by Rob Mclean
The President closed the door and turned to the Vice President, “What a mess we have, Mike.”
“It could be worse. At least we have the numbers in both the Senate and Congress to do what we want…”
“Which would be to reject the alien’s offer,” she said. The tone in her voice urged his agreement.
“That would be our own personal preference,” he raised his hand to forestall her protest, “and knowing our party members and our constituents, I’m pretty sure that is what the majority of them would want too.”
President Palin nodded her agreement silently.
“We could try to tough it out until the next election,” he continued, “but if that alien comes good with just one of its promises…”
“Then we’ll be screwed. The people will want the easy life; they always do. They won‘t care about doing what’s morally right.”
“The majority isn’t always moral.”
“Hasn’t been for a long time,” she said.
“You know what they’re saying on the net about the alien envoy?” He didn’t wait long for a reply. He squared his shoulders and looked her in the eye before continuing. “Many Christian sites are saying that he is the AntiChrist.”
He knew that he was taking a big risk politically by bringing up the topic, but he also knew that if anyone in this administration were likely to take it seriously, President Palin would be the one.
She said nothing at first. Her eyes stared into his, boring into the depths of his soul, trying to measure his intent.
“Just between you and me, Mike,” she held his gaze while she spoke, “I would have to agree that it is looking mighty like they could be right. These were always going to be the last days, regardless of that alien. The world has been heading for apocalypse ever since the first atomic bomb was dropped, ever since the world population outstripped its resources. It was always going to happen and I personally thank our Lord that people like you and I are in charge at such a time.”
“Amen to that,” he replied.
“So, just supposing we were to agree that the AntiChrist has appeared, what do we do about it?”
The Vice-President grinned slyly. “That old Admiral Van Nispen whispered something to me before he left. Made me think that he is one of us.”
“And what would that be?” she asked.
“He said that if you really want to take a shot at nuking that sucker, then what you need is plausible deniability.”
Chapter 23
Ragged, grimy, faceless dream people were huddled together around forty-four gallon drums while a light dusting of snow fell. They were burning any sort of rubbish they could find to keep warm; books, plastic and car tyres. The fires produced enough heat to lift the oily smoke over their heads. In the stillness, it hung like a dark grey billowing ceiling over the railway yards where John and his squad patrolled.
Lurid demonic faces stared down from amongst the clouds, but the masses of filthy people didn’t see them as they stomped their feet in the slushy mud and pressed together to keep warm waiting for the trains to arrive.
The M16 assault rifle John carried told him he was dreaming again. It felt light and lethal as he examined it; checking the mechanisms, and hoisting it about, testing its weight and balance. He felt sure it would do the job, but his rational mind wondered what job that would be.
A deep, resonating two-toned horn brought his thoughts back to the present. The train had appeared, a white Amtrak bullet train, but the passenger carriages had been replaced with cattle-cars. There were dozens of them, and they stretched away into the snow-shrouded, foggy distance.
He held his rifle up high and fired a short burst into the air as a signal to start the boarding. People shuffled slowly forward, reluctant to leave the warmth of their fires, but also unsure of their destination.
John kept his rifle pointed upwards in his left hand as he herded more of the tattered people in through the gates that marked the perimeter of the holding yards. The people wore the markings of the religious; either on the backs of their hands or on their forearms. Some hard-ass cases had them tattooed on their foreheads. They were predominantly Christian crucifixes, but also plenty of Islamic Crescents and Jewish Stars of David. There were representatives of other faiths, but they were far less common.
John didn’t care. He didn’t have to segregate them by faith now, and they were too tired and dispirited to fight amongst themselves. He just had to get them onto the trains. They were all being sent away together, and they could sort themselves out when they got there.
Where that was to be, he didn’t know, nor did he want to know. He imagined some sort of frontier land, far away from everyone else where they could practice their archaic beliefs privately. However, he knew, down in the darker corners of his mind, that the truth was more likely to be far worse. He had seen those sorts of live-stock carriages in black and white archival documentaries from World War II, and he knew it wasn’t good.
His dream-self shoved the believers from the holding yards onto the platform. When one protested, he lifted the butt of his rifle and jabbed it into her face, breaking her nose with a loud crack. She fell backwards into the press of people about her. A man rushed to her aid. The veins in his neck bulged as he yelled at John, but in this dream, he had no voice. While he screamed abuse in John’s face, his mouth moved and spittle flew, but his fury was silent.
A pair of uniforms grabbed the man. They put him in an arm-lock and marched him a short distance away from the crowd. They threw him to the ground and he landed in a plume of fine powdery snow. Grace stepped over to him and put her boot onto his chest, pushing him over onto his back. In one quick, fluid movement, she drew her pistol, and put a bullet into the man’s brain.
Grace shook her head and turned to John. “You think they’d learn,” she said as she re-holstered her pistol and wiped gore from her pants and boots. She then turned to the crowd and shouted, “Anyone else want to jump the queue to the promised land?”
Her voice was drowned out by the piercing wail of the widowed woman. Blood and snot ran freely down her face from her broken nose. It was flung about in sticky strands as she screamed. She had fallen to her knees and was clutching a pair of wide-eyed children tightly to her. One wore a Batman t-shirt, the other a Disney princess top. Both kids stood silently, staring at the lifeless, bloodied mess that used to be their father.
“Move along,” John’s dream-self said, “there’s nothing more to see.”
People obediently shuffled up to the platform and filed into the cattle-cars. John watched his dream-self with a detached sense of revulsion. He knew that he would never do anything like this in real life, but he wondered what set of real life circumstances might make it plausible.
Out of the corner of his eye, he saw a flash of yellow amongst the crowd. His heart started to hammer as he turned to find her; the woman in yellow, the one who had haunted his dreams.
He remembered the last time he had dreamt of her and tentatively lifted his feet to ensure they weren’t rooted to the earth. He half expected to see the solemn exodus of displaced people shuffling onto the trains to turn into zombie-like mannequins and attack him, but they didn’t. Their shoulders remained slumped and their heads stayed downcast as they trudged onwards to their fate.
John felt the unnatural warmth wash over him from behind and heard the familiar sensuous murmur of laughter moments before he turned to see her floating before him. Her yellow, flowing dress fanned out about her like a cobra’s hood, her arms spread wide, ready to embrace him, enfold him and devour him.
He ground his teeth as pulled the trigger, emptying the full clip into her. Her body was jerked, twisted and contorted in a danse macabre as the bullets ripped through her. Her arms flailed and she let out a piercing scream as her floating body was pushed backwards.
As soon as his gun was empty, she floated back in front of him, like a sheet blown in the breeze and her scream turned to laughter. She righted herself and
the holes in her dress closed over.
Her sinister glee was in sharp contrast to the carnage behind her. The bullets that had passed through her had chewed up dozens of people waiting to board the train. Strangely the rest didn’t panic or stampede; instead they kept trudging onwards, through the puddles of slick blood and over the bodies of the fallen.
“Is this how you want it?” she asked, her arms swirling about her in a pirouette. John didn’t know if she was talking about him shooting her or the plight of the believers.
“I have to get them onto the trains,” John heard himself say. He knew he was avoiding responsibility and her question about the fate of the captives.
“Just following orders?” She pursed her lips and frowned. “I didn’t pick you as a soulless company drone.”
Her words were said with such distain that John felt both ashamed and angered. He knew that he was trapped, like millions of others on the economic treadmill, forced through necessity to do a job that he didn’t really like, in order to survive. He tried not to think if he was doing the right thing or not. In his dream, this was his vivid reality. His real job in his normal waking life had been totally forgotten. “I have a job to do,” he said. “It pays the bills.”
“Such misplaced loyalty,” she shook her head. “You disappoint me.” She lifted her arms to the sky and began to steadily glow brighter. Waves of glowing heat radiated from her. The clouds parted, retreating from her brilliance. John had to shield his eyes and took a few steps backwards as the heat intensified.
John turned away from the blinding radiance. When he opened his eyes, he found he was now one of the believers, crammed inside one of the cattle-cars, dressed in rags, his forearm marked with a crimson crucifix. The swaying motion of the carriage and the repetitive clack of the rails told him they were underway, heading for an unknown future.
“Oh God.” He felt it strange to hear his own voice rent with such fear. His rational mind tried to remind himself that it was just a dream, but the dread he felt for his future was overwhelming. He glanced about the carriage, hoping to find an escape, but the rest of the anonymous people on board had accepted their fate and regarded him with a mixture of pity and distain.
Through the in slats the wall, shards of parallel yellowish light stabbed through the gloom in the carriage. It drew his attention and he looked out through the cracks to see the tiny outline of the brightly glowing woman in yellow, standing on the platform, diminished by distance, but still growing in brilliance.
His eyes watered despite squinting and shielding his face with his hand. While he watched, the light suddenly erupted in a soundless explosion of luminosity, blinding him momentarily.
John blinked and wiped his eyes. When he looked back to where the woman in yellow had been, he saw a mushroom cloud unfurling, an angry orange and black fireball curling languidly skywards. On the ground, a shock wave raced towards him, flattening everything in its path. Trees snapped and buildings crumpled under its energy. It sped towards the train with a frightening destruction, erasing everything in its path.
Train tracks and sleepers were tossed in the air as the shock wave caught up to the train. John froze in an electric shock of fear.
His body jolted as his consciousness was hurled back to wakefulness.
Chapter 24
John had chained his bicycle in the rack outside the surf clothing shop that was next door to Angela’s bookshop. He had rung Angela the previous night and was surprised to have her mother Clarice answer it. He explained that he wanted to see Angela again and was further astonished when she suggested that he drop in on her at her workplace during her lunch-break after explaining where it was.
The bookshop was nestled amongst a long strip of shops with a similar façade. Most were two stories and all had a shopfront veranda that reached across the sidewalk to the road where customers parked their cars at a 45-degree angle.
‘The Worship Word Shop’ was the name of the store. It was spelled out along the street-side front of the veranda in an olden style script. The gothic letters had faded and the paint was flaking away, obscuring a portion of the sign. By way of contrast however, the store’s name was repeated in a vibrant, fluorescent neon glow inside the shopfront window. It spoke of a reinvention of the store from being a straight-forward Christian bookshop in years gone by, to now diversifying in breadth with a newer generation in charge.
The single swinging door that the original shop would have had, had been replaced with a pair of automatic sliding doors. They opened as John approached.
Inside the shop was surprisingly light and airy. A multitude of discreet down lights, plus some skylights that let in the natural light and a dazzling array of mobiles hanging from the ceiling gave the shop an almost celestial feel. The cream marble tiles on the floor walkways added to the ambiance, but the music playing was out of place.
It was a mournful country and western style tune with the lonesome Texan drawl of a heart-broken girl. She was singing about how sad she was that she had lost her true love, except that the man she lost was Jesus. The song jarred his mind as he didn’t expect a ‘normal’ country and western tune to be about religion. ‘But why not?’ he thought, ‘if people can sing about lost dogs and forgotten friends, why not about Jesus?’
He walked further into the shop and listened how the same girl now rejoiced, in a catchy chorus, as her true love had never left her, even though she had turned away from him.
Along the left of the entrance, he saw the clothing section. A pair of mannequin busts stood prominently, dressed in T-shirts with loud messages such as ‘You Need a Life-Saver? Mine Walks on Water’ and ‘I Work for a Jewish Carpenter.’
Further in, jewellery was on display, also with a Christian theme. A huge range of rings and bracelets made with a row of joined crucifixes, or fishes. Necklaces with a myriad of crosses- conventional, coptic and celtic- made in a huge variety of styles and sizes.
Across the central aisle were a profusion of books on display. There were a variety of Bibles, as he expected, but also there were many more that he saw as study guides. Books had been written to help interpret the Bible and understand its deeper meanings. He felt uneasy with these, as he wondered if the original teachings in the Bible weren’t being distorted by these later interpretations, either mistakenly or deliberately.
His feelings of unease weren’t allayed when he saw the multitude of children’s bibles and guides on display. Somehow, the idea that children were being taught about religion before they could read for themselves worried him deeply. It stirred feelings of wrongness and injustice in him that he couldn’t ignore. It didn’t seem fair that they were being taught things before they could really think for themselves.
John felt as though he had stepped into a parallel universe. One that had always been there, but he hadn’t been a part of. He was aware that it was there, a world with God and Jesus were the central figures and all else was peripheral or inconsequential. The inhabitants of that universe saw the world as sharply divided between those who were aware of it, accepted it and were saved and those who were not and thus condemned. He had always dismissed it as fairytales, right up there with the Tooth-Fairy or Santa.
He shoved the children’s Bible roughly back where he had found it. He turned to look for Angela when a slim and otherwise pretty goth girl asked him, “Do you need any help?”
She had piercings along both ears, the obligatory spiky dog-collar and loads of silver rings. She had black laced-up army style boots, black, ripped, dirty-looking jeans held up with a matching black studded leather belt. Her hair was mostly black with red and pink highlights and looked as if it hadn’t been combed in months. She wore a black T-shirt with ‘My Master is a Jewish Zombie’ written in fluorescent orange and yellow 50’s horror font and a nametag that said her name was Chelsea.
‘I’m not the one that needs help,’ he thought, but told her that he was looking for Angela. She looked him over with a leering scrutiny that made him feel a
s if he were being judged. Going by the sly smile on her face, it appeared that he had passed her judgement.
“She’s off to lunch in a few minutes. Who should I say wants to see her?”
John smirked and said, “The glove puppet.”
She gave him a quizzical look and a half smile, but went off to convey the message with schoolgirl enthusiasm.
He busied himself looking over the music selection. There were all the usual genres, rock, country and western, pop and even a range of heavy metal bands that looked like almost perfect copies of ‘real’ grunge bands, but without exception, they all had a religious theme. Some were subtle, but most were blunt and up front about their devotion to the Lord, as if they had to shout it out for all to hear, lest they be mistaken for something else, something less worthy.
Again, the feelings that something wasn’t quite right stirred in the depths of his soul. ‘Who is to judge?’ his internal voice asked. Perhaps he shouldn’t be so quick to pass judgement, he reasoned. Maybe he should take a more objective view of these people, he thought; after all they are doing no real harm.
“What are you doing here?” Angela asked. The frown that creased her brow wasn’t the expression he had hoped for. Her voice carried concern mixed with worry or even a touch of anger.
His throat tightened as his breath stalled in his voice-box. Although she was at work and was most likely tired, hungry and counting the minutes until lunch, she looked as beautiful as he had ever seen her. She too was wearing jeans, but hers were a standard blue, and a pink t-shirt, which said ‘I’m a Princess; My Father is the King of Kings.’
She was clearly surprised at seeing him in her workplace, and by the way she looked around to see who else was around, he thought she also seemed a little embarrassed.
“I rang your phone,” John said, “and your mother answered.” He paused, hoping she might explain why her mother had her phone, but she said nothing, so he continued, “I wanted to see you again.” He looked into her eyes, hoping to see some sign that his words meant something to her, but her cheeks reddened and she hung her head in what he took to be further embarrassment.