Stuart Slade: Pantheocide

“Can I replace General Petraeus?” Obama spoke thoughtfully. “We could use him here.”

“Not really Barry. In theory you could but the Human Expeditionary Army is his command, with a Council of War to support him. That’s comprised of the five Army Group commanders, at the moment, one American, one Russian, one Chinese, one Indian, one Frenchman. All top-rank men by the way. If General Petraeus is relieved, his replacement has to receive the unanimous approval of those five. Very unlikely anybody will get that. Anyway, next issue. The weather.”

“You sound like a Brit, they always want to talk about the weather.” Obama’s voice was suave and it caused another ripple of laughter.

“Well, they’re justified in doing so now. We’ve had three super-storms, all of which have hit us hard. Two were here, we had the tornadoes in Missouri, they killed a lot of people and wiped out the B-2 fleet. We haven’t let on just how much of a disaster that was but we’re hurting from it. If I had longer in office, I’d cancel efforts to restart B-2 production and concentrate on the B-1 and B-3. That’s a course of action I’d recommend to you Barry. The second one hit Bermuda and trashed the base there. That wasn’t so bad, we lost a couple of ships and the population got hurt. The third one was the cyclone that hit India a couple of days ago. All three had the same pattern, a storm formed normally but suddenly increased in strength and changed direction. We’re being attacked using weather patterns but we don’t know how.”

“This has to be Yahweh of course.”

“Of course. President Abigor has confirmed that using the weather is a long-standing Yahweh tactic. He used it against the Egyptians now and then. But, how it’s done we don’t know. Ask the Baldricks and they just look apologetic and say ‘magic’. That’s their explanation for everything they don’t understand.”

“Mister President, Mister President-Elect. If I may have a word?”

“Please Doctor Surlethe.”

“We have an idea how the increase in storm strength is brought about. If one takes a hurricane, tornado or cyclone and injects a mass of warm air into the base, that’ll do it. That’s basically why such storms develop power over the sea and dissipate it over land. Of course, how a mass of warm air got injected into the storm is another matter. Some sort of portal is a working assumption. Steering the storm is another matter, we haven’t got a clue on how to do that. We’ll just keep battering at the problem until we come up with something.”

“A suggestion Doctor Surlethe?”

“Yes, Mister President-Elect?”

“If injecting warm air causes these storms to increase in strength, what would happen if we used a portal to inject cold air? Would that not diminish the storm or even break it up?”

“That’s a line of investigation we’re following right now Sir. The problem is that storms are hard to model accurately so we’re not sure what the results will be. But, that is a promising approach yes. However, we have another problem. We’ve had a series of attacks in South America, small towns where there have been massive, inexplicable deaths. People just struck down in very large numbers, usually between 70 and 80 percent of the population. The attacks are averaging around one every five days or so. Now, some months ago, we received a letter from a man called Jude Sanchez who claims to have met Uriel in Africa and included an account of this Uriel wiping out every living thing within the confines of a native town. He included evidence of other such incidents and we followed them up; they do pan out.”

“Who is this Uriel?” Obama sounded interested if a little incredulous.

“Well, another DIMO(N) operative, one Norman Baines who’s about the world’s leading expert on mythology, identified Uriel for us and gave a pretty good briefing on this particularly macabre gentleman. The name literally means “Fire of Yahweh” and he’s supposed to be one of the topmost ranks of Archangels. He is supposed to have been the Angel who guarded the gates of Eden with a fiery sword and I suppose the best description of him is that he’s Yahweh’s hit-man.”

“The Angel of Death then?”

“Not really Mister President, no. Azrael is supposed to be the angel of death in the Grim Reaper sense. Uriel is more along the vengeance and punishment line. Like a loan-shark’s enforcer. There’s one really nasty thing about Uriel, he doesn’t just kill his victims, he snuffs out their souls as well.”

“That sounds a bit far-fetched.”

“Not really Mister President. We have some supporting evidence for it; there have been eight of these attacks in South America, five in Brazil, two in Uruguay, one in Bolivia. They’ve killed around five thousand people. Not one of those victims has turned up in Hell. There is another oddity. In the Sanchez letter – and in the pictures he included – Uriel killed every living thing in the towns he attacked, even down to the birds, insects and earthworms. He left the ground sterile and clean. Yet in the attacks in South America, the animals, insects and so on all died, but anywhere between twenty and forty percent of the humans survived. The survivors all speak of the same events, things seeming to slow down, everything suddenly going quiet and most of the people dying. Here’s an interesting thing, all of the survivors were in the top earning brackets, the richer the inhabitants of a town were, the fewer died. Even more interesting, servants in the rich houses lived, but people living elsewhere did not, even if they were nominally wealthier than the servants. We’re still puzzling over that.”

“And so the war goes on.” Obama spoke reflectively. The meeting had been an eye-opener for him. “We’re under attack and we don’t know how its being done or whether we can hit back.”

“We’ll find a way, Mister President-Elect. Somehow, we’ll find a way.”

“In the meantime,” President Bush had a boyish grin on his face. “we’ve arranged a little message for Yahweh.”

National Cathedral, Washington D.C. Christmas Day, 2008

“We thought that this is the one day Yahweh might be keeping an eye on us, so we are going to send him a message.” Bush and Obama were standing side by side in the front row at the National Cathedral, waiting for the ceremony to begin. They were startled by a patter of applause at the back of the nave but it was just a small group of soldiers in the red-gray Hell-BDUs entering. A few of the civilians quickly stood and offered them their seats. Then, as the atomic clock sent out its noon alert, all across America, in every church that was still standing, the same ceremony took place.

A red flag unfurled from the spire, rippling in the wind as it burst open. Simultaneously, a group of trumpeters, in the National Cathedral taken from the Marine Corps band, elsewhere from marching bands, schools, even sometimes hastily-practiced amateur musicians, started a fanfare. It was always the same tune, an eerie, wailing, discordant melody that echoed and re-echoed across the land.

As the last notes faded away, Obama turned to Bush. “I don’t understand.”

“You’ll never make a Texan, Barry. That’s the Deguello. Santa Ana hoisted the red flag and played the Deguello just before the assault on the Alamo. Together, the Red Flag and the Deguello mean that we will give no quarter, we will have no mercy, we will take no prisoners, we will not stop attacking until we have won victory. And we played it on Yahweh’s day. I hope he gets the message and chokes on it.”

Sky over Khabarovsk, Russia. January 2009

Gliding in the skies high over the Earth, Colopatiron Lan Michael, strained all his senses to seek out threats from the humans who crowded the ground below him. The effort interfered with his soavoring of the tastes of human air, the smells, so faint but still unmistakable, of human life. Savoring the senses was one of the great rewards of entering human space but it could not be allowed to interfere with the task before him. This mission was crucial but extremely dangerous for it did not just take the angel into human space but into one of the most heavily defended areas on earth. Colopatiron could feel just how heavy the defenses were here, his skin was itching madly from the strange instruments that humans used and he knew his presence had to be known to the humans. They would be doing something about that very soon and all of Heaven had seen the destruction humans and their weapons had wrought on The Eternal Enemy and his fallen minions. Colopatiron’s mission was a response to that stunning display. The consummation of the wrath of The One Above All with the people of earth who had defied His will and continued to live a life of sin in disobedience to the Divine Message and yet did not repent was at hand.