The Day Jesus Returned

Chapter One

Midnight had already come and gone, and Callie Kay was not so much sleeping as abandoned on the sofa.

She had not made it to the bedroom. She had not taken off the clothes she had worn into the night. One shoe was still on. The other had given up somewhere between the door and the cushion. Makeup still clung to her face in the stubborn way cheap armor does after it has failed. Mascara had run and dried in dark little deltas under her eyes. At the corner of her left eye a cluster of lashes had glued themselves together with the thick, tacky mix of liner and old tears, so that the lid felt slightly wrong even in sleep.

The almost-empty bottle on the coffee table explained more than she wanted it to. It was better wine than she usually bought. The label had gold on it. She had not read the back. She had only wanted to forget for a few hours. Apparently, she'd succeeded.

Beside the bottle, a glass held what was left. In that shallow red, a tiny fly worked its legs against the surface and got nowhere.

The room had gone quiet in the way rooms do when the person who fills them finally stops performing. A monitor still glowed from the desk. A ring light sat dark on its stand. Cords made their usual lazy tangle across the floor. This was the same space where she livestreamed The Callie Kay Way on YouTube to over two million followers, and also the space where she ate cereal and cried and charged four devices at once. Tonight it only smelled like wine and warm electronics and the faint sweetness of makeup that had been on too long.

Callie breathed. Once, a little ragged. Then the sofa took her again.

The phone on her stomach buzzed.

She made a sound that was not a word and did not open her eyes.

It buzzed again.

A small, irritated noise leaked out of her, the kind she made at alarms and at people who texted you up after eleven.

Then the computer joined in.

One chime.

Another… Several, stacking, as if the machine had decided the night was not over.

Callie exhaled like the air itself had asked too much of her.

“World,” she muttered, eyes still shut, “I am exhausted people...”

The phone kept tapping its little fist against her. Her computer kept chiming right along with it. She dragged one eye open. The room swam. She blinked, and the left eye only half obeyed. The stuck lashes tugged; a thin bright sting followed. She rubbed at it with the heel of her hand, winced, worked the lid until it tore free of itself. The sting faded. The blur did not.

She was still mostly horizontal when her hand found the glass.

She drank.

Something moved against her teeth.

Callie froze, the rim still at her mouth, brain lagging three seconds behind the fact. She pushed the thing forward with her tongue and caught it between finger and thumb.

She held it up.

The fly was a dark speck in the blur of her vision. Its legs kept moving. It had survived the wine. Barely.

Callie gagged, swallowed hard, and squinted until the miserable little thing came into focus.

“Rough day too, huh?”

She tipped the fly onto a stained napkin and left it on the coffee table. If it survived the wine, it deserved a chance. She did not smile at herself.

The phone buzzed against her stomach.

She looked down at it the way a person looks at a roommate who will not stop talking.

Buzz.

The computer chimed again, then again, then in a messy overlap that meant something was moving through the feeds all at once.

Annoyance, not alarm. The internet was always on fire for somebody.

She peeled the phone off her shirt and brought it close to her face. She did not sit up. She did not become a journalist. She tapped a notification because it was there.

The screen bloomed.

Jerusalem. Dome. Stone. And above it, the clouds had split around a blaze of golden light. Someone had plastered JESUS IS COMING across the bottom of the clip in enormous white letters.

Callie stared with the one eye that was fully acting like it was awake.

“Uhhh… church people... Really?”

She swiped.

Another Jerusalem clip. Same impossible light, different angle. JESUS HAS RETURNED. Swipe. Clouds. Swipe. Jerusalem. Swipe. Another cross, another Bible verse, another person announcing the end of the world.

Her mood turned sour in an instant.

“What the hell? Is this some force-Jesus-down-my-throat contest challenge?”

A beat. The phone lit her wrecked mascara.

“They know I don’t want Jesus showing up in my feed.”

If she gave it any more thought than that, it was the cheap kind. It was AI. A meme. A coordinated pile-on. Of all the things the internet could throw at her tonight, it had picked Jesus. She did not pinch to zoom. She did not check a source. Tomorrow could have the argument.

She set the phone on the wooden coffee table. The wood received it with a small, final sound. Callie let her eyes close. Two seconds of quiet. Maybe less.

Then the phone engaged the table.

BRRRRRRRR.

The vibration was a chainsaw now, cheap wood amplifying every pulse. She did not open her eyes.

It stopped. Silence stretched, thin as a held breath.

BRRRR.

BRRRRRRRRR.

The computer chimed again, determined not to be ignored.

Callie groaned into the cushion.

The phone rattled. Rattled. Rattled.

Without sitting up, she grabbed a sofa pillow and dropped it on the phone. The sound went soft at once.

brrrrrr.

A muffled animal under cloth.

brrrr. brrrrrrrr. Still going.

Something out there was trying to come into the room by the only door she ever left unlocked.

Callie rolled onto her side, pulled a second pillow over her head, and closed her eyes.

Beyond the pillow the computer kept a faint, distant chiming. Under the first pillow the phone kept asking.

brrrrrr… brrrrrr…

She did not answer.

Chapter Two

BRRRR.

Silence.

BRRRR.

She closed her eyes and instantly regretted it. Her head throbbed harder. The computer chimed again. The phone answered from under the pillow like it had all night.

Callie grabbed the pillow and flung it away. So much for hiding from the morning. “Fine. I surrender!”

Sitting up was a mistake. The room tipped. Her mouth tasted like a carpet. She put her elbows on her knees and her hands in her hair.

“That was stupid. I know better than to drink like an idiot.”

Bare feet on the floor. The kitchen light attacked her. She dropped a pod into the Keurig and stood there waiting for coffee like it might save her life. She tore a granola bar open with her teeth.

From the living room, the phone buzzed.

She stared that direction and did not move.

Coffee started to pour.

The phone buzzed again.

“You people are relentless.”

Mug in one hand, bar in the other, she came back toward the sofa. On the coffee table the fly crawled to the edge of the napkin, tested the air, and left.

Callie almost smiled.

BRRRR.

Smile gone.

She grabbed the phone.

Not the public feed. The private one. The Callie Kay Way, the YouTube channel that paid her bills and ate most of her life. It was supposed to be work, not worship, not whatever this was. It was a pile-on. Moderators. Researchers. Editors. People who did not waste her time.

CALLIE GIRL LOOK AT THIS. ARE YOU AWAKE? CALLIE. THIS ISN’T AI. TURN ON ABC. JERUSALEM LIVE FEED.

Mike’s name stacked the list. Everybody else called her Callie. Mike called her Callie Girl. He’d never asked permission. He’d just decided he was allowed.

The phone rang in her hand.

She almost let it go. She answered.

“Mike, somebody better be dead.”

“Callie, just look!”

“I looked. Jesus in the clouds. Very tasteful. Somebody at church finally learned how to use AI.”

“No. Look again.”

He started throwing sources at her the way she had taught him to throw sources. ABC. NBC. CBS. Fox. BBC. Jerusalem desks. Israeli feeds. Tourist phones. Traffic cams. Different angles. Different compression. Different light. Feeds that had started in different pockets of the city from people who were not in the same group chat.

“Hack,” she said.

“Then they hacked the tourists.”

“Overlay.” “On a traffic camera?”

“Stunt. Projection. Coordinated drop.”

“Callie.” Mike’s voice went flat. “I’m doing exactly what you taught us to do.”

That one landed. Half a second. No more.

Coffee helped. Hangover or not, the part of Callie that knew how to chase a story had just woken up.

Laptop open cranking. She dragged feeds into a grid and started hunting timestamps. One stream rewound. Another stayed live. Another stayed live. Same skyline. The same glow cutting through a sky that should have been dark. Different rooftops. Different shake in the hands holding the phones.

“That’s impossible,” she muttered.

It didn’t scare her. It irritated her.

Mike said there was one feed she had to watch. A Jerusalem news camera locked on whatever was happening above the city. She enlarged it.

Night city. Dome. Stone. Traffic stopped like someone had pulled a plug. People in the street with phones up. Some crying. Some shouting. Some on their knees. Some just filming because that was what people did when the world stopped making sense. Hebrew, English, Arabic stacked over each other. The operator could not hold the shot still.

Above the city, the clouds were wrong.

Light where there should not have been light. Depth. Movement. Something coming that refused to sit still in the frame.

Callie froze holding the mug and not drinking it.

“Callie…”

“I’m looking.”

A figure came down through the brightness.

Not a cartoon. Not wings slapping air. A figure moved through the clouds toward the city, human in form but carrying a presence Callie could feel through the screen. The crowd broke first. People screamed. Some fell. Some ran. Some could not look away. He had something in his hands. The camera hunted it. Zoomed. Lost it. Found it.

A trumpet.

She knew what it was before she wanted to know.

The Lord Himself shall descend—

No.

She shoved the words back down.

The figure lifted it.

Then a voice rolled over Jerusalem.

Not shouted through a microphone. Not carried by speakers. It came from above them and around them, filling the city with words Callie somehow understood as clearly as if they had been spoken beside her.

“BEHOLD! HE COMES WITH THE CLOUDS! THE GREAT DAY OF THE LORD HAS COME!”

The city seemed to hold.

Then he blew. It did not sound like brass on a speaker. It came through the laptop too big for the speakers. The phone picked it up a fraction later from another feed, then another, same sound arriving from devices that were not sharing a cable. Callie jerked an earbud out. The note was old and terrible and calling.

After it, the light over Jerusalem thickened. Clouds pulled apart more. Opening an impressive way through.

Another figure started down.

Different. The first one had announced. This one arrived.

Feeds lunged for zoom and failed in the same places trying to steady the image. Below, the street came apart. Somebody near a camera was shouting a name Callie could not catch. Then an English voice ripped across one of the mics.

“Jesus!”

Callie did not look away.

Robe. Descent. Clouds. The whole impossible picture arranging itself into a face she had been taught and then spent years shoving out of her memory.

Mike whispered her name, “Callie…”

She did not answer.

AI. Deepfake. Hack. Stunt. Projection. Every word she threw at it sat in her mouth and did not explain it.

The trumpet was still in the speakers.

The figure kept coming down through the clouds over Jerusalem. Callie Kay, who talked for a living, could not think of a single thing to say. ...READ MORE