“Perhaps millions more will be saved.”
He came closer to me and put his hand on my left shoulder. I wanted to hug him, but I didn’t move.
I wanted to delay, to think of some reason to continue talking. I could ask him about the creation of the universe, about the laws of the Bible, about genetics, about aliens on the moon.
The way Jesus handled himself, I was confident he wouldn’t be fazed by any of my questions. He’d have some clear answer that sounded like it came from his Ph.D. thesis.
What would that get me? Some interesting bits of thought dropped into my hands, for sure. But were they of any value?
I could feel myself clenching my teeth. Jesus was a half foot taller than Adlai, but I was too determined to finish what I’d come here to do, so the height difference meant nothing. We outweighed him by a bit, and my muscles were those of a man who’d lived many more years than this teenager.
I grabbed him by the throat and squeezed.
I’d like to believe I caught him by surprise, but I doubt that. He didn’t jump back in shock. Rather, he carefully grabbed my wrists and tried to pull my arms from him. His attempts were quite feeble.
He tried to lock eyes with me, but I refused to look at him. I squeezed tighter and forced his body down to the ground. He refused to scream, but I could hear him trying to breathe. His nose flared, and he gasped for air, but I squeezed tighter as I forced him to the ground.
He finally fought back with more intensity, hitting me with his hands and trying to hit my face.
I glanced at his eyes. They were bulging and pleading for me to stop.
“Now would be a good time for you to perform a miracle,” I said through gritted teeth.
He hit at me harder. I had him pinned completely on the ground. He was kicking his feet, trying to bounce me off his body, but I had him tightly in my grip.
Beside me was the big rock pile I’d seen earlier. The tools weren’t close by. I had hoped to grab an axe or saw and finish him off, to let him out of his misery, but they were too far away.
“I am sorry,” I whispered.
He stared at me and stopped struggling for a moment, but then started to fight again.
I think in that second, he knew why I had to do this, and I hoped he might forgive me, but time was running short for that.
He bounced his body, shaking me. I reached for the closest rock and smashed his face with it. It was heavy, maybe five pounds, and I felt horrible when I saw the damage. His nose was crushed to bits, and his right eye socket was destroyed. I only had a quick glimpse, but I could no longer see his actual eye.
I closed my own eyes, and in spite of the terrible circumstances and my blindness to God, I whispered, “Lord, please forgive me.”
I didn’t know if it was me or Adlai praying.
The second and third smashes of the rock mutilated the rest of his face. His skull was cracked and I could see brain matter leaking out.
He stopped struggling, and I stopped hitting him.
There was no sound. He wasn’t breathing. His remaining eye seemed to look up to heaven.
I took a big gasp of air, not realizing I had been holding my breath.
The king was dead.
My head pounded with the pain of a thousand chisels carving into it. I knelt beside the body of Jesus Christ, staring in disbelief at what I’d done.
He was just a boy.
The pain I felt may have been time twisting and changing shape. The world I had created was nothing like the path that had already been carved out. I knew that. I felt the weight of momentum shifting, destroying the future I’d already experienced. I had no idea what world I’d be traveling back to, but I held onto the single basic fact that was critical to me: Hitler would no longer have a reason to kill six million Jews. My grandmother would live an easier, happier life, and so would so many other people.
I needed to believe my justification.
I half expected Jesus to blink and grin up at me, laughing at my feeble attempt to kill his story.
No such thing happened. His body remained motionless, and I could see it was lifeless. Small bugs already landed on his face and started to feed.
“For God so loved the world that He gave His one and only Son.”
My words felt hollow as I recited one of the most famous verses of the New Testament.
“That whoever believes in Him shall not perish but have eternal life.”
Even a lifelong atheist like me knew John 3:16.
My hands had pounded the life out of Jesus, and that verse no longer rang true.
Christians believed the only way to Heaven was by following Jesus. Part of me almost hoped that there was a grain of truth embedded in the story, so that Jesus himself could find his way back home.
“Good-bye, Yeshua. I wish I had met you under different circumstances.”
I stood and felt a chill in the air. There was a low-lying cloud on the horizon as the sun fell and darkness started to overcome the small village.
I needed time to escape, so I dragged Jesus’s body into an area that was bushier. Nobody would see him unless they searched thoroughly. I used the water from Jesus’s skein to wash most of the blood from my hands.
As I walked back to the center of Nazareth, I tried to put the memory of my actions behind me. Instead, I focused purely on finding Shonda and going back to Jericho.
Was I worried somebody would accuse me of murder? No. Times were very different. There was no police force, no formal judicial system, no prisons. There was the sixth commandment: Thou shalt not kill. The commandments, though, were a moral code, not a legal one.
Anyway, by the time anybody found the teenager’s body, we would be long gone. Adlai would be back living his solitary life, but perhaps now with a companion. Nobody would ever accuse him of anything.
I wanted to stay with the body for some reason. It was a weird connection. I had liked being with Jesus. He was a special person, and it felt like leaving was an even bigger betrayal than the killing.
“I need to go,” I whispered.
Taking small steps, I inched backward and finally turned and walked briskly away. I wanted to get a bit of a start on our hike before it was completely dark.
After a few minutes, I was back in the village. Most people had retired for the day. They worked hard from sunup to sundown, and I knew they were huddled in their bedrooms, aching muscles willing them to sleep. There was little alternative in any case. The only source of lighting they had were candles, which were valuable and not to be wasted.
Standing in the village square was Mary and her youngest child, Simon, who I’d met earlier. He wore the same rags I’d seen him in earlier, but they looked even more pathetic in the twilight.
“Good-bye, Mary. I am glad to have met you.” I nodded to Shonda and she moved to follow me.
“Is Yeshua coming?” asked Mary.
I looked at her, and I think she saw in my eyes what had happened. She seemed to be as intuitive as her famous son.
She put a hand over her mouth and shook her head slowly.
I closed my eyes. I couldn’t stand to see the hurt on her face. Without looking back, I led Shonda out of the village.
We walked in silence for some time, until it was too dark to go any farther. Adlai and Shonda huddled together. I pulled my own consciousness away and let Adlai control our body.
It was time to leave. I found the virtual gas pedal in my mind and pressed it, slowly at first and then faster and faster.
I raced through the rest of Adlai’s life, and I was grateful to see he spent the rest of his days with Shonda by his side. He never met anybody associated with Jesus again, and he died at the ripe old age of forty-three.
The rest of my lives sped by in a blur, because I wanted to get the fuck out of this life. I jammed the accelerator as much as I could, but even so it seemed to take forever until I finally hit the brick wall of my true time and was shocked back to my life as David Abelman.