The Caleb Collection Read online

  “Okay, Caleb,” he said. “The world awaits. Go up there and tell them how it is.”

  The boy paused and looked from Jason to Leiah, and then back. He seemed thrilled with them. He reached both arms up to them, inviting an embrace. Jason glanced at Leiah, and they both bent and hugged the boy.

  “I’m very happy,” he said.

  “We’re happy too,” Leiah said, hugging him tight. “Thank you.”

  He released them and drilled them with a stare. “Thank you.”

  It wasn’t until Caleb had mounted the stage that the tone of Caleb’s words struck Jason. They felt like a salutation.

  Donna ran toward Bill. “We’re on!”

  The boy walked toward the microphone, and some people at field level began to shout for everyone to shut up. The word spread like wildfire. The boy was taking the stage.

  By the time Caleb stopped in front of the wad of mikes, a deafening hush had engulfed the stadium. Only the background symphony of horns, honking in the distance, and the steady backbeat of a chopper’s blades sounded high above.

  Caleb stood in his large T-shirt and leaned up to the microphones.

  “Hello.”

  The word reverberated loudly. Too loudly. He pulled back and grinned, amused. He glanced over at Jason and Leiah and tried again.

  “Hello.” This time they had turned him down.

  “My name is Caleb.”

  A young woman in a front-row seat to their left stood, lifted her arms high, and yelled her approval. “Yeaaaa, Caleb! Yeaaaa, Caleb!”

  Hundreds rose to their feet around her and joined in her cry. Within seconds the entire place was on its feet, thundering its approval with yells and whistles. Caleb said something into the mike, but it was lost to the roar. The air shook under the power of eighty thousand voices screaming at full volume.

  Caleb blinked and stepped back from the mike. It was hard to imagine that a short five weeks ago the small boy they cheered had huddled under his tunic in the back of Jason’s bouncing Jeep. Hard to imagine that so many people would drop what they were doing to rush here on the news that Caleb was alive. But then the boy had walked onto the horizon of their worlds and changed everything, hadn’t he? They might follow him over a cliff.

  A dozen people who evidently fancied themselves as leaders ran onto the field and waved the crowd to silence itself. It took a good thirty seconds, but the din slowly died, to the yelling of a bare-chested man in jeans and long hair who was especially enthusiastic about their quieting.

  The boy glanced over at Jason, his smile now gone. Jason nodded encouragement, and Caleb stepped back up to the mike.

  “I’m just a boy,” he said. “It’s frightening to hear all this noise. You should be praising God, not me.”

  He paused. The hush felt unearthly.

  “Because you know that everything you’ve seen comes from God. All the good things, anyway. Dadda told me that we shouldn’t look for the praise of men.”

  Caleb glanced to the side, and Jason’s heart swelled. The boy was speaking like the young educated man he was. It was amazing how his extensive book learning of English had steadily translated to speech over the last month. You tell them, Caleb.

  The boy faced the mike again. “I’m not a magician. I know that some people think I am, but I’m not. And the power you’ve seen isn’t from my mind like some of you think, either. It’s not from me at all. It’s from God.”

  For a boy who had spoken very little publicly in the five weeks he had been in America, he was now forthcoming, gaining confidence with each word, it seemed.

  “And when I told you that Jesus Christ is the only power behind what you’ve seen, it’s not because I don’t know better. I know Christ because he’s saved me. I think I understand sin pretty good now and it isn’t very nice. I walk in Jesus’ kingdom, the kingdom of God. He is God. The only God.”

  You could almost hear the swallowing of tongues across the world. The boy’s words defied the beliefs of well over half of those watching. But he wasn’t finished.

  “Some of you believe in stone gods. Some of you worship prophets. I don’t understand all your fancy words, but I do know God, and I can tell you that he’s only one. He’s not Buddha, he’s not Mohammed, and he’s not man. He’s Jesus Christ, and he has made a path to God. To the kingdom of God.”

  A roar broke out spontaneously. The Christians couldn’t contain themselves, and neither could Jason. The stadium shook, and Jason realized that his own voice was among those that made it shake. It hardly mattered that half of those in attendance only stared at the boy with round eyes, shocked at his words. The pronouncement of truth from the rest triumphed, and soon others were joining in. From where he was standing, Jason could actually see the mikes vibrating with the thundering cry.

  “And some of you who call yourself Christians . . .”

  Jason saw that the stadium was now overflowing. Nikolous had arrived. He stood at the side entrance wide-eyed. The bare-chested man in jeans was running out in the field, vigorously waving the crowd quiet again. The cheers fell off.

  “And some of you who call yourself Christians need to learn how to walk in the kingdom of God, not just sleep there,” Caleb said. “Dadda told me that just because you are born into a palace doesn’t mean that you know how to rule. You are children who are blind to the power of God’s Spirit. I think you might still be babies in the palace. Maybe you are still playing with mud pies.”

  Jason laughed loudly enough in the silence to warrant the swing of a few cameras his way. He jerked at Leiah’s elbow in his side and swallowed his laughter. But she was chuckling under her breath. Dr. Thompson’s words were not lost on the boy.

  Caleb looked their way and grinned. “Jason and Leiah have walked in the kingdom. If they can, anybody can, because I think they once hated God.”

  What a strange, wonderful way to put it, Jason thought. He dipped his head and smiled. Several cameras swept his way again. Jason expected Caleb to turn back to the mike and continue.

  But he didn’t.

  He just stared at them. “That is all I have to say,” he said. The smile slowly faded from his face. The crowd stood rooted in silence.

  A wave of heat crashed over Jason’s head and rushed down his back. The air felt awkwardly heavy. He and Caleb froze like that, staring at each other, somehow trapped in time, oddly expectant.

  When Caleb’s head moved, it seemed to do so in slow motion. It went backward, still staring at him. The boy’s arms still hung loosely at his sides, but his head was now bent back at a right angle. A red mist sprayed through the air behind him. His eyes closed and Jason wondered why. Silence swept through the stadium.

  For an endless moment Caleb stood like that, with his head bent back impossibly and his eyes closed to the world. And then his legs suddenly buckled. His body crumpled backward and landed on the plywood with a loud thump.

  A great white ball of heat exploded in Jason’s mind. That was a bullet that smashed through his little head! Caleb had been shot!

  Then he thought, I’ve been shot too.

  Banks would have pulled the trigger a second time if it hadn’t been for the kid’s weird performance at the end. He’d just stood there, and Banks couldn’t help thinking that the kid wanted him to shoot.

  He leaned against the railing above the press boxes and kept the cross hairs on the boy’s temple for five seconds before squeezing his right forefinger. It had been perfect. No report, no flash, just a spit, and the kid was dead on his feet. Banks kept the scope on the boy for three full seconds before it crumpled. The body didn’t move. He was dead for sure this time.

  And what if they don’t pay, huh? Huh, huh, huh?

  He hesitated one more second knowing he should’ve taken out the other two by now. Jason stood stage left, gawking.

  Suddenly Banks was running out of time. The sound of a chopper’s blades beat through the air high above. That would be the police, and they would know by now. Banks spun the rifle
toward the woman, but she was running for the boy already. His time was running out; the stadium was in an uproar.

  Banks stood abruptly, shoved the rifle under his trench coat, strapped it in, and ran for the back wall. If Crandal didn’t pay, he would pop him, that was for sure. It had taken him twenty minutes to climb up here. It would take him no more than two to descend.

  He was unstoppable. Good enough. When he said he would make someone dead, they were dead. At least the boy was—he’d never really agreed to take out the two adults anyway. One point two was nothing. And if it really was nothing—if they changed the rules on him—he had himself a new hunt.

  Pop, pop. Good enough.

  It took a full three seconds for Jason to realize that he wasn’t dead. His head felt as though it had imploded, from shock maybe, but not from a bullet. Caleb—that was a different story.

  Cries of shock and unbelief began to build into a sea of confusion. Leiah had already rushed out and fallen to her knees by the boy’s body. He thought she might be wailing in horror, but he couldn’t be sure because the whole stadium sounded like a warbly siren gone berserk.

  The full realization of what had really happened hit Jason then, and he suddenly sucked at the air as if gut-punched.

  A groan worked its way past his dropped jaw. “Uhhh . . .”

  Adrenaline flushed through his body, and he staggered forward, on unfeeling feet of lead. “Oh, God! Oh, God!”

  Leiah was weeping, bent over Caleb, brushing his matted hair away from a gaping hole in the side of his head.

  Jason made it halfway to them before he tripped and sprawled to the floor. He clambered to his feet, suddenly desperate to get to the boy. This couldn’t be real, of course. Caleb hadn’t really been shot in the head. Not now, not ever, not as long as Jason was alive.

  His vision blurred and he went down again, but this time on his knees at the boy’s side. It was there, close up, that the serene look of Caleb’s bloodied face stamped the truth clean through Jason’s mind.

  Caleb was dead.

  Nothing with that kind of damage could possibly be alive.

  The breath left Jason completely. His throat ached and his chest screamed with a pain so deep he wondered if things were coming apart in there. This little boy had become his life, and now that life had been ripped from him. First Stephen, now Caleb.

  A vague thought stomped through his mind. The thought that this much pain was more than he could bear. It was maybe greater than he should be feeling. Panic ripped up his spine.

  “Oh, God!”

  The crowd’s screaming behind him and Leiah’s weeping at his right knee began to fade into a distant world. A dull thumping filled his own. His heart. As though it were slugging up and down through blistering molten steel.

  Jason clamped his eyes tight, threw back his head, and screamed at the sky.

  “Noooooo!”

  His voice wailed above the din, strained with agony, frightening in its pitch. And still his heart was exploding. Every nerve in his body seemed to be swimming in the pain. The last reserves of panic raged to the surface, and Jason knew without a doubt that he was dying. He was kneeling on the stage with his face to the sky, dying of sorrow.

  He ran out of breath and inhaled deeply. The sucking echoed hollow, as if he were in a huge drum, and his eyes fell open to the black sky.

  But it wasn’t black.

  It was blue. The same blue air they had swum through in the hills. Now around him a vacuum of silence.

  His eyes had been opened again! The pain eased.

  Or maybe he was dead and in heaven.

  Jason spun his head about. No, he was in the stadium, and the wisps of red and green and yellow floated through the air, as they had in the hills, but now they made slow circles around the stadium instead of skipping over the meadow.

  It was the same, and yet it was not the same at all.

  Jason pivoted to the bleachers. What he saw stopped him cold.

  The people were all out there, all 102,000 of them. But only some of them were standing, staring forward in shock, some of them crying, although he could not hear them. The rest . . .

  The rest were dead.

  Jason slowly climbed to his feet and walked forward a few steps. They weren’t really physically dead, of course, but he was being shown them as if they were. They sat slumped in their seats or lay crumpled on the ground, gray and lifeless, not unlike the boy behind him.

  Like a comet from the sky a small shaft of red light suddenly shot in from his left and ripped through his chest.

  The pain was immediate—the same searing agony he’d felt a moment ago by Caleb’s side. He gasped and collapsed hard to his knees, trembling. It felt as though Jason’s skull had been opened and boiling water poured down his spine. And in that moment the source of the pain swallowed his mind.

  He was feeling the very heart of God. Not for Caleb, but for these dead souls in the stadium. Because in reality it was these, not Caleb, who were dead.

  He gripped his temples with both hands, and an involuntary wail broke from his lips. He wanted to curl into a ball and beg for relief.

  In the same way Jason’s heart had broken with Caleb’s death, God’s heart was torn apart by the death littering this stadium.

  It was suddenly so plain, so utterly terrible. A sentiment similar to rage coursed through Jason’s bones, and he sobbed in long desperate gasps. How could these fools do this to their Creator? To their Father? To Christ?

  But the sentiment was immediately replaced by simple profound sorrow. And deep love.

  Tears streamed down his face. Jason felt like he might be melting into the floorboards. Begging for them, he reached feeble hands out toward the crowd.

  With a blinding flash the skies ignited and then blinked to black.

  Suddenly everything was back to normal. At least the stadium was—the sky still swam in colored light. Donna and several of the cameramen broke free of their shock and were racing for the stage. Exclamations of horror rippled through the stadium, and people were leaving their seats and running to the field. It looked like an ant farm gone nuts out there. They were going to swarm the stage.

  Jason lowered his arms. He knelt dumbly on the stage, panting, and it occurred to him that his whole vision had lasted mere moments. But he knew now what he had to do.

  He stood to his feet, steadied himself, and made for the stand. He snatched up one of the mikes and threw up his hand. “Stop!”

  His voice reverberated through the stadium.

  They didn’t stop. Donna had nearly reached the stage.

  He hollered it this time. “Stop it! Everyone stop where you are!”

  This time they stopped. But he yelled it again anyway. “Stop!”

  Motion seemed to cease—except for the colored lights, which circled, maybe a little faster now. A few whimpers carried on, but otherwise it was only his heavy breathing over the PA that sounded.

  He suddenly felt oddly jubilant. He wasn’t sure he’d ever used that word before, but it was the kind of moment that required such a word. Jubilant. As if he wanted to leap from his feet and join all those wisps floating around. God was going to do something. Something greater than any of them had seen. Not necessarily to him or to Leiah or to Caleb, but to the dead people out there, unaware they were even dead. He smiled.

  It occurred to him that while he was standing here breathing hard into the mike, contemplating words like jubilant, they were all out there staring at him as if he’d dropped out of the clouds. And not just these faces, but a couple hundred million others through the cameras.

  Jason looked back at Caleb and Leiah. The boy was definitely dead. Leiah was definitely weeping. He faced the cameras.

  “My name is Jason.” The announcement echoed, but it sounded distant to him. “My name is Jason and God has opened my eyes. I told you to stop because something is happening, and I don’t think you’re supposed to move yet.”

  He turned back toward Leiah, who was now
staring at him too. They were all staring at him. Caleb’s blood was making a pool around his head.

  The crowd is waiting, Jason.

  He put the mike to his lips. “This isn’t what it looks like.” He felt as if he were standing in one world and calling into another—the one in the football stadium. Maybe he really was dead.

  “I mean, I know Caleb’s been shot through the head. He really has . . .” He swallowed, thinking about that. “But he’s alive. And he was right. I was dead, but now I’m alive too. Alive in his Spirit, I mean. But you”—he pointed to the crowd—“most of you are dead.”

  He lowered the mike. It occurred to him that he wasn’t coming off in the most brilliant of terms.

  Donna stood five feet from the stage, white as a ghost. The bare-chested man who’d become a ringleader of sorts stood ten feet behind her, bug-eyed and silent. The cameras whirred there beside him, and the colored lights whipped quietly around the bleachers, riding warm waters of blue. The sky crackled with some static overhead, and Jason thought that was new.

  He tried speaking again. “What I’m saying is that God’s heart is breaking more for you than for Caleb. You have to turn to him. To Jesus, I mean. Please, you have to let him touch your hearts.”

  Jason paced to his right. “I mean maybe God does some dramatic things now and then. He heals a boy; he makes skin smooth; he opens blind eyes. But believe me, it’s the eyes of the heart that need opening. That’s the real miracle—to understand his love for you. To love him.”

  Above, the sky began a steady crackling—fingers of that static suddenly reaching across the sky. Yes, indeed, something was up.

  “God could heal Caleb’s dead body if he wanted to,” Jason said. “Sometimes when people are so blind, he will do things like that, just to get their attention. He turns rivers to blood, and he turns water to wine, and he knocks down stone walls. But it’s your hearts that he wants to heal. Whoever said that a straightened hand was more dramatic than a healed heart?”

  Jason glanced at Caleb, and heat spiked up his spine. Leiah had backed away from Caleb’s body. The boy lay on his back with one leg folded under his body and a giant hole in one side of his head. The cameras could see that. They could see that he was dead. What they couldn’t see was that he was also alive. They couldn’t see the blue light swirling all around the body. They couldn’t see the red hue surrounding his chest. They couldn’t see the static crackling high above.