Joab's Pagiel | Part 4

Joab was alone in his room when it happened.

The house was quiet. Night pressed against the windows. He sat on the edge of his bed with his Bible open in his hands, not really reading—just staring at the page, turning the thin paper with his thumb, trying to decide what kind of man he was going to be.

That was when he heard it.

Not loud. Not theatrical. It wasn't Just a certainty that settled into his chest like weight.

God had told him that "If you want Pagiel to survive, you will have to stay because you will have to join the united front."

Joab closed the Bible and rested his forehead against it. Whatever plans he had made—leaving, running, choosing an easier life—fell apart in that moment. He didn’t argue. He didn’t bargain. He understood.

By morning, he volunteered.

The reason he was accepted so quickly wasn’t just desperation. It was biology.

Months earlier, out of idle curiosity, Joab had taken an ancestry DNA test. The results traced through his Cherokee father’s side and revealed something else—Comanche ancestry. Not a lot, but enough.

The united front had rules for that.

If you had significant Comanche ancestry—traditionally at least twenty-five percent—you were required to serve. When pressure rose, that threshold dropped. Sometimes as low as five percent.

Joab tested at around eighteen percent.

That was enough.

They didn’t ask him gently. They told him plainly:

“You have to join the united front.”

Once enlisted, the transformation was immediate. He was issued a bulletproof vest. A reinforced helmet. He was sworn in as a police officer under the town’s emergency authority.

But some rules changed.

Normally, law enforcement required officers to be tased before being certified to carry a taser—and pepper-sprayed before being allowed to carry pepper spray. The logic was simple: if you know how it feels, you’ll use it sparingly. It was standard. Federal. Even the military followed it, with few exceptions.

Adiel refused.

He watched training footage. Saw how some men reacted—laughing while others screamed, turning pain into entertainment.

If this was supposed to build empathy, it had failed.

So Adiel shut it down.

“You know what? We are not going to require that anymore.”

The rule became local law. No mandatory tasing. No mandatory pepper spraying. Exposure was optional.

He explained it without apology.

“If this is meant to teach empathy, then why are men laughing? If you know someone is in pain, why didn’t you stop?”

He had seen how tasers were used—held longer than necessary, reapplied to force compliance, aimed deliberately at legs until muscles locked and bodies collapsed. It wasn’t restraint. It was cruelty with paperwork.

Adiel refused to force people into a role that required suffering as a prerequisite.

Joab listened. He understood.

The united front wasn’t trying to dominate anyone. They weren’t looking to punish. They wanted one thing only:

To keep people alive

And if that meant rewriting rules that had already failed their moral test, so be it.

To be continued...