Margaret's Ark

Like a child's toy on a string, the blue and white planet stopped spinning. It remained motionless for a fraction of a moment. As Suresh struggled for breath against the dock and Bernard Myers released his empty glass into the lake, the massive planet began its rotation once again, in the opposite direction.

Tectonic plates, some the size of continents floating within their molten beds, should have crashed together, torn free of the land with a spray of magma and rock. They did not. Everything above and below the exposed land surface of the planet held fast under some monstrous, gravitational grip.

Oceans and lakes and rivers, traveling along the planet's surface with a millennia of momentum, moving a thousand miles per hour, always in the same direction, had no such restraints. At eight-fifteen Pacific time, the planet stopped and just as quickly changed direction. The water continued forward as it had always done, caught unaware. The proverbial rug that was Earth had been pulled out from under it.

*     *     *

The pressure holding everyone to the bricks along the park's walkway subsided, followed by the sound of hundreds of people heaving gasps of air into their lungs. Jack grabbed the iron chain-railing. An inner joy verging on ecstasy spun in his mind, more than the vertigo that had just seized them all. God is truth, he thought. His word is truth and He has delivered unto us His promise.

He wiped his eyes so he could watch God's destruction clearly. Circling the water, the neighboring hotel and Commercial Wharf were not a crumbling pile of metal and stone. Jack rubbed his eyes again. Something was happening. The screams of those behind him were overpowered by the roaring of the churning sea. Waves smashed into the slimy sea wall, then each other, sending towers of salty spray into the air. Jack raised his arms with unrestrained glee.

“Behold!” He shouted, “The Power of -”

He stopped. Like a leashed dog watching his master's car drive away, Jack stared helplessly as the waters of Boston Harbor smashed and roared away from him in a flood played in reverse. Out in open water an MBTA harbor ferry was swept away with its screaming passengers. It looked to Jack as if a plug had been pulled from a massive drain far out to sea.  He fell against the heavy chain-railing, his mind confused by the sight. Miles away the Atlantic Ocean surged with a momentum built over millennia. It rolled past the shores, then completely over the outer islands. Then the water was gone.

Al ong the milky horizon, the ocean moved eastward like a fading gray wall.

Someone struck him on the shoulder. Jack did not turn around. People grabbed his arms and hands; some with violence, others pleading. Now and then a microphone wormed itself between the bodies, only to be yanked away and tossed aside.

“What did you do?” a man spat, cursing and gripping at his shirt.

“Please, it's not too late, I know it isn't. Please touch me and bless me.”

“What's happening? What's going on?”

Jack didn't listen to their words. He stared across the glistening canyon of mud and whispered to the lost sea, “Come back. Please come back to me.”

“Turn around, you coward.”

“Forgive me, Father....”

“Make it stop. Make it stop; please make it stop.”

Jack's grip on the rail fell away. Pulled and guided and shoved into the throng of his self-proclaimed parish, he floated amid their hands and arms. He stared past the bobbing heads, into the sky. In a sea of a hundred faces that twisted and writhed into their own distinct emotion, Jack twisted, both of his own accord and by the flood of arms and fists. Someone slapped him; another pulled at a chunk of his hair. A woman appeared before him, muttering “Bless me bless me bless me” then she was swallowed up as more faces, angry, terrified, moved in her wake. Something stuck Jack in the leg. Pain shooting.

He could see nothing past the faces.

“Michael!” His shouts mixed, and were lost, amid so many other voices.

He was pulled suddenly to his feet. A Latino man in an oversized Bruins hockey shirt was screaming but the words made no sense. Then the man coughed. Blood sprayed from his face and he dropped from sight. The horde behind him parted like the Red Sea. At the far end of this new path stood the young man with the wild blonde hair. His arm was extended, shaking. Jack noticed the gun only when it sparked and something punched him in the chest.

Jack staggered back as another flash punched him again; then the kid’s chest turned red, like it was in the hospital – Jack remembered him, now. So long ago...

Both fell, the kid to the cobblestones and Jack backward over the chains. He tumbled once against the slime-coated harbor wall before landing on his back in the muck below.

He felt nothing now, only a sense of hovering above the filth. Michael stood on the edge of the park, looking down, hand held out.

“Come on, Jack,” he said. Then he smiled. So beautiful, that smile, erasing the scars and lines on the angel’s face. Jack was standing on the wharf beside him. Police forced the crowd back, back, but Jack found nothing of interest here. Michael held his hand. Together they rose above the chaos and the pain, flying like Peter Pan into the bright, bright morning sky.

*     *     *

When she could move again Margaret tried gathering Holly into her arms. She needed something, someone to feel beside her. To this woman who was no more than a stranger, she said, “Stay close.” She could not hear her own words. Holly had apparently not heard either, for she freed herself from Margaret's grip and crawled away. Behind, what had begun a few seconds earlier as a low rumbling now overpowered all other sound.

The ramp still led up to the ark from the grass. Carl pulled himself up using the railing. When he'd fallen to the deck, he'd tried to hold himself over the baby to shelter it. Knowing it was useless he'd roughly slid Connor aside to avoid crushing him. Though the baby now wailed in his arms, it didn’t look hurt. Carl held him carefully and stared down to the grass below.

Margaret shouted as loud as she could. “Drop the ramp, Carl!” Wind blew with a panicked force against her back. Traveling with it, or perhaps pushing it along, the roaring din sounded like a freight train storming out of control behind her.

Hoisting the baby in one arm, Carl knelt by the bolts holding the ramp in place. He looked again at Margaret, then slowly beyond her. His face lost all color. Margaret's continued pleas were lost in the wind.

A few feet away, her back to the ark, Holly turned and saw what was coming towards them. She screamed, the voice only a distant keening.

In blind unison, people on the common raced towards the ark. The heavy man who a moment before was storming in that direction fell under the rushing mob. The sudden motion around the perimeter broke Carl’s paralysis. He didn't have time to think about what filled the western sky. Only that it was coming towards them really fast. He pulled the first wooden dowel free then skittered sideways and yanked loose the second. Connor squirmed and wriggled in his grip but Carl held fast, no longer caring if he hurt the baby.

The ramp fell with an unheard thud to the grass the same moment Carl swung the hinged section of railing closed and set the latch.

The mob slammed against the hull. Men in suits tried to scale the sides, only to slip on the thick coats of grease and fall onto three others waiting below. Everyone looked behind them at the monster rising over the town. The woman with the sandwiches raised one of her children towards the deck. There was no one there to pull him on board. The boy squirmed, and someone grabbed his foot as if to pull himself up. Both came crashing down.

*     *     *

“Everyone stay in the Lord's house for these final moments! God is pleased you came to him and we must continue the Mass!” Some of the parishioners, mostly those near the front, calmed a little and knelt in the pews. These people were safe from the chaos at the back of the church. There, the crowd pushed in claustrophobic mindlessness towards the exit. One of the glass doors shattered. The jet-plane roar from outside shook the building.

Nick held one hand flat against the altar and tried to remember where he'd left off. The Host and Chalice were prepared, but he didn’t think it was time for the benediction. He looked at the front row, at the young couple