"And God said, Let there be light: and there was light. It burned."
Neon Genesis 1:3 (Unified Standard Edition)
- - -
Qassim and Ali were helping shoulder a long bier atop which sat a heavy coffin as they slowly wound, for the sixth time, around the Kaaba in Makkah al-Mukarramah.
It was 95 degrees in the desert heat of Mecca past 2AM in the morning and they felt nothing thanks to the drugs.
They were eight in number, splitting nearly 600 pounds between them, and had been chosen for their sacred mission due to their strength and zeal.
But the drugs helped.
They each had been given a cocktail of modafinil and performance enhancers so they could complete their mission without submitting to fatigue given the grueling trek from Mina.
Qassim was the leader of their group, and had been given the arming code for the Soviet SS-25 Topol nuclear warhead hidden in the fake coffin they had carried six times around the black cube of the Kaaba, moving closer and closer in a careful spiral to avoid suspicion until the last possible moment.
He was on the left, most innermost side towards the front of the bier, and thus his actions were obscured from the throng of hundred of thousands of worshippers within the Great Mosque. His left hand dropped into the folds of his robes, fingering the trigger of a simple radio instead of the sub-compact machine gun strapped to his side.
Weapons were absolutely forbidden in the Holy City, and so he smiled to himself, knowing that once again, as it was during the Siege in 1979, that the Saudi government would be unprepared, unable, and perhaps simply unwilling to stop them.
They would assume, until it was too late, that it was simply another terrorist takeover by one of the many radicalized sects that were carrying on Al-Otaybi's objectives of ending western influence on the Faithful.
But the State of God's Mercy on Man were not followers of Al-Otaybi, Wahhabism, Al-Queda, bin Laden, or any other known interpretation of the Islamic faith.
No, they were something new.
Something beautiful, something reborn, he thought.
Because they knew the truth now: that they had been misled for years, for millennia!
The Great Messenger of God who had appeared in front of the worlds' leaders in New York had left no doubt in he and his brethren's minds: the Christians had inherited a mantle of God's favor and then subsequently lost it.
Logically, that meant that the Christians had been right to venerate Jesus as the Son of God. This was a hitherto blasphemous belief in total contradiction to the teachings of their own former Prophet, whose writings regarded him as merely a great teacher or fellow prophet.
But the Angel had Spoken with its fiery Sword and the entire world had felt the collective loss of their souls.
They were nothing now. Animals. Dust.
Life had no meaning.
They would pass from this world to nothingness.
And they deserved it - for their sins.
But was there not a path to redemption?
Yes. There must be.
They must tear down the old ways. They must root out the false idols and fake religions root and stem. They must purify the world for God's Messenger who would return one year from now.
This was the path. The glorious, shining path.
Qassim had no soul. Nor his brother.
But what of the future children of Earth?
His newly born beliefs centered around the idea that God was not capricious and cruel - not evil - simply disgusted by the state of humanity.
And thus would surely bless future generations with their souls once again.
At least so long as the world was redeemed from its sins first.
He would gladly march himself and his brothers into oblivion to accomplish that.
For that one fleeting idea, the thing they dared in the deepest recesses of their hearts to hold onto.
For hope.
That's what their new leader, Malachi, has brought them in the days after the death of the American president and the End of Souls. Hope. Maybe not for them, but for their children and their children's children.
The man, now their beloved leader, who was once a devout imam now channeled the will of God to His true followers.
He had answers.
From the dregs of the edge of society he had united tens of thousands - maybe hundreds of thousands - of the New Faithful and brought into existence a new nation, conceived in liberty from the Old Ways and Pillars, dedicated to the proposition that through devout service to God in this generation they could redeem the generations to come.
This new nation, this new State, existed in their minds and hearts and transcended petty things like borders and race.
They were God's Mercy.
Their creed was to bring miracles to life - to bless the cursed existence they now all lived before the penultimate end.
And Qassim believed.
He believed!
In God, in his Son, in Angels! And miracles!
Of course, having seen the Angel of New York, and having felt the presence of God, Qassim knew - absolutely knew - that miracles were real, and thus, by the grace of God, he and his brethren had been unsurprised to be delivered the greatest gift in their short history in the form of a tactical nuclear warhead - stripped from its intercontinental missile and lovingly reduced in size to something manageable by a half dozen men.
Yes, he and his fellow believers were already dying from radiation poisoning, having shepherded the deadly machine for the last week, eating next to it, sleeping with it in their tents, but what did it matter?
They, in the name of God, would remove the False Idol - the Black Stone - from the face of the Earth.
It would be vaporized in the cleansing fires of their new Lord. This way at least one Great Idol and Offense to the Most High would be dealt with before the Messenger returned.
And they were close enough now to the black curtains of the Kaaba for the Great Work to begin.
He clicked the radio's intercom three times in rapid succession.
A moment passed, and then an explosion rocked a distant tower of the Great Mosque within which they circled. Fire and debris rose skywards even as the crowd screamed in horror and confusion.
Men and women flowed around the zealots and their coffin as a stampede started.
Ali, at his side, said simply, "God is great."
Qassim nodded and they watched the crowd continue to increase in speed and mass, undulating in waves of pressure that began crushing and tearing at people fallen underfoot. A second explosion lit up the night, washing them with heat, even from the distant, surrounding walls, and the pressure redoubled around them before disappearing all at once.
They were close enough to the great black cube that they weren't crushed by the crowd itself, who parted around the Kaaba like streams of water. The placement of the C4 had been careful and precise - designed to ignite directly across the plaza from the men carrying the coffin to herd the pilgrims of the haaj past well past them and leave their own side of the great field empty.
And indeed, the entire crowd was pressed against the opposite side of the mosque, desperate to escape the fire, smoke, and debris littering the abandoned side.
Qassim and his brother Ali were actually survivors of the terrible stampede of the early 2000's. He knew what it was like to be in a crowd of resistant flesh as it crushed bones and asphyxiated without remorse. For a moment his stomach turned at the memory of the naked thousands who had died around him on that terrible bridge, their clothes ripped to shreds, the bodies bursting like sausages as the pressure of their panicking fellows squeezed the unlucky like corks in wine bottles.
But he was caught up in a great purpose this day and so was able to put his old terror aside; he spun, bringing his brethren with him as they quickly dashed through the curtain and into the Most Holy of places, dropping the coffin and bier to the floor in the lowly lit curtained cube.
They were met by the confused shouts of the guardians and holy men within. Qassim's brethren rebuked them with sweeps of gunfire from their hidden submachine guns, punching holes through men and curtains alike, letting streams of dusty brightness from the distant floodlights pierce the chamber in laser-like lines, playing across the coffin from the outside as the curtains shook.
"Open it!" he yelled and his men hastened to comply.
Qassim reached into his pocket and pulled out a red plastic card written in bold Cyrillic lettering. Cracking it half he took out a piece of plastic-like paper with a shaking hand. He motioned for the others to go, showing the numbers to his brother Ali.
He carefully entered each of the symbols, and then turned the red dial and key, already inserted, clockwise once, then counter clockwise in full.
The timer began blinking at 1 minute, and then ticked downwards.
"Begin, brother," he commanded, and Ali nodded, flicking the portable satellite uplink he had smuggled into the coffin next to the bomb to end all bombs.
The nascent social media page of the terrorist group began its own livestream, completely unaware of what had occurred halfway across the world in Virginia earlier.
"Brothers and sisters!" Qassim cried to the camera without preamble, "God has shown us the errors of our ways. The Prophet was False! This, the reputed Holiest of Places, a palace of lies built to make rich kings richer, and defile the true teachings!"
"Know that we, the State of God's Mercy on Man, cleanse this place -" and at this the camera panned down to the nuclear weapons control panel showing the countdown timer, "Not to appease our vengeful Lord, no, we know he has forsaken us! But to remove a taint that will prevent his love from redeeming our children!"
He thought himself eloquent, but the speech had been written for him.
Qassim raised his voice and lifted his head and arms above him, shouting:
"In the name of God and His Son, the one true Prophet, in the name of Jesus the Christ!"
"God is Great!" he heard from his brethren outside, joined in one voice.
Qassim watched with a gratified smile as the digital LED timer hit 00:00:00.
Within the heavy machinery an array of shaped explosive charges imploded a hollow sphere of Uranium-238, eating away in a microsecond the space that a spherical vacuum had once held, a sheath of beryllium reflecting rapidly multiplying neutrons towards the core of the warhead.
First, an atomic explosion of Uranium on par with the Hiroshima bomb came to life, exponentially multiplying its destructive power and folding it inwards.
Then, another microsecond later, the Plutonium core was breached by the cocoon of the atomic explosion shaped in origami perfection to crush it further into itself: in the time it took a sunbeam to travel a finger's width the neutrons focused together like a quintillion fiery lenses and a nuclear explosion erupted from the fist-sized chunk of radioactive metal.
Each atom of plutonium was energized and crushed into its neighbor until at last they fused together, releasing the same godly power than fueled the sun.
Fusion.
A mere meter away the uncountable number of molecules that made up the person named "Qassim" simply disassembled as their atomic bonds were ripped apart by the tide of expanding energy.
The Black Stone was vaporized next, followed by the Kaaba, the rest of the terrorists guarding the perimeter, the people fleeing from the previous explosions, and then the greater part of the city itself.
A sphere of nothingness ate into the bedrock of the desert followed by a great light, brighter than the sun, followed by a fireball that sprayed the carbonized molecules of more distant victims onto the baked stone around the city, instantly turning them from flesh into permanent shadows.
Everything from the Kaaba to the Second Ring Road was simply vaporized, while the blast grew outwards supersonically until it reached the Iran Sector near Mina, breathing back inwards as the buildings simply fell one way or another, the oxygen consumed all at once by the enormous fireball rising over the holy city.
More than 700,000 men, women, and children ceased to exist in the few seconds that had passed.
Hundreds of thousands more would die in the coming minutes. A million more would be injured and sickened.
Then the mushroom cloud rose to block the risen moon and total darkness fell across the desert amidst the wails of a million souls crying out in terror.
And in that darkness, hovering in midair over a hemispherical pit carved atom by atom by the 1-megaton nuclear bomb, was a green, shining jewel.