Apocalypse Rising (Episode 1 of 4): A Christian Apocalyptic Sci-Fi Thriller (Ichthus Chronicles Book 5)

by J A Bouma

  “And crucial to the gospel, I might add,” said Father Jim. “God’s revolutionary story of rescue in Jesus Christ is entirely dependent upon whether Jesus Christ really is God, or merely a man, a wise prophet. Ever since those days, and really from the beginning of Ichthus’s teachings concerning Jesus, there has been confusion about who Jesus is and what he came to do. Both outside and inside the Church.”

  “How so?” Ford asked.

  A cold dread began to spread over Alexander. For the reason why this was all so devastating was beginning to become clearer. Which had massive implications for Ichthus if his father was tapping the heretic to help the Panligo and Solterra cause.

  Father Jim went to answer when a shudder ratcheted through the floor—ricocheting through the walls before thundering up above.

  Ford turned wide-eyed to Nia. “What the hot Hades was that?”

  Chapter 11

  What the hot Hades is right…

  Alexander braced himself against one of the wall panels, the red and blue and green nanopixels flaring up with perturbation under his weight. Felt like before back in Roma, but something told him it was worse.

  Which threw up all kinds of bad, biblical implications.

  The apocalyptic kind.

  Another groan from the deep submergence station interrupted any reply from Nia, the rumbling continuing much like what happened the day before. An earthquake of such magnitude that it cut down into the heart of the sea and ratcheted through the underwater building anchored to part of the seafloor.

  Father Jim cried out, losing his balance and toppling from the quake. The sapphire slate slipped from his hand and clanged to the steel floor as the man banged into the table, his feet slipping out from under him and forehead banging against a corner. A gash instantly split, blood spilling down his face.

  Lucy and Rebekah raced to his side, the pair tending to his wound.

  “You both should be coming with me,” Nia said, snapping her fingers and pointing to Ford and Alexander. When they both hesitated, she added with exclamation: “Zaraz!”

  Alexander understood her meaning—hop to it!—but looked to Rebekah, who was pressing a torn piece of her shirt against Father Jim’s head. “Go on,” she said, “Lucy and I have this.”

  He nodded and followed after Nia and Ford.

  The quaking continued its relentless assault on the station, the water inside the tank running alongside the steel corridors sloshing something fierce. They braced themselves against the walls, the hardened metal feeling as though it would buckle. And praying that it wouldn’t.

  “We need to be getting to the control room!” Nia said. “Zaraz!”

  Ford said, “Sorry to break it to you, sister—” A foot slipped, sending him stumbling to the floor. He let a curse slip, then added: “No control room is going to matter much with the tilt-a-whirl the Universe has thrown at us!”

  “Or God Almighty from above…” Alexander muttered.

  They kept at it, weaving through the wavering corridors, the groans and creaks and thuds echoing through the station with menacing intent.

  “Here, we are reaching the control room,” Nia announced, slapping her hand against the security keypad and shoving through the door after it unzipped and departed.

  Inside was chaos.

  Equipment had toppled, smashing and coming apart. Water was leaking across the floor, the sea having broken inside from somewhere. One crew member was putting out an electrical fire still flaring up from a control board. Another was tending to a woman who had a gash similar to Father Jim’s.

  Nia didn’t let it deter her, jumping to take command of the chaotic situation.

  “Engage the seafloor release sequence!” she shouted to no one in particular, walking to a center console bright with blinking warnings and a string of assessments streaming across its screens.

  “Seafloor release sequence?” Alexander said, glancing at Ford and wondering if what he thought she meant was really what she meant.

  The man joined Nia at the center, who was already fast at work. Ford said, “Are you saying what I think you’re saying, sister?”

  Another shudder rattled through the station, a pipe at the bulkhead bursting from the strain and sending a firehose of water cascading into the room already reeling from the chaos.

  Nia didn’t answer the man. Instead, she pressed a blinking indicator light on the console display, then another until a warning chime sounded and the quaking began to instantly lessen.

  Alexander heaved a breath when the convulsions ceased altogether, the tension of the moment sending his pulse soaring and the solution adding to the confusion.

  “The station will be continuing to shake some after what I am doing,” Nia said, “as the seismic waves are passing through the water. But we are coming out of the woods, as you Amerikanskis are saying.”

  “Nor–amerikanskis, you mean,” Ford said. “You’re forgetting we fought a second war of secession. Succeeding this time, might I add, along with the rest of country splintering in quintuplets.”

  She muttered something in her foreign tongue, continuing to fiddle with the console.

  “What just happened?” Alexander asked on a still-shaking breath, coming to Nia’s side.

  “I am releasing the station from the seafloor. A temporary solution until we are figuring out what is happening and how we are solving it.”

  “Releasing the station from the seafloor?” Ford exclaimed.

  “Da,” was all Nia replied.

  “Well, is it safe?”

  She shrugged. “It is emergency measure until we are figuring—”

  “You already said that! I asked if it was safe.”

  “We’ll find out soon.”

  Ford threw his hands behind his head. “Just great…”

  “It has never been done before, as far as I know. Station was being designed to float in the event of such an earthquake affecting the seafloor.”

  “Not an apocalyptic one sent by the Lord Almighty himself to smite our asses!”

  “Ford…” Alexander said, heart pulsing in his ears now at the turn. But he was right. This wasn’t good.

  “Do not be worrying so much, cowboy!” Nia said, shifting back to the console display and pointing to what looked like an image of the station, white ovals at four ends showing a hundred percent. She pointed at the display. “Those are ballasts that are meant to be keeping the station afloat.”

  “Meant to be?” Ford said, raising a brow. “What happens if they don’t?”

  She sighed, putting her hands on her hips. “Then we’ll be sinking to the floor and be facing a whole other set of deep-doo-doo problems.”

  A purr from the console interrupted any further discussion.

  “What’s that?” Alexander said in a rush. “Are the ballasts failing? Are we going to sink?”

  “Nyet. It is message. Several, in fact. Looks like a combination of the Resistance and Remnant.” She opened the first one and started playing an attached media file.

  Static filled the video and audio until it normalized. An Anglo was speaking with a rush into a handheld device on shaking hands mid-sentence: “...started happening out of nowhere. Right here, in Noramericana!”

  Ford stiffened, and a wheeze of surprise escaped him. “My homeland…”

  “The rumbling that jostled Solterra has returned, and crazier than ever. Has to be a 7 or 8 on the Richter Scale, given how violent the shaking is.”

  The man was in a house, and the jostling of lamps and falling objects and cracking walls were heard. The man himself was surprisingly calm for the convulsions wracking his home.

  He continued, “I know the Republic denies it being a worldwide phenomenon, but I know better. We know better, us in the Resistance Alliance who have been exchanging stories of similar apocalyptic events. Well, it’s back. And worse.”

  The picture swung around to a door. It opened, and a new view emerged: a pastoral landscape, an old John Deere tractor with faded gre
en and yellow paint was anchored at one end of a parched lot, a few rusted farming attachments scattered near it beside flat fields under a wide, cloudless blue sky. Except what was happening shouldn’t have been happening.

  Thunder was rumbling, and purple-white tendrils of lightning were streaking across the sky. The kind that would fascinate Alexander as a boy and keep him up for hours on end in the middle of the night when fierce storms rolled across the Mediterranean. He’d sit under their family parish porch in his jammies and watch as spidery legs of purple and white danced across the sky. Exactly as they were doing—except there was no fierce thunderstorm with whipping winds and sheeting rain.

  The feed suddenly cut. And that was the rest of the file.

  “What the hot Hades was that…” Ford muttered, barely above a whisper.

  Alexander didn’t voice what he thought was the answer; didn’t dare. But something about it all rang true, connecting to a part of John the Seer’s revelations about the apocalypse.

  Nia said nothing, opening the next file and finding a variation on the same theme: a quaking rumble, thunderous skies and a lightning show to rival those childhood memories in a clear sky. Every message sent to the station, presumably from the Resistance, was a replica of this theme.

  Then it hit him. From the recesses of his memory of Scripture, which had surely been resurrected and fortified the past day after Solterra came crashing into the end of the world as they knew it.

  He bit his lip and sucked in a worried breath, his heart picking up pace beyond what it was already galloping, worried that his inclinations were proving true right before their eyes. Regardless of his disbelief, or rather his unwillingness to believe, he could hardly deny what Solterra was witnessing, from the thundering to the lightning to the quaking.

  Recalling the passage from Revelation, chapter 8, he muttered, “‘There came peals of thunder, rumblings, flashes of lightning and an earthquake…’”

  “What was that, homefry?” Ford asked.

  “Huh?” he said, turning to the man with wide eyes, mouth a coppery dry from the revelation.

  “You were mumbling to yourself like a crazy person.”

  Nia turned to him, demanding: “What is it that you are knowing?”

  Alexander swallowed, then quoted: “‘Then the angel took the censer, filled it with fire from the altar, and hurled it on the earth; and there came peals of thunder, rumblings, flashes of lightning and an earthquake.’”

  “What is this you are speaking?” Nia said, face twisting with confusion.

  “It’s from the Book of Revelation.”

  Ford’s eyes widened before glancing at Nia. He whispered on a worried breath, “So it’s the apocalypse then?”

  Alexander hesitated, gathering his words. “Presumably. It’s from chapter 8, after Jesus himself opens the seventh seal—”

  “The seventh?” Ford exclaimed with interruption. “That’s after the sixth!”

  Nia frowned. “That is generally how it is working…”

  “As I was saying…” Alexander went on. “Jesus opens the seventh seal, and after a period of silence in heaven—well, then seven angels were spotted standing before God, and they were given seven trumpets.”

  Nia folded her arms. “And what is it that they are doing?”

  “It’s something to do with the apocalypse. We best ask Father Jim for further explanation. However, what I recall is that in the passage another angel, carrying a golden censer, stood at the altar.”

  “And what is this angel doing?”

  “Offering the prayers of God’s people, the martyrs in particular, before God’s throne. And that’s when it happened.”

  “What happened, homefry?” Ford asked, a tremble in his voice now.

  Alexander swallowed. “The angel filled the censer with fire from the altar and hurled it to the earth. Then came peals of thunder, flashes of lightning, and the rumblings of an earthquake.”

  Nia let a startled sigh escape. “Just like what we were just experiencing.”

  He nodded.

  Ford leaned against the console display, bringing a hand to his head, as if rubbing away a headache. “So that’s it then,” he said quietly. “The worm has turned.”

  Silence engulfed them as the station resumed some semblance of normalcy, the quaking having stopped and the crew having gotten the command center back under control. Whether from the ballasts or the end to the events of the seventh seal’s opening, it wasn’t clear. What was, based on the flood of incoming intel from the Resistance in the field, is that Ford was right: The worm had turned. The Day of the Lord had indeed arrived. And both Solterra and Ichthus were caught in the middle of its unfolding judgments.

  Nia went back to the messages, opening the latest incoming transmission—when she gave a startled cry:

  “Apokalipsys!”

  No translation was necessary for that one. The Ukrainski woman was plain enough.

  Apocalypse.

  Alexander found it amusing that the word for the end of the world was pretty much universal across Solterra. Same in Germania, Athenia, even in the language of his Alkebulanan homeland. And now Muscovia of Ukrainski. Perhaps that was because every civilization from the dawn of time had some sort of apocalyptic lore at the end of their core worldview. A final reckoning for humanity that would either end in the world’s destruction, or end in its final cleansing.

  Regardless, something had just popped in from the Resistance that apparently made it all the more real for Nia. He leaned in for a closer look.

  Ford said, “Pretty sure we already established that we’re neck deep in the end of the world as we know it, but thanks for playing.”

  Nia grabbed his arm and yanked him toward the screen. “No, you idiot! It is being worse than we are imagining it!”

  She pointed at the screen and ran a finger back down a message that had popped on the screen, reading it a second time. “Bozhe!” she exclaimed, then clattered away at a keyboard.

  “Muscovia is not my forte,” Ford said, sidling up as she brought up another video. “But that don’t sound so good.”

  What started playing sucked the wind out of Alexander’s lungs, and sent his pulse plunging in despair. And head swimming for a carton of narcowafers to take him far, far away from the reality that was now fully gripping the Republic.

  There was no audio for the video; didn’t need any. The visuals told all that needed to be told.

  The rolling image could have been mistaken for a black and white pastoral scene from the 19th century, the picture speckled with debris and the landscape flat. Except there were erect posts scattered about, all bearing arms going this way and that, naked and blushing with the indignity of having been stripped of their clothes on top of what else must have rolled through.

  The trio stood silent before the revelation, the only sound in Alexander’s ears was the thudding of his heartbeat at the slow-motion dawning of what they were looking at, disbelief rising on a tide of bile up his throat.

  As a teenager, he had seen photos of the events leading up to the Great Reckoning, the period before the formation of Solterra Republic that could arguably be called World War III. Entire cities—not to mention countries—had been laid to waste by hydrogen bombs wielded without discrimination by all the great powers of the day. A thousand times more deadly than the atomic bombs that came to define the 20th century, they leveled cities to heaping piles of rubble, charring the countryside and leaving behind nothing but smoldering twigs erect at wicked, naked angles in charcoal dirt. Ash and soot saturated the air for miles and for weeks, so that the sun itself was blotted from view.

  What they saw was worse.

  According to the label on the video file, it was drone footage of the Amazon, the largest forest in the world, spanning over five million kilometers and home to the longest river in the world snaking through its dense foliage. Except there were no longer any trees. No dense greenery, no charred trunk remains left behind, no emergent growth singed
at the forest floor. It was a blank canvas of blackness, like cooled lava—wavey and pockmarked with craters still smoldering with ruin. Even the famous river was nearly nonexistent, the remaining riverbed not more than a Tripolitanan creek bed, the contrails of its former life still rising in the air on heads of steam. Old black-and-white pictures of Nagasaki and Hiroshima, the infamous cities that had been obliterated by the atomic bombs of the former U.S. came close to imaging what the world looked like, but in more sepia tones thanks to the shrouded sun.

  The picture changed, another view from another part of Solterra flashing on the console. This time it was ground level, from Cascadia, a temperate rainforest in the Pacific Northwest of the North American continent. Same burned-up destruction, same cloud of rising ash, the person holding the recording device crunching along similar blackened ground. The view changed again, this time with loss of buildings and other dwellings it seemed. Then again, panning to the same sad, terrifying incineration.

  Bile rose to the surface at the sight of so much destruction, Alexander’s stomach clenching with painful dread and head throbbing with horrifying tremble. His bowels went watery, his legs wobbled as if they would give way then and there. For a frightening possibility came rising to the surface along with that bile.

  Which he knew deep down was much more of a probability.

  “The first trumpet…” he muttered to himself, finally coming to grips with the truth of it all.

  “What was it you are saying?” Nia snapped.

  “Yeah, homefry,” Ford added. “You’ve gotta stop this muttering business. Totally puts a crimp in our—”

  “I said it’s the first trumpet!” Alexander took a breath and ran a hand through his hair. “Sorry, but it is like I said before. From the Book of Revelation, chapter 8: ‘The first angel blew his trumpet, and there came hail and fire, mixed with blood, and they were hurled to the earth; and a third of the earth was burned up, and a third of the trees were burned up, and all green grass was burned up.’”