2012 by Whitley Strieber

what you hear?”
    ” ‘Course not.”
    “You’re a cop, aren’t you at least curious?”
    “Not at all. Good night.”
    “Matt! MATT!” And suddenly it wasn’t funny. He had to know.
    “Yeah?”
    “Just do it.”
    There was a silence. It extended. Eventually, Matt came back. “Nothing.”
    “You must have heard something.”
    “The faint plink of leaves falling. Possibly, the snuffling of a possum, or it could’ve been a coon.”
    “No church bells?”
    “No, but I did hear something connected with church bells, actually. With belfries. Bats. In your belfry, squeaking like sonembitches.”
    “Somebody is ringing bells down there, my friend.”
    “You wake me up again, I’m gonna come out there and cuff your ass and put you in the tank.”
    “The drunk tank’s rusted closed. You told me so yourself.”
    “For you, I will apply Liquid Wrench.”
    Wiley hung up. He flipped on his police scanner and watched the red LED race across the little screen. The scanner emitted a slight burp of static each time it crossed the county sheriff’s carrier wave.
    Lonely sound. Lonely out here.
    He’d damn well heard those bells.
    Not in this version of Harrow, Kansas, though. If Matt had heard them, he would have gone down into town to check things out. He was too conscientious to dismiss something as odd as that. At best, it was going to be vandals, but at worst-well, maybe a fire, who knew?
    If he could sit down at the laptop-if he dared to do that-he might find out. He turned it on. His hands stirred, moved. His fingers fluttered above the keys. Then they touched them. It was like watching a machine turn on. The hands were not his.
    His fingers pounded keys. Stopped.
    Then he looked down at what he’d written. “The masters of the sky were on the earth in those days-and also afterward-when the sons of God went to the daughters of men and had children by them.”
    Was that a quote from the Bible? Or an ancient Hebrew text, maybe?
    He googled the passage, came up empty.
    But the masters of the sky had been the Nephilim, creatures who had come out of the air to rape and pillage, who had caused the devastating war portrayed in the ancient Indian Vedas, with their stories of sound-guided missiles, flying saucers, and nuclear bombs.
    In legend, the coming of the Nephilim had marked the end of the last age.
    As, indeed, according to the ancient Maya, December 21, 2012, marked the end of this one. The Mayan date 13.0.0.0.0.
    All the new-age gurus were howling that it was going to completely blow the mind of man. Wiley figured it was another Y2K, when the coming of the year 2000 had been expected to cause an outbreak of chaos, but which had actually been a lot of overhyped nonsense.
    When he closed his eyes, it seemed as if the office did not have his desk in it. Instead, there were two recliners with reading lights beside them. Where he kept his little TV, they had a bookcase full of science tomes, archaeology and physics. He saw the books so clearly that he could almost read the titles.
    The bells were now joined by the long wail of a warning siren.
    He found himself uttering a prayer for the other Harrow, and all whom she was losing on this night, right here, right now, December 1, 2012.
    Near him, he could sense movement.
    He tried to open his eyes, couldn’t. Really tried. Could not. He called Brooke, but nothing came out.
    The room in Martin and Lindy’s house became more clear.
    He could see a woman-Lindy. Kind of pretty. Scientific looking. Not gorgeous like Brooke.
    She, also, had heard the bells ringing, and had come in to listen at the window. She was haggard and had a shotgun in her hands-not a good one like his, but rather an old ten-gauge that had seen better days-much better ones.
    Then he noticed that he was typing. The damndest thing, he hadn’t even realized it. His eyes were closed, but he could hear it. Feel it in his fingers.
    He tried to draw his hands away from the keyboard,