Prologue: Nightfall.

"THE SECOND COMING"

Prologue. Nightfall.

Bray, Ireland. Friday, October the 10th, 2007.
Raymond Williams was used to waking up late in the morning. Since he didn’t have a job and nothing to wake up for, he just allowed his own body to sleep as much as it wanted to. Some days he’d wake up as late as two in the afternoon, when his wife, Sharon, came back from her job. She was the one who brought home the bacon, and she was happy about it, too, Ray thought. Sometimes you just need to give the woman a sense of power or control. But he wasn’t giving her anything. She thought he was, but he wasn’t. The one who still set the rules in the house was Ray.

Sharon was a beautiful woman. She had blonde hair and a very attractive –if not a little bony- face, a skinny body and the most uncommonly beautiful blue eyes (they just jumped at you, he had thought when he met her seven years ago). She worked in a real estate office not more than ten minutes away from their house. She’d have to leave the house in the afternoon sometimes to show a house or an apartment building to a client. What was great about her office was that she didn’t just live off her 5% commissions; she had a steady salary, enough to live by in the small town of Bray.

Bray was a town where you could live your entire life without ever leaving. Eventhough the crime rate is high for a small Irish town; it was a nice place to live. There was a movie theatre not too far away from the residential area (which had a small soccer field in which friendly neighbor games would take place), as well as a Mall and a Catholic Church. The grocery store was not very big but neither was Bray, it worked perfectly fine. A small forest, followed by a smaller field that collided with the cold Irish Sea was a great get-together spot for young teenagers who wanted to hide their parents the fact that they smoked.

Once again, the sun hadn’t shown its face.

When Raymond woke up the morning of the tenth, he was surprised at himself about how early he had lost any drowsiness he would have any other day. It was just ten in the morning and he felt good enough to take a down the forest, something he hadn’t done in at least two years. It would have been nice if the day was brighter and not just gray like a rock, but he was also used to the cold days of autumn.

He got off his bed looking at Sharon’s alarm clock. It was only 10:03; he had enough time to have a quick breakfast. He got dressed, grabbed a white scarf from his closet and walked down to the kitchen. In ten minutes’ time, he prepared a perfect breakfast that consisted of a bowl of Special K with milk, a slice of toast with peanut butter and a glass of orange juice. He ate it watching the telly. At 10AM, he could watch “Sport News AM”, which he hadn’t had time to watch in a long time. To his disgrace, none of the news was in the least bit interesting, so he began flicking the channels. Two channels down, he stopped at the image of a dead man lying on the street as some Chinese woman cried over him. A pretty news reporter was talking to the camera. It looked like she was ignoring the dead man behind her, but she was apparently talking about him. The label “LIVE” was placed in the corner, and under it, “Osaka, Japan”. It was as overcast in Japan as it was in Bray.

With immediate interest, he put aside his breakfast and turned the volume up. The image he looked at was absolutely chaotic, like they were shooting in the middle of an Earthquake. A news reporter was speaking of “what had begun in America nine hours before.” He had no idea what the pretty reporter meant, but he kept watching. The camera suddenly went from the dead man, to the news reporter, to the sky. A building was falling apart, where many other Japanese people ran in desperate fear. As the cameraman focused, he clearly saw a white ray of light that extended to the heavens. Ray’s gut twisted at the sight of that pillar of light. He did the sign of the cross on his chest; he couldn’t remember the last time he did that.

The walk in the forest had been postponed on the account that he couldn’t unglue his eyes from the news. As the cameraman again focused on the dead man and the woman that cried over him, he immediately thought of Sharon. Where was she? Was she in her office?

He flicked the channel once; some channel was airing old “Tom And Jerry” episodes. He changed the channel again. Channel 5’s signal had been taken over by some other news station, which was also labeled “LIVE”. This one wasn’t in Japan but in some other country, probably European, judging by the reporter’s face. The camera showed the remains of some building lying on the street. A reporter was talking to the camera but the sound of static was too loud to hear anything he said. The reporter pointed to the sky, the camera’s focus followed it. There was another pillar of light. The camera took a glance at the chaotic destruction around him. He felt a shiver slide down his spine when he immediately recognized London’s House of the Parliament, and Big Ben was not where he was supposed to be.

Terrorists, it has to be terrorists.

Whatever had started in America had spread as far as Japan and was also destroying London. London, which was not very far away from Ireland, from Bray. He ran upstairs to his room, where he had a clear view of the sea. He could see the United Kingdom from his room. Ray opened the window upstairs and looked outside. He saw not only a pillar of light, but three. All of them were far away from each other, but all of them in the UK. The fact that he could see them across the ocean made him immediately scared. He couldn’t imagine the size those pillars must have.

He felt a sudden urge to be with Sharon, if she had glanced at the news –or out the window, towards the UK- she was probably as scared as he was. He was going to go get her, pull her out of her job immediately. Without a second thought he grabbed his car keys and ran out of the house, leaving the TV on and the big red door open. He got inside his car, gave ignition and raced down the street. The wind had been blowing hard, a little harder than usual, but nothing to be scared of. Now, the wind began blowing harder, making some of the smaller trees bend and dance with it. He didn’t see anyone in the streets, only a couple of cars. God, he hoped Sharon was all right.

When he passed the Old Court House on Main Road was when whatever had started in America arrived in Ireland. The sound of the wind became louder, much more violent. Some trees were bending down, ready to snap off at any minute. He saw the DART line to Dublin in the distance, a train had stopped midway, probably in an emergency.

Oh my God, Sharon.

If the sound of the sea was amplified a hundred times louder, it would come close to sounding like what everyone in Bray heard then. The Court House behind him began to shake and quake as it began to shine with a white light. He stopped his car as a reflex. He was horribly scared and worried about Sharon, but he was also curious.

Suddenly, there was a silent calm; he could only hear a very soft wind blowing through the town.

The silence was broken less than a minute later when a loud rumbling sound roared from the Court House. The light began to spin around the Court House like the winds in a tornado. It began speeding up, growing louder. Ray began walking far away from it, as if it was some wild animal ready to pounce. The light extended upwards into the sky, light spinning around it in a straight cylindrical funnel of light. The pillar came with an explosion sound.

If he could have had an aerial view of how the Court House exploded into one of the pillars of light, he would have seen a perfectly circular expansive wave that bent Bray as it sped through it like a solid tsunami. All the cars in the distance were flipping end over end and crashing against trees or buildings. The Court House disappeared into the light.

An earthquake followed. The buildings around him crumbled like dried bread. Ray was thrown backwards like a rag doll when the wave reached his location, he felt like someone had bludgeoned him with a sledgehammer on the side of the head. Everything went black.

He opened his eyes again a few minutes later. Nothing was calm; it was just like the chaos he had seen in Osaka only moments before. He could hear the cries of pain. The floor was still shaking, the pillar was still there. He did his best to stand up on the uneven floor. His hands were stained with blood; he could feel a deep pain on the left side of his head and on his wrist, which looked broken. The cries of pain came from inside one of the crumbled buildings. They had crushed people inside as they fell apart.

Those were the last moments of Bray. Five minutes later, as Ray tried to make his way to Sharon’s office, ignoring everyone that asked for help on the way, three more pillars appeared not too far away from each other.

Twelve hours and seven minutes later, the entire planet was covered in white pillars of light. Life in Earth had come to a halt in a heartbeat. The cities and places that had once been the pride of the world now lay in ruins. When every human being was dead, the pillars of light disappeared, leaving a horrible darkness behind. They had left the sky as if trapped in an eternal night.