At least there were some doctors down there now, first aiders anyway. Orwell stood on the top of the gangplank, calling out the names of his team and checking their names off the list as they answered. All twenty accounted for. To his amazement they had been in the ship for less than ten minutes. It had seemed much, much longer. Then, he made his own progress down the brow to the relative safety of the dockside. The men and women from the ship were laid out on the concrete, some sitting up and looking for their rescuers, others laying on the concrete while the first-aiders worked on them. Three were already covered by cloths, for them the rescue had come too late. Orwell looked at the survivors and saw that the blonde woman he had first pulled out of the wrecked radio room was one of those who was able to sit up. She saw him as well, and grabbed his hand. “Thank you. Just, thank you.”
It was all she needed to say. Orwell walked down the quay to where his people were reassembling. Even as he did so, he felt the ground trembling under his feet as more rocks slammed into Manhattan. He stopped suddenly, feeling desperately short of breath, his chest hurt and his left arm was alternately numb and cramping. Then his vision blacked out and he crumpled to the ground.
Central Park, New York
The park was filling up as people from the lower half of Manhattan found refuge from the hail of rocks that were slowly battering the city into submission. The police were trying to shepherd people into the park and then keep order while they were there but both tasks would have been beyond their ability individually. Together, they were impossible. Inside the park, it was the mounted police who were most successful at preventing panic from causing an even greater disaster. From the backs of their horses, they had a viewpoint that allowed them to spot trouble-makers and get to the scene before they got out of hand. One man who’d tried to start a fight had been picked up by two officers, turned upside down and had his head pounded on the ground. “Testing the road surface,” they’d explained to appreciative onlookers.
Officer Sharon Grimble urged her horse forward and used its weight to push into a knot of people gathered around a woman laying on the grass. “Everything all right here?”
“Fine officer, she just fainted.”
“And you are?”
“Her husband, we were in The Sheep Meadow when the rocks started falling. ” The man handed up two driving licenses and Grimble used her Maglite to check them against the people she was speaking to. They checked out, husband and wife.
“Do you need a doctor? I can put a call out but it’s likely to be a long time before anybody comes.”
“It’s fine Officer, We’ll be fine.”
“Officer, its it true the Empire State has been hit?” The voice had a German accent, a tourist? There were such things even with the war on.
“No. All the damage is on the west side of the Island. The last four or five hits went into the Hudson so I think we’ve seen the worst of things here. Just stay calm and everything will be all right.”
She urged her horse forward and moved along the path, watching out for any signs of trouble. Some people faded away into the shadows when they saw her approach but she had neither the time nor the ability to chase after them. Overhead, there was another streak across the sky as a rock hurtled over their heads. A few seconds later, there was the orange glow of a hit on land. It looked like New Jersey was about to get its baptism of fire.
Or was it? The orange streak of the falling rock was immediately answered by two brilliant white streaks form the ground. They screamed overhead, the supersonic bang from their passing causing another wave of panic to start forming in the crowds of refugees. The white flashes ended as quickly as they had formed, vanishing through the portal high over New York.
Plain of Mapheloistamitos, Hell
Azrael knew that the attack was running into its final stages. His work teams were having to bring the great rounded 100-ton rocks in from further away and that meant an ever-increasing delay between the strikes. Soon, he would have to close down this site and evacuate the area. Still, it had been a highly successful attack, almost a hundred rocks had been dumped on the city the other side of the portal. The seventh Bowl of Wrath had been well and truly poured on the humans below. Now, all that was left was to invade them with the Angelic Host and all would be well. Normality would be restored and the divine order of things returned to its rightful place. What, therefore, happened next was the cause of a very brief episode of cognitive dissonance on his part.
The Ares missile was a kludge. Basically it took the airframe and engine of the GMD interceptor and armed it with an EBU-6 warhead. This was simply a larger and more powerful version of the weapon used to close down Belial’s Sky Volcanos Everything non-essential had been stripped out of the system to get the greatest possible payload and that included the guidance system. It was, therefore, good shooting that put both missiles through the portal over Manhattan island.
The fuzing system was also lightweight, a simple timer that had been pre-set to explode the warhead a few seconds after launch. The ground computers had known to a millisecond how long it would take for the missiles to reach the portal. They’d added a few milliseconds on top of that to let the missile get some height above the portal and that had been that. Both EBU-6 warheads had exploded in the same millisecond. It was as near to simultaneous as could be managed.
The explosions shut down the portal instantly. They also devastated the arrays of copper rods that had made the portal system possible. The explosions also tore apart the pre-notched steel coil that surrounded the warhead and turned it into a hail of deadly spinning steel fragments that scythed through the work teams that were still gathered around the portal site. Finally, as the metal fragments tore into him, Azrael realized that Michael had been right, it was extremely unwise to underestimate humans. It was a lesson he would need to remember.
News Studio, KOCO Television, Oklahoma City
“And the latest news is that missiles fired by the New York Defense System have closed the portal. A total of 98 rocks each weighing an estimated 100 tons have landed on Manhattan and New Jersey, inflicting catastrophic damage on the west side of Manhattan Island. Known casualties are already in the thousands and we will be getting more accurate figures as the dead start arriving in Hell. Already questions are being asked, why did it take so long to fire the missiles that ended the attack? What went wrong with the system that kept the portal from being closed until after this catastrophic damage had been suffered? This is Brandon Breyer reporting from the Bronx in stricken New York City.”
“Thank you Brandon. Well, there is no doubt that this is the long-awaited Seventh Bowl of Wrath, supposedly Heaven’s knock-out blow against us. Well, we’re still standing Yahweh. The hero of the attack was Norman Orwell, Curator of the Intrepid Sea-Air-Space museum in New York. After the carrier was hit by one of the rocks, he led an emergency team of museum staff into the wreckage to pull out the survivors from the destroyed ship. Thanks to his efforts, and those of his colleagues of course, nineteen of the twenty two people known to be on board the Intrepid were rescued alive. Sadly, just after completing this daring rescue, Doctor Orwell suffered a heart attack and died from his exertions. We will be broadcasting an interview with him shortly.