God Groupie Apocalypse

By James Burkard

"God Groupie Apocalypse" is a spiritual fantasy/borderline autobiography; some of it really happened, some is pure fantasy, and some of it I’m still not sure of. Psychologists say that if you talk to God that’s called prayer, but if God talks to you that’s schizophrenia. If that’s the case, I guess that makes me a foaming-at-the mouth, barking-at-the- moon, certifiable schizoid. I’ve also got a Looney Tunes guardian angel who fancies himself Gods own holy fool and looks like an eight-year-old Norman Rockwell poster boy but puts in a Humphrey Bogart, Philip Marlow, appearance when the mood takes him and has saved my ass wearing jade green armour and wielding a Jedi light sabre. Sound crazy? That’s just the autobiographical part.
Some years ago, I ended up by chance (?) at a Pentecostal revivalists meeting. I wasn’t a believer, more like a sceptical agnostic, but that didn’t make any difference to God who dropped me into the Grand Canyon of His mind and marinated me there for almost 24 hours. In fact, on a deep level I’m still marinating there. My Christian brethren call this being “saved”. I call it getting hammered like Saul on the road to Damascus. Why God saw fit to “save” a Christian persecuting, tax collecting scum bag like Saul or an intellectual skeptic like me when there are so many others who are more deserving and want it more is just one of the many questions I was left with, like the Big One, why does evil exist in a universe whose default state is absolute love?
God Groupie Apocalypse started out as an attempt to answer these questions but quickly took a comic detour through the end times of a fallen world where a reluctant spiritual warrior and his guardian angel are on a mysterious mission from God and forced to confront autistic preppers selling explosive dog chow, shape-shifting zombies on a picnic, a hell hound named Boris, and a geriatric witch in high heeled sandals and Lolita sunglasses, and they are all out to barbecue one reluctant holy warrior and his friends before they find out what their real mission is.
The book turned into a kind of quirky parable with many answers to my spiritual questions scattered through it. This combination of action adventure, and spiritual truth telling is what makes books like Dan Brown’s “Da Vinci Code” so popular. while readers of Lorna Byrne’s “Angels in My Hair” or Neal Donald Walsch’s “Conversations with God” will certainly find much that resonates with and at times questions their spiritual views but always leavened with a dose of tongue-in-cheek humor. As the saying goes, “A little bit of sugar helps the medicine go down.”
Anyone interested in a mystery novel with all the added twists and turns and red herrings of an Agatha Christie novel will find this book irresistible. But it is not only a mystery novel and a book of religious revelation but an action-packed adventure filled with wacky humor, quirky characters and a self-doubting hero who has trouble living up to the role God has laid on him.
I have previously published a science fiction novel, “Halfling Human” on Smashwords.

• Language: English
• Publisher: James Burkard
• Release date: Jul 7, 2021
• ISBN: 9789198007015

James Burkard

Writing is like jumping off a cliff blindfolded and trusting that you will land safely. At least that’s the way it is for me. When I started to write “Halfling Human”, I had no idea where it was going, what characters would appear, or how it was going to end. I had only a vague desire to combine my life-long interests in spiritual development and cutting-edge science in a science fiction action thriller. The whole book sprang from that initial desire, and when I started writing it, I tried to let the book go wherever it wanted to go. This isn’t as easy as it sounds. It is a constant battle to let go of the need to be in control and to just jump off that cliff and let the story take you where it will.What it comes down to is an act of faith that the story already exists in some unmanifest form and my job is to work together with it to let it come to expression, kind of like Michelangelo who said that he did not create those sublime statues but only removed the marble from around what was already there. For me “removing the marble” consists of ignoring or trying to shut down all those clamoring voices of self-doubt and criticism in the back of my head that want to be in complete control; analyzing and judging every word, telling me this or that isn’t good enough or this isn’t the way the story should go or OH MY GOD, WHAT WILL THE READERS, PUBLISHERS, AND CRITICS THINK!I have to constantly say to myself; screw the readers, screw the publishers, and screw the critics. They have nothing to do with this, the process of writing, because in the end that is only between me and the spirit of the book. When it’s done, the publishers, readers, and critics can have their say, and I would be lying if I said I didn’t care about their opinion, but if I have been true to the spirit of the book, then on one level their opinion really doesn’t matter.I realize this way of writing sounds a bit mystical, even anthropomorphic; as if the book is a living thing or spirit that has an independent existence, like those ancient spirit muses who inspired old time writers from Homer to John Milton. In the beginning, this also bothered me because it was so at odds with the rational, analytical approach to writing I had been taught.You know what I mean; you make a plot outline of each chapter so you know exactly where you are going and what each character will do next because you already have built up character profiles and there is very little room left over for the unforeseen, spontaneous surprises. Then after you have all your soldiers in place, you can begin the battle of writing your book like any good general in control of everything and moving his troops according to plan. I know that there have been many excellent works of fiction written in that way, but it seems such a boring, plodding process to me.I love writing the way I do because, like the reader of any good novel, I never know what is going to happen next, like when a minor character, who I think is only going to have a walk-on part, suddenly develops a life of his own and runs away with the story, taking it in a whole new, unexpected direction. When this happens, all the armchair critics, sitting in my head and feeding on my self-doubt, begin screaming, “This wasn’t planned! This isn’t where the story was going! If you let him do this, it’ll ruin the book!”For years, these critical voices made it difficult for me to trust myself or the process even though time and again it worked out and above all gave me intense pleasure and satisfaction. Then, I came across a book by Stephen King called “On Writing” in which he compares the way he writes to an archeologist who discovers a little piece of bone sticking out of the ground (the initial impulse or idea for a story) and as he uncovers that bone, he trusts that it will connect to another and that finally he will uncover a complete skeleton. The idea being that the skeleton or book, like Michelangelo’s statue, already exists buried there and it is the writer’s job to uncover it.Reading King’s book was a watershed experience. I realized I wasn’t the only one who wrote like this. It gave me faith in the way I was working, and I soon discovered that there were many others working in the same structureless, yet strangely structured way. One of the oddest examples is Minette Walters, the “Queen” of the British detective novel. Some years ago, I saw a documentary that followed her through one year of writing a crime novel. The interesting thing was that by page one hundred and six she still did not know who the murderer was! This was mind blowing. I’d always assumed that writers of detective stories wrote in the same logical, analytical way as their detectives worked to solve the crime by uncovering clues and red herrings that had been carefully placed beforehand. But this wasn’t the way Minette Walters worked.So the question is what is happening here? How do those creative writing classes that, teach structured outlines, conscious character building, and writing about things that you know about or have personal experience of, explain a phenomena where the writer has only the vaguest idea of what he is going to write about and no idea of what he is going to uncover along the way and yet still ends up with a highly structured, well plotted story?They will probably nod sagely and point to James Joyce and mumble something about stream of consciousness and the subconscious as if that explained everything when in reality it explains nothing because nobody knows where thoughts come from in the first place, let alone whole novels of thoughts.Now wait a minute, you’re going to say, everyone knows thoughts come from the brain. While it is true that neurophysiologists have discovered that certain areas of the brain are active in different kinds of thought processes, they still have no idea where an actual thought comes from. In fact, a group of young, radical neurophysiologists have theorized that thoughts don’t come from the brain at all, that it is just an interface receiver like a radio or TV, picking up impulses from somewhere else. They theorize that this somewhere else is what physicists call the quantum field which they define as an infinite, eternal, non-place, existing outside of space and time, containing unlimited potential energy, and is the source of everything that exists or could possibly exist, and to top it all it interacts with human consciousness and is therefore itself somehow conscious.This quantum field is beginning to sound a lot like what saints and mystics down the ages have called the realm of the spirit or even the mind of God, and with quantum theory it seems that modern science has curled back on itself and bitten its own tail only to discover that what it is biting into tastes suspiciously like religion.In any case, these young neurophysiologists have no time or appetite for religious implications and instead remain strictly scientific, theorizing that all thought results from a material meat mind interfacing with this non-material quantum field out of which the original seed thought springs. This seed is then filtered through the meat mind receiver which, like a badly tuned radio, distorts it with the static produced by the individual’s unique biology and personality, for example; disease, traumas, beliefs, needs, likes, dislikes, etc.However, it is not only individual thoughts that are waiting to be expressed but whole books of thoughts, an infinite number of books about all possible and impossible worlds that are waiting on the far side of material reality for someone to give them expression. And that bring us back to “Halfling Human.” and the strange, structureless structured way it was written.If quantum physics and the theories of radical neurophysiologists are anything to go by, then the way “Halfling Human.” was written and the way scores of other books are written is not so crazy after all. In fact, by trying to shut down the personal critical filters that say what a story should or should not do, we are, hopefully, making it easier for the story to come to fuller expression even though I must admit there is also a great deal of conscious editing and polishing that goes on afterwards because a story never makes it unblemished through the distorting filter of my meat mind.When I wrote “Halfling Human” I was driven by the desire to write a science fiction thriller that combined spirituality and cutting-edge science, and by and large I think I succeeded. I believe that “Halfling Human” represents the spiritual future of a new type of science fiction that walks the wild side of quantum physics into the spirit realm of mystics, saints, and shamans.

Book preview

Prelude

I woke up flat on my back in the middle of an Illinois cornfield with the night sky a swirl of stars and a vision of the Holy Mother, the Madonna, the Queen of Angels, standing before me. She was dressed in the cerulean robes edged with gold like you see on so many of her images.

She smiled down at me with infinite tenderness and said, Jack Daws, you have been chosen, saved from countless deaths for what is coming. You are my best beloved. I will not let you go into this dark night alone. I will send companions to guide and protect you. In the end they will stand with you before the plutonium gates of Hell. Then, she was gone and I fell back to sleep.

1

I Looked Over Jordan and What Did I See

We crossed the Mississippi into Iowa and were less than a day's ride from Fairfield when we heard the news. I'd been bicycling across country and sleeping rough in corn fields all across Indiana and Illinois and was looking forward to Fairfield and a nice clean motel with hot showers, soft beds and an all-inclusive breakfast. Afterwards, I'd go into town and maybe find out why God sent me there. Only God wasn't playing that waiting game. When would I ever learn?

I'd been cycling since before dawn with Chiselwitz sitting on the handlebars singing every barnyard song from the corn being as high as an elephant's eye to How ya gonna keep em down on the farm after they’ve seen Paree. At the moment, he was doing ’The Farmer in the Dale" mooing, honking, and barking along with it.

I'm not at my best in the morning and could feel a headache coming on, and The Farmer in the Dale was not helping. Chiselwitz may be my guardian angel and look like a sweet little eight-year-old Norman Rockwell, all-American boy but sometimes he’s a pain in the ass.

Suddenly, he turned and looked up at me. Do you know how to make a human being? He asked.

Chiselwitz, I'm not in the mood, I said.

Well do you? he persisted. Do you know how to make a human being?

I shook my head and prayed he’d shut up.

You just add coffee. He grinned. I read that on a bumper sticker. Maybe you should try it. He pointed down the road to where the corn fields thinned out into a small town or what was left of one.

We’d seen lots of places like it scattered across the back roads of the Midwest. They weren't ghost towns, but they were on their way. When the interstates passed them by and the railheads closed down and thousands of family farms got plowed under by predatory banks and corporate agribusiness, the lifeblood of these towns dried up, and what was left got sucked into Wal-Mart superstores in the nearest cities.

We pedaled into the outskirts, past a couple of rusted gasoline pumps shorn of their hoses and standing like postindustrial amputees guarding a deserted filling station. Further in, the houses were run down or abandoned with broken windows, sagging roofs, and the paint blistered and peeling from years of neglect. Main Street was boarded up windows and empty storefronts. Only a cafe and a few other businesses still hung on by their fingernails.

I parked my bike on the sidewalk in front of the cafe and eyed the two pickups parked nose in to the curb. The one was an ancient Toyota with most of its red paint fading into rust and its bed filled with an amalgam of broken aluminum lawn chairs, assorted garden tools, and bags of recyclable cans and bottles. It squatted in the shadow of a pristine white GM Silverado 4x4 behemoth jacked up on over-sized tires and towering over the little Toyota like a pumped-up body builder.

Nobody paid any attention when I stepped inside the cafe and took a seat at an old wooden table facing a beat-up Formica-topped counter that ran down the opposite side of the room until it was cut off by a rough wall of unfinished plywood. They probably didn’t need all that extra space. In fact, it looked like they didn’t need what was left either.

There were only two men, sitting with their backs to me at the counter, drinking coffee. They made an odd couple. The one was rail-thin and wiry, dressed in dirty overalls and a greasy, red John Deer baseball cap with wisps of ash gray hair sticking out from beneath the headband while the other was tall, broad shouldered, with curly black hair, wearing a spotless white cambric shirt, designer jeans, and snakeskin cowboy boots.

They were watching an old color TV that hung on the wall behind the counter. I glanced up at it just as a banner headline rolled across the screen, UNIVERSITY MASSACRE IN FAIRFIELD IOWA.

I closed my eyes. Oh Lord, not Fairfield, I thought.

Hey Dot, turn that up, will you? The big man shouted to an overweight, gray-haired woman sitting by the cash register, doing a crossword.

Up on the screen a newswoman appeared against a still shot of a large gold-domed building. She was talking animatedly, and as Dot pushed up the sound, her voice poured out with breathless, newsroom excitement "… initial reports say perhaps as many as one hundred and fifty may have been slain in a brutal unprovoked act of terrorism against the Maharishi University of Management in Fairfield Iowa.

The university is the home of the Transcendental Meditation movement, and the golden dome where the massacre occurred was filled with men practicing their morning meditations when at approximately eight-thirty a number of unidentified men broke in with explosives and automatic weapons.

She stopped and looked off camera, instinctively touching her ear bud. Then, she nodded. We have an exclusive, live eye-witness account of what happened in the golden dome this morning, she said, her voice ratcheting up with anticipation. Our reporter on the scene, Diane Fineman, has the story. Diane, what can you tell us?

A sleek, sharp featured, black haired woman appeared on screen against a backdrop of milling, screaming people and the flashing blue lights of emergency response vehicles. Just over her shoulder I could see the corner of a gold dome. Diane, can you hear us?

There was a moment of confusion while Fineman fiddled with her ear bud and then looked up and nodded. She lifted an over-sized microphone and said, This is Diane Fineman direct from what is probably the most horrific act of terrorism since the Twin Towers, and CNN is first with an exclusive eye-witness account. Then, she reached off screen and pulled in a tall, thin, balding man dressed in a blood-stained Chicago Bulls sweat shirt. He looked around dazed, uncertain, and obviously in shock.

Excuse me sir, she said, trying to get his attention.

At the sound of her voice, his head jerked around, and he squinted at her as if he was having trouble focusing. What … what is it? he asked in the high, reedy voice of a frightened child.

Can you tell us your name, sir?

Name? he said as if this was a concept he’d never considered before.

The announcer decided to try a more compassionate approach. It’s alright sir, you’re safe now, she commiserated. Just try to tell us what happened this morning.

This morning… he said, his voice trailing off. He stopped and stared directly into the camera. His face was smeared with blood and his eyes had the thousand-yard stare of a trauma ward. Then he blinked, and tears began running down his cheeks. I was meditating, he said as if talking to himself. Meditating... He repeated and stopped as if examining the idea.

Just tell us what happened! Fineman prodded with a raw edge of predatory impatience lashing her voice. So much for compassionate commiseration, I thought. But it did the trick.

Explosions, I heard explosions… he said in a mechanical monotone. There were people screaming, then shooting, automatic weapons. He shook his head slowly. The guy sitting next to me… he stopped and looked directly into the camera with that thousand-yard stare and the tears running down his cheeks. His head exploded, he said, like an egg shell.

He looked down at his bloodstained sweatshirt. And began picking at bits and pieces of gore that suddenly looked a lot like bits of bone and grey matter. They were killing everyone, he muttered to himself and continued to pick at his shirt. Everyone, he repeated as the tears ran down his face.

Hey, what do you think you’re doing! an angry voice shouted, and the screen filled with the back view of an overweight state trooper pushing his way between the victim and the camera. When that didn’t work, his hand shot out to cover the camera lens. Fucking ghouls, he said as he hustled the victim off screen. This guy should be in a hospital, not feeding your corporate ratings!

Suddenly, Chiselwitz said, We gotta go! Now!

I looked around. What?

"Now! he repeated.

Just then, the big man sitting at the counter got up, threw down a couple bills, and slapped the old man on the back. Be seeing you, he said and the old man just cringed and bobbed his head.

The big man turned and strode across the room like a young Clint Eastwood with his dark, curly hair, chiseled features, and six-four build. As he was about to open the door, he paused. His gaze swept the room. For an instant, I stared directly into his eyes and felt like a rabbit caught in the headlights of a high-speed car crash. Instantly, Chiselwitz jumped between us, seven feet tall, dressed in Jade green battle armor, and wielding his Jedi Knight light sabre. Clint looked right through us as if we weren’t there and hurried out the door.

I watched him jump into the Silverado, start it up, and peel away. The truck sounded like a Saturn five rocket on a space shuttle lift-off and left a screaming streak of burnt rubber smoking in its wake.

Holy Mother of God, I whispered as I turned back to Chiselwitz. What was that?

We gotta go now! Chiselwitz repeated.

But I haven’t had my coffee, I protested. I know how stupid that sounds, but after what I just saw, a little bit of stupid was excusable.

You aren’t going to get it here, Chiselwitz said and grabbed me under the arm and frog-marched me out the door.

I pulled my arm away and shouted, What the hell was that all about?

Chiselwitz stood with his back to me scanning the street, and I suddenly realized he was putting himself between me and whatever he thought might be out there. When he does that, it usually means nasty things coming my way from the far side of reality.

That did it! Forget the coffee! I jumped on my bike without further argument and started pedaling down the street as fast as I could. At some point just before we reached the edge of town, Chiselwitz, dressed in his usual little boy avatar, jumped up on the handlebars and sat with his back to me, kicking up his heels and laughing like a lunatic.

What a day! he said through hiccups of laughter, And best of all it’s hardly even started and didn’t even happen!

What do you mean, it didn’t even happen? I shouted angrily. I was still seeing Mr. Meditator picking bone fragments off his sweatshirt and Clint’s eyes burning through me with nuclear holocaust. And stop laughing, you idiot! There’s nothing to laugh at! Didn’t you just drag me out of that diner all dressed up in that Jade green warrior outfit as if we had all the demons of Hell on our heels?

Yeah, wasn’t it a rush!

I shook my head. Sometimes I think you’re seriously deranged.

He turned and gave me a bucktoothed grin. Do you know what time it is? he asked. Oh, never mind! and before I could answer, he reached in his pocket and pulled out a big, gold-plated pocket watch. He flipped it open and held it up by its chain to show me.

I didn’t know they made Mickey Mouse pocket watches, I thought. Then, I remembered who I was dealing with and noticed that Mickey was biting his tongue with a moronic, cross-eyed look of intense concentration on his rat face. The time was 7:10.

Chiselwitz swung the pocket watch back and forth while intoning, The time is 7:10, the time is 7:10, like some freak-show hypnotist. Then on the last swing, he let it go, and the watch sprouted little angel wings and fluttered away behind us. My, how time flies! he deadpanned.

I shrugged. You get used to that sort of thing if you spend any time around my guardian angel. He fancies himself a comedian, God’s own holy fool, and I’d hate to disabuse him. Besides, there was usually a method in his madness, but this time I had no idea what it was, and he wasn’t saying.

Instead, he started singing The Farmer in the Dale again. After the third or fourth Moo! and Quack!, I felt like pushing him off the handlebars and riding over his body. I could almost feel the two satisfying bumps going over.

2

A Question of Time

About a mile beyond the edge of town, Chiselwitz had me turn down an overgrown gravel road to the ruins of a farm house that was nothing but foundation stones and a rotting pile of rubble waiting to be plowed under. He jumped down and I pushed the bike into the shade of an old apple tree at the opposite end of the overgrown farmyard.

Chiselwitz followed me and dropped his little boy avatar in favor of a bearded, dark-skinned, Middle Eastern man dressed in long midnight blue robes. This was not good. He only adopted this avatar when something heavy was going down and God wanted me to do something about it.

He made a polite After you gesture, and I sighed resignedly and sat down beneath the apple tree. I waited while he sat down, straightened his robes, and meticulously smoothed out wrinkles. I recognized stalling when I saw it. Enough! I said, Let’s get this over with. Just tell me the worst!

You got to understand that when I talk to him like this it’s all in my mind, a kind of angelic telepathy. To anyone watching, it probably looks like I just had a brain embolism, sitting there staring blankly at nothing with my mouth hanging half open, sometimes I even drool. I usually try to look down when this is going on so as not to draw unwanted medical attention.

Well? I prodded when he didn’t answer.

Instead, he shook his head and shifted uneasily.

What’s that supposed to mean? I asked. Come on Chiselwitz, talk to me. You saw what I saw, didn’t you?

What did you see? he asked quietly.

What did I see? I saw that Clint Eastwood type had flames for eyes! I shook my head. No, that’s not right. When he looked at me, it was like I saw cities burning, and millions of people screaming and … I threw up my hands unable to express the enormity of horror. It was only a glimpse, I added. Those eyes just passed over me as if I wasn’t there. One thing I do know though, he wasn’t human. He may have been wearing a Clint body but whatever was looking out of those eyes wasn’t human and ... I stopped as I realized what I just said.

And? Chiselwitz prompted.

Aw shit! I said, It was a demon, wasn’t it? I hate demons!

Chiselwitz shook his head. That wasn’t just one of your run-of-the-mill, haunted-house, garden variety demons, he said. That was one of Satan’s own hierarchy.

And what are we supposed to do about that?

Instead of answering he pulled out his old, time-flies pocket watch.

I closed my eyes and groaned. Not that again! I was seriously not in the mood for any more court jester, holy fool, nonsense tricks.

Chiselwitz flipped open the lid and held out the watch. What time is it?

Mickey was still there, staring in cross-eyed concentration, trying to figure it all out. Well? Chiselwitz said.

I shrugged. What did I have to lose? I figured I could still tell time. Seven-forty, I said.

And what time did the attack on the gold dome start?

I had to think about that one. I think the announcer said eight thirty.

Very good, Chiselwitz said as if praising a dimwitted dog who just learned to roll over and play dead. And what does that tell you? he asked and swung the watch back and forth in front of my nose.

At that moment, I really regretted not pushing him off the handlebars and riding over his body when I had the chance.

Well? he prodded.

I don’t know Sherlock, enlighten me! I said irritably. I really needed that cup of coffee.

Lot of wisdom in those bumper stickers, he said, picking up on my thoughts. He was wearing a Sherlock Holmes deer slayer cap that clashed crazily with his Middle Eastern ensemble and made me smile despite myself.

That’s better, he said and flicked the watch back into the palm of his hand. Now, let’s get down to business. According to the TV, the attack on the dome took place at approximately eight thirty this morning, but that’s impossible because according to my watch, and my watch is never wrong, the time now is only 7:42.

So, the announcer got it wrong, I said, doing a slow burn of impatience.

Chiselwitz pursed his lips and shook his head judiciously. "Did you notice the time on the clock on the wall behind the counter in the café?

I shook my head. I hadn’t even noticed there was a clock.

It said 9:10. Chiselwitz said.

Maybe it was wrong! I shouted irritably. I’d had enough of this. Maybe it wasn’t even working! Maybe it’s been stuck at 9:10 for the last twenty years! What has any of this got to do with what we saw?

I suspect that what we saw hasn’t happened yet, Chiselwitz said. Maybe it never will happen. I think maybe we’ve been sent to Fairfield to make sure it doesn’t happen. I think that’s why God showed it to us.

Why the hell couldn’t He have just told us?

Maybe because a picture is worth a thousand words, Chiselwitz suggested. I bet you aren’t going to forget Mister GM Silverado any time soon.

Once again, I felt Clint’s eyes strafe me with hellfire, and a cold shiver ran up my back. God showing me what we were up against? Chiselwitz was right. A picture was worth a thousand