Giants Stormed the Ark While the Rain Came Down Boiling

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The Sentence Spoken Before the Rain

The word came down from before God's face, and it left no room for repair. Every living thing had bent its own kind off its path, and the ruling was plain. This generation would be smitten and swept out from under heaven, and their sons, born into the same rot, were counted with them. "My spirit will not always abide in man," the sentence ran, "for they also are flesh, and their days shall be a hundred and twenty years." The count had run out. The breath that held a man upright began to lift away from the whole world at once.

They were beyond warning by then. Down in the cities the sword had already gone into their own midst, brother cutting down brother until the strong learned to be afraid of the strong, and the fathers stood by and watched the children they had shaped fall in the streets. Heaven had waited a long time on them. Now the sky itself leaned down to finish what their own hands had begun.

The First Drops Came Down Boiling

Then the rain started, and it was wrong from the first drop.

Each drop had been sent through Gehenna (the realm of judgment after death) before it was let fall, driven through the place of burning until it came down not as water but as something nearer to liquid fire. The first man it caught did not have time to run. It raised a welt on his shoulder, then a blister, then it opened him to the bone, and he went down screaming into mud that was already steaming. All across the plain the drops found skin and stripped it.

There was an exactness to it. These were people whose whole sin had been heat, wanting without a wall around it, bodies that reached for whatever they set eyes on and burned through every restraint. So the punishment arrived as heat. As their own fever had inflamed them to every excess, they were scalded now by water made to boil, measure answering measure, the fire they had carried inside them handed back through the clouds.

The Giants Rushed the Timbers

Noah had stood among them for a hundred and twenty years while he cut and pitched the timber, and they had answered every warning with laughter. They were giants, men of enormous stature and strength, and they had done the arithmetic of their own bodies against his flood. If the water rose from above, one of them had told him to his face, it would not climb past their necks. If it broke from below, they would plant their vast feet over the mouths of the springs and dam the deep shut with their heels. His boat was a carpenter's fever dream. They had laughed him back to his workbench.

Now the springs were boiling their heels and the sky was flaying their backs, and the fever dream rode the water in front of them, sealed and dry and full of breathing things. So they went for it. A mob of them threw their whole weight at the hull, clawing along the pitch for a seam, driving their shoulders into the boards to heave the vessel over and spill the eight souls inside it out into the water with everyone else. If they could not float, nothing sealed against the flood would float either.

The Beasts Set at the Door

They had forgotten who else was aboard. Every kind of wild beast had gone up the gangplank ahead of them, two by two, and God had set the fiercest of them at the entrance like a living lock. When the first giants reached the door and hauled at it, the beasts came out of the dark of the doorway and fell on them. Lions took them at the throat. Others were flung back off the hull broken, down into the churn where the hot rain waited. The mob that had scoffed at a foolish old shipwright broke against his door, and those the beasts did not kill were driven back into the rising water to drown with the rest.

The Pounding Heard From Inside

Inside the ark, the family heard all of it through the wood. First the drumming of the boiling rain on the roof, steady and enormous. Then fists on the hull, and shoulders, and voices that had mocked their father now howling against the pitch to be let in. Noah did not open the door. He could not have opened it if he had wanted to, and he did not want to. The pounding went ragged, then thin, then it was only the rain again and the slow tilt of the boat as the water lifted it clear of the ground.

Outside, the giants who had promised to dam the deep with their feet were carried down into the deep instead. The water closed over the last of them and pressed them into the depths of the earth, where they were bound to wait for the day of the great condemnation, when judgment would be executed on everyone who had corrupted his way before the Lord. The plain went smooth and gray and silent. The ark turned slowly on the flood, alone, with the whole of the living world sealed inside it and everything else scalded, drowned, and gone.