by J A Bouma
His throat suddenly grew tight with emotion and a wetness sprang to his eyes. He heaved a breath and a halting cry climbed out. He set the brush on the floor and leaned against the handle, glancing out into the dimming afternoon in embarrassment, hoping no one had heard his weakness.
No one there but him and the barnacles and his bloomin’ brush. Pretty well summed up his lot in life.
Alexander wiped his eyes on his sleeve and thrust the brush back into the bucket of cleaner.
When a clang sounded from behind the sleek, hulking hydrocraft.
He jumped back with a start, his breath catching in his chest at the sudden sound. He glanced over his shoulder—when another thud snapped his head toward the rear.
Picking up the metal brush, he inched along the sleek titanium hull, gripping it like a weapon for any would-be thieves. Had been having some trouble of late with some vagabonds from the village up the coast rummaging around for spare parts to sell on the black market, even discarded fish.
Alexander neared the back, gripping the handle tighter and raising it like a sword.
When a seagull caw-cawed and bolted toward him from under the hull.
He swung at it, this way and that. The buzzard caw-cawed again, wildly flapping its wings at him and sending a plume of white feathers cascading down before rising high and circling.
“Come back here, you little—”
Another caw-caw, and another wild flapping before darting out of the entrance and into the dimmed afternoon.
He mumbled a string of curses under his breath, mostly grumbling about his lot in life, defined by sea buzzards and barnacles. “Sodding buzzard…” he mumbled from behind the hull.
Then he stopped, drenched with sweat now from the exchange and his conscience convicting him with one of several Psalms he had memorized, Psalm 9: ‘I will give thanks to you, Lord, with all my heart; I will tell of all your wonderful deeds. I will be glad and rejoice in you; I will sing the praises of your name, O Most High.’
He frowned. Hear you loud and clear, Lord. I do thank you and praise you and rejoice in you and your deeds over my life. Buzzards, barnacles, and all...
Alexander smiled to himself at the truth of those words, then sauntered back around toward the front of the—
“BOOO!” someone shrouded in the shadows yelled, hands out and arms wide and body looming over Alexander, who shrank back with arms over his face in fright.
The man laughed, stepping back with arms grasping his gut as if in pain, the tripod lamp catching his face and revealing all.
Kye, one of the Three Amigos and another immigrant who had arrived shortly before him. Tall and lanky and a decade younger than Alexander, the olive-skinned man with black hair and the immaturity of a teenager kept at it, stoking Alexander’s embarrassment from the earlier ordeal and giving him an excuse to vent.
Alexander raised a fist and punched at the kid. Who raised a shoulder just in time to take the brunt of his anger.
“Ooh, tough guy now, ehh, brotha? Not so tough back at beach.” He laughed again, then raised his hands in surrender when Alexander raised another threatening fist, his face twisted and reddening with anger. “Alright, alright. Chill, brotha. Just making sure you still had breath in your lungs after nearly drowning.”
“I’m fine,” Alexander said under his breath, shoving past the man and sauntering back to the boat covered with those blasted white lumps. Looked like the thing was covered in leprosy, it was so bad. And disgusting, hard work. Not to mention humiliating, the man who was Master of the Order of Thaddeus reduced to a pleb, the underclass of Solterra. Not that his former life of a priest was any better, but still. How the mighty had fallen.
He grabbed the metal brush handle and stuck it back in the bucket of solution meant to ease the cleaning.
Kye came up to his side, crossing his arms and leaning against the hydrocraft. “You know, Mateo ain’t so bad, once you get to know him.”
Sloshing the brush around, Alexander pulled it out and slapped it on the underside, ignoring Kye while working the brush against the polished underside, a patch beginning to gleam through the leprosy now.
“If you are wanting my advice, I’d stay away from the booze, and the women.” Kye jabbed Alexander in the arm and smiled, before continuing: “And make sure you don’t pass out on the beach. Because next time—”
A vibration suddenly seized the floor, interrupting the man as a tremor worked its way up through the craft and rattled the tripod lamp until the entire building was shuddering under the quake.
Kye bolted from the boat and threw out his arms for support. “Hot damn! What the devil is going on?”
Alexander glanced at him without answering. He knew the dangers such seismic activity in the earth’s crust brought for those left inside buildings. A wicked quake had decimated a town near his own back home in Tripolitania, sending older buildings crumbling within seconds and doing a number on the newer ones of gleaming glass and titanium constructed to the Republic’s specifications. Several members of his parish had helped with the recovery, and they had set up a temporary shelter at his parish for those in need of food and housing. The death count had been catastrophic, which meant they needed to get out into the open—pronto.
“Let’s get out of here,” he said, throwing the brush to the floor and turning toward the entrance.
When his breath seized in his chest and fear flooded his veins at what he saw unfolding outside.
“What the heck…?”
Chapter 2
Alexander threw his hands on the top of his head, face twisted up in horror at the scene playing out in front of him.
The beshadowed entrance threshold was shrouded in darkness now. Except it was still early afternoon, when the sun was brightest, most merciless. And the darkness wasn’t that of an incoming storm, but of the dead of night.
The tremor suddenly shifted into overdrive, the shudders turning violent now. Kye cried out in the tongue of his homeland and shoved past Alexander, who was planted to the floor with petrified immobility.
Something crashed at the back of the warehouse; same for the light stand that had been offering him light, the blasted thing slamming against the hull of the fishing boat before clattering to the floor. It shattered and flickered off, plunging the vast space further into darkness.
A cry rose from outside. Kye again, his arms waving frantically around and pointing at the sky, his panicked voice joined by others, a chorus of confused shouts and fearful screams coalescing into pandemonium.
Another crash jolted Alexander from his frozen stupor, a beam from on high smashing into the bridge of the hydrocraft he had been scrubbing and toppling it to one side, threatening to come unmoored altogether and trapping Alexander inside as the building continued convulsing.
He received it as his final warning from the good Lord above. He ran outside to join the protest.
Then stopped dead in his tracks at the fuller picture.
Men and women, his fellow fishermen and some others from the village just down the coast were standing at the edge of the Mediterranean awash in a faint crimson, the color of diluted blood. They were staring up into the sky; some were pointing and screaming and crying out on frightened breaths.
Trees snugging the warehouse property line were blocking his view, so he ran across the still-shaking ground to join his fellow crew members. Then sank to his shaking knees in the sand at what he witnessed.
The sun had indeed darkened. Not just from an invading storm cloud, but from a blackened sky, as if night had suddenly descended upon them. But that wasn’t all of it. A full moon was shining back at him, bathed in the darkest of red. A blood-red moon, full and menacing and portending a wickedness no one had spoken of in decades, even inside Ichthus. And a sky that should have been blanketed by stars was giving way to a blank canvas—literally, as the tiny specks of ancient light began falling from their perches high above, some with blazing tails that reminded him of the comets from childhood he
and his father had spent countless hours watching. Only this time falling to the earth.
A word started ricocheting across the beachhead that described the truth of it. From various tongues and in various languages, but all expressing the same exact sentiment.
Apocalypse.
Alexander sucked in a shaky breath as the ground continued its violent convulsing, the very center of the earth seeming to give way as the heavens themselves gave up any notion of what was sane and whole and real—the sun blinking out and moon shedding its blood and stars giving way. He threw his hands up on his head again and closed his eyes, his head filling with one resounding thought.
It has begun…
Immediately, a passage from the Holy Scriptures surfaced. Something John the Seer had witnessed, who Alexander had visited over a year ago now to retrieve the memory of the Church to bolster the faith and combat the rising apostasy plaguing Ichthus. From the Book of Revelation, chapter 6:
I watched as he opened the sixth seal. There was a great earthquake. The sun turned black like sackcloth made of goat hair, the whole moon turned blood red, and the stars in the sky fell to earth, as figs drop from a fig tree when shaken by a strong wind. The heavens receded like a scroll being rolled up, and every mountain and island was removed from its place.
Then the kings of the earth, the princes, the generals, the rich, the mighty, and everyone else, both slave and free, hid in caves and among the rocks of the mountains. They called to the mountains and the rocks, “Fall on us and hide us from the face of him who sits on the throne and from the wrath of the Lamb! For the great day of their wrath has come, and who can withstand it?”
The sixth seal. The final seal, unleashing a cosmic catastrophe to bring the world to the brink of the end times.
The beginning of the end…
The world continued rumbling around Alexander, even as the moon continued shining blood-red and the stars faded from view. Even as Alexander himself reeled inside, his brain going haywire at the turn and thirsting for narcotic relief, that wicked headache blooming into pain and sending his bowels into watery weakness.
A lesson from a class he had taken on the Book of Revelation under Father Jim’s tutelage at Oxford sprang from memory. He taught that the seals surrounding the scroll were the normal forces operating through the course of history, signaling both the brokenness of the world and picturing the redemptive, judicial purposes of God. War, murder and radical conflict, economic depressions and recessions, famine and plagues, the persecution of Christian brothers and sisters—all of it was history’s ongoing suffering.
Then there was the sixth seal. The one before the final one opening the scroll to unleash the Great Tribulation itself. Using language that was thought to be merely symbolic and apocalyptic to describe the end of the world. The language of cosmic catastrophe. Father Jim had insisted that John’s use of such language was completely poetic and symbolic of spiritual realities—the blotting out of the sun, the blood-red moon, the falling away of the stars. So had most everyone else, brushing away such language as not at all describing the end of the world as we know it.
And yet there it was! All of it. The darkness of the night in the middle of the day. The bloomin’ full moon bleeding crimson. The fiery contrails of stars as they fell from view, hundreds and thousands blinking off now for Pete’s sake!
Father Jim was wrong; they were all so bloody wrong...
What was he going to do?
What was the world going to do?
An arm seized Alexander’s own, a familiar vice grip that wrenched him from the fast-cooling sand under the shroud of darkness and dragged him to his feet.
It was Mateo, face beet red with that corkscrew vein popping out, swinging wild arms and pointing at the sky, shouting at the top of his frazzled lungs what everyone was wondering:
“What the bloody hell is going on, mystik!”
Alexander didn’t answer, his wide, frightened eyes darting up above to take in the apocalyptic scene unfolding.
He was slapped in the face, pain and blood blooming from his nose. Then Mateo grabbed both shoulders, centering Alexander’s gaze to his, the man yelling again: “I’ll ask you one more time, mystik, because surely you’re the only one in these parts with sense enough to interpret this hell unleashed on our beach. Answer me this: What the bloody hell is going on!”
A crowd had gathered, Kye at Mateo’s side with the two other Amigos behind, the faces of each and every man, woman, and even child echoing Mateo’s freaked-out plea for answers.
Alexander swallowed hard, a sudden courage and peace gripping him, and the force of the Holy Spirit himself leading him forward. As much as he might want to run from his calling as a priest and hide in anonymity, it dawned on him that he had trained for such moments.
Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, don’t fail me now...
He swallowed hard and began quoting the words of Jesus from memory: “So when you see standing in the holy place ‘the abomination that causes desolation,’ spoken of through the prophet Daniel—let the reader understand—then let those who are in Judea flee to the mountains. Let no one on the housetop go down to take anything out of the house. Let no one in the field go back to get their cloak. How dreadful it will be in those days for pregnant women and nursing mothers! Pray that your flight will not take place in winter or on the Sabbath. For then there will be great distress, unequaled from the beginning of the world until now—and never to be equaled again.”
The crowd hushed even as the world continued to quake, not a word being spoken, not a breath being breathed as Alexander continued with the words of Matthew’s Gospel: “If those days had not been cut short, no one would survive, but for the sake of the elect those days will be shortened. At that time if anyone says to you, ‘Look, here is the Messiah!’ or, ‘There he is!’ do not believe it. For false messiahs and false prophets will appear and perform great signs and wonders to deceive, if possible, even the elect. See, I have told you ahead of time.”
Mateo twisted up his face and glanced at Kye. “What the bloody hell are ye jibber-jabbering on about, mystik?”
“I’m trying to tell you!” Alexander yelled. He took a breath and huffed it out, running a shaky hand through his hair. “The words of Jesus, the founder of Ichthus, as you would say—that’s what these are. His word about the beginning of the end of the world.”
That got his attention, and the others, their faces draining of color and mouths falling open with a mixture of intrigue and panic.
Mateo nodded for Alexander to continue. So he did, quoting: “So if anyone tells you, ‘There he is, out in the wilderness,’ do not go out; or, ‘Here he is, in the inner rooms,’ do not believe it. For as lightning that comes from the east is visible even in the west, so will be the coming of the Son of Man. Wherever there is a carcass, there the vultures will gather.”
Alexander took a breath, then explained, “And here’s where it gets interesting, especially for the crazy we’re experiencing right now.”
Cutting off his homily, the back half of the warehouse threw up a collapsing shudder, the roof caving in and one side collapsing in a palsy that threw an exclamation point at the end of what he’d said.
Mateo looked back to assess the damage, groaning and smacking a meaty palm against his flat forehead before turning back to face Alexander with pleading eyes. “Go on, then!”
He did, reaching back into the recesses of his brain for the Gospel of Matthew, chapter 24, that he had memorized years ago:
“Immediately after the distress of those days
‘the sun will be darkened,
and the moon will not give its light;
the stars will fall from the sky,
and the heavenly bodies will be shaken.’”
“Then will appear the sign of the Son of Man in heaven. And then all the peoples of the earth will mourn when they see the Son of Man coming on the clouds of heaven, with power and great glory. And he will send his angels with a loud
trumpet call, and they will gather his elect from the four winds, from one end of the heavens to the oth—”
Mateo grabbed Alexander by his shirt with both hands before he could finish, yanking him from within a few centimeters of his face, his breath still reeking of beer and boiled cabbage. The man looked like he was on the verge of a manic episode, his eyes wide and forehead wrinkled with panic, his mawing mouth quivering and his hands gripping Alexander weakly now in a way that reflected the same panic. Probably was one foot into a complete psychotic break, given what he was experiencing—what they all were experiencing.
The man whimpered, “What does it all mean, Martin?” His eyes filled with tears, and his lower lip started quivering. He repeated with a whisper: “What does it all mean?”
Alexander went to offer a reply when he was cut off by another voice, high and shrilly and hysterical.
“Incoming!” someone shouted from view, near the beachhead.
Mateo turned toward the shout as a chorus of screams arose behind him. Alexander caught sight of the man pointing frantically at the sky.
He squinted, not understanding what it was. Then Alexander’s eyes widened and another bout of cold panic drenched him from head to toe, his brain not being able to process the fiery object quickly descending from the heavens.
‘the sun will be darkened,
and the moon will not give its light;
the stars will fall from the sky,
and the heavenly bodies will be shaken.’