Chapter 32
IT WAS 7 AM in New York City and 7 PM in Beijing when Abbadon struck next.
Amazingly, he was in both cities at the same time.
Astonishingly, he was also simultaneously in London (where it was noon) and Moscow (where it was 3 PM).
“I hope you are near a television, Daniel,” Abbadon whispered to the winds whipping around him on his elevated posts in all four locations. “This is going to be delicious.”
In New York Abbadon stood atop the Empire State Building; in Beijing he was out on the observation deck of a super-tall skyscraper called China World Trade Center III; in London he stood in an office window on the seventy-second floor of the unfinished London Bridge Tower; and in Moscow he chose the Naberezhnaya Building, which, at 881 feet, afforded him an excellent view of the chaos and destruction below.
“Witness my powers, Daniel! Fear me and bow down to me!”
In all four locations, buildings seemed to topple at his whim. Glass and steel and concrete slid down the sides of structures and crumbled to the ground as if the edifices were mammoth lizards losing several thick layers of skin.
In all four cities, Abbadon made the same bargain with the millions of panicked survivors filling the streets: “Serve me and live. Refuse me and die.”
“What would you have us do?” pleaded the terrified leaders of the four metropolitan centers.
“Leave your families. Destroy your halls of justice. Burn all your books and abandon your churches. Take whatever you want from whomever you want to take it and join me in the underworld. And bring me the boy called Daniel!”
“Yes, Master!” a million voices cried out in reply.
“This is my planet now!” said Abbadon. “Only those who descend into the abyss to be my slaves shall escape the coming cataclysm.”
“Yes, Master!”
Abbadon had never felt so close to total fulfillment.
All was now as it was always meant to be.