Epilogue The Abomination That Causes Desolation

Three days later Rick could barely stay awake after ten hours of monitoring netcasts deep inside a dimly lit chamber. Circled around the holographic netcast center with him sat two dozen refugees. Because these new arrivals had to constantly stay in front of the netcast center, Rick suspected them of not really being people of faith. Things were very chaotic on the outside and many people were running anywhere and saying anything to get into a safe place. They reminded Rick of the days he had been a homeless wanderer.

Suddenly the 3-D projection of a dour-looking cosmologist giving his tedious official explanation of the blood moon was cut short. A stunning view of the Mediterranean Ocean off the coast of Italy replaced him. As always Rick saw that the number of days since Secretary-General Sebastiao disappeared was in the corner of the projection. Rick woke up when he noticed what the number was today.

From beneath roiling white waves a gigantic scarlet beast emerged from the ocean. Was it five hundred feet long or a thousand feet long? Rick couldn't tell because it shape-shifted right before his eyes. Certainly the Abomination was larger than any other living thing in Earth's history. It stayed mostly in the form of a centipede; appendages of every kind lined the undulating body. Ten horns protruded from the largest of the beast's seven cat-skull faces. Upon close-up Rick saw that the horns were really ten torsos with the heads of men. One armless head and torso shouted out obscenities and blasphemies in Mandarin Chinese, at the same time one shouted out blasphemies in Urdu, one in Spanish, one, the largest, shouted in Hindi, one shouted out in the Malay-Indonesian language, one in Swahili, one short one in English, one in Russian, one horn energetically harangued blasphemies in both French and German right next to the bearded one spouting out curses in Arabic.