End Chapter 2, pp 24-27

“He is a bastard, ain’t He, the good Lord?” said Joe. “Proved it enough to me these last ten years. Can you turn the light back on? Little weird, just your demon eyes, all red and purple, in the dark.”

Lilac fire roared in the firepit, casting bleak light that abruptly ended outside of the circle of couches. “Has there ever been a human born that knew when to quit?” asked Finsternis irritably.

“If I knew when to quit, I’d’a killed myself ten years ago. I ain’t exactly livin’ the dream here, ya know,” replied Joe calmly, retaking his  seat on the velvet loveseat. He gestured at the iPad. “iPad?”

“Yeah. If you want to check your email or something, go ahead.” Lucia sat on a couch the exact colour of Pepto-Bismol and patted the seat next to her, scratching at her right calf with the other hand. Finsternis rolled his eyes, but sat next to her, jumped a little when she took his hand in hers. She rubbed at her left shoulder ineffectively, unable to reach the itch.

“Thanks. The library’s a bitch about the 30 minute rule. Well, if you look like me, anyway.” He picked up the iPad. “So, what’d I do  to deserve a couple of demons in my humble abode?”

“Nothing,” snapped Finsternis. Joe looked up at Finsternis curiously, then returned his attention to the iPad.

Lucia glared at Finsternis, unable to figure out what was the matter with him. He’d been polite and talkative with her, now he appeared to have given up blinking altogether and his voice retained an otherworldly tone. What was his problem with Joe? She scratched at her arm. Frustratingly, the itch was under the skin, too deep to reach, like a wool sweater under her skin. “You’re much more sensitive to true believers than I am, aren’t you? Sitting here must be driving you crazy.”

“Yes. He is dangerous, even if you refuse to see it.” The flames in the firepit flared and deepened. Lucia had to wonder what Hell looked like, filled with demons whose every mood affected the fires. Were all the flames purple, or did different demons produce different colours? If it were the case that colours were unique to individuals, then Hell would be the most beautiful place she could imagine.

“All you feel is belief in Yhwh, right?”

“Hey, when I open up the Twitter app it goes right to this LuciaDarkness person. Is there a way to switch it to mine?” Joe asked.

“Oh, yeah, just go to Twitter from the internet app, Safari, and sign in from there. The Twitter app is set up for mine,” Lucia explained.

“The homeless guy is on Twitter,” said Finsternis.

Lucia shrugged. “Who isn’t? Anyway, all you feel is belief in Yhwh, right? I mean, you don’t feel how they feel about Yhwh, do you?”

Finsternis opened his mouth to speak, shut it and shook his head slightly. “I am not a mind reader, no, but what difference would it make how he feels about Yhwh? He believes, truly believes, isn’t that enough?”

Lucia turned to Joe. “Hey, Joe, how’s the good Lord been treating you?”

Joe handed Lucia her iPad and pulled a bottle out from under the layers of clothing. Lucia thought it might be Irish Rose, which was one step below drinking paint thinner. He opened the bottle, sucked down alcohol for a few seconds, only stopping when he gagged. “The good Lord? He killed my wife and my daughter. Car accident. My wife was taking McKayla to daycare and she hit a patch of ice, couldn’t stop the car, and then, well,” he shook the bottle, sending oily amber liquid sloshing. “Do I really need to tell you the rest?”

Murders were virtually unheard of in Scranton, so tragic accidents were heavily reported. Lucia remembered when Joe’s wife and daughter died, the picture of a mangled white Honda Civic covering most of the front page. She remembered the pictures of Joe, who, despite his heavily lined face and grey beard, couldn’t possibly be over forty, holding back tears at the funeral.

“He believes, Finsternis, but he has no more love for Yhwh than you do,” explained Lucia.

“What are you two doing here, anyway?” asked Joe. He took another drink.

“He’s a demon. I’m the daughter of Satan. I need to stop the Apocalypse from happening and he’s helping me out with that.”

“Oh.” Joe considered that for a moment, then guzzled the rest of the alcohol. “How are you going to do that from here?”

Lucia looked at Finsternis. “How are we going to do that, Finsternis?”

Finsternis shifted uncomfortably. “Well, you need to stop the Horsemen and the Messiah. That will stop the Apocalypse.”

“The Messiah? How am I supposed to stop Jesus?”

“Oh, it’s not Jesus this time, it’s someone else. Besides, Judas was able to stop Jesus, and he was no more powerful than you. Although he was not afraid of spiders,” Finsternis explained.

“That makes no sense,” said Joe. “Jesus was God. Although I could buy Judas as the son of Satan.”

“No, it does make sense. Jesus wasn’t officially raised to the status of divine until the Council of Nicea, approximately 300 years after his crucifixion.” Lucia looked at Finsternis, who nodded in agreement.

“What?” Joe asked, clearly struggling through an alcohol haze.

“The messiah is a Jewish concept that does not require divinity. The prophesied messiah is a man, nothing more. The early converts to Christianity, all of whom were Jewish, had no problem accepting Jesus, the man, as the messiah. However, the general population at the time, in that part of world, worshipped the Roman pantheon of gods. These gods frequently had children by humans, children who were part god and had, well, superpowers.

“The pagans at the time were unimpressed by a human messiah, so, in order to make Jesus more attractive to the pagans, the Council of Nicea rejected all the gospels and writings that showed Jesus as a man, in favor of gospels that presented Jesus as divine.” Lucia paused. Joe was staring at her blankly. “Didn’t you ever wonder why only four of the twelve apostles wrote about Jesus? I mean, he was the son of god, the other eight didn’t have anything to say about that?”

“Huh, I never thought about that,” replied Joe.

“1,700 years since the Council of Nicea, most people don’t. Everyone seems to think the Bible was delivered straight from Heaven by Archangels. That’s not true. There were many writings about Jesus in the 300 years after his death, including the gospels of all 12 apostles, and many of them were contradictory. The Council of Nicea was formed to create one authoritative book concerning one agreed-upon narrative: that Jesus was God made man,” explained Lucia.

“There was a Gospel of Judas?” asked Joe.

“Supposedly. It’s not like the Council carefully filed away the texts they rejected,” Lucia said. She turned to Finsternis, who looked somewhat less murderous, and asked, “So, we have to stop the Messiah, but what about the Horsemen? Are they humans, too?”

“Yes, Pestilence, War and Famine are. Likely they do not even know what they are yet. They may never know. They are guided into place by Yhwh’s plan, herded like cattle for the slaughter. Famine will spread starvation, Disease will spread plague, War will spread violence without meaning to or knowing why. We must stop them.”

“What about Death?”

“Death is-“ Finsternis muttered something incomprehensible, a mixture of a hyena’s bark and a wolverine’s growl. “A problem for later.”

“So, the first three Horsemen could be anyone, anywhere?” Lucia sagged back against the filthy couch. 6,500,000,000 people on the planet and she was looking for three of them. She’d thought it would be impossible if the Horsemen were famous people, world leaders perhaps. Three random humans unaware of their role in the Apocalypse was just as bad. At least famous people would be easy to find. Hard to kill, but easy to find. Now, she was faced with finding three Joes in all the world without any place to start.

“Famine, huh? What about those Santalmo people?” asked Joe.

Lucia sat up. “The genetically modified food company!”

“Why would you suspect a food company of creating Famine?” asked Finsternis.

“Santalmo engineers its seed to germinate only once. With normal produce, like corn, a farmer can reserve a certain amount of the harvest to plant the next year. Produce grown from Santalmo seed won’t grow again next year. You have to keep buying seed from Santalmo year after year.

“Santalmo says that cross pollination isn’t possible, but there are rumors that in places like Mexico, poor countries, the cross pollination happens anyway, though, and farmers who reserved some of their harvest to plant again next year end up growing nothing at all,” explained Lucia.

“That’s gotta be Famine,” agreed Joe.

“I’ve got it!” exclaimed Lucia.

“What?” asked Finsternis and Joe together.

“I’m willing to believe the executives in charge of Santalmo are greedy bastards willing to starve people who can’t pay for more seed year after year, but I don’t believe the researchers employed by Santalmo area,” she said.

“Why not? Scientists ain’t saints. Look at that one guy, the Nazi doctor, um, mangle, mongol?” interrupted Joe.

“Mengele. Josef Mengele. Sure, but look at Oppenheimer.”

“Who?” asked Joe.

“He worked on the Manhattan Project, creating the atomic bomb during World War II. He was shocked and appalled by what his research ended up being used for. A lot of the Manhattan Project researchers were. The project was spread across forty different facilities. Very few people knew what the end goal was. They just worked on their little piece of the puzzle, happy to be aiding the war effort. After the bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Oppenheimer became a crusader against atomic weapons. It destroyed his career. I bet Famine is another Oppenheimer. After all, the purpose of genetically modified food is to make disease resistant crops that produce more food, not to starve poor people” asserted Lucia.

“Then why make the plants die after one generation?” asked Finsternis.

“My guess is an abundance of caution. They weren’t positive the genetically modified plants were safe, so they didn’t want them spreading into other people’s fields. They obviously didn’t anticipate the cross pollinization. So you see, I don’t have to kill anyone at all!”

Lucia beamed at him and Finsternis spat something that sounded like a flock of penguins torturing a herd of cats and dropped his head into his heads.

Joe rubbed at his ears and asked, “Isn’t that a good thing?”

Lucia shrugged. She’d thought so. Convincing the Horsemen to give up what was making them Horsemen, to stop the blind march to Hiroshima was a lot better than murdering them from her point of view. They were no more to blame for being Horsemen than she was for being a nephalim. Finsternis’ shoulders began to shake.

“Finsternis? Finsternis, what’s the matter?” For all Lucia knew, demons did this five times a day, every day, or he was dying. “Did I say something?”

Finsternis threw back his head and roared with laughter. The fire flared a rich blend of fuschia and violet.

“What’s so damn funny?”

“You . . . you are worse than Judas. And he loved the Messiah! Can you imagine, the son of Yhwh’s greatest enemy, born only to defeat Him, the best of friends with Yhwh’s champion? And you, you are worse! You seek to win a war without harming a hair on anyone’s head.”

“And you seek to bring about peace through slaughter! Which one of us is truly ridiculous?” Lucia shot back. “Hey, I have an idea, let’s get Pestilence to make Superebolaswineaids and kill everyone on the planet. After all, if everyone’s dead, the apocalypse has nowhere to go!”