The television blared into the living room, the powerful voice of Saul Ringman heard across the house. Tall, dark-haired and handsome, the young man kept on his firm, zealous and furious diatribes. A few weeks ago, he had started appearing on a minor televangelism show broadcast from Nebraska. The show's popularity (and ratings) had skyrocketed beyond all its competitors, and Ringman was definitely the reason.
The man's voice was addictive - everything it said seemed obviously, naturally true. His radical solutions for America's problems were simple, easy and effective. Most of all he knew where God's enemies were. The men in Washington were secret Muslims bringing down the nation. The Illuminati were spreading their message through pop hits and blockbusters. The whole nation was irrevocably tainted, he said - it needed to be burnt down and rebuilt from the ground up as a Christian state. What he said didn't involve logic or reason, he spoke to the gut.
And when he spoke the gut usually won out. His personality had overwhelmed the televangelist whose name adorned the show's opening titles and he was becoming fast fixed in public awareness. Now he said he was soon going to tour America and begin speaking at rallies. He was going to become the very public face of a new Christian movement which he said would blow everything else out of the water.
Words more true had not been spoken.
+++NORTHERN AFGHANISTAN+++
The Blackheart left his fighters to celebrate over their latest victory as the Sun rose over the valley and the burning village below. A sizeable town, it had fallen at sunset yesterday. His lieutenants and fighting men were still allotting their shares of women and plunder taken from the ruins - the most were of course his. From this vantage point he could see south and west, vast territories yet remaining for the taking. Suddenly, a cluster of sand blew towards him and shaped itself into the form of a man, a wicked grin on its face.
"It is good that you do this," the man of sand said. "But you must go on faster. Drive out the kuffar from this land and the King of All The Earth shall aid you in conquest after conquest, until you rule from the waters of Indus to the heights of Jerusalem. Slacken, and you will feel His whip upon your wretched back!"
"Yes, djinn of the sand," the Blackheart replied. "But I could not defeat the kuffar dogs unless I had a much greater army."
"Doubt you the King of the Earth?" replied the sand-figure. "He has countless servants under Him. Fight against the kuffar and they will assist you, for the King of the Earth likes what he sees in you. But do not, and they will shred your flesh and deliver your petty soul to the malice of His gaze!"
The Blackheart shuddered noticeably.
"Then, o djinn of the sand, I will drive out the kuffar; slay their warriors, take their women, slaughter their children like sheep. But tell me what I must do to defeat their fortresses."
The spirit of sand spoke.
==THE NEXT DAY==
The sun was beating down upon the Coalition base when the Blackheart made his assault. He had one-hundred and sixty-nine Pashtun fighting men under him - far less than the kuffar host and very oddly specific. But the djinn's instructions had been adamant. They were to attack the main gate at noon in a direct assault. It seemed suicide, but the djinn had demanded it. They were allowed to kill and plunder and rape to their hearts' content after they had won - such was the djinn's promised reward.
As they charged, Kalshnikovs screaming, it seemed as if a fist made of air rose up and smashed right into the gate. The sentry towers buckled and fell, the gate and the fence itself exploded inward and the soldiers nearby were destroyed and scattered by the wind. The rest seemed trapped in a kind of primal fear, unable to do more than whimper and soil themselves. They were cut down like wheat. It seemed that their Kalashnikovs never ran out as they continued the charge, screaming and slaying. Kuffar died all around - the Blackheart dimly saw out of the corner of his eye vicious jackals shredding men alive, larger and far more predatory than usual.
The kuffar had gathered around their flagpole, their symbol, but they were clearly outnumbered - not only by Pashtuns, but also by those jackals and odd, semi-transparent shadowy figures that seemed to stand around them, dim glimpses of skeletal jaws and dead eyes in the corner of the eye, clutching semi-material and wicked-looking rifles. There were about 300 in all kuffar present - helpless and doomed to lose a fight.
The Blackheart laughed heartily and spoke.
"Surrender to me and you will be allowed to live," he said grinning. "Do not and..."
He double-tapped his rifle and a young man fell lifeless.
"...You will die."
Before long the hated servants of the Great Satan were whimpering on their knees. The Blackheart noted with a grin that some were female, soon to be put to a better use than whatever reason the Great Satan had for their presence here.
As the sable banner of the Blackheart replaced the Stars & Stripes, the spirit appeared in the way it usually did, rising out of the dust and sand.
"The Great King of the Earth will send you his great lieutenant to assist you in but a few months," the thing laughed. "With him at your side, none shall stand in your way."
==NAPLES, ITALY==
Stefanie Delacroix was an exchange student from France, studying astronomy. So why was she dreaming of fires beneath the city? Idly, almost automatically, her hand was writing in the dream diary she'd been keeping for months.
He under the mountain. Dreams. Waking up. He will rise.
We will burn.
Fire. From below. Man of fire. Sleeps, old wounds. Battles long ago. A glittering host. Shields shining like starlight. Swords biting. Spears wounding.
Creeps below. Goes to sleep. Waking up.
She. Great Whore, Mother-Monster. Echidna on land, Tiamat in water. Abominations of the Earth: Chimera, Cerberus, Hydra, worse.
She tortures them along with shining man. Alters them, beautiful once, ugly now. Abomination, horror, bogeyman. Orc.
"And I saw the woman drunken with the blood of the saints, and with the blood of the martyrs of Jesus: and when I saw her, I wondered with great admiration."
More things. Their words are poison and their breath is fire. Lizards (serpents?), winged, fiery, flying. Dragon.
Man goes into cave - no, not man. Laughs and grins as he fights, gold hair shining like fire in the sunlight. She cannot face him. Is wounded, flees naked into wilderness, far to east. Waits for time to strike.
Coming soon.
A sky with a black sun and a bloody moon. Look, hoping to see something (what is it, what star will fall from heaven to mark the Doom?) but it is nowhere.
"And they worshipped the dragon which gave power unto the beast: and they worshipped the beast, saying, Who is like unto the beast? who is able to make war with him?"
Leave. Go North. This city is stumbling to its destruction. You will be guided.
Stefanie blinked and looked at the page again. She had written that? What did it mean? Who could interpret this properly? She ripped the page from the diary and put it into her breast pocket. This was certainly far more than the random whims of her subconscious.
As soon as the summer holidays began, she was heading as far way from here as she could.
+++MAY 25TH, NEW YORK+++
The city was under a pall of malice. There were lots of disasters taking place and many cities had been heavily damaged, but not here. But still this place seemed to be under a shadow of fear and uncertainty. There were lots of bad things happening with the people, encouraged not least by the black hole in the sky that had appeared recently. People were scared of that thing, not just because of the abstract horror it suggested - that the very cosmos was altering somehow - but also because the darkness that seemed to pulse, to seethe, to live in that gap - visible even in daytime, a blot on the sky always present - was sadistic, vile, almost pure evil. To live happily under that oppressive malevolent fault in the world was impossible - some few loners, mostly anti-social teenagers and depressive types, claimed the thing was talking to them, urging them to either run around committing crimes or commit suicide.
The warlord gathering steam in Afghanistan was also a concern. He had taken to assaulting Coalition bases right now and was awfully good at it. Obama seemed to be wringing his hands about the situation there and this was worsening the situation. Men based in Afghanistan had killed thousands of citizens after all.
And last night there'd been major riots throughout the city. Hundreds had died as hordes of blood-maddened lunatics had gone hunting to kill or assault anybody in their path. Many had claimed the voice behind that gap in the sky had ordered them to do it, rape and kill and tear and eat until the cops had beaten them senseless and they had woken up, awfully aware of the last night's horrors done by their perfectly willing hands.
Saul Ringman, the televangelist, was preparing to put on a rally tomorrow on Saturday. He had talked of restoring order and making the city safe, but it was clear that it was on a knife edge. His impending presence - as a famous big-C Conservative anti-everything ideologue - was putting the city on a knife's edge. New York would live or die by what happened tomorrow, everybody was sure.