Breathless

  * * *

  Marlena went out for a few hours to “take care of things,” as she put it. Jason and I were left alone in her apartment. Jason easily made himself at home, raiding Marlena’s pantry for pretzel sticks and sprawling out on the couch in front of the television.

  I sat next to him, wondering at this new turn of events. We were staying at woman’s house who made illegal IDs, could get Jason a credit card, and also probably smoked marijuana. It didn’t seem like a particularly safe place to be. Plus, for some reason, I didn’t really like Marlena. She seemed a little too cavalier about what was happening to Jason. Of course, maybe she was used to interacting with Jason when he was in mortal danger. Maybe Jason was in mortal danger all the time.

  Nothing was happening. When nothing was happening, it was too easy for me to think about the mess my life was. I didn’t want to go back to the way I’d felt in the car, like I couldn’t think or breathe. I began to panic, wishing I could distract myself easily the way Jason did. But I couldn’t focus on the TV. What could I focus on? Then I remembered. Jason had promised to explain things to me. Now was as good a time as any.

  “Jason,” I said, “you promised to tell me who the Sons were later. It’s later now.”

  “I guess I did,” said Jason, and he shut off the TV. He took a deep breath. “I don’t know where to start.”

  “How about with your mother?” I said. “Sheriff Damon said she was killed by her husband.”

  Jason looked confused. “When did he say that?”

  “I overheard him talking to my parents once, right after you were found.” Actually, now that I thought about it, Jason had apparently told my dad his mother had died in childbirth. Maybe I shouldn’t have started with that little revelation.

  “I never met her,” said Jason. “Anton told me her name was Marianne Wodden and that she died right after I was born. That’s all I ever knew.” He looked thoughtful. “Killed by her husband? So I guess that’s a matter of public record?”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  Jason disappeared behind Marlena’s beaded curtain for a few moments and returned with her laptop.

  “She doesn’t care if you use that?” I asked.

  “Marlena’s like my big sister,” said Jason. “Or as close as somebody like me gets anyway.” He flipped open the laptop. He was quiet for a few minutes as he searched. Then he sat back.

  “What?” I said.

  “All this time,” he said, “and I never even once thought to just google her name.”

  “It’s true?”

  “Yeah,” he said. He turned the laptop screen so that I could see. The screen was filled with a graphic of two big golden angels holding a banner that said, “In Memory of...”

  Underneath the text read, “Marianne Rachel Aird Wodden, 1973-1991. Our beloved sister and aunt. Shot to death at the hands of her husband, Ted Wodden, who then being the coward that he was, turned the gun on himself. Nothing can bring her back, but she is in our hearts and prayers forever.”

  I scrolled down the page.

  There was another entry. “Jason Edgar Wodden,” it read. “Unborn child of Marianne Wodden. Marianne was pregnant when she was killed.”

  “Oh my God, Jason,” I said. “Look at this.”

  He moved the screen back.

  “That’s you,” I said. “You’re supposed to be dead.”

  “Well, I’m not,” he said. “Weird.” He shrugged, closing the laptop. “Well, anyway, about the Sons of the Rising Sun.”

  I wanted to know about the Sons, so I didn’t want to stop him, but I couldn’t help but wonder, “That’s it? You aren’t more concerned about your mother?”

  “If she’s even my mother,” said Jason. “Maybe Anton pulled a name off some website like this to name me in the first place. Who knows where I came from.”

  “They didn’t have websites in 1991,” I reminded him.

  “Whatever,” he said.

  Okay. He really wasn’t concerned. “Jason, if this is true, your mother had a sibling and that sibling had kids. You have a family.”

  He was quiet for a second. Then he shook his head. “No, not really, I don’t. Let’s not talk about this part anymore. I can tell you about what I know. I don’t know anything about my parents.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Who are the Sons of the Rising Sun?”

  “They’re the people who raised me,” said Jason. “They’re a huge, huge group of men who have influence all over the world.”

  “Like the Illuminati,” I said excitedly.

  He grinned. “Yeah, you and your Illuminati. I guess sort of.”

  “You’re the one who called them Freemasons with guns,” I pointed out.

  “Okay, it’s true that the Sons have members high up in every major world government. It’s true that they affect global policies and all kinds of stuff I don’t understand. I know that much. I just don’t know how they do it. Because there are members of the Sons who are out in the public like that, but there are also the Brothers, the other members of the Sons. Anton was a Brother.”

  “And you were raised by these Brothers?” I asked.

  “I was raised by Anton. I saw other members. Sometimes. Not often, at least not when I was young. Anton was in communication with them. It was his job to keep me out of sight and safe. And to teach me and train me, in preparation for...”

  “For what?”

  “Well, you know, at first I didn’t know what they thought I was,” Jason said. “I didn’t have any real idea of the way the rest of the world worked. My earliest memories are of Anton. I remember being a really little kid, maybe three or four, and Anton reading to me before I went to sleep. We always slept in hotel rooms. We were always moving. I remember things like Anton teaching me how to tie my shoes. I remember playing games with little men, which he had helped me make out of toothpicks. I remember eating in diners and fast food restaurants. I remember all kinds of little things like that. And at the time, I was too young to know that wasn’t the way everyone lived. It’s the only time I was ever really happy, I think. Because by the time I was just a little older, I began to realize that there was a whole other world out there that I didn’t understand and wasn’t part of. And that everybody else was part of it. And I hated that.

  “But back then, I didn’t know that things were weird, and so I didn’t bother to ask why we did things the way we did. When I was older, when it started to become clear to me, I did ask Anton. I wanted to know why we didn’t live in a house. And why we always traveled. And why I didn’t have a mom and a dad like everybody else.

  “Anton said that I certainly had a mother and father, but they were dead. He said that we traveled, because there were bad people who wanted to find me and hurt me, and we had to stay away from them.”

  “Did he tell you why people wanted to hurt you?” I asked.

  “Well, back then, Anton just said I was special. And I was five years old, so I believed it. Who doesn’t think they’re special when they’re five?”

  “Five? And that was when you started shooting guns?”

  “Yeah, definitely. Anton always had guns. We shot cans off railroad tracks in southern towns. We always traveled through the south when I was a kid. A couple times he took me to a shooting range. He taught me guns were tools. That they were powerful. That they could cause all kinds of damage. They weren’t toys. Anton was very serious about everything. It made for a kind of solemn childhood.”

  “Was that one of the things that made you think your life was strange?” I asked.

  “Not really. In a lot of ways, everything I knew about the world, I got from watching television shows in hotel rooms. Everybody had guns on TV. No, I thought guns were normal.”

  I shivered. What a way to grow up! “So you’ve spent your whole life traveling from place to place?”

  “No, not my whole life. The first ten years of my life pretty much. We were always running from one place to the other. The first time I think
I realized exactly why was maybe when I was seven. I think I was about that old. Anton and I were staying in a hotel somewhere in backwoods North Carolina. I woke up in the middle of the night to the sound of gunfire. They were shooting into our hotel room. The window shattered. There was glass everywhere.”

  I covered my mouth with my hand, horrified. But Jason’s face was composed and unemotional.

  “Anton made me hide under the bed. I wanted to help him. I remember I wanted to shoot with him. But he wouldn’t let me. I had to hide. Anton took care of them. And we left in the middle of the night without paying for our hotel room.”

  “Did that kind of thing happen to you a lot?”

  “Maybe four or five times before I was ten,” said Jason, thinking about it carefully.

  I couldn’t believe he was so unaffected by relating the story. That he couldn’t specifically remember how many times he’d been shot at as a small boy. “Why were they shooting at you?”

  “They were trying to kill me,” said Jason.

  “But why?”

  “I didn’t know at the time,” said Jason. “Anton really wouldn’t talk about it. He said that they were bad guys and that seemed to make sense in my way of viewing the world. There were bad guys on TV. The men were bad guys.

  “Anyway, it started to get worse. The shootings were more and more frequent, so that was when Anton and I went to England. Anton was from England. And that was when I found out.”

  “You’ve been to England?” I said, astonished. I’d never been anywhere besides to Virginia Beach for vacation a few times. And my family didn’t go on vacation too much. There were too many of us.

  “Yeah,” he said. “Not for long. We were maybe only there for a year. We went to visit the High Council of the Sons. At the time, Anton didn’t tell me exactly why we were going. I was mostly excited because we got to ride a plane.”

  I’d never been on a plane! “Is that when you met Marlena?” I asked. “Is she British?”

  “She is,” said Jason, “but no. I met Marlena when I was really young. Um... I don’t know, maybe six or so. Her father was a car thief, and I guess Marlena’s mother wasn’t in the picture anymore, so he just kind of dragged his daughter around with him, stealing cars. After her father died, Marlena started doing forgeries instead. She’d always helped her father with that kind of stuff, I guess. Titles to the cars and things. I don’t know. Anyway, Anton and I were often in the need of untraceable transportation. Marlena’s dad was one of his contacts.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  “So, Anton and I went to England,” said Jason, picking up where he’d left off, “and when we got there, we went to stay in this strange old castle. It was really weird. The walls were made of stone. And it was drafty. There were all these very serious British men wandering around, and they were all really interested in me. They asked me all these questions all the time, and anyway, we had to go to these meetings, where we sat in front of the Council, and they questioned Anton, and without anyone really explaining it to me, I sort of figured it all out.

  “The Sons of the Rising Sun, like I said, have these branches. So some of them are businessmen, and some of them are politicians, and I’ll bet there’s some feeder fraternity in some colleges somewhere, God knows. But like I said, Anton was a Brother. And the Council is made up of Brothers. And Brothers are kind of like monks or spies or something. They’re like Jesuits mixed with James Bond.” He grinned at me.

  I laughed. “Okay.”

  “So, they’re celibate. And they devote their lives to pursuing the Purpose.”

  “What’s the Purpose?” I asked.

  “Oh, come on, this should be easy for you, Miss Illuminati,” he said.

  I looked at him blankly.

  “You even said that stuff to your dad about the dollar bill,” he said.

  “Novus Ordo Seclorum?!” I gasped out. No way!

  He applauded. “And she comes out swinging. Exactly. New World Order. I guess, technically, they just want to establish a global government. More accurately, they want me to establish a global government.”

  “You?”

  “Haven’t you guessed?” Jason said, spreading his hands. “I’m the freaking messiah.”

  I snorted. “What?”

  He laughed too. “No lie,” he said. “That’s totally what they basically said.”

  “I don’t get it,” I said.

  “You don’t get it? Think how I felt.” He took a deep breath. “Basically—well, it’s too complicated to explain basically, because they have pages and pages of stuff on all of this crap—but, the gist of it all is this: Many ancient religions talk about the return of a deity. Christianity obviously talks about the return of Jesus. Norse Mythology has the return of Balder after the earth has been recreated after Ragnorak. In Indian mythology, Vishnu is going to return in his final avatar. Then there’s the dying gods of the mystery religions, who die and return in cycles. Mithras. Dionysus. Osiris. Um, beyond religion, there’s talk of the return of King Arthur, when England needs him most. So, the Sons of the Rising Sun believe that this super being of some kind is going to descend on the earth, and they scoured texts from various religious and mythological backgrounds to come up with a list of trillions of signs and wonders leading to the return of what they call the Rising Sun.” He pointed at himself.

  “You? But why you?”

  “Well, when I went to England with Anton, they were not sure it was me. There were maybe two other contenders. And that was why we were getting shot at. Because proponents of the other possible Rising Suns didn’t want me in the way of their guy. So, we went there because Anton was like, ‘You guys asked me to keep this kid safe, and we’re getting shot at by other members of the Sons. I want better protection.’ Anyway, it turned out while we were there, one of the other contenders died in a car accident, so it was just me and this other guy.

  “And the Sons decided that they’d call the other guy to England as well, and they’d just figure out which one of us it actually was.”

  “How’d they do that?”

  “It was like a trial. We had to go sit in front of the Council and hear people bring evidence forward, most of which had to do with the list of trillions of signs and wonders leading to the return of the Rising Sun.”

  “So, you fulfilled these signs and wonders?” I asked. I was confused.

  “Well, we both did,” he said. “At least we both fulfilled some of them. A lot of them contradicted each other. This guy was older than me. He was maybe fifteen. And he hadn’t been raised by a Brother like I had. He had a family, I think. I don’t know what happened to him. Anyway, they picked me, because I was born in 1991, clearly an auspicious year since it’s the same backwards and forwards.” He made a face to show how silly he thought that was.

  “I was born in 1991, too,” I said.

  “Yes, but you’re a girl,” he said. “And there are no women in the Sons of the Rising Sun. It’s very sexist. Plus they’d have to change the name to Sons and Daughters or something.”

  I laughed. “Okay, so why else did they pick you?”

  “I can’t remember every reason,” said Jason. “Um... I remember the biggest deal was this verse in the Bible, Genesis 49:10. It says something like the power of Judah won’t be restored until Shiloh comes. And I was born in Shiloh. Of course, the verse might have meant Shiloh, Israel. Or it might have just meant the messiah. Anyway, Shiloh, Georgia was good enough for them. And there were lists of lists of things besides that, all from different religious traditions. So, in the end, they decided it was me.”

  “That’s crazy,” I said.

  He nodded. “Yeah. It is. And can you imagine what it was like, to come back to America, an eleven-year-old kid, thinking that you’re like the savior of the world?” He laughed. “Do you have any idea how much pressure that is?”

  I didn’t.

  “Everyone’s careful of you. No one lets you experience anything, because they’re afraid it wil
l ruin you for your higher purpose. You live a half-life, not a real one.”

  Wait. That did kind of sound familiar. I shrugged. “I was groomed my whole life to be the vessel.”

  He laughed. “Yeah. That’s got to be why I like you so much. You kind of understand.”

  I had another thought. “Wait,” I said. “You’re supposed to impose a New World Order. Like... you’re an agent of Order, sent to enslave the world?”

  “What?”

  “The language of the Satanist vision,” I said. “It was kind of right about you.”

  “I’m not going to do any of that, Azazel,” said Jason. “Why do you think I ran away?”

  “But how did that woman who ran the online forum have a vision of you? And how was she right?” I asked.

  “What are you saying?” Jason said, a grin breaking across his face. “Are you saying you’re really filled with the spirit of an ancient demon?”

  “No, of course not,” I said. “It’s just weird, don’t you think?”

  “It’s a coincidence,” said Jason. “I’ve spend my entire life around people who read stuff into coincidences. Things are what you make them. That’s all there is to it.”

  And I agreed with him. But I still found that somewhat disconcerting. What if there was something to what the Satanists had to say? What if... I shrugged it off. “So you came back to America when you were eleven?” I asked.

  “Yeah. And we went to live in a Society of Brothers of the Sons, which was located in Tennessee somewhere. It was an old building where a bunch of celibate men lived and tried to further the Purpose. There were some guys closer to my age there. It was the first time I really ever hung out with other kids. That was where I met Hallam.”

  “The guy who came to Bramford?”

  “The very one. He’s only a few years older than us. He was studying to become a Brother. In the Society, the High Council would send down orders to the Brothers telling them to carry out certain missions. That was how Anton had ended up being my guardian. It was his assignment. Anyway, these orders were sometimes kind of dangerous, and there was never any rationale given to them. So, the Brothers didn’t know why they were doing it. They just did it, because they trusted the Council. As I got older, they started to give me orders to carry out as well. I always had to stay back. I never got to really be part of the action, because it was important to keep me safe.

  “Sometimes, the orders made sense. Once I remember we infiltrated a suicide cult and took down the head of it before he could make all the people, you know, kill themselves. Sometimes, they just seemed really random. We got in the middle of a gang war once. We were supposed to protect one side, instead of the other. No one knew why. No one could tell a difference between the sides. It was bloody and scary and violent, but they were already fighting, so it didn’t bother my conscience too much.

  “But sometimes, the orders were not only just random, they seemed downright, well, wrong. Hallam and I were sent once to a...” Jason trailed off. He took a deep breath. “To a sorority house. The girls there were basically prostituting themselves for extra cash. It was a bad scene, for certain. It was illegal. But, um, they told us to go in and... kill everyone.”

  We were both quiet. I didn’t know if I wanted to know this about Jason. I almost told him to stop, but I didn’t. I couldn’t speak. I just watched him.

  Jason’s Adam’s apple bobbed. “I couldn’t do it,” he said, looking at his hands. “I tried, because I thought it was my duty, but... But Hallam. He... Sometimes I have nightmares about that night. I see Hallam’s face. Blood’s spattered all over it. And he’s screaming. I can’t tell if he’s screaming because he’s horrified, or because he’s having a really good time. And I’m just standing there. Watching him. Not stopping him, just watching.”

  I reached over to touch Jason’s shoulder, wanting to comfort him. Jason had been through so much. It made everything I’d seen him do make so much more sense. I didn’t relate. I couldn’t. But I ached for him. I wished I could make it better somehow.

  Jason shook himself. “Anyway,” he said. “It was stuff like that that made me want to leave. But in the end, I left because of what happened to Anton. Anton had always believed everything that the Sons said, hook, line, and sinker. He believed that I was the Rising Sun. He believed that the Sons had the best interests of the world in mind. He believed that there were prophecies. He believed in a right and wrong, and he wanted me to be on the side of right. So when stuff like that started happening, Anton got kind of confused. He had a code of ethics. Shooting college girls, whether or not they had turned into hookers, was not part of his code of ethics. He started doing some research and looking into what the Sons were asking us to do. And I don’t know what exactly he found out, but I think it was that the Sons don’t care anything about right and wrong or a peaceful New World Order. Basically they just care about making money and having power over people. I think Anton was going to tell all the Brothers and start a revolution of sorts.

  “He asked me to come see him in his room one night. He said he had something he wanted to tell me. I went there, and by the time I got there, they’d already gotten to him. He was lying on the ground, bleeding from multiple gunshot wounds. He wasn’t conscious, but he was breathing. And I held him in my arms until his lungs filled up with blood, and he drowned on it. “

  Jason stopped for a second, studying his fingers.

  He looked up at me. “And then I took some guns and some money, and I just left. They followed me. I ran. I ran and ran until you found me.”