When Your Apocalypse Goes Wrong.
The morning of September 23, 20__, when the Seven Trumpets sounded, few were even aware. Traffic noise, blaring TVs, iPods with headphones, and the general chatter of 7 billion humans drowned out the sound for most of the population.
The Anti-Christ appeared that day, but James (The Amazing) Randi debunked every one of his “miracles” and the poor guy was doomed from that point onward to prestidigitation acts in local and state fairs, and Shriner Telethons for Birth Defects.
When the Seven Headed Beast rose up out of the sea, it made the mistake of appearing on the coast of South Carolina. It was met by the AR15’s of a group of White Nationalist Militiamen. The Whore of Babylon barely escaped with her life. An enterprising owner of a local truck stop teamed up with a local taxidermist to quickly stuff and mount the corpse of the Great Beast, and the Flying J Truck Stop became a favorite stop for selfies among families headed to the Outer Banks. Children loved to crawl up and down it’s scaly back, while mom and dad snapped numerous photos.
(The Whore, having no other recourse, went into porn films, and Babs Long was said to be the greatest new porn starlet of the age… with Historic Knockers.)
When the sky was rolled up like a scroll, meteorologists the world over explained it as a simple case of the Coriolis effect combined with a massive temperature inversion. As the “stars fell to earth” everyone craned their necks to see the yearly light show of the Geminid Meteor Showers. No one was especially impressed.
The angel poured out his vial of poison into the seas, and a strange chemical reaction occurred, the poison acting as a catalyst that allowed the discarded plastics and spilled crude oil to combine with all the CO2 dissolved in the waters, and creating a form of limestone that quickly sank to the ocean floor as sediments. The seas had not been so clear and pollution free in over two centuries. Sea life, much of it on the brink of extinction, rebounded, and whale, dolphin, fish, and shark populations once again played freely throughout the waters.
When the angel poured his vial of diseases onto the lands of the world, The Centers For Disease Control and various similar government agencies world wide, rushed to contain the plagues, having been preparing for years for a pandemic of Bird Flu or Ebola Virus, and being bored to tears when such diseases never materialized on any global scale. The plagues were soon eradicated.
The Four Horsemen touched down to Earth, they made the mistake of landing on a runway at Dulles Airport in Washington, and were promptly arrested for creating a hazard to airline navigation. They were all convicted, sentenced to 200 hours of community service and later found jobs. Conquest and War were immediately hired at the Pentagon, Famine went to work for the CIA Black Ops Division, and Death became the new Head of the IRS. Their beasts were sent to a nearby Purina factory, but rumors connecting this to an outbreak of dog attacks in West Virginia a week later were greatly exaggerated.
When the Moon turned to blood, nobody was at all surprised, the Lunar Eclipse had been predicted months in advance.
Jesus fared no better. His own arrival, on his shining white charger, with the hosts of heaven at his back was met by ICE Agents. Jesus, being a bit too brown skinned for their tastes, and having no papers or a green card, was promptly shipped off to the nearest Detention Facility. The hosts of heaven, having no leader or purpose, wandered the countryside, begging for food and odd jobs. When “The Dead In Christ” rose from their graves, a nation too well primed by many seasons of “The Walking Dead” took to the streets with every blunt object they could find, and beat the zombies of their own loved ones back into their graves.
After almost a month in custody, Jesus was deported to Tijuana, but being that he spoke no Spanish and none of the locals understood a word of ancient Aramaic, he wasn’t able to find even one disciple, let alone another twelve. He wandered south until, in a small village outside Mexico City, one Pablo Hernandez took pity on the strange fellow. This turned out to be a boon for Pablo, as he owned a small tavern. He put the crazy guy to work, and this turned out very well, as his ability to turn water into tequila, and to magically multiply tacos meant Pablo no longer had much overhead. Sure, the fellow was useless when the occasional fight broke out, being a bit of a “puta” and having no “cojones” whatsoever, but he worked for no pesos and slept out in the stable because, as he explained in his very broken Spanish, it reminded him of when he was a “bebé pequeño”…
When the “New Jerusalem” appeared falling through the clouds, a world weaned on Star Trek mistook the cube-like “Holy City of God” for a Borg Cube… five nations immediately launched an all out nuclear attack, blasting the offending Metropolis into a billion small shards. A week later, when North Korea finally heard the news, Kim Jong-Un declared to his people that he alone had fought the descending city with his own nukes and a blunt sword. The rest of the world laughed at the crazy, fat, little dictator.
The sun going black was no surprise either, as everyone knew of the upcoming total solar eclipse, the only result was an uptick in sales of those cheap paper eclipse glasses.
It was nearly a month after the initial trumpet blast (that nobody noticed) that something molten shot from the caldera of Mauna Loa in Hawaii and scientists were baffled by the fact that while it shot straight skyward, it never returned. This was perhaps the most puzzling event of the entire sequence.
In his cloud castle, Yahweh sat on his golden throne, and Lucifer (the unexplained molten thing) appeared before him.
“So, what have you to say for yourself, Lucifer?” Yahweh demanded.
“What? I did everything you commanded of me… it’s not my fault the humans don’t need you any longer.” he responded, a bit miffed by it all.
“Say old bean, are you losing some weight?” Yahweh asked.
“Not that I am aware, but come to think of it, you’re looking a bit slimmer too… and maybe a might transparent…”
“Wait, what’s going on?” Yahweh asked, truly puzzled for the first time in many, many ages.
If you had been there, and had strained your ears, you might have heard the tiny pop sound, as the two old adversaries ceased to exist. It was even possible you might have heard Lucifer explaining… “Now that they don’t believe in us anymore, we have nothing to support our existence” as they faded into the nothingness from whence they’d come.
Heaven’s clouds blew off to the west, and people from San Diego to Vancouver were treated to the most amazing sunset anyone had ever seen.
And everyone lived happily ever after… that is, until two weeks later when the Stars Aligned and deep under the Pacific, in forgotten R’Lyeh, ancient Cthulhu stirred from his aeons of slumber…
Seriously:
THE END
