.

  Judas nodded. “Yes. Not of the science but of the event. You see, humans did evolve, but without the Father’s help they would have never survived, so in a way, both the evolutionists and the creationists are correct, but they are also both wrong.

  “Mankind teetered on the verge of extinction after Toba erupted. Humanity in Asia was wiped out. Europe. North America. The few human survivors were those who lived in equatorial Africa and they weren’t doing too well. There were small pockets of people, barely surviving along a narrow belt of land. The Father brought them together into what in the Bible is called the Garden of Eden. There wasn’t just one Adam and one Eve, there were about ten thousand.”

  Angelique had been leaning forward, listening intently. Now she slowly straightened as if the words had hit her. “Jesus told you this?”

  “Yes,” Judas said. “He told me his Father led the people to the one place where they could survive.”

  “And how did He do this?” Gates asked.

  “He gave them all a vision of the Garden and brought them together that way.”

  “Exactly what the Brotherhood is attempting to do to save people now,” DiSalvo said triumphantly, nodding as if he finally understood something.

  “Not exactly,” Judas said.

  “Why ‘not exactly?’” DiSalvo demanded.

  “Because he was the Father and they are the Brotherhood. And the Brotherhood is making the mistake of trying to play God.”

  The Final Day: Terminal Impact In 24 To 12 Hours

  Southern Somalia

  They had taken her off the streets. Kidnapped her. A white van, the door sliding open, two men roughly grabbing her. And then darkness. She remembered that much. After that, there had only been the padded cell with the other five, all as confused about why they were there as she had been.

  Then there had been the voice and the vision.

  She had never known such a feeling, not even during her most intense high on the purest of heroin. The most shocking thing was that it was as her mother had always screamed. Jesus was Lord of all.

  She didn’t understand why she’d never heard the voice or seen the vision before. It would have saved her so much grief. Allowed her to keep her two children. Saved her from catching the virus that was killing her.

  The voice had been smooth and gentle, echoing lightly inside her head, speaking words very similar to what her mother had screamed. Words from the Book. It was a voice that inspired confidence and trust by its timbre and cadence.

  And then she had seen Him. So handsome, but also looking so wise. Deep blue eyes. A dark beard and tanned skin. His smile was what she remembered most. The smile that lit up His face as He invited her to join His kingdom. Who could say no to such an invitation?

  She knew now that she was saved by the Lord, Jesus Christ. The voice and the vision had assured her of that. AIDS didn’t matter. The bad things she’d done didn’t matter. As long as she pledged her faith to the one true Lord and God, she was saved.

  “Glory be!” The words escaped her lips for the fiftieth time.

  Now she was in a place by herself. Not a cell, a room, but the door was still locked. Why were they keeping her locked up? She knew she’d been bad before, but everything was different now. They’d saved her. She owed them everything.

  When she was first kidnapped, she’d thought she’d fallen into the hands of some crazy cult, but now she knew it was the best thing that had ever happened to her.

  “Glory be!” She shouted it out loud, the sound absorbed by the padded walls. She screamed it again, just as her mother had every single day, but she shouted it with joy, not with the anger her m
other had.

  It used to drive her crazy when her mother did that. Between that and the beatings, she’d taken off as soon as she could. Just twelve-years-old and out on the street. But anything was better than the beatings. Her mother had blamed her. At first for her father leaving them, and eventually for everything.

  How could her mother have done that if she’d heard the voice and seen the vision, the young woman now wondered? She shook her head and abruptly stopped the movement as a small spike of pain poked the top of her head. She automatically reached up to see if something had fallen and hit her, but there was nothing there.

  It was quiet here. She had no idea if it was day or night—had had no idea since being brought here. She didn’t even know where ‘here’ was. She thought—

  The thought was never completed as the spike came back, this time multiplied ten times over, as if someone had driven a huge rod right down through the center of her head. She screamed in pain and doubled over, sliding off the bed she’d been sitting on, to the floor. Her hands were grasped about her head as if she could ward off whatever was pounding into her brain.

  But it was coming from the inside.

  She curled into the fetal position, screaming, not from the joy of knowing the Lord, but from unbearable pain. She didn’t even realize blood was flowing out of her ears, nose, and even her eyes, red tears coursing down her cheeks.

  “Please, Lord. Please. Please. Please.” She repeated the word, just as she used to as a child when her mother was beating her. Like then, the plea didn’t change anything.

  The pain was no longer a spike but a burning orb that filled her head as if the interior of her skull were on fire. Her hands were beating against her head now in rhythm with her cries. Blood splattered about unnoticed, pouring out of her skull as if it, too, were trying to escape the pain.