Zak was sick.

He was not old, but he had an old heart.

He had seen so much injustice in his life, and he had gained so much from his poor upbringing, and lost so much.

Embedded in poverty, he fought and fought and climbed and climbed, and finally reached his goal: the middle class.

Yeah, he had three kids who he deemed wonderful, and a wife who had stood by him, scrapping all the way with him.

He had a house with a modest mortgage, on a nice street in a nice midwestern town, he knew all of his neighbors and went to the right church and had the right political friends.

And it had all come to nothing, to shit.

He had a modest business, which would support all three of his kids, for they were all ambitious. There was room for growth, and he had been working on that, expanding his ring of political friends statewide.

And constant fatigue, although unacknowledged by him, had driven his wife to force him to see a doctor for the first time in his life.

So, on his fifty-first birthday, he was introduced to modern medicine.

And modern medicine?

Gave him a death sentence.

Malignant cardiomyopathy.

His heart, that great machine in his chest, had betrayed him.

It had started when he was young, with an undiagnosed malady.

That he had survived as long as he had was a medical miracle, according to the docs at the nearest research facility.

He had an operation, one usually performed on kids that were six years old. His heart was fixed... as much as it could be.

A pacemaker was installed, not because it was needed right now, but because it soon would be.

And, within a month, it was doing what it was intended to do: making his heart beat.

Three years ago, that was.

And the heart muscle, very damaged by the early non-diagnosis and years of constant three-pack-a-day smoking, was giving out.

It was sluggish flab.

Zak could hardly even work any more.

He went to half-days, but then he would just sit and fidget, waiting to get back to work, to at least direct his little empire.

But he did make use of his time.

He watched the news.

And, as a lifelong Christian, he was infuriated at the turns that the world had taken.

Homosexuals being married in the churches! Recognized by the states!

Black people having a say at every level of government, some even being elected....

People not realizing that Jesus was Lord of all.

People not realizing that "In God We Trust" weren't just words on our money.

People not respecting... not respecting anything.

Zak pondered, and pondered, and pondered some more.

He knew, without a doubt, that he was dying.

What could he do?

The bible says that a warrior should be willing to give up his life gladly for the lord, and he believed in the lord, and in those words.

So what could he do with his life?

He was not a warrior, but a worker. But he wanted to be a warrior, he had always wanted to be a warrior, but he never had the courage.

As a child, he would not fight the physical fights. He was looked upon as a sissy, and he didn't mind that at all. He didn't want to hurt people, and he didn't want to be hurt; but he only had control over what he did, not what was done to him.

And the physical part was soon resolved; he made friends who would fight for him when necessary.

So, not a warrior.

And now? Dying... and he still really wanted to be a warrior.

If you have to die, die for a cause.

His cause was, always and forever, the Lord.

He dragged an oxygen tank around with him wherever he went. It was a royal pain, but necessary. He had recently had to increase the flow, and now used it constantly.

He was dying, and he knew that... that doctors in their white coats had used their stethoscopes and an array of sophisticated machinery to prove that to him.

But he had known all along.

So he wrote.

And he found that writing, by itself, does nothing.

Just the ravings of a dying man, sour grapes in a notebook.

And he discovered the internet.

And he wrote there, but it was not really satisfying.

Nobody hardly read his writings, and most of those who did let him know that he was wrong, that he was trying to drag his country and the world back to the eighteenth century.

So... what he needed was exposure.

There were plenty of people, he knew instinctively, that agreed with him.

How, then, could he get them to read what he had written? How could he bring them together?

If he were famous, than they would come. They would read, and they would act, and the world... it would be changed for the better. Because he had written.

But... he is not famous.

And he doesn't have time to get famous, no matter how hard he might try. He was, after all, just a mid-western businessman.

More thinking ensued.

And a decision: he would lay down his life to get his message out.

But he had to get noticed, and the only way to get noticed... the same old conundrum... was to be famous. And he wasn't.

People who deal with suicides know the litany: "They'll be sorry when I'm dead!"

"They'll pay attention when I die!"

But it would take more, much more, Zak knew, than a simple suicide, to make people pay attention.

And the plot grew in his mind.

He knew some people...

He knew lots of people...

People who could provide him with plastics. Plastic explosives. Plastique.

He knew people who could show him how to rig the explosives to go off when he wanted them to.

He had watched them insert his pacemaker... it was done under a local, and there was a video setup so that he could watch every move. It all seemed pretty simple, with the exception of inserting the leads into the proper vein and threading them into the heart.

He didn't need to know how to do that.

He knew... he knew that he was dying

Over the next month, he procured the necessary apparatus, and several bottles of xylocaine, a local anesthetic, and a syringe and a needle and suture materials.

Christmas was on a Friday, and every year for the last thirty, he and his family had flown to LA to be with his wife's family. The airline reservations had been made months in advance.

They shut the shop down on Wednesday night, and they were going to fly out that evening.

But Zak begged off, saying that he didn't really feel like flying, why don't they just go without him.

And naturally, his wife wanted to stay with him.

He finally convinced them that he would be OK, and that they should all go, and that if he felt better, he would get out there later. They left just barely in time to catch their flight.

And Zak went to work.

He had the e-mails written but not sent. They would be sent the next day, after all was said and done: to the white house and all of the news agencies, directing them to his web site. He set up his final treatise to be delivered at midnight, replacing his splash page on the server.

He assembled his supplies: three pounds of plastic explosive in a large baggie with two wires sticking out: a one-ounce trigger mechanism: and what looked like a cigarette lighter.

The cigarette lighter would send a signal to the trigger mechanism which would send a signal through the wires to the fuse of the plastique.

Zak sat down at the kitchen table and sharpened a paring knife. He used three different grade of diamond whetstone.

He drew it lightly across his fourth finger on his left hand ... the one that he wouldn't be using during his procedure. Perfect: it just cut through the dermis... sharp as a razor.

He got out the syringe and the xylocaine and filled the syringe.

He removed his shirt them, one of his favorites, a red flannel.

No time now for reflection. Just do the job.

With a pen, he made a mark above his pot belly, an arc like a smile between his nipples.

And he started deadening the tissue, working methodically from left to right along the arc. And then another line two inches below, plunging the needle in, squirt a little, come out a quarter-inch, squirt some more. The needle started getting dull, harder to pierce the skin, about half-way through.

Then he took the knife and slit across the smile to a depth of about a half-inch.

And then he took a dull but clean table knife and started dissecting the tissue away from the abdominal muscles... he couldn't use anything sharp, it might cut through the muscle if he slipped, and foil his plans completely... further and further down, until he could feel the pain.

The pouch that he made was big enough for the plastique finally; luckily, there wasn't really enough blood to worry about.

He contoured the plastique in the bag so that it kinda looked just like another roll of fat and poked it into the pouch that he had made. He then attached the trigger to the wires and tucked it behind the plastique.

It was not comfortable... but comfort in these last few hours was something he wasn't worried about.

Swiftly, he stitched everything in place... he had done a lot of sewing in his life when he was poor, extending the life of his clothes way beyond their expiration date.

No worries about infection,either, of course....

He wrapped Saran Wrap around his belly, just in case he leaked a little blood.

He then put on his red flannel shirt, and a cardigan sweater over that, and buttoned it up. He surveyed the results in the hall mirror: he looked just like he wanted to: a sick balding guy with grayish skin and a pot belly.

He had, on the sly, made reservations on the next flight out.

He had packed a small suitcase with clothes that he had been meaning to throw out anyway, not wanting to waste anything good....

His mind was clear with resolve as he drove the hour to the airport and parked in the long-term lot. Caught the shuttle just right, it was rolling up to the stop as he approached.

He had pulled out his pacemaker card as he approached the gate. With that and the O2 tank and his obvious frail health, he was hustled through boarding and into his seat.

He debated briefly if it would be better to go before the plane took off or wait. And if he waited, how long should he wait? Until the landing?

No, that wouldn't work, he might chicken out.

He set his mind on twenty-five minutes after takeoff. In twenty-five minutes, he knew from previous flights, they would be over sparsely-settled land.

No time now for reflection. Just do the job.

He prayed silently, relentlessly, for the souls who would accompany him in his blaze of glory.

And the captain had just finished his greeting to his passengers when there was a bright red-and-yellow blossom over the brown fields of Minnesota as three hundred and nineteen people died for Zak's Lord.