Project Lazarus (48 page)

Every good story starts at the beginning.  This story of resurrection is no different.  Every story has an ending.  This story doesn’t.

This story starts where it begins with two boys out to find adventure and mystery in the woods.  Gilbert and his younger brother Ivan Chuttle wandered the vast terrain in the outskirts of a small town named Cotter in Arkansas.

Life was simple then.  Nothing was complicated.  There’s something about having youth on your side that doesn’t allow you to see how cold the world can be unless you’re born into difficult circumstances.  Many youngsters grow up hungry, abused or worse in a world where no one knows their name and no one cares as long as it isn’t them.  And for the lucky few that don’t grow up in dire situations, it’s a shock to learn the world is a cruel place.  It’s a place for evil.  Cynics are losers roaming the lands waiting for vengeance.  The wicked hoard their winnings and leave the innocent to rot.

A negative but undeniable force works in this world.  One we can’t ignore.  There is a fight.  A moral one.  An ethical fight.  A religious battle.  And it’s as simple as when time began.  There is good and there is evil.  Most of the time people think they’re the ones in control fighting out the battle.  All the while, they don’t see the temptation of the devil or they choose to ignore it.  Once in a while, as if to say, I’m still here, God intervenes.  But he lets it play out.  He wants to know are we worthy or are we willing to sell out?

We plod along picking and choosing our battles to fight and we watch both friends and enemies alike fall.  We keep our friends close buts sometimes we lose them to the evil.  We sleep with one eye open but often we don’t see the enemies coming, the ones we never knew we had.

Anyone can become an enemy anytime.  Yet, we make our friends do triple time to prove their loyalty and once the trust is broken, we pray for forgiveness.

Forgiveness is a strange thing.  We take that into our own hands.  The Bible tells us to do so.  It tells us to turn the other cheek.  But when it comes to revenge, The Bible tells us vengeance is not ours.  Someone else will right the wrongs.  Can we take the risk?  Our own soul and faith declares that we do.

Idyllic places such as Cotter can be completely destroyed by the plans of evil men.  Project Lazarus, while as intriguing as the public might find it, held no place for the residents of earth to delve into such a course of action.  The Bible makes it clear only God can raise a man from the dead.  Or rather, only God should. 

The Amazon man raised the dead in the entire town on the day the Chuttle boys met the Lazarus man from Hell.  Yet, his powers were more than likely evil.  If the devil can tempt…can he resurrect?

It was a religious and ethical horror show that occurred in Cotter.  Powerful men liked to play God.  The devil liked to play God.  The problem with playing God is you better fit the part.  For God has the final say in your performance.

Gilbert and Ivan Chuttle learned too much about powerful men and evil deeds that year.  All innocence was lost.  They plodded on with their lives for ten years.  Now in their twenties, they existed.  They had been allowed to live.  After all they experienced, the two young men knew how to hide but they didn’t really think anyone in the military or government would want to kill them.  And they didn’t.  They just wanted to watch.  The boys were the key and what they would do next would open a Pandora’s box.

It took them ten years to track down Dylan Dempster.  The boy resurrected by the Amazon man, Charlie and Millicent’s only son, was also saved by God.  What had he become?

He knew the cross when the Chuttle boys presented it to him.  The cross the Lazarus man left behind for the boys.  It was the day he saved their lives and told them to find Dylan Dempster.  It held a meaning for them all that transcended the dark days in Cotter.

Together, they bonded.  They wondered what happened to their folks.  They prayed for the lost souls.  They knew the secrets and they kept them.

The friendship was one built on trust that grew into loyalty.  The Chuttle boys thought it better to keep Dylan close, whether he turned into an enemy or remained a friend was his choice.  Life was lonely and desolate for all the boys.  What do you do when your entire life is a mystery?

Eventually, Dylan told them what happened that day in the room when Commander Henrid tried to kill him. 

“God saved me,” he would often say.

Together the three young men endured survivor’s guilt.  It was an awesome amount of guilt too much to bear.  For they weren’t the lone survivors of a small airplane that crashed, they were the survivors of an entire town that was blown up and burned, completely destroyed.

They mimicked the town.  No matter how they tried, each young man was destroyed and broken.  There were no outsiders.  No relationships.  How do you have a relationship when you feel your life has a higher purpose but you have no idea what it is?  School and higher education were no longer an option.  How do you honestly attend school when you know more about how the world works than anyone on the planet?  How do you educate yourself when the mysteries of the universe are a part of your history?  Work was a joke.  There were the odd jobs to get by.  But why work?  The sky could fall on them at any minute.

They spent a lot of time with nature.  It was there they could breathe.

But the guilt was killing them all.  They had a terrible secret and they didn’t know how to keep it anymore.

It took quite some time for the Chuttle boys to tell Dylan Dempster about “The Fixer”.  They had no idea how “The Fixer” might know them.  But it was made clear they had to get Dylan to “The Fixer” before “The Fixer” found them.

It’s a funny thing to be the messenger.  You never know what kind of message you’re delivering.  Sometimes words are nothing but surface.  They are spoken and sent to the recipient without little thought.

Yet, the Chuttle boys gave great thought to this message.

“How are we going to find The Fixer?’  Dylan would ask and “How do you think he will help me?  Why do we have to find him first?”

“I don’t know,” Ivan told him.

Gilbert nodded.

“He just said we did.”

“The Lazarus man, the guy resurrected from the dead.  The guy like me.”

“Yes,” Gilbert agreed.

“But I thought you guys said he was from Hell?”

“Yes, but he risked his life to tell us this and he saved our lives so we could deliver the message to you,” Ivan told him.

Gilbert stared off into space. It was a lot to bear.

“I’m feeling like I want to end it all again guys,” Ivan, the younger and weaker of the Chuttle boys had grown weary and suffered guilt and grief for his parents, sometimes so much he no longer wanted to live.

It was becoming more difficult to get Ivan out of these dark moods.

The darkness that had clouded Ivan’s mind was one of the reasons that brought them to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.  It was a place they could all blend and disappear.

It was scary at first, none of the boys had lived in a large city before.  They were scared of the world and this gave them one more thing to be scared of, navigating around the city.  But it allowed them to roam the street without being noticed or without judgment.  It also offered a wide array of museums and art to peruse on days Ivan couldn’t take it.

“Come on Ivan,” Dylan offered to his friend, “I have an idea.”

He grabbed the keys to their small, mice friendly apartment and announced it was time to get out of the stifling quarters.

“Let’s get out of her for a while,” Dylan announced.

They had spent the last few hours drinking, thanks to Gilbert being over 21 years old.  The two younger men could have a drink now and them even though they were underage.

They headed out of the sparse apartment.  They possessed few belongings and means of entertainment, as they spent the majority of their time surviving and contemplating what might happen next.  They were always afraid of the resurrection men and the possibility of another Project Lazarus loomed.

On odd occasions, they grew savvy enough to contact the odd journalist who either knew they were drunk on the phone or didn’t take their story seriously.  After all, this was long after the Natalie Winston story broke and there were a lot of copy cats out there seeking fame and fortune.

They read the Natalie Winston story often, it gave them hope.  There was confusion too.  They wondered how much more she knew and why she didn’t tell.

“Come on guys,” Gilbert said, “Let’s grab something to eat.  I’m hungry.”

The three young men huddled on the corner.  Fall and its cold winter were nipping at them.  The Pennsylvania winter was new to them.  Snow wasn’t an everyday occurrence in Cotter. 

They greedily ate down the hot food they got from a street vendor.  They never took for granted what others did.  The meal felt like a feast. 

Ivan was cheering up.

“See all you needed was a little food,” Gilbert told him.

“Excellent,” Dylan agreed finishing what little was left of his food for the day.

“I’ve been thinking,” Ivan offered, “It’s been a problem for all of us….keeping this to ourselves.”

“Yeah,” Dylan agreed, “And I worry about The Fixer.  Even though, we’ve moved so far away.  I feel like he can find me.  And what will he do when he does.  I get the feeling he might kill me.”

“No,” Ivan told him, “I don’t think we would have found you if that was the case.”

“But he’s from Hell,” Dylan reminded him.

“And where are you from?” Gilbert asked.

“Gilbert?” Ivan sounded off at his brother.

“It’s okay.  I know I’m some kind of freak.  Who comes back from the dead?”

“You were saved by God,” Ivan reminded him.

“But where did you go?”  Gilbert asked him.

“I don’t remember,” Dylan told him.

“You could have gone to heaven or hell,” Gilbert confided.

“He was only a kid,” Ivan defended Dylan, “what commandment could he possibly have broken that might send him to hell?”

“Guess so,” Gilbert answered somewhat unconvinced.  Gilbert trusted no one.  Not even Dylan. He decided to keep him close.   Unlike Ivan, he felt it was their duty to deliver him to The Fixer.  He knew The Fixer would restore the balance, the balance the Amazon man wanted and this time God would not intervene.

Dylan Dempster kept his friends and enemies just as close and he saw the Chuttle boys as both.  He was eerily silent.  He never told the boys the sins he committed at age eight.  He never told anyone about the drowning in the pond.

Why did God save him back in Cotter?  Was it God who saved him?  If so, he should have redeemed himself long ago.  That wasn’t to be.