THE SON OF ELI

CHAPTER 4: BAD RAPTURE

It was back to a stalemate as the world leaders went back to debating on how to deal with the threat.

Some suggested a full airstrike with heavy artillery and missiles. Others suggested nuking the crater again.

Finally, it was decided to set up a united army base within the perimeter of the Sinaki region as close as possible to that ominous crater and away from the purple cloud. The plan was that a second tactical nuclear bomb could obliterate it. The concern was how to release the news to the media. Secondly, how could they protect the nearest communities in the Sinaki area from any after-effects of another nuclear bomb?

Luckily, the cloud was just around the bowl crater and had not spread any farther. With an army base in place, experienced commando sweeps could better advice on the best attack approach whilst monitoring any changes in and around the crater.

As they were ironing out the modalities for the establishment of the army base, the president of the United States received an urgent call from his vice president. He instructed his aide to pick the call but he was informed that it was very urgent, and he needed to hear it. He excused himself and picked the call.

Whilst he was listening, the Japanese president also had a call, followed almost immediately by the Norwegian president.

The other leaders were beginning to get jittery now at what was going on as more of them excused themselves to receive calls.

"What is going on here?" the French president asked softly with raised eyebrows. A minute later, he also received a call from his vice.

"Ladies and Gentlemen," the president of the United States said suddenly, and it was evident he looked shaken as he gazed into the camera. "I have just been informed that Mr Carlos Kolowski, a terrorist we had in a maximum-security prison, just disappeared from his cell."

There were gasps from the other leaders.

They all knew Carlos Kolowski, the international terrorist who had masterminded several horrible bombings against the United States and across Europe, killing people in thousands. He was a sick, demented and brutal killer, and his actions had held the world at ransom as he ran berserk.

He had not been reckless at all; his attacks had always been executed with tactical precision and with deadly effects.

He had been arrested three years previously when he tried to storm and take over the White House in the USA. However, one of his lieutenants had made a fatal mistake by using an unsecured communication device with a colleague.

"Jesus!" the Prime Minister of Great Britain gasped with horror. "How did that happen? How was that possible?"

The president of the United States sighed heavily.

"Apparently, it happened during his lunch break," he said softly. "Mr Kolowski was in strict solitary confinement with no visitors allowed. His cell has cameras to monitor his every movement. They have sent me the surveillance tape from his cell. Perhaps, we should all watch it together."

"Yes, yes, it is imperative we do," the president of the Czech Republic said hurriedly.

"Just a moment then," the president of the United States said.

His face soon left the screen and in its place was a camera feed from the cell of Mr Carlos Kolowski in bright colour footage.

The man was wearing orange prison garb and was lying on a bed reading. A few seconds later, his arm dropped along the side of the bed as he put his other forearm across his face, evidently feeling tired or sleepy. The book in his dangling hand fell on the floor at the same time that his body became rigid on the bed. His arm dropped from his face and he arced his head back, his face suddenly contorted, then he began to jerk spasmodically as if an electrical surge was passing through his body.

He was gasping for breath, and his teeth clenched tightly in a rictus of pain as his body jerked.

There were shouts in the background as those monitoring the cameras raised the alarm. Carlos uttered a prolonged scream of pain that made the watching presidents gasp with shock, and then his body went still.

Moving slowly, he sat up in the bed and turned to face the door. The camera zoomed in on his head, and the watching people gasped again at the sight that filled the screen.

The shock was great!

Carlos Kolowski had lost all his hair!

The hair on his head, his eyebrows, his neat moustache and a huge beard, were all gone!

There was something worst, though!

His eyes had popped out of their sockets and were hanging by thin membranous strands on his cheeks.

Twin trails of blood from his eye sockets were falling down his chin!

And there, on his forehead, were three red concentric circles!

It was the same symbol that was on the sides of the crater bowl the alien was cocooning in!

The same three red concentric circles!

"Oh, sweet Jesus!" Mr Sho Kawasaki whispered with horror.

Mr Carlos Kolowski opened his eyes suddenly!

The leaders gasped with horror!

Instead of empty sockets, the spaces his eyes had occupied were now bright, purple lights!

The tendrils holding his eyes snapped, and his eyes rolled down his chest and fell on the floor!

Then Carlos Kolowski smiled!

He had new teeth now!

They were long and curved like fangs and spaced. He had about ten teeth up and ten down… and they were purple!

The cell door flew open, and two prison warders entered with four more in the corridor outside with levelled guns. The guards were shocked for a moment at what they were seeing, and they hesitated!

Kolowski was still smiling as he lunged from the bed and clamped his hands on the shoulders of one of the guards. That was when the watching leaders noticed that his hands had changed too!

They had become incredibly huge, and broad, with long fingers and with several joints, and he had about ten fingers on each hand!

The guard screamed as Kolowski sank his fangs into the side of his neck and chomped down hard!

"Oh, God!" many of the watching presidents whispered with horror.

The guard was screaming and struggling, but Kolowski held him easily with his new hands and bit harder into the side of his neck, then he pulled up his head with a loud growl, tearing off a savage chunk of flesh from the guard's neck and began chewing with obvious relish!

He let the guard fall!

The man clamped his hand to his neck and screamed as blood gushed out in torrents. Kolowski was laughing in a macabre fashion with his alien hands held out, and his eyes glowing as he chewed the flesh in his mouth with blood dripping down his chin!

"You motherfucker!" the other guard screamed with fear and disgust as he levelled his gun and fired.

The heavy bullets tore into Kolowski, but suddenly he disappeared!

Just like that!

He was gone!

The guards rushed into the cell and swept their guns around. One of them checked under the bed whilst others entered the washroom, but Kolowski was simply gone!

Poof!

Bye-bye!

The man Kolowski had bitten was sitting limply on the floor with his back against the wall. Blood had matted the left side of his uniform.

"Let's get him to the infirmary!" one of the guards shouted and dropped his weapon. He bent low, evidently trying to hold his colleague, then he uttered a strangled scream of horror and took rapid steps backwards!

All the other guards stared at the man with horror!

First, his clothes fell off his body!

Then he began to puff up!

His face, neck, chest, stomach and legs began to expand and puff up, just like what had happened to the soldiers inside the crater!

A second later, he exploded with a muted phuut!

The skin and veins and tissues just exploded off his body!

The watching guards screamed and raised their arms protectively, but they did not need to worry! The flesh of the guard did not splatter everywhere as they had expected!

They seemed to float in the air just a few inches from the horrible skeletal caricature on the floor!

A second later, the organs that were within the skeletal frame of the guard exploded too with a muted phuut sound, then the flesh and organs seemed to merge and dissolve into a thin purple thread of light that rose with speed and slipped through the vents, and was gone!

The skull and bones of the guard collapsed on the floor and began to roll around. They were dry, white and ancient.

Not surprisingly, the other guards fled from the cell!

***

It started with Carlos Kolowski, but it eventually came to be known as the Lebedev Syndrome because the Kolowski horror was not made public, but the Igor Lebedev attack happened in a courtroom in Russia.

Igor, once a decorated soldier and revered for his bravery, strength and wit, fell from grace when he went on a mad rampage one winter afternoon. Back home for a short holiday, he had loaded his jeep with an assortment of weapons and driven to a local restaurant where he had ordered his favourite pelmeni dish and gorged it down. From there, he had driven to the centre of Anadyr, picked up his machine-gun, and just started mowing people down.

When he was finally overpowered, an hour had elapsed, and he had killed two hundred and twenty-one innocent civilians, including children.

Perhaps the most heart-rending incident was his savagery inside a retirement home where he had brutally shot dead fifty-one retired men and women.

Igor Lebedev had gone insane, so it seemed.

His story grabbed the attention of the world.

His trial took a month, approximately. On the day of his sentencing, he was brought to court in handcuffs and with chains around his feet.

Since his arrest, he had become generally docile and meek, and not given to much speech. His defence team had pleaded temporary insanity caused by the stressful conditions he had lived under as a combat soldier but the jury had found him guilty of two hundred and twenty-one counts of first-degree murder.

There was no doubt that he would receive the death sentence. It was what the state wanted, and exactly what the people wanted. Igor had sat in court with his head lowered and his hands folded across his laps, the picture of docility.

It all came down to the final moment the judge asked him to stand up. As cameras swung on him and projected his image across homes, the seven-foot muscular Igor Lebedev suddenly began to thrash around in a severe, sickening manner!

This incident happened exactly ten minutes after the Kolowski incident had shocked the world leaders.

Lebedev's arms jerked stiffly in front of him, his legs became rigid, and his body shook violently. His huge head swung back and forth at such speed that it was barely visible! The table in front of him smashed on the floor.

His lawyers moved away from him in apprehension as the judge frantically called for doctors to attend to him. Police officers readied their hands on their weapons and looked apprehensively at him.

Then, as suddenly as it had started, he went still. His chin had sunk to his chest, and that was when they noticed the first unusual thing: Igor Lebedev had lost all his hair!

The nicely-barbered hair on his head was gone!

The lawyer nearest to him noticed that the man's fingers had increased, that his hands had become very huge, and there was nothing natural about them!

The lawyer did the sensible thing; he quickly moved off the chair and hurried up the aisle. The courtroom was shocked into a coma of the surreal, not really understanding how a man could lose his hair and yet there was no trace of hair anywhere on him or the ground.

The screams rang out when Igor Lebedev lifted his head!

His facial hair was gone, his eyes were hanging by threads below his chin, and his eye sockets were filled with a horrible purple light, and his teeth had changed to sharp fangs!

And, burning brightly on his forehead in red, were three concentric circles that had not been there previously!

He lifted his hands and snapped off the handcuffs as if they were dried grass, and then he pulled the chains off his body in one fluid movement. He stood up with his bloodied round eyes dangling under his chin and fixed his purple eyes on the prosecutor, Anna Ivanov.

Igor had developed a special kind of hatred for the fiery, brilliant and beautiful prosecutor who had pushed for his death from the onset.

Igor smiled in a fang-filled way.

"Привет, дорогой," he said in a guttural voice.

Anna Ivanov heard him and did not want to be addressed by him as 'hello darling, it's me.'

She knew what was coming next, and she tried to flee from the courtroom. Igor lunged at her, blocking her path. Her beautiful face cracked up in an expression of terror as she looked around desperately for help. She reached into her bag where she always kept a pepper spray handy.

Behind them, three policemen and a woman had their guns out, but people were flitting between them and their target, so they held their fire.

Anna lifted the can and sprayed directly into Igor Lebedev's eery eyes. The giant grinned his fangy smile again, reached out, grabbed her hand and snapped it at the elbow.

Anna screamed shrilly with terror and Igor caught a bunch of her hair, dragged her forward and sank his teeth into her throat. He was a giant of a man with a huge mouth, and Anna was a petite beauty with a slender neck. The result was that a big chunk of her throat entered Igor's mouth, and he yanked it out with a nasty, shredding, tearing sound that made people cringe and wail with terror.

The judge got up with a loud bawl and dashed for a door behind his bench, his speed quite blinding for a man his size; he was quite obese.

The police now had clear sight, and they opened fire at Igor Lebedev's back. Igor turned casually and dropped Anna's dead body. She had thick red blood pumping out of the big hole in her neck.

Blood covered Igor's lower face as he chewed on the trachea and neck tissues he had pulled out of Anna's neck. The bullets struck him, driving him back a step or two, then he lunged at the policemen like a wild hog.

He caught one of the male cops by the neck and sank his teeth into the man's face. His long fangs made a crunching sound as they bit into the cop's cheekbones right through to his nose before yanking out almost the whole facial structure!

Behind him, Anna exploded off her skeleton!

People saw what was left of her and began to vomit whilst others screamed. Another second and her internal organs exploded, liquefied into tendrils of light purple and then shot into the sky!

Her dry, marrow-less bones clunked on the hard floor with tinkling, fluty sounds with her skull landing upside down with a grin as if she found the whole horrific situation quite funny.

The policeman whose face had been chewed out was jerking spasmodically like a puppet when Igor dropped him and chewed the gelatinous membranes and bones he had torn out.

The cops had lost the urge for the fight and were fleeing like other people.

Igor caught one by the collar and pulled him down hard. He lifted his gigantic right foot above the man's head. The policeman screamed and raised his hands to protect his face but to no avail. The foot came down hard on his head, breaking his skull and flattening it as if it had been formed from dough! Grey brain matter mingled with the blood on the floor. The cop's head was mashed, but his hands and legs moved spasmodically with the aftershock. One of his hands flailed weakly around Igor's right calf.

Igor Lebedev placed a foot on the dead man's shoulder, grabbed his upper arm, and pulled the whole arm right out of its shoulder socket, held it up, and bit luxuriously into the sinewy inner arm.

The body of the cop with the bitten face exploded with that soft sinister sound, phuut.

There was a mad rush for the exits then.

The horrible images and videos were soon hitting trending levels, and the Lebedev Syndrome was born.

***

The virtual meeting of world leaders ended.

It seemed that in every country, a particularly evil person had suffered the Lebedev Syndrome. The calls came in almost by the second, and the fear factor escalated.

They all knew that this new attack was coming from that terrible entity that had entered the earth, TPV. Those ominous red concentric circles and the purple eyes were indicative enough, and Doctor Sho Kawasaki served a chilling warning to them.

"Our unwanted visitor is far powerful than we thought!" he told the assembled world leaders. "From the crater, it has been able to reach out and select the most evil of characters across the globe! That is not good."

"Why those people? Those murderers and criminals?" the Turkish president asked. "Is it what I am thinking? Anarchy?"

Kawasaki nodded grimly with fear on his face.

"Yes, sir, anarchy it is!" he said grimly. "It has seen we have rules and hierarchal systems of law. That would make its quest for human fodder – excuse my language – a bit difficult. If it can topple the organized systems in all countries and replace them with a system of anarchy powered by terror and fear, it could get access to a large number of people and explode them for fuel, as we've been witnessing. If the purple visitor is very weak and needs to replenish its strength and energy with liquefied people, or whatever he turns the flesh and organs into, then I'm afraid we're just seeing the beginning of a horrible time for humanity ahead of us."

"And why do you say that?" the French president asked.

Sho Kawasaki licked his lips.

"So far, reports trickling in indicate only a few people – one person from each country, so far – have been affected by the Lebedev Syndrome. It knows these people could be overpowered, somehow. And it needs it replenishments. I'm tempted to believe this evil entity is going to adopt other measures to ensure it is fed and kept healthy!"

"Are you not taking your preconceptions a tad too far?" the German chancellor asked, his voice sounding irritated.

Sho Kawasaki looked at him grimly.

"No, sir, I'm not," he replied. "There is an incident in the Bible about an hour when Jesus Christ would appear in the sky after a trumpet sounds, something like that. It says good people would be taken mysteriously out from across the world. They would disappear mysteriously."

"Oh, come on!" said the president of Nigeria. "Surely, you're not saying this is the Divine Rapture, are you?"

"Of course not, no," Sho Kawasaki said. "But the symbol on their foreheads, the replacement of eyes, their sudden disappearances are all indicative. This is a bad rapture, if you ask me, where the wicked are rather being taken and strengthened. This alien is going to harm the earth. We should be prepared for any eventuality. It can start something else, something diabolical and maybe irreversible. We must blow it up with any means possible, no matter the sacrifice!"

There was a clear understanding of what he was saying, and this suddenly made everybody uncomfortable.

"I will pretend I did not hear you linking g******e with the Kingdom of Eden," the king of Eden said coldly.

"Gentlemen, it should not come to that," said the Secretary-General of the United Nations quickly. "Every nation is sacred and sovereign. Please let us take a break and reconvene in five hours. Let's deal with this Lebedev Syndrome menace in our countries, and come back with a more pragmatic plan about how to get rid of this Purple bastard and his bad rapture, as Doctor Kawasaki puts it!"

The leaders quickly agreed to this suggestion. Most of them had heard that the victims of the Lebedev Syndromes in their respective country had appeared inside the official residences of the world leaders!

That was horrible news for most of them because they knew just how murderous those individuals had been. The presidents had to neutralize these threats, or they could be dead in a few minutes.

They took the five-hour break.

However, as events turned out, no one really needed that break. By the time the hours crawled eventually to five hours, the meeting was no longer a priority.