A Premature Apocalypse Read online

  The task was impossible. There were too many variables, too many contradictory traditions. This wasn’t even his job. Elijah the Prophet should make these decisions. But where was he?

  He must not get this wrong. The stakes were too high: the world’s Redemption; and Yosef’s life.

  If he was going to make any progress, he had to reexamine his assumptions, and not just about the Messiah.

  “Is this the eternal bliss we’ve been hoping for?” Adams had said. Yosef felt the stab of disappointment too.

  For centuries, the dispute had raged among the sages. Did the Future Reward require the reunion of body and soul in This World, or did that eternal bliss belong to the World of Souls alone?

  When Moshe had awoken in his second life, he had remembered nothing of the World of Souls. What was the soul, anyway? Did the soul even exist? If the body was all we had—all we were—then what of eternal reward? The axioms of life, the very ground beneath his feet, wavered over a dark abyss.

  He closed the heavy tomes of Talmud.

  Body and soul. God and Satan. Dualism appeared in many guises. But there was only one God. No devil encroached on His dominion. Was the body-soul divide an illusion? The six hundred thirteen commandments sanctified life in this world. But if we have no incorporeal existence, then the Resurrection made sense. Without the Resurrection, there could be no afterlife. The World to Come was the here and now, just later.

  Yosef’s phone vibrated. The text message from an unknown number contained a single word: BOOM.

  Yosef’s guts clenched. He made an educated guess as to the identity of the sender. How had he obtained Yosef’s personal mobile number? The same way he had sneaked into his office under false pretenses. Had the sender graduated from persuasion to bomb threats?

  A sudden apprehension made Yosef nudge his laptop from slumber.

  The YouTube clip from the reverend’s email still displayed on the screen. Yosef clicked play and skipped to the end. A jarring detail in the video had gnawed on the edges of his consciousness, but he couldn’t put a finger on it. On the Temple Mount, men in blue overalls constructed a dais opposite the golden Dome of the Rock ahead of tomorrow’s mass gathering.

  Yosef played the section again. One worker had caught his eye. The man kept his head low as he carried a package on his shoulder. The shot was distant and pixelated, but Yosef knew the red beard and sparkling eyes beneath the flat cap.

  Oh, no. Yosef guessed what he was up to and had to stop him.

  Yosef grabbed his desk phone.

  “Ram, get the Police Commissioner on the line. It’s urgent!”

  Chapter 55

  Avi heard the voice of a ghost when he stumbled into the offices of Upward on Keren Hayesod Street. The ghost was cackling.

  Avi halted, then winced as his arm in the plaster cast swung forward. The last time he had met a ghost, Moshe Karlin had returned from the dead and wrecked his life. Was this happening all over again?

  He peered around the corner and blinked his eyes. This cannot be! He had seen Gurion on the platform, giving forth at the microphone, when the ground had collapsed.

  Avi had danced sideways, as cracks tore through Zion Square, and he fled for his life. Looking over his shoulder, he saw the entire platform disappear into a gaping hole as if swallowed by Godzilla.

  Then the earth flipped Avi like a burger, his arm slamming into an iron street pole. He had known pain before, but never like this. Bright lights sparked before his eyes as the mob surged ahead, tripping over his legs and trampling his injured arm until the world faded to white.

  He awoke in Shaare Zedek hospital, a fresh cast on his arm. After an overnight stay for observation, the nurses released him. Only when he’d left did he realize his luck. The hospital had generators and water reserves. Outside, the situation was bleak.

  He called his parents—the screen protector of his phone had shattered in his back pocket—and walked to their apartment in Wolfson Center. They’d never been so happy to see him. Gurion’s stage had descended into the belly of the earth, and they had assumed that Avi had followed close behind.

  He lay on the couch, munched his mother’s honey cakes, and sipped sweet tea boiled over a gas burner. With Gurion gone, Upward would disintegrate, and when his term in Knesset ended Avi would need a new job. That gave him time. Few administrations lasted a full four years, but something told him that Moshe might break that rule.

  Moshe. Avi had tried to warn him. He’d even tried to spy for him behind enemy lines. Now the Opposition was in disarray. With Gurion as his champion, Avi hadn’t bothered to invest in warm relations with the other party members. If he was to be of use to Moshe, he’d need to butter up the next in line, or his days in politics were numbered.

  The emergency services had done a great job. Within a day, they had reinstated critical services, and life had gone back to near normal. Soldiers filled the streets and kept downtown under wraps. They had to—according to the rumors, the fault line was encrusted with diamonds!

  And so, Tuesday afternoon, Avi made his way to Keren Hayesod Street to figure out which way the political winds were blowing.

  At the door, he heard Gurion’s voice, and he was laughing. Was that a recording? Gurion was gone. Had he survived, he would have nothing to laugh about either. But when Avi stepped inside, sure enough, there he was—Isaac Gurion in the flesh, alive and well—if a bit scratched up—and chuckling.

  “Isaac—you’re alive!”

  Gurion glanced at him but continued cutting a newspaper with a pair of scissors.

  “Were you resurrected?”

  Gurion glared at him. “Don’t be ridiculous. I’m not one of them. Oh, no.” He hummed to himself as he cut along the edges.

  Avi looked to the others in the room. A group of aides and Upward members of Knesset stood to the side and watched their leader from a safe distance, fear in their eyes. Avi wasn’t the only one to have noticed the change.

  He drew near. Gurion cut around the frame of a photo in the newspaper, a photo of Moshe Karlin. The headline read, “PM Karlin: Israeli Sovereignty Unshakable.”

  “Are you OK?”

  “Never been better.” Gurion cackled. Discarding the newspaper, he kissed the photo of Moshe and pinned the cutting to the corkboard on the wall. He stepped back to consider his handiwork.

  “Long live the king,” he muttered, and he giggled again.

  That’s it. Gurion had escaped the earthquake with his life but lost his mind. But his sudden adulation for Moshe Karlin gave Avi hope.

  “Is this the new plan?”

  “What?”

  “Is there a new plan to defeat Karlin?”

  Or, Avi thought, will we join him at last? He must have said something hilarious because Gurion crumpled into a fit of teary laughter. Avi looked at the bystanders, who were not laughing, but cringing.

  Gurion recovered and stared at Avi as though seeing something beautiful for the first time. “We’re not going to defeat Karlin,” he said, his old venom returning.

  Then his arm was a blur and with a loud snap, the scissors lodged into the corkboard, the blades planted smack in the middle of Moshe’s face. “Oh, no. We’re going to kill him.”

  Chapter 56

  “You should have told me,” Eli said. He sat beside the hospital gurney. Noga lay beneath the sheets, unmoving, her breathing shallow.

  Dr. Stern stood beside him. “You were in a bad state and needed rest. Besides, we could have lost her any moment. I feared that you’d despair and slip away. I couldn’t risk losing you again.”

  Eli stroked Noga’s hair. For the hundredth time, he called her name.

  Irreparable. This couldn’t be the end. They had set her plan in motion. Soon the entire country would know the truth about the Lost Tribes. They were so close to their goal. Noga had to be there to see it.

  “I’ll do it,” he said. “Whatever you need to heal her.”

  “We must move quickly; her vitals are falling. The go
od news is that we don’t have to manipulate her DNA. That would require equipment far more advanced than I’ve cobbled together here. But this treatment is obviously very experimental. Normally we would perform lengthy testing and clinical trials.”

  “But that could take months,” Eli said.

  The doctor nodded. “More like years. I think I’ve identified the epigenetic activators associated with your healing abilities, as well as the aging inhibitors. But to generate those in the lab will take more time and equipment. Our only option is to harvest the activators from you directly.”

  Harvest. That sounded painful. “Whatever you need. And you can skip the theory. Just tell me what to do.”

  “We need your blood.”

  “My blood?” At the mention of the b-word, Eli felt lightheaded.

  “We’re in luck. You’re Type O Negative, the universal donor.”

  Eli swallowed hard and held out his arm. “How much do we need?”

  Dr. Stern gave him an apologetic frown. “A lot. A transfusion is the only option. Bring in the gurney.”

  Eli nodded. He rushed through the tent flaps, wheeled in the metal bed, and positioned it alongside Noga, while the doctor arranged the blood equipment. At the sight of the needles, Eli’s head spun so he climbed onto the gurney and lay down. He turned his head away and stared at Noga.

  Once upon a time, people had thought that bloodletting was healthy. Eli had never bought into that. “Ouch,” he said, as the needle punctured his skin.

  “Sorry about that,” the doctor said. “The nurses do the blood work at the hospital.”

  “Yeah, I can tell.”

  The tube warmed against his skin as his lifeblood flowed. A metallic taste filled his mouth, and a white frost accumulated at the edges of his vision.

  Think of something else, something good.

  When this was over, he’d take Noga out for a juicy steak dinner. They’d clink their wine glasses together and watch their website traffic climb.

  An electronic alarm sounded from the ECG. The beep of Noga’s heart had slowed and the numbers on the display shifted.

  Dr. Stern walked over and disabled the alarm.

  “What’s happening?”

  “She’s losing blood pressure. Her systems are failing.”

  “Then do something!”

  “I am!”

  Eli’s chest shook as fear ripped through him. Noga lay right beside him, her life seeping away, and he was powerless to save her. He reached out and held her hand in his. This can’t be happening. You can’t let this happen, God! Noga had reignited his will to live; she had renewed his faith in humanity. Without her, he might as well give up.

  “There,” the doctor said, his voice soft and far away. “She’s connected. Now we wait.”

  Tears dripped from Eli’s eyes onto the metal gurney, and the world frosted over.

  Chapter 57

  Numbness spread over Moshe’s body as the stranger delivered the news. The scientist’s lips moved but Moshe no longer understood the jargon. The tidings had frozen his brain. This was the end of the road. And not just for Moshe. For everyone. Humanity’s plans and schemes, hopes and dreams—everything anyone had ever done—all amounted to nothing. This was, literally, the end of the world.

  Moshe held up his hand to interrupt. “Let’s start over,” he said. “Where did you get that?”

  He pointed to the image on Professor Stein’s tablet computer: a blurry white speck on a backdrop of inky black.

  “The Hubble Space Telescope,” he said. “NASA forwarded us the images an hour ago.” The professor, a slight man with tidy gray hair and lined cheeks, headed the Israeli Space Agency, a division of the Ministry of Science and Technology.

  “And we’re looking at an asteroid?”

  “Correct. That’s a large body of rock. This asteroid, PK-7, originated in the Asteroid Belt between Mars and Jupiter.” He talked slower than before and used simpler words.

  “And this asteroid is heading for earth?”

  “Yes.”

  “Are you sure of that?”

  “PK-7 will hit Jerusalem tomorrow at twelve oh-three PM.”

  Moshe couldn’t argue with that level of specificity. During a nighttime hike in the desert hills outside Eilat, he had admired the shooting stars. Meteor—and asteroid—showers happened all the time, didn’t they?

  “Has this sort of thing happened before?”

  “An asteroid of this magnitude? A bunch of times.”

  Moshe relaxed his death grip on the armrest of his chair. This had happened before. How bad could it be?

  Professor Stein continued. “The last one hit sixty-five million years ago and wiped out the dinosaurs.”

  “Oh.” That sounded less positive. “And what can we expect from this PK-7?”

  “The main impact will obliterate everything within a twenty-mile radius and leave a deep crater.”

  “I see.” Israel would lose her capital along with her important religious and archaeological sites. The loss would injure tourism revenues, but the country would survive. Jerusalemites could evacuate the city within a day. But the professor wasn’t done.

  “Of course, the region lies near a major fault line, so the impact event will trigger severe earthquakes across Israel.”

  “Worse than Sunday’s earthquake?”

  “Far worse.”

  Moshe felt the blood drain from his face. He’d have to beg the foreign troops to return. Major population centers would need to evacuate, perhaps across the border.

  “Shmuel, get the ambassadors of the USA and Russia on the phones. We need to resolve that diplomatic crisis and beg them to allow flights to leave the country and save as many people as possible!”

  “Sorry, sir,” Professor Stein said. “But I wouldn’t bother.” The professor was a real downer. Moshe would not be inviting him to official cocktail parties. “The aftermath of the asteroid strike will be much worse than the initial damage. The impact will eject large amounts of dust and ash into the atmosphere. This dust cloud will spread over the planet, blotting out the sun. Photosynthesis will cease. Within weeks ninety-nine percent of life on Earth will perish.”

  A short, incredulous laugh escaped Moshe’s lips. “But humanity will survive, right? We have technology and science…”

  Professor Stein shook his head. “Even the deepest nuclear-powered bunkers will eventually run out of supplies. We’re talking total annihilation. They call it Planet Killer Seven for a reason.”

  Moshe stared at the faces of the cabinet members around the conference table, the last cabinet of the State of Israel.

  “How did we not know about this earlier?”

  The professor cleared his throat. “The asteroid was in a secure orbit and not on any astronomical watch lists. It appears that the unusual solar flare a few months ago tugged the asteroid just enough to send it our way. Until today, Mars had blocked the asteroid’s trajectory from Earth’s line of sight.”

  Silence reigned in the room. Scientists had attributed the Resurrection to the effects of an unusual solar flare. The solar flare had given, now it was taking away.

  “On the bright side,” Professor Stein said, and all eyes clung to him for a shred of optimism, “CO2 levels will decrease markedly after a few hundred years, and the planet will cool. Climate change will no longer be an issue.”

  The assembled ministers gaped at him. If humanity was extinct, nobody would be left to worry about climate change.

  Moshe’s father’s voice whispered in his ears. A Karlin never quits. A final spark of resistance flared within.

  Moshe slammed his fist on the desk. “Then we have to prevent it. At all costs. We’ll shoot it down or land astronauts on the surface and nuke it to pieces.”

  Professor Stein coughed. “Hollywood physics do not apply. All the nukes in the world would be unlikely to change the outcome.”

  “There’s no hope of escape?”

  The professor frowned. “Bomb shelters will
crumble. Tidal waves and fires will follow. The few to survive the impact will die of hunger and disease.”

  “So, this is the end—there’s nothing we can do about it?”

  “That sums it up pretty well.”

  “Thank you, Professor.”

  “You’re welcome.” He reached out and shook Moshe’s hand. “It’s been a pleasure to meet you, Mr. Prime Minister. Our team at the Space Agency wanted you to know that we’re very proud and think you could have really fixed the country. Best of luck to you all.”

  The professor left the conference room.

  The cabinet members pondered the situation in stunned silence. Failed coalitions and corruption charges—even earthquakes and imminent world wars—no longer seemed important. Nothing mattered. Tomorrow, they were all going to die.

  “Has the news hit the press yet?” Moshe said.

  “That’s the strange thing,” Sivan said. “Nobody’s mentioned it. Not in Israel, not the international media either.”

  “Then I suppose we’ll need to tell the nation ourselves.”

  “Bad idea,” Shmuel said. “People will panic. Our last minutes will be pandemonium.”

  “He’s right,” Sivan said and wiped a tear from her face. She had agreed with Shmuel; the world really was ending. “It’s too late to do anything, and nothing we do will make a difference.”

  Moshe got to his feet, and the world shifted and swirled around him. He was a rudderless ship on a choppy ocean in the dead of night. He’d faced the fearsome waves before, but this time no safe shore beckoned on the horizon.

  “We owe our citizens the truth,” he said. “The news will leak soon enough; at least they’ll hear it from the government first. I’ll prepare a final statement.”

  He took one last look at his cabinet, his loyal supporters through the highs and lows of the last stormy months of human history. They looked to him for guidance and inspiration, but what hope could he offer? This time they would all go down with the ship.

  “Thank you,” he said. “For your service and your friendship.”

  Chapter 58