The Armageddon Boy part II: A Very Special Child (standard:fantasy, 1161 words) [2/3] show all parts
Author: Frank N. Stine	Added: Jun 24 2002	Views/Reads: 2648/1875	Part vote: 0.00 (0 votes)
Part 2 of the 'highly' popular Armageddon Boy series.

The Armageddon Boy Part Two: A Very Special Child 

When Mrs. Shephard  returned home to 11 Dandelion Close, the child was
wailing loudly.  All night she and Mr. Shephard tried to find a way to 
stop him crying.  They rocked him in their arms, and in the cot that 
had once been their son's.  They held a feeding bottle to his mouth, 
but this just made him struggle and knock it from their hands.  And on 
the third day, when he had yet to feed and his breath was growing 
shallow, they became very concerned. 

'We need to take him back,' Mr. Shephard suggested from his armchair
where he had been watching the World Cup and trying to listen to it for 
the last three days. 

Mrs. Shephard was horrified at his suggestion. 

'God has graced us with a child,' she said to him, 'and prayer will show
us the way.' 

Mr. Shephard turned up the volume on the television, trying to drown out
the wailing of the child. 

That night, Mrs. Shephard took the boy to her room and prayed.  She was
a Catholic and believed that God would answer her prayers, even if the 
answer was no.  Her bedroom, like most of the other rooms, had crosses 
of different sizes hung on the walls.  And that night, she lit a candle 
beside the child and read from the Bible for many hours, shouting over 
the sounds of the baby.  But the louder she shouted, the harder the 
baby screamed. 

Finally she took a crucifix down from the wall and gently placed it on
the child's chest. 

Then the most unusual thing happened.  The child screamed in a way that
he had not done before.  Almost as if the cross was scalding hot, a 
high-pitched wail serrated the air.  It sounded to Mrs. Shephard like 
the sound of a dog whose tail had been stepped on. 

Quickly she took the cross away.  Immediately the child grew quieter,
but did not become silent.  This gave her the strangest idea: 

She took all forty-seven crucifixes from the walls and hid them in the
cupboard under the stairs.  When she returned to her room, the boy had 
become silent.  Not stopping to wonder what this all meant, she fed him 
the bottle and watched him slowly drift to sleep. 

Having been awake for three full days herself, she lay down next to the
child and placed her hand on his chest so she could check his heart was 
still beating.  And under the flickering orange light of the candle, 
she dozed off. 

*                             *                                     * 

She dreamed she was flying high above the clouds, below her she could
see her house in Dandelion Close, then the hospital she had visited so 
many times in the last few months.  Then she realised it was not her 
flying.  She was on the back of an angel, a large man with wings of the 
finest white plumage.  But he did not even seem to notice she was there 
as he dove towards the treetops of Hyde Park, then rose again into the 
reddening sky. 

The sun was rising somewhere ahead of them, and little cherubs with
curly hair, tried to keep up while plucking their harps.  They were 
giggling happily as they tried in vain to race the angel, and he turned 
and smiled at them with his yellow bill. 

Yellow bill! she wondered. 

Then she realised it was not an angel anymore, it was a bird.  A large
white stork whose wings seemed to go on forever.  But what was most 
unusual about this bird was that it was wearing a hat turned backwards 
with the words 'First Class' displayed in red letters. 

As they soared out over the ocean, and the sun grew ever larger, the
stork turned to her and said: 'You have to get off now, you can't come 


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