What the Hand: A Novel About the End of the World and Beyond

by Stockwell, Todd

  I’m not sure why, but seeing the look on her face took the fear right out of me. I wasn’t afraid at all any longer; in fact, I was angry, so I did what I always did when I was angry or cornered. I opened my big fat mouth. “I thought she was your fiancée?” I said, stretching out the word fiancée as long as I could to get the full effect.

  Of course, it was a big mistake. The crowd broke out laughing. I glanced up enough to finally view the surrounding horde. They were having a lot of fun at our expense, and for about a half a second I was actually enjoying myself, too, until I looked back up into the now red face of Bret McNeil and realized he had no choice but to give me the beating of my life. And so he did.

  ***

  Bret didn’t knock me unconscious or anything, but he pummeled me to the ground, giving me a black eye and a bunch of other bruises. I made only a halfhearted attempt at fighting back because I knew I would get it worse if I resisted. After a while, figuring I was done, he left me to nurse my wounds.

  ***

  Kids back then, even big dumb jocks like McNeil, had a lot more scruples when it came to fighting. I mean a kid might beat you up and all, but he wouldn’t keep kicking you in the head or something once he knew you were beat. I don’t know how many videos I have seen where some kid was already unconscious, yet the kicks and the punches and the bottles, and everything else kept coming without mercy. Nobody died from a fight when I was a kid, but in the years before the Rapture, kids were often seriously injured, brain-damaged or paralyzed—even killed—in stupid fights over nothing. There was no longer any sense of fairness or sportsmanship, or whatever you want to call it. The Old Earth had become a violent free-for-all even on the playgrounds.

  ***

  I didn’t hate Bret McNeil or Susan Shaker after he kicked my butt on her orders. In fact, in just a few days, I felt no animosity toward them whatsoever. But that was the way it was with me. I don’t know why, but I just couldn’t hold a grudge. Maybe that’s why God didn’t hold my botched life against me.

  I actually felt sorry for them in a way because they weren’t very likable people. It seemed they only had each other. He was a football player, but none of the other football players wanted to hang out with him. And she was so nasty to be around that everyone avoided her like the cafeteria meatloaf. I never said one word to them after the pummeling, but they continued, until they graduated, to scowl at me when I passed them in the hallways.

  ***

  I also realized they had done me a favor, teaching me to choose my words more carefully, saving me from an unknown number of beatings and retaliations.

  ***

  Bret and Susan actually did get married right out of high school, or so I heard. I wonder if they stayed together. Perhaps I’ll go and visit them to ask them about it—I mean if they made it here. I hope they did. Honestly.

  ***

  That was the weird thing about first coming to the New Kingdom. You might have gone out of your way to find somebody you hardly knew or didn’t even like on the Old Earth, just to ask them about something stupid. Or to look for some complete stranger you read about to confirm some fact or story, like you were all the sudden some kind of reporter or investigator or something. But no one was in any kind of rush to see all the people they were close to on the Old Earth when they arrived. I mean I saw my daughter straight away, but it took me three months to visit my poor mother and father, and over a year to visit my siblings. I guess I was too busy working through my own junk and just plain feeling guilty.

  ***

  Even if I had died and gone straight to heaven, I wouldn’t have seen everyone right away. People on the Old Earth often assumed that once you got to heaven you’d be greeted by all these dead relatives like some kind of big ghostly family reunion. Or they’d all show up to welcome you and teach you the ropes like they have it all figured out or something—aunts and uncles and cousins and everyone hugging you, escorting you around and whatnot. I barely knew any of them when I was alive. What the heck would you say to everyone after just having had the shock of your life, realizing you’re dead and all?

  ***

  All in all, I suppose my childhood was pretty normal; at least I wasn’t abused or anything like that. It sure didn’t account for all the trouble I got into later. I pretty much acted like a delinquent jackass until I left the San Fernando Valley to join the Army at twenty-three, and even after that.

  ***

  I finally did learn how to fight, though. The Army taught me hand-to-hand combat, and even how to kill a man. Then they sent me to Fort Sill in Oklahoma to drink beer.

  4

  It took me twenty years to leave the San Fernando Valley and as many to get back. It was during my divorce from Renee that I decided to go live somewhere cheap and familiar, so I was living in an apartment near the house where I grew up when the tactical nuclear bomb took a big chunk out of Washington and killed the Jewish president.

  ***

  Everyone assumed it was another Islamic terrorist attack, as was the intention of the Illuminati. And because the bomb was small enough and so effective, and there was no trace of evidence left to say otherwise, everyone continued to believe it.

  The Illuminati plan was to get the American people all juiced up, patriotic, and on the offense again, just like we were after Islamic terrorists brought down both towers of the World Trade Center, put a hole in the Pentagon, and destroyed three passenger jets, causing the gruesome deaths of some 3000 men, women, and children going about their business. They wanted us to support another attack on a guilty or not-so-guilty country.

  A fourth plane, United Airlines Flight 93, missed its intended target after a group of gutsy passengers stormed the hijacked cockpit with hot coffee and a snack cart, saving the White House and any number of its inhabitants. Still, the hijackers were able to place the plane into an irreversible nosedive, crashing it into a strip mine in Pennsylvania. There were no survivors.

  I read something strange about Flight 93 at the Hall of Knowledge. Two of the hijackers, who just minutes earlier had stabbed a female flight attendant and slit the throats of the two pilots, were steering the doomed plane and daydreaming about the seventy-two virgins they were promised and a bunch of other nonsense driving them to commit horrible acts of homicidal madness and destruction in the name of their god, when they heard the loud banging of the snack cart on the cockpit door as it was being pummeled open by those determined passengers.

  Once they realized they would never make it to the White House, the hijackers sent the plane diving toward the Earth. They were able to yell, “Allah is the greatest!” a few times before being drenched in hot coffee.

  After that, writhing in pain from the hot liquid pouring down their faces, they screamed incoherently. The passengers tried to pull the plane out of the nosedive, all the while praying aloud. Everyone was disintegrated along with the plane when it hit the ground.

  The next thing the passengers knew, they were standing with Christ in heaven. They said they hadn’t felt a thing. The hijackers weren’t as fortunate. But that isn’t the strange part. The strange part was the last words of the hijacker sitting in the copilot seat.

  He said this: “Sweet Jesus!”

  ***

  The Illuminati plan to get Americans hyped up over the nuclear attack on the Capitol worked like a charm. Americans wanted revenge. This time it was decided that it would be a good idea to help Israel bomb Iran back into the Stone Age. I was all for it. I had been duped along with everyone else, although I found out later the Iranian attack was justified anyway. Not for any specific terrorist act, but because the Iranian leader was another Illuminati puppet who was getting ready to annihilate Israel.

  This nut was told by demons that he needed to build a nuclear weapon and launch it at Jerusalem in order to usher in Armageddon, just so a character called the Twelfth Imam could establish an Islamic paradise.

  What the demons knew that the Iranian leader did not know was that Armageddon was goin
g to come anyway, and the Twelfth Imam was just another dead guy who couldn’t come back even if he wanted to. And he didn’t want to.

  How do I know? No, I didn’t read about it at the Hall of Knowledge, I asked him. The guy once known as the Twelfth Imam lives eight shacks down from me. He was just an ordinary kid when he was on the Old Earth, and he told me the whole thing was a big misunderstanding, which the demons then exploited to make him the spearhead of a fanatical sect of Islam:

  “It all began when I became lost in the mountains near my home in ancient Persia while on a hunting trip with my father,” he said. “For some reason, my father was embarrassed and told everyone that Allah took me. I wandered around the wilderness for a few days until a caravan heading to Assyria picked me up. I had no choice but to go with them or die in the mountains. After what my father said, people were making up all kinds of stupid stories, like the one about me hiding in the caves until my return centuries later to save the Muslim people. How ridiculous is that? I was only eight years old. How could I survive in cave for week, let alone hundreds of years, even if someone could live that long? What a lot of goat poop!”

  ***

  If Armageddon was going to happen with or without the nutty Iranian leader anyway, why did demons bother to put all these crazy ideas about the Twelfth Imam into the Iranian leader’s head? They were messing around again.

  ***

  The American-supported attack on Iran by Israel opened up a huge can of worms in that region, paving the way for one of the great miracles predicted in the Old Testament by the prophet Ezekiel. The prophecy described an attack on Israel by a coalition of forces from Russia, Iran, Turkey, and Sudan. This attack would be so overwhelming that the destruction of Israel would seem like the only possible outcome. However, God would intervene with “fire from the sky” and help Israel destroy the invading armies before they could do any damage.

  Israel had been worried about Iran’s nuclear program for many years. Iran’s alliance with Russia was a major factor in the Israeli government’s hesitation in doing something about it. But the rhetoric from the knuckleheaded Iranian leader, who had already asked for the destruction of Israel, had been heating up. Together with the confirmation that Iran was then ready with a functioning warhead, the U.S. clamoring for some form of payback was enough to get the attack off the ground. In six hours of sorties, Israeli Bombers with laser guided missiles and American cluster bombs decimated Iran’s nuclear facilities.

  Three months later, Iran and its cohorts were on the offensive, with the Russian Air Force and the Turkish Navy backing them. All seemed lost for the tiny nation of Israel. Neither the U.S. nor any other ally had time to react. Minutes from annihilation, Israel felt it had little choice but to implement the Samson Option, which would launch enough nuclear weapons to basically disintegrate not only their attackers, but all of the surrounding area, including Israel itself.

  ***

  The Samson Option was named after the Biblical Samson, who was granted superhuman strength by God, the source of which was embedded in his long hair. Samson’s strength was taken from him when his backstabbing girlfriend, Delilah, had his hair shaved while he was sleeping. This enabled his longtime Philistine enemies to capture him. The Philistines tied him to giant pillars in their temple to sacrifice him to one of their demon gods. The problem was they waited too long and some of his hair had grown back. Still, he wasn’t strong enough to break his bonds, so he prayed about it, and God returned his strength and then some, except the Philistines were too many and they had spears and bows. Samson decided if he was going to die anyway, he might as well do God a favor and take down some Philistines with him. So he destroyed the pillars along with the temple, killing himself and most of the hated Philistines.

  ***

  I looked up Philistines at the Hall of Knowledge. They were a particularly nasty group of devil-worshipers, full of giants and other demon offspring. They were all about causing mayhem and havoc and waging war on the Jews, and God despised them for it.

  God despised anyone who messed with the Jews. This is what the enemies of Israel never understood. The Jewish people had been through enough. God promised that once Israel became a nation again, it would never be taken. God protected the Jewish state with a vengeance. Nations whose polices were against Israel were cursed and would not prosper. Those who waged war against the tiny country, no matter how superior their forces, would be soundly defeated. In war after war, battle after battle, against overwhelming odds, Israel crushed its attackers.

  ***

  The idea behind the Samson Option was developed by the new Jewish state from their centuries of persecution, especially the Holocaust where most of them went to the ovens like debutantes to a cotillion because they couldn’t believe what was happening. They vowed never to go down again without a fight. And they never did.

  ***

  As it turned out, Israel didn’t have to resort to the Samson Option, but they came very close. The news and the media would later downplay the whole event, calling it a freak accident of nature. But however they spun it, the incident was an undeniable and complete miracle. This was how one of the few reliable news sources of the time put it:

  Seconds from their targets, hundreds of Russian, Iranian, Turkish, and Sudanese Jets and bombers filled the skies, while navies from Turkey and Sudan advanced from the Mediterranean and Red Seas, the Israeli finger ready on the Samson trigger. But from the clouds, there clapped a great thunder, and rips of lightning struck the morning sky from every direction. Fire rained down and red hailstones big as boulders followed, crushing, burning, and exploding the threatening forces in the air and on the sea, until none were left to fight.

  ***

  Practically the whole world watched this event on live television—another Biblical prediction slapping everyone in the face. How come those witnessing the miracle didn’t turn to Christ? How come I didn’t run to the nearest church to confess my sins and proclaim my faith? Stupidity, of course.

  ***

  Besides, all that crazy stuff was going on while my own world was falling apart, and being a self-centered moron, I was oddly excited about the whole nuclear hit on the Capitol, the one-sided battle in the Middle East, and all the other madness going on everywhere. I’d sit around my ugly apartment in Tarzana, drinking beer all day, watching the world go down the toilet on cable news. It sure made my problems seem less important. I mean I didn’t want anybody dead or anything, but if it had to happen it was excellent timing.

  Things had been going bad for me for some time. I’d lost my company, our home was in foreclosure, Renee had kicked me out and filed for divorce, and I’d broken my poor daughter’s heart.

  It all began with the stupid business. You see, I had been a loan originator for a short time on the Old Earth, when a partner and I decided to open our own mortgage brokerage. We made a small fortune giving out horrible loans to unsuspecting and greedy borrowers.

  Our favorite type of loan went by several names: The Option Arm, The Pick a Pay; or, for those in the know, The Neg. Am loan. Neg. Am. was short for negative amortization, which meant borrowers lost equity each month making payments that were less than the interest owed. The idea was to lure them in with a lower payment and a low starting interest rate. It worked. Everyone wanted in on the fun. Home prices soared and so did the demand for these awful loans. I even convinced myself I was doing borrowers a big favor by getting them into the house of their dreams they couldn’t afford.

  The truth was, we would get at least four points on every loan because the bankers were excited about the huge interest rates they’d be getting once the initial teaser rate expired. And we would charge another two points because the borrowers were just as excited as the banks, but over those initial low payments. That meant we made $18,000 on every $300,000 loan. Whole plate of mackerel! Was I making some cake or what? And I spent it, too, on clothes, food, cars, gambling, drugs, booze, strippers, lions and tigers and bears, oh my!
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br />   But the end would come swiftly for the mortgage boom and for me. Just when the banks were licking their chops, ready for all those fat interest payments, they got whacked, too! When their $1500 dollar mortgage payments became $3500, guess what? The borrowers couldn’t pay back the banks.

  And guess what else? Exactly. The Illuminati had planned the whole mess: the loosening of restrictions on the financial markets, the drop in interest rates, the push to get unqualified borrowers gobbling up home loans, the slicing and dicing and selling of the loans to hedge funds—and it didn’t take much convincing. They just pushed for a few changes in the rules and then let greed takes its natural course. The borrowers lost, the mortgage companies lost, the small banks, the homeowners, the taxpayers, the country lost. Who won? Wall Street, the insiders, the huge bankers, the foreign bankers, the world’s elite, the Illuminati.

  ***

  The Illuminati plan was to collapse the American dollar. They had been pushing for a North American Union similar to what they had achieved in Europe, but Americans were much more stubborn and prideful about their dirt than the Europeans, and it was taking too much time.

  They’d already gotten presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush to ignore our sovereignty by selling companies and jobs to the highest foreign bidders, and by ridiculous free trade agreements that benefitted every other country but the United States, and by border security that couldn’t measure up to the security at a drive-in movie theater.

  Next, the Illuminati got President Barack Obama to step in with massive bailouts to the same banks and firms that caused the whole mess, ensuring their continued power. This paved the way for the eventual collapse of the dollar, the North American Union, and a replacement currency called the Amero.

  ***

  Obama was basically a socialist, globalist, and one-world government pusher. He spent trillions on bigger government, rewarded people on the dole, tried to nationalize the auto industry and healthcare, taxed the heck out of everyone, deferred policy-making to the United Nations, and kissed the behinds of the international community.