I’ll tell you--but not what you want to hear--I’ll tell you the truth.  The demon hit us fifty feet into the ravine--Brown screwed up.  Because we had tech, because we had holies, he maybe wasn't edge, dreaming Puritan dreams of crisp white sheets and Grace, so he died souldeath.  The landscape writhed, tentacles morphing from rock, snatching young Goodman into air even as its touch turned him to dust.  Dead fingers jerked the trigger of his autoshot, the Bushmaster roaring impotence as depleted-uranium slugs blasted a grave for charred bones, but right then Sister Bea was calm on it with the LAW,  The Changeling shapedshifted, rising up, cresting like a wave of rainbow vomit.  It poised--tasting the flavor of our souls--then surged--right into the sacred wireguided.  The demon made this sound--a Zyklon scream from Auschwitz--and vanished.  In the silence I breathed deeply of ozone. . . .

    I lived in Frisco when the old USN killed Rahab.  The Prince of the Primordial Ocean strode into the bay upright, twenty stories of demon meat, hippo head and fangs, claws and spiked tail.  In the harbor was an ancient battleship with a Chaplain named O'Connor onboard.  He was hardcore from before the Tribs--zealot before it was law--so when Revelation went down he was man in motion.  He led the mutiny and brought the ship about into the storm and fury of Rahab.  He blessed those sixteen-inch guns and consecrated those volkswagen shells.  He stood on the bow, cross in fist as shield and sword, as the guns roared in defiance of that Great Dark Thing. I remember it dead, hunched against a mangled Golden Gate, head bowed as if in prayer.  The military napalmed the carcass and it burned for a month, the charred meat stench settling over the city like a shroud. 

    I walked over and picked up Goodman's Bushmaster.  Standing over his blackened bones, I breathed again the end of the world.