Kingdom Come

            Amanda DeSosa, unable to help herself, took a quick look around as she stood in front of the Victorian house at the corner of Sycamore and College.

            “Force of habit,” she muttered; it wasn’t like there were any cops around anymore.  Even if it hadn’t been six months since the Congregation, there was no way that the inhabitants of the stately, white mansion, complete with square pillars by the doors and a conical tower by a grey, cobblestone chimney, would have let the lawn grow so long that the grass brushed against Amanda’s knees.  Cautiously, she waded through the miniature field, one hand clutching the worn, blue-green backpack slung over her shoulder, the other cautiously stretched in front of her.  It was very unlikely that anything hiding in the grass would be slow enough that she could punch it, in spite of her surprise, but the concept of punching made her feel better.  She’d gotten pretty good at it.

            Having survived the field, Amanda crept onto the porch, flinching at the creaking of the wood beneath her weight.  As quietly as she could, she stepped towards the windows, trying to peer inside.  The sitting room looked deserted, and even strangely untouched.  Amanda felt emboldened.  She allowed herself to casually walk towards the front door, going so far as to consider using the gauche lion’s head brass knocker before remembering her circumstances.  Instead, she tried the knob, and to her complete shock it turned and opened the door.  It was the first time in weeks that she hadn’t needed to use her trusty house-entry tool on the windows.

            This house was also one of the few she'd seen that Amanda could describe as “intact.”  It was a little dusty, sure, but it lacked the scorch marks, locust hives, bloody pools, and general rubble-ness of so many other houses.  It wasn’t as though San Jose was devoid of areas more heavily affected by the Congregation.  Amanda had followed the railroad tracks to the city once Sunnyvale had been cleaned out, and what was left of the train station was covered in hundreds of thousands of dead frogs, with the long, red nose of a tengu poking out from deep within the pile.  But during her search of the kitchen Amanda found the reason for the house’s relatively intact state. 

Having salvaged a few cans of Campbell’s from the cupboards, she approached the fridge (if anything decomposing in there had seeds, those could be valuable when she reached the next settlement) and noticed something familiar.  Two years ago, Amanda’s friend Pilar had returned from her trip to the Middle East, eager to show anyone who would stand still the massive trove of photos on her phone.  Amanda had sat through almost an hour of squinting at the images on Pilar’s phone, politely feigning interest at photo after photo.  One of the pictures on the fridge—an old, wooden ladder leaning on a stony ledge beneath a window and an archway—was instantly recognizable.  Pilar had shown her an almost identical picture, explaining that it was from the Church of the Holy Speulchre, where Christ had been crucified two millennia ago.  The other photos plastering the fridge, all variations on the theme of “dumpy, white, blonde family in deserts and churches,” suddenly made sense.

            “These guys were raptured up,” Amanda murmured to herself, and practically jumped when an eerie, unearthly wail sounded just outside the window.  She dove to the floor, reaching into her knapsack for her house-entry tool in the vain hope that whatever was outside would be vulnerable to a brick in the face.  The shadow on the fridge as the creature passed by the house, dark lines that occasionally stopped and resembled semi-circles, confirmed Amanda’s worst fears.  She put her brick away as the shadow passed again, and waited for several minutes before moving, slowly crawling under the strain of her backpack towards the front door she had carelessly, thankfully, left open after entry.  She was lucky.  The Throne, two massive rims of gold wreathed in white-hot fire, was fixated on an abandoned house across the street.  The smaller, interior rim spun perpendicular to the larger one, grinding against it and producing the shrieking sounds that had saved Amanda from instant death.  The larger rim aligned itself with the smaller, rolling back towards the Victorian house, leaving behind a trail of flame and melted pavement.  Amanda couldn’t see this particular Throne very well, having dove into the deep grass of the front lawn as soon as she realized the angel was occupied, but she had seen a Throne before.  She knew about the rows of eyes, some looking on wistfully, some glaring with rage, that coated each of the rims, and what happened to people when the eyes stared at them for too long.  She had spent weeks trying to wring Robert out of her sweatshirt, and it still smelled a little bit.

            Amanda crawled like a glacier, moving inch by inch towards the farthest corner of the lawn.  She couldn’t risk moving any faster, lest the Throne notice the grass rustling, and had she stayed inside the house, there’s no way she could have escaped if the Throne had rolled inside to investigate.  Robert had the brilliant idea that the two of them should hide in the tub of the place they were staying in, and that didn’t turn out well.  But if the Throne went inside the house now, with Amanda lying in wait at the edge of the lawn, it wouldn’t have a line of sight on her, and she’d be able to sprint away to find somewhere with less company.

            It was a good plan, and it probably would have worked if Ammit hadn’t barreled out of the house the Throne had investigated earlier, roaring a challenge.  The Throne, which had begun to roll towards the lawn, made a hairpin turn, scorching the front of the grass and singing Amanda’s fingertips.  Its eyes narrowed at the Egyptian Goddess, her hippopotamus hindquarters shaking the Earth as she stomped, her lion’s claws gleaming in the sunlight, and her crocodile’s head, dripping and glistening from within her bushy mane, snapping her fangs.  The two began to circle each other, both knowing this would not be an easy fight.

            Before the Congregation, everything from cash-strapped evangelicals to dumbasses misinterpreting Mayan tablets had been ranting and raving about “the end of the world.”  Looking back, there was a fundamental flaw in their beliefs about the end times, one that post-Congregation seems far more glaring and obvious than any obviously faulty math or date predictions.

            They were too simple.

            It wasn’t just Hapikern and Yahweh that decided the fifteenth of March, the day now known as The Congregation, was the day it would all come to an end.  It was everyone.  As people vanished, raptured away only to be sent back to fight and die against the chaos below, blue-flamed Jinn leapt from person to person, leaving some unharmed, some insane, and some as piles of ash.  As Loki steered Hel’s colossal ship of fingernails from Europe to Greenland, long-buried pharaohs and priests uttered incantations and turned into eagles, clawing at the horned devils advancing down from the north.  Tengu, oni, asura, ghosts, the Leviathan, Seth—if somebody had worshipped or feared it, it was indiscriminately killing people or slugging it out with some other supernatural force.  So far, only one religion had completely failed to materialize in any way, and Amanda cursed the noodly appendages of her false savior that it wasn’t Scientology.  Xenu had the Los Angeles area firmly within his control.

            The Throne and Ammit were still circling each other, with Amanda silently watching from the grass.  At this point, her course of action was fairly obvious: Thrones were most effective at killing with their stares, and it had been giving Ammit its evil-eye long enough that if anything was going to happen, it already would have.  When the Goddess figured this out, she would make her move, and if she was resistant to fire, she’d probably claw out enough eyes that the Throne would retreat.  All Amanda had to do was wait for it to slink back to the derelict house, or sleep, or find something else to kill, and she could slip away.

            Sure enough, Ammit snarled, leaping at the Throne and catching one of the spinning rims mid wail between her massive jaws.  The larger rim frantically spun to and fro, whacking at either side of Ammit’s head, which stubbornly held onto her prey.  With a rapid twist, the goddess snapped the inner rim.  A bright, golden glow burst forth from the Throne’s wound, and it was this glow that was the last thing Amanda saw before the Throne exploded, leaving San Jose a crater and Ammit mildly annoyed.

            Amanda flinched, but her reaction was too late.  She wasn’t in San Jose.  The glow was gone.  She was standing in a long, green pasture, with wheat, basil and tomatoes growing in clumps like weeds.  Off in the far distance was a lone mountain, topped with a massive peak shaped like a beer can.  There was a distant boom as the cylinder erupted, and brown, sticky drops rained from the heavens.  Amanda ran towards shelter, a lone tree sprouting from the otherwise flat landscape, but some of the liquid landed on her lips.  It was beer.

            “No way,” Amanda whispered, catching her breath under the tree.  “I…I’m sorry.  I stopped believing.”

            Not in your heart of hearts, child. A voice boomed in Amanda’s mind, and she slowly turned around, awestruck.  A cloud of spaghetti, each strand as wide around as one of her legs, floated before her, cradling two gigantic meatballs deep within its mass.  Eye-stalks emerged from the center of the creature, and peered down at Amanda.  You would always save any Chef Boyardee you found for last, or for special occasions.  You have given me tribute.  The Flying Spaghetti Monster gestured with one of its noodly appendages towards a little person standing beside it, wearing short-shorts, a cap emblazoned with “I <3 Meatballs,” and nothing else.  This is Steve, from the creation.  He manages the stripper factory, which bursts at the seams with oiled, ripped dudes waiting just for you.  He will guide you there.  Paradise awaits.  With that, the omnipotent mass of pasta ascended upwards, gracefully spinning before flying out of sight.

            Amanda let her backpack slide off of her shoulders.  She felt like she could fly.  “So,” she said, walking hand-in-hand with Steve, “is there anywhere before the stripper factory where I could stop for a shower?”