Now that’s novel!

Instead of doing the many, many things that I need to do this week, I’ve been reading about premillenial dispensational estatology on wikipedia. Doesn’t that sound like something very scientific or researched and reasoned? See, esatology is the science of how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. Premillenial dispensationalists believe that normally only so many angels will fit, but due to certain prophetic circumstances, infinite angels can be accommodated. (This in contrast to postmillenialists who believe . . . I forgot joke I was going to make here. I can’t even satirize something already so outrageous.)

Ok, so those are a bunch of fancy words for trying to do sekrit magik with the bible. It’s got sekrit prophesies in it, which you can learn about in bible “college” or via wikipedia. Or via my coming potboiler end times novel. Thanks to my exhausting exhaustive research, I can now provide an very rough outline, including some character names and prophetically required plot points. It gets less structured as the tribulations drag on.

Outline

World Currency: Euro used for international trade
AntiChrist: Angel Caduto, head of UNICEF
Whore of Babylon – heads religion

Back story: ww3 expanded Israel’s borders and lead to the breakup of the US

Mary Sue is a very famous composer who teaches at the conservatory.
Ralph teaches art at the art academy.

  1. Ruso-Ethopian war (told in flashback, witnessed by Ralph)
  2. Rapture
  3. Dutch disaster services
    1. this is not ww4
  4. Caduto, head of UNICEF addresses world
    1. no human technology could have caused this
    2. “To be frank, we have no way of knowing what has happened or if the missing will be returned.”
    3. no country has been spared
    4. therefore, must be natural or alien – at least not originating on earth. Aliens!!!
    5. North America may have been hit so badly because it was facing the aliens
    6. Kids are smaller and maybe easier to transport (also, tastier)
    7. We don’t know why some people disappeared and others didn’t, but are looking into factors. Many did not drink alcohol. (not pre-marinated)
    8. We must unify to fend off possible invasion
  5. Ralph wonders why Jews weren’t spared. Mentions passover, Lot and Noah. Meanwhile, TV shows pictures of huge disaster in North America – crash planes, fires burning, whole government vanishes live in C-Span.

WOB commissions memorial piece from MS for the disappeared at world-wide interfaith memorial. Calls for spiritual unity.

Caduto calls for everyone to have an RFID chip implanted in them to make a better tracking system.

Ralph goes back to Israel and joins sect making sacrifice on temple mound.

WOB or Caduto reveals that all the adult disappeared were Christians and children. To insure the protection of those left, alcohol is required and xtianity is outlawed. “There is no heaven or hell, there is just survival!”

War breaks out (war and rumors of same)

giant earthquake (maybe change this to a meteor? “The sun goes dark, the moon turns blood-red, and meteors fall from the sky. “) 25% of those remaining die

illegal religious group gets radio implants and organizes black market

fire, smoke and sulphur hit

Caduto is murdered along with 2 underground religious leaders and another political leader

Caduto rises from the dead after 3 days – lightening storms. moves to temple

Those who have UN RFID chips get sick from them

Oceans turn to blood & rivers too and whatnot

sun scortches

darkness – (finally some relief from the sun. oh no, it’s dawn again and still august! augh!)

Rivers dry up – which is probably not such a bad thing,s ince they’re full of blood

giant hailstones (do these melt to restart the rivers?)

Jesus comes back and kills a lot of people. (The lion of god, the prince of war. Reveals the Beatitudes were a bunch of bullshit thrown in to fool people who couldn’t crack the sekrit code, just like dinosaur bones, but for pacifists.) All the disappeared and killed underground folks come back to life. Zombies!!!!

a bunch of other crazy shit happens. jeebus, USA foreign policy is based on this crap?

The end of the world

So there’s a whole genre of books based on some crazy idea called Darbyism. The Left Behind books are en example of this genre. They have a set of weird ideas about the end times and the books have to touch on all the plot points. I’ve been reading a great blog detailing some of the problems with the Left Behind series and I thought I could write better than that. so here goes:

Mary Sue bent over her bicycle, jiggling the key in the rusty lock. She kept forgetting to get grease for it. She kept running late. “Merde”, she mumbled.

A clean cut, blonde, broad-shouldered Dutchman approached her, pamphlet in hand. “Wordt u gered?” he asked.

Mary understood but pretended not to. “Ik spreek geen nederlands.” She mumbled. Half true. She had rehearsal and no time for Jesus freaks.

The man, mercifully, did not pester her, but instead approached a sprawled junkie nearby. Mary turned away from them and started towards school. The junkie closed his eyes and cursed softly as the young Christian shoved a pamphlet into his hand. He prayed a silent prayer that all the evangelicals with their weekly Thursday public prayer meetings would just disappear. When he opened their eyes, they had.

Mary biked past the Jesus houdt van u – Jesus loves you van with the top mounted speakers, out of tune hymns blaring out at evening commuters. And then the hymn halted all at once, mid note, like somebody pulled the plug from the speaker. But there was no click and pop of a disconnection, just the clunk of the microphone dropping to the ground. And then the whine of feedback.

Mary braked and turned to look back as a collective gasp went up. The only previous time she had ever heard the Dutch gasp like that was the time her dog had attacked a guide dog in the middle of the shopping district on a sunny Sunday afternoon. This gasp was even more shocked, but without the air of titillation.

All of the street preachers were gone. A moment ago, they had been witnessing and now they were just missing, piles of their clothes were on the ground. Mary’s mouth hung open, like mouths all over the GroteMarktstraat. A woman with a baby stroller glanced down into it and began to scream. The scream echoed across the city, across the country, across the world. Her baby was gone. All the babies were gone.

Mary numbly sat where she was on the ground. Around her, people frantically rushed around. Around her were sobs, cries and sirens. “Mijn baby!”

This can’t be happening, she told herself. I have got to quit smoking pot before bedtime, the dreams are too weird. But then she thought of something else, Ralph’s crazy story of going to Israel to visit his boyfriend during the Ethiopian-Russian war.

“I saw all the missles,” he had improbably claimed while they sat at the bar at Cremers, sharing a joint and drinking beers. “They were all over, coming from everywhere, right towards us. It was terrifying. I swear I peed my pants.” His eyes were bright, although glossy and red-rimmed.

“Hmm” Mary said, too high to trust herself to say much more.

“And then, like, all of the sudden, all the power went off everywhere at once. I thought it was like an electromagnetic pulse, from a neutron bomb or something. I thought I was dead. Everything stopped. Everything. Every mechanical sound or electric thing just stopped. And the missles, seemed to be going in slow motion. They pulled up and turned, passing each other in the sky. And they were gone. It was unbelievable. I looked at my watch and it had stopped right then. It said 4:20.”

Mary suppressed a giggle. That explains it.

“But then I looked down it later and it had restarted. Not only restarted, but the time was right. Everything was like that. Everything turned back on as if nothing had happened with the new correct time. All the radios came on at once. It was crazy, unbelievable, but we all just stood there. Nobody screamed. We all stood and listened, totally calm, like the most peaceful thing in the world had happened. And then the news announcer came on and said in calm, cheerful hebrew that Moscow and Ethiopia had been nuked beyond recognition. They launched pre-emptive strikes at each other at exactly the same time! How is that even possible? I felt the hand of G-d there. I really felt it.”

Mary swallowed another sip of beer. “So that’s why you converted?

“Jews really are G-d’s chosen people! How else can you explain that?” Ralph was getting loud, but didn’t seem to notice the now-widespread eavesdropping.

“Mass hysteria?” Mary flinched at the look Ralph gave her. “No seriously.” she paused. “Ok, I was in the big earthquake in San Francisco in 1989. One of my high school teachers was in the gym. He absolutely swore he had seen the sky when the roof of the building popped up and landed back where it belonged. He really, really believed it. But it was impossible, even he admitted it. If the roof had jumped up like that, the building would have collapsed. He wasn’t the only one to see it, but it just couldn’t have happened. None of the bolts were even out of place. He just thought he saw it because he was so scared.”

Ralph sipped his beer and considered. “But that analogy doesn’t work. He was scared because he was in the earthquake. If what I saw didn’t happen, then I wasn’t in anything. I had no reason to see anything. None of the thousands or millions around who saw the same thing. But we all did.”

The lights at the bar flashed on and off then, signaling the end of the evening. Mary hadn’t thought about that conversation for the last week. She’d been so high, she’d barely remembered it the next day. But it came flooding back to her now. But this felt nothing like the hand of God. This felt like a bad dream. She sat where she was and cried.