A mortal blow against the world. No one notices; no one could be expected to notice. We have each been ending since the moment we began. But now beginnings are almost spent.

•••

He awakes, in chaparral, beneath the turnoff from a winding road threaded through golden hills. Comes to his feet, climbs a little against loose, tumbling earth, turns out to the world. A tightening of the throat not there a moment before; he stands upon a promontory overlooking a great bay and, for his first ten minutes upon the Earth, does nothing. Only stares at the happy accident beneath him. For a moment he regrets what he must do; then he remembers it doesn’t matter. He turns and walks to his car.

        It’s black and elegant; low-slung and expensive yet not flashy. The key is in the silk-lined chamber of his pocket. He opens the door, buckles himself in, turns the ignition. Gazes out at the sea for a long minute, then jerks the car’s stick-shift, and, without bothering to look behind him, throws the car into the road. For a moment he considers a leisurely joyride through the warren of streets and back-roads around him, but thinks the better of it. There’s not much time now. He guns the engine and heads for his destination at a fantastically illegal speed; he knows there’s not a cop within five miles of him. He flips on the radio, begins scanning aimlessly through the electromagnetic spectrum, enjoying the schizophrenic clangor of a species that does not yet realize its own peril. After some minutes he inevitably stumbles across frothingly conservative talk radio. This keeps him entertained until he reaches Danville.

        Even he is a little surprised when he sees the place.

•••

Danville, California is a most unlikely locale for an apocalypse.

        The town is a simple suburb, one link in a chain of such municipalities that constitute the eastern periphery of the San Francisco Bay Area. Hemmed against the rising walls of the San Ramon Valley, Danville is a cornucopia of cool, tree-lined streets and pleasant, very slightly immodest houses. The place is peopled by the prosperous upper strata of the American condition: attorneys, doctors, financiers, and other professionals, who have congregated here because the town affords more space and peace of mind than San Francisco itself. Otherwise the place is not obviously special. Ask a lifelong resident for a point of local distinction and they might point to nearby parkland, or a good car museum, or the estate of a cantankerous Nobel laureate (now passed) but even they would likely concede that it’s just a town really, just one more place in America...

        All of this begs the question:

        Why here?

        And while we are on the subject:

        Why now?

        Why the Devil?

        Why?

        Address any of these questions to the Devil––and they will all be addressed to him, and many more, once people begin to realize what is happening––and he will smile, and nod, and utter two words: “Why not?” (The Devil can be a font of information; but only on his terms.) In the face of such maddening vagueness, speculation shall of course run rampant. Conservatives will argue that the Devil is merely alighting to his natural constituency, the Godless hub of liberalism that is the San Francisco Bay Area. Liberals will posit that the Devil’s presence is due to socioeconomics; that higher powers have decided for once to let the rich bear the brunt of catastrophe. Outside the United States people will suggest, in a plethora of languages, that the Devil’s presence is a divine retribution for America’s wrongdoings. Others will spin fanciful theories built around all manner of improbable mechanisms: proximity to research universities, redwood trees, government laboratories, the Pacific Ocean. Religious people will attempt to connect Danville to various Biblically significant cities. Perhaps, rational minds will inevitably argue, it’s all due to simple chance; that the Devil has engaged in some occult equivalent of throwing open an Atlas and spearing a point on a map with a finger. After all the Devil has to come somewhere: Danville may simply be the locale that drew the metaphorical short straw.

        Each of these guesses is, in its own special way, utterly wrong.

        The Devil will eventually give a straight explanation as to why he is in Danville. At the time he will be standing at the head of the longest table in the world. Shocked, astonished eyes, from every corner of the globe, uncountable in number, will be staring up at him. Mouths filled with half-gnashed food will hang open. The Devil’s explanation will be given no more credence than any of the one-thousand-and-one theories that are about to spring from the collective consciousness of an imaginative, paranoid species. This will please the Devil to no end. The Devil does not actually need to lie to mislead the human race; he only needs to exist.

•••

The Devil enters Danville at high speed, abruptly knifing across four busy lanes of traffic to catch the main off-ramp into town. Horns erupt and middle fingers rise, but the Devil takes no notice; rather his attention is drawn to Danville itself. Against all odds the place captures the Devil’s immediate fancy. This may have something to do with the air. The Devil enjoys a superhuman olfactory capacity—a nose that can tease out vanity or lust behind the reek of sweat, the self-indulgence coiled up in whiff of expensive perfume. This enormously potent sense of smell immediately catches an encompassing, complex musk that engulfs the town. Not quite arrogance and not quite ignorance, it is... “Complacency.” The Devil enjoys the twitch of his facial muscles as he utters the word, and immediately turns left on a road where he ought to go right. Though on a schedule the Devil allows himself a full hour to make several lazy circuits of the town. From the air-conditioned comfort of his car the Devil takes in zealously tended lawns and ogles joggers, admires the slightly pudgy physiques of the locals and watches teenagers—recently liberated from school––parading in small packs through the town’s modest commercial district. And throughout his rounds the Devil detects not a sense of worry, not a dram of real concern. The locals are not merely ignorant of the Devil’s presence––this is a given––but almost to a person suffer the compelling delusion that they control their own fates, that the world cannot truly harm them here, that they are safe.

        This fills the Devil with a glee beyond measure. A Cheshire grin erupts, an expression that shall soon send chills down the spines of billions.

        After an hour the Devil pulls up at a curb in a shady lane across from the town library, rises from his car. The Devil does not display himself in a gaudy form; he comes to a moderate height, perhaps a little less. Has sandy blonde hair and mirthful blue eyes sunk into a countenance that smiles easily and often. He nods in the direction of a number of passersby, and receives only the most perfunctory, least-interested of reactions in return. This is not fated to last. The Devil strolls into a delicatessen, consumes a sandwich, then darts into the bank next door.

        He has to pick up his house keys.

        (Is it odd that the Devil should not have made his own housing arrangements? That he should have to travel to a bank to learn his new address? Not really. Many important people leave the orchestration of picayune matters to others: and the Devil has more pressing concerns than securing accommodation. Besides the Devil’s faith in the person making the arrangements for him is boundless...)

        A bank clerk––a young man, barely twenty––acknowledges the Devil with professionally mandated enthusiasm as he approaches the counter. The clerk hands the Devil a white half piece of paper, and the Devil duly fills it with expansive, artistically legible handwriting. The Devil hands back the slip of paper to the teller, who stares at it for a moment before returning it, telling this presumed wag of a customer to write his real name. The Devil protests that that is his real name, and reaches into his pocket for a form of identification, which––when it emerges into the sunlit interior of the bank––proves to be a Belgian passport. The Devil is immensely amused by this festively arbitrary form of documentation; the teller not so much. The young man does not take the little Burgundy booklet; rather, in the most diplomatic way that he possibly can, he tells the Devil to stop wasting his time. The Devil, a grin still etched on his face, ensures the teller that he is being entirely truthful, forces the passport insistently forward. With a sigh the teller takes it.

        This is a mistake.

        For a shocked moment the teller thinks that the world around him is expanding. Of course this is ridiculous.

        In reality the teller is starting to shrink.

        Nerves and tissue and sinews and bone claw back in upon themselves; organs compactify, eyeballs shrink, and an uncountable number of neurons somehow conspire to squeeze themselves into an ever diminishing volume... The teller plants a hand on the counter and watches in horrified fascination as it contracts, recedes slowly into the depths of his shirt cuff. He feels his teeth shrink and watches as his whole upper body descends, slowly but purposefully, towards the floor... The pain, when it comes, is beyond description.

        And then the process reverses itself. Molecules, crammed closer together than ambient conditions permit, remember themselves. Bones bounce back; skin returns to its original dimensions. Two hands pop from shirt sleeves. The hapless teller shoots back to his accustomed height, and the steady gaze of his grinning customer.

        There is no permanent damage; not even a mark. The only harm of any kind to the teller is a nosebleed, which deposits three ruby drops of blood from his left nostril onto the counter. The teller ignores the blood, only leans in towards the Devil, as if to whisper. The Devil obligingly sinks his body in towards the teller, until their faces are mere inches apart. “Are you,” the teller asks softly, “shitting me?”

        “No,” the Devil says with equal quietude.

        Three minutes later the Devil holds the key to his house. Besides the Belgian passport, his left pocket contains three coal black credit cards and a California driver’s license, the photo suggesting jauntiness. The Devil nods respectfully to the teller, who just stares at him now with increasingly naked fear, then steps out into the early afternoon sun...

        The house is on the other side of the Interstate that bisects Danville, at the front of a subdivision tucked off a winding back-road. Single-storied and somewhat rambling, the abode is very nearly new and has never been inhabited––a string of prospective buyers having each suffered inexplicable credit meltdowns shortly before purchase. (This string of misfortunes had vexed the affected realtor to no end, at least until an enormous check had arrived unbidden in the mail, without any indication that the buyer wished to see the house. This was more than a little strange, but the check had cleared, and the realtor had not been one to indulge in further inquiry.) The Devil pulls onto the driveway of the house and rises from his car. He glances with a certain modest interest at the neighboring abodes––either equally squat, equally rambling clones of his own, or slightly more august models with a second story––before wandering ‘round to his back yard to stare at his swimming pool. The Devil finds the fact that he has one immensely pleasing. He falls into it, rolls about in the water for a few carefree minutes like a happy, well-tailored, giggling seal. Once sated, the Devil hauls his sopping person from the water, pulls out his key––the contents of his pockets have faithfully failed to slip out––and, after taking a moment to slough off drenched clothing, enters his home. A towel is present on a table immediately within the door. The house is already furnished, though an outside visitor might not realize this immediately; the Devil has spartan tastes. The dwelling contains only two real marks of extravagance; one of them hangs on the wall over the fireplace in all of its gauzy, wafting, Florentine splendor. The Devil wanders into the living room to gaze up at it, then turns to the other extravagance: a large and impressive clock. He checks that the timepiece is synchronized with his watch––it is, perfectly––then removes the watch from his wrist and flings it away, in the direction of the kitchen. It falls into a perfectly situated wastebasket. The Devil does not bother to notice, only stares up at the clock. Twenty minutes ahead of schedule, he thinks. He wanders over to the wet bar, pours himself a drink, then falls into a heavily padded chair. A remote control for the stereo system lies on the right armrest. The Devil picks it up, hits the ‘power’ button. The room is filled with a jaunty pop tune from the 1980s:

        That’s great, it starts with an earthquake, birds and snakes, an aeroplane, Lenny Bruce is not afraid––

        The Devil laughs at the little joke, listens to the entire song, consumes five minutes of his self-appointed period of leisure. When it ends he sucks down his drink and considers what must happen next. The neighbors have to be told, of course. Not the whole truth––not yet––but the Devil prefers omission to outright falsehood, and the matter of a name is not something that he can possibly obfuscate. So he’ll simply let it out. He sits back and imagines, with a certain glee, the expressions on the faces of his neighbors as the syllables slip from his lips: looks of heavy, blinking incredulity, masking furious calculations as to whether the new neighbor, has just made an utterly tasteless joke or is, in fact, mad... Never, not for an instant, will the truth be considered. At least not yet...

        The Devil chuckles, rises from his chair. At present only one of his neighbors is home, but there’s no point in tarrying. Besides, the Devil knows that even now the word is being spread... He grins very broadly as he walks out the door.

II.

The Devil does not come alone.

        He cannot. His arrival has left a rent in the world and a sea of things beyond human imagination waits to spill out after him. The hole is not large––but apply a little pressure and the tiniest of perforations can expand with explosive speed, like helium shredding a punctured balloon. And this is exactly what will happen here: the Devil’s entry into the world shall be followed by a flood of miracles.

        Even as the Devil sets foot upon the earth curious things begin to happen. The heavens are unexpectedly seeded with paper. The pending labor of pregnant women is synchronized and vocal cords still in utero prepare themselves. A certain august author is dredged from the grave and presented with a frankly preposterous mission. A crucial fencepost goes missing. And, at a height of twenty-nine thousand and two feet above the surface of the Earth, an eighteen year old girl makes a decision that may or may not end the world...

        In short things are about to get weird.

•••

So what will mankind do when the magnitude of its peril is recognized? The answer is complicated. There will be a fight, of course. Humans do not, as a rule, sit back and allow things to just happen to them with equanimity. Especially not when confronted with enormity such as this... And yet... this is a challenge without precedent. The arms of a warlike species––the accumulated divisions, the stealth aircraft, the nuclear submarines cruising in lethal anonymity beneath the sea––all of these will prove useless against the Devil. Unable to farm out its defense to the normal practitioners of organized violence, mankind will fall back upon... Theology? Superstition? Blind hope? All of the above and vastly more.

        Cults will form. Organized religion will both be immeasurably strengthened and shaken to its core. Faiths will swap adherents like ten-year-olds once traded baseball cards. Evangelical mobs will form in Tibet and prayer flags will fly in long undulating strands across the empty plains of Nebraska. Laws against apostasy will be bent to or even past the breaking point. Hordes of people of all faiths will congregate in great makeshift masses in the public places of the world to pray. Deities and prophets and saints and all manner of things in Heaven and Earth will receive entreaties for help. Prayers that for once, just once, prayers will actually be answered.

        And will it all be for naught?

        Maybe.

        There must surely be a God; the Devil’s presence proves this. And yet even as the Devil parades flamboyantly across the Earth, God will remain maddeningly aloof––and God never seems so distant as when he is needed most. When faith is presented with an ultimate test, is confronted with rampaging demonic power, any number of people will wonder if the Big Guy upstairs gives any sort of a damn at all...

        Even the people who will hold the balance of the world in their hands, who have been assigned by God to save the world (or perhaps to let it fall to destruction) will have their doubts.

        There will be four of them: an accountant, a wastrel, and two teenagers. Danville residents all. And, like Danville itself, they are not obviously special. Even now they wile away the last hours of their respective obscurities in more or less normal fashion: one is buying groceries; one is lead-footing an expensive automobile; one is trekking up a dun colored hillside with two friends; the last is throwing open a catch to a car on the Paris metro, whilst simultaneously working up the nerve to make an unpleasant phone call. Only one of them would ever, in a million years, imagine himself in the role he will shortly assume. And even he will be surprised when he grasps the magnitude of the mess he is in.

        The others will simply be gobsmacked.

•••

And just as there are heroes there shall also be messengers. More than one in fact. The first miracle is even now entering the world.

•••

Even as the Devil leaves his house, Mr. Caleb Matthews emerges into the florescent brilliance of the John Muir Medical Center in Walnut Creek, California, six and a third miles from Danville. He is the forty-second baby to be born in the hospital that day, precisely twenty-three minutes after the first. This is abnormal. On average someone is born somewhere once every six seconds. Over a span of 23 minutes approximately 230 children ought to be bought into the world. As the J.M.M.C. is the proximate point of medical care for approximately 1/100,000th of the human population such a string of births is...statistically unlikely. A nurse with a penchant for math works out that the hospital––which averages one birth every three hours––is producing children 320 times faster than normal, a number impossible to square with simple chance. A hard probability with an astonishing number of zeroes is calculated, and the person doing the math gasps gives voice to a thought caroming through any number of heads in the hospital: “This is a fucking miracle.”

        It’s also a fucking pain in the ass.

        The J.M.M.C is not equipped to handle forty-two near simultaneous births; indeed nothing so preposterous had ever even been contemplated until a small army of women entering labor had simultaneously descended upon the hospital. Attempts had been made to shift patients to other locations, but a number of factors––ranging from obstinance, to maintenance, to a small fire, to an outbreak of food poisoning, to bureaucratic bungling, to, in the last and least expected instance, raccoon attack––had prevented any of the women from being transferred. And then 42 women had gone into second-stage labor and all hell had broken loose... Several children had ultimately been delivered by three general practitioners and an agricultural veterinarian from the nearby town of Alamo who had come for the birth of his third daughter. The customary post-birth examination of the babies had been quickly shunted off onto a trio of interns. “It’s very simple,” the head of the department had explained. “Just make sure each baby has the right number of everything, and make sure none of the holes are blocked.” Thus Dr. Adrian Lopez becomes the first person to take a really good look at Caleb Matthews. He holds the child up to the light and begins to count:

        “Two, two, one, two, one, ten, one, one–– then Adrian lifts the child up to the light to get a good luck at his properly minuscule toes. He counts them over four times before calling the head of the department in. “Doctor Alexander––Janet!”

        Janet Alexander, the hospital chief of obstetrics, arrives moments later, her last conversation (‘Is anyone else preggers in this building?’ ‘No.’ ‘Thank God.’) echoing down the corridor behind her. Dr. Lopez listens to the strengthening sounds of her footsteps, steels himself. Janet Alexander becomes curt when she is tired, and after 42 babies... “What?” Adrian Lopez, not wholly unintimidated by his boss, merely holds up the baby. “Twelve toes.” His voice is almost firm. “Six on each.”

        Janet Alexander stares long and hard at the child before finally shrugging. “Whatever.” Polydactyly. A naturally occurring phenomenon where a person is born with more than five fingers or toes on an extremity. The extra digit(s) can range from a nubbin of skin to a fully functional digit. Incidence is about one in five hundred live births. Strange, certainly, but neither life threatening nor bizarre enough to overwhelm the weirdness of the baby rush itself. Though, Janet thinks, it does make a pretty fitting coda for the last twenty-four hours... She’d have to explain it to the parents––but what was there really to explain? Your kid has twelve toes. End of story. You can have two of them snipped off, or just make sure the little bugger wears socks. And be glad it isn’t an extra head...

        Janet Alexander tells the intern not to worry about it, then retreats to her office, collapses into her nice rolly padded leather chair. Reclines as much as the chair allows, and, hair spilling off in long tresses off the side, thinks of God.

        I suppose this is your idea of a joke. Janet Alexander has a dysfunctional relationship with the Lord. She is nominally an Atheist, but this is really just her way of sending a message to the Almighty; letting Him know that He can’t take her for granted. Janet Alexander is 51, hard-talking and Iowan; a little more than short, and by no means fat, but tending ever more towards pudginess––she likes food and there aren’t enough hours in the day to maintain a calorie deficit. She is nearly indefatigable, which means she has almost enough energy to keep up with the frankly preposterous demands of her job. Her staff revolve around her in a sort of a state of fearful, awestruck wonder; a few of her (relatively senior) colleagues joke about her forming a cult. This prompts a grin and nothing more. She had been quite religious once, downright evangelical––had even gone so far as to vote for a Republican presidential candidate––but then college had intervened, and Janet had developed, as she liked to put it, ‘her own way of looking at things.’ I wouldn’t last long in the South, Janet jokes, usually near her Medical school diploma, which reads University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in flowing letters. At present she finds herself resisting a strong urge to go down a beer.

        Outside in the hallway, someone, somewhere starts playing very nice choral music.

        For a pleasant moment Janet Alexander sits back, breathes slowly, takes a moment to appreciate what her staff had accomplished.  “Forty-two,” she whispers to herself. A twist of a smile. Two caesareans had been medically necessary, and everyone had spent time on the verge of panic, but nobody had bungled anything severely enough to bring lasting harm to either a mother or child. 42 babies, 42 healthy mothers. Barely 20 minutes. Not once in a million years. And probably not again in another million. A smile, and she remembers a couple of side comments tossed about by frantically rushing doctors after the first thirty babies or so. I hope someone calls Guinness... For a moment Janet feels a sense of total equanimity. And then she makes the most terrible of innocent mistakes; hoping that the music outside might waft in more fully, she opens the door to her office.

         For a pleasant moment Janet only stands by the door, admiring the sound. Then she notices a tumult of people rushing down the corridor, towards the nursery. Hesitation––oh, Janet thinks for a moment, wouldn’t it be nice if this could be someone else’s problem?––but then professionalism gets the better of her, and Janet is racing down the hallway, berating herself for her momentary cowardice. Her pager starts beeping, but she ignores it, rightly intuiting where she is being summoned, her head already racing with the potential emergencies that might afflict a newborn...

        The plexiglass window, looking into the nursery, is thronged. This is unsurprising––forty-two babies ought to draw a crowd. But the feeling is wrong... There is no sense of joy, or happiness, or any hint of the excited cooing that normally accompanies proud parents watching their newborn offspring. There really isn’t anything at all; just a stillness, an utter stunned stillness... Janet assumes this indicates that something is going terribly wrong inside––post birth complications, an army of nurses and doctors descending upon a bassinet, a crowd staring on in stunned silence, no one bothering to turn off a radio. With all possible haste Janet muscles her way through the mob to a key-carded door to the side of the window, and rushes into the nursery, ready to deal with whatever is transpiring within...

        But there are no doctors frantically attending to an emergency.

        There is no radio.

        There is a nurse, more profoundly and wholly stunned than any person Janet Alexander has hitherto seen.

        There is nothing else in the room except gorgeous four part harmony and babies.

        It’s a good ten seconds before Janet Alexander realizes where the music is coming from.

        The voices and the newborns; when the disconnect unravels itself, the unmet ends fusing themselves together with a viscerally jostling lurch, Janet only barely manages to remain standing. She momentarily considers steadying herself upon a bassinet, then remembers that leaning upon things that roll is a bad idea––and also sees that this particular bassinet holds an adorably tiny mezzo soprano. She goes ramrod straight; turns and walks slowly from the nursery, stepping lightly and with her arms close to her torso, as though she is in the midst of a tiny, chorusing minefield, set to explode at the slightest perturbation. Janet nearly makes it from the room before noticing that many members of the crowd are recording the babies––and Janet––with their phones... Within minutes, video of Janet and the babies will be beamed around the planet; a serenely diminutive chorus and a shell-shocked, astonished woman whom Janet will hardly be able to recognize as herself when she sees one of the recordings... But this is the least of Janet’s worries at present; the crowd has begun to flood through the doorway that Janet, in her haste, had left open... Janet raises her arms to shoo the interlopers away, but before she can speak she is confronted by a woman who asks, with mystified panic: “How can anything so small sing bass?”

        Janet can’t answer; she wonders the same thing herself. She tries to order everyone out, but is ignored; within moments the nursery is filled by a crowd wallowing in its own collective bafflement. “Does anyone know what they’re singing?” asks another woman, leaning cautiously over a bassinet. She’s answered by a male voice, emanating from within the human phalanx still flooding the room. “It’s Palestrina.”

        “Who?”

        “Fifteenth century Spanish composer. Did choral music. The song’s called Sicut Cervus.”

        “Oh,” A disconcerted pause. “That doesn’t make it better.”

        “No, I can’t say that it does.”

        “Pretty though.”

        “Yes, very.”

        The end; the four parts come together in harmony. The last word is deus, and then silence. Or near silence. After a moment the crowd realizes that one of the babies is still... not singing, but chanting. They creep towards him slowly, in the back-most corner, for he is indeed the last: Mr. Caleb Matthews. His diminutive form is perfectly serene and babyish, except for his mouth, which moves outlandishly; and from it issues an odd babble that, whatever it is, is not the normal murmurings of a newborn. No one present––with one exception––can tell if any of the noises have meaning, but a sinking, terrible feeling comes over one woman who gives voice to her thoughts after a long, speechless minute. “Please tell me,” she says, “that that’s not the Book of Revelation––”

        “––it is.”

        “Fuck!”

        No one thinks to wonder at the odds that someone who is conversant in Attic Greek is in the nursery; nor does anyone notice that the response comes from the same person who recognized the provenance of the choral music. Janet Alexander, now huddled protectively over Caleb Matthews’ bassinet, begins to consider the consequences that might stem from having a minor miracle erupt in her hospital ward. Then she looks down at little Caleb. Or not so minor.

        She storms from the room, the sole motive object in it, and then not in it, paging the hospital’s chief of security...

•••

        And with good reason; already hundreds of people have been informed by text message, phone call and e-mail that something miraculous has happened at the hospital. A nearly full video of the chorus and Caleb Matthews’ recitation of the Apocalypse of John is posted within five minutes of Janet quitting the nursery. Within twenty minutes there’s a small crowd outside the J.M.M.C, earnestly and politely flabbergasted that they aren’t welcomed inside. They don’t leave. Within an hour the crowd has metastasized into a full blown mob, wholly engulfing the hospital parking lot. Many more people will come.

        Though nobody can even begin to guess at the fact yet, only two more people need to arrive.