The Shadow of Armageddon

by LeMay, Jim

  “Many of the faithful didn’t recognize the first three horsemen for what they were. My own dear father, the Reverend John Wesley Gephardt, did. He was commanded by Our Lord Jesus Christ to found a new Faith based upon the Book of Revelation. It was to be called the Church of Rapture of the Last Days. It was not established to replace the existing Faith. Oh, no. On the contrary its purpose is to prepare all believers for this glorious time by explaining the truths revealed in the Book of Revelation. My father preached of the coming of the Last Days. He described the advent of the first three horsemen, which had already occurred by the time the Lord Jesus Christ revealed the Last Days to him, and warned him of the arrival of the fourth horseman.

  “Now the first four seals have been broken and the remainder of Our Lord’s prophecy is suddenly clear even to those of weak faith. Let us continue to examine the prophecy as given in the Book of Revelation.” And he did so. Through the breaking of the fifth and sixth seals, which led to a lot of other strange and mainly revolting tales. At one point some people were taken to heaven and washed their robes in the blood of the lamb (there was that critter again!) which somehow made them white. It began to seem as if they would never get to the breaking of the seventh seal.

  Finally the seventh seal was broken. John assumed that the vision would then end, but it didn’t. Instead, a new series of seven events began, each of which consisted of an angel blowing a trumpet with gruesome results. When the fifth angel blew his trumpet, for example, all hell literally broke loose. A bottomless pit opened which emitted smoke that obscured the sun. And from the smoke issued locusts shaped like horses, with the tails of scorpions and the heads of men.

  A seemingly endless stream of strange apparitions and activities followed. Finally even the young preacher’s charisma could no longer enable John to suspend his disbelief. His attention wandered. Then description of a new monster elicited brief interest as John tried to figure out what it would look like: an evil Beast, somehow equipped with seven heads and ten horns, would rise out of the sea and conquer the world. At least this was something new, he thought, even though it must be way off in the future, given all the other stuff that had to happen between the last horseman’s recent arrival and the Beast’s appearance. The Beast would build a new city called Babylon (Wasn’t there already a Babylon? he thought) but the righteous would kick him and his host out of it and then the righteous and the host of the Beast would meet in a huge battle for one final showdown.

  “The name of this final holocaust, Brothers and Sisters,” declaimed the young preacher, “is given in Revelation 16:16: ‘And he’ – St. John is talking about the Beast here – ‘gathered them together into a place called in the Hebrew tongue Armageddon.’ There the hosts of the righteous will defeat him, but the battle will rock the very foundations of the earth. And the Beast is a man, Brothers and Sisters. The Lord has marked him with a number so that he can be identified. Listen to Revelation 13:18: ‘... Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast: for it is the number of a man; and his number is six hundred threescore and six.’ The number of this man who is the Beast is six hundred sixty-six.”

  Brother Gephardt paused for dramatic effect. Though John couldn’t see him of course he sensed the man’s great agitation. He continued.

  “This man who is called the Beast, Brothers and Sisters, is not some far-off danger that will threaten our children or grandchildren. Oh, no. Once the opening of the seals began, the rest of the events prophesied in Revelation became inevitable. No power on earth can stop them. And they will happen very quickly.” (So John had been wrong; the Beast’s arrival was imminent.) “The Beast, Brothers and Sisters, walks amongst us right now. He and his entire host shall be cast down at Armageddon, but many of the righteous will die there too. His minions live with us too, preparing for our destruction at Armageddon. We must be ever vigilant, seeking always to identify members of his host. The more of them we cast down before that fateful day, the more of us will survive the final battle.

  “We live under a Shadow, Brothers and Sisters, not the Shadow of the Four Horsemen nor of other terrors of the past. The vicissitudes they brought were terrifying but they are finished, never to visit us again. But those horrors are nothing like those that are to come.

  “No, the Shadow that looms over us is not from events of the past. It is cast from the future. The near future. It is the Shadow of that last and most horrible event of the Last Days, the battle of Armageddon.”

  He was quiet for a moment. A hush hovered over the crowd. John realized that Jaclyn had crept under his arm and was hugging him with both arms around his body, shivering slightly, whether from the dire predictions of the sermon or the growing coolth of the evening, he couldn’t tell. Alicia sat apart from them, completely enthralled by the young preacher’s message.

  “Let us pray,” said Brother Gephardt, and he began. It suddenly struck John that, though the young preacher’s tales had seemed pretty outrageous they could have happened. The pestilence, in the form of Chou’s Disease, had certainly been real enough, if that was indeed the work of the rider on the pale horse. Though he had been too young to remember it, the adults of Newcastle had continued to talk of it in low fearful tones. He knew many had died from it, his father among them. Perhaps these other disasters had happened, like disease, before he was old enough to remember them. Matt would know though. He hardly listened to the words of the prayer. He must talk all this over with Matt as soon as possible.

  Then the prayer was over and he heard Reverend Gates’ squeaky voice asking for contributions. While the piano played, Alicia told him ushers moved down the aisles to receive them. Alicia, pulling Jaclyn out from under his arm, hissed, “Come on, come on. Sissy’ll be looking for us!” And to John, with a smile and a shake of the head, “I’ll see you soon, John. You need me to teach you a lot a stuff.” Jaclyn called “’Bye, John Moore,” and watched him rather wistfully as Alicia dragged her down the slope by one arm.

  He reflected with a pang of regret that the wrong girl had sat with her arms around him while the right one sat mesmerized by the young preacher.

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Matt awoke to pain in near-darkness. A massive hammer slammed just behind his closed eyes in time with his pounding heart. He forced himself not to move, didn’t make a sound, hoping his tormentors weren’t present. He lay there for a long time, hoping he hadn’t groaned as he gained consciousness. He lay on his stomach with his right cheek resting on a cold hard surface, probably concrete. He listened. At last he decided he was alone. He flexed different parts of his body – nothing seemed to be broken – and cautiously turned over on his back, stifling a cry of pain. Painfully opened his eyes. Looked up through wavery red to rafters above. Perhaps the ceiling of some sort of basement. A small window in one wall admitted a little thin pallid light; it must be getting dark outside. He wondered how long he’d been out.

  He tried to assess his situation. The last he remembered was the attack by the guard and others. He didn’t know how many, but there had been at least two holding his arms. If the guard had attacked him out of revenge for making a fool of him, he should be dead by now. There had been no witnesses but the guard’s henchmen and thus no reason to spare his life.

  Then he remembered the figure standing behind the guard, a small man who seemed familiar, though Matt couldn’t see him clearly for the leaves of the sapling he stood behind. As far as Matt knew, the onlooker had not joined in the beating. How did he fit in?

  He turned his head to examine the room. Directly across from the window was a solid looking door, closed, and no doubt secured. It was a fairly good-sized room but full of stuff, apparently a storeroom. One end of the room was stacked with chests and boxes. A bound bundle of thick sticks in the corner were, from the smell of pitch, pine boughs intended for use as torches. At the room’s other end was a stack of folded waterproof hides and tarpaulins, the type that scroungers used to cover their truck in wet weather, and coils o
f cord to use for pitching tents, securing truck to pack animals, and for other uses. Shelves covering the wall from floor to ceiling on both sides of the door held rather small uniform items of some kind. There was even a shelf above the door.

  Gingerly, he sat up. The movement made his aching head spin. He remained sitting until the room became still, the hammer behind his eyes settled down a little and his vision cleared somewhat, then crawled over to the shelves. The small uniform items turned out to be jars of preserved food. Knowledge of this hobby from the back-to-the-good-old-days movement before the Last Days had now become a survival technique. He used the shelves to pull himself to a standing position, and just for the hell of it tried the door. Just as he thought: locked tight. Then he went to the window and opened it, with difficulty and only a little, though it was too small for him to fit through even if it had opened farther. It had not been opened in a long time. Its hinges made a small noise. A voice outside the window made him jump.

  “Pringle! Matt Pringle! Is that you?” A harsh whisper. He flattened against the wall beside the window. “Answer if y’r in there, asshole, an’ I’ll tell y’ what’s gonna happen to y’.” A kind of snuffling chuckle. The voice sounded familiar. Matt pressed against the wall, kept utterly still.

  “I know y’r in the basement somewheres,” came the familiar whisper. “I saw ’m lug y’r sorry ass down there.” Snuffle, snort. Matt must be in Chadwick’s basement.

  “I know what they’re gonna do t’ y’, Pringle. Heard Chadwick an’ his boys talkin’ ’bout it. They know who y’ are. I want y’ t’ know who told ’m. Me, Geraldo Grimes.”

  Grimes had been the onlooker behind the sapling when the guard had beaten him unconscious. That’s why he sounded so familiar! He was an itinerant trader who bought goods at Nellie’s Fair and took them to other markets. Matt remembered his many humiliations at Johnson’s hands, like the time in the Rat’s Nest when Frank had brought tears to Grimes’ eyes by squeezing his thigh with his legs. He remembered the venomous glare Grimes had given Johnson and the others on his way out. Grimes had ratted Matt out, undoubtedly as a way to at last get even with the Johnson gang.

  “After supper Chadwick’s comin’ down there to person’ly beat you inta tellin’ where y’r gang is. Tell him quick, Pringle, an’ maybe he’ll kill y’ quick.” Again, that nasty chuckle. Grimes was quiet for awhile. Then, “Well, don’t know if y’r there or not. I’ll move on t’ the next winder. Remember, give in quick if y’ wanta git it over with.” Snuffled chuckling as he moved away.

  Matt’s heart pounded. There was no way out. He worried that he would indeed give the gang’s location away quickly; he didn’t feel very brave just then, but weak and vulnerable. He had no way to warn the gang so they could flee before Chadwick came after them.

  In his helplessness and frustration he began to pace the small floor area, ignoring his headache, growing anger at Chadwick and his men beginning to override his panic. While counting their enemies’ transgressions against the gang, he looked around the room in the waning light, searching for defensive weapons.

  Then he looked up. Maybe there was a way ... not to escape, perhaps, but to make torment by his captors more costly than they had bargained for.

  * * * *

  It was practically full dark. Matt heard the bolt, which secured the door on the far side, being slid aside. He willed himself to be calm. The action would start soon. Then his growing panic would be stilled. If there are only two, he thought, I can handle them. Probably not three.

  The door opened slowly, cautiously. Flickering yellow light spilled gradually over the floor, probably from a candle in the adjoining room. Chadwick entered first; Matt recognized him from his wedge-shaped build and balding head. A second man followed, taller, wearing a scrounger’s broad-brimmed hat. He carried (ominously) a large pair of hedge trimmers. He stopped abruptly, stumbled into Chadwick who had stopped and was looking around the room.

  “Wheah the fuck is...?” Chadwick was saying as he looked around for Matt. A third man carrying a long thick wooden dowel blundered into the first two.

  Damn, thought Matt. There are three.

  Matt’s inspiration for his defense had come just after Geraldo Grimes left and he had looked up at the ceiling of his prison. They won’t look up for me up there, he had thought, at least at first, looking at the shelf above the doorway. He had climbed up the side of the shelving next to the door far enough to remove the jars of preserved vegetables from the shelf. Then he returned to the pile of blankets and tarpaulins at the end of the room, grabbed a tarp, took it up to the shelf, and unfolded it. His thin frame and the tarp fit perfectly there. He waited.

  Now it’s show time, thought Matt, judging the distance to his enemies below.

  Just then, everything Matt had planned went to hell. Matt’s shelf, deciding he was too heavy, parted from the wall with a screech, spilled him downward toward the three below, whose startled faces swung up toward the unexpected sound. As he fell he flung the tarp over them, albeit more wildly than he had intended.

  Matt had sensed, when he first saw Chadwick, that even though the man was shorter than Matt, he was much stronger. The tarpaulin was meant to disable him at least temporarily. Unfortunately it missed him altogether as it engulfed his companions.

  Matt tried to guide his leap such that he would land feet first on Chadwick. But the collapsing shelf made too unstable a launch site to allow the execution of an exact trajectory. Matt landed on one of the other two men writhing under the tarp, lost his footing, pitched forward to his knees. The shock of seeing his captive diving toward him from the ceiling briefly immobilized Chadwick. But he quickly recovered, caught Matt by the throat, and yanked him to his feet.

  “Clevuh mothafucka aincha?” snarled Chadwick. Matt tried to back himself out of the viselike grip, but Chadwick was too powerful. Frantically but futilely he struck at Chadwick’s face as the other forced him backward. In the near darkness, they stumbled over the two covered by the tarp, Matt walking quickly backward to keep from falling, knowing he would be lost if Chadwick wrested him to the floor. Matt came to an abrupt halt against the shelves by the door, his throat still clenched in Chadwick’s inexorable grip, Matt could no longer breathe. Spots appeared before his eyes. He was losing consciousness fast. He flailed his arms randomly about. His left hand struck one of the jars of preserved food on the shelf, reflexively grasped it. With the last bit of strength in his arm and his last remaining shred of rational thought, he swung the jar, felt it connect with the side of Chadwick’s head.

  With a surprised, “Unnh!” Chadwick loosened his grip on Matt’s throat just slightly. Just enough. Matt raised his arm and brought the jar down on Chadwick’s head with as strong a blow as he could muster. The jar broke. Fragments of glass and juice struck Matt in the face. He tasted raspberries. He was free, at least temporarily.

  Chadwick came for him again. Matt held the broken jar by its cap end, pressed the broken shards to Chadwick’s throat. Chadwick backed quickly away. He tried to grab Matt’s wrist, but Matt kept swinging and jabbing with the makeshift weapon to Chadwick’s face and throat. Chadwick retreated.

  Then Chadwick struck Matt’s wrist and sent the broken jar sailing across the room. He launched himself head first toward Matt.

  Which lent itself well to Matt’s training by Johnson. So thorough had the training been, he reacted automatically; the fog of his pain made thought impossible. After Chadwick was too far committed to correct his course, Matt ducked to the side, grabbed Chadwick, and aided his headlong flight, slammed him head first into the wall with as much strength as he could muster.

  Matt tried to say, “Yeah, I am a clever motherfucker at that,” but all he could do was choke and cough and try to see through the red fog before his eyes.

  He turned to see one of Chadwick’s companions emerging from under the tarp – the other wasn’t moving – at the same time striving to extricate his weapon, the long thick dowel. Matt kicked him in th
e side of the head and finished untangling the dowel. The guy was still rolling on the floor, groaning. Matt smacked him on the head with the dowel. He didn’t move again. Matt stood over his unconscious adversaries now, filled with rage and adrenaline. I can kill them all if I haven’t already. With this club.

  No. He had killed enough. He hoped no one upstairs had heard the commotion, then immediately realized that if they had, they would assume it resulted from Chadwick’s interrogation of him. Peering cautiously out of the storeroom, he saw a large elaborately-furnished office, apparently Chadwick’s, lighted dimly by a single candle on the desk. No one was around.

  He stumbled out of the room clenching the dowel, choking and wheezing, gasping for breath. He closed the door, slipped the bolt through its holds, crossed the office and looked through an open doorway. It led down a corridor with closed doors on each side to a stairway that appeared to lead upstairs to the first floor. No way out in that direction. Looking back across the office, he saw a door in the opposite wall. He crossed the room and slowly and cautiously opened the door the slightest bit. He could see a concrete patio bathed in dim cold light. The door opened to the ground level outside. The basement was a walkout, and there was probably a guard out there. He eased the door shut, walked to the desk, and blew out the candle.

  Holding the dowel at the ready, he returned to the door and opened it slightly.

  “Boss?” A voice from outside.

  “Yeah. C’mere.” His voice, still a hoarse whisper, sounded surprisingly like Chadwick’s.