[center][h2]“The Least Of These” - Part 1[/h2][/center]

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Part 1 of a JP/Collab from [@Xandrya], [@PatientBean], [@Bugman], [@Gunther], [@wanderingwolf], and [@sail3695]  

“Just don’t seem right,” Brother Raphael muttered under his breath.

Hadn’t Brother Jebediah preached of the virtuousness in looking after your neighbor before yourself?  He heard the words aplenty.  “Blessed be the giving of bread to those who hunger.  Blessed be the sweat of your brow in service of those who need.”  Plain as day.  But now, here he was, nudging a wheelbarrow full of bricks through the checkpoint.  To hear Brother Jebediah and that Sister Lyen tell it, the hour of deliverance was at hand.

But it didn’t seem right.

Everywhere he looked was misery and suffering.  The blackout zone was teaming with desperate souls…grim faced men who fought for their own and bore the pain of not being able to provide better.  Their women, stoic and resigned to this fate, taking whatever form of work, no matter how unseemly, to put bread into the mouths of their children.  And those children, lost little innocents forced to learn life’s harshest lessons at such a tender age.  As an Anabaptist, was it not his mission to “ease the burden of all within thy sight?”  

“Just don’t seem right.”

“It ain’t raht, brother,” Joe Hooker explained to the boy. “This is why we’s takin y’all away from here. Git you tah someplace better. Mebee make a new start for yerselves.”

Brother Joseph Hooker seemed a decent man…a man who in quiet moments told of the righteousness of delivering Raphael and his sect from lives of slavery and want.  [i]Seemed an-ti-thet-ical[/i], the seventeen year old weighed the job foreman’s words against his lifelong views.  Mayhaps he could seek the man out for further counsel.  Brother Joseph was not of the faith, but didn’t Brother Jebediah say to “drink well the minds of men and women, for wisdom lies there?”   

Joseph Hooker had once belonged to a Protestant sect not too dissimilar to these Anabaptists. But then he really didn’t know what they stood for. The McGinnis family took him and his brothers to Sunday meetings every week. We prayed to God and listened to the gospel frequently. But everyone worships their higher power differently. Joe Hooker would not judge these people because their manner of worship was different from his own. The differences were irrelevant. Freeing them from a life of servitude was paramount.

Sister Emily was a mere girl of nine.  She labored ahead, her arms beginning to tremble with the weight of bricks she carried in a burlap sack.   

Elias would stoop down, reaching out a hand to grab the sack from the girl, trying to smile as he worked to ease her weight. With the scarf wrapped around his mangled face it was unlikely she’d see much of this but he hoped that the raised muscles of his upper cheeks would still convey some friendliness to the child that might be startled at the sudden intrusion. Given his size, he was already ordered to carry far more than anyone else. While he was certainly stronger than more or less anyone he could see, the tasks he was given were proportionally far greater than what others would have to compensate for. Still, he couldn’t particularly bear to see a child suffer like this. The weight of all he carried cut into his flesh far more than any overloaded bag of groceries could upon hands but at the same time it was nothing compared to what he had experienced at the hands of the reavers and thus could be taken in stride. So much time had passed for Elias to live in such a state, he knew already to not bother wiping accumulated sweat away: it would soak into his facial wrappings. The lack of comfort was something that he kept reminding himself would end soon. It would, it had to. Then he would be free, though this thought brought him less comfort than it may have when he was first imprisoned. It wasn’t exactly that he came to enjoy spending time with the Anabaptists. They were still alien to him after all this time. But in his enslavement the man came to see that this wasn’t all that different to his past time. His lack of freedom now was more apparent, but was he ever free before? Working at the threat of poverty seemed to now not be to different to working at the threat of being disposed of as would likely be his fate just as the other slaves. Now that his situation was so much more clear, all the other coercion he experienced in retrospect now seemed all the more obvious. Perhaps this was a way to cope with his reality, but it felt like a damn good one.

The group of refugees stepped into the shadow of the China Doll, Hook posing as their foreman, himself the back-renter of these ‘wheelbarrows’ filled with bricks. Captain tipped his hat to Joe as he led the group; from where he stood, it looked like the man was working hand over fist to atone for what had happened to Abigail, though without communicating such. Maybe there was some cosmic balance the man catered to, but Cal always preferred an unfeeling, empty ‘Verse. 

As he watched, a behemoth of a man stepped up the ramp among the much shorter Anabaptists. Strand’s brows arched as he appeared to be carrying a wheelbarrow’s worth of brick in a sack over one shoulder. He didn’t much look like a member of their sect, by the way he wore a scarf over his face and sheer size. Still, he paused his ascent to help the burden of a little girl who struggled under her own load. With a glance over the stream of the oncoming ‘fugees, Cal turned his attention toward the chain of stations that would lead them to their makeshift berths throughout the China Doll.

Despite his upbringing, Brother Raphael couldn’t help but feel the wary curiosity rise along his backbone.  The Stranger had simply appeared one day, much like an abandoned dog attaching himself to the next kindly humans in his path.  Though he chided himself for his sinful reaction, there was some comfort in noticing the same from Sister Emily’s wide eyed staring at the masked giant.  The man never spoke, though he listened earnestly and gestured in reply, some form of sign language Brother Raphael had yet to comprehend.  But despite the mystery swirling about the man, his kindness toward the little child was undeniable and dispensed with no expectation of return.  Raphael would think on him some more.  And pray.

“The ship’s over yonder, y’all! We are nearly there!” Joe shouted to the Anabaptists as they neared their finish line. He felt like Moses leading his people out of Egypt on Earth-that-was. It made him feel good. The thought warmed his heart and brought a smile to his lips.


[b]...TO BE CONTINUED…[/b]