Publisher's Synopsis
The world's, particularly America's, descent into the abyss continues, and indeed intensifies. A typical large and raucous college sporting event becomes nightmarishly deadly as many thousands of enraged student fans storm the field upon a questionable call that loses them the game. They slaughter thousands, and the ancient Roman gladiator contests that virtually all have thought were long dead do now return. Many of their victims are Roman Catholics, and the Earth's last pope in Rome, Urban IX, is filled with righteous rage and resorts to witchcraft for revenge. What happens next is even more horrific as another university and its surroundings are filled with death and utter blackness. Urban inadvertently destroys himself, although technically he does survive, and summons long-dead spirits of great astronauts who were gone before their time. Gus Grissom is the foremost-he is a symbol of how anyone can falter, how all of us are no better and no worse...and yet are evil. Much like Carl Ring, the Earth's last king, the Antichrist. "This is his throne. He is coming," Grissom says, and soon it will be true.And then there's Ryan Preston, the last president-the False Prophet. The truly awful moment he has long dreaded finally arrives, that of Hu Chiang-Genghis Khan-arriving on the West Coast of the Americas with his 20 million soldiers, a full 10 million of whom are meant just for the U.S. It starts with one small strange demonstration, one involving Mongol "khevtuul" who ransack one small West Coast town to make a statement, the Khan among them in disguise. And then it is the nukes-65 high-yields at once throughout the West, which will kill millions and permanently disfigure America and the Earth she proudly rules. In terms of weather, in terms of geology, in regard to communications, in regard to sanity. The Khan launches full-scale conventional bombing runs that night too, followed by a massive invasion that soon conquers the whole Pacific region, easily defeating Preston's ground and air resistance. As for the grassroots civilian resistance that the Khan's men encounter stateside, it is easily wiped out and/or assimilated as his own. Particularly humiliating for the Prophet is the fact that he has no real naval presence in the theater since he's lost two fleets already to the Khan. Even so, the torment of the States is just beginning. There is no remedy. What follows is occupation, what follows is lost freedom, what follows is redistribution and reeducation and much purging and immeasurable squalor as conditions worsen. And still, another bitter blow-the bitterest of them all in some respects. For, you see, Carl Ring escapes, after just two years in prison, with the help of right- and left-wing radicals alike. They have already seized all Ireland, and soon he will again have all the territories he once seized, plus many more. He is taken to Tintagel, home of Arthur, on Walpurgis, where he-of course immortal, and once himself a great witch-hunter in old Germany-is informally "crowned" king of both Great Britain and the West as civil war rocks all of Britain for the first time since Oliver Cromwell. From there he will wage global war, both on battlefields and in halls of power, for his ego and his bloodthirst know no end. Even so, his evil will receive an answer, both from God and God's Creation. For there is Loch. Braeden Darcloch. Ring's long-time adversary, a good Scotsman who was once a vampire of the night and a bloodthirsty rebel who loved ruin too. Now he has been changed, now he is of Christ, and his prayers against the evil that he feels as Ring approaches are, yes, answered in the form of fire and beasts like Nessie. Loch realizes that his Scotland is not the place he thought it was, and so, encouraged by strong visions of his deceased Irish wife, good Shannon, he prepares for what will be his greatest test: serving God and His true Church as the first of the Two Witnesses in Jerusalem. The time is near.
