Final Crossing: A Novel of Suspense (16 page)

“Ain’t nothin’.”

She says nothing else about the knot on his head, which must be swollen and red against the death-kissed pallor of his skin. When she turns, he reaches up for the first time and touches it. Skin feels like fire.

He follows her. They pass down the short corridor and through a set of double doors. Small gymnasium. The place maybe once was a school. Cots lined up in neat and orderly rows. Rudiger counts thirty-three of them in total. Only seventeen are occupied.

The woman points to a cot farthest from the other guests, as if she knows that would be best.

“Blanket, pillow here. There’s a toothbrush and toothpaste and some other articles in the baggie for you. Showers are down the hallway if you want, and we have a clothing bin if you want us to find you anything new to wear.”

“I’m fine,” Rudiger mumbles. “Thank you.”

“My name is Mary. What’s yours?”

“Peter,” he says, wishing it were true.

“Well, Peter. I’m glad you came in tonight. Let any of us know if you need anything.”

He nods and tracks her steps with his eyes as she walks away. They’re not so different, Mary and him. Both doing God’s work, in different ways and all.

Rudiger sits on the cot and considers how long he’ll stay. Police will keep looking for him. Maybe search here. They’ll ask Mary about him. She’ll speak of a man wearing black clothing with injuries on his face. Have to keep moving. But he’s tired and...confused. He decides to stay, leaving his fate in God’s hands. If God wants him to succeed, then the police will stay away. If they come and arrest him, then God wants him to fail.

A deep-tub sink stands in the corner of the gym. It looks out of place, an afterthought, perhaps a place to hand-wash some clothes. Rudiger walks past his row of cots toward it. He keeps his gaze firmly ahead, ignoring those who might be watching him. At the sink, he opens a bar of hotel soap—Comfort Inn, the wrapper says—and lathers up his hands. He watches the grime from his fingers swirl in a cloudy pool down the drain. He brings the water to his face and cleans himself, feeling the sting and the throbs from his injuries. The water is good, purifying. He pushes his tongue out to taste it. Soapy and warm.

He opens his eyes and notices the cross for the first time. Small, wooden. Hangs on the wall instead of a mirror. Not the traditional cross design. But Rudiger is familiar with it. Two equal lengths bisecting in the middle, like two capital letter “I’s” on top of one other. Four smaller crosses embedded in each quadrant. Sometimes called the Crusader’s Cross, but Rudiger is more familiar with its more common name.

Jerusalem Cross.

It’s a sign, and it comes at the perfect time. A time when Rudiger is close to questioning his cause. Jonas was supposed to lead him to the One, but he slipped away. Rudiger doesn’t understand why God would ask him to do something and then not let him do it.

He closes his eyes and tells himself his life is a story, though he doesn’t remember much of his childhood before the time of the Preacherman.

He remembers riding his bike after his paper route, because his momma told him it would be okay.
You ken
, she said.
Not that dark out yet. Summer still got hold of us
. He’d been coming home after delivering the three sacks of papers he was responsible for, and his momma was wrong. It
was
dark out. That night had been warm—soft summer night in the Appalachians—and as he rode he noticed the dirt-grey Lincoln trailing him, following like a pack of coyotes waiting to surround an old dog. Rudiger didn’t know why, but he didn’t try to ride away. Just let that car come right up alongside, just as fate intended it to. That was the first time he saw the Preacherman. Saw the gray stubble on pasty cheeks, the long face leaning out the cracked and dirty car window. The black hat with the round brim, sharp enough to cut. And later, under the haze of the single light bulb in the basement, the smeared dirt and filth on the Preacherman’s white collar.

The time between the Preacherman and the Army was supposed to be a time of healing, of new-born hope, but it wasn’t that at all. It was a time of withdrawal. Isolation. He’d never told no one but his sister what had happened in the two months he was gone. He saw his momma and daddy split up, unable to reconcile their baby boy with the thing that came limping back home, bloody, torn, and silent. It was also a time when his ability grew, the way he could see letters in a way no one else seemed to. And it was a time of the Bible, of understanding the one lesson Preacherman taught that Rudiger believed. That there would be a Judgment Day, and, glory to all, that day would be the end of all his pain.

And then there was the Mog. This part of his life Rudiger remembers well. He killed that family in the Mog, for they were unclean and impure, but, moreover, the Somali street sign told him to. Doesn’t regret the sacrifice, but he didn’t fully understand it until the next part of the story: the
transformation
. The transformation happened only last year. The last time he saw a Jerusalem Cross was at his transformation, when the doctors in the Israeli hospital told him he had the Syndrome. Jerusalem Syndrome.

As the surviving rivulets of water creep down the side of his face, Rudiger thinks about that day—the day he was told what to do. He wasn’t crazy, like they said.

He was the sanest one of them all.

JERUSALEM, ISRAEL ONE YEAR EARLIER

THE STREETS
are narrow and clogged, the arteries of an old man waiting for his heart to finally stop.

Rudiger separated from his group, though he was told not to. He didn’t care. Groups are for safety and protection, neither of which he needs. Jerusalem would protect him. He carried his backpack loosely over his right shoulder as he walked through the Jaffa Gate. His guide had told him that, at the time of the Second Intifada, a non-Muslim would not dare pass through this gate to the Old City.

A man hoisting a slaughtered lamb barked in Arabic as Rudiger passed.

Red. Blue. Blazing yellow. The fabrics hanging in the stalls ghosted from the breeze of passing humans; the outside air was only a visitor down in the tangled streets of the ancient city and had no bearing or direction. Smell of spice and meat. Vendors shouted, mostly to each other. To get lost in the Old City was an expectation, but Rudiger knew where he was going. It was where he was always going. It was why he booked the trip. Why he decided to fly halfway around the world.

It was too easy to say he was looking for answers. He’d reached a point where answers didn’t matter anymore. He had a new last name. New documents. A job. A small apartment, where he kept quietly to himself. Private Rudy Sonman was killed in Somalia. Rudiger Mortisin was alive and living in Salt Lake City, earning twenty dollars an hour as an independent building contractor. He didn’t speak to many people, but to those who asked, Rudiger received the jagged scar on his ear from a job-related accident. Sometimes they asked for more details. Rudiger never gave them.

The trip to Jerusalem was his first time outside the country since the military. As in all things, he traveled alone, though he was part of a tour group for pilgrims coming to the Holy Land. Even now, as he walked the streets of the Old City, he did not fully understand why he had come, but he had learned to trust the direction of his instincts.

For years Rudiger sought to end his pain. This pain that could only be eased by the something far greater than suicide. Ever since Rudiger learned of the Rapture under the tutelage of the Preacherman, he was convinced that only the judgment of the world would end the degree of suffering within him.

A flyer for the trip to Jerusalem had initially caught his attention. He knew he had to go. He would go to where it all began, and he would find answers.

Go find an answer. Go find salvation. Bring it all about, and end the pain. The confusion. The thoughts and the void. Pour it all into a new world, where he didn’t have to be Rudiger anymore.

Here, in the din of the merchants and the smell of animal flesh, Rudiger wound his way past throngs of tourists. He turned one corner, then another, the space above him alternating between corrugated steel rooftops and open sky. Stone street smoothed by the footprints of millions before him. Black with filth. Rudiger veered right, up a grade of steps, lost but certain. History surrounded him, buried beneath capitalist catcalls and promises of salvation.

He was closer. He looked up at the limestone building next to him, and saw the letters carved into the rock.

Via Dolorosa.

Way of Suffering.

He had memorized the maps weeks before his trip and knew he was on the west end of the eastern fraction of Via Dolorosa.

There. On the right. Barely marked on the exterior of the Polish Catholic Chapel, but unmistakable.

The third station of the cross. Where Jesus fell for the first time.

The lashes had bled Him. The cross too heavy a burden. As they watched, as they all watched, Jesus fell, the massive cross surely crushing His lungs, perhaps causing internal damage that sped His death.

Rudiger touched the wall. A man next to him snapped a picture, more interested in proving he was
there
than understanding what it was he documented. Rudiger stared at him, his hand still outstretched, his fingers spread wide on the cool rock. The man backed away.

Rudiger hurried for no reason. No reason except the twisting thing inside him telling him the message was soon.

The voice was the Preacherman’s. Raspy and old, scratching like a cat.

He will tell you

He speared past an elderly couple. The man shouted something. Rudiger ignored him. Up the narrow road, weaving through humanity, ignoring trinkets thrust in his face. The connection was closer now, promising him information. Promising truth, dangling it just out of his reach, teasing him.

Chapel of Simon of Cyrene. Fifth Station.

Simon had aided Jesus here, and, for a short distance, helped to carry His cross. A man dressed in all white stood against the face of the chapel, his eyes closed. Long, dirtsmeared toes crept out the front of his leather sandals. A Bible clenched in his right hand. He opened his eyes and nodded at Rudiger. Rudiger nodded back.

go further

Rudiger left him. Moved on. Faster. Closer. He didn’t understand his exchange with the man, but there was little he understood about any of this.

Seventh Station. Franciscan Chapel.

The remains of a tetrapylon stood against time on the lower level. Here, Rudiger knew, Jesus fell a second time, His agony only beginning.

The crowds thickened. Rudiger pushed and shoved through them. The heat of flesh swirled about him, the smell of unwashed skin heady and brilliant. A woman snapped her head around and her hair whipped against Rudiger’s face. Smelled like earth. A group of Americans spoke in loud and intrusive English. Rudiger shoveled through them, glaring. Then one of them stared so deeply at him Rudiger feared the man would attack. Then:

“Sonman?”

Rudiger squinted and looked at him. Familiar but loose. Intangible. His gaze fell to the ground.

“Sonman,” the man repeated, shouting over the crowd. “It’s me, Cohen. From the Tenth Mountain Division— Somalia? Holy shit, is it really you?”

The memory reformed in his mind and Rudiger saw Cohen as he had known him, back in the dust and the dirt and the heat. Both men knew what had happened then and that Rudiger was presumed dead. He couldn’t be anything else right now, not to anyone. Especially now.

Rudiger was pulled from his focus, his vision. Cohen was part of his past. Cohen
knew
him, and that made the man a liability.

If Rudiger had a knife, he could have easily slid it between Cohen’s ribs, and in the crowd Rudiger would have had time to move on. But he had no weapon. He could not kill this man, at least not now.

Rudiger instead pulled himself close to Cohen, invading the centimeters of private space left to anyone in the throng of people. Cohen tried to pull his face back, but Rudiger pressed forward. With their noses almost touching, Rudiger said:

“I don’t know you.”

Cohen blinked but did not pull back. “Jesus, Sonman. It’s you. Did you really do what they said?”

Sonman raised his hand and put it on the back of Cohen’s neck. Someone from a distance might have expected the men to kiss, but Rudiger instead squeezed the back of the man’s neck and repeated what he had said:

“I don’t know you.”

He held for a second longer, released his grip, then assessed the look in Cohen’s eyes. It was the look a sane person gives the second they realize the person in front of them is not.

Rudiger said nothing else as he then pushed past him, still looking down. Cohen had no chance to follow—the crowd closed in behind Rudiger like water filling the wake of a boat.

He looked up. He had arrived. It would be here. Where he was meant to go all along.

This was
the place
, though many argued one could never really know. Constantine’s mother was certain, so she had a church built here.

Ninth station. The third and last time Jesus fell. The remaining stations would be inside.