When the clock struck midnight on December 12th, 2012, a baby’s cry could be heard among the low hum of machinery reverberating throughout the Saintsbury, England nuclear power plant. Just one of thousands of plants built in the past year, popping up like weeds all over the world.
Marigold Lovelace had been an electrician at the Saintsbury power plant until it all went down. At this particular point in time, she was contemplating suicide. It would’ve been easy, too. Being an electrician at a power plant, she had access to all sorts of dangerous equipment that could’ve ended her life right then and there, had she chosen to. She wasn’t even supposed to be at work at that moment, but she’d gotten an ominous call from her boss earlier that night calling her in to fix the small light in his office. If you were to ask her to recount the specifics of that call, she wouldn’t be able to. Largely due to her now being dead.
Regardless, Marigold was contemplating ending her life. But how she would go about it, that was the question. Climb to the top of the reactor and jump? Maybe. Take a shot of radioactive waste? Possibly. Or perhaps the ever-iconic fork-in-outlet trick. Would be a fitting demise for an electrician. Decisions, decisions.
It was then that she had heard the wailing. She stood up from her boss’ brown leather swivel chair (which she was not supposed to be sitting in, mind you), and cracked open the door into the hallway connecting the boss’ office to the rest of the plant.
It was long, narrow, and led straight to the part of the plant that the workers who actually did things usually spent their days. The lights flickered, and the distant baby’s crying seemed to flicker with them. Marigold sighed heavily and began her trek down the hall. The brownish-yellow floor tiles were faintly sticky with an unidentified grimy residue. Marigold began to walk faster, feeling an ever-so-slight sense of impending doom.
The feeling consumed her, mind and body, until she was power walking toward the screaming almost unconsciously. None of her senses seemed fully present, so it was a mystery as to how she found the source at all. But find it, she did.
It was, as you may have guessed, an infant child. Only this infant child was covered in a green, glowing sheen of radioactive liquid waste, where it came from, she had no idea. Marigold probably shouldn’t have touched it, but she was not in her right mind right then and there. So, she picked it up with her bare hands and brought it to the closest bathroom to wash it off.
The waste slipped away to reveal a strawberry-blond baby boy. The sclerae of his eyes were light yellow, and his irises were bright green. And, from what Marigold could tell by examining the bumps faintly protruding from his gums, he would one day sprout a mouth of sharp, pointed teeth.
Marigold hurried out of the power plant with the boy wrapped in her coat and caught the angry vermilion sky of night giving way to the sickly lime green of day.
The boy would grow up to be one Jude Lovelace. Marigold’s son, yes, but the Antichrist of Becquerel’s Armageddon first and foremost. And she was sure he was, because his first word was not “mama” or “dada” or anything of the sort. In fact, there were multiple words. He uttered them a little over a month after Marigold found him, around the time that all the world’s seas and oceans transformed into giant puddles of the same strange green liquid he’d been found covered in. Baby Jude’s first words had been as follows:
“And with my arrival,
I bring the end.
I bring betrayal.
And most wonderfully of all,
I bring Rot.
Decay.
Destruction.
I bring all of hell with me,
And Earth will welcome
Becquerel’s Armageddon.”
At this, Marigold stared at her son with a look that said, “Do we have to do this right now???”
But the answer was, of course, “Yes.” And so, Marigold quit her job as an electrician and embraced her new life, as the mother figure to the Antichrist in a world that no longer needed order. And it wasn’t all bad, at least for a while. She would feed Jude the pure radium he would manage to dig up around town like a dog digging up bones. She would read him bedtime stories of incompetent heroes who fell like flies at the sheer will of the villains’ evil. She would support and encourage Jude’s homicidal tendencies, even going as far as to help him hide bodies in his closet when concerned parents came asking about their children.
All in all, she loved her son. And he pretended to love her, so as to not complicate their dynamic, but he could not actually love her.
Because Jude Lovelace, Antichrist of Becquerel’s Armageddon, was just that.
Loveless.
Killian lives in Quebec and enjoys both writing and reading vaguely comedic stories with fun worldbuilding. He wants to write and direct movies in the future.