by Mark Romang
Battle Sky
By Mark Romang
Copyright© Mark Romang 2016
Kindle Edition
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead is entirely coincidental.
Cover design by Robin Ludwig, Inc.
www.gobookcoverdesign.com
Prologue
Downtown Seattle
The homeless woman went by two different street names: Crazy Mary and Scary Mary.
They were cruel labels to be sure, but Mary didn’t mind the disparaging monikers too much. Although her dirt-smudged face, uncombed hair and mismatched clothing certainly added relevance to the hurtful names, deep down she knew she was only down on her luck and not crazy.
Peculiar? Yes, but not crazy.
Mary pushed her battered shopping cart along the deserted street from body to body. Her eyes—gray and distant—flitted from corpse to corpse. The view before her was like an end-of-the-world movie scene.
The dead littered Seattle like wind-scattered trash.
They were once ordinary people who came from all walks of life. Some were rich, some were poor, and some were destitute. They were lower class, middle-class, and upper-class, and they represented multiple ethnicities. But now they served as nothing more than buzzard food. Carrion feeders gorged on bloated corpses, while more buzzards circled the sky, others perching on streetlights and signs, anxiously awaiting their turn to feed.
A massive clean-up was underway all over the city. Bodies had already been removed from neighboring streets, but not this one. Soon though, a bulldozer would come and push the dead into a pile. A flatbed trailer would then arrive to transport the bodies to a landfill to be burned. Another homeless person Mary knew told her this is what the city was doing. This person also told her the same thing was going on all over the world.
Mary wore a dirty handkerchief over her face to help block the stench. She was sure she emitted a terrible smell herself. She hadn’t bathed in months. But her smell was perfume compared to the stench wafting from the corpses.
Occasionally she would stop pushing her cart to retrieve an item off a corpse. It was dirty business what she was doing today, but profitable. Her wardrobe and jewelry collection had increased dramatically over the last several hours.
Now she could use the jewelry to barter with other homeless people who had food.
Mary approached the last body she’d yet to check. This corpse lay halfway on the sidewalk and halfway on the street. A businessman attired in a natty suit by the looks of him. He might be wearing an expensive watch, Mary thought, her interest peaking.
Although there were UWC officers lurking about and overseeing the cleanup, Mary didn’t pay them any mind. Nor did they pay her much mind. She was just a homeless person, dirty and unkempt, a piece of living trash, some would say. For that matter she was practically invisible. And she liked it this way. She didn’t have the Skymolt marking chip implanted under the skin on her wrist or forehead, had never even bothered to acquire it.
But then she never had been one for obeying rules or mandates.
Maybe this is why she’d always been an outsider looking in.
Like Sinatra, she had to do it her way.
Mary squatted down by the dead businessman. She swatted away some buzzing flies and pulled up on the suit sleeve of the man’s left arm. A gold sport watch looped around his swollen wrist. Mary slid the watch off the corpse’s wrist and pocketed it inside her flannel shirt jacket. She would wait until later to see if the watch still ran. But she was sure it did run. And it looked like a top-drawer model. It might even be a Rolex.
She briefly looked at the dead man’s face. No burn marks were visible on his decaying skin. And his suit, though dirty, wasn’t damaged. The smoke must’ve killed this one, she thought quickly. Some of the other corpses died from sulfur burns. This was obvious because these corpses were charred black like roasted hotdogs.
It had been two days since the mass killings.
The cause behind so many people simultaneously dying all over the world remained a mystery. Government scientists under Henrik Skymolt’s employ blamed the billion-plus deaths on global warming, or holes in the polluted atmosphere that allowed solar flares to reach all the way to Earth.
Mary wasn’t so sure about the global warming or the solar flares explanation. She had an acquaintance who said the purging of humans was a judgement from God—the sixth trumpet judgement to be precise. Mary tended to agree with her acquaintance. He’d shown her the passage in Revelation that talked about the sixth trumpet judgement.
The scripture passage scared her. It talked about an army of two-hundred million demons unleashed on Earth to kill a third of mankind with sulfur, fire and smoke. Strangely enough, the dead all shared a common denominator: they all had taken the Antichrist’s marking chip. Even more bizarre, not a single unchipped person had died in the mystery genocide, or even been affected.
Jacob Ackerman told her all this. Jacob was a Jew, and he claimed to be one of the 144,000 witnesses sealed with a mark on his head by an angel and anointed by God to preach the Gospel to the whole world. Jacob was homeless like her, and lived with eleven other Jewish men who were also witnesses belonging to the 144,000.
Jacob was an exceptional speaker, so exceptional that he led her to Christ. And now despite her frumpy clothes, dirt-smudged skin and lowly position in life, Mary knew her distant future was not only a bright and lofty one, but an eternal one. She’d been adopted into the family of God; she was a co-heir with Christ.
But still, her present situation couldn’t be bleaker. She needed food and water, and had nothing in her shopping cart to eat or drink.
Mary left the dead behind her and turned down a side street. She headed east. A Safeway sat a few blocks away. She assumed the grocery store had been looted like most of the other businesses in the city. But there might be a few scraps left behind to get her by. She didn’t need much. And at this stage even dog or cat food sounded appetizing.
She felt guilty about stealing. But living in the Tribulation was so incredibly hard that it skewed her views on right and wrong. Her morals that were once either black or white had bled together into a dingy gray color.
These were the Earth’s last days, and she did whatever she had to do to survive, legal or illegal. It was really that simple.
Chapter 1
Olympic Peninsula—41 months later
“It’s worse this time. Isn’t it, Tanner?” Brooke Mason asked her brother as they ran as fast as their legs would carry them down a dark mineshaft, fleeing an evil presence they couldn’t see but could feel all too well.
“Yes, they’re more determined than ever,” Tanner panted, holding a hand out in front of him to knock down cobwebs. The smell of sulfur—the stench given off by demons filled the mineshaft and seemed to follow them.
Their headlamps cast bobbing splashes of light onto the mine walls and floor, adding dancing shadows to their macabre setting. “What are the demons saying?” Brooke asked with difficulty. She and Tanner and C.J.—Tanner’s twin brother—had been living in an abandoned goldmine for over three years. Their father, a Christian man with prepper interests, had purchased the property a year before the Rapture happened and converted it into a bunker, stocking it with nonperishable food and water.
“You don’t want to know what they’re saying, Sis. It’s not repeatable.”
“We should stop running then. The Bible says we need to submit to God, resist the devil and he’ll flee from us.”
“Easy for you t
o say! The demons aren’t trying to possess you.”
“This is silly, Tanner. We can’t outrun them. One of us is going to get injured running like this,” Brooke shouted. Ever since Tanner had started making Christian broadcasts using a HAM radio, otherworldly things had been happening in the mine. Little by little the incidences grew in intensity and frequency. Tonight it all hit the fan and they were neck deep into spiritual warfare.
“Okay, okay. When I grab your hand, drop to your knees with me. I’ll start praying. Maybe they’ll leave.”
“When we bind them with the power of the Holy Spirit they will leave.” Brooke shouted. She felt Tanner grab her hand almost at once and dropped to her knees like he requested. Rails that once transported ore cars dug into their knees.
Tanner draped a protective arm over his sister and with his other hand lifted up a small crucifix he’d fashioned from tree branches. As soon as he lifted up the homemade crucifix a powerful wind entered the mineshaft and whipped around them, trapping them in a tornado-like vortex. Dust blew into their faces, burrowing into their eyes.
Tanner closed his eyes, not out of reverence but out of survival instinct. He opened his mouth to pray, willed himself to stay calm and think cogently. Words tumbled out his lips in halting bursts and were immediately swallowed up by the howling wind. But he knew God heard his petition loud and clear.
“Almighty God, the God of angel armies, rally to our defense. We desperately need your protection. We are your children ransomed with Christ’s precious blood. Our souls are sealed eternally by your Holy Spirit. Encamp around us. Bind Satan and his demons and drive them out of this mine. Make this place divine with your holy presence.”
Despite Tanner’s faith in God’s provision, the wind blew even harder, its shrill wailing like an arctic storm whistling over desolate icepack. The demonic wind tugged at the humble wooden crucifix in his hand and tried to dislodge it. Tanner squeezed harder, determined to not let his grip weaken. His fingers twitched and trembled but held fast.
It seemed bizarre, but the wind acted as if it possessed emotions. And the most prominent emotion it displayed was anger. The enraged squall wailed and shrieked as it buffeted their hunkered bodies and nearly pulled his upheld arm from its socket. Tanner stubbornly held on to the crucifix with all his might. He didn’t want to lose it.
There was no power in the humble object he’d fashioned from two sticks and twine. But the crucifix symbolized Christ’s sacrificial and momentary death on the cross, which meant everything to Tanner. The cross and what happened on it, and the resurrection on the third day that followed it, was the cornerstone, the capstone of his faith. No way was he going to let the demons hiding in the wind snatch the crucifix from his hand.
Tanner felt Brooke’s body shudder. He squeezed his sister tighter with his arm. Her long dark hair whipped around in the squall like a wind-whipped flag. The wind settled in on top of them and acted as if it wanted to crush them, its weight unbearable and suffocating. He could hardly breathe.
Tanner could sense Brooke’s fear, could almost feel her heart pounding as fast as his. He hated putting her through this. It was all his fault the demons were even here in the mine.
He’d been broadcasting some defiant messages against the Antichrist over the HAM radio, and also some evangelical messages. He had no way of knowing how many people had heard the broadcasts, or where in the world the messages beamed. Regardless, it was now payback time. He couldn’t keep dissing Henrik Skymolt and not be sought out and punished.
Against the merciless wind, Tanner fought to open his mouth. Words spilled out from his lips and flapping cheeks.
He heard his voice speak again, frail and insignificant when compared to the screaming wind, but oddly serene given the hellish circumstances he found himself in. “Lord, you are my stronghold, a refuge and an ever present help in trouble. You once told Jeremiah the prophet, ‘They will fight against you but will not overcome you, for I am with you and will rescue you, declares the Lord.’ I claim that verse for this moment, Lord. Chase these demons away and banish them from this mine forever.”
Tanner suddenly remembered C.J., who had left earlier in the evening to map out a mineshaft they’d yet to explore. “Lord, please extend your protection to C.J. and place a battalion of warrior angels around him. Help C.J. stand strong. He’s all alone.”
Unnerving as it was to stand their ground against the supernatural wind, Tanner marshaled his courage to do just that. He could hear Brooke praying now. They were tag-teaming the wind, and the faceless demons inside the wind didn’t like it one bit. Course growls, caterwauling screams and vile obscenities occasionally broke through the wind gusts.
Even though Tanner still held his eyes tightly shut, he noticed that light suddenly leached through his eyelids. Curiosity overrode his terror and he blinked open his eyes.
His mouth dropped open.
The mineshaft should’ve been black as spades with only their headlamps poking holes in the darkness. But instead an intense golden light lit up the mineshaft. Even better, the golden light waged war against the wind, grappling with the demonic squall and pushing it away from Tanner and Brooke.
Tanner tapped Brooke on the head. “Open your eyes, Sis. You have to see this.”
Brooke opened her eyes, and she and Tanner watched with slack jaws as the wind took on color and shrank down to a sinister black vapor, a curling mist that gradually lifted off them and retreated down the mineshaft, bullied by the golden light.
Eventually both the light and the smelly black mist disappeared altogether, leaving them alone in the dark mineshaft.
“I guess your prayers worked, Tanner,” Brooke mumbled in a stunned voice.
“I think it was both our prayers that worked.”
“Regardless whose prayer it was that chased them away, the demons are gone.”
“For now,” Tanner said grimly. His pocket vibrated, and he reached into his jeans and pulled out a small two-way radio. He pushed the talk button. “Are you okay, C.J.? Did you try to call me?”
“Yeah, I’ve been trying to call you for some time, Tanner. Why wouldn’t you answer?”
Tanner looked at Brooke briefly, careful so as not to blind her with his headlamp. “Brooke and I were having an impromptu prayer meeting. It got kind of intense.”
“Well, while you two were sitting around I found another way out of the mine.”
“Did you mark it somehow?”
“Yeah, I did. But I did it in a way only we would know.”
“Cool. Now head back up and meet us in the common room. We need to talk.”
C.J. came back over the radio. “A family meeting? Sounds serious. I’m heading that way.”
Tanner pushed the talk button a final time. “See you in a bit, C.J,” he said and pocketed the radio. He then turned his attention to his sister. “Are you okay, Sis?”
Brooke nodded. “I suppose. My heart is pounding like crazy though.”
“Mine too,” Tanner said and began walking quickly.
“What do you think that light was?” Brooke asked, struggling to keep up with him.
“I’m going to go out on a limb and say it was angels.”
Brooke nodded. “I agree with you. There was something very supernatural about the light. And we shouldn’t be all that surprised. The supernatural will soon become commonplace on this planet.”
“If it was angels they sure showed up in the nick of time. I don’t want to think about what could’ve happened to us if they would’ve tarried.”
“Do you think the demons will come back into the bunker, or do you think we successfully exorcised them?”
“I’d like to think we got rid of them, but I imagine they didn’t travel too far away. They’re probably hanging out somewhere in the forest, licking their wounds and plotting their next attack. Maybe they’ll give up after I make my last broadcast. And the next broadcast will likely be the last one. The propane cylinder is almost empty,” Tanner said. The
HAM radio he used was powered by a small generator, which in turn ran off propane gas from a BBQ grill cylinder. He was sure there couldn’t be much more than fumes left in the tank. He’d made two-dozen broadcasts over the last three years.
Brooke gave him a sideways glance. “That will be weird. You’re the voice of the resistance, Tanner. You can’t go silent.”
Tanner shrugged. “I don’t have a choice in the matter, Sis. No gas equals no broadcasts.”
“Yeah, well we don’t have much longer to go before Jesus returns. So I guess it doesn’t matter.”
Tanner smiled at the thought of the Second Coming. “I can’t wait until that glorious day. It’s going to be spectacular.”
“I wasn’t sure we would make it to the end of the Tribulation. But it looks like we will.”
“We’re definitely going to make it, Brooke. Nathan must’ve successfully grounded the drones, because I haven’t seen any for a long time. And If the UWC hasn’t discovered us by now they’re not going to,” he said, referring to the Unified World Coalition policemen who hunt down Christians like the Gestapo once sought out Jews. Tanner watched Brooke hang her head. And instantly he regretted mentioning Nathan Banks. Brooke had a crush on Banks that just wouldn’t dissipate. She would never admit to it, but she pined almost every waking moment for Banks.
“I keep telling myself we’ll make it. But then sometimes I get so paranoid that we’ll get caught. I can’t begin to comprehend how awful it will be if we’re arrested. I don’t want to die a martyr’s death,” Brooke said.
Tanner put and arm around his sister as they walked. “I don’t want to die a martyr’s death either. No one in their right mind would want to. But we can’t dwell on stuff like that, Brooke. It does us no good at all. We just need to keep on praying and trusting in God’s provision. That’s all we can to do at this point,” he said, hoping his simple reply would prove truthful.