by Matias Travieso-Diaz.
And I saw when the Lamb opened one of the seals, and I heard, as it were the noise of thunder, one of the four beasts saying, Come and see. Revelation 6:1
The Great Tribulation came upon the world swiftly and proceeded in overlapping phases that went on for many years. As foretold in the divinatory text, each phase was ushered by the arrival of a pitiless rider, whose course upon the earth was earmarked by a new calamity that left its imprint on all who witnessed it. This is a short accounting of the Tribulation’s progress.
- A white horse: and he that sat on him had a bow, and a crown was given unto him
“You keep tossing and turning” complained the wife. “It’s impossible to share a bed with you and hope to sleep.”
“Ah, sleep,” lamented the husband. “How can I possibly find rest?”
“I told you at the time, you should have turned down the position when it was offered to you. It isn’t as if you didn’t know what was going to happen.”
The husband sat up, his legs dangling blindly in search of his slippers. With a creak of his muscles, he got up and went to the kitchen to pour himself a cup of coffee.
Her voice trailed after him. “You have already outlasted your predecessors. Four months or less, that’s all the others were good for.” He took the steaming cup to the living room to escape her nagging.
Of course, she had a point. The Overlord had galloped into power in Columbia on a trail of lies and empty promises, storming heavens on a blazing white horse, trampling friend and foe. He was full of himself, oblivious of everything save his ambition and greed. All barriers fell before his ego; the rules of law, science and common sense meant nothing and the offended decency of others served only to fuel his base appetites. He demanded absolute loyalty and often rewarded it with scorn or betrayal, yet the force of his personality was irresistible.
As he sipped the scalding beverage, the husband scrolled down the messages showing on his tablet. There were the customary notices about further dismantling of the government structure through downsizings and furloughs that concentrated power into fewer and fewer hands. One item was, however, personal: A three-sentence notice from the Attorney General: “Your services to the government of Columbia are no longer required. You are to take your personal belongings and vacate your offices by close of business today. Your termination pay will be sent to you by mail.”
He almost chucked up the coffee in his mouth but controlled himself and forced it down his throat slowly. As he did, he was assaulted by a host of contradictory emotions. There was anger, of course. It was characteristic of the goons in power, from The Overlord down, to consume their underlings, extract every possible bit of service from their tired bodies, and then toss them away without even a word of thanks. While he savored the bitter taste of his indignation, another feeling came up in his thoughts: confusion. He examined his recent actions on behalf of the regime, and apart from their patent illegality there had been nothing wrong with his execution of the ruler’s commands.
The confusion led to another feeling that soon displaced all others. He became increasingly apprehensive about his safety and that of his family. Whatever he had done or failed to accomplish, he had moved to the other side of the ledger and was now available for blame and retribution for his misdeeds. It would be fortunate, but unlikely, that getting fired would be the end of his troubles. In the best case, he would need to struggle to find a private sector position despite the black mark on his record; in the worst case, he would be blamed for some governmental failure and singled out for punishment and end up in jail or worse.
Should he try to escape from Columbia? Where would he go? Would he be allowed to leave? Was it already too late? He laid down the unfinished cup of coffee on the table and shambled away towards the bedroom, to seek refuge in the arms of his wife.
- Another horse that was red: and power was given to him that sat thereon to take peace from the earth
The soldier crouched in the improvised bunker that had been dug in the woods near the refinery that would be the target of the attack by his company. While most of the Columbian military action would be conducted by Reaper-type attack drones, a human mop-up operation would always be required at the end to to root out remaining enemy forces and secure the installations that remained standing.
From the bunker, which was sheltered from view by an array of branches and leaves, the soldiers could watch in relative safety the battle that was being waged in the air by his country’s attack drones and those defending the installation. When, on orders from the Overlord, the country had launched a surprise, unprovoked attack against its neighbor, there had been a general anticipation that the war would be over in weeks if not days, and the foreign nation would have been defeated and occupied. The defenders, however, had battled with tenacity and skill against the much larger invading army and the war had reached a stalemate in which thousands of troops were deployed on both sides over the extensive border that separated the two nations.
The soldier was too young and ignorant to understand the reasons for this war and the others that Columbia was conducting simultaneously in two other fronts. All he knew was that heavy casualties were being reported from all theaters of operation and the entire world seemed to have caught fire.
The soldier felt safe, hidden in his bunker. In addition to the detection protection of the bunker’s cover, he was wearing a uniform made of infrared resistant (IRR) fabric designed to make it difficult for night vision and thermal imaging devices to detect him. IRR fabric also hid his team’s military uniforms, gear, and other equipment from infrared detection.
Thus, he felt secure in his expectation that he and his comrades could lie in wait while the Reaper drones overwhelmed the enemy’s defenses. He was thus surprised when an enemy drone hovered above the bunker and dropped two guided bombs that fell, with a sibilant noise that presaged death, over the bunker.
The soldier’s surprise did not last long. In seconds, the entire area that had given shelter to him and his contingent became a towering inferno and all its occupants were vaporized.
Encounters like this took place time and again throughout a world driven mad by the Overlord’ thirst for conquest. There were a variety of outcomes to the battles, which resembled each other only by the vast destruction that followed in their wake. At the end of the wars, what was reached was a cessation of hostilities that no one would call peace, but exhaustion; there were no winners or losers, only casualties.
- And lo a black horse; and he that sat on him had a pair of balances in his hand
The stock of imported foodstuffs and novelty items ran out and could not be replaced because of the ongoing trade wars. Pablo soon found himself without inventory and was forced to close his shop. The store and the real estate in which it was located were acquired in a distress sale by one of the corporations owned by the oligarchs that shared power with the Overlord, and Pablo became broke, out of business, and lacking the means or willpower to start all over again.
He thus joined the growing mass of the poor that drifted aimlessly through the streets of the once vibrant capital city of Columbia. The government no longer offered social security payments, unemployment compensation, welfare benefits, or job search capabilities. Those, like Pablo, who were no longer gainfully employed had to seek help from the overstressed private charities or the family and friends who still had means, or had to resort to crime – like latter day Jean Valjeans – to put food in the mouths of their loved ones.
Like Jean Valjean, Pablo was arrested for shoplifting from one of the megastores owned by an oligarch and sentenced to five years of forced labor in a government-owned artichoke farm, harvesting immature flower buds for the tables of the very rich. It was back-breaking work that required him to spend twelve hours a day walking rapidly through the plant rows, choosing ripening blossoms, cutting them from the stalks with special knives, and tossing them into a “canasta” or basket on his back, which when full weighed upwards of eighty pounds.
During his imprisonment he was virtually starved to death and was exposed to toxic fumes released from tractor-mounted spray booms for the control of moths and other vermin. He developed a fatal case of pneumonia and was dead less than two months after arrival at the prison farm.
Like Pablo, millions of people in the general population of Columbia suffered from the effects of the economic crash caused by the wars and the economic policies of the Overlord. Widespread poverty and famine had been rarely known in Columbia until the recent past, but now living in the country was comparable to surviving in the poorer nations of the world.
- Behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed
The world witnessed three pandemics of varying intensity while the Overlord was in charge of the world’s once greatest power. To be fair, at least one of them was outside his ability to avoid or control: a new strain of mammalian flu, or avian influenza in mammals, became active as mammals were exposed to infected birds or dwelt in contaminated environments. The mammalian flu pandemic killed untold millions of cows, sheep, swine, and other domestic and wild animals worldwide and resulted in a universal famine among rural populations. The response to this pandemic was hindered by the throttling of non-military research and development activities in Columbia. Whereas prior to the Overlord’s accession to power his country had been the world’s leader in all areas of science, it now fell on a worldwide scattering of institutions, governmental or private, to carry out the fight against this new type of flu and other natural disasters.
The progress of the other two pandemics, however, was directly attributable to the actions of the Overlord and his government. First, there was the resurgence of smallpox – a disease that had killed millions of people over the centuries until it was eradicated through concerted vaccination actions on a universal scale. An isolated area of a Central African nation had remained the site for sporadic outbreaks of smallpox; these remained unnoticed until a man from there arrived in Tripoli and took passage of a boatful of migrants. He and his fellow travelers brought the disease to Sicily and from there into Italy and beyond.
The worldwide response to the smallpox threat was commendably swift, and resulted in launching a massive vaccination drive that would have overcome the threat except that a small number – by all accounts, less than a dozen – of infected individuals managed to arrive in Columbia and spread the virus among the general population. Alerted to the problem when the first cases were discovered in the country, the government declined to lift its anti-vaccination policies and allowed the smallpox outbreak to grow unchecked, until millions of cases spread throughout the country and beyond its borders.
The second and even deadlier pandemic was caused by a new virus that had first afflicted the population of an Indian reservation in Columbia. It was a viral hemorrhagic fever that caused a gruesome and most painful death through blood loss from discharges through the nose, gums, eyes, and body openings. The disease became an epidemic and then a universal scourge because the government of Columbia no longer had the means for conducting effective medical research or the will to launch an immunization drive to protect the population and prevent its spread in other parts of the world.
There were innumerable victims to the hemorrhagic fever, but the experience of just two of them suffices to describe the disease’s horror: a mother and her daughter perished together, clasped in a close embrace. The daughter, only seven years of age, had contracted the disease from traces of infected blood on the seat of her school desk. Two days later, the initial symptoms of the disease manifested themselves in the way of fever, chills, headache, muscle aches, sore throat, nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, raised bumps all over the child’s body.
By the time bleeding started, the mother was already aware of the nature of her daughter’s illness and its inevitable conclusion. Realizing that her ministrations would not arrest the course of the disease and not wishing to remain alive after the daughter’s demise, the mother smeared herself with her daughter’s bloody discharges and licked her vomit in an effort to accelerate the onset of the disease on herself. She succeeded in matching her daughter’s agony, and the two of them left the world with no other consolation than each other.
Columbia, already ravaged by war, poverty, and social unrest, became a vast charnel house for the millions who lost their lives through pandemics occurring during the years during which the Overlord held power.
- And there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain: for the former things are passed away.
It took decisive action by the people of Columbia to end the Great Tribulation and restore the world to order and peace, and this did come to pass, and all that remained of the years in which the Overlord ruled were bitter memories that hopefully will be imprinted forever in the hearts and minds of the people. For the surest way to invite future calamities is to forget the errors and disasters that caused them in the past.