Excited Delirium Book: Chapter 64 (The Great 08 Quake)

By liam

Author’s Note: The following is Chapter 64 of the my online book “Excited Delirium”. Please post comments. Please tell your friends about this story. If you’ve missed a chapter, please click here for Chapter 1 (Prelude) or here for the full index .

The vague and distant tremors felt in Beijing might have been mistaken for a train rushing through town. Or joyous celebrations in a stadium packed to the brim with people watching a football game. Or maybe even a low angry growl of a feril dog that had not been fed, warning passersby to stay away.

These were the trepid and barely noticeable rumblings that would bring forth what would soon be known as the “Great ’08, the Quake that Altered the World”.

The 20^th century has seen more significant natural disasters than any other century. Some even say combined. It’s because of this escalation in nature’s wrath against mankind that many religious leaders and sects claim that we are approaching what they call the “End Days”. To these people, these are the times when God, Shiva, Allah or even Fenrir come to molest and devour everything that we know because we’ve molested and devoured everything that they’ve given us. The term for this belief is ‘eschatology’ and it’s a prevalent and doom-ridden ideology that has accelerated the end of our world out of a sense of carelessness and negligence.

1906: San Francisco earthquake. At least 3,000 dead.

1908: Messina, Italy. More than 100,000 dead.

1909: Epidemic in Chine. 1.5 million dead.

1917: Spanish flu. 30,000,000 dead.

1928: Drought, China. 3,000,000 dead.

1948: Ashgabat earthquake, Russia. 110,000 dead.

1970: Cyclone, Pakistan. 600,000 dead and missing.

1976: Earthquake, Guatemala. 23,000 dead and 250,000 homeless.

1990: Earthquake, Iran. 35,000 dead.

2005: Hurricane, Katrina. 2,000+ dead, $81 billion in property damage.

But what does it mean when the disaster is man-made? Is it an extension of God’s will or living proof of the fundamental question most atheists ask themselves: if God were so smart, why would he create a race of beings that was so cruel and idiotic?

These disasters pale in comparison to what we have done to ourselves.

We started World War I. And II. We allowed Chernobyl to exist in the first place, let alone melt down and boil the Ukraine because we couldn’t turn off a few extra lights. We invented the corporation so that it could ravage and pillage the earth within the boundaries of laws that it’s invented. We created shock doctrine. We built the wall that separates Israel and Palestine, and we stood by and did nothing while it was built. We developed Abu Gharib and Guantánamo prisons and allow secret black op planes that shuttle innocent people to deep caves in East Europe to be tortured by people who have long repressed issues with their parents or school masters.

Some have even suggested that the worst natural disasters experienced in the last few years were a result of man-made technology designed to try to squeeze just a little more oil or gold from the thin crust of material that is our inhabitable earth. Or that we continue to even contemplate wars for oil and spend hundreds of billions of dollars on military incursions when an iota of that money could have been invested in carbon-free technology that would eliminate another problem we created, climate change. Or that Hurricane Katrina was brought on after unlabelled planes generated Tesla waves over the Gulf of Mexico and whipped up a storm so fierce and so merciless that the experiment was considered a great success by an elite few that seek to rule the world. An elite that uses destruction and reconstruction as a mode of maximizing their take from an impoverished government and morally bankrupt people that on September 11, 2001, following a well planned and executed attack on the mightiest country on the planet, had an opportunity to lead the world and turn the other cheek, but instead chose vengeance. And in the process of doing so, unleash the greatest transfer of wealth and power from a once mighty and intelligent population to a small cabal of dark, evil and small people.

A day that should have been considered Day One in the annals of history is a day the sun went down on western civilization.

Cui bono? Who benefits. Indeed.

And so, with no God to blame, the Great ’08 seemed insignificant and imperceptible, but within moments of the first fluttering of the earth, this quake threatened to flip the continent of Asia over, not one boulder at a time, but by great massive plates of buildings, railways, houses and museums. All within a matter of seconds rather than hours.

Those tremors would go unfelt as people gather in the capital city of China for the launch of the 2008 Olympic Games. Spirits were high, the mood was exceptionally optimistic and the inhabitants – permanent or temporary – all oozed a sense of delight and joy at the notion tha the greatest athletes in the world would compete and not fight to kill for the opportunity to say that they are the best in the world at what they do.

As the clock approach the launch of the festivities, these rumblings quickly switched to cruel and ruthless wrenching and grindings.

Entire city blocks were heaved into the air as the Tesla shock waves generated by a small subsidiary of a subsidiary of the OMNINet corporation radiated from their source and grew from minor little ripples into massive and ominous tsunamis of concrete, dirt and city infrastructure.

In our modern times, forecasts of rain and snow can be made, giving people the opportunity to stay indoors or to wear a jacket, but there was no warning people about what was going to happen to the city of Beijing today, despite the information that Kite and his friends tried to share with authorities.

How could they protect themselves from an unannounced deluge of stone and glass, showering from the ancient and modern buildings alike in Beijing?

How do people arm themselves against an undeclared war, one that is fought from the bowels of the earth, grinding against you with the unpredictability that only the angry earth can provide? Defending against a threat that swallows or gobbles humans whole, like grubs at the grinding wheel of a great tilling machine, spinning our thin crust from a well-carved landscape to nothing more than a mound of inhospitable and deadly terrain?

Within moment of the start of the Tesla tremors, Beijing, one of the world’s most densely populated cities, was in ruins.

[Author’s Note: I conceived of this plot component in 2006 and wrote most of these chapters into the story of ‘Excited Delirium’ during the course of 2007. I was stunned like the rest of the world when a tragic earthquake struck the province of Sichuan on May 12, 2008. Please believe me that I do not want to ‘profit’ from the suffering that the hundreds of thousands in this quake experienced. I remind all readers that this is a work of fiction and that my goals are to speak to the symbolic reference that’s used in the numerology along with the viewpoint of one fictional cult concerning the fate of the Chinese. When Tom Clancy wrote “Sum of All Fears”, was he just imagining a scenario that could happen and convert that to a warning to Americans or was he hoping that serious harm would befall the people of Baltimore? I feel quite confident it was the former.]

(Note: “Excited Delirium” is a work of fiction. Any person, place or thing depicted in this work of fiction is also a work of fiction. Any relation of these subjects or characters to real locations, people or things are an unintentional coincidence.)