Iglesia ……………………………………… Episode 28

(Iglesia is a serialized novel, published on Tuesdays and Saturdays at midnight ET, you can read all of the episodes by clicking on the tag.)

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Abraham got up off of the grass and started walking, he had no reason to, and saw no purpose in, ever stopping.

Tears were streaming down his face and he could not remember ever feeling so sorry for himself. And he could not remember ever acknowledging that he felt sorry for himself…while feeling sorry for himself. That’s how sorry for himself he felt.

His mind wandered even more than his body, but the landscape their was decidedly uglier. He was walking through waist high yellowgreen prairie grass, his eyes nominally on the red sandstone horizon and his auto-pilot presumably taking him towards some distant point. He flushed a mother fox and her two kits. The mother looked up at him with a look of pity. The kits ran playfully into the tall grass, unaware that a vast and complex human drama was playing out in their vicinity.

All his life….all his FUCKING life, it seemed like, people had had a use for him, manipulated him, wanted to train him and point him like some machine. All his life, and now he was fucking dead and here he was with some English gentleman wannabe with a bad Indian accent and Ghandi glasses telling him that even in death there was no peace, that even now the struggle continued, that the fight was endless…and so….unwinable.

Then a raven crapped on his shoulder.

And he just kept walking.

No way was he going back, no way was he going to serve another master, no way was he going to kill any longer on command. Fuck it, what could they do, kill him?

Night fell and he kept walking as a full moon rose over the lip of the sandstone cliffs. He reached the base of them and sat down next to a mesquite bush. Before he really knew it he had assembled the makings of a fire from twigs and branches. He instinctively patted his clothes where his lwindproof lighter would be if he  was still wearing his Center issued chamo suit. When he became truly conscious of what he was doing, it made a lump of feeling come up inside him like a meal of bad pork. He let it rise, when he normally would have fought it. And he sat in the dark by his unlit fir and as yet another wave of emotion rose within him and as he just sat there and bawled like a little baby …again… a-fucking-gain. He had to get a grip. This was NOT who he was.

He was a warrior dammit. One of the best of the best. he didn’t know if he could walk out of this place, he would find that out in the morning. But he had been through The Center’s survival school, which was of course, the best on earth.

Of course, he supposed that he wasn’t actually technically ON earth anymore. But there was game and fuel for cooking and water and he was DAMNED if he was going to toe another line and just give in again and do the bidding of some master. He was through with that shit for good. And if worst came to worst he would be very happy to just follow the example of the hero of his fighting arts instructor back at The Center, Bhodidharma. He would sit down in front of a sandstone wall and meditate until he either wasted away or…..something happened.

That would teach them.