City of Ruins (16 page)

“But these shall be offerings of praise!”
Jeremiah keeps yelling. “Not burnt flesh! These shall be covenants
of the heart.”

“He was always my favorite preacher,” A.J.
says to me at last, after I’ve been standing next to him. He hardly
even seems surprised to see me.

“Boy, have I come a long way to find you,” I
tell him. “And I think you’d better give me some answers. More and
more lives are depending on it.” I look at his face through the
flames. He looks right back at me, nods a little bit, then points
back out in the darkness, towards Jeremiah, who’s still pacing at
the edge of the light.

“Jeremiah strips everything right down to the
bone and gets down to business. He puts everything that happens
right there in front of you, where you can almost touch it, the
good and the bad, and then it’s up to you which one you take” —
A.J. taps his chest, over his heart — “right in here. Where the
answer belongs.” Then he lets out a big sigh. “Of course, that
means you have to have an answer.”

“I need to have an answer,” I tell him. “I’ve
lost my mom, my dad’s almost a prisoner of the government now, I’ll
never have a chance to grow up like a normal kid, and all I do is
move through history watching grownups burn down cities and start
wars. And you always seem to be there. Why? Why are you
here
? Did you come back to stop slow pox? And if you did,
how were you planning to get back?”

A.J. just watches the fire dance for moment,
and doesn’t say anything.

“Can you just tell me what’s going on, and
why my life is so mixed-up with yours? And what’s with this
‘Rebuilder’ name, anyway?”

Naftali is watching both our faces like it’s
a Ping-Pong match. Is Ping-Pong invented yet? At last, A.J. decides
to talk.

“I’m still lookin’ for some of those answers
myself, boy. Never thought I’d find myself back here, livin’ out
God’s word directly in the Bible. Don’t know if I’m worthy of bein’
in such company. But I don’t know anything about this ‘Rebuilder’
business.”

“There’s someone who fits your
description…who suddenly appears in certain editions of the Bible,”
I tell him. “That’s one reason I came back. You seemed to messing
up history even more than it already is. Everyone’s scared.”

He shakes his head. “Then it’s the exact
opposite of what I wanted to do,” he says. “I just wanted to
vanish. But first I wanted to help your father.”

“How? Help my father how?”

“Lotsa answers, son. And we either have all
the time in the world, or it’s running out faster than we imagine.
I can’t tell just yet. But let’s try starting at the beginning. The
path that hooks both of us together also runs through these two.”
And then he reaches into his pocket, and pulls out an old
photograph — not the microchip kind with different scenes or three
dimensions on it, but the old flat-paper type, with just one
picture on it that doesn’t move at all.

But this one doesn’t need to move to keep my
eyeballs focused, to almost knock me out, or at least to surprise
me more than stepping into the pages of the Bible to have a talk
with A.J: It’s a picture of my mom, standing in an old-fashioned
dress, from like when Mickey Mantle still played with the Yankees.
The kicker is she’s with Rolf Royd, the Dragon Jerk kid, except
that he’s a Dragon Jerk grownup in this one. And even worse, his
arm is around her.

And standing next to them is Andrew Jackson
Williams.

Chapter
Thirteen

Eli: Uproot and Pull
Down

583 B.C.E.

I need to ask A.J. about this picture, need
to find out what’s been going on with my parents, with my mom, with
the whole history of DARPA, but I haven’t gotten the chance, since
Jeremiah keeps preaching, shouting out, and A.J. is constantly
distracted, listening to him.

“When was that picture taken?” I ask. “What
was she doing?” I reach for him, but he steers my hand away and
points toward the campfire. “Shh, son. In a minute. Jeremiah’s
catchin’ the spirit now.”

Apparently, the “spirit” makes you yell a
lot: “God said to me, I chose you before I created you in the womb!
There is no escape for you! The words you are given will hound you,
till you give them voice! — words that will uproot and pull down!
Just as He said that our people not only uproot, pull down, and
destroy — but eventually replant. And rebuild.

“These are the words, the visions, I’ve been
given. They do not come from me. The come from the Holy Source,
from which all life springs. They come from the God we were meant
to follow!”

Jeremiah paces around the fire as he talks.
It’s clear and cold this evening, people pull rags and shawls and
pieces of whatever they can find over their shoulders, but it’s not
enough, and most of them shiver. Most, but not Jeremiah, who has a
thin, rough rag over his bony body and bare shoulders, and a sandal
on one cracked and scabby foot.

On the other foot, there’s only bare skin,
but it’s tough and scabby too, like alligator hide.

Naftali raises his hand, like he’s in a
classroom. Once he realizes Jeremiah isn’t looking at anyone in
particular, but gazing out into the dark as he talks, he just asks
his question out loud.

“We’ve been trying to replant, but all this
cold weather came. Will God help us?”

“Does God play tricks?” Jeremiah asks in
return. In the firelight, his eyes seem even sadder now. “You see
the hand of the Almighty all around you. Nothing is hidden;
everything that has come to pass is in plain view.”

“But what about the food?” someone else asks,
nodding toward Naftali.

Jeremiah sighs. “Before we can plant, we need
to gather seeds. When this snow passes, you can go to the fields
the Babylonians put to the torch. Sweep away the ashes. Gather what
survives. Raise it up, and let it grow.”

“Is this another of God’s lessons you’re
giving us?” a woman asks. She’s the one who said Thea was
Gehenna-marked.

“No, I’m telling you where to plant crops.
This lentil bread should be finished cooking in the fire soon. We
will share it when it’s ready.”

“But then these lentils will be gone!” the
woman says.

“Have you forgotten what time of year it is?”
Jeremiah says wearily. “It’s Rosh Hashanah, the New Year. Time of
think of winter crops, not spring. And time to ask forgiveness for
what we’ve done, what we’ve been. Time to ask for blessings.”

“How? With sacrifices? We have no animals, no
offerings to take the temple! We have no more sacrifices to make!”
the first man shouts.

“We’ll sacrifice you!” the Gehenna-woman
shouts. “You brought on this misery, with all your talk!”

The rest of the crowd shouts their agreement
and moves to surround Jeremiah. It isn’t just me or A.J. or Thea —
anyone can become a “stranger” at a moment’s notice, I guess, when
everyone is so scared. And if everyone else is scared, it’s hard
not to be that way yourself — whether it’s the middle of war or
sickness or just feeling lost and alone. And then you don’t think
real clearly, and how do you ever change your situation?

I’m working real hard on trying not to be
scared right now.

“I just wanted some food,” Naftali says in a
quiet voice. I think I’m the only one who hears him. Naftali has
even more-basic concerns.

A.J. has been tending the bread, or what’s
called bread. The loaves are like big, thick pancakes, and A.J.
reaches into the edge of the fire and rips off a piece.

“Here!” he says, speaking in Hebrew, holding
up the piece of bread. “Here is your sacrifice! A piece of the meal
we were to share!”

The crowd stops, looks from Jeremiah to A.J.
A.J. keeps going. “We’ll offer it up to God! We’ll ask for every
blessing for what we do!”

“We don’t have an altar,” the Gehenna-woman
says. “We don’t even have a temple.”

A.J. looks around, like maybe they have a
point, but then he turns back to the group. “Then we’ll make one,
right here.”

And he sets the bread down, then starts
picking up big rocks from the rubble.

Naftali’s holding up a torch and following
A.J., so he can see what he’s doing, which earns him bites of the
lentil loaf A.J. was cooking.

It seems Jeremiah might be saved, for now.
Everyone else is standing around, watching A.J. work.

I’m helping, too, picking up smaller rocks
and carrying them. I’m starting to understand how he got the
Rebuilder name. But I also want to talk to A.J., to ask him more
about that picture.

Though right now, all he wants to talk about
is the temple.

“This was the great temple of the early
Israelites, son. People would come from all over the country for
all the great holidays, like Passover, and the Jewish New
Year.”

“Rosh Hashanah?”

“Yeah. They were tribal people, mostly, so
they’d bring something to offer up to their god.”

“The sacrifices everyone’s talking
about?”

“Right. Something to let the heavens know you
appreciate what you have, and if it wasn’t too much trouble, you’d
also appreciate not starving to death in the new year, or for no
one to get sick, your kids to be taken care of, all the usual
things people want. Hand me that rock.”

He takes a flat stone I’m holding, and tries
to lay it across the other rocks, like a tabletop. He shakes his
head. “Too small.”

“So, since the temple was destroyed…”

“…they can’t talk to God in the ways they’re
used to. Jeremiah was talkin’ about getting blessings for these new
crops they want to plant.”

“Do hungry people have time for
blessings?”

A.J. doesn’t answer that. “I need to find
some more rocks,” he says.

I go with him, and Naftali follows us with
the torch.

“I really need to know more about that
picture,” I tell A.J. “You have me all scared that something
happened to my mom.”

“She tried to do some good, son. But the
story of that picture really begins with our buddy, Rolf Royd. He
came back from his trip through the Fifth Dimension, showing up
somewhere in America, in the 1950s, a few years after World War II.
That turned out okay for him, because some of the new government
agencies, especially the spy agencies that America had created,
decided a few of those Nazis knew things that could still be
useful. The German rocket scientists, too — we gave ’em jobs
workin’ for us.”

“Scientists? Like the one Thea and Clyne met
in that big cave, with the factory in it?”

“Yeah — Wernher von Braun. Give me a hand
lifting this rock up. Yeah, him and other ex-Nazis. But not just
building rocket ships. Some of ’em got work with our spy outfits,
teaching them what they knew.”

“What did they know?”

“How to keep track of people. How to keep
your citizens from doin’ things you don’t want ’em to do. It was
called Operation Paperclip. Hey, this one look big enough to
you?”

It’s flat enough and big enough to go between
those other stones he set up. But it looks heavy. Still, if I help
him, it keeps him here, and keeps him talking. “I think so.”

“Then help me take it over there.” He grunts
a bit, but continues his story without me asking. Maybe to take his
mind off how heavy the rock is. “Yeah, Operation Paperclip. We took
those Nazis right into our own government, because we thought
another big war was brewin’, with the Russians.” He shakes his
head. “Nobody can really think straight during a war.”

No kidding. During World War II, there was
another secret project we both knew about: Project Split Second —
the time-travel research my mom was working on with Samuel Gravlox
and his team in San Francisco. She tried to slow the work down, so
that time travel wouldn’t be invented too soon and turned into some
kind of weapon that might mess up the world even more.

“After the explosion at Fort Point, which you
were part of, they moved their operations to a secret base in the
Oklahoma panhandle,” A.J. explains, moving slowly with me as we
keep dragging the rock. “Just like the work on atomic bombs, they
didn’t slow down their time-travel research just because one war
was over. The idea was, the next war would be even more fierce,
more destructive.” He shakes his head again.

“Your mother stayed on the Split Second team,
Eli. She tried to be a voice of reason. That’s what got her in
trouble.”

“‘Trouble’?”

“Accused of being a peacenik, a communist, a
spy. Whatever they could accuse her of, because she wanted everyone
to think twice about the kinds of weapons we were buildin’. But
they had somebody else who knew about time travel, knew how it
could work. Someone they decided could run the Split Second team,
since they were havin’ doubts about your mom.”

There was a sick feeling in my stomach, like
what happens if you eat donuts and ice cream and a big jug of soda
pop, all at once. “Rolf?”

A.J. just nods.

“He worked with my mom?”

“Yeah, after the war. He was part of what
they called the ‘team.’ His hair was stark white, even though he
was still supposed to be a young man.”

“He really worked with her?”

“He worked with everybody. Anybody that could
make him more powerful. All the way through the 1960s.”

“So she’s definitely still alive.” I don’t
ask it as a question. I was always too scared to ask the question.
Now I’m just relieved.

“Ready? Heave!” We lift the flat rock and let
it crash down on the two big stones A.J. has set up. It stays put,
and we have our table.

“Altar. It’s done, son. The first part of
rebuildin’ the temple for these people.” A.J. wipes off his hands
and looks at me. “Maybe things can get back to normal, now. As for
your mom...”

“She’s alive, but you haven’t told me
where.”

“She
was
alive, certainly back then.
But I’ve lost track of her.” My stomach gets all queasy again.
“That doesn’t mean anything bad’s happened to her! I just wasn’t
always able to keep tabs, since I had some of my own problems with
Rolf, and with our fine government folk to contend with.”