Chapter 6: Mark of the Beast by Stephen Simpson
He looked up at the ceiling and wondered if the governments
of Rheta had a secret agenda to infiltrate Christian homes with these barcodes.
Was this the Devil’s plan? Was this the end of times foretold in the Bible?
He believed with all his heart and soul that being a Christian
was not about keeping rules and guidelines, performing rituals, or even going
to church. It was about a deep, meaningful relationship with Christ.
The Bible said that before the second coming of Jesus, people
would be branded with the mark of the beast. Was this barcode that mark?
He considered that these days everything gets a barcode.
Bill remembered when barcodes first started appearing. People were saying back
then already that the barcode was preparing the world for 666 the mark of the beast
but nowadays nobody even gave barcodes a second thought. That was until
Christmas morning. Did the Devil very carefully and with subtlety indoctrinate
the world to this convenient, new digital world? With finesse prepared the
people of Rheta for this precise moment?
He knew that the way the bars of a barcode were arranged was
not as haphazard as it might seem at first glance. Each number of a barcode was
made up of discrete bits of data designed within the black and white spaces.
Each one of these linear lines were assigned a specific width within the code
and the scanner and computer could differentiate these widths as digital
information.
Having worked in Retail for most of his adult life, Bill
knew the spacing and thickness of the lines within the barcode pattern could be
translated as a particular number sequence for the identification of a product.
The digital data scanned from the barcode could then be used for stock control
or any other automated identification. Is this what the leaders of Rheta were
planning to do with people now? Inventory control?
There were three guard bars on a barcode. They were located
at the beginning, middle and end, and were longer than the bars in between.
This basic 666 pattern was the principal control code for the entire international
barcode system to properly operate. Inventors of the design did not have to use
a variation of the number six for the control codes, but they did. They could
have used any of the other binary codes that identify a number. They could have
developed a completely unique bar pattern just for the control codes alone. Why
did they choose a variation of the number six when other potential patterns
existed?
When he had to work the check-out because one of his staff
had called in sick at the last minute, he could see that digital money was already
connected to the digital identification of people and things. Almost nobody
paid in cash anymore. Everyone paid with their debit cards, and more and more
he saw people paying with their mobile phones.
He knew that when he went to the barcoding centre this
morning, he would be sacrificing his soul because, as a Christian, he believed
that whoever received the mark of the beast would be tormented forever in fire
and brimstone. He had to do it, though. In getting the mark himself, he can
safe Cynthia and Lydia’s souls from the same fate. If only those who had the
mark can buy food or necessities, he would be the one to provide for his
family. He grew up in a simpler time, a time with different morals and values as
today, and this was his job as the man of the house.
Giving up on falling asleep, he quietly got up from the bed.
He pulled the bedroom door shut behind him and went to the bathroom to have a
shower. After he had a shower, he went downstairs to the kitchen to make
himself a cup of coffee. While he waited for the kettle to boil, he pulled the
blinds up and stood at the sink overlooking the still road in front of the
kitchen window. There was a little garden in the front, but the plants had all
died with the frost of winter, as it did every year. Every Spring, the garden
got a do-over that would last only a couple of months before the chill of
Autumn settled on everything again.
He turned away from the stillness. It felt like the calm
before the storm. Soon he wrapped his hands around the hot mug, to let the heat
seep into his palms.
His thoughts were a million miles away. So far that he did
not even notice that he had drank the last of his coffee until he tilted the empty
mug up to his lips. He looked out the kitchen window again and saw that the sky
was starting to get lighter.
With a heavy heart, he climbed up the stairs. He went to
Lydia’s room first, and bend over her sleeping form, giving her a kiss goodbye
on her cheek. He then went back to the bedroom he shared with Cynthia. When he
leaned down to kiss her goodbye, she woke up.
“Where are you going? So early?”
He said, “Go back to sleep.”
She turned over to face him, not lifting her head from the
pillow. “What time is it?”
“It’s early. I’m going for a walk to clear my head.”
“Oh. Okay. Be safe out there.”
“I’ll see you later.”
She pulled the blankets higher up so that they covered the
lower part of her face. “Be safe.”
“I love you,” he said.
“I love you too.”
When he reached the bedroom door, he could hear she was fast
asleep again.
Downstairs, he made sure all the unnecessary plugs were off,
and he opened all the curtains before he walked out the front door. He checked
it was locked three times before he pushed his keys in his pocket and walked
away.
The walk to the town centre was not long, and it was flat,
so he made it there in about twenty minutes. From a distance he could see the
pitch of the tent where he knew he had to go to get the barcode. The tent was
set up in the War Memorial Park, behind the Primary School, on the edge of the
village and the closer he got, the noisier it became. He thought he would be
early, one of the first ones, but it seemed that people had slept in the
carpark of the school so that they could be first in the queue. To get it over and
done with, he assumed, as quickly as possible. People were folding up sleeping
bags and camping chairs. Here and there Bill saw an expression that mirrored
his own apprehension, but overall people seemed jovial. He walked along the row
of people, nodding every now and again in greeting. Alton Stine was not a very
big village, there was a population of only 1,780 the last time he checked, and
he knew just about everybody. The walk to the end of the line felt longer than
the walk from his home.
Eventually, he got to the end of the line in High Street and
then the wait started. According to the news on the TV it was not supposed to
take long. He watched a show where they explained the procedure, he assumed to
put people’s mind at ease. Fifty people at a time would go into a tent at the front
of a bigger tent. There would be a short briefing and then they would be
ushered to the bigger tent at the back where there would be rows of beds, and
that was where they would get the barcode.
It was midday and he had just turned the corner into School
Street. He realised that Cynthia would be beyond concerned about him by now.
She always worried herself sick, always thinking the worst had happened. He
patted his jacket pockets and discovered that he did not have his phone with
him. He traced his steps backwards in his mind and concluded that he had left
it on the charger in the kitchen. This was odd because he hardly ever went
anywhere without his phone. He was so busy making sure he had all the proof of
identification documents that the website said he had to bring with him to get
the barcode that he forgot the one thing that he always had with him.
He was starting to get thirsty. His tongue was starting to
feel sticky in his mouth, but he did not want to lose his place in line and go
back to the shop on the corner to get a drink. Luckily, he thought to wear his waterproof
jacket this morning, when it started to drizzle and the cold, icy raindrops
started running down his collar. If he was a superstitious man, he would have
thought that all the signs were pointing him back home. He did not want to
listen to that nagging voice in his head. He was afraid of the consequences it
would have for Cynthia and Lydia if he was not brave enough today to do this.
Spaced out the same distance as every lamppost on the side
of the road, there was a young boy or girl, hardly turned eighteen by the looks
of them, standing across the road from the queue. They had assault rifles
clutched to their chests, the butt of the gun was facing down and the muzzle
facing up. They were wearing army uniforms, and their berets were pulled down
low over their foreheads.
It made Bill a little nervous, seeing how young they were
but he knew that there had been a big intake of young people to help the army
and police to keep the law and order on the streets of every city, town, and
village. Bill did not think it was necessary here to have so many of them or
even for them to be armed because so far everybody was well behaved and
compliant. He could not even see any evidence that any of the shops had been
targeted by rioters and looters. This had always been a safe place to live.
Suddenly, a large group of people came running down the
road, one of them knocking into Bill and almost toppling him over. Bill put out
his hand quickly and steadied himself against the low garden wall of the house he
was currently standing in front of.
Bill’s eyes darted to the young man with the gun standing
behind him, two lampposts away, when the boy yelled, “Stop!”
The man who knocked into Bill turned around and flipped the
fingers on both hands at the kid with the gun. He yelled back, “Try and stop me!”
The young man brought the muzzle of his gun down and aimed
it at the man who was now laughing a manic sound.
Bill felt fear rush through him, and he stepped back until his
legs were pushed flush against the low stone wall behind him.
He heard the burst of the automatic rifle and felt something
knock him hard in the chest. Dumbstruck, his hand touched the sudden eruption
of pain. His fingers felt sticky, and as he brought them up in front of his
face, he started sliding down, leaving a smear of vermillion coloured blood
that followed him.
He was overwhelmed with a sudden feeling of regret that he
would not be able to keep Cynthia and Lydia safe. Then, just as quickly, he was
filled with a sense of euphoria that he would not have to sell his soul to the
Devil anymore. His soul had been saved.
As Bill and six other people lay dying on the side of the
road, everyone panicked and started running in every direction possible. In
their haste to get away from the carnage they trampled Bill’s body so badly
that, in the end, he was hardly recognisable.
All work created and posted on this blog is the intellectual property of Stephen Simpson.
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