Good Omens

Mr. Young checked his watch. “Getting ready for bed, I would assume.”

Tyler grinned, tightly, triumphantly. “I doubt it. I saw him and his little fiends, and that appalling mongrel, not half an hour ago, cycling towards the air base.”

Mr. Young puffed on his pipe.

“You know how strict they are up there,” said Mr. Tyler, in case Mr. Young hadn’t got the message.

“You know what a one your son is for pressing buttons and things,” he added.

Mr. Young took his pipe out of his mouth and examined the stem thoughtfully.

“Hmp,” he said.

“I see,” he said.

“Right,” he said.

And he went inside.

AT EXACTLY THAT SAME MOMENT, four motorbikes swished to a halt a few hundred yards from the main gate. The riders switched off their engines and raised their helmet visors. Well, three of them did.

“I was rather hoping we could crash through the barriers,” said War wistfully.

“That’d only cause trouble,” said Famine.

“Good.”

“Trouble for us, I mean. The power and phone lines must be down, but they’re bound to have generators and they’ll certainly have radio. If someone starts reporting that terrorists have invaded the base then people’ll start acting logically and the whole Plan collapses.”

“Huh.”

WE GO IN, WE DO THE JOB, WE GO OUT, WE LET HUMAN NATURE TAKE ITS COURSE, said Death.

“This isn’t how I imagined it, chaps,” said War. “I haven’t been waiting for thousands of years just to fiddle around with bits of wire. It’s not what you’d call dramatic. Albrecht Dürer didn’t waste his time doing woodcuts of the Four Button-Pressers of the Apocalypse, I do know that.”

“I thought there’d be trumpets,” said Pollution.

“Look at it like this,” said Famine. “It’s just groundwork. We get to do the riding forth afterwards. The proper riding forth. Wings of the storm and so on. You’ve got to be flexible.”

“Weren’t we supposed to meet … someone?” said War.

There was no sound but the metallic noises of cooling motorbike engines.

Then Pollution said, slowly, “You know, I can’t say I imagined it’d be somewhere like this, either. I thought it’d be, well, a big city. Or a big country. New York, perhaps. Or Moscow. Or Armageddon itself.”

There was another pause.

Then War said, “Where is Armageddon, anyway?”

“Funny you should ask,” said Famine. “I’ve always meant to look it up.”

“There’s an Armageddon, Pennsylvania,” said Pollution. “Or maybe it’s Massachusetts, or one of them places. Lots of guys in heavy beards and seriously black hats.”

“Nah,” said Famine. “It’s somewhere in Israel, I think.”

MOUNT CARMEL.

“I thought that was where they grow avocados.”