Matt Hocking had had enough. Snakes in the kitchen, snakes in the lounge room. Even snakes in the bedroom. He had heard the warnings, and it did seem uncanny that the snakes were not attacking. A big black snake had curled up in the bed, beside him, on the first night after the plague began. It didn't move, even when he threw the covers back in angry shock on discovering it the next morning. But there was nothing supernatural about these desert creatures. He had shot several through the head, including the big black, and they died the same as any other animal. He even beat a couple to death with a rake. So no fool warning about these reptiles being from God was going to scare him off. It was time to act.
He strapped two six-shooters to his thighs, and carried a stock whip in his left hand as he headed off to the Department of Peace and Unity in downtown Kalgoorlie, a rural mining town in Western Australia. His neighbour, Cal Linley, was one of them; he was sure of it. Cal had been warning Matt not to kill the snakes, saying God would kill him if he did. And he saw with his own eyes Call giving food to a vagrant earlier in the week. If he wasn't one of them himself, Cal sure as hell was supporting them; and the only way to deal with a snake like that was head on.
The office was quiet, with just two people on duty when Matt arrived.
"You got a report form?" he asked a huge middle-aged woman sitting on a stool behind the counter. It looked like she was doing a crossword puzzle as she leaned her heavy frame on the counter.
"I got someone for you," Matt announced.
"Down there on the end of the counter," the woman replied lazily, pointing to her right. "There are pencils in the box beside the forms."
Matt started filling one in, giving the authorities Calvin's name and address, and details of his suspicions.
Out of the corner of his eye he caught a glimpse of movement on the floor.
The whip flew from his left hand to his right, and with a flick of the wrist, the tiger snake's back was broken, rendering it immobile. Matt swung the whip two more times, breaking the deadly snakes back closer to the head this time, and then crushed its head with the heel of his heavy riding boots.
"Jist gotta let 'em know who's boss," he said, looking up at the fat woman with a grin, and then at her young geeky-looking assistant, who was peeking around a computer on the other side of the counter.
Matt finished the form and then walked with it up to the woman.
"Thank you," she said, as she reached out to accept the piece of paper from Matt.
"Liz, look out!" shouted her assistant. A death adder had been hiding behind the waste paper basket and it lunged at her ankle. In her rush to get off the stool, both the stool and the woman fell to the floor. The death adder struck again. And then once more, before returning to its hiding spot behind the waste basket.
Matt Hocking could not see what was happening behind the counter, but he had a good idea. Stupid bureaucrats, he thought. They've probably never seen a snake in the wild before. Live their whole lives behind a desk, they do.
"Here, you take it," Matt said to the nervous young man as he placed the form on the counter and turned away with callous indifference to the woman's plight.
"No, I don't want it!" screamed the assistant as he debated whether to help his superior or whether to track down the death adder. "I don't want anything to do with it!"
He raced to the woman, but already her breathing had stopped.
"Oh God! What do I do now?" he asked himself, for he didn't really believe in the One whom he had so spontaneously addressed.
He dialled triple 0, reported the incident, and then scooped up a few things from the drawers of his desk. Finally, he grabbed the form that Matt Hocking had just left on the counter, studied the address before stuffing it into his pocket.
"Oh God, let him be one of them," he said, suddenly realising that this time he really was talking to God.
Outside, a small crowd had gathered across the wide main street of downtown Kalgoorlie. Between this newest recruit to the ranks of the Tribulation Saints and the crowd, scattered across the road, lay the dead bodies of three or four snakes, each with their backs cruelly broken. In the middle of the crowd lay the lifeless body of Matt Hocking.