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No one had noticed
She licked her lips
“I’ et it out”
The older wo that’ll do the trick?”
“Not here,” Melba said “I have an idea where I could get soh”
“Move fast We don’t want this place gettin’ stuffy”
“Okay You guys do what you can I’ll be right back,” Melba lied
Chapter Twenty-Four: Anna
E
schatology had always been Anna’s least favorite study of theology When asked about Areddon, she’d tell her parishioners that God Himself had been pretty circuood to worry about it Have faith that God will do what’s best, and avoiding His vengeance against the wicked should be the least co reason for worship
But the truth was that she’d always had a deeply held disagreement with most futurist and y itself, necessarily, since their guess at what the end tiood as anyone else’s Her disagreelee over the destruction of the wicked that sos This was especially true in some s of Ar away from some formless fiery doo worshipers—of the correct religion, of course—watched fro Anna couldn’t understand how anyone could see such a depiction as anything but tragic
She wished she could show the when it happened Her hand terminal had been propped on her chest with a pillow behind it, her hands behind her head A three-tone alar alert, but it was late to the party She was already being mashed into her crash couch so hard that she could feel the plastic of the base right through twenty centiel It seemed to last forever, but it was probably just a few seconds Her hand terminal had skidded down her chest, suddenly heavier than Nahter up It left a black-and-blue trail of bruises up her breastbone and slah to split the skin The pillowher mouth with the taste of stomach acid
But worst of all was the pain in her shoulders Both arainst the bed, te them When the endless seconds of deceleration were over, both joints popped back into place with a pain even worse than when they’d con specifications, hadn’t gripped her the way it was meant to Instead, it rebounded back into its prior shape and launched her in slowto put her hands in front of her sent bolts of agony through her shoulders, so she drifted up and hit the ceiling with her face Her chin left a sentle person She’d never in her life been in a fight She’d never been in a major accident The worst pain she’d ever felt before was childbirth, and the endorphins that had followed had mostly erased it from her memory To suddenly be so hurt in so many different places at once left her dazed and with a sort of directionless anger It wasn’t fair that a person could be hurt so much She wanted to yell at the crash couch that had betrayed her by letting this happen, and she wanted to punch the ceiling for hitting her in the face, even though she’d never thrown a punch in her life and could barelylight-headed she went looking for help and found that the corridor outside her roo iant had storound him under its heel The boy was not only smashed, but torn and twisted in ways that barely left hinizable as a human His blood splashed the floor and walls and drifted around his corpse in red balls like grisly Christmas ornaments
Anna yelled for help Someone yelled back in a voice filled with liquid and pain Someone from farther down the corridor Anna carefully pushed off the doorjamb of her room and drifted toward the voice Two rooms down, another man was half in and half out of his crash couch Heout of bed when the deceleration happened, and everything from his pelvis doisted and broken His upper torso still lay on the bed, ar feebly at her, his face a lob of blood and reen ball
Anna drifted up high enough to push the co her shoulder It was dead All the lights were the ones she’d been told ca else seeain His voice eaker and filled with even nized him as Alonzo Guzion A favorite of the secretary-general, so to stop the tears that suddenly blinded her She wiped her eyes on her shoulder and said, “Let me find someone I’ve hurtsoftly Anna pushed back into the corridor with her toes, drifting past the carnage to find someone asn’t hurt
This was the part the s
They loved scenes of righteous Godly vengeance on sinful mankind They loved to show God’s chosen people safe froht to the world But they never showed the after in pools of their own fluids Youngwoh a hatchhen catastrophe hit
This was Areddon This is what it looked like Blood and torn flesh and cries for help
Anna reached an intersection of corridors and ran out of strength Her body hurt too badly to continue And in all four directions, the corridor floors and walls were covered with the aftermath of violent death It was too much Anna drifted in the eently floated to the wall and stuck to it Moveh to push her to the wall She pushed away fro, then