dc Talk at the End of the World
It was a crisp November afternoon, and popular Christian recording artist dc Talk was eating cold chicken sandwiches on the veranda.
“Love is a verb,” Michael Tait mumbled dreamily as one perfect crimson leaf fluttered down, right into his open palm.
Toby McKeehan and Kevin Max both sighed, but like super deeply and meaningfully, and wrapped their arms around him. They were all three sitting on the same side of a weathered wooden picnic table, huddled close against the chill.
They stayed like that for a while, just holding each other. You can’t even imagine how close they were. They were like lovers, but a billion times closer.
It had been so long since dc Talk had any visitors.
“What have we become?” Toby McKeehan asked.
One day, a girl climbed up into their hidden sanctuary.
She looked pretty tired. She had a large pack on her back, filled with weapons and gold coins and blackened cooking pans, shit like that. She had a sword too.
“O wise dc Talk,” she cried, “I have traveled through moor and dale, mist and fen, through sand, through swampland and the treacherous mountains of the Deep North, through the hidden country of the Colossi and the desert holdings of the Faceless Stonemasons. I have passed over the Knives of Eld and the terrors that lie therein. I have forsworn all human comforts and now, after years of searching and the deaths of all my companions, I have crossed into your lands at last.”
Grammy-winning supergroup dc Talk looked at her.
“It has been many thousands of years since anyone has seen you,” the girl said. “The world is a shell of what it once was. When will you return? When you again succor your people in their need?”
The three of them were holding hands now but it only added to how tough and strong they looked. Honestly? It would have made a sick album cover. Toby McKeehan glanced at Michael Tait. His eyes looked like chips of ice, or like a couple of diamonds or whatever.
“Every day we live,” Michael Tait said to him in a voice like pure butter, “there’s a chance to give.”
“You gotta lose yourself, for somebody else,” Kevin Max pointed out, with just a hint of his signature vibrato. The others gripped his hands tighter in theirs.
“For somebody, somebody,” he continued.
The girl thought for a minute, then slowly nodded. “So you’ll help me?”
They considered this.
Genre-bending iconic rap/rock trio dc Talk knew a thing or two about tearing down the walls, about getting to the heart of the matter—I’m talking the real nitty-gritty here—like when they covered that Larry Norman song about the Rapture. But they also knew their limitations.
“The disease of self,” Toby McKeehan said at last, “runs through my blood.”
“Through my blood,” Kevin Max agreed.
“It’s a cancer fatal to my soul,” said Toby McKeehan.
The three of them used their fists to drum a quick eighth-note triplet on the picnic table, then held out their hands to her.
“Thank you,” the girl said.
She was starting to worry. Sixteen-time Dove Award-winning cultural mainstay dc Talk had been conferring quietly amongst itself for hours. It kept sneaking glances over at her, across the picnic table.
“Back up off with less of that zest,” Toby McKeehan suddenly gasped as Michael Tait whispered something into his ear. Kevin Max looked scandalized, but he also looked pretty impressive with his pursed lips and platinum blonde hair slanting against his forehead.
Michael Tait’s huge shoulders (he worked out a lot) were heaving. He just couldn’t keep it in any longer.
“She’s that kind of girl,” Michael Tait cried in his powerful falsetto.
Kevin Max nodded. Toby McKeehan frowned and said, “The kind of girl you meet behind the door of the church?”
Understanding slowly dawned on the girl’s face. “‘Ya see, God’ll bring her to me so I don’t have to search,’” she recited, recalling some long-buried memory, something her granddame used to sing to her when she was a child in the Green Fells, the morning sun catching in her hair as she taught her granddaughter how to properly sharpen—and wield—a blade.
“The prophecy!” the girl yelled, startling maverick no-holds-barred superpop sensation dc Talk.
“Too hard I’ve been scarred by the ones of the past,” Toby McKeehan said carefully, rhythmically, questioningly, with tears in his eyes.
“‘So put an APB out on the one that’ll last,’” the girl finished. She was crying now too. “That’s… could that really be me? I mean, I found you. I’ve been looking for so long. Could I be…” Her voice was hushed. She wasn’t even sure she’d be able to say it, but finally the words came, the words she had somehow always known she would be the one to speak.
“I’m… That Kind Of Girl,” she said.
Everyone paused for a minute. It was really intense.
“Different from the ones before,” Michael Tait finally whispered.
“She’s the one that I adore,” Kevin Max shouted, surprising everyone, even himself, doing this awesome thing with his voice where he went all the way up to the major seventh, but then fell back down to the fifth instead of going for the resolution at the top of the scale. God, he could sing so high.
The girl and dc Talk laughed. Everything was going to be okay.
“Virtuous in every way—”
“Kind of girl who makes you say—”
“I hope she comes my way,” all four of them exclaimed, at first in unison, but then going into this crazy stacked chord on the last two words. It was, like, a minor seven with an added ninth or something? Seriously, it was fucking luscious. If you’re not crying right now then I don’t even know what to say to you.
They collapsed to the ground, delirious with laughter. The prophecy would come to pass, at last.
“I always thought—” the girl said later, haltingly. “So those words weren’t about finding… the least worldly girl of all? Like, romantically? My people say—“ she stopped again, blushing. “My people always thought you were talking about, you know, a real Proverbs 31 woman. We thought it was some kind of terrifying religious thing.”
dc Talk laughed a mirthless laugh, a tight cluster of notes. They pulled up their sleeves and showed her the thick tattoos spiraling up their arms, the dizzying glyphs on their backs.
Just then the girl remembered that in the ancient tongue, the mountain pass she had crossed to get here (filled with all kinds of exotic dangers) was sometimes called Door-of-the-Church. She gasped. The kind of girl you meet behind the door of the church. It was her. It had been about the prophecy all along.
“How could we have gotten that so wrong?” the girl said.
Kevin Max shrugged. “Some people gotta learn the hard way,” he said, dropping this flawless little scaling riff in at the end.
Multitalented, certified-platinum American “holy hip-hop” legend dc Talk was packing up its meager, monklike possessions for the long journey down the mountain into the South, where the girl said a few humans still lived in small, tight-knit communities. They would visit them all. The girl would show them.
Everything was going to be okay. She tightened her pack and cinched up her boots. She looked over at them, these Three, the last of the Immortals left in the world. The only Ones who remembered what things used to be like, before the Fog came, and the Freeze, and the Long Winter in its stead. They looked so fucking badass right then.
There was so much work left to do, but the girl was ready. She had always been ready. She whispered a prayer to the soul of her granddame, thanking her for this strength.
Legendary chart-topping soul-nourishing blockbuster power-troika dc Talk, whom James Dobson once called “the Christian Beatles,” kept packing. They were doing this awesome three-part harmony now. Kevin Max’s part was way higher than the others. It sounded really, really good.
