The Gate 2: 13 Tales of Isolation and Despair

WORLDWIDE EVENT by David Dalglish

Jake Finley was sitting at his computer at 2:37 a.m. when the Worldwide Event struck. He started in his chair, not by any physical sensation but by the sudden lack of it. He stared at his monitor dumbfounded, his forum post momentarily halted. He scratched the stubble on his cheeks.

“The hell?” he said.

He pushed back his chair and stood, most of his weight on his left leg. Taking a deep breath, he kicked out with his right leg. No pain. No stiffness.

“What the hell?”

On went the lights with a flick of his finger. It was as if he needed to see, to know for sure he wasn’t asleep or hallucinating or dead. He looked at his knee, saw the scar across the bottom of his kneecap. After the surgery, he’d had no cartilage left in the joint. At least he thought he didn’t, but now, well…

He snap-kicked again, feeling like a short-haired, overweight version of a Rockette. No pain at all.

“What the hell!”

After a few minutes of walking, jumping, kicking and stomping like an infant discovering his feet could make noises, he picked up the phone. He had a terrible urge to call a friend, but he didn’t have any. The closest person to a friend he knew was a paralytic man named Reuben who lived several hours away in Kansas City. And of course there was the whole middle of the night thing. He backed up his browser and hit refresh, scanning the titles of forum posts that had erupted over the past few minutes.

I might be crazy but…

Miracle?

Anyone else feel that?

God is here!

The words gave him the courage. He dialed the number.

“Hello?” Reuben’s gruff voice said before Jake even heard the phone ring. It was as if Reuben had been waiting for him.

“Sorry if I woke you up,” Jake said, staring at his monitor. He felt so stupid, so silly, but at the same time so goddamn happy that he had to keep going. “It’s just…well, you know my knee, right?”

“Jake,” Reuben said, not even giving him the chance. “I’m standing right now. As I’m talking to you. Standing on my own fucking two feet, not a wheelchair in sight. Your knee’s working, isn’t it?”

“Brand-spanking new.”

“I’ll be honest with you,” Reuben said. A bit of a chuckle came through the receiver. “I didn’t know who to call. I almost called you, but I didn’t think you’d believe me. You do believe me, right?”

Snap-kick.

“Damn right I do,” Jake said, and he laughed and laughed.

*click*

“…eaves just two roses left: Greg and…”

*click*

“…with a final score of twenty-three to…”

*click*

“…still receiving calls, but it appears that this is not a localized phenomenon. We have confirmed cases from Canada, Mexico, Great Britain, as well as reports ranging from Brazil to Germany to China. I want to stress that, no matter how outlandish this appears, this is no jo…”

*click*

“…and who now can deny the coming of the Rapture? God’s hand has come down and touched us all, and if these miracles do not affirm the reality of…”

*click*

“Whoooooooooooo lives in a pineapple under the…”

*click*

The next morning Jake went for a walk, because he could. He wore gray slacks and his nicest shirt, usually reserved for graduations, birthdays, and the occasional Sunday service with his mother before she passed away. Going outside felt like an event. There would be people out there, hundreds of them. The television had confirmed this. It all wasn’t in his head, and it wasn’t just him. He stepped outside and onto the sidewalk. Doing his best to fight his tendency to limp, he picked a direction and walked.

Strangers smiled at him. Some held their arms, or winked, or clutched their stomachs with their fingers. It was like everyone wanted to tell everyone what it was that had been cured. Several men walked past carrying canes high above the ground, and Jake smiled with a sense of kinship at their quick, exaggerated steps. The whole while, he ached to talk with someone, anyone, but he knew them not, and they did not know him. So he accepted their smiles, their understanding, and let his ears steal bits of conversations between strangers, indulging in their closeness.

“For over fifteen years I’ve had rheumatoid arthritis in both my hands. Could always tell you when the weather’s about to change. Now all I feel like doing is knitting…”

“Doctor told me just last week I had cancer. Can you believe it? Still got my hair, praise God, it’s almost like he did this just for me.”

“Now I’m not a religious man. I go by what I see, what I touch. Smart, you know? Now I wake up, not a bit of a cough, and you ask me who I think did it?”

At this Jake laughed and turned around. He wanted to appear happy, and he really was happy, but without anyone to share, anyone to talk to, he felt aimless. All his joy, funneled nowhere, building up inside and spilling into nothingness. Before he went back in his house he checked the mail. Flipping the envelopes through his fingers, he found his disability check. He ripped it open, a weird grin spread across his face, and with the flourish of a child opening a Christmas present he tore the check into pieces, tore those pieces into pieces, and then hurled them into the air. He watched the wind take them, scatter them across the grass and sidewalk like confetti.

“I need to go to church,” he decided.

Ever since his mother’s funeral he had not stepped inside a church. He felt like a burglar. His mind kept shrieking at him it’s Thursday! Still, Jake’s gut told him the small Baptist church would be packed, and he was right. He pushed through the crowd gathered at the doors, no easy task given his large girth. His slicked back hair and shaved face didn’t feel like his own. Jake was terrified someone would notice him, ask how he was doing and how long it’d been since he’d attended service. The sluggish crowd made their way through the corridor to the pews. No one noticed him, and for some reason Jake felt disappointed. A wayward son like he, weren’t there supposed to be trumpets, fanfare, and a father running down the road to greet his prodigal son?

Instead he found a giant room filled with people but no air. He struggled for every breath. A man in a black suit and white tie held a microphone to his lips and shouted hallelujah. Jake did not respond in kind, feeling embarrassed to reveal such emotion. There were no seats, so he stayed in the back, where the murmuring was strong. So many stories. Everyone had one. A disease cured. A pain removed. One single, prominent problem of their life…gone.

The church’s choir picked up their microphones. The pastor in the white tie smiled and let them take their turn. Everything about them was spontaneous and jubilant. Jake listened, the joyous lyrics washing over him. He mouthed along, still not having the courage to sing. The first song ended, and then they began Amazing Grace. Jake had heard it sung many times before, a slow, lumbering song weighted by the burden of forgiveness, always somber, always mourning. Not this time. The joy in it floored him. He rubbed his knee with one hand, and his other he raised to the sky. He didn’t care if anyone saw. There were a million hands raised high in that room, and he wanted to be one of them.

In that far back corner of that small Baptist church, Jake dared sing aloud.

The television was already on and waiting for Jake when he got back from service. Along the bottom ran updates about what had been dubbed The Worldwide Event.

“Even now we are receiving additional hard information,” a pretty blond said, her makeup barely covering the dark circles under her eyes. “Hospitals all across the U.S. are reporting spontaneously healed trauma cases, gunshot wounds, but the most prominent has to be the cancer patients. We go now to field correspondent Alan Green.”

“Thank you, Susan.” Alan was a white man with brown hair and an enormous nose. Briefly Jake wondered how he had ever been allowed on television.

“Standing with me are lines of men and women waiting to be screened here at Sacred Memorial Hospital. All had been diagnosed with cancer sometime before The Worldwide Event, with many having already undergone months of chemotherapy. Ma’am, please tell me, why are you here?”

He leaned the microphone toward a pretty woman with a very obvious wig.

“Well my father’s elbow has kept him from golfing for years, but now he’s out swinging, but I can’t go golfing to show my breast cancer’s gone. I want, and I think we all want this, to prove what we already know. Our cancer’s gone.”

At these words the rest in line, which had shushed to listen to the interview, let out a loud cheer.

“Nothing but optimism here,” Alan said, turning back to the camera. “And that optimism is well-founded. Every time someone leaves the hospital they’ve shouted their diagnosis to the crowd, and it’s always the same: no cancer. Susan.”

“Thank you, Alan,” Susan said, taking the top piece of paper before her and cycling it to the back, as if it were relevant to her ability to read from the teleprompter. “I don’t think this should surprise anyone, but church attendance in the nation has skyrocketed. Churches are reporting triple and quadruple attendance, with many holding additional days of service to accommodate the sudden…”

Jake turned off the television and sat down at his computer. He stared at it, unsure of what to do. For years he had hunched over his keyboard, doing his talking and socializing through games, forums, and voice-chat. Now he could walk. Now he could get out. But what was out there for him? He loaded up one of his favorite hangouts, clicked to start a new thread.

“I think I found God today,” he wrote. “Now what do I do with him?”

After a few minutes he closed the browser, having never posted his question.

For the next two days he took long walks, wishing he didn’t sweat so much and breathe so hard when he did. Sometimes he recognized a face, and he smiled at them when he did. Still no one talked to him, other than a courtesy hello or good morning. Sometimes he caught a few strange looks, and he had the feeling these people thought all the fat on his arms and legs should have been what was cured.

On Sunday he woke up, showered, and pondered over possibilities of work. He had been a lowly delivery driver when he’d blown out his knee. Hardly an exotic job, but what else did he know? As he slid the curtain away and stepped out, his heart halted. A twinge of pain tickled its way up his leg. He took his weight off it, clutching the towel rack hard enough to make it quiver. Slowly, gently, he put his leg back down. Again, a tiny tingle of pain. Jake let out a breath. He’d walked how many miles the past few days? Hell, his good leg hurt, too, now that he thought about it. Chuckling away his doubt, he grabbed a towel.

Jake decided to go to the park, hoping the trees and grass would help settle his unease. That feeling of aimlessness had grown stronger. There was something he should be doing, he knew, but he didn’t know what. So he walked. In the park he saw a trio of women talking at a bench. Longing to join in, he leaned against a nearby tree so he could listen.

“I think that just proves God’s grace,” the lady in the center said, her graying hair up in curls. “Even though we don’t deserve it, He has given everyone a taste of what heaven will be like.”

“I hardly needed the proof,” said a redhead on the left. “Not after Johnny’s car wreck. But it’s good. I haven’t felt like this in years. You really think the rapture is about to happen, like Pastor Rick said?”

“Sure hope it does,” the center lady said. “With half the nation stuffed into church this week, we might have a chance of filling heaven’s bleachers after all.”

“This grace, though,” said the lady on the right. “That’s what this is. God’s grace, even though we don’t deserve it. That’s what we offer the world, us Christians, God’s amazing grace.”

Jake wandered off. He didn’t have a chance in joining that conversation. He wasn’t sure what the rapture was supposed to be, and the only grace he knew was in the song, which still moved him to tears when he thought of it. As he walked a man called out to him, jostling him out of his trance.

“If you wouldn’t mind,” the man said, sitting cross-legged in the grass with a plastic bag open before him. A few dollars and some loose change held it down against the wind. The man’s clothes were dirty, his hair long, and his teeth yellow, but his smile was kind and inviting. In his lap he held a sign that read Hungry and Homeless. Desperate for conversation, Jake drifted over when his natural instincts told him to smile and continue on. Without a clue what to say, he stood in front of the man. Thankfully, he was spared from silence. The homeless man was an expert at guiding awkward conversations.

“Things just never went right for me, you know?” he said. He scratched at his face, which was covered with an uneven growth of stubble. “Tried traveling across the states, did that for awhile, but man, I haven’t had anything to eat in a day or two, and I’m really hungry.”

Never asking, Jake realized. His hand was reaching into his pocket, and the man had not even asked.

“Things not picking up at all?” Jake dared ask. “Since, well, you know…”

“Since God touched us all?” said the man. “Better, sure. I was blind, but now I see, like Jesus himself spat on my eyes, but it don’t do no good. People look at me like it’s my fault now, as if the whole world’s been fixed. Get a job, they say, like I got a phone for them to call me back on, or a return address so they don’t throw it away the second my ass is gone. Should see the looks on their faces when I ask for work. Praise God, I can see, but I’m still hungry.”

As he was talking the three women on the bench stood and tidied up their coats and skirts. The hungry man held up his sign. Two of the women completely ignored him as they passed, the third glanced over and frowned.

“You’re right, grace is exactly what this world needs,” the center one said, their conversation never halting. Jake watched them go, a hard rock in his stomach. He pulled out his wallet and dumped its contents into the stranger’s plastic bag.

“God bless you,” the man said, tears in his bloodshot eyes.

“Sure thing,” Jake said, hurrying off as if he felt the whole world pointing at him and laughing. When he got home he kicked a hole in the wall, then stared at it red-faced and more embarrassed than ever in his life.

Pain twitched and grew in his knee.

In school Jake had read how all the watches in Hiroshima had stopped when the bomb went off, so among the bone and ash they knew the exact time Hell had hurled up a piece of itself to Earth. Well, The Worldwide Event was that bomb, and Jake felt like the watch, stuck in place without hope of fixing. It seemed irrelevant that the bomb had repaired his knee. If a second bomb had fallen after the first, sucking up the ash and rebuilding the walls and giving life back to those who’d been vaporized, they still would have stood around dumbfounded and in shock. How does one continue on with living and working and fucking and dying after something like that?

Jake sat on his bed, head in hands. Depression, that roaring lion, was breathing down his neck, its weight heavy on his shoulders. In front of him was a shoe box. Inside that shoe box was a gun. Reuben had arranged for him to have it during his lone trip from Kansas City to meet Jake.

“You’re one of us now,” Reuben had said, handing over the gun like it was an initiation. “Don’t let anyone tell you what life is and what it isn’t. You know your life, you know what you have and what you live for. Don’t you dare hesitate for fear of what those other faggots might say. You got that? Your life. You control it, and you can end it when you damn well please. Just keep the safety on at all times, all right? Last thing I need on my conscience is you accidentally blowing your fucking nuts off.”

Jake didn’t dare take the lid off the box. Seeing the gun, clean, black and well-oiled, might give him some crazy ideas.

To his right the television ran on mute. On the scrolling newsreel, the constant updates ticked across.

Scattered reports across the U.S. suggest symptoms removed during The Worldwide Event have begun returning in select individuals.

Jake tried to stand, grimaced, and sat back down. He cried.

*click*

“…think the most logical explanation is a global mass hysteria, except instead of a disease or fear it was a cure that spontaneously spread, perhaps building through increased…”

*click*

“…have sent nano-technology into our atmosphere from their spacecraft. Now listen to me, the sudden activation would have given everyone relief at approximately the same time, would have defied detection by our current medical professionals, and now perhaps they have run their course, or encountered problems with our genetic code compared to theirs, and then shut down.”

“So what you’re saying is aliens might be the cause of this Worldwide Event?”

“Well, that’s one possible source of the nano…”

*click*

“God’s wrath has come upon us now! Woe unto you, Jeruselam, for in your disbelief Jehovah has revoked the gift given to us, and unless we embrace, fully embrace the blood of Jesus Christ we will burn in the fire that approaches, for the bible is clear, the afflictions we suffer shall only become worse! Pray for those you love! Beg God for forgiveness, for these are the days of Revelation, and the lion and the lamb shall return carrying a sword…”

*click*

“…reports from hospitals have only increased what many experts now believe were only psychosomatic episodes, although no one has yet adequately explained the x-rays showing cancer remissions.”

*click*

“…anyone truly doubt the awesome abilities of the mind? The world, in its sorrow, yearned for a cure, and as our souls connected in the ether, we made whole our physical shells…”

*click*

Jake hobbled to his mailbox, his teeth locked tight as he fought the natural impulse to limp with his right leg. He fumbled with the key, inserted it backward, then flipped it over. As he pulled out the lone envelope, he noticed its address and immediately opened the flap. Inside was a single sheet of paper, a form letter with a statement followed by a single question.

It read:

Once inside, Jake checked the third box, cut his tongue licking the return envelope, and then smashed a second hole in the wall.

On the drive to the church, Jake kept rubbing his eyes as if to pull himself out of a very deep sleep. He winced every time he hit a bump. There were two reasons. The first was the pain that flared up and down his leg from his bad knee. The second was that the lid to the shoe box next to him kept coming dangerously close to slipping off.

He turned his radio to a Christian music station, hoping to find a hymn or something to calm himself down. Instead he heard vaguely sanitized rock with love of women replaced with love of God. He felt the stone in his stomach turn. Turning into the parking lot of the church, he kept running insane thoughts through his head, hearing Reuben berating him again and again, calling him a weak pussy, cowardly and afraid of everything. In his mind, he could offer no rebuttal.

Inside the church there was room to breathe, and the jovial atmosphere of elation and celebration was gone. A dark cloud settled over the hallways, and worry leapt from the red carpet like fleas. He found a spot in the back and stood, eyes closed and hands open at his side. One time, for a brief moment, he had been touched by God, but it was too brief a touch. He had not grabbed on, had lost the opportunity to be led, and within the church he prayed for another chance, another touch, to be clutched in a hand wiser than his own and led down a path far better than the dismal, dark loneliness he feared.

Somber songs. A band leader that told everyone to keep faith with a smile on her face that did not match her voice. The preacher was soaked with sweat, and he held the bible aloft like a lightning rod. And then they sang Amazing Grace. Jake’s heart leapt. The song began, and he hoped for a regression to the way things were. He even prayed for his knee to be healed, for that glimmer of hope to be restored in his chest.

But the song did not move him as it once did. He heard the human voices, heard their worry, their sorrow, their desperation and exhaustion. Where was the joy in defeat? Where was the worship to the heavens as the lions consumed them in arenas? He opened his eyes. Where the Hell was he? A brief whisper, something intimate yet foreign, brushed against his heart. When the pain flared in his knee, and his prayer remained denied, he dismissed the feeling, hardened his heart, and limped for the door. As he did the choir began another song, one that seemed sickly perverse given all their circumstances.

“He touched me,” they sang. “Oh, he touched me, and I’ve never been the same.”

Lie, he thought. Damn lie. They were the same, everyone the same, and that was the fucking problem.

He turned the key in the ignition with a shaking hand. The radio flared up with the engine, and breathing heavily, Jake stared into nowhere, his hands on the steering wheel, the car still in park. Going home meant giving in. It meant accepting a long, painful life. It meant living on the aid of others, of constant awareness of his loneliness and lack of friends. Could he endure that? So many times he had thought no, and only a sliver of hope kept him from opening that shoebox.

But what hope was left? God had touched the entire world, and in less than a week things were back to normal. All the sorrow, the heartache, the good and the bad and the rich and the poor and the weak and the strong, all living in loveless discord. The same. How could he believe things would get better when that very prayer had given him nothing?

The words of a song on the radio slowed, and the sudden tempo change plucked him out of his mental coffin.

“Good won’t show its ugly face,” the verse began.

Jake turned the volume up, imagining the church he just left filled with such vile, ugly good.

“Evil won’t you take your place?”

Was that the reason for the return of pain? A callous reminder that the world wasn’t perfect?

“Nothing ever changes…nothing ever changes…”

The devil’s inertia was too strong, and who was Jake to fight against it? What if…what if…

“…by itself!”

Jake turned off the car and removed the lid from the shoe box.

The clip had thirteen bullets. A sudden inspiration hitting him, he ejected the clip, removed one bullet, and then shoved the clip back in. He got out of the car. Gun in hand, he limped back into the House of God.

He would be an inspiration. He would be a source for change. Their arthritis, sores, and bad coughs would return, but his wounds, his bullets…they would remain. They would remain throughout the lives of every man, woman, and child in that small white building. Forget pathetic wounds like sight, breath, and touch. He would show them God’s true power. Sorrow. Death. Horror. Loss.

Let God heal those wounds.

Then all would see.

Twelve disciples.

Twelve bullets.

One Judas.

David Dalglish lives in Missouri with a wife that is way out of his league and a daughter who was obviously conceived of better stock than he offers. He is the author of nine books, all blatant ripoffs of World of Warcraft and Dragonlance. His dream is to one day be an accountant for a Vegas prostitution ring.

Of all his books, his most popular to date are the three novels in the Shadowdance series—A Dance of Cloaks, A Dance of Blades, and A Dance of Death. His other series include the tremendous Paladins series, possibly the best writing he’s ever presented and The Half-Orcs. He also compiled and edited—as well as wrote many of the tales included within—the anthology A Land of Ash. To read more about David and how overrated he is, feel free to visit http://ddalglish.com.