The short story Adalia references is real, but I don't remember the title or author.

The speech is almost entirely taken from the book. I wanted to keep the commentary on it toned down, but the universal response from Jewish people when I asked was...well, not positive, and I can't imagine it would be better post-Rapture with two guys at the Western Wall killing Jews while saying Jesus is the messiah. The gratuitous non-English is copy-pasted from the web, so if I got some/all of it wrong, point it out and I'll fix it. Along similar lines, the miracle formula is now named Netssa, a combination of ness, miracle, and neta, plant, or so random internet pages have claimed.

Forever in Hell, thanks for your advice and you're quite right about speeches and sermons needing to be broken up better...but I didn't really do that for the one this chapter, because there's so much going on there already. I will definitely try to follow your advice when I write less chaotic scenes.


Of Beasts

Getting a job was easy, she found when she tried the next morning. Just as she had wanted to help her church, it seemed a lot of nonbelievers wanted to help Carpathia. There was already a website up for anyone to apply to, and she heard they really would take anyone and everyone who did. A good thing, with the rest of the economy in shambles. She'd meant to sit down and try to pay the credit card bills on the table, but there was a large READ ME link on the top of every page of the site listing countries that had frozen certain companies and which. As an American, she was advised not to pay credit card bills or loans, that paying utilities was optional during this transition period, and that mortgages could not be collected by banks until a court had reevaluated the home's worth. What in the world? Could he do something like that?

She just hoped it was real, otherwise she'd get in trouble for not paying. It seemed legitimate, even if it was a link labeled in oversized red capital letters. It was hosted on his site, anyway, and assuming the antichrist could accomplish whatever he said he wanted seemed a safe bet.

That was a godsend, though, however it was accomplished. She wouldn't be able to afford to pay the bills for more than a few months at best, unless her job at the antichrist's came with a ludicrous salary.

What salary - what anything - could be ludicrous in a world where the antichrist had just killed every credit card company as one of his opening moves, though? She'd have been less surprised to have been told interns were paid a million a year instead.

She returned to filling out the form. For hours wanted, she was surprised to see an option labeled part time that was basically volunteering whenever she felt like it, without set hours or days. Probably some sort of benefits scam, she thought, but it also seemed the safest option, so she clicked it. If she decided she needed to disappear, it'd take them a while to realize she wasn't reporting in, and it'd let her stay home any time she needed.

After a few minutes, she tried to go to the next page to fill it out and was informed she'd successfully sent her application. It'd never asked her what job she was applying for, she realized. Maybe the option she picked was only for one kind of job. She considered trying to go through again to see if she'd missed something, but she didn't want to accidentally resend an application and look like an idiot. And when she checked her email again a few hours later, she found a reply informing her she'd been accepted and should show up at one of the local branches. She was expecting it to be Boston, but according to the map the closest one was the next town over. How many of these did he have? But maybe she'd just been lucky, or God had made it work out. Perhaps that meant this was what God wanted her to do.

"I'm going out, be back soon," Adalia called.

"Uh-huh," Noah grunted, eyes glued to the television screen as he mashed the controller's buttons.

-

She got confused along the way, but after a bit of circling she managed to find the right turn and drove up to a nondescript office building. The parking lot was about half full and had an unusually mixed collection of cars, from fifteen year old Hondas with rust eating away the rims and underside to brand-new jaguars. She remembered the car she was using was hardly hers, and no doubt she wasn't the only one to have done so, and of course, given the choice, people would probably have picked the fancier ones. But she'd also driven past burnt out buildings and the mangled remains of horrific car accidents - it would not be unlikely that someone might have lost their car. Or even had it stolen, in the chaos after the vanishings. And so, this, a mishmash of years and care, all making the same pilgrimage to help the man who would save the world and bring about the apocalypse. She parked carefully next to a hummer and walked in.

There was a wide open lobby with an incongruously plain wooden desk sitting on top of the meticulously polished floor to one side of the manicured plant centerpiece, with a young man behind it. "Hi," he said, smiling. "Name?"

"I - I'm Adalia Gottfrey," she said, trying to make sense of this. As he typed that into the laptop, she asked, "Um, was this..." She wasn't sure how to say it. "...like this before?"

"I figured people couldn't be expected to come in and wander around until they found some sign of life, especially since we're only using a couple rooms right now." He gestured at the desk and room at large. "The whole bottom level is designed with this sort of aggressively useless aesthetic. We're mostly using the second and third levels right now, but this is the place where people enter, so here we are."

"So, this wasn't a UN building before?"

"Oh no, just bought by the Global Community. It's your standard poorly designed office building. A lot of companies are dumping property as they contract, so Carpathia wanted them bought up to prevent a market glut. We're trying to keep things stable."

"I thought things weren't that bad yet."

"To be honest...About the only places that are actually stable are the European countries, and that'll change if the economy falls apart. America's doing as well as can be expected, but we think we lost more adults than anywhere else in the first day. At least we're not China. Anyway," he said, eyes flicking to the screen, "you'll probably be put to work as an intern in some department but for now go to the second story and go into the room on the left. Should have a piece of paper with Unassigned written on it taped up on the wall or door. If not, tell them I told them to do that an hour ago."

"Are you guys just taking anyone?"

"Pretty much," he said with a rueful smile. "With companies flailing about like chickens with their heads cut off, someone's got to employ people. Never thought CEOs were all that essential, but live and learn, hey?"

"Live and learn," she repeated. For a second she wondered if she should tell him about Jesus, but there'd be time for that later. Instead she thanked him and headed for the elevator.

The next floor was carpeted in gray. She turned left and took a few steps around the corner in the corridor to see a sheet of paper taped to a door. UNASSIGNED was written in scribbly block letters, like someone wanted to make it thick enough to read from a distance but only had ballpoint pens to work with. There was also the numbers 216 scratched all over it like a border, with small hearts drawn in between them. She opened the door.

"What's with 216?" she asked. "Is it the room number?"

"Nah," said a girl inside, sitting at a table with a collection of other young men and women. "It's the number of the beast, get it?"

Adalia didn't. She shook her head, then said, "Wait, beast, like antichrist?"

"Yeah. Are you Christian too?"

She nodded.

"Cool. I was worried we'd be outnumbered."

"You still are," said the boy next to her. "But aside from not getting your meat pizza, what does it matter?"

"Your immortal souls," she said with a seriousness so intense it was impossible to tell if she actually meant it.

The rest of the table rolled their eyes.

"Um..." Adalia asked, "so...what now?"

"Interview coordination stuff." One of the boys jerked his head toward the cubicals further down. "They take like twenty minutes. Pizza takes like fifteen minutes to arrive, so if we eat fast enough, we can finish it off before Kelly gets out. Take a seat."

She did.

Everyone, even her fellow Christian, was in good spirits. And Adalia, after initial surprise, found herself falling into the same mood. Part of it was simply chattering, talking about things other than the upcoming end of the world and the suffering and persecution that would come, but part of it, she thought, was that there was the sense they were going to do something productive, have a purpose.

"Why are you here?" she asked.

"Because of Carpathia, I guess," was the consensus, and then one boy added, "Pay's decent, too. Ten dollars an hour, plus the same amount in Global Communities bills that you can use...somewhere. I guess at the cafeteria."

"Who'd use that much money on cafeteria food?"

"Hey, maybe they'll be offering caviar, I don't know."

Something about it reminded Adalia of a story she'd read. "Half the pay is in their own currency?" she said. "That's - something's wrong."

"It's weird, I guess, but places pay you in stock and discounts and that sort of thing all the time, right?"

She shook her head. "I - it's silly. But there was a story I read, with this time traveler who had to fix things or prevent something bad from happening, where the US had gone into a depression, and there was this big industrialist who was giving everyone a job, and he'd started printing up his own form of money that people could use at any of his stories, everyone was hailing him as a savior, it'd gotten so that other stories had started to take his bills rather than real money, and he was going to end up controlling everything. He was going to become president and then king. Because people would have let him, you see."

It might have had more of an impact if the Christian girl hadn't immediately said, "See, guys! I told you!"

"Yeah, right. A story got written by some guy and so that's considered evidence - oh, what am I arguing, that's always been what you say."

"It's true," the girl insisted. "The Bible is, well, like the Platonic Ideal of a text, so all writing approaches it. And the Bible is prophesy, so you can find prophesy reflected in other writing. Though Christian writers are the only ones you can really rely on, of course."

"But tarot cards, those are evil," said another girl, rolling her eyes.

"That's different. It's fortune-telling." You could have cracked diamonds on her conviction. Adalia wished she could be half so certain of the truth.

The girl being interviewed appeared from among the cubicals, and the Christian girl, next in line headed off.

"So what'll you be doing?" they asked her.

"I will..." she began gravely, "be serving the vital roll...of acquiring and transporting...heated decaffeinated liquids!" She grinned and laughed. "Or something like that. I'm pretty sure they're just classifying most of us as interns."

"Why are they bothering with interviewing people, then?" Adalia asked.

"Apparently they're expecting a lot of turnover? He was kind of vague when I asked. I guess for part-timers and stuff, they want to know who can do what. If they've got five people who can do one thing, but only three of them can do another, it makes sense not to assign all three to the first thing. Or if half of us quit, they'll want to know who to plug into the vacant coffee-gopher slots. Ooh, mushroom pizza!" She snagged a piece and started eating, then sat down. "Hey, what time is it? How much longer until the treaty signing?"

"The treaty signing?" Adalia repeated. "You mean, with Israel? That's today?"

They nodded.

"It was just announced yesterday morning! You can't have a treaty all ready to go like that!"

One of the boys shrugged. "I know what you mean, but that's how it is. Didn't you listen to the news today?"

She shook her head. "I have been, but not today."

"Since Carpathia took over yesterday and the creation of the Global Community, there's been a lot of new announcements. Like the one about bills, you know about that?" She nodded and he continued, "They're dismantling the credit card companies and there's a rumor they're going to kill the rest of the loan industry next."

"What? I read something on his site but...they can't do something like that!"

"Who'll stop them? Half the guys in charge disappeared and half the guys left have either offed themselves or sold everything and run off to build a bunker. And are you really going to get upset if all the stuff you owe just disappears?"

"Well, of course not," Adalia said. "But there's a reason for them." She would have elaborated, but she wasn't really sure on the finer points.

"There's a reason to wipe the slate clean on occasion, too," he argued. "Besides, once that formula gets out, a lot of stuff is going to fall apart one way or another. If people thought Israel producing cheap food was screwing the world's economy, imagine what'll happen once people can feed themselves for nothing more that a dash of Netssa and a bucket of water? And they're making progress on those diesel trees - two years from now, you don't have to buy food or gas. Learn how to weave cotton and you're literally home free. The time to stick to old capitalist ideals is long over. It's adapt or die time now."

"Huh," said one of the boys, ignoring them both. He'd turned on the television. "This is weird. They're saying some guy's bought airtime in the slot before the treaty signing, in Israel."

"Well, try another channel, see if they're reporting on it over there."

"No, wait," interrupted another boy. "He's a rabbi? Maybe he's got something to say about the treaty."

"What if he disagrees with it?" Adalia asked.

"Well, then he does," the boy dismissed. "I'd like to think our rabbis would be smarter than that, though."

"Guys, you could listen to what they're saying it's about if you're so curious."

"The sound is off," he retorted as Adalia quickly looked to the screen to catch a flash of the closed captioning before it disappeared, too fast to make out most of the words.

"The messiah?" Adalia repeated. "Jesus?"

The boys exchanged looks as one said, "Not if he's a rabbi. Maybe he'll be bringing up the question of if the last messiah will appear. I mean, it's got to be a pretty big question about now, considering they're going to rebuild the temple."

"What?" Adalia almost shouted. "What happened? There's a mosque there!"

"You think a rabbi's going to be talking about Jesus but you know about the Dome of the Rock?" The boy shook his head. "And no, they're relocating it."

"There is no way..."

"That's what I'd have said yesterday. There's having good relations with the Muslims and then there's mind controlling the entire populations of several countries at once. I mean - I never thought it'd happen, that's for sure. But Carpathia convinced them somehow."

"Considering how much they benefited from Israel's prosperity, it seems like the least they could do"

"Considering Israel's part in the mess, that seems like the least they could do," said a girl.

"Guys, guys, let's have our death fight over a country none of us have gone to after the show."

"Hey, I've been to Israel," one of the boys argued.

"Still seems kind of weird to bring this up right before the treaty. You think he's messianic?"

"There's no need to jump to insulting conclusions. I mean, rebuilding the temple, that's a pretty big deal."

"Uh, so what'll this be about? Who the messiah is?" Adalia asked. "Like, who the prophecies point to?"

"If the messiah shows up, we're not going to need to be told." At her expression, he added, "Do not start with the Jesus stuff. Hell, Carpathia fulfills more than Jesus, who managed a whopping zero."

"But..."

"But he didn't do what the last messiah will do. He shows back up to make all Jews know every word of the Law from birth, then we'll consider it."

"Or just writes the full scripture on their hearts in ink." At the glare the girl protested, "What? It's a legitimate reading!"

"No. Just...no."

"So then what'll the rabbi talk about?"

"Just what this means, I guess. You know, the last messiah is supposed to rebuild the temple, or else come about at the same time, or else will come once we build it, so if we're rebuilding it, either he's one of the guys helping or he's going to appear shortly, or they've misinterpreted something."

"Turning the sound on," the boy with the remote said, sounding irritated. "Now perhaps we could try just listening to what the guy says instead of debating what it might be."

A bearded man in full black rabbinical garb was sitting at a desk or counter, with paper in front of him and a standard news backdrop. The whole thing seemed rather plain.

"Pretty blond for a rabbi," one of the boys said.

"Next you'll complain his nose isn't big enough," said a girl. "Besides, he might be a convert."

"That is indeed an even more unlikely possibility," said the boy. "But nah, just think it's odd."

"Good evening," the man was saying to the camera.

"Huh, his voice sounds American. Wonder why he's broadcasting from -"

"Shush!"

He introduced himself as Rabbi Tsion ben Judah.

The boys snickered.

"What?" she asked.

"He's basically named Israel son of Judah. Kind of like being named John Christian Smith, only Jewish. And more over the top."

" - have undertaken several years of study on the subject of the messiah. I have come to the conclusion that we may know beyond all shadow of doubt the identity of our messiah -"

"Oh lord," one of the boys groaned, covering his face. "This is messianic bullshit. This is embarrassing. He's going to start talking about prophecies and prerequisites."

"Our Bible has given clear prophecies, prerequisites, and predictions that only one person in the human race could ever fulfill. Follow along with me and see if you come to the same conclusion I have - "

"We should have ordered beer, we could have started a drinking game."

"How did this guy get airtime?"

" - and we shall see whether Messiah is a real person, whether he has already come, or whether he is yet to come."

"Oh man, he thinks we haven't heard this pitch before," one of the other boys said, sounding mortified. "Why isn't he getting cut off?"

"What do you mean? You know who he's talking about? Why would they cut him off?"

"This is Jews for Jesus evangelical boilerplate. They always try to make a big deal about leading up and 'see if you come to the same conclusion'."

"The best part is when you say, 'Ooh! I know! I know! Is it Jesus?' and they get all excited like you're going to convert on the spot. Because it's not like anyone else ever recited the pitch they have on their website. No, it is a big secret we've never heard before."

"Oh, and now he's talking about studying the prophesies."

" - confirming the accuracy of the late Alfred Edersheim -"

"I bet ten bucks that guy's Christian."

"You're on. There's no way he'd tell people he's basing everything off a Christian's writing if he's going to claim this is Jewish. No one's that dumb."

" - Edersheim had postulated that there were four hundred fifty six messianic passages in Scripture -"

"No, that's pretty Christian."

"There are messianic Jews that say that kind of stuff."

"There's a difference?"

" - based on careful study, I believe there are at least one hundred and nine separate and distinct prophecies Messiah must fulfill."

"I've got twenty bucks on 'Evangelical convert to Jews for Jesus', anyone want to take that bet?"

They require a man so unusual and a life so unique that they eliminate all pretenders."

"No way."

We consulted a mathematician and asked him to calculate the probability of even 20 of the 109 prophecies being fulfilled in one man. He came up with odds of one in one quadrillion, one hundred and twenty-five trillion!"

"No wait, I'll take the bet. That's hard core fundy, not simply Jews for Jesus."

"Despite the billions of people who still populate this planet, you can put a postcard in the mail with just a few distinctions on it, and I will be the only person to receive it. You eliminate much of the world when you send it to Israel. You narrow it more when it comes to Jerusalem. You cut the potential recipients to a tiny fraction when it goes to a certain street, a certain number, a certain apartment. And then, with my first and last name on it, you have singled me out of billions. That, I believe, is what these prophecies of Messiah do. They eliminate, eliminate, eliminate, until only one person could ever fulfill them."

"Why hasn't he gotten cut off yet?"

"It's humiliating. Can't someone hold up some cue card off camera and at least tell him there's already been more than one messiah? Or that there's supposed to be one potential messiah in every generation?"

"Or at least get him to stop using it like it's the guy's name?"

"Hey, you're not even supposed to be proselytizing in Israel. Nothing they do now is going could make him stop looking like an idiot short of cutting the feed."

"Messiah is not limited to just a few identifying marks," the man continued. "We Jews -"

"Yeah right!"

"- have been looking for him, praying for him, longing for him for centuries, and yet we have stopped studying the many identification hallmarks in our Scriptures. We have ignored many and made favorites of others, to the point that we are now looking for a political leader who will right wrongs, bring justice, and promise peace and salvation."

"We don't need salvation!"

Adalia cringed. "How can you not need salvation?"

"By not getting hung up on original sin in the first place."

"And not believing God thinks we're a bunch of worthless scum."

"Or not believing in God period," added a brunette. "That makes things simple fast."

"The very first qualification of Messiah, accepted by our scholars from the beginning, is that he should be born the seed of a woman -"

"No, it's that he be born of the seed of King David!" yelled one of the boys at the TV. "Come on, this is basic!"

"- not the seed of a man like all other human beings. We know now that women do not possess `seed.'"

"Now he's failing biology," said a spike-haired girl. "And history."

"How'd this schlemiel get airtime?"

"The man provides the seed for the woman's egg. And so this must be a supernatural birth, as foretold in Isaiah 7:14, `Therefore the Lord Himself will give you a sign:"

"Behold!" the boys shouted.

"Behold -"

"The!"

" - the -"

"YOUNG WOMAN!" half of them yelled, the other half shouting, "ALMAH!"

" - virgin -"

"Fail."

" - shall conceive and bear a son, and shall -"

"Wait, so which is it?" Adalia interrupted.

"Young woman. If she was a virgin, they'd have called her a virgin."

"Yeah, not like Hebrew doesn't contain both words."

"Really?" one of the other boys said in mock amazement. "And here I thought it was written up in King Jame's English and we were all reading in Hebrew just to be annoying."

"Our Messiah must be born of a woman and not of a man because he must be righteous. All other humans are born of the seed of their father, and thus the sinful seed of Adam has been passed on to them. Not so with the Messiah, born of a virgin."

"Hebrew, benzona, do you speak it!?"

"Our Messiah must be born of an extremely rare bloodline - "

"I can't believe he hasn't been cut off yet!"

"While he must be born of a woman, that woman must -"

"Maybe they're laughing too hard to cut him off."

"God himself eliminated billions of people from this select bloodline so Messiah's identity would be unmistakable."

"Because God was worried the whole resurrecting everyone who had ever died and ushering them into an everlasting kingdom of peace thing wouldn't tip us off."

"First God eliminated two-thirds of the world's population by choosing Abraham, who was from the line of Shem, one of Noah's three sons. "

"Oh man oh man, he's a young-earth creationist who believes in the flood. Okay, yes, they shouldn't cut him off, this is going to be pure gold. Hey, anyone know which group colonized North America?"

"Why, the magical aquatic Jews, who swam there from the African coast. After all, when you've eliminated the impossible, whatever is left, however improbable, must be correct. That's science!"

"Of Abraham's two sons, God chose only Isaac, eliminating half of Abraham's progeny," the man said. He had started to glance to the side of the screen, as if something was going on off camera, but he soldiered one with, "One of the two sons of Isaac, Jacob, received the blessing but passed it on to only one of his twelve sons, Judah. That eliminated millions of other sons in Israel." The rabbi continued down the list of men to the heckling of the boys.

"You think this chiam yankel noticed they're all men yet? As in, it doesn't transfer down the female side?"

"Ah, but he totally already had to. If daughters counted, then he wouldn't be able to keep halving and twelving it neatly."

"No, a tembel like this probably never even thought it through. He's just repeating what someone else told him."

" - Messiah will go to Egypt, because the prophet Hosea says that out of Egypt God will call -"

"Is he talking about the entire Jewish population? Because I think he just started talking about the entire Jewish population."

"We are all Messiah!"

"Awesome! I'm going to go get drunk on bottled water!"

"Bottled water? Damn, wouldn't it be cheaper to just buy wine? Go with tap."

"Yeah, just because you're Messiah doesn't mean you get to screw up the environment."

"Well, what good is it then?"

When they quieted, Adalia could make out the sounds of people talking on the television. It sounded like they were trying to be quiet but their voices had started rising. She didn't hear any words she could understand.

"Do you hear that?" she asked.

"I think they're talking about stopping the broadcast," one of the boys said. "It's a bit hard to hear."

The man was shuffling his notes quickly."I may not have much time, so I want to speed through a few more clear prophecies and tell you what conclusion I have drawn. Isaiah and Malachi predict that Messiah will be preceded by a forerunner. The Psalmist said Messiah would be betrayed by a friend. Zechariah said that he would be betrayed for thirty pieces of silver -"

The off-camera voices were getting louder and more insistent, and he kept glancing at them as he spoke. The Jewish boys were quiet aside from occasional snickers.

"What are they saying?" Adalia asked.

"They're saying this meshungina needs to shut up. More politely than that. He probably can't understand it anyway."

"Why aren't they telling him in English?"

"It's an English broadcast, so everyone would understand them if they did that. Off camera they're probably holding up cue cards or something written in English, though, because he's obviously getting the gist of it."

"Wait, not more politely. They just called him a meshungina."

"If I had more time -"

"Ooh, yeah, I'd say he's getting the gist of it. He's nowhere near through his hour."

He was talking faster, as if expecting to be cut off shortly." - I could share with you dozens more prophecies from the Hebrew Scriptures that point to the qualifications of the Messiah. I will broadcast a phone number at the end of this broadcast so you can order all the printed material from our study. The study will convince you that we can be absolutely sure only one person could ever be qualified to be the special Anointed One of Jehovah.

"Let me close by saying that the three years I have invested in searching the sacred writings of Moses and the prophets have been the most rewarding of my life. I expanded my study to books of history and other sacred writings -"

"Why would we care what Hindus said about their gods?"

"Come on, the only sacred writings this tahat ever read was New Testament."

" - including the New Testament of the Gentiles -"

"Finally!" The boys high-fived.

" - combing every record I could find to see if anyone has ever lived up to the messianic qualifications. Was there one born in Bethlehem of a virgin, a descendant of King David, traced back to our father Abraham, who was taken to Egypt, called back to minister in Galilee, preceded by a forerunner, rejected by God's own people, betrayed for thirty pieces of silver, pierced without breaking a bone, buried with the rich, and resurrected?"

"Oh, was there? I wonder who that could possibly be? Because I have no idea who you're talking about schmendrick!"

"According to one of the greatest of all Hebrew prophets, Daniel, there would be exactly 483 years between the decree to rebuild the wall and the city of Jerusalem `in troublesome times' before the Messiah would be cut off for the sins of the people. Exactly 483 years after the rebuilding of Jerusalem and its walls, Jesus Christ of Nazareth -"

"It's not a damn surname!"

" - rode into the city on a donkey to the rejoicing of the people, just as the prophet Zechariah had predicted: `Rejoice greatly, O daughter of Zion! Shout, O daughter of Jerusalem! Behold, your King is coming to you; He is just and having salvation, lowly and riding on a donkey, a colt, the foal of a donkey.'"

"Because they totally spoke English back then!"

"Jesus Christ is the Messiah!"

"Jesus the Anointed Messiah is the Messiah? Christ, does he not even know what the word Christ means?"

People had appeared on the set, gesturing at him, and others were starting to shout. "You have to stop," one was saying.

"There can be no other option!"he shouted over them. "I had come to this answer but was afraid to act on it, and I was almost too late. Jesus came to rapture his church, to take them with him to heaven as he said he would. But I have since received him as my Savior. He is coming back in seven years! Be ready! Yeshua ben Yosef, Jesus son of Joseph, is Yeshua Hamashiac! Jesus Christ is the Messiah! Jesus Christ is - "

The screen blanked out.