At least the rural folk had the green and blue they had always known, their fall cushioned by the dewy grass, onlookers nothing but nature itself. There is a kind of fulfillment to go that way, to die as one lived, the soil's fool, in the softness that humanity craves at the end. The city dwellers had no such comfort at the last; their end would be filthy and harsh, we knew it, we who had seen the wickedness that their spaces had bred.
That day there was a kind of loosening of the order of things. No one had ever cowered from such strange clouds, that grew first in the conciousness, and then in space; a rushing fierce blackness, with a leading edge that burgeoned, consuming the sky. As it approached and swooped above us, phantoms of shapes, whipped and in heavy relief, would dance in the mass, and then disappear. A strong indraft of damp, warm and foetid air surged through the city, and all went silent. Quizzical eyes scanned from the windows of buildings, curious at the sudden dark. Outside, pedestrians began shrinking back into the edges of the side walks, more acutely aware that the way of things had become unhinged. All that fought the gloom were the streetlamps, stirring, but oblivious to the pregnant moment. The wind subsided, our world was still.
Then, a marked drop in air pressure, our ears pop; the already low heavens sink alarmingly, and we feel a static charge all about us. A shocking white bolt breaks from above and with a piercing scream, plunges onto the Cathedral - twice the size of the latter - destroying it; sudden judgement with bloody conflagration against a reddening slate sky. Mothers, possessed with fear for their children, began to run for shelter, the supernatural spectacle rooting others to the spot. A dull, low whoosh from above caused heads to raise and then we saw burst after burst of seething bolts pour down, bringing stunning light into the street, and they hit the buildings, one after the other, flaying and tearing out gaping wounds from walls. A hail of falling concrete and glass, and the first few I saw to die, in this way met their end, being slashed and battered by the cascading masonry. Many that were still frozen, were mown down by the stampede of terrified hordes. After several hits, buildings would fall altogether, and a miserable groan of twisting metal and breaking concrete began, and was without an end whilever one great building toppled after another. Glass, from doors, glass from windows, glass from car windshields popped, smashed and slashed at the unfortunate people running by. Children and adults alike were screaming, and then, would be suddenly silent. The rancid damp street quickly became filled with dust, and breathing became a battle, each gulp of the lungs taking as much rubble as air. And bolts rained down, small ones now, but with greater frequency, and they seemed to have the character to set fire to what had already been killed or destroyed, stoking the razed city into a terrible blaze.
We had been expecting this day, but it's coming still speared us with a racing fear - we had no moment for thought of Jehovah's apportioning of justice, and whether or not we were to be among the favoured. Not until the city fires really started to rage did we gather ourselves, and notice that amongst all this destruction, we had survived unmolested, except by shock and fear.
After the day, we were ordered by Jehovah to move clear of the old city sites, and after a time, only the brothers who had proven themselves to have been the spiritually strongest in the old system were given the privilege of levelling what was left of that wicked world, and cleansing it all away. They were provided at each day's end with a provision of spiritual food, to help them to remember why Jehovah was right to butcher Satan's followers, why he had to protect his loyal servants from the old world, whose remains they were interring. Their faith in Jehovah's wisdom, justice and love would not be shaken, even as the wretched broken and burned corpses of pregnant women, and mothers, even in death still clutching their little ones, turned to dust in their hands. With great effort and commitment to the cause of forgetting, they ploughed the mangled and scorched debris of buildings, street decorations, families, cars and such under the soil.
The early evening sunlight still catches the mounds in those ploughed fields. I remember the deaths that the people whose broken bodies are hidden under those mounds suffered, and they did suffer, I had been forewarned of that suffering, and I had seen it. I saw the momentary suffering of the woman who howled like a beast over the gnarled and dying body of her husband. Hit in the breast by a piece of shattered concrete, he had fallen, his chest sunken, his legs twisted. The sobbing woman placed her hands under his heaving rib cage and held close his ruined body as he lay. Fast, their pain was over; a slamming sound, and they were scattered in a hundred pieces, blasted by one of Jehovah's awesome bolts, obliterated. I saw a small boy escape his injured mother's last embrace, stagger backwards in confusion away from her. He retreated, kneeling in the edge of the road, tears washing the dust from his red cheeks, with just a bare dirty car bumper to hold onto for comfort amid the chaos. He too was slaughtered in the dark by Jehovah's furious agents of death, frightened, helpless, crying and alone. I remember children and adults alike fleeing, tripping over kerbstones, running into walls, unable to see with their rubbed, stinging and half closed eyes. Dogs, crazed and staring with fear, tore and rent at anyone in their way, and the shaking of the ground brought down the old and vulnerable.
True, the anguish and suffering was for those people very short, but I saw it, and their suffering remains with me. I walked dazed through the rubble, and saw the burning old world, I saw the charred skull, with it's jaw jerked open reproach me. "You survived", it seemed to say, "At least grant that an hour ago, you might have said 'Hello' to me, you might have nodded your thanks, if I had stood aside to let you pass. Well since you granted me that humanity then, I say to you in it's name now; Do not permit yourself to forget this misery, to forget that I and many like me have paid the highest price we can pay so that you can live on, and praise the one that brought this terror to us".
pepheuga
