Apocalypse Vs. Armageddon: A Short Story

“Do you believe in the apocalypse?” I asked her, after I saw her room, stacked full of provisions. I wondered at the inflatable mask I saw hidden under her bed.

“I don’t think it’s a matter of belief,” she said, “You can believe or not believe, but the apocalypse is going to happen. It’s possible to not believe in Armageddon, however.”

“What is that?”

“It’s the religious version of the world ending, the final judgment and all that.”

My friend sighed, smiled ruefully, and pushed the gas mask back under her bed.

“You never know when they might arrive,” she told me. “The apocalypse is coming, no question. We’ll all be on their side soon enough. It’s Armageddon you can’t be sure of.”

I felt awed by her sense of knowledge  and expertise on the subject. I myself had never given much thought to the world ending, except to hope that it would be sometime in the far future, removed from my own lifespan.

I felt so ignorant. All I had in my room were a few extra bottles of water in case of an earthquake. Actually, they were just in case I got thirsty, but they could always be used in emergency situations. My friend had books piled floor to ceiling: Defining the “Other”: Anthropological Studies, The Earth is Just a Big Rock, Time is an Illusion—you get the idea. I wondered about where she, I, anyone, fit in to all of this.

~~~

I had seen their numbers growing over the past few weeks, increasing day by day. It started out with one prototype, unmarked, unremarkable. By the evening he had marked at least five among us. I saw them congregating, finding strength in numbers, the dark red gleam on their brow setting them apart from the rest of us. I saw a hunger swelling in their eyes, as if they saw a future that I could not imagine, and longed only to grasp it.

My friend refused to leave her room, delving in to the food she had stockpiled over the preceding weeks. She left the house only to attend classes, and then she would sneak out before the sun rose, hiding in a tree while the sky grew pink. When it was safe, she snuck down from the tree and made a dash for the building. She was only safe inside.

I started to wonder if I should feel threatened. The red gleams were faintly menacing, but none of them had bothered me so far. I wondered if we were being shunted to the edges of society, those of us who were lacking a red gleam. I remembered one of the books on my friends’ shelf, and a conversation we had had one time about cannibalistic societies being misunderstood by our Western mindset. We tend to marginalize those that are unlike us, assuming their motives to be base. I wondered if this is what I was doing to the red gleams, by being faintly amused instead of accepting them as a threat. Then an even more horrible thought occurred.

“Have we become the ‘Other’?” I asked her with concern.

“No, no. We are the ones who developed this other idea --Armageddon. It’s from the Judeo Christian tradition. The final judgment. That’s different. That means the end of the world, the earth as we conceive it.  The apocalypse is just the end of the physical planet.”

That was what she said, speaking mildly and casually about the end that was sure to come. 

A few days later, my friend was taken. She tied a red band across her brow, and became like them—a bloodthirsty hunter, intent only on its next kill. I never believed in zombies until I started seeing them all around me. But I had not elected to be one of the Chosen, and so I was shut out of the apocalypse