The Prophecy (Watty Awards 2013)

Prologue & Chapter 1

Prologue

The Spirit of the Lord will be poured out on His people.

“And it shall come to pass in the last days, says God, That I will pour out of My Spirit on all flesh; Your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, Your young men shall see visions, Your old men shall dream dreams. And on my menservants and on my maidservants, I will pour out My Spirit in those days; and they shall prophesy. I will show wonders in heaven above, and signs in the earth beneath: Blood and fire and vapor of smoke. The sun shall be turned into darkness, and the moon into blood, before the coming of the great and awesome day of the LORD. And it shall come to pass – That whoever calls on the name of the LORD shall be saved.”

Acts 2:17-21 (Joel)

I

Lozada was a changed man now his wife Nancy had passed away due to a rare case of malaria; they had visited South Africa for their first anniversary, although the couple were scared of even venturing out of the city. He had always blamed himself and took it hard when she finally lost out. He had constantly been shy and he was actually fortunate his colleague was sick that day as he had been sent to meet the new boss, who had, funnily-enough, been his future wife. But since the disaster things had to change. Ironically, it had been a “cure” for malaria, among other things, that had caused this catastrophic event. He had always questioned the satirical idea that a “cure” would destroy everything he had once cherished. Suddenly the people that had surrounded him were suffering. He had all kinds of questions in his head that very first day of reckoning, such as why me? Slowly the realization that his life had been replaced by a constant, impairing melancholy feeling, and that his sweet and desirable flat shared with his overwhelmed wife had gradually twisted into a baron wasteland, shared with alcoholic psychopaths.

He lived underground; sharing the drink of loneliness with moronic imbeciles, but his heart never belonged there, for he had aspirations in life, but he had no life now. He was always running, scavenging, always frightened and alone, but the thing that really ate away at his soul since the disaster was the on-going war between the two main organizations. The “Rodents”, as they were nicknamed, were all that Lozada had come to know. They were distinctively recognisable with beige-grey coloured survival gear and water-extractors able to drain any seeps of water in the earth. They had once been able to arise out into the unknown upon the surface, but “The Collective” had now found their command centre and any surface-scavengers would be slaughtered instantaneously. But if they managed to escape that then, for sure, the incessant, relentless sandstorm would sweep them up and devour them like a viper engulfing their prey. The Rodents had one thing in common: they were all lost children in the anarchic world. But they had polar opposite ideas of the corrupt Collective; an insane collection of extremists all intent on doing one thing: exterminating the Rodents from the wasteland and finally becoming the pure Aryan race above the equator of juxtaposition.