43. The Testerbird of Faith (D1-end change)

__ "Test of faith. Test of faith. Test of faith."
__ Doug kept repeating the mantra as he left Maggie alone in the dark behind him. He kept picturing her standing their, the tall black shadows of winter-laden trees surrounding her. No light. Coldness. Silence. But he had to.
__ Doug didn't know exactly what God's plan was, why he chose him, or how he was going to carry out the mission. All he knew was that he would confront the devil.
__ And the devil would gloat over Maggie's corpse. Something that could easily be prevented if Doug just turned and went back to the little girl. Lucifer would spare her - and Doug - if he just went back, snatched up the child, and ran until there was no more darkness and no more frozen summer.
__ The voice came from behind him. It was a tone he had heard as a teenager. It was vile and cruel. It was the voice that hurt.
__ "Testerbird!"
__ Doug stopped, but didn't turn around. In his mind, he felt Maggie prod him on, "Don't stop. Go!" But he held fast. The moment, the test of his faith, was at hand.
__ "Testerbird, I'm talkin' to you!"
__ It was Munson's voice - or was it the Pizza King kid's? He couldn't be sure. He wanted to turn and see who it was, but -
__ Doug continued walking, hands in his pockets, head down, tears burning his eyes.
__ "We're going to rip her to pieces, you coward! Don't you care!?"
__ Maggie screamed. The sound of a brief scuffle found his retreating ears.
__ Doug stopped again. "No," he muttered. It was a silent command to them to stop though he felt he possessed no such power. It was a command to himself to not stop but to follow his course though he couldn't in good conscious.... But I can't leave the child like that? I can't -
__ "Here comes an arm, Dougie," the voice called. More screaming. Maggie's cries were like knives flying into his ears. The muffled cracking sound -
__ "No! No! No!" Doug broke into a run, away from the shrieks of Maggie's torture and the tormenting laugh of her otherworldly attackers.
__ "Come back, coward!" They cried, a little farther back now. Something thrown tumbled through the air to Doug's right and kicked some snow off tree limbs. It was only a couple feet long, swaddled in a wrinkled man's suit sleeve, and had five fingers.
__ "No! Damn you! No!"
__ Maggie's screams continued like a shrill siren announcing the end of the world.


__ Lucifer spat out the chunk of Ardy's heart he was chewing like gum. He cocked his head, studied her ruined body torn open by his own fury, the beautiful blacks, purples, reds, and browns of her entrails spilled out onto the floor. Her heart had no flavor. It was gone. She had been taken up and would not be his.
__ The light bearer looked over his shoulder to the hanging Pizza King boy. Legad, formerly known as Todd, had failed miserably.
__ He knew how this happened. It was his own fault.
__ For centuries, Lucifer had been waiting for this day, the Second Coming. He knew it would be at such a time when God would harken back to the Great Flood. "Your second failure," the dark lord sneered. The first, Lucifer maintained, was creating man in the first place.
__ "We had paradise." The bitterest three words the fallen angel had ever known.
__ "Now we have nothing. Well," he allowed a smile. "You have nothing. I have hell."
__ The return of the Son was supposed to be heralded by the Great Conversion. All souls pointing heavenward with the shocking realization: The Christians Were Right.
__ "Doomed to failure," Lucifer whispered turning away from the crucified psychic. He sat next to the altar, on the step leading up to the bashed-in pulpit, and rested his head in his hands. The devil wept. "If you had kept me with you. If you had forgiven me, instructed me. I would have been there to warn you of your mistake, the lapse. Your damn pride!
__ "Not mine! Yours!"
__ Now God's world had changed. The great teams of society were split even more than in His time. Even if more than the pathetic third of humanity were Christian, there are still less than one percent who claim themselves as God. Colleges teach existentialism. War in the holy land paints an even darker picture. Patriotism is the new Christianity, and that makes for strange and prideful bedfellows. "Science is the new Christ," the devil sneered.
__ Lucifer scratched his eyebrow.
__ "Media. Entertainment. Movies, television, the internet - the Almighty Internet." He looked toward the ceiling, scowled as if he was making direct eye contact with God. "These golden idols your Moses cannot cast down for you."
__ Lucifer's victory would be bittersweet. He had planned for this day, saw it coming. He saw the rise of distraction. He saw the numbers of human souls as they fell into his hands increase thousands fold. He even held the beating hearts of so-called Christians in his hands. They confirm their religion, they may even speak kindly of Christ, then they lust in church over the kneeling skirts at communion. They covet the neighbor's new car in the church parking lot. They hate the pastor for not allowing their marriage. "It is decay, as this flesh," Lucifer sniffed as he plucked a piece of Clye Morrow from his bronze forearm.
__ All of this.
__ All the world's distractions, the absence of love for God, enabled the fallen angel to rise again. Lucifer was walking God's earth because, as he figured, it wasn't God's earth at all. It now belonged to these worms, the two-legged imps. The mockery of creation itself.
__ He was made whole. The irony was that he was made whole in a house of God. His Son returns, and the devil walks among those who will crucify him a second time.
__ "What then? The promised fire?"
__ Lucifer stood and stretched. "Only too happy to oblige."
__ He shouted to the ceiling, "You sent me one who peddles lies for a living instead of your legions of angels. You sent me a murderer, a sinful lamb, instead of your archangel assassin. You send me a man distracted by false gods, instead of a redeemer of light.
__ "And they all fell before me. They all fail when you send them. Because they are only human, they fall. All of them."


__ "Not all of them," Doug said from the doorway.