As they settle into their locations, each of them begin a scrolling message around the sides of their ships, on these giant marquees like movie announcements of old, but in Greek . . . “Ἐν ἀρχῃ̂ ἐποίησεν ὁ θεὸς . . .” and it continued. Arkady recognized it, but didn’t say a word, fearing to be compromised even more than he already expects. Still, he smiles in silence.
There is a pulse of information pushed out across the world, hacking into every electronic device from cell phones to ATM’s, super computers to traffic notice boards. The government computers, university and stock exchange computers, porn servers, and even the technology properties of the drug cartels and human traffickers received the same downloads – hundreds of versions of the Scriptures – Old and New Testaments – in original languages and modern language translations most closely fitting the regions receiving, and a simple invitation or warning without any caveat. It all concluded “We invite everyone 1 Thessalonians 4:13-17 – Saturday – Sunrise – Yerushalayim time” and nothing more. The ships hovered in their locations, with no visible means of propulsion, sitting in space, as if waiting for a response, or not.
The military and scientific communities of all nations attempted to make some sort of contact, only to receive the same message again. Even the most basic, text receiving flip phones receive “1 Thess 4:13-17 – Saturday – Sunrise – Yerushalayim time,” but everyone receives something.
Many begin an Anti-Bible rant on their social media, in the papers (though only “papers” in name anymore), the News Media, and governments all over the world. To many, this whole Bible thing is an affront to their way of life, imposing morals on people who don’t need them, want them, or value them. “No thank you,” says the world, because each man is, for the most part, a law unto himself. Some things are suppressed by the Mullahs, salvaging their influence, unawares to the world. Imagine the conflagration if people would suddenly discover that there actually is a God, who had provided an End User License Agreement on your life, who had the right to expect certain steps in maintenance of your life, who would eventually hold you personally accountable for what you had done with that life! Now, imagine a world determined to rebel against such a notion, blatantly, determinately, vehemently, with anger, the media, and with force of government when needed. Within hours the ACLU had filed lawsuits, injunctions, cease and desists, and Amicus Briefs with every cell phone and internet provider in the US for allowing this violation upon every citizen, “whether they wanted any of this Bible crap in their lives or not.” They will log over ten-thousand man-hours before Saturday morning arrives. They would get replies that it was a “hack” and not of their doing, that someone had found vulnerabilities in every single product and projected their message. And the ACLU refiled that “It is the job of the service provider to be bullet-proof in such matters.”
They don’t really understand the technology.
But Saturday is coming, and the world is atwitter with expectation, both positive and negative, as to what is about to happen. There are theories and conjectures galore as the Criminal News Networks battle it out, to see who can get the most ratings over the most radical ideas and prognostications. Some say the “Rapture” is about to happen, while others suggest that the Christians of the world are about to rise up and overthrow everything, including government, or that they are planning to sneak into everyone’s houses and kill them in their sleep. Many say it is the Jews, planning to take over all the markets of the world that they don’t already own – though they don’t actually own any – and that soon we will see the revenge against Babylon in every way. There are those whose conjecture is that all the Jesus people are plotting revenge over Christmas and Easter being hijacked by the commercial enterprises of the world for so long. No matter what else is said and done, the bony finger of accusation is pointed at the Christians, with some – no more than usual – pointed at the Jews.
We have to realize that the Jews are always being accused of some manner of evil, though the evil is almost never theirs to begin with. Remember back in the first two decades of the 21st Century, when Israel was being accused of genocide? It turned out that they were defending themselves, and God was defending them, and that thousands of people died trying to launch weapons into Israel. But the news agencies reported the incidences as Israeli attacks, when there had been none, and when rocket launchers blew up in schoolyards killing children . . .
People of all kinds, but mostly news people and God-hating bloggers, actually did the reading recommended, checking into what is said in the Thessalonians passage, and realized that it was talking about everyone leaving – well, about the “church” leaving this world in a moment. But now, in the context of the press and internet with so much vitriol toward anything of God, what they said was that it was about the Christians getting out of the way so someone could come and kill the non-Christians.
Many said it was the Spanish Inquisition all over again, claiming that if you were a non-Christian then your life was in danger, forfeit on the spear of history, fodder for cannons, just as if Torquemada were back with a vengeance.
By the time Saturday morning was arriving in Yerushalayim, the anger fomented against all of modern Christianity and Jews was so great that open riots were beginning to break out in places. In the Islamic world, Christians of all ages and stations in life, were being dragged to the tops of every tall building, preparing for a mass beheading, to prove that Allah was boss, that these pesky “monkeys and sheep” mean less than nothing.
Since the announcement came, no one has been able to see a single ship, but everyone knows they are there . . . sort of. The ships being positioned in such a way as to not allow themselves to be plainly visible allows many people to deny that they are even there. There are actually millions of people now, waiting for the time to pass, but fully self-convinced that there never have been any ships prognosticating the date, rather some high tech sort of hoax perpetrated on the world.
Back in the US, the President had his way and was meeting with Wade Bennett. As per his instructions, Walid sent a group of near graduates of MarSOC to Mr. Bennett’s house, where they wrangled his whole family into a helicopter from Diego, to the airstrip at Pendleton, and whisked them away to Andrews AFB, where they were brought to the White House on what is usually Marine One.
It’s just after 10 PM, Friday evening, when the US President, William “Billy” Harrison is meeting with Wade Bennett.
“You don’t understand, Commander Bennett, we require your services,” Walid tells him, “and according to your contract, we can recall you at will . . . until you are dead.”
“Now, Walid,” begins Billy Harrison, with a smile, a slight country drawl, and an attempted handshake. “We don’t have to be harsh to the Commander.”
“I’m not a commander anymore.”
“I disagree, Wade. And, let’s face it . . . I am the President of the United States.”
“But as I figure it,” starts Wade, “I will only be under your authority for another fifteen minutes or so.”
“Don’t you realize,” President Billy begins to raise his voice, still in a sort of country tone that got him millions of followers, and got him elected, “We have your family?”
“Doesn’t matter . . . fifteen minutes.”
At that moment, hundreds of miles above them, the seventy-two vehicles hovering over the Earth, open the sides of each craft, with five folding doors each, and dispense another twenty other devices, all of which spread out in a geometrical pattern between the previous ships, and two of the smaller units settle over the poles.
The cosmonauts report back to Moscow, and the conversation is carried in real time over a pirated UsTube connection to the world. Three hundred million viewers watch as the Russian space cowboys turn their video to the skies over Earth. The additional devices each begin to glow and tendrils of what look like electricity, blue and purple sparks and bolts wrapped in charged gelatin, reach out from one to the next, to th
e next, and back to the first devices. They sparkle and charge until there is a network of glowing spheres, connected to everything over the Earth, all under the altitude of the rest of the Earth’s satellites. The glow intensifies farther, until it becomes a blanket of interlaced blue and violet lightning, hovering over the planet, showing up on all these computers, phones, tablets, and watches below. Millions watch in stunned amazement as the beginning of the end plays out in plain view for all.
Below, in the Oval Office, Billy Harrison signals Walid to have Wade’s family marched into the meeting. Wade waits anxiously, confident in his personal conclusion, knowing what is about to happen, but not knowing a thing about how.
Five Marine guards escort Mrs. Joyce Bennett, sobbing, into the office, along with a sixteen-year-old daughter, terrified, a ten-year-old daughter, on the verge of screaming tears, and a seven-year-old son, who spits on the President as soon as he is in range. “Relax, Junior! Everything is going to be fine in just a few minutes.”
“What’s going to happen in a few minutes, Mr. Bennett?” asks Walid.
“We’re leaving!”
“And I suppose you’re going to just walk right out of here . . . past all these guards and guns . . . into the free world?” says Harrison.
“I have no idea,” he points up with his nose, “but He knows.”
“Do you think God is going to protect you from the US government, Mr. Bennett?” says the President, stepping over to one of the Marines. He gestures for the Marine to hand over his side arm, which he does with a salute. “Do you really believe that I can’t just kill your wife and kids, right here, right now?”
“Have you got a minute? Maybe two?” asks Wade, almost in jest. His wife is breaking down, daughters clinging to her from both sides, and his son holding onto Mommy’s skirt, staring defiantly at the President with a gun. Wade stares into the President’s eyes, and the President stares back, determined that each will not blink before the other. The President cocks the hammer back on the Sig Sauer P226 Navy model pistol, leveling the barrel toward the eldest daughter.
“Just a minute, Baby!” consoles Bennett.
Suddenly a bright light shines through the windows of the office. It shines through the windows of every office, every house, every store, everywhere there is to be on Earth.
From hundreds of miles above, the cosmonauts record the event and from the networked electrostatic field of orbs and cylinders, there shone an almost blinding light, which reached down to the surface of the earth like a flood of illuminated gel, oozing to the surface. As soon as it reached the surface of the Earth, it stopped, disappeared suddenly, the smaller devices collapsed into the larger ones, the primary ships fired some sort of lightning at the others, which suddenly disappeared, and the twelve ships remaining blasted one more communique, in hundreds of languages, which read;
“We’ll see you in 42 months.”
And they are just gone.
The President, who ceased his distraction by the gigantic light, angered by the immensity of the interruption of his finalizing his negotiation, squeezes the trigger of the gun aimed at the teen-aged girl and hears a grown man screaming instead. He looks and the whole Bennett family is gone, as if they were never there. Also missing are two of the Marines who had escorted them. “Find them!” screeches Harrison. “Search the house from the basements up!” He is livid in his anger and confusion.
The man on the floor says, “They didn’t go anywhere, Mr. President!”
One of the men standing, who had knelt down to give aid followed by saying, “They just suddenly weren’t there anymore, sir.” Harrison shoots him in the left hip and throws the gun at another of the Marines, all of whom begin getting their wounded comrades out of the room. The least ranking Marine puts the gun in the back of his belt. As they pass through the door, that Marine says, “This President is fucking nuts.” Harrison throws a crystal globe from his desk at the door, which has already closed by the time the antique gift shatters on the frame.
Yuri looks around the station and Arkady is missing too. In that few seconds that it took for the glowing stuff . . . whatever it was . . . to reach the Earth and cease, just over one point two billion people disappear, leaving no trace to follow or find. The alien emanation that reached out to touch everyone is gone, also with no trace. All of it, and all of them . . . just gone.
Laying where they had stood, sat, or lain, were clothes, shoes, jewelry, phones, medical implants, and appliances. There were pacemakers and replacement hips, titanium knees, millions of handguns, wallets, and business cards.
There were of course a thousand know-it-alls, who would parade through the stages of every newslet in the world, each claiming to have special knowledge, but only one of them is right, and because it is only one, she is laughed off the stage, and straight out of academic life, into public ruin.
She hypothesized that the smaller devices were part of a larger transmission amplification system, which was all part of a trans-galactic-teleportation technology that was used to introduce the “Tribulation Period” she had been studying about, in one of those whackadoodle churches that still preaches about Jesus being God and a removal of His people before the end.
The day after the event, she became a real believer, but it was still a day late. She will spend the next few years learning what it all means for herself. The best Bible software – Logos – has become free around the world because almost no one at Logos is on Earth anymore, so what does the company care about money?
One point two billion people transported, and in the next ten days, another fifty million will become converts to Christianity in some form or another, because they now understand that it was real – when Paul and John wrote about it, it was real. That was a hard and bitter pill for some to swallow, and some refused to swallow at all. Another half billion will be driven to the edge of faith in the next few months. More than a billion will be driven to the edge of insanity – even many national leaders.
Another interesting event is that, when all the smoke clears, there will be about a billion life insurance claims written, and on the first day the insurance companies begin business in these matters by asking, “Where is the body?” By the tenth day of this kind of response, there are thousands of remote offices on fire, bulldozed, with cars or trucks, even diesel rigs, driven through them. Most of the insurance corporate headquarters have been assaulted with all manner of weapons, including military hardware, taking revenge for the losses of ordinary people. Some of the more responsive companies see the writing on the wall, realize that this cannot go well in any direction, decide to pay out all they can, preferring to go bankrupt rather than be killed in a financial insurrection.
Islam Arise
Then another horse came out, fiery red. The one riding on it was permitted to take peace from the earth, so that people would slaughter one another. He was given a great sword.[14]
E-Day Minus 7 Years
The numbers begin to roll into the White House about the disappearances across the nation, and around the world, and none of this information is good for them. The economy is in collapse, consumer confidence has become a market terror, and twenty percent of the population is either missing or dead from the flash of light. Many of those were the most productive people in the nation – including over twenty-five percent of the active military and police. That’s not including those who just believed enough to walk away from their jobs in a few days, because they became someone else in their newfound reality.
Thousands of churches, pastors in pulpits, open as usual the next Sonday, and, for the first time in generations, the congregations are without those annoying hardliners, naysayers, and keepers of Robert’s Rules of Order. Without all those sticklers for Truth, they are free to be the social clubs and do-gooder factories they want to be, except for one minor problem. Most of the bigger contributors to their coffers are not in service that next Sonday, or any Sonday after. They are gone. Some churches, which have taken their dona
tions electronically, continue to process payments, even though the account holders are gone. Realizing that this is a short-term opportunity, they took greater amounts for the next few months, then quit once the government began to formulate a list of the missing.
Islam, however, doesn’t have the problem of the missing congregants. Their congregations are, almost entirely unadjusted. There are a few who have gone missing, less than one percent of a percent, but it will be later discovered that they had likely become Christians, yet couldn’t manage to tell anyone, for fear of becoming a social pariah, of family disowning, even falling victim to honor killing in some cases. But now, they are home free – in every sense of the phrase. Now they can stand in the congregation and praise Y’shua, right next to the few million Jews who had come to know their Messiah before the disappearance. And there are billions of Bibles left behind, for the hundreds of millions looking for the truth.
Islam seizes the opportunity to advance their three-pronged approach around the world with renewed fervor. Before they even begin their recycling of process, they go online and on the air, telling the world that Allah had taken a bunch of those radical Christians out of the world, so the Religion of Peace could be more fully disseminated. This results in about ten million new members joining their ranks, believing that Christianity and Judaism have always been the problems of the world, then begins the proper process. Part one is to demand the press and public officials more ardently proclaim them as a “religion of peace.” Then they were requiring judgments, in the court of public opinion, and in the court of law, against anyone who would call them anything else. Of course, as always, they continued the murder of innocent men, women, and children around the globe. This has always been the course of Islam, and forever shall be, but the world won’t hear it because, after all, they’re too busy declaring it a religion of peace to see all the war.
The Warriors' Ends- Soldiers of the Apocalypse Page 14
