Copyright (c) 2015 by Randall R. Peterson ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
This is a work of fiction. All persons, locations and actions are from the author's imagination or have been used in a fictitious manner.
ARMAGEDDON
By
R. Peterson
“…and
thou hast tried them which say they are apostles, and are not, and hast found
them liars…”
Revelations
2/2
Amna
pulled the ragged coat around his shivering body. Two buttons were missing and
it was hard to keep out the freezing wind. Most of the richly dressed people
walking into the newly built NEW WORLD CHURCH OF THE DIVINE LIGHT Convention
Center ignored him and the wooden sign he carried. Still he thought with thousands
of people using the main entrance, someone would notice his words. He didn't
have to wait long.
A
hard faced man stooped to study Amna's sign; close enough for his coat to brush
against Amna's cheek. The material was of the softest cashmere and smelled
store fresh. Amna reckoned that coat had probably cost the equivalent of two
months' welfare checks.
“THE
END IS COMING!” Cashmere Coat read the words out loud with contempt and then
laughed. “Why doesn’t a scumbag like you get a job instead of stinking up the
doorway for decent people?”
“This is my job,” Amna replied. “I
am to make wide a path of righteousness for he who comes.” Amna knew the man
was an officer on the New York City Police Force and a vain man with ruthless
ambition but he was not afraid. More information about the man was pouring into
his memory all the time. Captain Charles W. O’Conner was evidently a very important
part of God’s plan and purpose.
“I should run you in for blocking
the sidewalk,” O’Conner said. “But I don’t want to get my hands dirty.” He
pulled an I-phone from his coat pocket and punched a call-button. “I’ll have a
car here in five minutes. If you don’t get the hell out of here you’ll spend
forty-eight hours in lock-up and one of my boys will break that #%&$@# sign over your head. Do you
understand?”
Amna nodded and began to shamble
down the paved stone walkway. The tiny soft voice in his head told him to
leave. The voice in his head was always right. And lately, all it took was the
slightest brush or contact with another person for the voice in Amna's head to
know everything about that person; good and bad.
A long white stretch limousine pulled to the
curb and the Reverend Jason White and four others, one a woman wearing a fur
coat made of Russian sable stepped out. Three of the men wore dark suits and
dark glasses, the usual choice of uniform for bodyguards. In keeping with his
name, the Reverend White wore a white silk Brioni
suit. Amna glanced at them. The men all had hand-guns with silencers hidden
under their coats. White had a VIPERTEK VTS-881 micro stun gun in his vest pocket.
The charismatic evangelist hated for his followers to touch him. The value of their clothing would feed the
poor who flocked to the Eighty-sixth Street Mission for the Homeless for more
than a year. O’Conner held a door as he waited for White and his party.
“Can’t you do something about these vagrants?” The woman was pointing at Amna.
“They make our Crusade of Light look
bad.”
“It’s been taken care of,” O’Conner
assured her.
“Then let’s go inside … my obedient flock
awaits!” Reverend White took Cecilia Evans’ arm and they walked behind the
first guard. Cecilia had been a thousand-dollar a night prostitute before White
reformed her. Now she came from a
wholesome Nebraska farm background with impeccable credentials thanks to
O’Conner’s vast connections.
“…and it’s shearing time,” Captain
O’Conner finished White’s words, but not too loudly. There were still hundreds
of people clambering to get inside and find a seat. Some of them recognized
White and surged forward trying to touch his hands or even his coat. The guards
kept them away. Every seat in the 41,900 capacity stadium was taken. The roar
of the crowd was like the rumble of thunder. Surely this would be a night to remember, White mused as he waved
his arms in the air and moved toward the stage.
-------*-------
Amna almost made it to the alley that
was his home, when a blue and white police car squealed onto the curb and
blocked the alley’s entrance way. One of the officers (a cop with five children
the oldest named David attending New York University) threw him to the ground.
“You want to put him in the back?” Louis Constello asked his partner.
“Naw,” the other cop said. (Pete
Swensen who made an extra six thousand a month reselling confiscated crack
cocaine.) “O’Conner wants him out of the way. They only hold these creeps for
two days … I’ve got something in my belt that will save the city a few bucks.
He unfastened a baton called a Texan,
a length of lead wrapped in leather, from his utility belt as they dragged Amna
into the alley.
Amna felt the first blow that struck
his head … but not the second … or any after.
“I
know thy works: behold, I have set before thee an open door, and no man can
shut it.” Revelations 3/8
A child’s cries roused Amna from
unconsciousness. Although his right eyelid refused to open, when he squinted
towards the child, the pain in his head disappeared. Tears made white vertical lines
under six year old Dani Garafalo’s eyes as she staggered into the alley. “What
is it … Dani?” Amna beckoned the raggety-tag child towards him. She held a
lifeless animal in her thin dirt-smeared arms.
“It’s Tripper,” Dani sobbed. “My gatti
(cat) got ran over by a taxi.”
“Bring her to me,” Amna’s voice was
soft and reassuring. “I think she is only sleeping.”
The
animal’s head was crushed and bloody, the body already cold when he took her in
his arms. Not much older than a kitten … too young for such a fate.
Amna closed his eyes and
concentrated on a mountain stream he’d seen as a boy hiking with his father in
the mountains of South Eastern Idaho. Bright clear water had bubbled out of
solid rock like a kind of magic. He blocked all of his senses until he could
hear the sounds of the water and feel the mists of memory on his face. A cool
breeze cleared his mind of all tribulation and replaced it with faith. All power comes from loving God.
Tripper
was purring when Amna handed her back to Dani. The cat snuggled into her arms.
“Thank
you Benim Kurtarıcım,” the child said.
“Turn
your back on sin,” The Reverend Jason White declared from the pulpit as
thousands in the audience rose to their feet, “and say no to the demons who
seek to lead your children into the darkness.”
Offstage, Cecilia Evans sucked at a
cigarette and checked her watch for the twentieth time; only an hour had
elapsed since the three-hour revival meeting had started. Captain Charles W.
O’Conner made sure that none of the stage crew could see him then he slid one
hand seductively across Cecilia’s stomach and over one breast. “Let’s go in the
lounge area and lock the door,” he suggested.
“The Alter-boy suspects that his
enemies may be a lot closer than he thinks,” Cecilia whispered. “What would he
do if he knew someone from another farm was riding his pony while he was out gathering the hay?”
“He’d keep his mouth shut if he knew
what was good for him!” O’Conner cursed under his breath as he squeezed her
breast with an iron grip. “I’ve got enough dirt on him to create a dozen farms!
God, I want you bad!”
Cecilia
moaned. “Why didn’t you say this was a prayer,” she whispered as she took his
hand and led him toward the lounge area, “…as the good book says … ask and you
shall receive.”
“And I wept much, because no man was
found worthy to open and to read the book …” Revelations 5/4
They
were getting to the part that Jason loved: A very pretty twenty-three year old woman
wearing a simple cotton yellow-flower print dress pushed a wheelchair toward
the stage. Her passenger twisted in
the chair as if in the midst of a serious seizure or convulsion. He was dressed
in an Operation Desert Storm officers-uniform which automatically granted him
the title War Hero. Reverend White stopped in the middle of a discourse on the
evils of homosexuality as if startled by the intrusion. He left the pulpit and
approached the woman as the crowd gasped. “What is it my child?” The audience
was alarmed; many rose from their seats. Three microphones on booms
miraculously appeared and picked up the woman’s voice with amazing clarity and
detail. “It’s my husband,” her voice broke. “He came back from Iraq broken and
twisted.” The crowd was hushed. “We’ve always believed in God … and in you …
Please help him!”
“My child!” the Reverend declared.
“What makes you think I can help you?”
“They say that you have been touched
by the hand of God,” she whispered, “and those you touch shall be healed.”
“It is true that I have seen God and
that I have eaten at his table,” White said. “But I have no power unless it
comes from his grace.”
“Please help us,” the woman wailed.
White
raised his hands as if in exasperation. “I truly know how Jesus felt,” he
boomed. “The troubles of the world come knocking on my door.”
“Please,” the woman sobbed
hysterically. “Touch his head and he will be healed.”
White
addressed the crowd with wide eyes. “Shall I heal this woman’s husband?” he
shouted.
“Yes!” the crowd thundered back.
“Shall I rescue him from Satan’s bloody
child-stealing hands and lead him into salvation?”
“Yes!”
Jason
White removed his $18,000 Armani white silk coat and dropped it on the stage. The
crowd was working itself into a religious tumult.
“Yes!” thousands of voices chanted
over and over like the first rumbles of an earthquake. Jason secretly thought
the sound was better than snorting cocaine. He dashed from the stage, caught-up
in the crowd’s fury and placed his hands on the disabled soldier’s head. “By
the grace of God I declare you whole,” he thundered. Overcome by the apparent
release of power from his hands, the Reverend trembled all over, and then
slumped to the floor the same time as Corporal Edmond Lewis rose from the
wheel-chair and began to walk. Mrs. Lewis dropped to the floor and began to
pray as four men lifted the unconscious White and carried him from the stage.
Lemont Hicks who was head Pastor at
one of the more than twenty-six NEW WORLD CHURCH OF THE DIVINE LIGHT branches
picked up the coat and as he hung it on the pulpit the microphones picked up
his voice. The next two hours belonged to him. “Come forth,” he declared over
the noise of the crowd. “Come forth and feel the power of God!”
The
congregation was formed into six lines … those who dropped more than
five-hundred dollars into the collection box were moved into the fastest line,
and were allowed to actually touch the coat. Others, who donated less, were
allowed to shake hands with one of the more than fifty Angels who made a
tremendous spectacle over touching the white jacket and then passing on God’s
power to the masses.
Jason
White watched from backstage. It was a good night. The last Evening with God had netted almost
seven-million dollars in tax-free donations
… tonight looked to be even better.
Gracie Lewis followed her now healed
husband off the stage. Jason grabbed
her from behind the curtain. “You’re a good actress,” he told her, “and so is
your husband.”
“Eddie is not my husband,” Gracie
giggled. “God! That damn queer doesn’t even like women.”
“Ten thousand for three hour’s work
… is that right?” White’s eyes roamed over her cotton daisy-print dress.
“Yes, that’s for each of us,” Gracie
said. She was aware of White’s hand moving across her backside.
“Then I still have more than two and
a half hours of your service.” Gracie shrugged her shoulders and nodded her
head … she’d been with rich and powerful men before.
“Just don’t get too rough,” she
said.
White
smiled as he led her to one of the private healing
rooms. This one had a lock on the door, a furnished bar and a king sized vibrating bed.
“Ten minutes later, after they had each
drank a tiny glass from a four-hundred dollar bottle of Dom Perignon Champagne,
White pulled the yellow daisy-dress over her head and removed her underwear. He
pushed her roughly onto the bed and enjoyed the look of fear in her eyes. “Now
you’ll see the power of God,” he said as he removed his belt.
“And I saw when the Lamb opened one of
the seals, and I heard, as it were the noise of thunder, one of the four beasts
saying, Come and see.” Revelations 6/1
Amna
and Dani walked east toward the river. “Where is your mother, Child?” Amna
asked her. Carla Garafalo was a part-time prostitute dying from alcoholism. Dani
still held the cat in her arms; the just-out-of-kitten-stage animal appeared to
be sleeping.
“Sometimes when Mama goes viaggio she is gone for several days. I
haven’t seen her since Wednesday.”
“Who looks after you while she is
gone?” Amna was impressed with how bright her eyes were. It must be the result
of her love for the feline.
Dani
laughed. “My mother does not look after me, I look after her …. I have been
searching for her.”
“The voice tells me that I must find
a proper bed for you to sleep in until your mother returns,” Amna told her.
“You’ll see, I’ll help you find her.”
“How long, O Lord, holy and true, dost
thou not judge and avenge our blood on them that dwell on the earth?” Revelations 6/10
It
was snowing. They were approaching a narrow service access between two tall
apartment buildings. In addition to the apartment blocks dumpsters, a makeshift
ghetto of cardboard boxes and torn-fabric tents lined both walls. Amna thought
this might be a good place to look for Carla Garafalo. More than forty-five
adults and sixty children lived in the forgotten alley some residents of the
inner city called Bratton’s Abyss
after the heartless police commissioner who said “ …stop giving these
troublesome bums money and they’ll go away..”
They
were halfway down the alley, stepping over several men sleeping inside plastic garbage
bags and a woman trying to wrap her child’s feet in discarded newspapers. Amna
noticed a headline on the first page of the New York Times: TURKEY DOWNS
RUSSIAN JET! IS THIS THE BEGINNING OF WORLD WAR III? A new Dodge Ram pickup-truck
screeched to a stop in the alley entrance. Six young men wearing New York
University sweat-shirts and waving metal NYU Bobcat baseball bats jumped from the back. Four others, including
two women with lengths of metal bars, climbed from the truck’s cab.
“It’s time to take out the trash!” a
red-headed youth yelled as he beat a man trying to run with plastic tangled
around his feet. Blood from a broken jaw splattered against a wall and started
a frenzy of clubbing as the homeless were driven to the end of the alley.
Thin
childish wails pierced above the screams of men and women, Amna followed behind
the murderous college mob.
“This is what’s wrong with America,”
a young man thundered as he broke a woman’s nose with a bat and sent her squalling
baby rolling across chunks of broken asphalt and frozen garbage. “All of our
tax money goes to these lazy people who refuse to work and live off the
system!” He chased three Asians from an overturned garbage-can where they’d
been huddled together. Amna noticed the shoes on the thug’s feet: $1800 Nike
Men’s Air Jordan 5 Retro Premio "Bin 23" and would most likely feed a
family of six street people for three years.
“We ain’t asking you for money! Why
don’t you go on and leave us alone?” A black man wearing a Vietnam era army
jacket threw his arms in front of the woman. Mike Bloomberg broke-out his teeth
with the bat and then sneered. “You people are the #%$& of the Earth and by
God! It’s time someone cleaned things up!”
“Do not invoke God’s name unless you
are here to do his bidding.” Amna’s voice was a whisper that echoed down the
alley like a gunshot. Eight young men holding bats and lengths of rebar turned
and looked.
The thug wearing obscenely expensive
shoes pushed attackers out of the way and opened a pathway for Amna and Dani.
“You want to join your friends?” he yelled. “Go ahead! This will say us the trouble of hunting you #%$&$ down later.”
As
Amna moved forward, a beautiful co-ed wearing a Trump for President tee-shirt tried to grab the kitten from Dani’s
arms. “They buy the best cuts of steak with their damn food stamps and then
waste it on mangy animals like this!” she sneered. Dani screamed and clutched
the cat tighter. The woman grabbed and tried to twist the child’s arm. Amna
closed his eyes for an instant, when he opened them the woman was flying across
the alley. A stench filled the alley as she splattered against the cinder-block
wall like an over-ripe tomato and her inner ugliness spilled out. Several of
the men in the mob backed away from the strange homeless man who appeared to be
radiating some kind of light.
Amna recognized the frightened faces of John Bingham
and Conner Wilson huddled with the frightened homeless. The two obviously
homosexual men were trying to drag the injured behind a flimsy barricade made of
cardboard.
“Let’s
get this over with,” Mike Bloomberg yelled. “The first keg at the Sigma Alpha
fraternity party should be getting tapped … just about now!”
He moved forward and
swung his bat at Conner Wilson just as the overly meek man opened his mouth to
beg for mercy. Alma lifted his hands in the air and the baseball bats the
attackers wielded turned into pythons. The iron rods became red-hot liquid metal
and dripped onto the women’s hands as the huge snakes curled around the shrieking
fraternity brothers’ arms. Backward curving fangs, acted as barbs as the
fraternity brothers ran shrieking from the alley dragging the snakes behind.
The girls followed screaming and holding burned fingers in the air like
blistering forks.
“Amna! God walks with
you,” Conner Wilson gazed at the homeless man who had saved them all from a
terrible beating as John Bingham fell to the ground.
“Is your friend hurt?”
Amna asked him.
“Not by theses fiends,”
Conner said. “John has a large lump in his abdomen. We think it must be a
tumor. Unfortunately neither of our jobs offers medical insurance.”
“I know a place that
will look after your friend without charge,” Amna said. “It is important that
we take him there at once.”
“…and
he that sitteth on the throne shall dwell among them.”
Revelations
7/15
Amna
and Conner Wilson helped carry John Bingham into the Emergency Room Entrance of
New York City’s Mercy Hospital. There was almost an hour wait as friends and
family raged over the shooting of an unarmed black teenager by police. “This is
outrageous,” the father yelled. “My son was shot sixteen times … that officer
reloaded his gun and shot him again and again as he lay on the ground.”
Amna sat with Conner, Dani and
Tripper when the medics finally took John into a room for a computerized axial
tomography (a C.A.T. Scan). The group waited for more than two hours. Conner
told Amna how he’d been a member of The Presbyterian Church of Oak Springs and
a choir boy until first his parents disowned him and then the Church. “Being homosexual
puts a weight on a person,” he said, “and the equality in life isn’t always
fair.”
Amna
disagreed. “The balance in life is always equal,” he said. “People choose the
good in this world and in the next. Good must always be balanced by an equal
measure of bad.”
“You may be right,” Conner said. “I
was in a despair so deep I though death was the only way out. I was on a high
bridge over a ravine getting ready to jump when John found me. He spoke with
truth and courage when others, even my own parents, only acted out of fear.
They thought they could change me. Only John accepted me as I truly was.”
“It sounds as if you and John were
made for each other,” Amna said, “did you ever think about getting married?
That seems to be the in-thing for gay couples now-a-days.”
“John doesn’t believe in gay
marriage,” Conner said. “He believes that those of us who are different were
put on this Earth for a specific purpose. We never engaged in any kind of
sexual activity. We are first and foremost friends but we don’t take the term
lightly. We would die for each other in a heartbeat.”
“Let’s hope it don’t come to that,”
Amna told him.
Edward Dickens, the doctor caring
for Conner, came into the waiting room flanked by four other doctors. “We have
examined John Bingham thoroughly,” he said to Conner. “John has you listed as
his closest relative and to be notified in a medical emergency.
“That’s right,” Conner told them.
“Is John okay?”
“We performed over twelve
physiological tests and some Neurological ones,” Dickens said. “Finally James
here who is an Obstetrician suggested an ultrasound.” Dickens pointed towards a
white faced white coated man behind him. “We all laughed because we checked
every inch of John’s body and we know without doubt that he is male. There is
absolutely no evidence that he was ever anything else. No sex change operation,
nothing of that kind. No one in this hospital or any hospital anywhere in the
world has ever seen anything like it. Although there are no other female organs,
John Bingham has a uterus … and he’s pregnant.”
“This can’t be right,” Conner
stammered. “Things like this do not happen.”
“Actually they sometimes do,”
another doctor said. “Parthenogenesis (same sex reproduction) has been
documented before, but it’s confined to the female of the species, never the
male, and it’s never occurred in humans.”
Henry
James handed Conner several x-ray films showing the curled fetus. “It’s a boy,”
he said.
“How will you deliver this baby?”
Amna asked the doctors.
“We have some of the best doctors in
the world flying in to New York City as we speak,” Doctor Dickens said. “I’m
sure it will be similar to a standard C section with every precaution taken for
the safety of the child and the mother … err make that the father,’ he
stammered.
The small voice inside Amna’s head
muttered a warning. Out-loud he asked, “How many people know about this … son
of man?”
“I
think it’s safe to say, that by morning, the whole world will know of this
baby’s impending birth.”
On the other side of the city, the
Reverend Jason White emerged from a shower. A towel was wrapped around his
mid-section while he dried his wavy hair with another. Gracie Lewis lay naked on the king size bed.
Most of the welts and her back and butt were bleeding from White’s belt. He
liked to show women who God put in charge.
An aide knocked twice before entering. White
recognized Lemont Hicks who had been with him from the time when they burned
their first church in Mississippi and then blamed it on a rival congregation.
The people’s wrath had propelled White into his first position of power.
Religion was a game like any other and Jason intended to win, still he was
furious at Lemont’s intrusion.
“Don’t you ever knock?” he
complained when Hick’s eyes wandered over the naked girl.
“I try,” Hicks said. “But you said
to keep our eyes and ears open. What you’ve always predicted has come true. A
baby has been born into this world with no mother and only a father.”
“Where?” White blasted. “This better
not be some kind of trick.”
“Right here in New York City,” Hicks
said. “Isn’t that convenient?”
“And you are sure?”
“We have confirmation from at least
a dozen different sources,’ Hicks said. “It is true.”
“Prepare a news conference for the
morning,” White said. “This news will rock all nations and thrust us into the
spotlight of the world.”
“You are prepared to embrace this
child? After you know what is to come?”
“Of course I will at first,” White
said. “Then I will receive a revelation from God declaring that the child is
the spawn of the Devil himself and must be destroyed. All the Christian
Churches of the world will accept this. Is the father not a homosexual? The one
sinner on Earth whom Christ truly hates? By the time we are done I will lead
not just a congregation but an army … and no power on Earth can stop me.”
TO
BE CONTINUED …
