Free More Bedtime Stories for the Apocalypse by Joel Arnold Page B

the bell tower’s spiral steps and strode into the
middle of his congregation. Amund followed.
    Blom glanced around at his people, those
he’d known for so long, those he’d baptized and confirmed and
counseled. He cleared his throat. “Let us sing,” he said. “ A
Mighty Fortress is our God .”
    They sung.
    “ A mighty fortress is our
God,
    A Bulwark never failing…”
    Amund joined in.
    “ And through this world,
with devils filled,
    should threaten to undo us…”
    They sang it loudly, boldly, defiantly.
    “ The Prince of Darkness
grim,
    we tremble not for him…”
    As the hymn ended, all was silent.
    Until…
    Until softly at first, they heard the
ringing of a coffin bell outside. It grew louder and was soon
joined by the ringing of another. And another.
    The sound of thunder grew louder.
    The congregation didn’t move from their spot
inside the church, even as the foundation of the building
shook.
    They listened. Again, they started to sing.
This time Rock of Ages .
    Because…
    Because there was nothing else to do.
Nothing else to say.
    From one cemetery to the next, from town to
town, across the farmland and prairie, across river and forest and
marshland, the coffin bells – all of them – began to
ring.
     
     
    * * * * *
     
    * * * * *
     
     
The Soft Caress
of Falling Bombs
     
     
    The child grew in an incubator of deep-sea
pressures, grew to the size of mountains, of deep oceanic gorges,
its skin pasty green, eyes blindly bulging from cavernous sockets.
Now it seeks escape from its watery womb and rises, rises, rearing
its head from the liquid surface.
    The child thrashes at the sudden hit of
newly felt atmosphere. Tidal waves form. Air patterns change. The
seismic wind flips the first wave of fighter jets over, knocking
them into ocean swells the size of which has not been seen in eons.
They smash like thin glass bulbs dropped on cement, not even
registering on the newly risen babe’s senses. The child calms. It
decides it likes the feel of air on its warped doughy face.
    More jets come; tiny mosquitoes. The child
smiles faintly at the pop of broken sound barriers. A bubble forms
and bursts from its toothless maw, the membrane of spittle knocking
out aircraft and aircraft carrier alike, crushing the highly
trained crews and equipment into a mist of blood and metal.
    The babe takes its first tentative steps,
its pod-like limbs disrupting the ocean’s flow. Submarines spin out
of control, their steel skins peeling back like heated popcorn
hulls.
    The babe’s long memory is mostly of the
simple feel of deep ocean pressure, but it remembers Mother, too; a
faint, faint memory deeply stored somewhere in its thick, ropey
membranes of cerebellum. It wonders where she is, not knowing she
died millions of years ago, that her carcass has long since
dissolved, her molecules dissipated throughout the far reaches of
the globe. It only knows she was once there, and now she is
not.
    It wants her, but Mother is all around, in
the water, the earth, the sky. It can smell her, but so can all of
us, although the scent is so long ingrained in our brains that we
have forgotten its origin. But the child smells her. The child
knows the source of the scent.
    It takes another step, destroying ships,
islands, and shorelines hundreds and hundreds of miles away. Long
dead putrefied whales drip from its nasal passages.
    Cruise and Minutemen missiles arrive, some
finding their way to this gargantuan child-thing. They burst on its
skin, punching tiny pinpricks in its vacuous eyes, into its dumb
maw, into its rolling mountainous neck.
    They tickle the babe, and the babe claps
bulbous appendages beneath the surface in amusement. More shoreline
is laid waste with its enthusiasm; coastal cities are
destroyed.
    Nuclear warheads are released from the
U.S.A., France, Russia, Pakistan, all merging on the wonderstruck
babe, exploding in multi-layered mushroom clouds.
    And now – now somewhere deep inside its
ancient brain, it believes