So endeth the Philistines.
On August 15, a Category 4 hurricane hit the Gulf Coast, flooding the lowlands from Galveston to New Orleans. Sea water surged over parking lots and marshes, pushing inland to historic markers. Twenty-two inches of rain fell in sheets so solid it appeared to Alice Holstead in Port Aransas that God had turned on a firehose and was trying to wash all sinners from the Earth. So much rain fell that the city of New Orleans actually sank two inches. Not to be outdone, a Category 5 hurricane hit Florida and the Carolinas two days later, with sustained winds over one hundred and fifty miles per hour. Dave Mertle’s tractor ended up in Phil Oxley’s barn thirteen miles away, perfectly placed with wheels down on the dirt floor behind locked doors, like a Christmas miracle, until you looked up and saw the tractor-shaped hole in the roof. Turn around, don’t drown was becoming the unofficial motto of the Southern states.
No one argued the power of wind anymore.
On August 16, in Indiana, all the clouds were said to look like birds. Reports came in later that night from Bailey Island, Maine, that every lobster caught that day was blue. These were one in a million odds, the experts said. Implausible but not impossible. What more evidence do you need, countered the faithful, that God is among us, making plans?
Whatever the answer, disaster preparedness was becoming a billion-dollar business. Sales of home generators and bilge pumps skyrocketed. New guns were sold by the ton. Across the Central Plain states, millions of holes were dug, pockmarking the landscape, the latest in storm cellar design deployed. Some argued we should return to the era of the dugout, cutting homes into hillsides to make use of the natural temperature regulation of packed earth. Wired magazine ran a cover story on The New Troglodytes, documenting the return to cave living—mostly by technology entrepreneurs and forward （backward?） thinking urbanites. STAY COOL UNDERGROUND! ran the ads in magazines like Outdoor World. The planet is heating up, went the argument, aboveground. Why not dig yourself a hole and cool off?
Outside Pittsburgh, residents reported seeing phantoms at sunset. Smoky figures hovering on the horizon with spectral arms and hooded eyes. They seemed to dance and spin in the final rays of sunlight. Experts blamed exhaust smoke from nearby smelting plants, but their fires had been burning for decades, and no phantoms had ever emerged before.
Somewhere, deep in the electrons of Facebook, a storm was brewing. Posts became memes, became movements. Chat rooms and timeline posts filled with speculation. Follow the clues, we were told. Everything connects. The God King had been stabbed in the back, and now his enemies’ children were killing themselves. All those empathetic liberals lost in grief, LOL. How naive to think this was a coincidence. It was a plague, of course, like those that struck Egypt in Pharaoh times. We were returning to the wrath of the Old Testament.
Pundits pointed out that the dead belonged to both parties, but the faithful knew the truth. Anyone who lost a child was a traitor, no matter what allegiance they claimed. No matter how loyal they had been in the past. The death itself was the proof.
We are counting down, went the meme. It showed the image of a clock where all the numbers were fives, taken from a cartoon where a woman at a kitchen table said, I never drink before five. What did it mean? Five what? Five days? Five deaths? By this point the suicide count had reached 210,000.
In Los Angeles, people called 911 claiming to smell smoke and hear the roar of approaching flames, but no fires were burning. Was it prophecy or old trauma? In Nebraska, residents claimed to hear the voices of children calling up from old wells, but when divers descended on ropes, no children were found.
On August 19, millions of Americans woke to the sound of an Amber Alert on their phones. They reached for their devices, groggy, studying the blue glow. They saw the familiar triangle, telling them a child was missing, but instead of a name, the text read your son, your daughter, your nephew, your niece, and the description of the suspect’s vehicle simply read pray for their souls.
Terrified, people took to the streets. Stabbings increased, clashes between police and protesters, but the assemblies had become confusing. Often the protesters’ signs were blank. When journalists pointed this out, men and women with angry eyes seemed puzzled. They studied the clear white space where their outrage had once been written. Had they forgotten to pen their grievances, or had the scope of their outrage exceeded the space available? Around the country, men in Hawaiian shirts started showing up at rallies with more guns than they could carry, patriots strapped with six, seven, eight pistols, a stack of rifles weighing down their arms or slung over their backs, like a burden they’d been forced to carry as penance. As if they could solve the world’s problems if they could just get the number of guns right, like revolution was some kind of riddle.