He said, Some of them wanted to see the miracle. Some of them wanted my help, like, Oh, you’re the magical death man, can you do something about my body? Can you fix my fibromyalgia? Thing was, I could. That surprised me. I could take out their tumours. I could fix their macular degeneration. Big damage was easy, unless they’d actually lost the limb or whatever. Couldn’t grow those back. But I spent hours and hours a day playing Jesus. That was nice, those were some of the nicest hours I got to spend.
He said, But when you’re doing the whole Go, my child, your knee cartilage is fixed, you’re going to get a lot of visitors. I had to turn people away because I had to eat, I had to sleep, even though I didn’t want to. M— had brought in her best friend, the nun, and I was worried I was going to get the Antichrist bit from her too, but she was just like: stop doing this! Read your Bible! This was Christ’s whole problem!
I was like, What are you talking about, Jesus cured the lepers and everyone was all, Hooray, thanks man. M—’s nun was all, Are you kidding, Christ never said no and never asked anyone to pay and got way too much attention and brought the heat down on everybody. Christ didn’t keep to office hours, she said. Don’t do that.
He said, So we limited Jesus stuff to one hour a day, and I always had to eat breakfast. But by then the whole world was on our doorstep.
He added, We knew it was going to be a big problem. You’ve got this guy with an army of upward of forty walking corpses that he acquired legally but was meant to bury a while back, it’s time for some hard conversations. He’s curing cancer, that’s great, but he’s bookended by two zombies that they’ve dressed in outfits, that’s bad. You’ve got a wizard out in the wop-wops who’s now got blanket bans from nearly every video upload site and a whole bunch of people have entered the country because of his YouTube channel, the government isn’t all, Love that small-business entrepreneur spirit. The government says, This is a cult.
He said, They came in thousands—pilgrims and tourists and sceptics and believers and CIA plants and wannabe stars and priests and oddballs. And here we were squatting in this building, trying to prepare a gambit for every eventuality, but we were in the middle of a shantytown and an international controversy and we knew any moment a riot squad was going to bust in. And we were all living in three rooms together and we were scared. Turned out to be a huge fucking blessing that we had a nun on cast as she bought us some breathing room. She applied to the Vatican to argue about whether or not it was a miracle because I’d been baptised. Didn’t mention that I’d only gone to Parachute ’cause of the underage drinking. But she was a lifesaver. And then A— brought in his little brother who was a hedge fund manager. A— Junior was useless but he was a darling, I couldn’t fault A— for adding him to the mix. All of us were getting frightened. We’d bit off more than we could chew. We were gathering the people we loved and closing the doors.
He said, At that point the government asked us to come in quietly, with our hands up.
He said, We didn’t want to. We always said, they want us, they have to come get us. We’re not getting separated. We’re not getting disappeared. Brave words. But stopping them was on me, you know? You’ve got two scientists and an engineer and a nun and a lawyer and a banker and a cop and an artist. That’s not a defence force, that’s a cop and six different kinds of nerd. P— was great, but like, Ministry ties or no Ministry ties, a big part of her career was going around to the local high school throwing blue-light discos and telling the drugs kids that they shouldn’t be doing drugs. She’d won medals for competition shooting back north in Hamilton, but we’re not talking Jesse James. We’re talking Hamilton.
He said, The cryo lab was about a hundred metres across, concrete and steel and cladding sat on two acres of repurposed farmland. I had forty corpses on hand, and a lot of them were in a state, with partials from earlier testing. We had a lot of flash-frozen brain matter. I couldn’t harvest anything from Ulysses and Titania. I refused. A— and M— were making black jokes about taking volunteers from the crowd for the skeleton army.
One day we ran out of time before those jokes could become suggestions. P— called ahead. She’d betrayed the police for us, told us the riot squad was about half an hour away and they were carrying big guns. She chose us that day, not her career. I always loved her for that. She’d adored being a cop.
He said, I knew what I needed. I needed to cut the place off. Wall it up. Do something impressive to buy us time. Let them know we couldn’t get pushed around. So I pulled up walls close to three foot thick, what you’d now call perpetual bone, staked six feet down. G— ran the numbers for me. I didn’t listen to his warnings about plumbing so I busted the outside water pipe, but that was the worst that happened. The cops arrived in half an hour and tried a battering ram, industrial cutters, everything. They worked for hours, but nothing even penetrated. It was perfect. Except that I’d forgotten to do air holes, so I had to make some of it permeable up top, but, like, fine, we caught it early, nobody suffocated.