What the Hand: A Novel About the End of the World and Beyond Page 2
***
True, the New World Order did try and cover up the Rapture with a story of mass alien abductions, but it was pretty slim stuff, especially after the Antichrist began setting up shop.
The Antichrist was even mortally wounded like it was predicted in the Bible. Yep, some lonely, wannabe religious hero shot him right in the head with an exploding cartridge. It was all over the television, even—brain matter flying out the back of his head and everything. Three days later he was as good as new and more famous than the Beatles. Satan loves irony.
Yet, there they were, those who knew all about the predictions, anxiously waving their marks over the chip scanners to collect their pizzas, cheeseburgers, and all manner of cakes and pies, while I was on the run and could only dream of such goodies. So dream I did.
***
One of the Beatles, John Lennon, said the band was more popular than Jesus Christ. He was wrong. There were about a billion Christians and maybe one hundred million Beatles fans when he said it. He later apologized.
In 1980, a disturbed, attention-seeking young man, Mark Chapman, shot Lennon in the back outside his New York apartment. Chapman said he heard voices telling him to do it, but it was just demons messing around again.
***
Demons were always messing with people’s heads. It was one of their favorite things to do, right up there with outright possession. They used to make a lot of crazy movies about possession: The Exorcism of This One and The Haunting of That One. People on the Old Earth loved to see spinning heads, projectile vomit, contorting bodies, deep voices coming out of little girls, and all kinds of terrific junk like that. What most people didn’t know was how real that stuff was. They found out after the Rapture when the demons were unleashed. That’s why they stopped making all those exorcism movies; in fact, they stopped making horror movies all together. Who would pay good money to see something they could watch from their own windows for nothing?
***
Besides, most of the movies made after the Rapture were about how great a one-world government would be, where everyone would live in harmony and peace and love, speak the same language, use the same money, wear the same clothes, drive the same cheapo cars, and have slumber parties or some such nonsense all the time.
And after the Antichrist took power, most of the movies were about him and how great he was, how we were all so lucky to have him as our leader. These movies were so boring they had to threaten people to go see them. If you didn’t see at least one boring New World Order movie or one boring Antichrist movie a month, you’d be on some sort of list and men in black jumpsuits would drag you out of your house and beat the crap out of you. You could watch people getting the crap beat out of them all day long if you wanted.
***
But that was near the beginning of the Tribulation, before things really got interesting on the Old Earth. By the grace of God, I missed the worst of it while hiding in caves. I made my first cave as comfortable as I could; it was roomier, at least, than the shack I have now. But it didn’t last, as I was hounded and chased from cave to cave by the Minions of the Antichrist.
***
It was while hiding in my third cave that I met Danielle Knowles. We called her Danny. It was a deep cave and the safest one I’d found. I thought I was in love with Danny, except I didn’t know anything about love.
I spotted her group with my binoculars one afternoon, peering out of my hole in the mountain. They were pillaging through the canyon below for food and searching for a cave of their own. They were the first people of any kind I’d seen in over a year, and I nearly broke a leg in my haste trying to get down the canyon to them.
***
Danny was eight years younger than me and looked like a 1940s movie starlet or at least a Suicide Girl. She had a nineteen-year-old son named Roger, with an IQ of 65, making him a target of the New World Order. The New World Order euthanized the cognitively challenged, the mentally ill, the very old, the feeble, and pretty much anyone who wasn’t, in their opinion, genetically sound. That’s why Danny took him and ran.
***
The Nazis did the same with their less desirables, except they were having so much fun, they expanded their program to include gypsies, homosexuals, criminals, communists, intellectuals, priests, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Poles, Czechs, Russians, Jews, of course, and pretty much anyone else they felt like murdering. What a world it was.
***
Fortunately, The New World Order didn’t get the chance to erase too many cognitively challenged people because most of them were taken in the Rapture, but Roger didn’t make the cut because he was also a devil-worshiper and a psychopath.
***
I scared the bejeebers out of them when I emerged from the bushes with my scrappy beard, dirty clothes, and overall disheveled appearance. Joe Mellon, a retired police officer, almost shot me with his service revolver. He would have, too, except he was getting older and slower at drawing and firing, so I had plenty of time to duck behind a rock and yell out that I was a friendly. They didn’t take long to convince because anyone with my appearance couldn’t be of the New World Order, as the Minions of the Antichrist were well fed, cleanly shaved, and sharply dressed in their black, jumpsuit uniforms.
Also in the party were Billy Sanchez, a line cook and ex-convict; two middle-aged sisters named Ida and Eva; a bulky, gay phone repairman, Howard Frost; and a twenty-four-year-old office clerk, who was in such shock after watching his wife raped and murdered that he forgot his own name. The sisters called him Speckle because of his large eyeglasses and small frame.
We became a tight little tribe for a while, until they were eventually picked off by Satan’s Minions, or done in by demons and various disasters. Except for Roger, who took a few Minions down with him in a blaze of glory, as psychopaths are wont to do; and Danny, who left and became a martyr because she was braver and godlier than the rest of us; and me, of course, lucky me—I never did die. I got to see it all.
2
I’ve been here in paradise, or the New Kingdom, for nearly eight years, though it seems more like two. Time isn’t like it used to be. You could be sitting around thinking about some little thing that happened or something stupid you did on the Old Earth, and the next thing you know it’s already a week later.
But you don’t have to be too careful with thinking about things and losing time. People expect you to be late or even missing altogether, and they don’t get offended at all or think you’re some sort of flake like they would’ve on the Old Earth.
***
Anyway, I should at least attempt to start somewhere near the beginning. My name is George Somerset, and I was born November twenty-second in the year 1967. That was exactly four years from the day President John Fitzgerald Kennedy was assassinated. On my birthday, the television would be filled with highlights of the president’s life, the whole Kennedy clan running around Hyannis Port and the White House and whatnot. But mostly they’d run footage of the assassination. They’d play that over and over again. There’d be Kennedy, year after year, riding in that big open limousine with the First Lady, smiling and waving at everybody like he was just going to have another wonderful day at being the president and all.
I’d stand in front of the television in my footed pajamas, yelling loud as I could at the driver of that dang limo, “Speed that thing up, you dummy!” But sure as anything, that driver would continue crawling down the road without a care in the world, like he was going backwards practically.
The next thing you know, the president’s brains are flying all over the place, and his poor wife is hanging over the trunk, trying to gather up her husband’s scalp, all the brain matter and other gook, to put it back in his head, they figured, though nobody ever asked her.
***
They blamed it on a supposedly lone assassin named Lee Harvey Oswald. Oswald was mostly a patsy, as even he later figured out, another puppet of the Illuminati, who told him it was a good idea to shoot at the preside
nt. And since he was tired of everyone ignoring his ideas, ignoring all the things he said he did or said he was going to do, he listened.
***
The Illuminati were demons, more or less, and they’d been around for centuries. In my day they wore business suits and ran the world. There had always been demons on the Old Earth, in many forms, beginning with Satan himself, slithering around Adam and Eve, tugging at their elbows, just like that one kid you knew who was always trying to get you to do something rotten.
Satan eventually brought down the rest of his buddies, other fallen angels, who mated with human women, creating the giants, the Illuminati, and the false gods: Zeus, Poseidon, Aphrodite, Isis, Athena, Hercules, Hades, Prometheus, Cupid, Venus, Mercury, and the other characters you read about in elementary school—they weren’t just mythological figures. Who the heck could make those freaks up? Every culture passed their stories down. Sure, the stories had been exaggerated over time, but they actually walked the planet.
***
How do I know all this? I looked it up at the Hall of Knowledge. It’s only a couple of miles from my shack. The Hall of Knowledge is more or less a giant library the size of ten or twelve Walmarts, and you can look up anything you feel like, anything at all. I found out where the Ark of the Covenant was stashed, why so many ships and planes were lost in the Bermuda Triangle, where Bigfoot was hiding the whole time with practically every hillbilly in America out looking for him, and how the universe was created. I even looked up how many sneakers I went through as a kid. And since the new bodies are a lot smarter than the old ones, you understand and remember most of it, no matter how dumb you were on the Old Earth. Heck, you could probably learn quantum physics or something in a couple weeks.
***
Walmart was a giant store on the Old Earth where you could buy pretty much anything. It was full of cheap products made in China. After they built a Walmart in your town, people wouldn’t have to go into a bunch of smaller stores and buy quality products from people they knew whose families owned those smaller stores for generations. They could go to one place and spend a lot less money for their junk. Walmart was supposedly owned and managed by Christians. But the only good news they offered was that everyone in town could get a minimum wage job out of the deal if they wanted.
***
Yep, you can learn most anything at the Hall of Knowledge. The only thing you can’t learn is how to be a better human being; that you have to do all by yourself—just like on the Old Earth.
***
Anyway, I found out the Illuminati were bred from the favorite children of the fallen angels, the cream of the crop, stronger and smarter than their own brothers and sisters, or any five humans—some who could pick up a man and throw him like a Frisbee, and some who knew everything about everything. They knew about the planets and the stars, about space and time, about math and science, and they knew how to build things.
These demon offspring told the humans to worship them as gods. They made slaves of the humans and forced them to build statues and monuments in their images, so the humans could pray to them. Many of them were giants, some over ten feet tall, who caused havoc everywhere they went.
After some time, though, humans began to figure things out. They saw that these “gods” could be injured, that they grew old and died just like men. They eventually realized they weren’t gods at all. Tired of them taking their women and pushing them around all the time, the humans rebelled. At first they killed a few in their sleep. Emboldened, they gathered in groups, attacking them head on. It was one of the bloodiest eras in history. Realizing their number was up, the false gods fought dirty and took as many humans with them as they could, but the sheer numbers eventually overwhelmed them. The false gods were on the run, they were hunted for centuries, until their numbers dwindled to just a handful of the stealthier ones, and the era of gods and giants became legend.
It was far from over, however. Hiding deep in the earth, these demon outcasts got together and figured out that a twelve foot guy with one big eye in the middle of his forehead, strolling to the corner store for a gallon of milk, might be somewhat of a target to the riled-up humans.
Thus, a new breed of Illuminati was born—demon offspring who could pass for humans. These were cold, robotic creatures, blending, mating, and working undiscovered among us. With their super intelligence, they acquired land, wealth, and power. The Illuminati formed and hid for centuries in the higher degrees and levels of Masonic clubs and other secret organizations, pushing their agendas on unsuspecting governments and corporations through manipulation and mayhem until they had enough power to control the world and pave the way for the Antichrist.
***
Lee Harvey Oswald was later killed by another Illuminati victim, a Dallas businessman with links to organized crime named Jack Ruby. He shot Oswald on television just like it was with the Antichrist, except it was in the stomach, in black and white, and too fuzzy to see the blood and guts and everything. Since Ruby had a lot more self-esteem than Oswald, and he wouldn’t be talked into doing such a stupid thing like shooting someone on live television, the Illuminati had to threaten him with a Sicilian necktie.
***
A Sicilian necktie is a method of execution wherein the victim’s throat is cut and the tongue pulled out through the slit. The Italian mob stole the idea from the Columbians, who came up with it in the late 1940s to send a message to political opponents. The message was this: don’t mess with criminals or politicians.
***
The actual shooters in the JFK assassination were a professional hit team from France, hired and trained by the Illuminati. Just when the assassins began licking their chops, ready to collect all that money from the great job they’d finished, the Illuminati had them all whacked, too. You can’t trust anybody!
***
I spend a lot of my time at the Hall of Knowledge, looking up the things that puzzled me when I was on the Old Earth—things like disappearances, ghosts, dinosaurs, heaven, hell, creation, and all kinds of neat stuff. It’s all there, anything you want to know.
Yes, I looked up Jimmy Hoffa. It turns out he wasn’t killed by the mafia after all. No, aliens abducted him because he had a big head. Aliens were always abducting people with unusual features for this or that genetic experiment. That time they were looking for large brains, but when they cut open Hoffa’s head they only found a thick skull, so they ended up tossing the whole mess.
Jimmy was pretty unlucky as far as alien abductions go—usually, they’d harvest some sperm or a few eggs, erase your memory, and drop you back on the highway naked or something.
They could easily get you back in your clothes, except most aliens are practical jokers. You wouldn’t know it by looking at them, but aliens have a good sense of humor. They tend to be a bit mean spirited with their jokes, but, after all, they are related to the fallen angels.
It’s true. Fallen angels and aliens share the same genes. Aliens didn’t come from outer space, not originally anyway. When the outcast demons were making the new and improved Illuminati using their own DNA, they messed up quite a bit before they got what they wanted. These failed experiments made for all kinds of freaky humanoid creatures. Most of them were smothered or drowned, but some of them were pretty smart and useful, so they decided to keep them around. However, this became a problem because the creepy things mated and multiplied like cockroaches.
That is until one of the demons came up with an idea to build some rocket ships and send them off to other planets. For thousands of years, there were no aliens on the Earth. But once these deported space misfits became settled, and after some time, they began building their own spacecraft, better machines—flying saucers and such. The aliens even figured out how to travel through wormholes, so they could pretty much go anywhere they pleased. After populating planets across the universe, they began their own genetic programs, spitting out aliens of every shape and size to use for their own creepy agendas, but mostly to do the bid
ding of Satan and the Illuminati.
***
Even though the Illuminati are genetic cousins of aliens, they have no sense of humor whatsoever. This is because the Illuminati were engineered to be utterly ruthless, coldblooded individuals, capable of anything, no matter how awful, especially if it moved them closer to one-world government. And they did their job well, pretty much running the show on the Old Earth, causing pain, heartache, suffering, misery, and mayhem wherever they roamed. In any case, they didn’t have a lot of time for practical jokes.
***
As far as Illuminati mayhem goes, The Kennedy assassination was relatively mild. It would barely crack their top 100, even as far as assassinations went. The last presidential assassination was a real doozy, however. It occurred on the Old Earth after the first Jewish president, Arthur Joshua Friedman, was elected.
***
It took nearly 200 years for the United States to elect a Jewish president. Why did it take so long? For all its posturing of freedom and equality, like much of the Western World America was founded and ruled by white Protestants, who mostly believed that other races were inferior. And believed it or not, Jews were the most hated people of all time. They were more hated than Blacks or Latinos or Arabs or Asians or Indians or anybody else. It wasn’t even close. No other people in history were despised, maligned, hounded, beaten, enslaved, persecuted, tortured, murdered, and exterminated to such a prodigal and horrific extent.
***
Still, the Illuminati didn’t assassinate President Friedman because he was Jewish. They had him killed because he wouldn’t cooperate with their agenda. To dispose of the defiant President Friedman, the Illuminati convinced another fellow who needed attention, the trusted White House gardener, Curtis Trout, to take a brand new red riding lawnmower onto the White House grounds. Trout was nicknamed Bigmouth by teammates on his high school swim team because he wouldn’t shut up even in the water. The new lawnmower didn’t actually work, though, because it was gutted and packed with an explosive device. What Bigmouth didn’t know was that he wasn’t smuggling in just any explosive device, but a small tactical nuclear bomb.