Chapter Seven: The Destruction

By 2000, I meant 1000. Let's try this again...

The very nature of the Descrution, Jonathan Brooke said, keeps me from being able to tell you every detail. In the process, a lot of the history of the world was lost. I can give you an outline of what happened and the story of how people survived.
As near as we can figure it, there was a was somewhere around the year 2400CE. The United States of North America had been in a long cold conflict with The East Asian Conglomerate. We're not sure what caused the two sides to start fighting openly, but I can tell you that, over the years of conflict, slowly almost ever nation was drawn in on one side or the other.
The weapons use caused death unlike anybody had ever seen before. More poeple were dying in this conflict than any other in the history of Earth. The USNA and EAC's leaders, however, never once ordered the use of nuclear weapons. Franklin Greene, the president of the USNA, tried to keep teh war off of American soil, but, for the first time in centuries, a war was being fought on their home soil. General Hung, the leader of the EAC, pushed his soldiers further and further inward, from the Pacific West. The USNA was slowly losing ground. The European nations were trying to push into the EAC's territory with little success. It looked like Franklin Greene was going to lose the war.
A group of radical Chrisitans began to take the war as a sign that the apocalypse was coming. They believed that God saw the world as a group of sinners, and that when Jesus Christ returned, he would not redeem the souls of the people. Unless, of course, he was brought back in the right manner. Their leader, Septimus Jones, began to freely interpret the book of Revelations in a manor never before considered his interpretation was supposed to bring Jesus back, if carried out properly. The book says that the lamb would break seals on a scroll, releasing different terrible things upon the world. I'm not religious, and don't specificaly understand this section too well, but it seems that the lamb was somehow related to the second coming of christ. Either Septimus Jones saw himself as Jesus Christ, or he believe the lamb did not represent Jesus, because he began 'breaking the seals'. the first seal was meant to release the first of the four horsemen of the apocalypse - Conquest. Septimus Jones' group, calling themselves the Apocalyptists seized weapons from USNA forces and stole a colony mine hauler.
The conflict, up until this point, had been contained to Earthly soil. The colonies of both major powers had focused on producing materials to better feed the war effort rather than fighting each other.
The Apocalyptists diverted the colony ship to the moon, and proceed to take over the moon. Nobody's sure how they managed this, the surface of the moon is now radioactive black glass, but I'll get to that.
The Apocalptists found something on the moon that would forever change the course of history. A USNA weapon's development lab was disguised under a large crater (we're not sure which one). Spetimus Jones took controll of the station as his base of operations. He felt that the first seal was effectively broken by his conquest of the moon. The next seal would release the horseman called War.
Not any war would suffice to bring about the end of times and the second coming of Christ. It had to be a war started - and won - by Septimus Jones and Apocalyptists. One of the weapons found at the secret moon base was beyond Septimus Jones' understanding, but he chose to use it anyway. He did not know what it would do, but programmed the weapon to strike every major city on Earth. In twenty-four hours, he could begin his conquest by destroying most of the industry on Earth.
What he did was more terrible than even he imagined could be possible.
The weapon was disguised in the crater. As it began firing, shot after shot towards earth and her cities, it looked as if the moon were spewing balls of blue flame.
Franklin Greene saw what was happening and then did something that had not happened in centuries on earth. Not since the nuclear wars of the middle east had a nuclear weapon been launched. Franklin Greene knew it had to be done. He launched much of the USNA's arsenel at the moon. The warheads would core the moon, ferreting out and killing Apocalyptists. It seemed like a drastic measure, but President Greene knew what teh weapon would do to Earth.
Somebody in the EAC saw this sudden launch of warheads as an attack, and began launching a counter-attack at the USNA. General Hung was quick enough to notice that the missle the USNA had shot off were not aimed at the EAC. Fearing the USNA would retaliate agains the EAC's nuclear strike should any of the warheads land, he ordered that the missles his country had launched be detonated en route. All this served to do was complicate matter for the Earth the radiation in the atmosphere dirtied it to the extent that traces could still be dected when I left Earth a few months ago... over a thousands years after the war.
The missels that President Greene had launched took twenty-six hours to reach the moon. They were more than two hours behind the time when the weapon finished it's firing cycle.
Septimus Jones was powerless to stop the nuclear warheads, and he was wiped out, along with the rest of the Apocalyptists on the surface of the moon. It now glints in the dark, radioactive black glass covering much of the visible surface. We don't know the actual events that happened on the moon, because, frankly, everybody on it was killed.
The blue balls of flame from the moon, however, rained down on Earth. They could not be stopped.
They were a kind of elctromagnetic storm that cause all electronics to be destroyed. A fatal side effect had been noted when the weapon was first tested by the USNA - one that had caused them never to use it. The Elctromagnetic storm it caused destroyed neurons in the brain of humans, causing brain death.
Every major city in the world was hit with one of these. People died by the billions.