“Gregory, get in here!” Jamie called from the living room where she’d been pacing back and forth in front of their television, wringing the remote in her hands tight enough for her fingers to hurt. “Hurry!”

“What is it?” Gregory called from the kitchen, mouth full of a bite of something he’d scrounged up for his lunch break. Likely leftovers from the night before. “What’s got you so worked up?”

When he stood in front of her to stop her pacing, she pointed towards what she’d been watching for several minutes now. “Our boy’s on TV.”

“Huh?” Gregory took a second to process what he saw, sitting down on his lounging chair. “Sure enough. What’s this all about? Why are there police? Has our boy gotten himself in trouble?”

The headline read: Demon worshiper approaches local blockade.

“Wait a minute!” Gregory shouted, putting aside his food to stand and take the remote from Jamie. He rewound the live footage to watch things from the beginning. 

“If you’re hesitant to go into the Towers, don’t be. I promise the outcome of not going is worse than anything that could happen if you do!” Wyatt held out his hands wide. “The whole world has changed, and if you’re still in denial, you’re part of the problem!”

Gregory paused the TV to look at Jamie. “Am I hearing things right?” He stuck a finger in each of his ears and cleaned them out, checking to see if anything came with. “Looks good to me, so what’s our boy getting himself into?”

“Just… keep watching, darling,” Jamie says, to which Gregory clicks the play button.

An officer behind where Wyatt sits on his motorcycle calls out on a megaphone. “Wyatt, please stop!”

Then the man beside the female officer decided to issue a command, “Men, raise your arms and train your sights on that heretic!”

“For the love of God, son, do as the man says!” Gregory shouted, getting down on his knees and wringing the remote tight enough to make the plastic squeal. “They’ll kill you, boy!”

But no, Wyatt keeps going, “The Devil God doesn’t care about what we want. He only cares about what he wants. And what he wants is to be fed. If you’re Numbered and not in a Tower, you’re the problem!”

“Jamie,” Gregory whispered, hanging his head, “what has our boy become?”

“Don’t be so harsh on him! We raised him to think before acting. There has to be a good reason behind what he’s doing!” She knelt beside Gregory and watched the TV intensely, eyes taking in every detail. “There has to be…” 

Wyatt, their son, turned to look towards the barricade of police vehicles blocking of the road forward. Jamie and Gregory watched as armor popped out of thin air, encasing their son entirely.

The police chieftain, a man they’d been friends with for the last thirty years, shouted, “If he says another thing, you have permission to fire!”

“Rick is going to kill him, Gregory! You have to do something.” Jamie’s unsteady breathing grew faster as the scene continued. “Gregory! Call Wyatt. Or Rick! Do something before they kill our son!”

“Love,” Gregory muttered, turning to look Jamie in the face with hard eyes, “what can we do? We’ve never been able to stop him from doing whatever he set his mind to. Just think about that gang he had. Do you remember what happened?”

“But… he’s better now. He promised…” She looked down at her shaky hands. “He’s been good, was going to school and making good grades. He promised he’d stay out of trouble.”

“And he lied. That’s all there is to it,” Gregory stated, turning to train his eyes on their son. “He knows his actions have consequences.”

Their baby boy looked straight at the camera and spoke words that chilled them to their bones. “You’re going to die, and it’ll be all your fault!”

“Fire at will!”

“NO!” Jamie screamed, watching in horror as nobody fired. She grasped the TV as if she could reach through and drag their son out, but alas, she couldn’t.

The cameraman focused on Rick as he grabbed a rifle, took aim, and then fired while screaming, “Die heretic! May your soul rot in Hell!”

Pop.

“NOOOO!” Jamie wailed, slapping the screen.

Then the damnedest thing happened, and both Gregory and Jamie stared with wide eyes, feeling vastly different things. Tink. The bullet slammed into their baby boy and came to a complete stop.

“How… could Rick… say such terrible things about Wyatt?” Jamie stammered, looking at Gregory with eyes begging him to agree with her. When he looked away, she grabbed his arm. “You… can’t be serious? Someone just tried to kill our boy, and you think they were justified?!”

“I didn’t say that,” he grunted.

“But you’re not denying it!” she shouted, eyes now wide with horror. “You… think Rick was in the right?”

“Let’s keep watching,” Gregory said, dismissing Jamie’s accusation.

They watched as Wyatt held up the bullet for everyone to see. “See this?! This world is no longer ours! Bullets don’t mean shit to Numbered. Devil God Yugmuswa is here! There is no arguing that. His servants walk among us, his Towers offering hope in a world steeped in corruption.”

“He really has become a demon worshiper,” Gregory said, hanging his head. “Where did we go so wrong, Jamie?”

“Don’t jump to conclusions! We’ll give him the chance to explain himself.”

Gregory gestured towards the screen and glared back at Jamie. “The evidence is all there. What more could you want?”

“I want to hear it from our son! He may have had a rough past, but this…? This is too much, even for him. There has to be a rational reasoning behind his actions,” she said, but it sounded like she was trying harder to convince herself than him.

“Shut your damned mouth!” Rick screams, firing three more times. The shots strike perfectly, to no avail. “Who do you think you are, heretic?!”

“Restrain the captain!” the girl from the beginning of the broadcast shouts over Rick.

But he turns the gun on her. “You’re one of them too, aren’t you? A sympathizer is no better than a heretic. Begone!”

“Has he gone mad?!” roared Gregory.

“Don’t!” Jamied mouthed, watching in renewed horror as the trigger inches closer to releasing death.

But then he stops as shadows rise up from underneath him to stop things from escalating further.

Those closest to Rick dogpiled on top of him, restraining him in handcuffs. The girl looked stunned by the rapid sequence of events, but neither Gregory or Jamie could blame her.

“He’s lost his mind,” Jamie muttered, eyes glued to the screen. “He’s really lost his marbles, Gregory.”

“I’ll go talk to him after things calm down and see what’s wrong. This isn’t like him.”

Further conversation ends as the camera focuses on Wyatt again, and he continues, “I’ve spent every day in the Tower working hard, and I can tell you this. If you’ve ever had a dream, it can become reality.”

“He’s delusional. His mind really must be scattered. Maybe he hasn’t been taking his prescriptions?” Jamie muttered, eyes full of sadness. “Maybe if we call now, we can tell the station he’s unwell?”

Gregory turned and shook his head. “Wyatt just deflected four bullets. That can’t be the work of anything but demonic influence, love.”

“No! I won’t believe it, and neither should you!”

“What’s it like in there?” someone close to the camera shouted.

For a moment, their son watched in silent contemplation. Then they see that look in his eyes, one everyone in the family knew well. A look full of determination, an unbreakable will.

“Dangerous at times, but there is hope. There are options to overcome weakness, options for everyone to find their way to power, wealth, and security. There is opportunity.”

Gregory sighed, rising from the ground to return to his seat. He numbly ate his sandwich, eyes glazed over and signaling to Jamie he’d checked out. But she continued watching. Even if Gregory was convinced Wyatt had sold his soul for power, she didn’t think he’d ever do such a thing.

She knew her baby boy better than that, had raised him as a fighter. Even running his little gang back in the day, he was more like a modern Robin Hood than a careless villain running amok. And even if he was, she didn’t know if she could ever forsake him.

A mother loved her children unconditionally, and if he was caught in something, she’d help him through to see the other side and get him the help he needed.

“What do you think of the Devil God?” the same voice near the camera inquired.

“From looking at everything he’s done, I think he’s fair,” Wyatt said, sending a hot lance of grief down to Jamie’s core.

“Do you believe God has abandoned us to this Devil God?”

“Come on, son,” Gregory said, tuned back in to the screen. “If you haven’t abandoned God, then he too shall not abandon you. Please, son…”

The scowl Jamie saw on his face set her heart palpating in ways she was far too old to experience.

Then Wyatt’s answer came, “Who cares? What’s more important is here and now, what we can see and do something about. I promise all who are afraid that there is a way to overcome that fear. The world is changing, and we have to change with it. We can all benefit from this.”

“So he’s lost his faith,” Gregory concluded. He stood up, leaving behind his lunch with only two bites taken out of it, and left out the front door.

Tears streaked down Jamie’s face, the absence of her husband leaving a hole in her heart. He’d given up on their boy, but she wouldn’t. There had to be some way to fix this. Maybe Sammy would know?

“What about the power that it gives to people? Don’t you think it might destabilize the world?” the voice close to the camera asked.

“Why should I care about that? Our world is steeped in filth, so I can’t be bothered to give a shit about maintaining the status quo. Don’t cry to me about the unfairness of this new world under the Devil God’s system, because he doesn’t at least try to act like something he isn’t.” He waved towards the camera. “That’s all. I seriously need to go.”

Thinking the program was coming to an end, Jamie fumbled for her phone but didn’t find it in her pockets. Looking around, she didn’t see it anywhere in the living room.

“Hold on, there’s a development on scene. It looks like, after exchanging some words we can’t make out from here, the blockade has been ordered to move,” the man who questioned Wyatt said. “Oh, look that way!”

The camera turned down the road the blockade was on. A speeding bus was barrelling down the road. Jamie watched in horror as the bus sped up even faster, making its way straight towards the blockade with a cone of darkness at its front.

“Oh no…” she whispered, watching as the poor police officers ran to get out of the way of the bus.

When the bus impacted, shrapnel flew everywhere, most of it wild and uncontrolled. But that same darkness spread out to tear all of the vehicles into ribbons and tossed them towards Wyatt’s back.

Jamie hadn’t seen him move to protect the female officer, but her heart nearly stopped when the first piece of metal slammed into her son at the speed of a bullet. But it harmlessly rebounded off as the bullets had and coalesced around him.

“Is this what he was trying to tell them about?” She’d seen how he pointed down the road, frantically gesturing down the road and the barricade. “He was trying to save them? He must have known about the bus coming…”

She turned to look towards the door where Gregory had left, wishing he’d stayed. When she returned her focus to the TV, the unfiltered scene left her nauseous and horrified. The shrapnel had done awful things to those unfortunate souls who hadn’t made it behind cover.

“Oh my God!” she exclaimed, covering her mouth with her hand.

The female officer handed something to Wyatt and started to walk away, but he followed behind and helped assemble the injured into rows. Then what came next could only be described as a miracle of God.

A brilliant dome of green encapsulated all of the injured officers, and before Jamie’s very eyes, her son healed all the injured men and women. Whatever he did left no marks at all. No scars, not a scratch, no sign many of them had nearly bled to death in those few precious moments.

But the carnage of the incident couldn’t be ignored. The metal remnants of the police vehicles and blood all over the place, nor the torn clothing.

“He’s a saint!” she exclaimed, the camera watching as he ran down the path to the Tower in the distance before turning back to focus on the police force.

She paused the TV again and jumped up to find her phone in the kitchen. Flipping it open with shaky hands, she dialed Wyatt. The first time, it rang fully, but it went to voicemail. The second and third did too, but then fourth immediately reached the voicemail.

He’d likely turned his phone off to not be disturbed, but she needed to talk to him. Right now!

Sammy was the only other one she could think to call, so she dialed her daughter and prayed. When the line clicked and connected, Jamie nearly cried when her daughter’s voice filled her ears.

“Momma? What’s up? Is everything okay?”

“Samster, it’s your brother. We need to talk about him…”