Divine Fantasy by Melanie Jackson Page A

he talked to me about my new state, and then got dressed and left the plateau where he had chained me down for the procedure. The Dark Man said nothing else, just returned to camp, packed his bag and went away with a small platoon of…zombies. Though, at the time I thought of them only as wounded soldiers who had had miraculous recoveries.” Ambrose shook his head. “He was smiling when he left, enjoying a great joke. That damned grin has haunted me ever since. It pleased him that he had told the truth and I failed to believe him.” “Obviously he was right about you, though.” “Yes. I continued to deny it all through the war, but evidence began to pile up. There were severe injuries that healed too quickly when they shouldn’t have healed at all. I never got sick, though I passed through cities where there were epidemics of contagious disease. Pancho Villa eventually shot me when we argued about using zombies—one had bitten me and I broke its neck in a fit of rage—and he dumped my apparently dead body in a shallow grave and left me. But I didn’t die, though that was the end of our uneasy association. Never say I can’t take a hint when it’s delivered with a bullet.” He smiled fleetingly
    “One day, after waking up on a beach after a shipwreck, somehow alive though everyone else on the boat had drowned, I realized that I had exceeded every law of probability and even luck. I could no longer pretend that my good fortune in matters of health was mere coincidence. The Dark Man’s treatmenthad done more than rid me of disease. I wasn’t aging and I had become something akin to immortal.” He paused. “Obviously new plans had to be made for a postresurrection life. I understood that I couldn’t return to my family and friends and I would have to become someone else.”
    Immortal. Resurrection
. He really meant it. As a supposed Christian I was trained to believe in resurrection to an eternal life. But it was meant spiritually, metaphorically. The modern-day Christian isn’t like an ancient Inca or Egyptian. We don’t believe in literal resurrection. So we don’t do anything like make travel arrangements to the next life. We try to be good enough that our souls aren’t turned away at the Pearly Gates, and of course our relatives dress us nicely for the last hurrah with the candles and flowers—but that’s it. Immortality, the kind Ambrose was speaking about, wasn’t something we were raised to accept. In fact, as someone born in the late twentieth century I had an obligation to deny what he was saying. Only, I couldn’t. There was a walking corpse twitching on the barbecue and a man more than a century old sitting beside me that contradicted my beliefs about the laws ruling the physical world.
    “What did you do then?” I asked.
    “I decided to put his theory to the test, of course.”
    “How?” I asked, opening both eyes.
    “I killed myself again.” He grinned once more.
    I pestered him for a more complete answer, but he refused to say anything else about it.
    He said instead, “I’m stronger now than I ever was. Faster. Much faster. And I get faster and stronger each time I resurrect in the lightning. All my senses have been heightened—especially hearing,” he remarked. “I can stand outside the kitchens and hear a bottle break and I can tell you if it was made of clear glass, or green, or brown. I know it sounds crazy, but colored glass makes a different noise when it cracks. Regular glass breaks at about three thousand miles per hour. The colored glass is slower.” He looked at me. “I can hear your heart too. It’s broken. You have a flaw in one of the valves, don’t you?”
    This bit of knowing, after all the rest, shouldn’t have disturbed me. But it did. I didn’t want anyone to know of my flaw, my literal and metaphorical broken heart that had caused my parents to reject me.
    Nature designed the human heart with four chambers in order to regulate our blood pressure so we