Part 5: The Flood

Well, after Enoch left, Methuselah and then Lamech led the people of god. As the planet cooled from creation, it became ever harder to eke out a living up in the mountains, but the valley became downright pleasant. God’s people cried out to him, as they always did over every little thing, arguing that the devil’s people had it better and hadn’t god’s people worked so hard to be righteous and stuff?

So god got to thinking over his espresso, having recently emerged from rehab for his drinking problem that wouldn’t have been a problem if man would just behave, and it finally occurred to him that the bad people were on the bottom and the good people on the top. He could just drown the bad people.

God called in his engineers and they sat down to calculate. They figured out how much water would drown everyone and set about doing that. To preserve life, they designed a boat that was simply gargantuan. They told Noah it needed to be at least six miles long by a mile wide and around three thousand feet high to hold all the animals and food that was going to be embarked.

God had to later admit he was a bit drunk when he told Noah this, but he still thought Noah could have used his brain. Here they were around twenty years into building an ark out of shitty wood, being as there wasn’t any old growth timber up in the mountains suitable to building an ark (redwoods take thousands of years to grow, and creation only happened a few hundred years ago), and the whole project was being conducted by Noah and his sons, and the ark was about 600 times too small. It would barely hold all those who still sort of believed in god.

So, god worried and fretted, and cast about for a plan, but found none. Twenty more years passed and god got more worried until one day Jesus came in unto god and said unto him, 'behold, twenty years ago when you finally realized that idiot Noah was building the ark too small, there were thousands of righteous in the mountains. Lo, now, there are mere hundreds, so many have starved, died of disease or simply moved out to join the devil in the valley. If you just wait a while, there will be few enough they will all fit in the ark.'

And god was so relieved at the plan that he slept well for the first time in a very long time that night. He awoke the next day and went unto Noah, saying unto him, 'I have decided to prolong the time before the flood that more may be saved. Verily, preach unto them of the evils of the valley whilst thy sons assemble the ark.'

Thus did Noah set about preaching to anyone who would listen, having about as much luck as Enoch. Even many up on the mountain lost interest in the idea of waiting for a flood to float this massive boat, and many of them had seen Noah’s simple sons assemble it and were not at all convinced it’d float. Many of them went down into the valley.

As a matter of fact, the more Noah preached, the nuttier he got, working in all sorts of conspiracy theories about the evil in the valley, much of which simply was not so. True, sodomy was tolerated in the valley, but you couldn’t get it accidentally, and if you were not a sodomite you would almost certainly fall to the wiles of one of the women of the valley long before you fell for the men. It certainly was a relief to not have to chase sheep. And, certainly, the only danger to a young woman was to swoon at the sight of the seriously hunky, yet stylishly sophisticated and serenely sensitive men who had attended the devil's classes on how to treat a lady well.

As an historical note, the behavior of sodomy, something god abhors because he sees everything and just is disgusted by having to see that, the behavior lent its name to the city, not, as is commonly assumed, the other way round.

Well, Noah, his wife, his sons and their wives were soon all that was left. The rest of the patriarchs died off and everyone else lost interest in trying to eke out a slow starvation on the increasingly cold mountains, moving to the valleys for warmth and food. Truth be told, Noah’s wife and his sons wives would have left as well but were too ashamed to leave.

Down in the valley, the devil and the scholars felt that god was just bluffing, that there was way too much work invested in this world, and that god would not snuff people simply because they wanted to have a nice life. Boy were they wrong.

When god finally got around to it, after ushering some animals in for show and suspending the rest momentarily in limbo, god rained water for forty days and forty nights. He broke every natural dam. The scholars say there was water under the earth somehow, and he released that. He tore a chunk of ice off a comet and melted that onto the earth for good measure. He covered every single mountain by at least six feet.

Noah’s wife and his sons’ wives were actually feeling pretty good about their choice in husbands at this point, which brings up an odd truth, that religious people are afraid to die. Lack of faith has been god’s biggest problem when it comes to leadership of the fallen race of man, because the devil does not lead; he merely tempts man with a happy life of ease.

Anyway, god scoured the surface of the earth, upheaving a great many forests and burying literally billions of metric tons of detritus that would later become coal for the Christians to use in exploiting the world. God did not realize it at the time, but the energy he was burying at this point would make life so much easier later on that people would come to praise him for the flood, for now they could heat their homes cheaply.

The devil sat in with the people of the plain. So distraught was he with god’s doing that he wished to die with them. The scholars write that the devil feared he might die, but the truth is that death was the dearest thing to him in that dark hour, as all his earthly friends died a slow death by drowning, their accusatory eyes turning glassy as their bodies bloated and began to smell, and the devil forced himself to watch, forced himself to feel, forced himself to partake of their misery he felt he had helped cause. In the pit of his stomach, a revulsion formed that a god would do such a thing, and he resolved to fight god every step of the way. On the fortieth day, he went out seeking Loke.