The Eye of Moloch by Glenn Beck Page A

they’ve taken him next.”
    “Thank you.”
    “Now come on, let’s eat. They’ve got enough glazed ham, and roast chicken, and salt potatoes in there to feed an army.”

Chapter 12

    T he spread looked like four Thanksgivings, every homemade morsel of it mounded in steaming dishes around a long banquet table set with polished silver, cloth napkins, and company china. When everyone had taken their seats, the patriarch of the family stood at his place and spoke his welcome, introducing each of the guests by name and background as though he’d known them all his life.
    Hollis had, in fact, known most of these ten people for as long as he could remember. Of late he’d known them chiefly as a disheveled band of tired, filthy, and cantankerous vagabonds who could neither run fast enough nor shoot straight enough to be of much use as legitimate fugitives. But looking around the table now as each one was called out in turn he began to see them differently again, through the admiring eyes of another.
    As the name of their organization suggested, these ten had sworn an oath to be keepers of the words and thoughts of their nation’s Founding Fathers. It was really as harmless as that, and not at all a political movement in its beginnings. They’d started out as nothing more than a quaint conservation society, a counterpoint to what they perceived as the subversive, progressive rewriting of mainstream U.S. history.
    Each of the group’s members had responsibility to preserve a single Founder’s written wisdom. This wasn’t a simple matter of rote memorization, though that’s where each apprentice always started. Something odd would always happen then: after a few weeks of total immersion a peculiar transformation would begin to manifest in these people, as if the vital spirit captured on the page might be coming alive again to take up partial residence in a new incarnation.
    He took a look around the table and paused a moment on each of his people as they sat interspersed among the Merricks. Day to day, to Hollis these ten were Doris, and Mae, and Paul, and Miles, and Grace, and Jeremiah; twin brothers Bill and Ronald; their father, Gene; and then Molly. Seeing them now, well dressed, upstanding, and largely recovered from their latest ordeal, he could also detect in them the faint but unmistakable presence of their alter egos: Hancock, Adams, Allen, Rush, Paine, Hamilton, Madison, and Jay. As Jefferson had proved to be too much for any single vessel to contain, his essence was divided evenly between the two brothers.
    They’d never found a decent George Washington, and now with the death of Ben Church the group had lost their Benjamin Franklin as well. There had been others, too, who’d disappeared, defected, or otherwise fallen away in the past year as the going got tough. But as of tonight these core survivors were alive and well, and after a hot bath and a good day’s rest they appeared to have once again begun to take on the distinguished mantle of their namesakes.
    Hollis was seated next to Molly’s place of honor at the foot of the table. When his time came he was briefly introduced, with only a few kind words to gild the lily, and thus his role in the group was left appropriately vague. Then, with the opening toast complete, one of the grandchildren was asked to step up and say grace.
    As the child began to speak every head was bowed to partake in her sweet, simple prayer, with only three exceptions. Hollis himself was one of these outliers; he generally used such ritual pauses to attend to his ownprivate thoughts and observations. The second was young Tyler Merrick, whose gaze seemed downcast mainly to avoid eye contact with the big mean man on the end who’d taken away his phone earlier in the day.
    The last of these nonparticipants was seated at the head of the table, down at the far end almost directly opposite him. She was an old woman, very old it seemed, who appeared to be composed of little more than