"It's over!" Don said, "it's over!" "We're alive!" I said, "we're alive!" He grabbed me and hugged me and we danced in circles at the same time. Don was one of our older elders. "I've never felt so alive" he said. Everybody was doing the same thing, hugging and dancing in circles. "Did you ever think Armageddon was going to be like that?" my good friend, Tanny, said with tears streaming down her face. "Awesome" I tried to say, choking on the lump in my throat, "Just awesome". "Just look at that sun", she said, looking up and shielding her eyes somewhat with her palm. "It's back to normal. Isn't it wonderful?" she added.
There were now about 35 from our congregation there in the Kingdom Hall parking lot. Every one was running around grabbing each other and hugging and jumping and laughing and crying and shouting. Some would throw their hands up in the air and look up and say, "Oh thank you, Jehovah, thank you, thank you". Others would drop on their knees, clasp their hands in front of their face and sit there on the hard ground with their eyes tightly squeezed shut, in heart-felt prayer. Some were squeezing their children again and again. The brothers from the Spanish congregation were there too. I couldn't understand what they were saying, but it was evident that this day for them was everything that it was for us.
We had been doing this for hours. "Look, another car!" someone said. We all stopped and stared in silence like we did every time. I couldn't hear anything but my heart pounding. We watched. It was a late model Ford. It looked in pretty good shape compared to a lot of them. Everybody had parked in the street this way and that way. Some left the doors open and just ran. "Who is it?" Tammy, my wife, said, as she tugged on my arm. "Jerry and Kay", all of us shouted at once. "It's Jerry and Kay". They came running into the parking lot with this whole crowd of people running at them. And the hugging and dancing and laughing and crying started all over again.
This same thing happened over and over all day long. But, those who came that day were the ones who always came. We kept looking in anticipation as to who we would see next. But they were the ones we would always see at every meeting. "Isn't this something?", One sister, Cindy, said to me. "Is that all you can say?" I quipped back at her, "Well, isn't it?" she said as she grabbed both of my arms just above the elbows and stared into my eyes with a pristine expression. "Yes it is, it sure is something", I said with a loud laugh. "And those birds", I added, "Just listen to those birds! Have you ever seen so many birds?" We all hugged again.
Jerry was a soft spoken brother who was always thinking ahead. He came up to me and said with sparkling eyes, "What does the inside of the Hall look like? It is sure nice to see it not boarded up any more. Do you think we should start cleaning it?". We thought we would get inside eventually and sit down. We thought maybe we would have some kind of meeting and talk about what we were going to do next. But we didn't. Not that day we didn't.
About noon we realized that we were getting hungry. The elders appointed groups to go out and find supplies. The sisters thought it would be real fun to go shopping, but it was mostly brothers who went. After a while they started coming back. Two brothers returned with huge motor homes and one with a big travel trailer and a generator. One group brought china and silverware. A lot of it was real fine china, and even some real silver. One group brought tables, and the rest brought food and drink. We had lots of food, all kinds of stuff. One brother, Patrick, came driving in the parking lot in a police car with the lights and siren going. He had it stuffed with cases of wine and coffee. And in the trunk was a large espresso coffee machine.
Every one pitched in with food preparation and soon dinner was ready. Parl, our presiding overseer led us in a long prayer and we began to eat. We thought we could maybe start to settle down a little, but we weren't prepared for what happened next.
"I think I'm too excited to eat" I said to Bob, one of our elders, as we stood looking at each other with our plates in our hands. "I know what you mean," he said, looking down at his food and licking his lips, "I am never 'too anything' to eat, but I'm real close". I had my back to the street. Bob was looking over my shoulder. I saw his mouth drop open. His eyes popped out and he dropped his plate and just stood there. I turned around and there, coming into the lot, was Brother Brody, the brother that had helped more people into the truth than anyone I know, and from his wheelchair at that.
Now, he didn't drive to the kingdom Hall. He didn't walk. He didn't run either. He was skipping! Like a little kid, he was skipping and chuckling. He had a smile so big I thought the corners of his mouth were going to get caught on his ears. The sisters shrieked and shrieked with excitement. The brothers mostly stood there laughing and wagging their heads, and pointing. I think a lot of tears were dripping into a lot of food about then.
Towards the end of the day a brother came from the next congregation to ours. He brought a 2-way radio and we talked to four different congregations that first day and we made plans to meet the next day at the assembly Hall. We heard that one brother had contacted Patterson by ham radio but nobody knew any more than that.
That night we built a campfire right there in the parking lot. I was standing there by the crackling fire watching the shadows and the fire light dancing on all the smiling faces. Jerry turned to me and said thoughtfully, "What are you thinking about, my brother?". "Life" I said, "Life just seems so delicious!". We played kingdom songs on the stereos in the motor homes with speakers outside and we all sang song after song and each stood up and told his story of how Jehovah had saved them. That is when it happened ... what everyone alive on earth that day will remember forever and ever.
There was a swirling warm breeze that seemed to engulf us. And who could ever forget that enormous pillar of fire up in the sky slowly spinning around. Tongues of fire kept departing from it in a circular motion as it turned and showered down in all directions. We all sat there transfixed in amazement as some of those tongues of fire came right toward us and were distributed around to each one of us. Then there was that thundering, resonant voice from the heavens. You could feel it reverberating right through you, but we weren’t afraid. There was a calm that settled down over all of us. The voice said, "YOU ARE MY FAITHFUL WITNESSES AND I AM JEHOVAH. I WILL POUR OUT MY BLESSINGS UPON YOU BEYOND WHAT YOU CAN DREAM."
Carlos, a brother from the Spanish congregation, stood up and raised his palms as high as he could and said, "Praise be to Jehovah, we will serve him forever". And he began relating prophecies that we had all just seen fulfilled. I ran over to him and said, "Carlos, Carlos my brother, how is it that I can understand what you are saying?" "I don't know" he said, "How is it that I can understand you?" Then all the brothers and sisters from the Spanish congregation came running over and started hugging all of us and we all were hugging each one of them. And we, all at once, were talking and talking and talking. And many were praising Jehovah for his wonderful unifying gift.
We had gone to neighbouring houses to find stuff to burn in our fire. It seemed funny going up to those vacant houses. We didn't knock. We would just open the door and say "Oh, 'I'm not interested', You say? You have your own religion? Too bad, too bad, you great city, for in one hour your judgment came." We even brought back a couple of signs for the fire. One said, "No peddlers or agents". And one said "Beware of dog." We laughed long and hard as we pitched them into the fire.
We kept celebrating into the wee hours of the night. Nobody wanted to go home even if they had one. This seemed more like our home, and more like our family, than ever before. Finally, towards morning many of the friends started falling asleep.
I walked over to Don who was still wide awake. I said, "Don, do you think the Israelites were this happy after they crossed the Red Sea?" He looked at me thoughtfully as he ran his hand through his silver hair. But his hair didn't look so silver to me. I thought maybe it was the golden light from the fire. He said, "Happy? I'm sure they were. But I don't think any human ever felt like every one of Jehovah's people do this day. You know", he said, "I will always remember this as "Day One" of forever!"
The next morning, just after sunrise, we all emerged from the dozens of small tents on the lawn of the KH, and I for one felt sparkling. I’d never felt like this before – it was almost as if I could run a hundred miles and not even breath hard. I’d never felt so strong or so vigorous before in my life.
Carlos, the Spanish elder, led us in prayer that second morning. Now there were so many birds that the sky was darkened by their sheer mass – in fact, Carl had a pretty hard time making himself heard above the cacophony of bird screeching and squawking above our heads, but it didn’t matter, because we all pretty much got the general idea, and that was that we needed to help the Elder Body to organize our new dwellings, and that they needed to be as close to the KH as possible for convenience of worship. Our KH was in a nice suburban area, and we soon set in groups of 10 or so, with an Elder at the head of each. By the late afternoon, everyone had been assigned a home to clean up, remove bodies from, and make fit for habitation again. We were instructed to drag the bodies of all the hundreds of dead worldly people out onto the sidewalks (but not onto the streets) so that the birds that Jehovah had sent could get rid of them for us. Sure as hell, every time a corpse was laid out on the concrete sidewalk, a hundred birds would settle on it almost immediately and began stripping the flesh from the dead person in a summarily business-like fashion.
It was pretty sad for my wife and I to drag the bodies of the four children who had died in the house we were assigned to. Little did my wife know when she chose the lovely two-story ranch built house that a complete nuclear family and two dogs had been staying in it. The expressions on the faces of the children were terrible – they looked like someone had been putting them through a food processor when they died. Worst of all was the cute little girl – barely four years old, still dressed in a blue summer frock, clutching her rag doll. Knowing that these people had been evil, I did most of the work, but with a grimace. It was all a bit too much for my wife, who couldn’t stop crying after she saw the little girl being eaten by the ravenous Godly aviators on our sidewalk outside the house. Not even the pretty flowers I gave her later from our garden could console her. My, but everything is growing quickly now. It’s almost as if some wonderful energy from Jehovah is coruscating through all the living things here (except the dead worldly people of course).
Thursday night came, and the sun fell behind the horizon. It was strange seeing all the stars – there was no more electricity. From what we heard over the two-way radio, the brothers were looking into getting the electric power stations downtown running again, but had so far not succeeded.
That night at the meeting, the funniest thing happened. We sat as usual, paging through our Bibles as Brother Parl cited scriptural reason for the deaths of the many worldly people. I could see that quite a few people had been violently upset when they saw all the children who had died, but Brother Parl assured us that it was Jehovah’s justice, and that we shouldn’t question it, because then we would die at the end of the 1000 year reign of Christ. Oddly enough, I had to go to the Index of my Bible in order to find the book of Matthew – for the life of me, I just couldn’t remember where it was in the Bible. This struck me as rather odd, considering that I had been in Jehovah’s service for nearly 60 years before Armageddon came and went. I just dismissed it as nerves. Besides, my head had begun sprouting little black hairs this afternoon just before the meeting started, about which I was overjoyed, having been as bald as a billiard ball for nearly 20 years now.
After my wife and I consummated the sacred bonds of our marriage, she remarked to me in the absolute darkness that the lack of electricity afforded us that I was “stronger than a stallion”, a term which she hadn’t used for nearly 40 years now. I hadn’t been the fittest of people when Armageddon came, that’s for sure.
Once again, both my wife and I were kept busy the next day. There was so much to do in this brave New System, so many things to organize. When we went to the KH for lunch, driving a beautiful BMW that a Brother I had known who owned a car dealership had given us as an Armageddon gift (cars still worked, but the gas supplies were dwindling slowly), the Sisters set up a very nice table full of food. As we munched on the snacks, one Brother remarked that he had been having difficulty preparing his Watchtower earlier that day, which was odd, considering he had suddenly gained incredibly good, hawk-like eyesight, a change for a man who had worn Coke-bottle glasses for most of his life. He mentioned that he was having difficulty reading the longer sentences, and that it took him a lot longer than usual to complete his outline for when he conducted the Watchtower study.
Within two days, many of the Brothers started having problems reading their Watchtowers. Deciding to find out from the top what was happening, I got into our shiny new BMW to drive down to Brother Parl’s house, only to find that I couldn’t for the life of me operate the car. It seemed so extraordinarily difficult to pull it out of the garage – it was like I was driving for the first time in High School again. Eventually, after driving in a very low gear most of the way, I made it down to Brother Parl’s house, and there I proceeded to forget where the brake pedal was and found myself buried in his white toothpick fence. Brother Parl’s wife came running out of the house, and I spent several minutes figuring out how to open the door, and finally got out of the steaming wreck I had turned the BMW into. Our elder’s wife was making the oddest grunting noises and gestures, and there was brown chocolate pudding (or at least, something that looked like it) all over the back of her dress. I ran away, scared for the life of me. Was Satan possessing our sisters now?
Don’t remember much yesterday. Kwiet here, wife eating when I up in the morning to go visit Parl again. KH empty, people in thee strret. Nobody make sound, everybody looking for food now. Wife is lokkng yung, very yung and yum yum yum!!!!!!!!!
, I cannt use pen to good now, keep sliping from my hend as me write this, what happen to us, is Devil Devil Devil SATAANANANNA!!A posesing me two? I see outside my house is people, walking around look food, hungry. Tired of writtin. OH HEAVENGLY JAH, JAH GOOD, HE LOK AFTR HIS PEEOPELE. GOD IS LOVE, o I love u, love u cantt wrieet so good no more
At noon two weeks later, a tiny robot dog got up from the kitchen table it had been hastily left on by a child nearly three weeks ago, after the child had foolishly run outside to see the giant fireworks display in the sky outside. Seconds after the girl was killed by a super-heated rock crushing her into the lawn, the robot dog, a very high-tech Sony model with gigabytes of on-board memory as well as a skin composed chiefly of solar panels to power it without batteries, stopped operating, having exhausted it’s internal power source so much while the girl was playing with it that it couldn’t crawl into the narrow shaft of sunlight that had covered the other side of the table. Now the seasonal shift of the sunlight coming in through the kitchen window had finally reached it’s silvery hide, and it began to wake up again, checked it’s systems, and then finally managed to crawl into the middle of the sunlight. Within an hour it’s batteries were fully charged, and it began it’s pre-programmed search for the little girl who had been imprinted into it’s facial recognition circuits the day it was purchased from a toy store in Ohio.
It’s lithe robotic legs squealed as it jumped off the table and made it’s way out onto the lawn, skirting the large impact crater that had once been a 7 year old child. Inside it’s silver head lay a handful of electronics so incredibly well designed that they succeeded in mimicking the behaviour of a real dog almost perfectly. The only difference was that this was a dog that never could or would eat any bone in the whole word, as it had no mouth. It could bark pretty well though, and it began doing this, using pre-programmed actions in an attempt to find it’s keeper. Although simple, it’s mind was quite functional, and it reasoned slowly that it’s keeper was playing in the street.
Soon it was running briskly down the street, it’s little plastic tail clicking up and down as it ran past the deserted, severely damaged homes. It was rapidly running out of battery power now, and the sun had already set by this time, so before it could find a nice sunny recharge spot, it’s legs gave out and it fell to the ground, frozen until the next morning.
The last thing the dual microcams in it’s stylised doggy eyes saw was a group of grunting, savage people, some with strips of cloth still hanging off their skeletal, starving frames, and one of the ragged tribe ran up to it and picked it up, ogling it, then threw it down to the ground with a grunt, where the little robot was broken instantly. As the light faded from it’s eyes, it’s microphones picked up the jeering, screeching sub-human cries receding from it.
Up in Heaven, God and Jesus looked down upon the Earth.
”Well, now the Earth is a paradise again. I told you that you shouldn’t have let Satan play with that genetic mutator thing – I mean, look what he did, went and tricked our nice little humans into growing big frontal lobes, and then they started getting clever, and made a mess of themselves. I mean, you had to send me to sort it out. Next time please consult the Governing Body before you decide to let Satan do something so silly again,” Jesus muttered, his glorious face capturing the attention of a billion angels as he spoke.
”Look, it is good. Now they are back in Eden where they belong. Their children will be born without that fatal mutation, that frontal lobe thing that all the humans had when we culled them. I took care of it. No problem. Now let’s go play a game or two of poker, shall we?” God replied.
[SYN], UADA - Unseen Apostate Directorate of Africa - For Great Justice!
