The Blood Gospel (5 page)

It was over.

“Tommy …” his father gasped. “Go …”

Disobedient, he sank down beside them.

If I’m going to die anyway, let it be on my own terms.

With my family.

A sense of finality calmed him. “It’s okay, Dad.” He squeezed his mom’s hand, then his dad’s. Tears flowed when he thought he had none left. “I love you, so much.”

Both of his parents looked at him—square in the eye. Despite the terrible moment at hand, Tommy felt so warm right then.

He hugged them both tightly and still held them as they went limp in his grasp, refusing to let gravity take them as death had. When his strength gave out, he knelt next to their bodies and waited for his own last breath.

But as minutes passed, that last breath refused to come.

He wiped an arm across his tearstained face and stumbled to his feet, refusing to look at his parents’ crumpled bodies, their blistered eyes, the blood on their faces. If he didn’t look, maybe they weren’t really dead. Maybe it was a dream.

He turned in a slow circle facing away from them. The foul smoke had blown away. Bodies littered the ground. As far as he could see, everything was dead still.

It was no dream.

Why am I the only one still alive? I was supposed to die. Not Mom and Dad.

He looked down again at their bodies. His grief was deeper than weeping. Deeper than all the times he’d mourned his own death.

It was wrong. He was the sick one, the defective one. He had known for a long time that his death was coming. But his parents were supposed to carry on memories of him, frozen at the age of fourteen in a thousand snapshots. The grief was supposed to be theirs.

He fell to his knees with a sob, thrusting his hands toward the sun, his palms upraised, both beseeching and cursing God.

But God wasn’t done with him yet.

As his arms stretched to the sky, one sleeve fell back, baring his wrist, pale and clear.

He lowered his limbs, staring at his skin in disbelief.

His melanoma had vanished.

October 26, 2:15
P.M
., IST

Caesarea, Israel

Kneeling in the trench, Erin surveyed the earthquake’s damage and sighed in frustration. According to initial reports, the epicenter was miles away, but the quaking rocked the entire Israeli coastline, including here.

Sand poured through the broken boards that shored up the sides of her excavation, slowly reburying her discovery, as if it were never supposed to have been unearthed.

But that wasn’t the worst of the earthquake’s wrath. Sand could be dug out again, but a cracked plank sat atop the child’s skull, the one she had been struggling to gently release from the earth’s grip. She didn’t permit herself to speculate about what lay under that chunk of wood.

Just please let it be intact …

Her three students fidgeted near the trench, keeping to the edge.

Holding her breath, Erin eased up the splintered plank, got it free, and blindly passed it to Nate. She then lifted the tarp that she’d covered the tiny skeleton with earlier.

Shattered fragments marked where the baby’s once-intact skull had been. The body had lain undisturbed for two thousand years—until she exposed it to destruction.

Her throat tightened.

She sat in the trench and brushed her fingertips lightly over the bone fragments, counting them. Too many. She bowed her head. Clues to the baby’s death had been lost on her watch. She should have finished this excavation before following Nate to the tent to study the new GPR readings.

“Dr. Granger?” Heinrich spoke from the edge of the trench.

She leaned back quickly so he would not think she was praying. The German archaeology student was too bound up with religion. She didn’t want him to think that she was, too. “Let’s get a plaster cast over the rest of this, Heinrich.”

She needed to protect the rest of the skeleton from aftershocks.

Too little, too late, for the tiny skull.

“Right away.” Heinrich combed his fingers through his shaggy blond hair before heading toward the equipment tent, which had ridden out the earthquake undamaged. The only modern casualty was Amy’s Diet Coke.

Heinrich’s sylphlike girlfriend, Julia, trailed behind him. She wasn’t supposed to be on the dig site at all, but she was passing through for the weekend, so Erin had allowed it.

“I’ll check out the equipment.” Amy’s anxious voice reminded Erin of how young they all really were. Even at their age, she had not been so young. Had she?

Erin gestured around the hippodrome. It had been in ruins long before their arrival. “The site’s been through worse.” She injected false cheer into her voice. “Let’s get to work putting it to rights.”

“We can rebuild it. We have the technology. Better than it was before.” Nate hummed the theme music from the
Six Million Dollar Man
.

Amy gave him a flirtatious smile before heading off to the tent.

“Can you fetch me a new board?” Erin asked Nate.

“Sure thing, Doc.”

As he left, his tune drifted through her mind. What if they could actually rebuild it? Not just the excavation, but the entire site.

Her gaze traveled across the ruins, picturing what this place must have once looked like. In her mind’s eye, she filled in the half that had long since crumbled away. She imagined cheering crowds, the rattle of chariots, the pounding of hooves. But then she remembered what came before the hippodrome was constructed: the Massacre of the Innocents. She imagined the raw panic when soldiers snatched infants from their helpless mothers. Mothers forced to see swords cut short the wailing of their babies.

So many lives lost.

If she was right about her discovery, she began to suspect the real reason
why
Herod had built this hippodrome at this spot. Had it given him some dark amusement to know the trampling of hooves and the spill of the blood further desecrated the graves of those he had slaughtered?

Shrill neighing startled her out of her thoughts. She stood and looked toward the stables, where a groom walked a skittish white stallion. She knew horses. She had spent many happy childhood hours at the compound’s stable and knew firsthand how they hated earthquakes. The great, sensitive beasts were restless before a quake struck and unsettled after. She hoped these were being properly taken care of.

Heinrich and Nate returned. Nate had an intact board, while Heinrich carried a box of plaster, a water jug, and a bucket. An art minor, he had careful hands, just what she needed to help put the broken pieces in place.

Nate handed her the board. It brought with it the forest scent of pine, out of place here in this desert. Taking care to avoid the remains of the skeleton, he climbed in next to her. Together she and Nate shouldered the board between its braces and back against the edge of the trench. She hoped it wouldn’t fail her like the last one.

While Nate left to check on his equipment, she and Heinrich dug out sand. The board had damaged the skull and the left arm. She remembered the tiny fontanel, the angle of the neck. There had been clues there, she felt certain. Now lost forever.

Intending to preserve what was left, she raised her camera and focused first on the shattered skull. She took several shots from multiple angles. Next, she photographed the broken arm, shattered mid-radius. As she clicked away, her forearm gave a twinge of sympathy. Her own arm had hurt off and on since she was four years old.

Placing her camera down, still staring at that broken limb, she stroked her fingers down her left arm and slipped into a painful past.

Her mother had pushed her toward her father, urging her to show the crayon picture of the angel that she had drawn. Proudly, with the hope of praise, she held it toward his callused hand. He was so tall that she barely reached past his knee. He took the picture, but only glanced at it.

Instead, he sat and pulled her into his lap. She began to tremble. Only four, she knew already that her father’s lap was the most dangerous place in the world.

“Which hand did you use to draw the angel?” His booming voice washed over her ears like a flood across the land.

Not knowing enough to lie, she held up her left.

“Deceit and damnation arise from the left,” he said. “You are not to use it to write or draw with ever again. Do you understand?”

Terrified, she nodded.

“I will not let evil work through a child of mine.” He looked at her again, as if expecting something.

She did not know what he wanted. “Yes, sir.”

Then he lifted his knee and snapped her left arm across it like a piece of wood.

Erin gripped the site of the fracture, still feeling that pain. She pressed hard enough to know the bone had healed offset. Her father had not allowed her to visit a doctor. If prayer could not heal a wound, or save a baby’s life, then it was not God’s will, and they must submit always to God’s will.

When she fled her father’s tyranny, she spent a year teaching herself to write with her left hand instead of her right, anger and determination cut into every stroke of the pen. She would not let her father shape who she became. And so far, evil did not seem to have invaded her, although her arm ached when it rained.

“So the Bible was correct.” Heinrich drew her out of her reverie. He lifted a handful of sand off the baby’s legs and deposited it on the ground outside the trench. “The slaughter happened. And it happened here.”

“No.” She studied scattered bone fragments, trying to decide where to start. “You’re overreaching. We have potential evidence that a slaughter occurred here, but I doubt it has anything to do with the birth of Christ. Historical fact and religious stories often get tangled together. Remember, for archaeological purposes, we must always treat the Bible as a …” She struggled to find a noninflammatory word, gave up. “A spiritual interpretation of events, written by someone bent on twisting the facts to suit their ideology. Someone with a religious agenda.”

“Instead of an academic one?” Heinrich’s German accent grew stronger, a sign that he was upset.

“Instead of an objective agenda. Our ultimate goal—as scientists—is to find tangible evidence of past events instead of relying on ancient stories. To question everything.”

Heinrich carefully brushed sand off the little femur. “You don’t believe in God, then? Or Christ?”

She scrutinized the bone’s rough surface. No new damage. “I believe Christ was a man. That he inspired millions. Do I believe that he turned water into wine? I’d need proof.”

She thought back to her First Communion, when she had believed in miracles, believed that she truly drank the blood of Christ. It seemed centuries ago.

“But you are here.” Heinrich swept his pale arm around the site. “Investigating a Bible fable.”

“I’m investigating a historical event,” she corrected. “And I’m here in
Caesarea
, not in
Bethlehem
like the Bible says, because I found evidence that drew me to this site. I am here because of facts. Not faith.”

By now, Heinrich had cleared the bottom of the skeleton. They both worked faster than usual, wary that an aftershock might strike at any time.

“A story written on a pot from the first century led us here,” she said. “Not the Bible.”

After months of sifting through potsherds at the Rockefeller Museum in Jerusalem, she had uncovered a misidentified broken jug that alluded to a mass grave of children in Caesarea. It had been enough to receive the grant that had brought them all here.

“So you are trying to … debunk the Bible?” He sounded disappointed.

“I am trying to find out what happened here. Which probably had nothing to do with what the Bible said.”

“So you don’t believe that the Bible is holy?” Heinrich stopped working and stared at her.

“If there is divinity, it’s not in the Bible. It’s in each man, woman, and child. Not in a church or coming out of the mouth of a priest.”

“But—”

“I need to get brushes.” She hauled out of the trench, fighting back her anger, not wanting her student to see it.

When she was halfway to the equipment tent, the sound of a helicopter turned her head. She shaded her eyes and scanned the sky.

The chopper came in fast and low, a massive craft, khaki, with the designation
S-92
stenciled on the tail. What was it doing here? She glared at it. The rotors would blow sand right back onto the skeleton.

She spun around to tell Heinrich to cover the bones.

Before she could speak, a lone Arabian stallion, riderless and ghostly white, bolted across the field from the stables. It would not see the trench. She rushed toward Heinrich, knowing she would be too late to beat the horse to him.

Heinrich must have felt the hoofbeats. He stood just as the horse reached the trench, spooking the rushing animal further. It reared and struck his forehead with a hoof. Heinrich disappeared into the trench.

Behind her, the helicopter powered down.