Thunder Sandwich #26 - Michael Ward fiction

Summoning the Wrath of God

"The company is downsizing Rod. We have to eliminate certain positions to stay competitive. I'm afraid yours will be one of those positions. We have to let you go."

"What?" said Rod Hershey.

Carl Reinhart looked awkward. "I'm sorry Rod," he said.

"Are you sorry enough to pay my rent. It's due in a few days."

"You'll get two weeks pay in lieu of notice," Reinhart said.

"Two weeks pay won't go that far. You know how bad the unemployment situation is. You're putting me in a bad position Carl."

"You'll get something Rod. Just use your credit cards. They'll help tide you over."

"Carl my credit cards are maxed out like everybody else's. Are they letting you go too?"

Carl Reinhart looked uncomfortable. "No I'll be moving to another position," he said.

Rod Hershey glared at Carl Reinhart. For a moment he wanted to hit his boss. Tension hung in the air between the two of them like a knife. With an effort Rod calmed himself. It would do no good to blow up at his boss. That would just give them an excuse to shaft him even more and not pay the two weeks notice. This was bad, very bad.

The drive home was weird. Hershey's concentration was shot. He almost totaled his car when the vehicle in front stopped suddenly. He was not surprised when he found himself turning into the liquor store. Even though it was only ten in the morning he bought enough beer to get two men drunk. As he approached the checkout he tossed a bottle of vodka in the cart for good measure.

Ten minutes later he was in his house. The first beer went down so fast that it hardly touched the sides. He was halfway down the second beer before the buzz even began. After the buzz came the rage. Life had been hard for the last two years with the recession. Crappy pay rises coupled with an increase in his rent. Hershey sat in the chair and began to brood. He opened the vodka and took a pull straight from the bottle. The vodka burned as it went down but who cared.

If Hershey had just sat in his chair and gotten drunk everything would have been fine. He would have been rehired a week later. It would have been a stressful and worrying week but that would have been it. Instead Hershey looked up at the ceiling. His thoughts went up to the sky. He prayed often and usually his prayers were good prayers. This one was not. He began.

"Please God, I want you to examine this world. It seems that now it is a harsh world full of bad people. The world never used to be like this. Please God scour the world and where you find bad people burn them off the face of the planet."

The prayer done, Hershey drank more beer. Very quickly he began to get drunk. He began to pray repetitively. As he drank more the prayer began to change. By the time he was halfway down the bottle of vodka he was shouting for God to blast the Earth right out of the heavens. By three o'clock in the afternoon, when he had been drinking solidly for four hours he passed out in the chair.

Hershey slept for over four hours. He was dead drunk. As the effects of the alcohol began to clear he started to dream. Suddenly the dream exploded into clarity. Hershey found himself sitting on a mat in the Himalayas opposite an Indian sage.

"My boy, what have you done?" the sage said.

"What do you mean what have I done?" Hershey replied. He was surprised to have no hangover; he remembered the drinking session as being a bad one. "Am I dreaming?" he asked.

"Yes," replied the sage. "It is only in a dream that I can communicate with you."

Hershey looked around. The sun shone on the mountains. There was an air of peace. He wished that New York could be like that.

"My boy," said the sage, "you have done a very bad thing."

"No, you have it wrong," said Hershey. "A very bad thing has been done to me. I lost my job today."

"You lost your job and that is the reason you have done this."

"Done what?"

"God does not hear the prayers of everyone but you are special. He has heard your prayer."

"So what," Hershey said. Then realization dawned. The last thing he remembered was asking for the Earth to be blasted out of the heavens. "You can't be serious," he said.

"I am totally serious," said the Indian. "We are in the age of Kali Yuga, an age where mankind becomes corrupt. At the end of the last civilization the Earth was cleansed with water. At the end of the Kali Yuga the Earth will be cleansed with fire. However, we are not at the end of the Kali Yuga yet. Your prayer has brought it forward."

"Wow," said Hershey. "That's pretty cool."

"You are not taking this seriously," said the Indian. "Six billion people will perish if you do not reverse your prayer."

"You know what," said Hershey. "In about a month I'm going to run out of money. Then I'm going to be thrown out of my apartment. Then I'm going to have the luxury of sleeping in my car. So, excuse my language but I don't give a flying fuck if six billion people are going to perish. The only good thing is that my employer will get to see his front lawn burned about a second before he's burned."

"My boy, my boy," said the Indian. He looked horrified and also a little sad. "Six billion people. You cannot do this. All you have to do is reverse your prayer."

"Alright," said Hershey. "Now you're making me feel bad. Tell me what I need to do and if I have time between looking for jobs then I'll do it."

Now the Indian looked angry. "I am talking to a fool," he said. He sighed. "Here is what you have to do. The alcohol brought out your emotion. The prayer was a product of high emotion. You must use alcohol and bring out emotion again. You must fire your prayer up at God. It will not be easy but it must be done."

"Okay, in my present state of being shafted by the world I have absolutely no problem with getting drunk again."

"You cannot get drunk," said the Indian. "You must drink sparingly so that you feel emotion but still have the control to begin the prayer. It must be a repetitive prayer like the one you did before."

"Okay you've persuaded me," said Hershey.

"Good," said the Indian. "You must do this as soon as you wake up." With that the sage began to fade from view.

Hershey woke instantly. The pain hit immediately, it was all over his head. One massive hangover. The dream faded as he sat up. His head pounded as he walked over to the coffeepot and got it started. Ten minutes later he was drinking coffee. He picked up the job pages.

"There's no time to save the world," he said. "I need to call some people first." He laughed, the dream now more of an amusement than a reality.

As with any search for jobs in a depressed economy, the morning was more frustrating than fruitful. It seemed like human resources people had been breeding like rabbits and devised more and more strategies to mix, sort and shake people into categories. By the end of the morning he was in numerous systems ready to be processed but without a hint of any job offer.

That night Hershey left the alcohol well alone. He thought idly about the prayer but there was no way he was going to drink. That night he dreamed he was running through a park being chased by an Indian in flowing robes.

The next three days, Hershey religiously applied for jobs, called companies, knocked on doors to no avail. People who would have grabbed his arm so hard they would have almost pulled it off two years ago were now all too busy to see him. He noticed all the men around in the daytime, men who should be working but were not.

On the fourth day Hershey sat down again. He drank slowly and carefully trying to get to the point the Indian had described. Soon emotion was beginning to be heightened and he was ready to pray. At that point the phone rang. Hershey debated for a second whether his voice would sound slurred and then he answered it. Big mistake, it was his landlord.

"Don't forget the rent is due tomorrow," said the landlord. "I heard you lost your job. You will pay won't you."

"Yes," Hershey said calmly. "It won't be a problem."

Hershey put the phone down and sat back in his chair. A vein pulsed in his forehead. He took a long hard swig of vodka. This time he asked God for meteor showers, for the sun to leave its borders and envelop the Earth, for the planet Venus to hurtle millions of miles across space and smash the Earth out of it's orbit. He passed out yelling for yet another meteor shower.

Four hours later Hershey sat opposite the Indian again. "I'm sorry," he said.

"You are a stupid western fool," said the Indian. "If I knew where you lived I would catch a plane and come and beat you with my stick."

"I thought you guys were non-violent," Hershey said.

"In your case I will make an exception."

Suddenly the Indian faded out and Hershey woke up. This hangover was worse than the last one. As he drank coffee again, Hershey began to consider his options. He was going to lose his apartment if he didn't get a job. Sleeping in his car would last until he couldn't make the repayments on the car. Then he'd be on the street. Or he could die in the cleansing fires in three days. If he did nothing six billion people would die. That is, if the Indian was right. Six billion people. Suddenly he thought about his unemployment situation and he was angry.

"Fuck them," he said. "Fuck all six billion of them. Let the chimpanzees inherit the Earth. They'll have to work really hard to screw it up as much as we did."

That said, Hershey reached for the remains of the bottle of vodka. It burned like hell as it went down but after ten minutes he felt damn good. The next two days were spent in an alcohol-fueled haze. He came to around seven o'clock on the last evening. The phone rang.

"Where have you been," his boss said. "I've been trying to get you for two days."

"I've been out job hunting," Hershey lied.

"We need you back. Can you come in tomorrow."

"What?" said Hershey.

"Things have changed, we need you."

"Don't you mean you found out nobody could do my job," Hershey said.

"Can you start tomorrow," his boss said.

"Sure," Hershey said, his problems over.

"Hey go to your window," said his boss. "Wow look at those meteors."

"Hershey went to the window. He reached over to put the light off. There were red trails on the horizon. Hershey watched for a second. Suddenly there were more and more. One of the meteors made it to the ground and Hershey watched a house explode. A huge meteor almost half a mile across hurtled down. It slammed right into the middle of New York City. The ground shook.

Hershey had time to say the words, "Please God take back my…" before the meteor smashed into the side of his apartment building. Just as he had prayed for, he perished in the cleansing fires.

[Index]