Obey or be destroyed

Wednesday, September 25, 2019

My God! This month has been insane.

I haven’t been online for a while. I understand things are different in other parts of the country, but here in SoCal things have disintegrated into chaos. There have been four more good sized quakes, and dozens of small ones. We haven’t had stable power for two weeks, and up until this morning the city grid has been ‘temporarily offline by order of the Department of Homeland Security, Information Directorate.” Make of that what you will. I’m not commenting, I’ve got enough problems.

Angels appeared in Los Angeles and San Diego on the morning of August 27th, two days after the Mexico City Ultimatum, and a day after the events in Washington and Buffalo and Kansas City.

I guess they were welcomed in the Midwest, John and I watched their arrival in Kansas City, it seemed as the whole population was out, singing hymns and holding up candles like some 90’s We Are The World concert. I guess it was fairly peaceful there, at first. We haven’t heard any reports out of there in a week though, so I have no idea what it’s like.

The vicious commenter Anon Y Mous, whom I’ll just call Mouse from now on, told me to stop giving second hand reports. I never intended to be a source of news, Mouse, and I have no idea of where you live, but you’ll get your wish today if you’re still around. What I’m about to say I saw with my own eyes. And I really wish I hadn’t.

About 10 AM on August 27th, we were sitting in the dinning room watching the news with what has become our usual motley crew: Geeky Dude, Born Again, and the Preacher (who is turning out to be an interesting fellow, more on that later). Geeky Dude’s phone rang, he answered it, and turned pale as milk.

“They are here,” he announced. “In the park.”

Balboa Park of course.

“Get your hat, Van,” John said to me. “I want to see these things for myself.”

“Screw that!” Geeky Dude said. “I’m going home and hide under the bed. I don’t want to be anywhere near those things. Nobody has heard shit out of Buffalo in two days! And you all heard what happened in Tehran, right?”

We’d heard. But I didn’t have any intention of throwing rocks at Angels or Aliens or whatever they were. Yeah, yeah, hindsight, but even canny old John didn’t see this one coming.

We locked up and I hung the “closed” sign on the door. Geeky Dude went home to, presumably, hide under his bed and Born Again went off to find a prayer meeting or something. But The Preacher tagged along with us. As I said, he has turned out to be an interesting fellow, not at all what either John or I were expecting. No fire, no brimstone and he hasn’t tried to convert either one of us, yet.

We took the trolley down to the zoo station. And zoo was the right word, the crowd was huge and growing larger every minute. There were prayer groups and people singing. There were a lot of frightened looking, ordinary folks. And lots and lots of crazies. I saw a dozen big guys who looked like they were having the time of their lives; they were dressed up as science fiction soldiers and had painted themselves leaf green. I had no idea who the hell they were or what they were doing, but they seemed to be having fun. It was pretty obvious that the cops had completely given up on enforcing the ordinance, and were just settling for trying to maintain some kind of order. There were more Blackrivers than I’ve ever seen, but even with all of their fancy gear they couldn’t do much more than the PD – so they just stood around glaring at people and stroking their machine pistols. Somebody said the Angles were near the fountain in front of the museum, and we pushed through the crowd in that direction. John took point, he’s built like a bulldozer and he forced a path for me and The Preacher. We made our way through the Spanish Village and around the Natural History Museum, and managed to find a spot on the steps.

And there they were, less than a hundred yards away.

I don’t know if you seen the pictures. I’d put some up but my bandwidth is limited at the moment, maybe in a couple of days. I’ll try to describe it. There were twenty of them at first, in a circle around the base of the fountain, facing outward. As far as I could tell they were identical to the ones that appeared in Mexico City. Giants, The Preacher said, and giants they are. If you haven’t seen one, they are enormous – comparing them to the fountain, I’d say they are at least nine to ten feet in height, and huge across the shoulders. They look like men in football gear, only not.

“Neanderthals,” The Preacher said.

“Yah, that’s what I thought too,” John answered. “But, damn, I thought cave men were shorter than modern humans.”

The Preacher gave us both a look, and I’m still not sure what he meant when he said, “I guess God can make his servants any size he wants. The Bible and the Torah both speak of Giants, Nephilim. Goliath was a giant, supposedly. And there are Neanderthal skeletons in the Dan Carmel natural history museum in Haifa, in Israel, I’ve seen them. No giants, but…”

“You’re saying those aren’t Angels then?” Somebody shouted from behind us, The Preacher had been overheard, apparently. People started making growling noises, I swear, they wanted to believe and it was about then that I realized just how quickly things could turn ugly.

“No.” Preacher said in that reasonable tone he has. He held up his bible so everybody could see it. “According to Jewish text, Nephilim are not Angels, they were the giants of Canaan…”

“Fuck the Jews, those bastards are going to get judged today!” somebody shouted.

“Shut up. Now.” John told The Preacher.

“Yeah, big mistake.”

John and I pushed the crowd back but I thought we were going to get lynched right there.

And then it happened.

I just caught it out of the corner of my eye when the Angel appeared over the fountain. There was a crack like thunder and then dead silence; you could hear echoes from the boom rolling down over the city. I’ve never seen so many people so suddenly quiet. There was a scream or two, then – nothing. People began falling to their knees, I would probably have been one of them, but we were pressed up against the railing and could barely move. I guess up to that point I didn’t really believe that they were actual Angels. Even seeing the Nephilim with my own eyes hadn’t completely convinced me, Hollywood and Disneyworld are just up the road after all, and some of their special effects are just as convincing. Maybe more so.

But the Angel was different. It glowed with a fiery white light and its wings were like nothing I’ve ever seen. Oil on water, somebody said. Yeah, if the oil was burning in a thousand unnamed colors, colors you didn’t even know existed before you saw them, and if the oil was floating on water that reflected the light of a thousand nebulas, like those pictures from the old James Webb space telescope. It’s been a month and I can’t get the image of those wings out of my mind. The pictures on TV and the internet are nothing but shadows compared to the real thing. Those wings are like a door into another dimension, or into Heaven.

The Angel was different from the Mexico City Angel. Smaller, though much taller than a man. It hovered above the fountain and its robes floated around it like those ghosts in the final scene of Raiders of the Lost Ark. The wings moved, but not like a bird flapping, and it was pretty obvious to me that they weren't what was holding the Angel up. The Angel was thin, elfin almost, and its skin glowed with pale light. There was a halo around its head – a ghostly rainbow of light. I couldn’t see it very well from where I was standing, but afterward people said that it was like when light bends going through water. And no matter how you looked at it, it was always the same, the same orientation as if there was an invisible sphere around the Angel's head that you can only see then the light passes through the edges.

It raised its arms and spoke.

Obey the Word. Cooperate and be rewarded. Resist and be destroyed.

Its voice was like nothing I can describe. It was like, well, angels. Like a choir. Like an earthquake. Like a thousand people screaming. Like buildings falling. Like worlds colliding.

Like the Voice of God.

I heard it in English. I understand that others heard it in different languages, and heard different words though the message was the same. I don’t know. I don’t know if I heard it with my ears or somewhere inside my brain. People fainted. People were crying. I heard ten thousand people moaning together and I might have been one of them. Rapture.

I am Arhiziel, Messenger to the Light and Servant of The One. The rule of man is at an end. We have returned and things will be as they were. The Host will move among you. Obey the Word, do not interfere. Failure to heed the Word will unleash the fires of Heaven.

Until I die I’ll remember those words, I can’t forget them.

And I’ll never forget what happened next either.

There was a popping noise. And people screaming. And you could see across the plaza something was going on, people trying to run, but so packed that they could hardly move.

What kind of batshit crazy does it take to shoot at an Angel?

Arhiziel turned to face the sound, unharmed so far as I could tell, and raised his horn. Up to that point I hadn’t even noticed that he had one. I only got a brief glimpse, but I’ve seen pictures since. It doesn’t really look like a horn, other than the flared bell, and I couldn’t describe it any better than I can describe the Angel’s wings. But I can describe the results, it's not a horn or a trump or any other musical instrument – it’s a weapon.

There was a sound, more terrible than anything, and the buildings began to come apart. I only saw what was happening to the people for a second, I saw the whole front line of security go down and come apart just like the buildings, before John grabbed me from behind.

“Time to go!”

“Where!”

“Through the building, this way!” The Preacher led us towards the doors and I noticed that he elbowed Jew Baiter in the nose as he went past. We made it through the doors with the museum ripping apart around us. The sound was unbelievable! We found a fire exit on the far side of the building. We got through the crowd faster than I would have believed possible, people were still pushing towards the fountain, toward the carnage, they hadn't figured it out yet. We yelled at them as we went past but nobody was listening. Eventually we made it across the Cabrillo bridge and across US5.

A dozen Blackrivers were running ahead of us, dropping weapons and uniforms. John got one of the machine pistols, and The Preacher grabbed two more. Me, I just ran and had just enough remaining sense to realize that an ex-con with a weapon was a very, very bad idea.

It took us hours to get back to the café, we walked most of the way.

I don't know how many people died. If the government knows, they're not saying. Martial Law came down that night and has been in place ever since.

And that, of course, was only the beginning.

Posted by VanDerDecken at 8;02 AM