a postapocalyptic fantasy notion

I once read somewhere that there's some bible quote about the meek inheriting the Earth, and also that this is supposed to be wildly taken out of context, as it was originally placed as what comes next after people choose between Heaven and Hell during Armageddon. And I got to thinking... If God's done with the world, why would there still be an Earth for them to inherit?

The obvious answer is that the Earth would hang around so that they would have a place to spend the rest of their miserable existences. But, if God's crossed the whole Earth project off his to-do list, what's to keep the legions of Hell from setting up shop?

That's the core idea of the setting. Armageddon happened, the righteous got yoinked upstairs, the wicked got flumped downstairs, and the lazy ass stupid masses remaining got abandoned from above and invaded from below. With Heaven not caring any more, there was nothing to keep the demons from turning the world of the meek into a playground. Mayhem, slaughter, rape, and other vile antics would be commonplace, and lots of less than voluntary demon-human crossbreeding would result. (Bear in mind that the invaders are extradimensional entities who call Hell their home, so there's not a whole lot of ethics for them to worry about.)

This brings us to the topic of an anti-Christ, which theoretically is supposed to be key to Hell's battle plan in their war against Heaven. However, no such animal showed up during Armageddon (later known as the second war against Heaven), giving rise to the popular belief among the demons on Earth that when they do get an anti-Christ, it'll be to lead the way for their third war against Heaven (thus all the crossbreeding).

A few centuries go by, and they seem to have run out of humans. So the full-blooded demons (and a rare fraction of the hybrids with the right powers) go back to Hell for whatever's going on there, while the vast majority of the many various and sundry hybrids lack the ability to travel between worlds. So the world's remaining population are all demonic hybrids, and it's a nasty brutal place.

However, the world hasn't been destroyed yet, so there must be at least one of the meek remaining. In the first arc of the story, that survivor is discovered, most likely in cryogenic suspension of some sort. And it's a woman, thus giving the anti-Christ hopefuls a goal.

Her main ally would be a demonic hybrid of a more practical sort, who believes that "third time's the charm" is a bad plan for picking a fight with Heaven. Plus, he's got no cause to believe that he'll be rescued when the Earth eventually gets destroyed, so keeping her alive (and neither pregnant nor running screaming into the night for somebody else to then go kill her) is in his best interests.

And as they say, wackiness shall inevitably ensue...

Blitz -- six month report

Six months ago today, Blitz came to live with my family. It feels like it's been longer; like it's been a couple of years. He's so deeply ingrained himself into the structure of the family, that it's hard to picture what life was like without him here.

I still miss Kathren, of course. I miss how she'd lick my face, how excited she'd get at the sight of a pizza box, how she'd make a fool of herself every time it rained. But Kathren's dead, and Blitz isn't ever going to be able to replace her, really.

I was walking Blitz around the houses overlooking the river last night, and I got to thinking about a comic book story in which a hundred pound sled dog would be a main character...

------------------------------------

Picture a man walking his dog at night through the streets of a small city. The man has a rifle slung over his shoulder (which none of the passersby seem to think is out of the ordinary), and the dog is of course a huge powerful animal (just like my Blitz). There's some calm, mildly introspective narrative captions in the man's "voice", which get interrupted at some pithy moment by an automobile accident in the street in front of him.

A delivery truck plows head-on into the driver's side of an SUV, causing the SUV to be flipped over and spun around. The truck comes to a stop shortly thereafter, but the man is rushing to the SUV, pausing just long enough to tell his dog to "stay" as he drops the leash. The driver's a woman, unconscious, and her door is wrenched shut by the impact. So the man runs around to the opposite side where the passenger (an old man, soon revealed to be the driver's father) is injured but conscious.

The dogwalker tells the old man to cover his face, then uses the butt of his rifle to break in the window, allowing him to pull the old man out of the car. The old man insists that the dogwalker go rescue his daughter as well, and so he crawls back in. The woman's seat belt is stuck, so the dogwalker has to cut through it with a knife that he presumably had on his person somewhere.

But before he can cut the woman free, she wakes up and goes psycho on her rescuer, trying to attack and bite him. He swears, takes the knife, and jams it into her skull, which doesn't stop her but does allow him to hold her back long enough to fumble for his rifle. He pushes the rifle forward, missing her head and pushing the rifle up against the window.

He pulls the trigger, shattering the window, and then abandons the rifle, concentrating on keeping her back from biting him. He then shouts the dog's name, and it comes running across the scene, smashing through the remains of the window and grabbing the woman by the back of her neck, snapping it with the brutal efficiency of a predatory animal.

The man tells his dog to "heel", crawls back out of the overturned SUV, retrieves his rifle, and the narrative captions resume, establishing for the reader that this is a zombie story.

Questions? Comments?