Armageddon?? (37 page)

Apartment
in Queens, New York  He carefully wrote out the name and address on the plain
manila envelope with his black sharpie. It whispered across the surface as his
elegant but simple strokes spelled out the name James Randi. He stopped for a
moment, the quiet dulcet tones of the classical music in the background was
swelling up now and he listened. He ignored the palsied shaking of his left
hand. There was no time for fear.

His
eyes drifted down to the small pile of photos stacked up next to the open
envelope. The top photo was a wide angled shot of an African village, thatched
huts and low hanging solitary trees with scrub brush everywhere. It was almost
clichéd as if he had taken a photo of an African village set in the back lot of
Paramount. He only wished that were true. In the wide angled shot there were
plumes of black smoke rising up in several locations throughout the center of
the village. His thoughts, unbidden as always, drifted back to that moment in
time. His eyes lost their focus on the photo and he was no longer in his quiet
home in a non-descript neighborhood of Queens. He was stalking through the deep
scrub brush of the African village.

The
heat was oppressive and the sweat clung to his body unwilling to leave and
unable to really cool him in this Subsaharan warmth. He had heard of the
atrocities committed here in Darfur and like many of the Western journalists
here he was losing hope that anyone cared about the Africans dying in the
wastes of this forsaken place. As he walked into the village he was painfully
aware of how alone he was here and how exposed should rebel or government
forces decide to descend on this village and finish what they had obviously
started. He could already hear the lamentation of the women. It was a mournful
yet desperate dirge that refused any succor or solace.

It
was the wailing of the women, the gnashing of the teeth of the men that must
have attracted it here. The sounds of death in the old ways. The way people
used to mourn before things got so civilized. But he was getting ahead of
himself, wasn’t he? He stepped between huts and abandoned carts, weaving
through the debris and the occasional crater caused by some form of ordinance.
Perhaps the government had sent another of it Russian made bombers up north to
deal more death to these villagers. It had happened before.

He
camera whirred and clicked in rapid fire sequence as he took his shots while
moving through the village, a discarded doll, a shoe left in the dirt, blood
smeared across a doorway. It was all a flowing narrative and he was capturing
it as best he could in this miserable heat and squalor. The smell struck him as
soon as he approached the town center and he immediately knew what the fires
were. People were burning. He pulled his camera up before him like a weapon,
fingers tense as he prepared to take his shots.

He
stepped over a dead mule, the flies already swirling in angry buzzing clouds.
His eyes narrowed on the ruined town center. The market was on fire and there
were people trapped within some of the flaming wrecks. A lot of people. The
bombs struck at midday when many of the villagers were gathering what they
could for dinner. The people who did this knew precisely what they were doing
when they carried out the attack. He began snapping photos, lens quietly
clicking as it focused in on the flailing limbs of the trapped and burning,
capturing the expressions of pain and anguish. The lost hope was stamped across
the faces of relatives. He had to keep taking the pictures because if he
stopped, even for a moment, he could actually begin to comprehend what he was
actually seeing and he would lose all sense of composure and self control.

People
were trapped in the rubble and being burned alive and there was nothing anyone
could do about it. He captured, with numb resolve, the desperately futile
attempts by relatives and good Samaritans to douse the flames with buckets of
water or dirt. He continued snapping pictures as they worked furiously.
Suddenly a young girl rushed up to him and began tugging at his arm and
speaking to him in machine gun like delivery. She was begging him, begging in
the most heart wrenching manner for assistance. All he could do was drop his
camera for a moment and shake his head sadly. Tears welled up in her eyes and
she pulled now, almost as if trying to physically drag him to the scene. He
continued to shake his head and then weakly responded in his stilted version of
her dialect that he could do nothing.

She
shook her head and wailed, slapping herself on the sides of her forehead and
falling to her knees. She sunk down into the packed earth and sobbed into it as
if it were her mother’s breast. Her body shifting back and forth furiously as
if trying to burrow into the ground to escape her grief and her cries were like
knives in his heart. He stared down at the sight dumbly, unsure what to say or
do. His Western mind was unprepared for this level of grief.

“It
is like music don’t you think, Jude?”

He
froze. The voice was soft like silk sheets on skin. The person stood beside
him, materializing out of the air like a shadow escaping the noon day sun.

“The
anguish, the terror, the guilt. When death comes for humanity it is the most
feared and awesome event in their too brief lives.” His eyes slowly turned to
regard the person. He stood taller than Jude, black as obsidian in the sun and
wearing simple white shirt opened at the chest with filthy khakis. His feet
were clad in battered hiking boots. The boots were splattered with what he
guessed were ancient blood stains. “Imagine it, Jude. You come into this world
and breath for the first time you have simultaneously taken one more step
towards death.” The newcomer turned his head slowly to face him and it was so
achingly graceful that Jude wanted to weep. “The moment you are born you are
dying. That is the paradox in which you live.”

Jude
shook his head slowly. “Who are you?” he asked quietly. There was an awesome
sense of power around him, like standing next to a livewire and he was dimly
aware that the activity around them, the dying and the screams were all slowing
down and muted as if the world were pausing out of respect for his conversation
with the stranger.

The
stranger smiled softly as if at a private joke. “I am a traveler in your world,
I come and go as I please and where I go death follows me.”

“You’re
not human.” Jude replied without thinking and immediately had no idea why he
just said that.

“I
am more than anything you have ever known, Jude, son of Gregory. I am the
sword, the scythe of the One Above All and in my passing entire nations have
wept bitter tears. The first born tremble at my name.”

Unspoken,
Jude heard a single name whispered with reverence in his head. “Uriel.”

The
black Adonis like being said nothing but pursed his lips as if contemplating
his next words carefully. “Follow me.”

“What?”
Jude stammered.

“Follow
me, Jude. I have many roads yet to travel and this continent pleases me. The
people here still know how to grieve. They are still connected on a primal
level to death and mortality. Your sterile world repels and abhors me. Death in
your world is a clinical state with consequences tied up in paper work and
inconvenience. Here. In this place.” Uriel slowly raised his arms as if to
embrace some unseen thing on the ether. “Death is still felt.”

“This
is insane.”

“No,
this is life and death happening now. There is something coming. A great
message that might make even your great Empires in the West feel again. I
wanted to bask in the cold glow of entropy one last time before I must leave
this place.”

“I’m
talking to the angel of death…” Jude whispered to himself in disbelief. “I
finally lost it. I’ve seen too much.”

Uriel
suddenly reached out, at least Jude guessed he reached out because he must have
done it between the blinks of an eye, for the in the next instant Uriel’s hand
grasped Jude’s chin tightly and forced him to look into his eyes. And in the
angel’s eyes he saw pool of white within white and something else. Something
dark and chittering like a mad insect.

“FOCUS
child of Seth.”

Jude’s
hair grayed at the temples and he felt a palsy come over him, hands shaking and
his bowels released their contents without hesitation. He stood in abject
terror, rooted in place and suddenly everything Uriel wanted and said was the
sole thing in Jude’s universe.

“Follow
me, you will know my wake for in it there is pestilence, war and famine. Follow
me throughout this continent and see my great works. For when I am gone there
will be none like me again in this universe. I am the One Above All’s scythe,
where I go, humanity dies. I am not just some quaint Angel of Death, I am
entropy incarnate. I weep for your world for my touch is far more merciful than
what is to come. The Morningstar has always been too…blunt an instrument for my
taste.”

Jude
said nothing but his tongue lolled in his mouth and his vision began to fade.
He could hear his own heartbeat pounding in his ears and the roar of blood.,
His heart was slowing, inexorably slowing to a dull thrumming and he could feel
ice collecting where Uriel’s fingers touched his flesh, his blood had instantly
recoiled at the touch and remained away from the points of flesh on flesh contact.

“Within
your bloodline is carried the ancient gift like the one borne by the Witch of
Endor and all that ilk. You can see me for what I am. So follow me, Jude, I
choose you as my final witness in these dark days. A prophet for a new age.”

Uriel
released Jude’s chin and watched the young man for a moment as blood rushed
back into his face and graying cold clammy skin slowly regained its luster. His
hair remained grey and his cheeks had sunk in slightly. There was no doubt
these were scars that would remain. One did not touch the divine without scars
remaining to mark its passage.

Uriel
looked back over the crowd of screaming refugees, the world apparently was
coming back up to speed and volume and nodded as if coming to a decision.
“Peace be with you and my peace I grant you.” He whispered and suddenly every
single living thing in the town square down to the angrily buzzing flies
dropped to the earth in an instant. Uriel nodded in satisfaction turned in a
slow beautiful motion and strode away. In the glaring noon day sun Jude saw the
hint of ebony wings jutting from his back. He numbly looked around and then
realized what had happened and acted as only he could. He lifted his camera.

He
snapped back to the here and now and saw that he had finished writing the
address. He sighed softly and coughed. Blood speckled down on the white coffee
table. Yes, one did not walk with the Angel of Death and remain untouched. He
gently took the stack of photos and scanned them one last time before slipping
them into the envelope. Each photo a place in Africa, each one a record of
devastation and death and each one followed by a photo of a black man, black
enough to have been carved from obsidian like a walking statute and beautiful,
so beautiful that in many instances the photos of his face simply blurred as if
man’s technology simply could not capture the sheer grace of the being, and in
many of these photos there were the onyx wings unfurled like a predatory hawk
as it strode through the wreckage of its passing.

Every
prophet needed his gospel. Every prophet needed to warn the people. Jude
Sanchez was no different. He had to warn the world that Baldricks were not the
only thing that stalked them from beyond. He sealed the envelope.

Hampshire,
England.

The
knock at the door came while Commander Nigel ‘Sharkey’ Ward, DSC, AFC, RN
(Retired) was eating his breakfast. Cursing the interruption at this hour of
the morning he made his way to the door.

“Yes,
what is it?” He asked before taking in who his visitor was.

To
his surprise he saw a very young looking Sub-Lieutenant, Ward noticed the wings
on his sleeve marking him as a naval aviator, with two armed bluejackets, both
wearing the brassard of the Naval Police, standing behind him.

“Commander
Ward, Sir.” The young officer said.

“Yes,
how can I help you, Sub?”

“Your
presence is required at Yeovilton, Sir.” The Sub-Lieutenant replied, handing
Ward a sealed envelope.

He
was shocked to discover that is was from the First Sea Lord and Chief of the
Naval Staff, Admiral Sir Jonathan Band, himself. It informed him that the Royal
Navy was returning the Sea Harrier FA.2 to service and as part of this was
recalling as many retired Sea Jet pilots to service as it could. As the senior
Sea Harrier pilot, and pioneer in operating the aircraft, his services were
required for refresher training. Admiral Band also offered him a promotion to
Captain should he accept this post, if not he would simply be conscripted as a
pilot at his former rank.

“Give
me ten minutes to pack a few things, Sub, and those two Regulators won’t be
necessary.”

Bruntingthorpe
Aerodrome, Leicestershire.

The
aerodrome echoed to the sound of four Rolls-Royce Olympus turbojet engines
being throttled up to full power. A great delta winged shape emerged from
behind one of the hangars and made its way towards the runway; Vulcan XH558 was
back in service.