THE RED WAKE

INTERLUDE-Chapter 20 (PT)

INTERLUDE

     Violence.

     All across the world, the spectre of the Red Wake loomed. And as it descended upon cities and towns, hamlets and villages, no man, woman or child was left unscathed. A race as old as the stars had declared war on humanity. Now agents of that ancient people stalked freely upon the Earth. The Herald had accomplished the first part of its mission.    

       The horror- show well underway, in the long days that followed the Herald’s disappearance, the Earth was plunged into chaos. Mankind’s ancient vision of contact from beyond our world had become a horrific reality.

*

     And somewhere in the Void, Pitch tests his strength against the mighty cage he has occupied these countless millenia, and the walls of the prison created by his vanished jailers breaks. From the depths of the ruptured shadowcage, Pitch laughs….and reaches through. 

 *

 Rio De Janeiro: Tens of thousands take to the streets in an orgy of religious mayhem. Beneath the watchful eye of the Messiah atop Mount Corcovado, Rio consumes itself as the obsidian spheres are absorbed into the Earth. 

 *

 Tokyo:  A culture known for it’s ability to cooperate erupts in a chaos- wave of murder and destruction. Tokyo goes down in flames.

  * 

 Moscow: Black marketeers attack the Kremlin, using a stolen nuclear warhead, a legacy from the Cold War to hold the city hostage. Before the city can be fully evacuate the gangsters are ambushed by foot soldiers of an advance force that no human army has the power to resist. When the slaughter is over, the creatures follow their Masters' instructions  and detonate the warhead.  

 *

Prague: The capitol of the former Czech Republic is pummeled by a rain of black spheres so intense that in moments, every human being in the city and surrounding hamlets vanishes. What replaces the city's former inhabitants is a settlement of beings not remotely human. 

 *

 Selma Alabama: a week-long wave of lynchings culminates in a race war that spills out of the city and into outlying areas. Black outrage, fueled by the energy of the Red Wake spills over, bubbling into the surrounding, predominantly White suburbs. White hostility, so long frustrated, restrained and forestalled, finds jubilant release in the long shadow of the Red Wake’s passing.  Superior numbers of whites create grim new forests of swinging black bodies, while the descendants of African slaves attempt to abolish the sons of the traders in human flesh.  

     Immortal and savage,  the secret seeds sown by the Founding Fathers finally bear the strangest of fruit, and when the black spheres begin to fall like errant chickens coming home to roost, the real winners of the war reveal themselves to the shrieking human tribes. But these new conquerors mark no distinctions in skin color.

     To them, the survivors are truly equal.

  *****

INTERLUDE

Bottoms Illinois...

     The pulsing thing that sat in cell Number 3 bore no resemblance to either of the dead humans from whose bodies it had drawn its substance. The cocoon- like sac was a mottled gray color, the height of a small man.  It was ringed around with deeply etched lines that were a deep, blood red, tapered at both ends and thick through the middle, like the larval pod of a gigantic caterpillar.