Episode 25: Beck and Call

“Wh… What?” Becky’s body quivered in terror.
“Ha, just joshin’ with ya!” Jesus grinned, and lowered his arms to the side. He continued to glow and hover. “Yea, my child.” He smiled to comfort her, and it worked. “You actually have half an hour to live.”
Becky began to panic again.
“Woah, woah, yea, my child! Relax! Everyone’s got to go sometime!” Jesus’s face was awash with concern. “I was just being honest, my child,” He said nervously as she broke into tears. “Please, please don’t cry. Oh, it really hurts me when good Christians cry… I was just trying to lighten the mood. You know, like making it seem worse than it actually was? Hey, you have ten more minutes than you thought you had ten seconds ago, don’t you? I’d say that’s a definite gain. Hey, come on. I had to spend how long was it dying? You’ll be fine.” Her tears began to slow. “And you’ll just be missing out on the horror that’s being unleashed on the earth right now. And, hey, you didn’t die the way your family did!”
Becky began wailing in horror upon these words.
“Oh, oh, Jeez… Oh, come on. Hey, Becky, I really need you to cheer up…”
The flow of tears was not stanched by this.
“Okay, Becky, please. It’s me, Jesus. I have a very important job for you.”
Becky managed to calm herself down to a sniffle.
“What kind of… j… job?”
“A very, very important one, that will ensure you a place at my feet. You’re going to heaven anyway, but if you do this, you’ll be even closer to me.” He smiled upon her, and lo, did her tears fade a bit more.
“And if I do what you tell me, I can live longer than half an hour?” Unlike most people, when Becky spoke through her tears, her voice ended up only muffled, not stuttered. She didn’t exactly know how to stutter. She often stammered, but only when she was excited, not terrified.
“Oh, no, my dear! You’re going to die in half an hour whether you help me or not.”
“Why?”
Jesus rolled his eyes. “Because you’ll have eternal life in the paradise above! Jeez, you humans are so desperate. Always clawing to get a little bit more time on this little planet of yours. I spent a good amount of time here. Trust me, it’s not that great. You live, you suffer, you die. Now, if you do what I say, I can guarantee you everlasting life in the paradise of the afterlife!”
Becky suddenly realized what was happening. She was having a religious vision. She fell to her knees, and began planting her face against the ground.
“O, Lord, O, my lord! Tell me what to do, and I shall do it unto you!”
“Oh, Jeez! You go from the weeping to the sniveling. I Goddamn hate mortals! Look, this is very simple. You now have twenty-seven minutes to do… stand up, will you? Just stand up!”
She complied, with a grave look of uncertainty on her face.
“Oh, what is it now?” Jesus burst at her after a few seconds of looking at her face.
“My p, parents and p, preacher always told me to revere Jesus… But now, you’re Jesus, and you’re telling me not to revere you…”
“Oh, Christ! We don’t have time for this! You have to help the apocalypse!”
She stared at him in absolute disbelief.
“Okay, so, not apocalypse, exactly. Did you know that that’s not the correct meaning of apocalypse? Apocalypse actually just means revelation… But, oh, you have to help Armageddon along!”
“You mean… this is it? That was just the rapture? My parents got carried up to heaven?”
Jesus looked worriedly at her. “Er, yes, sure, that’s what happened. Your parents got lifted up in the rapture. Yes, let’s go with that. Now, Becky, listen to me very carefully.”
She nodded and began listening. But slowly, as he spoke, her thoughts drifted to Cody. Why had he been with those robed people? Where had he gone? He, and they, had just disappeared. She sincerely hoped that he was okay, and that he would come back, and that he wasn’t at all mad at her for having followed him there, oh, how badly she wanted to tell him that she hadn’t followed him there at all, that it was just a terrible coincidence, and she tried not to think of why he had been there and… Hey, what was that rumbling beneath her feet?”
“You got all that Beck… Oh, shi…..n guards! Becky, run! Up that hill! Into that windmill! Just DO IT!”
She yelped and did as he said, just as the ground below her began to burst open. She didn’t dare look back. It was too dangerous, if it had Jesus Christ Our Savior scared. She ran up the hill, towards the windmill. The horrible churning of earth behind her continued, and she heard some moans. One of her few moments of displaying any sort of proper sense followed, when she got the horrible feeling that she was being followed.
She reached the door to the windmill and, just because that’s what you do in these situations, she spun to look. She saw the second... No, third... No, fourth most horrible sight she had ever seen. The other three had all been that night, family’s deaths, which she insisted to herself had not really happened, bumping this sight back up to the very most horrible thing she had ever seen. Below and beneath her, where she had just come running from, were people. They were following her. And they were rotting. Her eyes widened, and she began to faint again. Jesus, fortunately, appeared at that moment and caught her.
“So far so good, Becky,” He said. “You got away from the hordes of shambling dead AND you got up to the windmill that you have to be at! Now, just go inside, and...”
“Jesus, did you say the hordes of shambling dead?”
“Yes, yes I did.”
“Then those are...”
“Dem bones Dem bones Dem, Dry bones!” He sang.
“I hear the word of the lord...” she whispered. She turned, with a stern face to him. She had remembered the story of Ezekial, who had been ordered by God to revive the dead-To connect dem bones.
“What must I do, oh lord?” She asked reverently.
Jesus very nearly asked her if she was bipolar, but decided against it. “I just told you moments ago what you must do, my child. Ascend the Windmill and activate the signal atop it.”
“You leave me a whole twenty-five minutes to accomplish this? Why, oh lord, should I have so much time for so simple a task.”
He stared at her in disbelief. Someone this pious had not listened to Jesus Christ when he appeared to her, but had rather dealt with her own mind? What the hell was wrong with her. After a very long moment, he spoke again. “As I told you before, the windmill belonged to someone very eccentric. A cloaked man. He was supposed to activate the signal before he began chanting, but he didn’t have time. He wasn’t even going to activate it for me; he just got the idea to activate it himself. He even designed it himself. And if this Armageddon is going to go forward as it must, then you must activate that signal. But, as I said, the man was... Eccentric. On his way out, he always activated a very intricate security system. You must find your way past the security system and get to his computer at top of the windmill. I will, of course, be here to help you along the way.”
She gazed admiringly at Jesus as he spoke, hoping to... Well, she wasn’t sure what she was hoping for, but she knew that Jesus could provide it. She nodded.
“Anyone else would ask why the heh....ck he had his computer with this signal at the top of a windmill wherein he put a security system that was very difficult to breach, but I know you won’t. So I won’t tell you why. I’m not sure why myself. I’m not in everyones’ heads all of the time, as everyone seems to think. I can see everything if I want, but not the contents of peoples’ heads. So don’t ask these things, okay?”
She continued to gaze at him.
“Okay, I can see that you’re enraptured, and that from here on out you’re going to do everything I say without any sort of complaint. So let’s get on with it. You’re going to die in twenty-four minutes now, which I can only hope is enough time.”
She still stood there looking at him.
“Oh, just go in and bolt the door!” He burst. She finally moved, and bolted the door. He floated in through it.
“Just to make sure you don’t ask,” he said, “I can touch you but I can’t touch anything else. I can touch you because you’ve got faith in me. I pass right through the wood because it has no faith in me. It only has faith in the fact that it is wood, part of a windmill.”
She gazed reverentially at him once more.
“Alright, alright, Go towards those stairs. Watch out, the floor is checkered with mines. Like a checkerboard. You see how the floor is tiled? The black ones are safe to walk on, and the white ones aren’t. You got that Becky? Only step on the black ones. They’re the only ones that are safe. Stepping on a white one will lead to your premature death. Not that twenty-three minutes from now isn’t premature. But you know what I mean.”
“My lord, I must only step on the black tiles?”
“Yes. And my father told me to make it clear to you that this is not symbolic in anyway of anything. It is, very simply, a checkered floor that could kill you.”
“My lord, I will step only on the black tiles and not read any symbolism in the fact that they are the tiles I am to step on.”
“Er... Yes. Just go.” And she did. She very carefully, and reverentially, crossed the floor to the stairs, stepping only on the black tiles. Jesus was astounded at how different this girl was from how she had been. Moments ago she had been confused and unsure; now she was some sort of ultra well-trained sheep. It kind of freaked Jesus out. He didn’t understand how humans, especially devout, sure ones like her, could be so intensely... Bipolar. Before he could finish thinking all this, she had made it across to the stairs. He watched as she craned her neck and looked upwards, as if enraptured with the ceiling.
“Oh, Lord, I have crossed thine floor of judgement, allow me my next task in worship of you!” She called out towards the sky. Jesus stared for a moment and then it dawned on him.
“Er, Becky, I’m over here. Please, please. Right now, I am not up there. I am down here, with you. What you have to do now is go up the stairs. But, it’s not that simple. The stairs are trapped too. If you don’t climb them just right, they will change into a ramp. A very slippery ramp. Which will roll you right back down onto the mined floor. The correct way to climb them, though, is very simple. You skip every other step, and every three steps that you step on, you must pause for two seconds. Start on the second step. You got that?”
“Yes, my lord. I must step on the second step, and then the fourth, and then the sixth, and then stay there for two seconds. Then I must skip one step, skip another, skip another, and pause for another two seconds.”
“Exactly! My dear Becky, I think that you’ve got the hang of this! Now, go, quickly!” A thumping began to emanate from the door behind them. “And I mean quickly! Do it that way until you get to the top!” As she climbed the spiral staircase in the bizarre pattern that the eccentric owner of the windmill had set up, Jesus levitated himself up through the floor, into the next room, to wait for her.
This was a strange room that amused Jesus greatly. There was a repeating pattern of laser sensors that scanned the entire room. At least, it seemed to scan the entire room; there was a convoluted pathway, just a few inches wider than the shoulder width of a largish, hulkingish man. Becky would have no problem passing through it if she followed Jesus through it. He didn’t personally have to worry; the lasers wouldn’t activate if he passed through them. But Becky couldn’t see the lasers like he could, and if he didn’t trace out her path exactly, she was liable to run into one by accident. If something crossed the path of the lasers, the room would be filled with a poisonous gas that would kill anything alive within minutes. The eccentric man, both confident in his poison, and wishing to give any intruders at least a partial chance to survive, had designed the trap so that it was still possible to escape the room. The door in remained unlocked, and the puzzle on the door to go further into the windmill was still solvable. He had already decided that he would worry about the next door when Becky made it there.
And her footsteps on the staircase stopped. Jesus waited a moment, and then realized that he hadn’t told her to go through the door. He almost got annoyed, but then he realized that even if she was being a sheepish, er, sheep, it was better that she waited anyway, in case that door was trapped. He floated through it, and told her that it was safe to come through. He then explained the primary trap of this room to her.
“Now, you must follow my path exactly!” He commanded her. And she obeyed. They made it through the room without incident, and still had twenty minutes left.
“There are only a couple more... Things... Left before we can get up. We should have enough time. The next one is very simply a puzzle; no risk if you get it wrong, you just have to start over. They’re randomly generated, but he’s very good at them, so it only takes him a moment. I’m not so great at them. But you seem like a smart girl. How are you at Sudoku?”
Becky’s heart fluttered involuntarily again. She had practiced Sudoku extensively when she learned that they were one of Cody’s favorite puzzles. She had become pretty good at them, and now she knew for sure that God had a purpose in everything. He had built up her affection for Cody just so that she could get through this door! She nodded quickly, and advanced to the door, and began solving the randomly generated Sudoku. It proved to be a bit more difficult than she had anticipated, in part because she wasn’t as good at Sudokus as she thought. Five minutes in, a terrible crashing came from beneath them.
“Da...quiris! The zombies must have gotten through the front door! This is not good! Becky, hurry!” Jesus descended through the floor and saw that, yes, indeed, the zombies had made it in. He swore, just under his breath, so that Becky wouldn’t hear. Some of the zombies noticed him, and began shambling towards him. An idea struck him. He stuck his head back up through the ceiling, and spoke to Becky.
“Call out when you solve the Sudoku. I’ll come instantly.” He descended back through without waiting for a response, and lowered himself down to the floor.
“Hey, Dry Bones!” He called out to the zombies as he pressed himself against a wall far distant from the stairwell. He beamed proudly down at the checkered floor, then shot the same look at the approaching zombies. “Come on, you mindless, persistent, slaves! Just try and get me!” He grinned as the first one that stepped onto a white square. It exploded beneath him, sending bits of him flying, and bits of tile spinning into the heads of other zombies. The zombies were knocked back by the blast, but only a few were knocked dead. He continued taunting them for about five minutes, by which time almost all of the tiles on this side of the room had been blasted apart. He heard a cry from upstairs and quickly flashed through the ceiling to Becky. Some of the zombies continued to approach the corner of the room where Jesus had been waiting; by the time they got there, all of the tiles in that half of the room had detonated, and there were a couple dozen zombie corpses scattered, fully dead, about the room.
“I solved it, my lord!” Becky said excitedly. Jesus knew he didn’t have time to tell her to stop calling him My Lord, but he really wanted to. It made him feel kind of awkward; he was no one’s lord, really. He knew he was just a guy who had been born into the right family. A Primogeniture sort of thing. He had powers, and some of the stuff he had said was pretty cool, but he hated being people’s lord. The door slid open, revealing a new room.
“Hurry through, before it closes!” He commanded, and she did.
This room was decieving too. There was another spiral staircase at one end, and on either side of it was an elevator and a ladder with a hatch at the top. On the wall to the left of the elevator, a “Lady and the Tiger” sort of puzzle was described. Jesus ignored it, as he had the answer already. All three methods were completely safe, meaning that the room’s puzzle was designed solely as a time waster, so that there was a greater chance that the eccentric windmill owner would come across an intruder and stop said intruder from reaching his computer.
“The puzzles are all musical. Do you know music very well?”
“My lord, I know notes well and can sing.”
“Well. Singing won’t help. The ladder is a complicated musical staff. Too difficult to deal with. The stairs consist of something with scales and arpeggios, or something. My personal favorite is the elevator puzzle.” Jesus smiled. “It pleases me.” He snickered slightly, and led Becky into the elevator.
“Okay, so there’s this song called ‘Hallelujah’...”
“Rufus Wainwright,” Becky said quickly. The thought of it made Becky’s heart flutter once again; Cody loved that song. Besides, it was on the Shrek soundtrack, which she loved. And it was religious. A trifecta of taste, for her.
“Er, well, he does do a version of it. But that’s a cover. It doesn’t matter who it’s by. The main thing is the first verse.”
“Now I've heard there was a secret chord
That David played, and it pleased the Lord
But you don't really care for music, do you?
It goes like this
The fourth, the fifth
The minor fall, the major lift
The baffled king composing Hallelujah,” Becky smilingly sang far too highly. Jesus was certainly baffled, that the young lady thought she could sing, and that he was about to be composing Hallelujah. It made his brain hurt just a little.
“This puzzle is based on that first verse. The secret chord goes like this: the fourth (the first key) the fifth (the second key) the minor fall (the last key) and then we get the Major Lift. It’s all very clever, and the eccentric amazed me with this puzzle. Yes, it’s obvious, considering that it’s one of his favorite songs, and that he has the song piping into the elevator quietly, but it’s still an amazing thought. Now, the panel has twelve different floors. Obviously, the windmill does not have twelve floors. But that display there tells us that we’re on the seventh floor. Which means that the code is, the fourth floor, the fifth floor, and the minor fall-the sixth floor, as that would be a very short fall from the seventh floor.” Becky obligingly, and excitedly, pushed the fourth, fifth, and six buttons.
“There’s the major lift,” Jesus grinned, going up at the same speed as the elevator. They ascended a single floor, and the elevator door opened into a new room, one with many different computer sorts of things.
“Don’t jump the gun here, Becky. This room is another trick. The eccentric owner is the only one who can instantly distinguish the correct computer. We are going to have to go through all of them and find the one that takes the correct password.”
“What is the password, my lord?”
“That’s one of the jokes... The password is E Pentus Unum. Roughly, and probably wrongly, Out of Five, One. Haven’t brushed up on my Latin lately.”
“Why, My Lord, is that a joke?”
“Oh, it’s not important. You’ve got to get to it now, though. You only have eight minutes to get through all these computers. Start flipping them on. I’ll tell you when they start being ready.” It took her two minutes to turn on all the computers she could find-which was, fortunately, the exact same amount of time that it took for the first system to get to the point where a password could be entered. Jesus beckoned to Becky, and she did as she was told. She went to the computer and entered the password exactly as follows: E Pentus Unum. The first computer rejected it. Mentally Jesus swore. He knew it wouldn’t be that easy.
“Six minutes Becky. I hope you can do this...”
She moved to the next computer. Again, nothing. The next three were all the same, and she was down to five minutes.
The sound of gas pouring out came from beneath them.
“The zombies got up the ramp pretty quickly. How’d they manage that? Becky! Don’t listen! I’m talking to myself! Stay with the computers!”
Three more didn’t respond to the password. Then, finally, number eight began to boot up. “My Lord, I have something!” She cried out. And lo, Jesus did respond. He floated eagerly over to the computer she was at.
“Thank my father! Okay, now open the... Oh, jeez, the fifth program down. That little... Heh.” Jesus smiled as Becky opened it. “Now, click that... And... Yes! It’s transmitting! It’s transmitting!” Becky felt something inside her shake.
Jesus smiled sadly at her. “I’m afraid, Becky, that I told you a couple of little lies...” Becky’s face turned away from its joy at having succeeded. “Don’t worry. They were only small ones. I really am Jesus Christ, and I really did need you to do that for the apocalypse to go forward as planned. But the apocalypse proper isn’t coming for another three years. This is just some lead-in. I’m sorry I had to lie to you Becky. The second lie I told was that you were going to die thirty minutes from the time I met you.” The shaking inside of her got worse. “This signal... Purely by chance, I assure you, as Christ himself... It’s the exact frequency that can blow you apart, just as the chant of the Illuminati did to your family. It should happen in about thirty seconds.” Becky began to cry as the internal shaking got worse. “But don’t worry!” Jesus smiled upon her. “You really are going to sit at my right hand when all this is over. In three years, when the apocalypse proper happens, you are going to be amongst the first resurrected, and you will be in my personal guard. Okay?” That elicited a slight, hopeful smile from Becky. “Oh, and the last one wasn’t so much a lie, as just something I didn’t tell you... The eccentric man who owns this windmill and built this system? You may have guessed already, but it was your friend, Cody Sky...” And then for Becky, all was dark.

Jesus frowned as he wiped the chunks of Becky off of his robes. “Damn. Too bad about her. She was a good servant, even if she was a little creepy.” He looked at the computers. “At least the signal is transmitting... The Fourth World will soon be safe, for now.” He glanced around the room. “Ugh. Whenever I’m in this world, I have this strange urge to narrate myself...”
He waved his hands and a sort of window appeared before him. “Can I come back yet?” He asked the window.
“No,” said an extremely friendly, and echoing voice. “You still have a responsibility. The survivor of that family. She does not deserve to be alone. We can help her. And she can help us. Find her, and bring her when you return.”
“Dad, why do we have to draw this out so long? Why can’t we just simply...?”
“Because, my son, these things take time. The instability would be nearly incomprehensible. Adam and I still have some things to take care of. Go, my son. Find the survivor of that family. Take her from The Second World, and bring her here.” The window vanished.
“Dammit,” Jesus grumbled. “I just had to be born into the ultimate royal family...”




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