by J. L. ROBB
Jeff noticed the brown UPS cargo van. This was at least the fourth time it passed through the Publix parking lot, not that it was a big deal, only UPS drivers usually knew where they were going in the first circle or two. And something about the van didn’t look quite right. Trained as a Navy SEAL but discharged after an auto accident, Jeff was especially attentive to oddities.
“What kind of signs did Jesus give th…”
The explosion, loud and deafening, was preceded by an intense flash of bright, white light. As deafening as it was, the blast only broke the front windows of Starbucks. The tempered safety-glass shattered into what looked like a horizontal rain of crystalline stardust, blowing across Latté Lady and into the back wall, past the latté machine.
The drive-up window withstood the blast, but Miss Attentive, a.k.a. Latté Lady, a.k.a. Jenifer, visited the back wall with a vengeance, along with the glass shards. She lost her sight that day, as well as her olive skin that was now bright red with newly oxygenated blood.
Mr. Chameleon caught his last mosquito just seconds before the blast and joined Latté Lady against the back wall in a waltz of crimson with a slight tint of green, provided by the ex-lizard.
Jeff, Blonde Ponytail and Professor-Rabbi had suddenly become intimate in their encounter, as they all lay in a pile of debris, one on top of the other.
“We have to stop meeting like this,” Jeff told the young girl who recently was talking about the end of the world and now probably thought it had happened. She lay squarely on top of Jeff, who was lying across the legs of the good doctor Rosenberg.
Missing the humor, the shell-shocked, ponytailed girl slowly began to get onto all fours but collapsed almost immediately. Dr. Rosenberg was unhurt, other than being in shock.
Jeff helped the doctor and the ponytailed girl to their feet, urging them to get out of the building before it collapsed, dust and debris still falling.
Running through what had been the front door.. Jeff would not run into the frame this time since it was no longer there.. the three joined others in the middle of Ashford-Dunwoody Road, a road that had earlier in the day been traveled by visitors in horse-drawn carriages. The road was now a cloud of dust and debris.
“It’s started,” Dr. Rosenberg said with confident finality.
Jeff wondered what the doctor was talking about. He didn’t buy the end-of-the-world hysteria, nor did he believe in God; but he did believe that Islamic terrorists were intent on taking over the world, or at least the West, if not the world.
“What’s started?” asked Blonde Ponytail, a small droplet of red beginning to ooze from her chin where the glass shard had earlier penetrated. “What are you talking about?”
Before the good doctor could answer, the air vibrated and dust again stirred as the second explosion of the morning sprung to life with violence and vigor just a few blocks away, assaulting once again the inner ears of all those standing among the splintered Yoshino cherry trees that had once lined Ashford Dunwoody Road.
***
Nine thousand miles east of Atlanta, in the hills of Pakistan along the Afghanistan border, Muslims throughout the valley waited for the Great News. The valley was sparsely inhabited, but all the men were well-versed in Islamic radicalism and it’s philosophy of hate.
“Turn on the TV! Turn on the TV, Muhammed! Please!”
Mehdi ran into the well-hidden quarters of Muhammed and his sister’s home, built into the side of a mountain like many others and well-protected by the village elders. Like most homes in the Korengal Valley of Pakistan, just north of Peshawar, there were few, if any, luxuries, no iPods or flat-screen TVs; but there were satellite dishes everywhere, donning each shelter with a small, white saucer-shaped dome that glowed in the silver reflection of full moon light, a moon that was referred to as a Harvest Moon in the decadent United States, the home and the heart of Satan himself. The moon should not grace the Great Satan, at least in Mehdi’s mind, as it was a holy symbol in the religion of Islam.
“I don’t need to turn on the television.” Muhammed spoke, patiently, fatherly, to Mehdi. Mehdi was excitable, he knew. The smell of goats mingled and mixed with the bittersweet chocolate odor of the poppy fields nearby, the main source of finance for the militants, though they did not consider themselves militants at all. They were Allah’s army, Jihad’s Warriors.
With all the medicinal purposes of the noble and beautiful poppy plant, stoic pinkness on a three-foot stalk, these flowers would not be used for any noble purposes. As soon as the flowers turned to grayish pods, the latex-like outer skin would be cut with small incisions. The milky substance that oozed forth would dry quickly, transforming into opium, and then heroin, and then to the streets of London, Paris and New York City.
“No! No! It’s started, hurry. Turn on CNN so we can watch! We can watch Allah’s work!” Mehdi was at least as jubilant as excited, cackling like a wild hen getting ready to lose its head.
Muhammed’s two guests nodded in agreement with Mehdi, knowing that this was the day that would be the beginning-of-the-end for the great Satan and his puppets in Europe.
Spotting the worn and dented TV remote, a luxury they did have, Mehdi hit the ON button and waited. Finally, the twenty-seven inch tube-type television came to life.
“On a weather note, in the town of Nag’s Head, North Carolina, a hailstorm with grapefruit-sized hailstones, yep that’s what it says, has destroyed two piers and several homes and busine…..excuse me, we have Breaking News. Can this be right?”
The news anchor, always calm and meticulous in dress and appearance, looked disheveled, more than dismayed, maybe not believing his own eyes as he read the report coming across the prompter from Reuters and the Associated Press.
“Ladies and gentlemen, as much as we like to break a news story, I have been advised that we will take a commercial break while this unfolding event is verified. Please stand by, and we will be back in sixty seconds.”
As the screen turned to a commercial about the all-new Toyota Prius, guaranteed to stop when the brake is pushed, Mehdi could hardly hold himself together. Already high-strung, his constant chatter really got on Muhammed’s nerves; and today Mehdi was in rare form.
“Yes Muhammed, they surely do have some breaking news.” They all laughed boisterously, except for Muhammed’s sister who wondered why her brother and his friends only wanted to fight all the time. They were all obsessed with killing, if not Westerners, then their very own brothers, just like it said they would in the first book of the Bible. Muslims are like that, she thought, at least the men. She knew by now that Islam really wasn’t a “peaceful religion,” with hatred spewed regularly from the clerics. The men really couldn’t help it. They were brainwashed since birth to hate the Jews and Christians, and anyone else they mistrusted, which was almost everyone, including their own brothers.
Waiting anxiously, Muhammed, Mehdi and the two soon-to-be-martyred visitors stood by patiently. The commercial faded to black, and the commentator reappeared above the large Breaking News logo that took up the bottom third of the television screen. He looked sick, Mehdi thought, a smile coming to his olive but acne-pitted face as he waited for news of the bombs. He wondered if the breaking news would be about the bombs in Europe or the ones in the U.S. It didn’t really matter.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” the anchor began, “We have a disturbing report, though we are still waiting on complete verification. This is what we know so far…”
Mehdi was salivating like a Great Dane eagerly awaiting his tasty Beggin Treat. Mehdi, however, was not salivating over fake bacon but the smell of the blood that would soon be flowing in the streets of the West.
“According to the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, there appears to be a large asteroid that is headed toward earth. It is not yet known if this asteroid, newly discovered in the last 24 hours, will hit the Earth or if it will be a close encount…”
“What the hell?” Mehdi interrupted the commentator. “What i
s this garbage?
“Turn on FOX News, what channel?” Mehdi was clearly flustered, as were the others, knowing that at least 48 bombings should have taken place in the U.S. by now, at least 48, one for each contiguous state, maybe more.
“I hate FOX.” Muhammed had not liked FOX News since the 9/11 coverage made Islam look evil. He could not forget the 9/11 coverage FOX gave the Palestinians in Gaza and the commentary that followed. As the militants fired rifles into the air in celebration of the Great Collapse of the New York City skyline, FOX had been the only major network to cover the celebration in detail; and the coverage was not positive toward Islam.
Mehdi keyed the remote and picked up FOX in mid-sentence.
“.. on Peachtree Street. The first bomb, apparently inside what appears to be a UPS panel truck, blew up in front of the Georgia Pacific Headquarters building, shortly after the driver entered the side entrance. There is another report just coming in of explosions in the Dunwoody area, a north Atlanta suburb, and also at the Mall of Georgia.”
The four members of Jihad’s Warriors gave FOX a standing ovation that day, with Muhammed proclaiming his newfound admiration for FOX and its fair-and-balanced coverage. The foxy news lady continued.
“The second explosion occurred a few blocks from the first, targeting a children’s hospital. My God, who would target a children’s hospital? There have been no confirmed deaths at this time, but the toll is expected to be high. There are also reports coming in from Rome, Paris and London.”
Greta paused and stated they would be right back after the commercial break. Mehdi turned the TV off.
Had Muhammed, Mehdi and the two soon-to-be-martyrs not been so impatient and had left the TV on CNN, they would have seen Wolfe’s studio shake as though an earthquake had stolen into the studio to have a little Waltz with Wolfe. They would have seen Wolfe rushing to the window to watch the fireball rising from the distant streets.
CNN would be at the scene in seconds.
CHAPTER ONE
“In the last times there will be scoffers who will follow their own ungodly desires.” Jude 1:18
Earlier
“I’ve been seeing that sign a lot lately,” Jeff said to no one but himself as he crossed Peachtree Street, on his way to Georgia State University for his Advanced Astronomy class. Part of the women’s lib thing, he guessed. What a bunch of nuts!
There is no God, Jeff knew, and if there was it sure wouldn’t be a woman. If God was a woman, nothing would ever get done, because She would be out buying shoes!
Except for a brief time during childhood, Jeff had never believed in God, though he didn’t really not believe in god either. He didn’t know if God should be a big G or a little g and didn’t really care. He was way too busy to worry about trivial things. The market was crashing, for God’s sake, again.
Jeff had several business interests, owned a couple of restaurants and a couple of SCUBA dive shops in the Caribbean, but when it came to astronomy, that was his hobby and obsession. He remembered his Mom telling him, “You have a one-track mind Jeffrey Ross!” And he did.
His graduate courses would help him achieve one of his life-long goals, to make a spectacular stellar discovery, maybe discover a comet or asteroid, though a comet would be a lot cooler.
Jeff wondered how Halley must have felt when a comet was named after him. Hmmm, he mused to himself, maybe the Jeffrey Comette? No, too French. Since 9/11, Jeff had avoided anything French, even fries and dressing, though neither had anything to do with the French. The Jeffrey Ross Comet would work.
Running up the stairs, almost late for class, he couldn’t wait to find out if anyone else knew about the light in the sky he had seen last night. That’s when he was in Villa Rica, a few miles west of Atlanta, at the Georgia State University Observatory. He’d already decided not to say anything about it, it had been so brief. A bright light in the sky; and then it just disappeared, gone in seconds. The multi-magnitude light, brighter than the flash of those old, blue flash cubes on a Brownie camera, a light that almost sucked him into its folds, actually cast his shadow on the grass below. Then it was gone, just like that.
Jeff had taken a couple of digital photographs during the 12 seconds or so he observed the light, a pin-point prick of extreme-whiteness. He could almost feel the light, the beam of photons traveling through distant space at eleven million miles a minute, hitting his skin with an invisible and usually indiscernible force. He could feel the heat evaporating the moisture on his arm. And then the cool chill, as the blip of light disappeared as suddenly as it was born. Was he actually feeling the light hit his arm? Not possible.
“I think I’ve just had a Kodak Moment,” he said out loud, loud enough for the cicadas and other nocturnal animals in the immediate area to hear. There were no other people around.
In eleven years of studying the heavens, Jeff had never seen or heard of such a phenomenon. It could have been a supernova, he thought, but the characteristics weren’t right. A supernova, the result of an exploding star, usually lasts for several days or weeks. Some astronomers held the belief that the “Star in the East” in the Jesus story had been a supernova; but then, that story was a myth.
Walking down the hall, on the way to room 111A, the astronomy lab, Jeff took a quick detour and turned left into the men’s room. Avoiding the urinals, those wall-toilets he refused to use, they do splatter all over the place sometimes, he walked into the handicapped stall, inhaling the anesthetic aroma of Texsize, the smell provoking memories of his own home as a boy after Pearl, the cleaning lady, left. He liked the added space offered by the handicap stall, not so claustrophobic. Plus, you can’t just go to the bathroom out in the open, in front of God and everybody, he thought. Bathroom stuff was private!
As he turned to exit the stall, he saw it, a sign taped to the stall door. “THE END IS NEAR… for real Jeffrey!” At the bottom of the sign it said to check out the web site, shesmadashell.com.
***
Melissa Ross lived in a gorgeous cluster-home in Sandy Springs, an Atlanta suburb not far from Dunwoody where she regularly shopped, with patterned concrete drive, botanical garden-like landscaping in the small but impressionable front yard. The entrance was gated, of course.
She had been married to Jeff for almost twenty-five years, most of which were good years, but not all. They had been great friends at one time and travelled throughout the Caribbean, where they dove the coral reefs and walked in the sandy-white surf, hand in hand. They were both beach people and had taken few trips to the mountains. Some people like mountains, some people like beaches; but hardly ever is one a mountain person and a beach person. She knew that was true.
“Mommy, is Jesus happy?” When Jeff and Melissa adopted Audry, they didn’t have a clue how precocious she would be, learning to read by age five. At six years Audry had memorized the multiplication tables, up to 20 X 20.
“What do you mean honey?” answering Audry’s question with a question.
“You know Mommy, is Jesus happy?”
“Of course he’s happy, honey. Why would you ask?” Melissa never ceased to be surprised by some of the questions posed by her seven year old.
“Well, I was watching TV, and they were talking about this man on there, you know, named Elton John, who said Jesus was gay. So I got Daddy’s old college dictionary and looked it up; and that man was right, except I thought everybody already knew Jesus was happy.”
Trying not to laugh out loud, Melissa opened the dictionary to see when it was printed, 1960.
“Well I guess you’re right Audry. Gay does mean happy.” At least it used to she thought. But that was then, and this is now; and Elton was not alluding to Jesus’ happiness, she was sure.
Can’t wait to tell Jeffrey about this one, and Melissa couldn’t help but laugh.
***
After the bathroom stop, Jeff headed to lab, booted up his computer and immediately searched for shesmadashell.com, and there it was.
Jeff wondered which
“Jeffrey” the sign on the toilet stall door referred to. Surely it couldn’t have been me he thought. Could it?
Visiting the web site, he learned about a new religious movement with a Mother God, rather than God the Father. She was, before Him. Already convinced this was just another lunatic web page, he exited out.
Jeff thought it unusual, all the talk recently about the end of the world. The date, December 21, 2012, kept coming up. Seemed too precise. But there were also similar predictions from Merlin and Nostradamus; and the weather really was strange, to say the least.
Nostradamus gets a lot of press, he thought, along with the Mayans and the Hopi Indians. It seemed like every time he turned on the National Geographic Channel, Discovery or The History Channel, the world was soon ending. There seemed to be disaster and apocalypse and terror and crime and pedophilia and rapes and a lot of un-Godly stuff going on.
Jeff was a news-junkie, always had been, and was well aware of most of the tragedy that stalked the world. And then of course there was Mom. She seemed to always talk about the Bible and the end of the world. Used to scare the beejezus out of him. She would agonize about the earthquakes to come, the hailstorms, the plagues and famines, and God’s wrath that would surely follow. Only he did not believe in mythology, and that included God, or god. He wondered momentarily if all Mom’s preaching, and scaring, made him the doubter that he was.
Though a non-believer, Jeff had always been inquisitive and had read the Bible, or at least some parts, and had even read a little in the Koran and Book of Mormon. He knew that the Bible was, and is, the best-selling book in the history of mankind, but also the least read. It had sold many more copies than even the Harry Potter Series. For a brief moment, Jeff wondered if he should open a Bible store; but the thought was quickly dismissed.
“You better mind your manners Jeffrey, or God will get your butt!” his Mom reminded him on a regular basis when he was little, usually right after threatening him with reform school if he didn’t clean up his room. He did worry about that for years, even lost sleep about it; but his butt remained the same. Skinny. And he doubted God, or god, more every day. Sometimes he thought God was as mean as his Dad.