Jumpers for Jesus

by Emily Devenport

About the Author: Nine of Emily Devenport's novels were published in the U.S. by NAL/Penguin/Roc, under three pen names. She has also been published in the U.K., Italy, China, and Israel. Her novels are Shade, Larissa, Scorpianne, EggHeads, The Kronos Condition, GodHeads, Broken Time (which was nominated for the Philip K. Dick Award), Belarus, and Enemies. She has two new novels from Tor: Medusa Uploaded (May2018) and Medusa in the Graveyard (July 2019). Her short stories were published in ASIMOV'S SF MAGAZINE, the Full Spectrum anthology, The Mammoth Book of Kaiju, UNCANNY, CICADA , SCIENCE FICTION WORLD, ALFRED HITCHCOCK, CLARKESWORLD, and ABORIGINAL SF, whose readers voted her a Boomerang Award. She blogs at www.emsjoiedeweird.com.

Excerpt

I would be hard put to tell you how much I didn’t want that assignment. I didn’t want it so much, I considered quitting the newspaper. But Bill Thomas sat there with a fat cigar stuck in a face that had seen thirty years of reporting before I was born and said, “You’re a reporter. So go report.”

My feet moved out the door, the words I had wanted to spit at him forming a lump at the bottom of my throat. I still wasn’t sure I could handle the Bo Hendrickson job. I’m afraid of heights. Not the kind of heights you find at the top of a ladder or even a ten-story building—the extreme sort of heights you find at the tip of the Praying Hands, the highest point in the Foggies. Eight thousand feet of sheer drop.

Bo Hendrickson was planning to take his followers up there and “lead them in prayer.” He spun a bunch of rhetoric about confronting their fears and learning to trust in God, but Hendrickson was on several watch lists by then, as a leader whose faith ventured dangerously into cult territory. Thomas suspected he and his flock might be planning to jump off that precipice. If they did, he wanted me to see them off.

That’s not how he put it, but that’s what it amounted to. I wish I had manned up and told him where he could stick his cult-suicide story. However, I still had rent to pay (along with a nice collection of other bills), so by mid afternoon I was pointing my car at the Foggies and reviewing what I knew about Bo Hendrickson, spiritual leader and maniac.

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