After two thousand years of this, most people had grown a little jaded regarding the prospect of an imminent Armageddon. Predictions of The End became so common by the dawn of the third millennium that homeowners no longer thought twice about installing new flooring weeks or even days before a scheduled Apocalypse.

So it was not for lack of warning that Christine Temetri, an otherwise intelligent young woman who had recently purchased a nine hundred square foot condo in Glendale, California, made the astoundingly ill-advised decision to have new linoleum installed in her breakfast nook only days before the Apocalypse was scheduled to start. Her decision was, if anything, the result of an overwhelming surfeit of warnings.

The latest of these warnings came from one Reverend Jonas Bitters, First Prophet of the Church of the Bridegroom. Jonas Bitters was a former recreational vehicle salesman who had, through a combination of spurious scriptural exegesis, excessive reliance on Google’s automated Hebrew-to-English translation service and mathematical errors that could have been caught by a bright third grader, happened upon a date for the End of Days that was within a hair of being accurate. When one considers that most eschatological timetables were off by decades – if not centuries or even millennia – Bitters was so close to the correct date that speculation has arisen in certain corners of Heaven as to whether he was somehow guided in his feverish stacking of errors by the Almighty Himself. Advocates of this theory point to the fact that if Bitters had not forgotten to carry the one in a certain equation, he would have been dead on. Skeptics point out that if he had correctly counted the number of letters in YHWH, he would have been off by another eighty years.

The fact is that in cosmological terms, Jonas Bitters was about as close to dead on as one could possibly hope for. Unfortunately for him, human beings tend not to think in cosmological terms – especially when those human beings have been standing on a plateau twenty miles outside of Elko, Nevada for eight hours. Even Christine Temetri, who had the foresight to bring a lawn chair, a down jacket, a penlight, a book of expert-level crossword puzzles and the lowest of expectations, was getting antsy about the amount of nothing that was happening. She did, however, have to give up some begrudging admiration for Jonas Bitters, whose enthusiasm remained undiminished in the wee morning hours.

The First Prophet stood some twenty yards from Christine, surveying the culmination of his life’s work. Ten girls, ranging in age from thirteen to seventeen, stood before him, wearing only frilly polyester bridesmaid dresses of matching sea foam green, shivering in the early morning desert cold. Each of them held an old-fashioned kerosene camping lamp.