Destroyers by Dave Mckay (latest novels to read TXT) 📕

At first there were rushed attempts at holding trials, but that slowed down the move to stop this insidious influence, and so executions were soon being carried out under direct orders from the various District Officers. There were several from Shinyalu who had been executed, and many more from Kakamega. Moses knew one of the women who was killed, and he was surprised to learn that she had been so foolish as to have fallen for Josephat's lies.

What was becoming clear to him was that even if Amy and the kids were alive, and even if he were to succeed in finding them, unless they dissociated themselves from Josephat and his teachings, they too would face death. The government needed to deal firmly with the threat, but Moses could not bring himself to wish death on Amy and the children. He hated Josephat all the more for the moral dilemma that this had created for him. There must be some way to locate this sub-human, super-human, alien, heretical, kidnapping, false prophet monster, without betraying Amy, Rosy, or any of the others.

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Chapter 24. Going Too Far

"What happened to you?" Moses exclaimed as Jiddy came into the house quite late one Friday night after his usual trip to the markets. Jiddy was covered with blood, and Moses jumped up from his desk to assist; but Jiddy smiled broadly on hearing Moses' question.

"I'm okay," he said. "I'm okay. We had another celebration. It was my turn."

"Your turn to do what?" asked Moses. "You're covered in blood!"

"Don't worry, Stump. It's not mine," Jiddy reassured him, as though that was all the explanation that the younger man would need.

"But whose is it?" Moses asked.

"You remember Dinah?" he asked. "The girl you introduced me to at the bullfight a couple years ago, when we were still working as boda-bodas?"

Moses remembered the girl. She had suffered some kind of brain damage, but was quite beautiful nonetheless; and she had a gentle, sweet personality.

"We sacrificed her tonight," Jiddy said. "I was the executioner."

"You what?" Moses put his hands to his face and sat back down in horror.

"Where have you been, Stump?" Jiddy asked. "We've been doing it for months… in the theater… every Friday night. Dinah had something wrong with her anyway. She didn't even know it was going to be her."

"No, no!" Moses shook his head with his hands over his ears. He did not want to hear any more. "What is happening to us?" he asked, knowing that he would not get a satisfactory answer from his older friend.

"You wanna be careful talking like that," Jiddy said. "We do it for Dangchao. You should see the films they show of people doing it for him in Jerusalem. It kind of cleans out all of the evil in you if you just pour it all into the sacrifice. Everybody feels better afterwards."

Moses still wasn't listening.

"Jiddy, something is very very wrong about this. The whole village is going crazy."

Jiddy suddenly turned deadly serious. "Stump, you gotta watch that," he said. "I mean it. People are dying for saying less than that. I'm your friend and I won't tell, but others would, straight as a spear."

The full impact of what Jiddy had said was sinking in. Moses had been so busy making money that he had not paid much attention to what had been happening over the past year. It was just one more illustration of his ability to focus. He had shut out talk of strange meetings at the superchurch, since he never attended anyway, and he had only been to a couple of the adult shows, preferring to patronise the other theater on those few occasions when he had time for entertainment. He had never been there on a Friday night, simply because he knew that it was more crowded then.

Jiddy could see that his friend had been shocked, and he tried to comfort him.

"It's happening everywhere, Stump," he said. "Think of it like war. We don't have wars now, so we can afford a few people... just for fun."

Moses shook his head again and stood up to walk outside. Fun Jiddy had called it! He had to get away from Jiddy's disgusting justification for such a perverted form of entertainment in a society which had lost all sense of reason and morality.

Out in the open air, Moses looked up at the stars and remembered that night so long ago now, when he and Rosy had looked at the stars. She had been only 12 years old then, and now she would be 18, if she was still alive.

"Do you believe in God?" she had asked. And from that she had moved to asking him if he ever talked to God... or if God had ever talked to him.

He looked up at the stars and clenched his one fist. Was it rage? Not really. How could he be angry with a God whom he had never known? But he was struggling with inner turmoil. When he lost his arm, he never blamed anyone, and so why should he blame anyone for what was happening now? But still, something was not right in the village, and maybe in the whole world. Something inside of him cried out for an explanation. Was Dangchao really evil, like Amy and Josephat had said? If Dangchao was behind what was happening in the village, how could he be anything else but evil? And the bigger question was, what could he, a struggling small-time businessman living in the Kenyan interior, do about it?

Moses had always concentrated on just looking out for himself, and not bothering with other people's problems. But now he could not bring himself to think about Dinah without feeling revulsion... for Jiddy... for the people in the village... and maybe even for Dangchao.

Economically, things had continued to go well, both for Moses and for the rest of the world. He was close to being able to add another vehicle to his fleet, maybe something bigger this time, that could make a run to and from Nairobi. But he could see that he was being drawn into the very sins that he had condemned the U.S. for six years earlier. People wanted luxury coaches, and the one Moses had his eye on used incredible amounts of fuel. But it had the power and the added features that would pay for itself with satisfied customers.

Perhaps that was what Dangchao was doing too. Maybe he was just trying to keep his "customers" satisfied. People are so crazy, Moses thought to himself, still gazing at the stars. He was honest enough to include himself in his observations.

We all want more, even when we don't need it. Unless we have more than everyone else, we're not happy,he thought. For Jiddy the overdose had been pleasure. He had reached a point where he now only found pleasure in seeing someone else suffer. And it appeared that Moses' room mate had a lot of company... both in Shinyalu, and in the greater world outside of their village.

But poor Dinah! And how many others had they treated in the same way?

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Chapter 25. Another Disaster

Over the next few weeks, Moses found that, despite all of his previous successes in filtering out the negatives, what Jiddy had done to Dinah rarely left his mind. He knew that his friend was just one of millions who had let themselves become corrupted by whatever was happening to the world; but living with Jiddy and doing business with him day after day was a constant reminder of where the world was heading. He was repulsed by this young man who had always been his best friend; but at the same time, he could not express his true feelings to Jiddy or to anyone else, because Jiddy knew things about him that could get him killed.

People were now reporting anyone whom they suspected of being sympathetic with the aliens. For Moses, of course, the aliens and Josephat were virtually the same, and so he was innocent of feeling sympathy for them. But he had a sister and an elderly friend who were still almost certainly implicated in the movement.

The issue of Rosy's involvement had been raised in an angry crowd scene that erupted when Moses went to pick up his mail at the post office a few months earlier. He had not yet turned 22. Jiddy had been with him at the time, and had assured people that Moses had never had any contact with Rosy, from the day that she and the others had disappeared. "And Stump doesn't want to have any contact with her, either!" he had shouted.

That wasn't true at all, but it had been necessary for Jiddy to put it that way in order to save Moses' neck.

Others had been taken to Kakamega on as little evidence, and executed by guillotine at the soccer field there. Moses did not regard these deaths in the same way that he did Dinah's, because these people were more than likely guilty. A few were borderline, like himself if he ever got caught, but it was all part of global peacekeeping, and he supported the belief that the occasional innocent victim was a necessary inconvenience for the overall security of the system.

Another unimaginable disaster occurred shortly after the Friday night incident with Jiddy, which temporarily distracted Moses from the depressing thoughts he had been having about the world situation. The disaster changed the thinking of many others as well.

The two aliens were reportedly angry that their followers were being executed, and so they had predicted various plagues. News reports said that all their predictions had failed, and there was no reason for anyone in Shinyalu to believe otherwise. Except for one thing: The aliens apparently continued to roam free, untouched by the authorities. Surely they must have had paranormal powers to have avoided capture for so long!

Five days before it hit, news broke that the aliens had predicted a collision between Earth and an asteroid. Scientists confirmed that there was an asteroid due to pass within millions of miles of Earth, but that the chances of it actually hitting were infinitely small.

Millions did like Moses and checked the aliens' web site 'just to be sure'. According to the aliens, their other predictions had, in fact, occurred, but there was no way for Shinyalu residents to confirm that one way or another. When the first meteorite shower actually did strike, it was just as the aliens had said it would be.

The whole top half of Africa, much of Europe, and all of the Middle East were affected by the cloud of meteors that preceded the big one. There were craters everywhere, forest fires all over Kenya and neighbouring countries, and something in the meteorites that made the water, including Lake Victoria and the Nile, highly radioactive. Hundreds of thousands of lives were lost, both through the fires and through the massive hail storms that followed the widespread burning.

But the greatest loss of life came when the asteroid itself hit somewhere in the middle of the Atlantic. It caused a shock that could be felt around the world. Huge tsunamis wiped out whole