naive. When the news hit about the pedophiles in the church and Rome’s complicity in their crimes there had been a mass exodus among parishioners. And Cawood’s faith had started to die.
An unnerving thunderstorm en route to New York City had filled her with dread. The pilot announced over the intercom that their landing might be delayed. Rainwater flew from the wings in spraying torrents as they landed at JFK International. She waited an hour for the ride she had been promised, and finally hired a taxi to take her into the city.
She could still remember the vehemence with which the rain fell, how it tore at the pavement around the car. Its froth formed a violent film on the windows reducing the entire world to a flat gray wall. Pedestrians moved past like shadows, flitting from blurred doorway to blurred doorway.
The Change came while she was wrestling her bags through the door of the Venture Inn. The television in the lobby asked people to standby for a report from the U.S. Department of Defense. A crowd of guests and New Yorkers sheltering from the rain gathered on the snowy blue rug in front of it. Cawood joined them, watching. The screen flickered from gray, to snow, to black and then projected the image of a news anchorman. He fixed his steady gaze on the viewers.
“A weather system is forming at a speed and magnitude unprecedented in recorded history.” The newscaster seemed anxious. “The Department of Defense and the National Weather Service have issued this joint release: ‘All citizens of the continental United States are advised to remain indoors pending further notification.’” Electric tension jumped through the people around Cawood. The statement was punctuated with satellite pictures of the earth’s surface covered with whirling tempests of black and white and gray. It had all begun three hours before, the report said. Military and civilian satellites recorded the phenomena. What at first appeared to be several hurricane formations had taken on a more destructive tone.
Global weather stations confirmed the growth of a contiguous worldwide atmospheric disturbance. The picture of the growing cloud cover intensified during the broadcast, with a time-lapse effect, until the once blue globe darkened to a uniform shadow. Soon after, the satellite picture broke up and was lost. The news anchor’s image returned, flickered and was gone forever.
Cawood paused in her reverie.
Beads of sweat stood out on her pallid forehead as the moment returned to her in full. The lights in the lobby died. A man bellowed repeatedly into his cell phone until he charged out of the building screaming his children’s names. A woman shrieked, then apologized in embarrassment. The crowd hurried across the lobby to the desk, to a line of dead pay phones on one wall. There was a loud harsh clap of thunder, and the Change had arrived.
“Damn!” she cursed. All this was behind her, but Able had a way of stirring things up. Coming into her office so early in the day babbling about Angels and salvation and a new mission. “There’s no fucking mission,” she said to the empty room.
The first days of the Change were crisp in her memory. The group at the Venture Inn had dispersed quickly: huddled, cautious shapes going into a hissing gray nothing that smelled like autumn. Cawood was taken to a room by a busboy with a flashlight: taste of salt from the back of her hand as tears came upon her in the dark. She slept uncomfortably listening to sirens and awoke next day to the rain: smell of cleansers, the dry reconditioned air on her tongue. Cloud cover kept New York in perpetual twilight: searching for her underwear on the floor, the dusty curtain made her sneeze.
Rain thundered down for weeks without end. The riots started in week two, close on the heels of the looting. There was a slow realization setting in that things had changed permanently. As communications returned at the end of the first week-radio and television signals were inconsistent and distorted-digital signals were lost, replaced by analog. American meteorologists blamed the ozone and greenhouse gases, European scientists suggested an undetected meteorite impact. Few ocean-going vessels returned from the wild maelstroms the seas had become. The melting ice caps threatened to drown coastal cities. Estimates had 85% of all aircraft aloft at the time of the Change were crashed or missing.
Electrical systems went wild, city lights and telephones flickered and died, computers crashed and subways ground to a terrifying halt deep in their dark black burrows. Factories fell silent and millions died. No one was unaffected. Presidents and Prime Ministers made reassuring statements that could not hide their ignorance. Leaders religious and political wanted calm.
Calm. The absurdity still provoked a sarcastic smile in her. Their world was dying and they asked for calm.
Her first steps off the high road came when she sought her sisters and brothers in the rapidly sinking city. They had nothing for her. There were riddles in the text and that’s all they had: the text. The Revelation of St. John had been a long contested part of the Testament, but this Change was different. And the Bishop was missing. No one had heard word from the Vatican. It was silent, but most had grown used to its methodical responses to crises in the past. From her search for guidance she came away confused.
And there was the water to worry about. It was rising every day, and New York City was so big. Twice she was drafted into the ranks of millions who built dykes against the flood. She worked beside strangers with the rain pooling about her ankles. A slight increase in wind pushed the waves up and over, collapsing the hastily constructed barriers, flooding neighborhoods. Pull back; build new dykes.
The military was brought in to build dykes but became a police force and fire brigade. The world had Changed. On the radio all reports were the same. Coastal cities the world over were drowning. There was a Federal state of emergency instituted as panic set in. Buildings were burning throughout New York, the sound of gunshots and explosions rolled up every street. And as the rain continued, people left the city.
Cawood heard about the Vatican while riding on an army transport moving refugees to the mainland. Dying witnesses swore they had seen a mushroom cloud. That pushed her into a general trance of terror and disbelief. It wasn’t until later that she found out about the nuclear exchanges in the Middle East, India and Pakistan, China and Russia. To her a simple question: if the Vatican could be vaporized, then what value the cities of man and where was God?
Science, the last refuge of the faithful, could not answer many questions. Meteorologists were baffled by the worldwide weather system that set in and stayed. Some theorized that whatever had caused the new weather patterns was so catastrophic that the atmosphere reacted by creating a suspension-an equilibrium of itself- seemingly sucking up the moisture as the North and South Poles melted. Scientists at MIT announced their initial findings: the majority of species of bacteria had died off in a mass extinction of unprecedented proportions.
Lost for a time, Cawood felt no urge to pray. It was as though heaven itself had been destroyed with St. Peter’s. Still, she could hang onto something, the basic lessons of Catholicism. Yet even as she rallied, another blow fell as the second month passed. All pregnant mammals spontaneously aborted their fetuses. And it proved in the years that followed that humanity could not conceive again. The voice of childhood had been silenced. Cawood almost joined the suicides she tended though events soon made death a crueler fate than life. No sooner was science trying to explain the great stillbirth than the dead rose up from their graves.
Raise them up to live forever with all Your saints in the glory of the Resurrection.
Each country claimed to have had the first to rise. Clambering out of mortuary drawers, coffins and medical research facilities the dead came awake, but they were not alive. Bodies continued to dehydrate, but with the extinction of most bacteria, they did not rot. And this new revivifying affect, whatever gave them life, was not for whole bodies alone, severed parts were charged with some atrocious nervous activity, mindless, but lifelike. The dead retained the characters of the people they had been in life, so long as some portion of their brain remained.
Karen swiveled her chair around to gaze out the window at the cloud tops. She never felt guilty for having Sunsight offices high up in Archangel Tower. Never regretted a single sunset she got to watch while the populace below muddled through endless days of rain. She’d helped build it after all.
10 – Dealing with the Devil
Felon sat on his bed at the Coastview Hotel. He had set his guns on a rubber sheet: the rebuilt M-16, his Smith amp; Wesson. 9 mm automatic, a. 44 Magnum Colt Anaconda, and a Ranger. 45 Colt Derringer. He started disassembling, cleaning and oiling the weapons one by one. In his business the machinery had to work perfectly.
