The Book Of Joseph (Far Cry 5)

Part Nine.

IX

"Let us thank the Father who was chosen by the Voice, the brother who protects us from evil, and the brother who listens to our heart."

Sermon from the Project at Eden's Gate.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Two Seed's had been reunited. There was still no more, but at least I now had a man at my side whom no one could refuse anything. John Seed may have become himself again, but we still need John Duncan, the man who opened doors. The government was as helpful to John as it had been unyielding to me. Everything from personal data to confidential files became accessible.

This made it fairly simple to retrace Jacob's steps.

We knew that when we were separated, when Jacob had deliberately set fire to the farm, he had been sent to a juvenile detention centre. Thanks to a senior official with a weakness for prostitutes, John quickly had the full report in his hands.

Jacob had been a bit of a troublemaker in juvie.

Rebellious and hostile to any figure of authority, he clashed with the correctional system. Despite this, some reports praised his sense of honour and his leadership skills. It seemed that the guards hated him, but his teachers believed in him.

Regardless, once he served out his sentence, he had the same prospects as the other juvenile delinquents: the army or a life of crime.

Jacob enlisted in the Marines.

In his military file - given to John willingly by a high-ranking officer who had gotten mixed up in some shady arms dealing - was a photo of our brother.

He had grown into a broad-shouldered man. His eyes still burned with a wild light, just as they had been when we were children, still had that same flicker of insolence that seem to tell our father he could beat Jacob as much as he wished, but could never change him.

He wasn't as handsome as John, but his features were smooth and balanced - the type of man you would follow to war without hesitation, the type of man you would put in a military recruitment poster.

But in the military, Jacob had done more than just march in parades. He had been on the front lines and done several tours in Iraq and Afghanistan. He had been wounded and decorated multiple times.

As soon as he was back on his feet, he would return to combat. This lasted until a medical report warned Jacob's superiors that he was a broken man.

He suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder, the syndrome of those who have seen too much. The illness that is kept quiet. Later, Jacob would tell us of what he had experienced over there, everything that the reports kept hidden.

He himself had driven one of the bulldozers that buried enemy soldiers alive in their sandy foxholes. He saw the hands sticking up above the sand, still waving. He said they reminded him of a father who, during summers at the beach, lets his children cover him in sand with their buckets and shovels. The hands seemed to say, "Stop, that's enough, it's time to go home. Now, get this sand off of me!" But Jacob didn't obey. He didn't bulldoze the sand away. Eventually, after a final tremor, the hands became still. It wasn't his father under there, but he wouldn't have dug him up even if it had been.

He had hundreds of memories like that one. They could surge up at any moment, tormenting him day and night. He cried out in his sleep.

He had seen many comrades die, most of them young men barely out of childhood, who only realized it wasn't a game as they bled out in Jacob's arms. He himself had nearly died multiple times in merciless hand-to-hand combat. His face had been slashed by knives, his body shot with bullets and there was still shrapnel buried in his scarred flesh.

He had killed soldiers: men like him who had brothers who wished to seek revenge in a never-ending cycle of violence.

But this macabre dance will one day end for a lack of fighters.

All will die, while only a few righteous survive.

Jacob had killed innocent people too. he had take and lost palaces. He had pillaged and he had shared his food with orphans. He had been a monster and occasionally a human being in the service of the greed that guided those from whom he took his orders.

He knew instinctively that he was liberating nobody and nothing. He was merely accelerating a change in ownership, nothing more than a process server hastening in eviction, using bullets and grenades instead of rubber stamps.

After he was declared unfit for service, Jacob spent some time at a military hospital. Once his funds ran dry, he was simply tossed out onto the street. That's the way used-up soldiers have always been treated. They are decorated with medals, then told to take a long walk off a short pier. Maybe that's what all the medals are for: so that they'll sink and drown, and blot out those faces that reveal the atrocities they were forced to commit.

The file ended there.

Jacob was nowhere to be found. His pension was untouched, he had no drivers license, filed for no public assistance, committed no crime.

Jacob no longer existed.

But I wouldn't give up.

I knew that the site of out childhood pulled on the Seed's like a magnet. If Jacob was alive, he would be there.

I decided to visit every homeless shelter in Rome and the surrounding area, those meagre forms of assistance that society deigns to provide to its human sacrifices, whether they are national heroes or just out of work.

The shelters were indistinguishable from each other.

All were bare, austere institutions, as wretched and out-of-the-way as the hospital where I had worked. Their residents were identical as well: same stooped posture, same grey faces marked by both excess and hardship, the same lifeless gazes.

Any one of them might have known war.

All of them had been defeated, in any case.

I spoke with the volunteers who worked with these men and women. They told me about the fits and the yelling. They spoke of the theft, the fights that often broke out over a piece of bread or a spot near the heater.

Rich and poor alike are always vying for the best position. In the end, the only differences between them is that the poor steal things that are worthless.

Even worse, the drifters who came to the shelter brought with them only what was strictly necessary. If it wasn't a chipped knife, a laughter, or some spare change that was stolen, it was an item of inestimable sentimental value. I was told a story about an old man who cried for a whole week over a glass marble - a kids' toy- that had disappeared from his pockets. I heard about a young woman who died of a broken heart after a dried flower pressed between two pages of an old book crumbled.

Everyone had some link to their past. If it wasn't an object, it was a place that they revisited frequently, like the grave of a loved one, or a simple memory that they replayed in their head over and over.

Their world had crumbled around them, and yet they searched the rubble for something to keep as a talisman.

One day, in one of those shelters, I spied a silhouette on a cot. A man curled in the fetal position facing the wall. He was agitated and mumbling in his sleep, seeming to call out. I only understand two words.

The man was calling for Joseph and John.