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

  WHAT

  THE

  HAND

  WHAT

  THE

  HAND

  TODD STOCKWELL

  ZFS PUBLISHING

  Published in the United States by ZFS Publishing. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locals, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Edited by Cheryl Redman

  Copyright © 2015 by Todd Stockwell

  All rights reserved.

  ISBN-10: 0-615-95508-8

  ISBN-13: 978-0-615-95508-7

  For Zoë

  This is a work of fiction; the Bible is truth.

  The Tyger

  Tyger! Tyger! Burning bright

  In the forest of the night,

  What immortal hand or eye

  Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

  In what distant deeps or skies

  Burnt the fires of thine eyes?

  On what wings dare he aspire?

  What the hand, dare seize the fire?

  And what shoulder, & what art,

  Could twist the sinews of thy heart?

  And when thy heart began to beat,

  What dread hand? & what dread feet?

  What the hammer? What the chain?

  In what furnace was thy brain?

  What the anvil? what dread grasp

  Dare its deadly terrors clasp?

  When the stars threw down their spears,

  And water’d heaven with their tears,

  Did he smile his work to see?

  Did he who made the Lamb make thee?

  Tyger! Tyger! burning bright

  In the forests of the night,

  What immortal hand or eye

  Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?

  - William Blake

  In a large room in the city of London, a wall of computers had been gathering information about every individual on the planet since the early 1980s. These computers, nicknamed the Beast, did essentially the same thing that a fictional computer of the same name was supposed to have been doing since the 1970s. The fictional computer was from a novel about the end of the world.

  My name and Social Security number were entered into the Beast when I applied for credit cards on my first day of college. I accepted an American Express Card, three Visa Cards, and a MasterCard for good measure. By the time I turned twenty, I carried $42,000 in credit card debt, which I couldn’t pay, so I didn’t. My credit was ruined for seven years. The Beast duly noted that I was a bad risk.

  The Beast not only tracked each purchase I made with the credit cards, debit cards, and checks I used, but also my movements. The Beast knew what I ate, what I wore, where I traveled, the movies I watched, the bands I went to see, the gifts I bought, what my hobbies were, the schools I went to, where I worked, how much I made, the Internet sites I searched, and on and on. The Beast knew me better than I knew myself.

  The Beast knew something else about me, too. The Beast knew I would run.

  What the Hand

  1

  I live in a shack on the outskirts of paradise, and I’m lucky to have it. It is stark, rectangular, made of a thin yet sturdy wood. Outside my window is a blue meadow surrounded by low hills of a bright orange grass, colors not seen on the Old Earth. In the distance I can see the great houses of the meek and humble, and further still, the mansions and estates of the children, saints, and martyrs. And I am glad for them.

  ***

  I have a new body. We all have new bodies. Had I known I’d be getting a new body, I probably would have eaten more junk food. There isn’t any junk food here. We could have it if we wanted, I suppose, but nobody wants it now that we know what it actually tastes like. It tastes like poison, like antifreeze or drain cleaner might have tasted to us back then, back on the Old Earth, where our bodies had been acclimated to the chemicals in these foods since birth to such an extent that most of us believed junk food tasted really, really good. So good, in fact, some people would get into their vehicle in the middle of the night, drive to an establishment that sold such food, order two cheeseburgers, french fries, a large soda, and some sort of cake or pie to boot.

  Even if there were junk food here, it wouldn’t affect the new bodies. Nothing affects the new bodies. There is no physical pain here; nor is there death. And there won’t be any, not for a thousand years—992 to be exact.

  ***

  The new bodies are pretty neat. They glow kind of like a light under the water or like an old casino sign.

  ***

  I’m different than I was; it’s not just the new body—I’m a different person, more childlike I suppose. Not like the selfish, spoiled, adult child I was on the Old Earth. Christ said you have to be like a child to enter the Kingdom of Heaven. That might explain some of what I feel.

  ***

  My immediate neighbors are folks like myself who made it into paradise by a spider hair. We had heard about Jesus and God and everything but chose to ignore it all, preferring to lie, and steal, and cheat, and cuss, and fornicate, and on and on. That is, until all the crap came down, and we suddenly found Jesus.

  These neighbors live in shacks like mine. Well, not exactly like mine. Some people have painted or added little doodads here and there like they did on the Old Earth. It didn’t help then and it doesn’t help now. A shack is a shack is a shack….

  I thank the good Lord every day for my shack, my undeserved patch of paradise.

  ***

  I hardly know anyone in my neighborhood. Like on the Old Earth, nobody really wants to be friends with their neighbors here either. It would be like staring into a mirror all the time. Who the heck wants to do that?

  Most of my friends didn’t make it into paradise anyway. They are waiting out the thousand years with Satan in the pit. Then there will be a final judgment and one last chance at salvation. But there isn’t a lot of hope for them. A person can’t hang out with a guy like Satan for a thousand years without picking up more bad habits.

  ***

  Yeah, there is a devil and hell. There is Jesus and a new kingdom on a new Earth, and heaven and angels, and all that other business in the Bible that nobody has to guess about, or argue about, or fight about, or kill each other over anymore.

  ***

  Even though I live in this shack, I get to visit my daughter Sophie in her big house. All the children were given big houses when they arrived here. God figured they deserved them after living with adults who beat them, abused them, starved them, lied to them, or did any number of awful things to them.

  I was pretty good to my daughter Sophie on the Old Earth. I only cheated on her mother, broke up our family, lied to her all the time, and ignored her occasionally. Oh, and I was a big fat hypocrite, too.

  Sophie lives in her big house with her mother, my ex-wife, Renee; I wasn’t invited.

  ***

  The best part of paradise is the time I get to spend with my daughter. It was also the best part of the Old Earth. But you never would have known it.

  ***

  I didn’t get to see Sophie or her mother for a long time, not on the Old Earth, not after the Rapture. Oh yeah, there was a Rapture—people disappearing all over the place and whatnot. I was playing catch with Sophie when she disappeared. It was just like it was written in the Book of Matthew: “Then shall two be in the field, the one shall be taken and the other left.” I lobbed a ball, and it landed where Sophie had been standing not a second before. I knew right then what had happened, and I was happy for her, fo
r both of them. The good people and the children got to go to heaven early because God wanted to spare them the ugliness and the blood and gore and death and destruction, and every other horror that was to come with the seven year period of judgments known as the Tribulation.

  Sophie was thirteen when she vanished from the Old Earth, and then I didn’t see her for all those years—except when I arrived in the New Kingdom she hadn’t aged one bit. I nearly fainted from happiness. It would have killed me had I missed all that growing up. She is twenty-one and a young woman now.

  ***

  The Rapture left behind a lot of death and destruction even before the Tribulation, pilotless planes careening toward the ground, cars crashing all over the place and whatnot. But later, after all the mayhem we’d seen, we joked about it anyway. We would sit around our cave chuckling like idiots at some of the Rapture stories we’d heard. Like the woman yelling at her husband as he drives down the road, only to realize nobody is listening or driving the car; or the guy on the operating table waking up with his stomach cut open and not a surgeon in sight; or the tandem skydiver suddenly realizing the instructor isn’t there to pull the ripcord. Looking back, the stories weren’t very funny at all. We just didn’t have much to laugh about in those days.

  ***

  I lived in a few different caves back then. Things were pretty awful on the Old Earth. If you didn’t live in a cave or suck up to the Antichrist, you’d be tortured in all manner of disgusting ways, until you either died or denounced your faith. I knew I’d cry like a baby before they even threatened to pull out a fingernail, so I decided to run for the hills at the first sign of real trouble, figuring I could hide until it was over.

  ***

  Jesus said no one would know the exact time or day of his return, but the Mayans were fairly close. They predicted the world would end in 2012. They were wrong; 2012 came and went without a hitch. Still, it wasn’t a bad guess when you consider the prediction was made some 5000 years before it all ended. They were into the occult, that’s how they got close. They were also into cutting the hearts out of their live captives as a sacrifice to their gods. Those gods were actually demons messing around with their heads. These were the same demons who told them to make the calendar that ended in 2012.

  ***

  Demons were always off with their predictions, and it was the same for anyone dabbling in the occult: Nostradamus, Edgar Casey, Jean Dixon, Mother Shipton, the Sumerians, the Egyptians, the Hopi Indians, and on and on. These mystics, soothsayers, seers, psychics, or whatever you want to call them, tapped into the future, but it was like looking through a drinking glass full of dirty water, so they were always getting the little things wrong, like dates and facts.

  Nostradamus was better at it than most. Still, nobody knew what he was talking about half the time because he wrote down his predictions disguised as poetry. He had to be careful because, back in his day, some busybody might call you a witch, and the next thing you knew you were being burned alive, drowned, hanged, or some other nonsense just for even thinking you knew what was going to happen.

  ***

  But you didn’t have to predict things to be labeled a witch. Way back when on the Old Earth, they might just burn you for being weird, or different, or stupid, or smart, or ugly, or pretty, or for no reason whatsoever.

  ***

  A couple years back, I met a young woman, Isabel, once accused of being a witch. Isabel told me she had been burned alive at the stake in 1552. According to law, they were supposed to strangle people first before they burned them, but the audiences were always complaining about the lack of screaming, gore, and other good fun, so the executioners usually left out that somewhat critical step.

  It was Isabel’s husband who accused her of witchcraft. He did it because he wanted to marry a younger girl. Isabel herself had been forced to marry him when she was only fourteen. Her husband was forty-two when they were married. Forty-two was ancient back then. Lots of nice young girls were forced to marry ancient men in Isabel’s time on the Old Earth. That was when young girls first began throwing up on a regular basis—long before anorexia, bulimia, low self-esteem, and all that other madness had them doing it on purpose.

  Since Isabel was an old woman in her early twenties, her husband wanted nothing to do with her anymore. He had his eye on the pretty, thirteen-year-old daughter of the neighbor, another young girl who wanted nothing to do with him.

  ***

  In my day on the Old Earth, young girls and ancient men would get married all the time. They didn’t have to marry; they married because they were foolish and insecure—the old men I mean.

  ***

  Isabel’s husband testified that he would wake up in the middle of the night to find his wife outside their cottage howling at the moon. Rather an obese fellow, he also testified she had placed a spell on him that made him eat everything in sight.

  Nobody believed any of it—howling at the moon was merely a stereotypically evil trait even way back then, and Isabel’s husband had been eating everything in sight since he was little, but Isabel’s husband knew one of the guys on the tribunal, and the whole thing was a big gyp before it began.

  Poor Isabel was dragged to the center of the town square where they tried to get her to fly by beating her with sticks. Next, they took her to the weigh house because some genius in the church decided witches must be lighter than normal if they could fly, except nobody knew exactly what her normal weight should be—or anyone’s, for that matter. So what did they do? They made something up.

  By the end of the day Isabel found herself tied to a stake above a huge pile of wood. She passed out from fear or from the beating or both, but unfortunately her melting feet woke her up, and she suffered an agonizing death. What a world it was.

  ***

  Most of the yahoos deciding who was and was not a witch worked for one church or another. And as much as God didn’t like people messing around with the occult, these witch hunters were much more misguided, hypocritical, and evil than any of the people they were persecuting. That was when churches and religion in general began to get a bad rap.

  ***

  Isabel had never howled at the moon or cast any spells. She wasn’t even a very good cook and had absolutely nothing to do with her husband’s huge appetite. She hadn’t seen the future either. The only thing Isabel ever predicted was that her marriage would be miserable. She was right.

  ***

  If you really want to know, the only place to find accurate predictions is the Bible. From Genesis to the Book of Revelation, there are over 10,000 predictions, and everything predicted has passed or will pass shortly. These aren’t vague predictions like Nostradamus wrote. There are over 500 specific predictions in the Old Testament describing the coming Messiah alone, each fitting Jesus to a tee. The mathematical probability of even fifty of these predictions coming true is something like one in ten to the seventeenth power. That’s a ten with seventeen zeros. To put that into some sort of context: you’d get better odds on shooting a three-pointer with a medicine ball from the moon.

  ***

  And though there were all kinds of predictions from the Bible knocking everybody on the head in the last years, hardly anybody woke up. You couldn’t turn on a television or radio without becoming depressed over some riot, war, storm, hurricane, tornado, earthquake, tsunami, fire, disease, or somebody starving to death or something. Jesus said these nightmarish events would be like the contractions of a woman giving birth: more intense and frequent as the delivery neared. He wasn’t kidding.

  ***

  No, most people, including myself, ignored all the signs. We mostly blamed it on nature, climate change, bad people, bad politics, bad luck, or some such thing. I guess nobody wanted to believe the end was near.

  ***

  If you want to get technical, the end of the world never did or will occur, but the Old Earth ended when Jesus returned. First, the Rapture came, taking with it about two billion people. Then, after mo
re wars, the Antichrist solidified a one-world government, calling it the New World Order, offering peace and prosperity for a time. Except once he took power, he made it practically impossible to buy or sell anything without worshiping him as God and taking the Mark of the Beast—the once fabled 666 engraving or tattoo—which was actually a tiny computer chip embedded in the forearm and later in the forehead, after many changed their minds and dug it out of from under their own skin.

  The New World Order originally wanted the chip to be placed in the forehead, predicting such behavior, but so many refused they went with the less invasive wrist procedure. That was until criminals began kidnapping people all over the place, lopping their arms off, and running over to ATMs with their newly acquired and grotesque swipe-cards. This unusual banking method was enough to sway the masses into receiving the head implant.

  ***

  It was around that time I finally wised up and fled the city to live in a cave. Because, back when I was busy lying and cheating and stealing and fornicating and whatnot, a friend of mine, Charlie, who was always trying to convince me that Jesus was the only way out of my crappy life, told me about all of the stuff that was going to happen, and he also said this: “George, if one day lots and lots of people suddenly disappear and some maniac sets up a one-world government, do not, I repeat, do not take a mark or an implant or anything, even if it means starving or dying. Listen to me—do not take that mark—it will mean eternal damnation.” Charlie’s advice got me into this place.

  ***

  It amazes me how so many people, familiar with the Bible, confronted with the Rapture, the New World Order, the Antichrist, and all the other predictions coming true, could have accepted the Mark of the Beast. I guess if some people are hungry enough, they will take on a future of eternal damnation in exchange for a meatball sandwich.