During the challenging times of the 2020 Covid-19 pandemic, a mega church in a small town finds out the hard way that there really are only "Six Degrees of Separation".

This story will have you captivated from it’s start to the very end. In this script-converted novel, I’m expanding the yellow brick road journey by adding a few forks in the road. In, “The Big PayBack”, we endeavor to find out why there are six white sheets laying on the floor in the front pulpit of The Sanctuary of Holiness Church and how these six lives are tragically connected.

It was an usually dreary night in southern Arkansas. Sirens and flashing lights from the emergency vehicles parked in front of The Sanctuary mega church are in view behind Pastor Randal as he stands there with several microphones pointed at him, listening to the vast simultaneous questions from the media reporters, who have arrived from several TV stations.

The cameras are close-up directly on Pastor Randal’s face as he stands there looking semi-perplexed and simultaneously semi-worried, but we can’t hear what he’s saying.

As the narrator is speaking, the scene moves from Pastor Randal to follow a path from the outside of the church, where there’s a loud media frenzy, to the long aisle leading to and circling the front of the church where there’s six bodies with white sheets over them laying on the church floor, back around to the last pew where there’s a teen girl quietly sitting alone with her electronic tablet.

“She was right there, watching, listening, and writing every detail of it all in her blog the whole time, and he, nor anyone for that matter, had no clue what she was doing.” Is what the Hollywood Reporter said when I opened Twitter this morning, and Channel 7 News, and Facebook, IG, wow this girl was viral.

That girl was me, a high functioning teen. A nobody, as pastor would always say, tryna tell anybody about somebody, but ended up telling everybody. Or however it goes.

But about what? Let’s wait and see. Whoa! I’m either dreaming or in real big trouble now.

I can hear the song, ‘The Payback’ by James Brown playing in my head.