What Would Satan Do_ - Anthony Miller [4]
The old stadium seemed cozier now – replacing the metal railings and folding chairs with wood paneling and upholstered seats had helped – but it still didn’t seem all that churchy. He’d have to fix that. At some point.
He looked up at the rows and rows of empty seats, and thought about coming here with his Mom back when it was called the Pinnacle Arena to see his father perform with the circus. It was hard to imagine trapeze artists, lions, and elephants where he now preached the Word of GodTM. Down on the floor – in the “Corinthians” section, rows J, K, and L – was where it had happened. He pictured the little red car, his dad, and the other clowns – those heartless bastards – and closed his eyes to say a quiet prayer.
Bill Cadmon was the pastor of Austin’s Driftwood Fellowship, a non-denominational, evangelical Christian megachurch. It was the biggest house of worship in the world, if you didn’t count those Korean jerks and their Yoshi-yosho-buttrado-Kung-Pao thing. Cadmon sure didn’t. After all, he ran a live, closed-circuit feed to a whole other campus every Sunday. Plus, his television ministry reached out to over twenty million people in more than one hundred countries every week. And anyway, they were friggin’ Koreans. They could just go suck it.
He stepped down off the stage and walked the aisles, pausing here and there to thumb through stacks of promotional materials piled on the seats – like he did every week. These days it was just a spot check, but when he’d started, he’d taken a sort of pride in making sure that everything was in order; that each and every person who came in had a copy of the week’s program. But the church had grown – exploded really – so he’d long since had to delegate that task. And nowadays, folks got way more than just a program. They got glossy, full-color brochures advertising all kinds of interesting, faith-based services that the church now offered. But he still liked to walk the aisles.
As he worked his way up the lower bowl of the arena, Cadmon thought about what an insane ride it had been over the last few years. He’d begun expanding his business empire – “fellowship,” he reminded himself – with a line of books, taking the catchy phrase, “What would Jesus do?” and turning it into faith-based guidance for daily living. His most recent book – How Would Jesus Lose Weight? – was at the top of the New York Times Best Seller List, and had been there for six weeks already.
More recently, the fellowship had begun offering a variety of End Times-related services, the most successful of which was a planning business designed to help folks get their worldly affairs in order before Judgment Day hit. A last will and testament is great if you actually die, but what is the legal effect of being among the Chosen – those the Lord takes up to Heaven during the Rapture, before all the really bad, fiery, end-of-the-world stuff happens? Cadmon had experts standing by 24-7, ready to help figure that out. Of course, that kind of service would really only work if you could convince people that the end of the world was near. But he wasn’t worried about that. He had inside information.
He stopped and sat down at the end of a row, leaning back and propping his boots up on the seat in front of him. Things were good. Real good. And now he needed to do some thinking; to figure out his next step.
There is a strange kind of quiet that comes with being in a big, empty enclosed space like that. It hits you in the pit of your stomach, almost like a touch of