Lamb: the Gospel According to Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal

street toward the Essene Gate at Ben Hinnon. I came off the roof full stride and landed without losing a step. Although I heard something tear in my ankle I couldn’t feel it.
    There was a line of people trying to get into the city at the Essene Gate, probably seeking shelter from the impending storm. Lightning crackled across the sky and raindrops as big as frogs began to plop onto the streets, leaving craters in the dust and painting the city with a thin coat of mud. Judas fought through the crowd as if he were swimming in pitch, pulling people past him on either side, moving a step forward only to be carried back a step.
    I saw a ladder leaning against the city wall and ran up it. There were Roman soldiers stationed here on the wall and I brushed by them, ducking spears and swords as I made my way to the gate, then over it, then to the wall on the other side. I could see Judas below me. He’d broken out of the crowd and was making his way along a ridge that ran parallel to the wall. It was too far to jump, so I followed him from above until I came to the corner of the battlement, where the wall sloped down to accommodate the thickness required to hold the corner. I slid down the wet limestone on my feet and hands and hit the ground ten paces behind the Zealot.
    He didn’t know I was there. The rain came down now in sheets and the thunder was so frequent and loud that I could hear nothing myself but the roaring anger in my head. Judas came to a cypress tree that jutted over a high cliff with hundreds of tombs gouged into it. The path passed between a wall of tombs and the cypress tree; past the tree was a fifty-yard drop. Judas pulled a purse from his belt, pulled a small stone out of the opening to one of the tombs, then shoved the purse inside. I caught him by the back of the neck and he shrieked.
    “Go ahead, put the stone back,” I said.
    He tried to wheel on me and hit me with the stone. I took it from him and fitted it back into the tomb, then kicked his feet out from under him and dragged him to the edge of the cliff. I clamped onto his windpipe and, holding the cypress tree with my free hand, I leaned him out over the cliff.
    “Don’t struggle!” I shouted. “You’ll only free yourself to the fall.”
    “I couldn’t let him live,” Judas said. “You can’t have someone like him alive.” I pulled the Zealot back up on the cliff and whipped the sash from around his tunic.
    “He knew he had to die,” Judas said. “How do you think I knew he’d be at Gethsemane, not at Simon’s? He told me!”
    “You didn’t have to give him up!” I screamed. I wrapped the sash around his neck, then pulled it tight over the crook of a cypress branch.
    “Don’t. Don’t do this. I had to do it. Someone did. He would have just reminded us of what we’ll never be.”
    “Yep,” I said. I shoved him backward over the cliff and caught the end of the sash as it tightened around the branch. The sash twanged when it took his weight and his neck snapped with the sound of a knuckle cracking. I let go of the sash and Judas’ body fell into the darkness. The boom of thunder concealed the sound of impact.
    The anger ran out of me then, leaving me feeling as if my very bones were losing their structure. I looked forward, straight over the Ben Hinnon valley, into a sheet of lightning-bleached rain. “I’m sorry,” I said, and I stepped off the cliff. I felt a bolt of pain, and then nothing.

    That’s all I remember.

E pilogue
    The angel took the book from him, then went out the door and across the hall, where he knocked on the door. “He’s finished,” the angel said to someone in the room.
    “What, you’re leaving? I can just go?” asked Levi who was called Biff.
    The door across the hall opened, and there stood another angel, this one seeming to have more a female aspect than Raziel. She too held a book. She stepped into the hall to reveal a woman standing behind her, wearing jeans and a green cotton blouse. Her hair was long and straight, dark with reddish highlights, and her eyes were crystal blue and seemed to glow in contrast to her dark skin.
    “Maggie,” said Levi.
    “Hi, Biff.”
    “Maggie finished her Gospel weeks ago,” said Raziel.
    “Really?”
    The Magdalene smiled. “Well, I didn’t have as much to write as you did. I didn’t see you guys for sixteen years.”
    “Oh, right.”
    “It is the will of the Son that you two go out together into this new world,” said the female