Excerpt 1
Edward Selander first professed to be a Christian in 1973. He attended church regularly the first few years, but became disillusioned and began to fall away from the traditional Christian teachings. In 1977, he began a pilgrimage to find “the one true church.” After a “long and arduous search” he found that virtually all of the earth’s religions were “abominations in the eyes of God.” In 1979, he ordained himself a minister, declared himself a Prophet of God, and founded the Church of the End Times. His new religion had a pretty good run in the early 1980s, but quickly dwindled and died by the end of the decade.
When his church failed, Edward made himself a recluse and withdrew into the woods of Tennessee where he had planned to live out a solitary life. The mailman found him lying in the middle of a dirt road two miles from his shack. He was rushed to the nearest hospital in Franklin, where he lay in a deep coma. It had been determined that he’d been bitten by a rabid raccoon.
As Edward progressed deeper into the ravages of the disease, he was moved to John the Baptist Hospital in Nashville where modern medical intervention made it possible for him to linger for two more agonizing months.
Nurse Nicole Pangos adjusted his ventilator and checked his pupils. They were fully dilated, showing no brain activity whatsoever. That was to be expected. The virus had ravaged his brain tissue until there was little left. For all intents and purposes, Edward Selander no longer had a brain. In fact, a machine was beating his heart and another was breathing for him. He was dead, if not clinically.
Nurse Pangos began giving Edward his daily sponge bath. Lifting his frail chest high off the bed, she untied the light blue hospital smock, pulled it down to his waist and began washing his chest and arms. Suddenly Edward’s legs began to quake. Nurse Pangos backed away, let the seizure run its course, and then continued washing. She pulled his respirator off long enough to lift his upper torso, allowing her access to his back. She scrubbed hard, paying close attention to the reddening patches developing around his shoulder blades and hipbones. Satisfied he was clean, she laid him back on the bed and moved to his legs.
Pulling the covers down past Edward’s feet, she lifted the smock allowing her access to his upper thighs. She had just resumed scrubbing when she felt his legs began to tremble. This time she paid little attention. She was running late and there were other patients who needed to be bathed. She began curiously inspecting the bite mark still clearly visible just above his right knee when she became aware of an odd sensation—a stirring near her right ear. Then she felt something warm… air, breath—hot, putrid breath—blowing on her right cheek. She turned and nearly collided noses with a face, its black pupil-filled eyes inches from her own.
***
Nurse Wright heard the terrified screaming all the way back at the nurse’s station. Unsure of where the screams were coming from, she jumped from behind the desk and began sprinting down the hall. Within seconds, she pinpointed the room and burst through Edward Selander’s door. From her immediate vantage point she could see wild-eyed Nurse Pangos crouching in the corner of the room still shrieking.
Rounding the corner, Nurse Wright skidded to a stop. To her horror, Selander’s body was sitting stiffly upright on the bed. A scream burst from deep within her as she saw his dead eyes stare blankly at the hysterical nurse Pangos. Then his long dead, atrophied neck muscles began responding to his non-existent brain. Slowly, the head began turning towards Nurse Wright. The grisly black eyes, void of life, mechanically moved with the head until the ghastly face came full around and fixed a terrifying stare in the direction of Nurse Wright. Thick spit slowly oozed from the chin, hanging haphazardly from the contorted face.
Suddenly Nurse Joe Glines, one of the male nurses, blasted into the room. What he saw sent him reeling backwards into the wall.
***
“What’s happening?” Senator Groyden asked.
“I don’t know,” the news reporter answered, moving toward the hospital room door. She peeked out into the hall then turned back. “Could you excuse me for a moment, Senator?”
“Is that someone screaming?” the Senator asked.
“I don’t know,” she answered, still staring down the hall in the direction of the commotion.
“Uh, I’m gonna go down there for a moment, Senator, okay? I’ll be right back.”
She disappeared into the hall without getting an answer. The cameraman stood looking at the senator for an uncomfortable moment. “I’m sure she’ll be…right back.”
The senator scowled as the cameraman nervously went silent, turning his attention to his camera. Suddenly, the reporter reappeared in the doorway.
“Bring…camera…now…run…bring the camera…now!” She was ashen faced and screaming.
“What?”
She jumped, grabbed the cameraman, and pulled him out the door. The two clattered down the hall and turned into Edward Selander’s room. The cameraman gasped as the horror filled his viewfinder. He dropped his camera to his chest and joined Nurse Joe Glines, pressing himself against the wall.
The reporter pushed her way through the mayhem toward the cameraman. “Take…get…get this!” She pushed the camera back into the cameraman’s face. Again, the horror filled the camera’s view screen.
Something deep inside of what was left of Edward Selander began pushing air through dead, atrophied, vocal cords. As his oozing mouth began forming words, Nurse Joe Glines lost control of his bladder.
“Woe! Woe! Woe to the inhabitants
of the earth!”
The voice sounded like heavy grade sandpaper grinding across a piece of hardwood.
“Woe! Woe! Woe to the inhabitants
of the earth!”
The voice reverberated out of the
room and down the hall, invading every room until every corner of the hospital
was vibrating with the sound of it.
“How thou art fallen from heaven,
o Lucifer, son of the morning! How thou art cut down to the ground, which didst
weaken the nations!”
The three nurses and the news crew stood staring at the horror before them, still sitting up on the bed. The camera rolled as the very air in the room began to thicken. From nowhere and everywhere, near and far, it started softly at first. It was, they were almost sure, but it didn’t sound human … it sounded like… screaming. It sounded like a billion voices in one immense chorus. Like the unearthly disconnected screams of the forever damned.
The sound was building into an
unimaginable roar. Everyone in the room cupped their ears and hit the floor.
Nurse Joe Glines glanced up just in time to see the horror collapse onto the
bed like a rag doll.
Edward Selander had finally been granted his long awaited death.
Excerpt 2
Banging on the door!
Blood poured like a waterfall from a huge wooden table.
“Let my people go!” Moses ranted through his snow-white beard as lightning flashed and thunder crashed behind him on the mountain. Blaze sat at Moses’ colossal feet, hammering a massive golden bible with his fist.
Banging on the door!
The girl in the lobby smiled, her black hair framing her beautiful face, flowing down her neck, past her voluptuous breasts, down her curvy white stomach, swirling around her navel, dripping off—then turning liquid red, flowing into blood-stained buckets.
BANG! BANG! BANG!
Jim Donahue bolted upright from his nightmare. It took him a moment to fully regain his senses.
BANG! BANG! BANG!
He kicked off his covers and jumped from his bed, his heart pounding in his chest. He glanced down at the glowing red clock sitting on the nightstand. 2:27 glimmered in the darkness. He turned and stumbled in the dark, searching for the light switch, when he was rocked by yet another round of pounding.
BANG! BANG! BANG!
“Coming!” he yelled. “I’m comin’ already!” He found the switch, clicked on the light and reached for the doorknob. “Who’s there?”
No answer. He peered through the peephole…nothing.
BANG! BANG! BANG!
Jim leapt back, barely suppressing a scream, then reached for the door handle.
He wasn’t aware of the door opening, only that he was suddenly bathed in a swirling orb of indescribably bright light. He instinctively covered his eyes, then realized the light wasn’t painful. He felt profound awe, wonder, and then—fear as he became aware of a low, rumbling sound coming toward him like a distant tsunami. The sound grew closer and louder until the walls shook around him. That’s when he realized the roar was forming…words. He braced himself as he felt it coming.
“THOU SHALT NOT HINDER MY SON.”
The immense, hot voice passed through him, blasting his hair back and knocking him backward to the floor. Pictures smashed against the wall. The mirror spun off, and crashed through the window as the colossal utterance roared on into the courtyard, bending and snapping trees as it pushed a path of debris into the darkness. And then it was gone.
The dazzling light gradually faded. Slowly, slivers of dull, earth-bound light began to appear as doors cautiously opened revealing panicked faces peering out into the dim-lit hall. Jim leapt to his feet and ran from his room wearing only his black sweat pants. He jumped over a pile of debris, rounded the first right, and disappeared down the hall.
Excerpt 3
Deep in the great void of space, the school bus-sized craft floated nearly 380 miles over the marbled turquoise planet. Its orbital speed, around 17,500 miles per hour, insured that it would return to this very spot, somewhere over the west coast of Africa every 97 minutes. The gleaming chrome cylinder, with its odd wing-like protrusions, glistened against the blackness of space. Suddenly, the craft’s four reaction wheels whirred to life. The gyros aboard the Hubble space telescope began tugging the big craft hard to port, as the hatch door energized and slowly swung open.
The craft methodically maneuvered around until the precise Fine Guidance Sensors began to slow the gyros down. The bulky telescope coasted to a stop exactly where it was told and quickly began focusing on a tiny point somewhere between the earth and star cluster NGC 3532. Once in place, the four cameras located within the Hubble’s wide field and planetary camera began recording data.
Camera number four was recording a large panoramic view of the area, a view that would later be scaled down to be in proportion with the other three images being recorded simultaneously. The magnified view then fell on WFPC2’s planetary camera. It was viewing a region of space four times smaller than that seen by the wide field cameras, but was recording four times as much detail, focusing on an area no larger than the state of California and two and a quarter trillion miles away.
Three hours later, deep in the lush, green Puerto Rican hills, 26 electric motors located at the Arecibo Observatory whirred to life and began tugging the vast Gregorian dome—suspended 450 feet above the inverted reflector—until it was over the exact spot corresponding with the frequency of the same small area of space.
Near San Diego, California, at the Palomar Observatory, two 125 ton dome shutters began swinging open. At the Atacama Large Millimeter Array, deep in the Atacama Desert of Chile, 64 colossal antennas, each spanning forty feet, began eerily moving in unison like mammoth faces staring into the sky. They moved until they located their programmed coordinates and stopped. Within hours, computers were crunching out the numbers as all over the world scientists frantically scrambled, checking and rechecking the disturbing data, now pouring in from everywhere.
Excerpt 4
“This is Draper at The Ground-Based Electro-Optical Deep Space Surveillance in Maui. I’ve got Dante657 entering New York City airspace, still holding at sixteen k. It’s coming in high…steadily dropping altitude… maintaining, just above its projected course…Estimated time…of impact…eight minutes thirty two seconds…Switching to visual.”
The New York City skyline suddenly appeared on millions of televisions and computer monitors all over the world.
***
“I don’t see anything!” Nate Rosario yelled over the talk phone. “Do you read me? I’m not getting anything on the monitor! This is Rosario at the BBD communications desk. I’m not getting anything on visual. Has it already passed by?”
“Do you have the skyline?” the technician yelled back.
“Yes, but nothing’s happening. Shouldn’t we see—”
Suddenly, a blinding flash of light overcame the visual.
“What happened?” Rosario yelled. “The camera went dead. This stuff isn’t working…wait, it’s coming back!”
Random activity began slowly reappearing on his monitor. Computers switched automatically trying to locate one of the few surviving rooftop cameras. Within moments, the computers locked on to an active feed. Billowing clouds of dust peppered with flying street signs and billboards came into view. Trees, paper, and turbulent black rolling debris filled the screen.
Entire rooftops were spinning to the ground like gigantic Frisbees.
