SEAHORN EPUBLISHING HALLOWEEN EDITION
2015
THE CLOUD Manuel MaGilicutty always got the luxury seat in first class by the window. He had insisted on it. The newspaper that he had just got hired on, ”The Washington Post”, spared no expense for the man who was spearheading their ”New Media “ section of the online version of the paper. He had been assigned coverage of the end of in the U.S., as it was going on Spokane, Washington. Having lived all his life on the East coast, Manuel had been reluctant to take the job. But having just graduated from Washington University in St. Louis, Mo, the position presented itself. Plus, Manuel, who was African American, Cuban , and Irish , wanted to get out of the St. Louis after the riots last year and this year. He felt that because of his multi ethnicity, was a target. Manuel didn’t need to get into it with any racist fool, black or white, in St. Louis. So it was that he was nearing the Washington State border, 75, 000 feet above earth. He saw the mountains as they appeared under the cloud cover. He very seldom looked up while looking out of a window of a plane in flight. This time, he did. As the plane was preparing for descent at the Spokane airport, Manuel, as well as other passengers, saw what he saw. Ahead of the plane appeared what seemed to be a wall of clouds. That thought, which tumbled under his breathe, was so bizarre in and of itself. But what was really amazing to Manuel was that the wall of clouds seemed perfect: not like a series of clouds conjoined. It looked like a solid wall of white. Manuel strained his head. He could not see the top of the cloud. “If you look to your left, folks, we seem to have what we call in piloting a plane, “an Ariel phenomena,” said the Captain over the plane’s loudspeaker. “Ariel phenomena, my ass” Manuel said under his breath as he scrambled to get his digital camera out. Manuel managed to get a lot of the cloud on video. The weirdest thing was, the wall of clouds (or wall of one cloud, Nathaniel thought) went on for miles. The plane descended, with the horizon of the cloud and the horizontal going on for what seemed like miles in the sky.
Nathaniel exited the plane, and took shuttle to the hotel in which he could stay until he was able to locate an apartment. Manuel, Nathaniel, once settled in a booth in the cafeteria of the hotel, spent an hour searching for info related to the cloud siting. There were Facebook entries and YouTube videos. There were post and articles on Yahoo, AOL and a lot of other online news outlets. After two hours of this, Nathaniel decided to go to the downtown area of Spokane to grab something to eat, as the cafeteria food at the hotel was just that: cafeteria food. He returned to the hotel and sat in one of the cafeteria booths again. It was 3:00 in the afternoon. Still intrigued by what he and apparently a lot of folks around the country saw. He was amazed that the cloud sightings stretched as far north as Canada, and as far south as Mexico. By 4:30 Spokane time, posts on his Facebook page started talking about drones being sent out to further investigate this cloud. The loud had to have been almost a thousand miles wide to be seen by half a continent from north of south. But it was pictures transmitted by the drones that were something that made Nathaniel literally sit up straight and away from the laptop. He felt like he had been physically hit in the chest. Manuel sat back down, and started to read and scroll. The giant cloud was in the shape of a huge cross. But what the close-ups showed of the cross was something out of a science fiction movie. Thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of angels, arms stretched out as well as wings, formed the cloud. Each individual was clothed in white flowing gowns, which glowed a bright yellow white rhythmic flow, as of floodlights were being played upon. Each of the angels stood with arms and wings outstretched. And each of these angels, in all the pics and videos pulled from the net, consisted of every nationality on the face of the earth. It was 5: 30 in the evening, then. Manuel went downstairs to where the wide screen television was. The room of the hotel was filled with people who worked and were stay ng at the hotel. Some of them were whispering and pointing to the screen. Others were praying and weeping.
Still others looked at the screen, arms crossed in defiance of what their own eyes (via the widescreen) was showing them. Nathaniel then went back to the booth. He had to get backstory on this cloud, this seemingly religious event that would mark the most, and obvious, proof that the religion in the world had gotten it right all along. Post after post, column after column, wrote of the “end times” and that this was surely the sign of the coming rapture. Manuel was catholic by birth and religion, but even HE did not believe in things like the rare” commonly depicted in his own Bible as well as media. But here it was, Manuel thought, proof that there is a God. Or a very, very clever company of special effects cats that had simply out done itself. Manuel stayed in the booth until 6: 30. He was still glued to the computer screen when he felt, rather than heard, the rumble of the floor” Holy Shit!” yelled Manuel, grabbing his laptop protectively as he quickly sat up and exited the booth. But it wasn’t an earthquake. The floor was rumbling. The cross disappeared. Then, the roar in the air overwhelmed everyone in the crowd. The sky tuned red, then black. The sky was devoid of stars. And from out of this blackness, a red hand appeared, just as huge as the cross in the sky. The hand (or more like a claw) was tipped with huge yellowed nails, the size of mountains. The hand reached down toward Manuel and the crowd. It was 7:30 p.m. Then everything went black.