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

by Stockwell, Todd

  Private Smilko couldn’t believe how calm the creature was, considering the extreme nature of his wounds. “Maybe you shouldn’t be talking right now, little man….Stay still; help is coming.”

  “Please answer me, sir. Are you in charge?” said the strange pilot.

  “No, little fellow,” Private Smilko replied. “Are you a Martian?”

  “What is a Martian?” said the pilot.

  “You know, little man, men from Mars.”

  “No one can live on Mars anymore. I am from a planet called Quevis,” said the pilot.

  “What you doing here?” said Smilko.

  “I cannot tell you that,” the pilot said flatly.

  The grunt, not liking what he was looking at one bit, rubbed his chin and thought for moment. “Well, are you a good or evil thing?” he asked.

  “What is evil?”

  “You know—bad stuff!”

  “Bad stuff? Like what?”

  “Satan stuff, like stealin’, rapin’, and killin’. I heard you kidnap people,” said Smilko.

  “What is Satan?” asked the pilot.

  “You know, Lucifer, the devil, the destroyer, the dark prince, the ruler of all that is unholy!” Smilko fired back.

  The pilot seemed to be thinking on it.

  “The fallen angel,” added Smilko.

  Now the pilot was sure he understood and managed a smile. “Apollyon, yes, Apollyon!” he said.

  ***

  Apollyon was just another name for Satan or Lucifer. He was also known in Greek mythology as the God Apollo. Apollyon was one of God’s favorites, an extraordinarily beautiful and intelligent creature, an angel among angels.

  But Apollyon had his faults. He needed constant attention and was never satisfied. He didn’t like having someone around who was better than him. He thought he could do a better job running the universe. He was a cancer in heaven, always complaining about everything.

  He also liked to make dramatic speeches, shouting and waving his arms around to rile up the other angels. Many were foolish enough to listen and began to tag along and complain right along with the power-hungry angel.

  ***

  On the Old Earth, this same behavior of yelling and weird gestures while trying to control everyone was seen in many infamous world leaders: Hitler, Stalin, Napoleon, Mussolini, and Castro come to mind. This was because they’d allowed Apollyon to tell their brains what to do. Satan knew that people became easily mesmerized and convinced of things by yelling and weird gestures and such because it had worked for him.

  ***

  God, who didn’t like what was going on with Apollyon one bit, didn’t do much but shake his head and watch because he had already decided in favor of free will. So Apollyon and his horde were able to hatch a plan to take over heaven and an all-out war ensued, which, of course, they lost, and God kicked them out of heaven and onto the more physical realm of the planets as punishment.

  Later, God decided to make another creature more like himself. That’s when Adam and Eve were created. They were given their own little heaven, a paradise on the Earth, until Satan corrupted the two of them. Satan wanted to corrupt all of mankind, figuring if he gathered up enough souls for the pit, he might be able to beat God at his own game. He was wrong.

  Satan did, however, get many humans to turn to the dark side because humans were extremely susceptible to the power of persuasion. Satan was a heck of salesman, and a good salesman on the Old Earth could easily get someone to buy all manner of garbage, including bridges they didn’t own, swamp land, and defective automobiles called lemons.

  Once Adam and Eve crossed that line, there was no getting back their innocence. All sales in paradise are final. They gave themselves to an Earth lorded over by Satan himself. Adam and Eve had to choose between God and Satan. They eventually choose God and turned their lives around, but by then, they and their children and their children’s children knew sin—having the “knowledge of good and evil”—and so were constantly in flux between sin, confession, guilt, self-loathing, heartache, and all manner of inner conflict.

  ***

  But what did having the “knowledge of good and evil” mean, exactly? People on the Old Earth were often perplexed by this, and by the whole story of Adam and Eve, for that matter. Why was this snake talking to them? Why would God have a forbidden apple tree of such importance sitting right there for the taking? How could two people populate the entire planet, and on and on?

  What people needed to remember was that the stories in the Old Testament had to be passed down orally for generations before there were written languages. The stories were repeated mostly in the evenings in front of the community fire where children were present. So, they were told for dramatic effect, but also with lots of censorship to spare the children, and they were told in terms that could be understood by relatively primitive cultures.

  So what was missing in the story of Adam and Eve? Answer: the sex and the science. Remember, Adam and Eve were “created in the image of God,” which meant they carried God’s DNA. As long as they only procreated with each other, their children would carry this pure DNA.

  But God didn’t stop with Adam and Eve. If you read the Bible carefully, you can pick up the clues. Cain, who killed his brother Abel, and was supposed to be one of only four people populating the planet, suddenly finds a wife. Where the heck did she come from? Well, God was creating all kinds of people back then.

  As it was, these storytellers had their hands full remembering all the details they had to keep straight. Were they supposed to tell the story of Jim and Nancy, Bob and Alice, Ricky and Shirley, and everyone else? No. It wouldn’t have been possible. So they just told the story of the first two humans God created, with the direct bloodline (through Noah, Abraham, Daniel, and on and on) down to Jesus, fulfilling prophecy while proving Christ to be flesh and blood.

  And they didn’t know how to explain DNA, so they did the best they could. And they also decided to leave out all the sex because, frankly, it was embarrassing, especially with children listening. Satan was described as a snake because he stole Eve away from her husband. Sex was the apple that spread Satan’s corrupted DNA, the “knowledge of good and evil.”

  There is an obscure passage in the Book of Genesis that many Biblical scholars chose to ignore, simply because it confused the heck out of them or made them uncomfortable. It is this: “The Nephilim were on the Earth in those days, and also afterward, when the sons of God came in to the daughters of men, and they bore children to them…”

  Nephilim in Hebrew means “to fall.” The Nephilim were Satan and his crew, the fallen angels, who came to Earth to cause all manner of trouble. When they saw how beautiful God’s women were, they talked them into the sack, fusing their DNA with human DNA, forever tainting the genetic lines of mankind.

  ***

  Without the Hall of Knowledge, I wouldn’t have known about any of this, nor would I have known about the conversation between the lowly private and the pilot from outer space.

  ***

  Private Smilko was beginning to put the pieces together, deciding he was right about this thing being a demon. “Apollyon from the Bible?” said the private.

  “Yes, the great god!” said the pilot.

  “There ain’t but one God,” said the private, and now he was pretty angry with the little pilot.

  “Where I come from, there are many gods.”

  “I knew you was a demon!” cried the private.

  “I am me.”

  ***

  The pilot began to spit up the purple blood. Private Smilko sat next to him, lifting up his body gently, and cradling the little alien in his relatively huge Oklahoman lap.

  ***

  The low voices of the Illuminati’s special operations unit could be heard. They were close.

  ***

  Private Smilko took out his pocket Bible, laid it on the pilot’s stomach and petted the creature’s big head. “Don’t you worry, little buddy, help is coming.
”

  “I think you should go,” said the pilot.

  “Why?” said Smilko.

  “It’s dangerous.”

  “You think they might hurt me?”

  “They are going to hurt you.”

  “Why would they hurt me?”

  “You have seen me; you have talked to me,” said the pilot, his eyes barely open.

  “You rest, little guy—I’ll be all right,” said Smilko.

  ‘Please go—they’ll kill you,” said the pilot as he tried to get up.

  “Stay still…you’ll make it worse.”

  “Go!” said the pilot.

  “You don’t sound much like a demon,” said Smilko.

  ***

  Later, Private Smilko’s interrogators asked him what the alien had told him. When he informed them that the pilot had been warning him, they didn’t believe him and punched and kicked him to death. Then they burned his body.

  Gordon Allen Smilko was buried with military honors. His parents had been told he died while saving some fellow soldiers after a truck crash. When Smilko returned for the last man, the truck exploded, they said, and the brave private was blown to pieces. “He was a hero,” they added. It was the only thing they told his parents that was true.

  ***

  Smilko is doing fine. He got himself a big house in paradise.

  ***

  As for the alien pilot: for his attempt at saving Smilko, God gave him a soul and a planet to live on with other kindly aliens.

  ***

  Private Smilko wasn’t the only hero to die from knowing too much about aliens or other strange goings-on. There were many who had crossed paths with the Illuminati and their nefarious agendas. The Hall of Knowledge is full of the stories of their untimely deaths and disappearances. Most of them were treated as martyrs and live in mansions in the New Kingdom.

  Some of those martyrs were alien abductees who were returned. The hypnosis that was supposed to make them forget the traumatic event had always been a work in progress, so most of the abductees remembered bits and pieces, suffering all manner of psychological effects, including night terrors, anxiety, depression, and psychosis. Still, this helped the Illuminati to marginalize them as nutcases. But some remembered way too much and later died under mysterious circumstances, like bizarre car accidents and sudden illnesses, methods favored by the Illuminati.

  ***

  One of the first documented alien abductions was the case of Betty and Barney Hill. They were on their way home to Portsmouth, New Hampshire, after a short vacation to Canada, when some aliens nabbed them in order to extract DNA from their bodily fluids.

  The Hills were cruising along, minding their own business, when a giant glowing ball began tailing them down the highway. They weren’t sure what it was, so Barney stopped the car and got out to have a look. As the light moved closer, he could see that it was some sort of spacecraft. He could also make out at least five humanoid-looking creatures peering at him through a large window in the craft. He became frightened, jumped back in the car and sped away. That was the last thing they remembered, except they couldn’t figure out why it had taken them so long to get home. At least two hours were missing. Then Betty began to have nightmares about boarding a spacecraft and being examined by strange beings. Later, under hypnosis, they would both tell the same story about the abduction.

  Now a lot of people thought Barney Hill made the whole thing up. It was easier to believe he was lying than some flying saucer story. However, a little common sense should have prevailed in Barney’s case. The last thing a black man married to a white woman in 1963 would ever do is draw attention to himself with some cockamamie story about being abducted by aliens. They went to Canada in the first place just so they could walk around together for a few days without being bothered by ignorant Americans.

  Another reason people were more inclined to believe that old Barney had made the story up was because people were always lying about this or that anyway on the Old Earth. Heck, I used to lie about five or six times a day for no reason whatsoever.

  9

  After the Rapture, the spaceships, and the alien kidnapping story, the world was pretty aghast for a couple of days. That was about the attention span of most people at the time for monumental earth-shattering events, what with cell phones, headphones, Bluetooth contraptions, iPods, iPads, laptops, and all manner of devices permanently attached to everyone like they were on their own personal mission to Mars.

  Also, the people left behind, like myself, were more self-centered and self-absorbed than those sitting in heaven. And so the world became a much uglier place. There was more violence and chaos than ever before.

  ***

  In America, the middle class had been all but wiped out. The dollar became worthless and the Euro became the world’s reserve currency. People were out of work and hungry. The U.S. Army joined with the American Security Force to quell the madness in the streets.

  Desperate, the American government looked to the United Nations, which had taken over the European Union, having turned those countries around when they were falling apart. The United Nations urged the United States to open its borders to the south and merge with Canada to the north. Within a few months, a deal was brokered, and Whitey Newton became the first president of the North American Union. Newton’s first and last executive order was the minting of a new currency, the Amero. His new position would last less than six months.

  ***

  All of this was by Illuminati design. A new figure in world politics had been emerging for some time. He was the head of the U.N. when the Rapture occurred, and it wasn’t long before he seized power over Europe and aimed his sights on North America. His name was Victor Julius Talley. His number was 666 because he was the human vessel of the 666th angel created by God. That angel was a demon, whose name was Lucifer, also known as Apollyon, Satan, and the Destroyer. Victor Talley was the Antichrist.

  Even before morphing into the Antichrist, Talley was Illuminati, a devil worshiper, supernaturally intelligent, charming and charismatic, and a con man of the highest order. He was fluent in sixteen languages, gathering enormous crowds wherever he spoke. I had to force myself to turn off the television when he came on because although I already believed him to be the Antichrist, I’d find myself mesmerized, agreeing with his points, buying into his bull-crap along with everyone else.

  People were looking for a savior. They were tired of the violence and the chaos, and especially the poor economy. Victor Talley offered solutions. He joined with the aliens, who provided new farming technologies and energy sources. He created goodwill, prosperity, and peace wherever he reigned—for a time.

  Talley even became a great friend to Israel and a hero to the world when he solved the impossibly stalemated Middle East crisis seemingly overnight.

  That, too, impressed me. Palestine and the surrounding Arab countries, in fact much of the world, had this insane hatred for the Jewish people going back centuries. Their very presence in the region caused all manner of violent conflict. Governments and politicians had been trying to fix the problem, without success, even before Israel became a nation. After that, the situation became a political nightmare, an impossible stalemate brought on by blind hatred, interrupted only by needless and futile acts of aggression and terror. Israel would offer peace, making concession after concession, giving away land until they had very little of it left. But the Palestinian and Arab leaders would settle for nothing less than the complete dismantling of Israel

  Still, most of world continued to blame Israel for the problem. War after war was fought, treaty after treaty made and broken, and no one, it seemed, could solve the problem until the Antichrist brokered a peace.

  Before Victor Talley, the United Nations’ main function seemed to be to mess with Israel, passing resolution after resolution condemning the small country, while completely ignoring severe human rights violations in other areas of the world. The U.N. general assembly passed an average of twenty
resolutions a year against Israel, ten times more than all other countries combined.

  Equally partisan, the world media sided with Arabs and Muslims even at the cost of reason and common sense, at the same time spitting venom toward Israel at every opportunity. I mean a Muslim could strap on a bomb and blow up a bus full of women and children, or saw the head off some poor guy with a dull sword, place the footage on the Internet, and the media would barely take notice. But if Israeli soldiers so much as fired rubber bullets at Arab rioters, they’d give the incident prime coverage.

  Later, at the Hall of Knowledge, I found out that the supernatural had fueled much of the policy and vitriol aimed at Jews and the Jewish State. It was never about race or religion. It wasn’t even about politics or land. Six million Jews were slaughtered while the people of Germany let it happen with barely a breath of protest. How could so many remain idle while a race of people were being annihilated? It wasn’t exactly what one would call normal behavior. Satan and the Illuminati had pulled the strings and the puppets of the world gladly followed.

  ***

  Nobody even cared about that splinter of barren land next to the Mediterranean Sea until the Jews began settling en masse. So why was it the focus of so much of the world’s troubles? The whole country is 260 miles long and 70 miles wide, for heaven’s sake. Arabs controlled Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, Jordon, Yemen—hundreds of thousands of square miles. The landmass of Saudi Arabia alone could contain over a hundred Israels, yet the world continued to blame them over the plight of the Palestinians, robbed of their land by greedy Jews.

  There was never any such thing as a Palestinian until all the nonsense began. There were only Jews, Arabs, and Muslims. They lived side by side in an area known as Palestine, which was an area ruled by the British. Because the land was so desolate (God said that no one would be able to grow on it until the Jewish people returned, which is exactly what happened) nobody had tried to make a nation of it since the Jews ruled it 2000 years before.