Destroyer 130: Waste Not, Want Not

By Warren Murphy and Richard Sapir

PROLOGUE

She had lost faith in God even before the Almighty decided to slaughter his flock.

As she lay in the mud, she tried to remember when the loss of faith had happened. She supposed it came by degrees. She only remembered waking up in the jungles of South America one morning to the realization that the god she followed was a fraud. By then it was too late.

In the last few minutes before the bullet cracked her skull and pureed her brain, the thing that really vexed Jennifer Lonig's terrified mind was her own gullibility. He claimed to be God, for criminy's sake. Wasn't God supposed to be nice? Oh, sure, there was the occasional toad downpour or Mrs. Lot salt lick-but that was Old Testament God.

This was 1978. Smack-dab in the post-Watergate, free-loving, buy-the-world-a-Coke New Testament. All that everlasting-vengeance stuff had gone the way of burning bushes and Ozzie and Harriet. God was nice now. Everybody knew that. But it turned out the god Jennifer had chosen to worship was just a big old meanie.

"Check the ones at the back."

The voice came over the scratchy public-address system. The booming voice was calm, even as the world crashed down around his ears. The voice belonged to the man Jennifer now realized was not God.

Most of the others were already dead. They had lined up like good sheep at the big communal kettles. At their bad shepherd's command, the foolish righteous had dutifully drunk the tainted soft drink. As the first followers clutched bellies and throats, dropping lifeless to the muddy jungle floor, the rest continued to drink the poison.

They dared not defy God.

Jennifer had only pretended to drink. She found a nice spot in the mud and lay down, hoping-praying-to be lost in the crowd. Surely they wouldn't notice. There were hundreds of bodies-acres of dead.