character :: Thomas Dixon
Thomas had everything he wanted: a beautiful wife, a devoted church, a steady job and an education that would pay itself off in under 15 years at minimum interest. Financially, he had it all figured out: which was important to an accountant. They had purchased their own home, and the prospect of children was on the horizon. Just one problem: Thomas wanted to vomit every time he saw his wife naked. There's just something troublesome about being a closeted gay male in this society; if the conversion therapy didn't get you, something else inevitably did. Thomas knew it, everyone with a brain knew it. Behind the white picket fence, the polite smiles on Sunday morning, and the neatly pressed slacks - serious trouble was brewing.
Thomas woke up to a pounding in his head the morning it started raining fire: chaos in the streets. Sirens were blaring, the roof of his house was already beginning to smolder, and his wife was nowhere to be found. Smoke assaulted his nose, his eyes watered with the pain from his migraine, and right near the foot of his bed a cat was yowling. His next thought, which should have been of his wife, were instead of his own survival: he made a mad dash for the closet to grab the lockbox, a quick swipe at his bedside table where he kept his Treximet, and lastly a grab at his best friend Bishop (who rewarded his rescue with ten claws digging into his arms).
As it turned out...yeah, he was right all along. The end of the world was here, and guess who was left behind? God saw right through the ruse that fooled his mother, father, brother and in-laws, and now Thomas had to answer for his sins with his life. As Thomas crouched in the basement of a burned business downtown, Hell's army marched down the street shooting or stabbing what survivors hadn't been burned to death.
Thomas woke with a start after Bishop struggled to remove himself from the man's grip after having held him close and safe all night. Was this the world? Thomas looked around at the eerie scene, twisted buildings surrounded by rotting corpses. It had been ten long years since he'd done it...but a sole carton of cigarettes in his lockbox called his name. Lighting one up and taking a slow look around as he inhaled (it burned, but so did the air at this point), Thomas took inventory of what he had left. Six boxes of unlabeled powders and two vials of liquid, two thousand dollars in one dollar bills, a couple dozen of super-strength painkillers, a can of catfood, 199 Marlboros, and one pissed off looking cat.
mixed with blood, and they were thrown to the earth
a third of the earth, a third of the trees,
and all the green grass was burned up.
- Revelations 8:7
