XVI – The Tower

This is where they burn the corpses. The redbrick chimney hits the sky like Satan’s gore-caked phallus, jizzing smoke into a weeping sky.
Who is burning?   
Rachel Danver was, for a time, reckoned the most beautiful woman in Europe; Jack Danver was an accomplished violinist who played with several international orchestras; John Danver was a successful businessman and property developer who featured regularly in Rich Lists. 
Flames flickered over the capitals of the West; horses died and children moved through the echelons of crime from theft and thuggery to rape and murder. Rachel Danver’s coke habit ramped up; every socialite worth their Bolivian Marching Powder stuffed cotton up their nose to stem the constant bleeding, and outside their walled districts blood lapped against the kerbstones.
The bells clanged in the steeples, the sirens howled like demented dogs; the Swiss Guards opened fire every day on an army of vagrants and the dispossessed. Jack Danver, barricaded in the Teatro dell’Opera, decided to escape. He found some old work clothes backstage, pulled them on and fled through the sewers. What happened to him next was not pleasant, and involved a great number of rats.
John Danver had lost all his money thanks to vast gambling debts, a ruinous prostitution habit and the crash in the Argentinean copper market. He fled his home, shacked up with a fortune-teller in a squat in Pompano Beach, and by the time the fires started he had led gangs, shot rivals and made his way to the head of the feral Miami communities.
Rachel was killed when her apartment in Paris burned as she lay overdosed on cocaine; John was captured by a rogue military unit and tortured to death. What do these three have in common, besides their parentage? They begged, pleaded, sobbed and wept for death before the end. And their bodies were burned.
The Vatican fell, in the end; Paris burned and Miami slunk into anarchy.
If the cherubim and seraphim kept a tally of prayers, they would have noticed that everybody seemed to be praying for one thing.
Not deliverance; not quite.