Revelation Too: “Bang!” Spoke the Prophet

By Guy de Chausse

Worldly power and riches have corrupted humanity, but some heroes continue to fight for the Lord and the truth.

Take a journey through time, including a foray to thirteenth-century Prague and a quest for power through a manmade creature called the golem. Enter an age when societies of knights of the Crusades brought back secrets from the Holy Land, along with a system of banking and corporate organization that brought them vast richesas well as the enmity of the Church.

In modern times, powerful societies continue to operate and flourish in underground places. Theyve become bolder, and they want to dominate the world, but the power behind the thrones is becoming restless and will soon show his hand.

Rulers of the earthly realm begin to see that the power they thought they controlled really controls them. They discover it might be too late to become enlightened in Revelation Too.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Abbott Press
• Release date: Dec 21, 2012
• ISBN: 9781458207012

Guy de Chausse

Guy de Chaussee decided to stop being a closet Christian in 2010. Previously, he advanced the plots in his novels by using violence, but now he focuses on showing Christian love. His characters live as Jesus asked—loving God as well as their neighbors. He currently lives in Michigan.

Book preview

PART 1

Jesus came down from the wall of the soup kitchen and spoke to his disciples …

CHAPTER 1

The Table

D aniel snorted in disgust, agreeing with the man on TV who spoke disdainfully of how our president was saying we weren’t a Christian nation. Dan had just watched the news on the Christian Broadcast News (CBN) on the Total Christian Television Network, as he tried to do each evening, and as he flipped through the channels, another program on one of the three TCT channels caught his attention. He had seen the distinguished but rugged-looking guy before. Sort of a Hemingway character, with white hair and a short-cropped beard and mustache and muscular (well, it seemed that way—the guy was sitting solidly, but his open-collared shirt didn’t hint at any chiseled physique that it may be covering) body had a genteel Southern intensity as he spoke about the current administration and how it had denied that our nation was a Christian nation and the consequences of this.

Dan found himself in total agreement with the speaker and wished the interviewer would pipe down and let the man talk uninterrupted. He wished he had caught the beginning so he would have heard the speaker’s name. He figured he’d run across him again (and he did—and was sorely disappointed to discover that the man was a wolf in sheep’s clothing, preaching things that were not in the Bible, and he became one of those whom Dan began speaking out against). The interviewer asked about prophecy and whether the man had any words for the viewers. Prophecy was much on Dan’s mind these days, for he was certain that the world was entering the end times as spoken of by Daniel, Ezekiel, Isaiah, Jeremiah, and most famously, Saint John in the book of Revelation. Dan had just taken a class that discussed two of the Old Testament prophets—Hosea and Isaiah. Someone in the class had asked, Do we have prophets today? and Dan had argued in the class and at breakfast the next morning that if Jesus were the alpha and the omega, he was the last and no more needed to be said. But then he began thinking about it and decided that although Jesus certainly had the last Word (or was the last Word), and after him, he had sent the Holy Spirit, maybe the Holy Spirit needed the voices of human beings. Certainly, in the book of Revelation and other scripture, the end times had prophets speaking. The Holy Spirit needed to work through the agency of human beings. Believers were the body of Christ, so some had the gift of prophecy, just as others had other gifts.

Dan went back to those to whom he’d said there was no need of modern-day prophets and told them that he had been wrong. He also told them that Jesus had warned of false prophets, saying that he felt that one entire religion that had come to the forefront in recent times was definitely begun by a false prophet. He then said, Jesus said, ‘By the fruit you shall know the tree,’ so if you have any question whether a prophet or religion is true—and I would also remind you that Jesus said, ‘I am the way, the truth, and the life; no one comes to God except through me’—all you have to do is look at the fruit produced by that tree. I see nothing but poisonous fruit coming off the trees of certain religions, especially one that is in the news a lot recently. I see those who believe in Jesus Christ as the only true church—that is, the church is the collective body of those who believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of the living God. He told those he talked to at breakfast that the prophet may be the person sitting in the pew next to them at church—not to always be looking for the showy guy from some other town … or the photogenic preacher on TV.

After he went home, he was repeatedly struck by this concept of modern prophets. Like so many uncomfortable (and almost every message of God was uncomfortable) messages from God, which he had to be confronted with several times, practically ambushed and whacked upside the head with, at the outset, he was sure this concept had nothing to do with him.

Dan attended church Sunday morning, and the pastor announced that the soup kitchen downtown at the shelter needed help with food preparation and serving—more help than usual since some of the usual volunteers were out of town and one man was in the hospital. So after the service, Dan signed up to serve food that Wednesday. The group of volunteers met at the church and rode to the soup kitchen together in a van. He was nervous and told everyone that he wasn’t much of a cook, and they assured him that they had two people who could do the food prep, and that he would just be assisting them and serving the meals to the people and then helping clean up and put things away.

After Dan helped serve the meal, he was just ready to turn around to see what he should do next when the rendition of The Last Supper that someone had painted on the wall began to glimmer and suddenly take on depth. The background looked as though a window overlooked a landscape, and the table came forward. Then Jesus took on a third dimension and looked like a real man sitting at a table, but all the others in the painting remained cartoonish two-dimensional figures. As Dan blinked and stood transfixed, he saw that Jesus was looking right at him, and he felt his heart stop. Then Jesus gave him a smile of such love that it filled him with an overflowing sensation of warmth and well-being. Jesus stood up and stepped out of the wall and onto the floor.

He stopped at a tableful of diners and motioned to Dan to join them. Dan felt unworthy but he also felt that when your Lord invites you to come, you do! He went to the table, stood with the others, who had gotten up from their chairs, and then the vision was over—he looked around and saw that Jesus was back in the painting. He was embarrassed to be standing at the table with several people he didn’t know. He had a bad cold, and had hardly been able to hear, but felt his ears open and heard one man at the table asking another, Now what? Dan started to walk away.

Hey, young feller …, he heard a kind voice say behind him. He turned to see a stout man with dark hair and beard sitting at the head of the table. You’re a part of this; please join us.

CHAPTER 2

A Fisher of Men

B ernard sat in his usual spot at his usual table in the soup kitchen, gazing absently at a mediocre rendition of The Last Supper that someone with good intentions but less talent had painted on the wall. He sat next to Marie, a divorced mother of two. At the time of the divorce, she was addicted to crack cocaine and didn’t even fight when the court awarded custody of the boys to her husband. Bernard had found her one night two years ago near a trash bin behind a restaurant. He was searching for food; she had gone back there just to be out of the cold wind and wintry mix of misty rain and pellets of snow. Her skin was cold; she had no coat, only a thin shirt, and he knew she would be dead by morning. As she was too far gone to walk and he couldn’t carry her, he knelt beside her to pray and then opened his coat and lay mostly on top of her, afraid he would crush her because she was so delicate and emaciated. He prayed some more, and leaving his coat with her, he went toward the restaurant, not knowing what to do but knowing he needed help. Two years ago, as Bernie had walked toward the front of the restaurant, a man who turned out to be Grant, who now sat next to him in the soup kitchen, had walked out of the door and hesitated, looked Bernie in the eyes, and said, Do you need help?

Yes, well, not me, but if you could …, Bernie had stammered, and Grant had followed him back. When he saw Marie, he ran and got his car, and together they loaded Marie into the backseat. He started the car and turned on the heat, leaving Bernie with her while he ran back inside the restaurant. He soon returned with food and hot coffee. The shelter had been full that night, so Grant took them to his church, where he was a deacon. By doing so, he got in trouble, was dismissed from his job as a deacon, and became homeless himself, thus ending up at the shelter, also looking at the mediocre copy of The Last Supper on the wall he faced. The painting was nice enough, but the lifelessness, the lack of spirit, the flatness, and the seeming listlessness of the disciples bothered him.

Bernard shoved a piece of dry store-bought bread into his mouth and chewed thoughtfully—as much as a person could chew something that had the texture of mashed potatoes and less flavor.

Bernard was surprised from his reverie when Jesus stood from the painted table on the wall, toppling it over, the table with its shiny silken cloth falling right out of the picture frame and onto the floor of the soup kitchen, causing a cascade of utensils, dishes, and glasses. Bernard jumped up. Jesus’s eyes met his, and Bernard fell to his knees, averting his eyes from the intense gaze of the Savior. Bernard felt hands on his face gently urging him to lift his head. He opened his eyes to see that it was indeed Jesus there with him, his hands now on his shoulders. Jesus stood and helped Bernard to his feet.

Jesus spoke. You know, of course, that I am with my father. This is only a projection of the Holy Spirit using an image of God we knew you would be familiar with and would understand. Since I am with my father, you know, as I told my disciples ages ago, that you have to be my body to act in the world until I return, which will be quite soon now. And because time is short, I am helping you from the get-go by appointing your disciples and letting them know up front that you are the leader, because you have been the best servant to all. Don’t let the position go to your head. As I am telling your disciples, you will have the help of the Holy Spirit. Time is short; get to it! I love you!

Bernard called, Wait …, but then he realized that he was being impertinent and the Savior wasn’t listening and was already back in place in the painting, which was miraculously restored, with table and everything else back as it had been. He sat down hard in his chair and realized that the people at his table were looking at him in expectation. He looked at them with a question in his eyes.

Yup, we saw it too, said Marie, DeShawn, Mario, and Grant. Even the server at the table nodded in agreement.

Grant nudged him. Okay, boss, what now?

Bernie turned to his right and said to Grant, Huh?

You heard the man. What now?

You’re the honcho, said Mario. We await your orders.

Okay, then … Bernard saw the server turn and start to walk away. He called to him and invited him to sit with the group. He introduced them. Then Bernard thought for a moment. I think the first order of business is to eat a hearty repast and to begin it with a blessing—a special blessing to celebrate the inauguration of this new venture …

Grant nudged Bernie again. Remember, Bern, that Jesus said time is short! He gave the group a sly wink.

Daniel, the server, thought, So these people must have seen Jesus too, since they are all talking about seeing it and Jesus said time is short!

Bernie stood, and the group joined hands. After he blessed the food, they sat and ate.

Bernie was racking his brain for ideas, but he finally relaxed and ate. Then it came to him, a flood of ideas so rapid and so intense that it almost overwhelmed him, and he thought, Let go and let Jesus. Trite but apt. A series of illustrations flashed through his brain. He envisioned money that was hand printed with woodblocks so it had intrinsic value as art—each bill printed with a dollar value but with a picture of what it was always worth in the event of inflation. The one-dollar bill had a print of a loaf of bread; the five-dollar bill had a gallon jug of wine or grape juice on it.

Bernie got a cup of coffee and sat down again at the table. Okay, here it is. We need to talk to the board of directors of this place and form a corporation. They must know how to do that—get an attorney to do whatever it takes. They are probably already a corporation, but this may need to be a separate entity from the shelter. Maybe not. The shelter is already known and already has a presence in the community, and if we can do this without duplication of effort, so much the better …

Do what, Bernie? asked Marie.

"I wish I could just show you what I have seen presented in my mind. Sort of the Holy Spirit’s version of a PowerPoint presentation. Here’s how I saw it … It comes down to meeting the needs of the people. We tend to separate the spiritual needs from the earthly needs, but in some cases, they can overlap. There is Maslow’s hierarchy, which starts out with things like food, shelter, and clothing and ends up with things like self-esteem and spiritual needs. Well, churches do a pretty good job, some better than others, of course, in meeting spiritual needs. And some churches do well at meeting the basic earthly needs of food, shelter, and clothing—as we see right here at the shelter, which has this food site and the free clothing shop.

"The program I saw forms an umbrella agency to get as many churches involved as we can—let’s call it ‘the Christian Body.’ The various churches have a lot of land throughout the city and the county, and where possible and practical, that could be used for raising vegetables for food and dyes and fibers. In some cases, animals could be raised—chickens for eggs, sheep for wool, and so on. Not sure about meat right now—lots of complications with sanitation, disease, being humane, and what have you. I think the government would be forced to step in and regulate and make it more trouble than it would be worth. The fruits and vegetables could be grown and harvested by volunteers on church property and distributed through the food pantry network. I think I have seen networks of volunteers that grow produce on empty lots around the city already.

"Now, some of this may be seen as a duplication of government services, but there are some problems with government services. Government services, as we all know, have many strings attached. Government workers must receive a union wage and benefits determined by a union contract. That makes government labor often prohibitively expensive for operations where the profit margins are low or nonexistent. Churches have more latitude to act under the auspices of charity, and then there is the tax deduction for charitable contributions, which makes them attractive to donors.

"So that helps address food needs. As far as charitable contributions, food doesn’t currently seem to be a problem. People are giving enough to charities, and the pantries have enough, but with the economy taking a downturn, this could change. More on that in a minute. Shelter is a problem now, and it seems to be getting worse with the unemployment surge. Unemployment means lack of money, and that leads to loss of housing. Housing is the immediate problem. Especially here, where the big corporations have bought up all the affordable housing—at best, substandard, blighted, and downright crummy—and tore it down to replace it with unaffordable condominiums. Those who could afford to have moved, but now they have a hard time traveling to services. Before, they could walk or ride bikes to get a hot meal—now they have to ride on the Dial-a-Ride. So the loss of affordable housing, crappy though it was, has led to two new problems: lack of transportation and loss of other convenient services.

"This gets complicated fast because one thing depends on another. Anyway, another potential problem is how people view the future—they are afraid that the future will be worse than it is now. People are afraid that their savings will be worth less in the future than they are now, so that when they are ready to retire, the money they put away and invested will not only not have grown, but it may have been totally lost. Many people who retired have had to go back to work. Another fear is inflation. Therefore, I propose a guaranteed form of money. The money will be called temple dollars and will be shares of stock in the CB—the church body. Each share will have a dollar amount that you purchase it for in today’s money—one dollar, five dollars, ten dollars, and so on … Each of these certificates can be redeemed at any time for its face value in government-backed currency, such as one US dollar, a US five-dollar bill, and so forth. Or each denomination of temple money may be traded for one of whatever image is depicted on its face—the one-dollar bill would have a picture of a loaf of bread, the five-dollar bill would have a picture of a jug of wine, and on and on. Besides that, I am hoping that the so-called temple dollars would be nice woodblock prints so that it would have a real value as works of art. I may be optimistic here.

The main point is that the temple dollars would have a value that would keep pace with inflation. Furthermore, it would be an easy way to barter. The problem now with bartering is that I may want a good or service from you when I have nothing that you want in return. So I’d have to trade with someone who does have something you want … or trade with someone who trades with someone who has something you want. This would get cumbersome. Trading in cash that depicts a thing that has value, that is, a real commodity, may make this simpler.

The others began adding their ideas. Dan talked about the possibility of churches having power generators to provide emergency heat and electricity so people could stay there and bring food to have prepared for sharing in the event of power outages in emergencies. He also talked about emergency shelters using cargo containers trucked to sites and so on. He said that perhaps the most important thing was to start small businesses to employ people so they would have incomes.

Bernard added that many of his own ideas were still unfocused, and he said that even if he had all the answers, just giving them to everyone wouldn’t work—they had to be a part of the whole process.

CHAPTER 3

The Work Begins

L unch ended too soon, and Dan helped his gang clean the kitchen and when his group left to go back to his church, he told them to go ahead and he went with the others from the table and piled in the shelter’s van to go to work.

The shelter had a business doing groundskeeping in summer and snow removal in winter at various places around the county. On the way to the job site, Dan and DeShawn began talking and DeShawn began telling him about his past.

"I guess I was mad at the world, mad at God mainly. So I decided to go to the other side … join the other team. But it all seemed unreal. It was like playacting; I mean, no one really believed that Satan actually existed, right? He was the cartoon guy with the horns and tail and pitchfork—sort of cute. Maybe sitting on your left shoulder, whispering in your ear, telling you to do selfish stuff but nothing really horrible or anything, you know. Or even Flip Wilson’s ‘Geraldine,’ with ‘The devil made me do it.’ And it was always something like buy a new pair of shoes or something.

"The cats I got involved with, well, they was for real. No playacting and definitely nothing cute or funny, unless you had a perverse sense of humor. Some of them did … I won’t even tell you the nasty, perverse, sickening stuff they did. Pulling-the-wings-off-flies kind of stuff—but with people. And now that garbage is all over TV on those crime shows, those forensic pathology, crime scene investigation shows where they have to explain the motivation behind each sick, twisted, freakish fantasy and make you say, ‘Yeah, I can see where someone might do that. Be treated that way when you a youngster, shown no love comin’ up, you might turn out that way. Perfectly normal reaction.’

"The producers of these shows seem bent on mayhem, inuring the public to violence of the most horrendous type and hardening them to horrible stuff so that it seems almost commonplace. For what reason? To make it seem okay to not only have perverse thoughts, for we all are tempted, but to even act on them—so the viewer thinks, Hey, it wasn’t no big deal—so I got on the Internet and looked at some S&M. Heck, that rock-and-roll band had a video chock-full of it … So I fantasized about my granddaughter … guy in the rock video marries his little sister, I’m not thinking anything someone else hasn’t had thoughts about—it’s okay. It seems that it’s everywhere you look, on your TV or your computer or in the movie theater, or everything you listen to, and don’t get me started on the hip-hop and gangsta rap trash that inundates the community. Can’t get away from it. So instead of upbeat, decent thoughts in kids’, or even adults’, heads, you got these almost … whatdya call it … subliminal messages of evil, violence, and selfishness. Nonstop messages of sinfulness."

Grant chimed in. Say what you want about the old-time church with its hymns and so on, but it sort of fueled you up for the week. Between the sermon and the reading of scripture, there was the singing of hymns, and you’d leave church with those running through your head the rest of the week, with godly messages of grace and hope and love.

Right, said DeShawn. "Now you leave church and some kids drive by, the speakers in their car rattling the concrete a block before you see their car, the obscene lyrics of kill the cops and rape the bitches, and people wonder why we have so much violence and drive-by shootings and such. Kids go home and play Grand Theft Auto, or worse, and we wonder why they seem hardened to violence. Kids grow up watching hundreds of sex acts and killings on TV and their computers every day. Elementary-aged kids are sexualized in advertising, and we wonder why teenagers are having sex, getting pregnant, getting STDs. But we can’t have prayer in school …"

Dan laughed mirthlessly. Yeah, I was substitute teaching in a high school, and they were listening to Radio One, or whatever they call the so-called educational radio station, and I heard what sounded like a porn movie. I said, ‘What the heck is that!’ and the kids said, ‘Oh, that’s just a condom advertisement on Radio One.’ So we can sell condoms in the classroom, using the soundtrack of a porn movie, but heaven forbid that we allow prayer in the classroom. A woman complained at a school board meeting that her third grader brought home lyrics from a rap song he had to learn in third grade; it had the F-word in it several times. The chairman of the school board dressed her down at the meeting for her language because she quoted the lyrics. This is what the world has come to!

He shook his head. I could go on for hours about the current state of affairs—abysmal—in the classroom, but let me give one more anecdote. In a tenth-grade shop class, a kid kept fondling a girl at his table, and he wouldn’t stop when I told him to. Nor would he go into the hall when I ordered him out of the classroom, so I grabbed him. He told me if I didn’t take my hands off him, he’d sue me, and he was right—I had no right to touch him—yet here he was, molesting a girl right in the classroom! We have the inmates running the asylums. Literally … Except that all the asylums are closed, so the world has now become one big asylum. It started in Massachusetts, I think, where some do-gooder thought it was unfair for people to be in asylums, so he brought a class action suit and the courts agreed and ordered the places closed and the inmates released. Well, other states thought this was great—costs lots of money to run asylums, so pretty soon most of them closed their institutions and released the patients. So now the former patients live on the streets. Much better!

That day, they were clearing trash from a park area by the river, working with a community corrections team doing their community service sentence. DeShawn pulled into the park and behind another van. He knew one of the guys working off his community service hours and introduced LeRoi to the group from the shelter.

The group from the shelter had decided to call themselves the Table or sometimes the Family. The Table, came, of course, from the table in the painting of The Last Supper that they mirrored when they each had the shared vision of The Last Supper coming to life, and also because in several Christian ministry programs, the participants were divided into groups who sat together for a long weekend, often six to nine to a table, and they stayed in that group for the duration of the experience. Bernie and those who had participated in prison events of this nature knew that almost immediately, the participants from inside (as opposed to the volunteers, like him, who came in each day from the outside) referred to their table groups as their families. Tables were often named after books of the Bible, so the Table of Mark quickly became the Family of Mark. Bernard liked to think of his table in this case as the legendary round table of King Arthur—and each person as one of the legendary Knights of the Round Table in pursuit of the Holy Grail.

Work was quieter than usual that day—usually it involved noisy equipment like lawnmowers and trimmers, but today they were mostly picking trash up from the riverbank.

DeShawn’s friend LeRoi began telling them about monasteries and how they were repositories of knowledge in the Middle Ages, keeping the last sparks of light going through those times of social upheaval.

On the way home in the van, Bernard asked Dan about himself, how he had arrived where he was.

"Oh, along the same lines as what DeShawn was saying, I was disenchanted with the world and had given up on God when I was in college. I looked into Satanism but thank God I never got more involved in it than reading The Satanic Bible. After I rejected Satan and was saved, I began to look at Satanism from the outside and what I began to notice was that the rebelliousness of these kids was against their parents first and against society and its authority second, with cops and university presidents being major targets of theirs, but this was only evidence of their deeper rebellion against God.

"I understood why Alinsky dedicated one of his books to Satan, as he called Satan, the ‘first revolutionary.’ These guys had absolute hatred and destructive vengeance against just about anything, and it was their underlying, all-consuming hatred of God and his creation that fueled their nonstop temper tantrum. Mussolini and Hitler had the same rage. The destruction, the rage, and the anarchy were more important than anything else was. Like in the movie Tombstone, when Wyatt Earp asks Doc Holliday what was wrong with Johnny Ringo, and Holliday says that he guessed Ringo was just mad at the world. Earp asks why, and Holliday replies, ‘For being born.’

"They don’t want to be servants to a god, no matter how wonderful and good—they would rather rule in hell than serve in heaven. Milton was right. And some would rather serve time in a hellish penitentiary than go straight, live a white-bread life, and stay out of trouble and out of the slammer. Even if the life they lead is destructive to their family, to those they profess to love, or even, ultimately, to themselves. My college roommate used to say, ‘Why would I want to go to heaven? All of my friends will be in hell!’

And these sixties radicals are now the guys in the current administration. Dan took a long pull from the bottle of water he had been handed when he boarded the van. "This is like the carpetbaggers after the Civil War—they felt they were the victims, and now that they were on top, they were going to extract their vengeance. But I think DeShawn would agree that the carpetbaggers had more honest reasons to feel they were owed something, that they were wronged and now they were going to ‘get theirs,’ than those in the current O’ Banyon administration.

"What I see with the O’ Banyon administration is ‘I couldn’t beat you, so I used your white liberal guilt to get you to let me join you, and now that I’ve joined you, that isn’t enough—nor is it enough that I even rule you. No, I must destroy you. Then I will be happy. Then I will have my revenge—on you and on God for making me the way I am.’

"Religion and psychology are being taken over by political philosophy. Throw out the old, the status quo—and nothing is as old as that old-time religion. Reject all those old bourgeoisie concepts. Reject the idea that anyone but you matters—that anyone could be above you or matter more than the individual does. So daily, each person has the decision before him: to become as Adam and to reject God, to decide that he knows better than God what is right and wrong. He faces the decision daily to build a Tower of Babel of human knowledge and climb that tower of books to reach heaven to be like God. Daily, each person has the freedom of choice to choose to accept God’s grace and God’s counsel, or to reject him and go his own way.

"So, like Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment, these progressive elites, the above-it-all modern men, feel that they are beyond the morals of the little guy. Like Napoleon, they are too special to be governed like the masses, by outdated bourgeois morals. The satanic precept Do what thou wilt is the whole of the law becomes the only law for them. Thus they have the ultimate freedom—freedom from anything, and freedom to do anything."

Wow, said Grant, looking from Daniel to Bernie and back to Daniel. And I thought Bernie could get wound up and deliver a speech!

They dropped Dan off at his church where he had left his car and then returned to the shelter and meal site for dinner. After they ate, Bernie and the Table were out on the porch talking, discussing LeRoi’s idea of setting up a monastery or organization like the Knights Templar or Hospitaler—or maybe something as mundane as the Salvation Army.

The shelter manager walked over from the office and said he was glad they were all together, as he needed three or four people to go over with the van and pick up some boxes of food from the food pantry. He threw DeShawn the keys to the van.

CHAPTER 4

Lights in the Darkness

O n the way back from the food pantry, DeShawn was driving and Grant was riding shotgun. Mario and Marie were in back. They were talking again about how they could possibly set up a monastery—it seemed like an impossible task. Marie said it was about like Noah building an ark.

DeShawn suddenly hissed, Somethin’ ain’t right up there. They all got quiet, and he slowed the van. Grant said, Looks like a gangbanger hoopdee, but that other one isn’t.

DeShawn threw the van into park, and grabbing a tire iron from under the seat, he was out the door. Grant followed him, holding a flashlight. Mario told Marie to wait as he started to get out, but she followed him. They ran past a nice Lexus that was pulled over with the engine still running silently, the lights on, the driver’s side window smashed.

A gang of guys had a woman in an alley, but they were distracted from the attempted rape by the approach of DeShawn and Grant. There were five gangbangers, all armed with pistols. Things looked bleak since none of the Table were armed with anything but a tire iron and a flashlight. Then the alley lit up, and they all turned to see that a big SUV had driven in, blocking the mouth of the alley.

DeShawn and Grant were on each side of the alley, and they flattened themselves against the brick walls. Mario and Marie had just entered the alley, and they quickly backed out, squeezing past the SUV. The gangbangers raised their pistols, squinting blindly toward the SUV, but before they could fire, there was an eerie sound like a generator winding up or a musical beat increasing in tempo and pitch. Grant said later that it reminded him of the old organs that certain rock bands from the seventies used, with the Leslie speakers that revolved to give a bit of a Doppler shift. At the same time, arms covered with pulsing lights rose, unfolding from the sides of the SUV, threatening but somehow alluring at the same time. Those in the alley were transfixed as dark figures darted out of the SUV and glided up. The gangbangers were quickly disarmed and bound in shrink-wrap, and the woman was brought back to the SUV along with the four rescuers. The SUV backed up to the van and let Mario, Marie, Grant, and DeShawn out.

They saw that LeRoi led their rescue party. He said, We were out patrolling, and who did we see but your man Bernard … They heard Bernie’s voice from the passenger’s side say hello, and then he waved, climbed out, and joined them. He was hurrying down the street, so we pulled over and he directed us here, and lo and behold, here’s your van. And lookie, lookie what we found: a damsel in distress and a bunch of urban villains, if we can use an oxymoron. He walked over to a body lying on the other side of the alley at the entrance, with a rifle beside him. Anyone know who this might be? Potentially a rescuer, I would think. The guy was starting to sit up, and LeRoi helped him and told him to take it slow.

Grant came over with the flashlight, stooped down, and looked at the man. Hey, Bern, isn’t this the volunteer from the church who sat with us this morning! Umm, I forgot his name. He put the flashlight down. You okay? What are you doing out here?

Bernie ran up and knelt down. Yes, it’s Daniel. He looked at LeRoi. Will he be okay?

Oh, yeah. Right as rain in a few minutes. The effects wear off pretty quickly.

What were you doing out here? Bernie asked while holding Dan’s hands, trying to help in any way he could.

Dan finally focused and said, Hey, it’s you. Forgot your name … He licked his lips. Bernie asked for a bottle of water, and Marie brought a bottle from the van, snapped it open, and handed it to him. Bernie helped Dan take a sip. Dan tipped his head back and poured some on his face. Wow … that was pretty far out. He shook his head and said, I just had a sudden urge to come back to the rescue mission and saw Bernard running, and then I saw the broken glass of the Lexus’s window in my headlights, so I just drove up there and got my gun out of the trunk. Don’t remember much else. Oh, I remember the dark SUV driving up …

Yeah, you were sure a sight for sore eyes! said Grant, indicating LeRoi and the SUV.

Uh, yeah, said DeShawn. Speaking of sights, what on earth was that?

Wait, now I know where I saw that, interjected Dan. It was on a documentary about octopuses! Am I right? They’d sort of charm or hypnotize their prey with a light show and that really eerie sound … He shuddered involuntarily.

Yup, you got it, said LeRoi, or very close to it. They are actually cuttlefish. That’s where we started from in our research, and then we developed it from there. Goes right to the amygdala and bypasses all the rational centers of the brain. Actually works better on people who are already stressed or angry or otherwise in the grip of emotion—or who are susceptible to emotional outbursts.

Well, what was Bernie doing out? asked Marie.

You mean he got out of his cage again! laughed LeRoi.

No, I just mean … what brought him to this place? said Marie.

Bernie shrugged. It seemed like you guys were taking too long, and I just felt this urge to go out and find you, so I started walking and was just up the street when LeRoi and his crew drove up as if they expected me, and then we saw the van, and you know the rest. He smiled. "Like this would seem