Pat Robertson Vaporized By Asteroid Apophis

Lexington, Virginia, April 13, 2029 -- Pat Robertson, the aging former televangelist and radical Christian conservative, was struck and killed today by the widely-feared Apophis asteroid in a freak accident veteran observers are terming "an act of God".

God's Green Acres nursing home, Lexington, Virginia (after Apophis asteroid impact)

According to eyewitness reports, Mr. Robertson was eating minced corn and watery soup in the cafeteria of the nursing home he has inhabited for the past 21 years when the 1000-foot diameter asteroid, moving at an estimated 32,000 miles per hour, impacted him directly, vaporizing the doddering demagogue instantly.

Miraculously, no one else was hurt or killed in the incident, although the straggling eyebrows of many elderly witnesses were mildly singed.

Pat Robertson, born March 22, 1930, was the founder of the failed Christian Broadcasting Network and one-time host of a program entitled "The 700 Club", which reached an estimated one million daily viewers early in this century with Christian messages of hope, peace, tolerance, and calls for the assassination of foreign leaders and the persecution of homosexuals.

Pat Robertson was forcibly removed from the program in late 2008 after medical diagnoses determined the televangelist had been suffering from an acute form of senile dementia that led him to believe he exercised a "Godfather-like" control over America, with Pat Robertson in the role of the Godfather, and God in the role of a Luca Brasi-like hit man.

Mr. Robertson passed his declining years, prior to his vaporization by asteroid, in the God's Green Acres nursing home in Lexington, Virginia, Mr. Robertson's birthplace.

"Pat Robertson wasn't what I'd call an easy client," said Jebediah Cobblestone, an attendant at God's Green Acres. "A lot of these nice old folks are real easy to get along with, nice personalities, good senses of humor. With Pat, Mr. Robertson, you couldn't go a day without him calling down the wrath of God on some poor sumbitch for some trifling thing."

"Pat Robertson was the most out-of-control 99-year-old I've ever encountered," confirmed Delouise Farleybarley, a God's Green Acres nursing assistant. "I mean, he was bad enough when he was 85, but lately, huh. At dinner the other night, one of our guests sneezed, and no one said 'God bless you'. No one heard it, they're all deaf, you know? But Pat Robertson saw it. He spat out his creamed peas, pointed his bony finger at every one of the people at that table, including the person who sneezed, and said 'God will smite you, and you, and you, and you'. Mean old coot. Real mean."

Ms. Farleybarley is one of the hundreds of eyewitnesses to the asteroid impact.

"It was the most incredible thing I ever see," she said. "I was helping some of the old folks with their corn when the whole place suddenly just exploded. We didn't hear a thing before it happened, then there was a huge kaboom. The building just disappeared like a kernel of popcorn popping in reverse, and there was this giant ball of flame. All of us were left standing and sitting in the bottom of this huge hole, like five miles across and a mile deep, looking at each other and wondering what the hell happened. The middle of the hole was right where Mr. Robertson had been sitting, but he was just vanished. Nothing left of him but a little smoking scrap of hairpiece and a pile of gray ash. I don't know how the rest of us survived. It's really just a miracle."

Wyvern Shelloch, an amateur astronomer who had been on a hilltop some miles away arranging a telescope for his evening's observations, said "I saw the whole thing. I was looking up into the sky, trying to decide which way to point the scope, when I spotted an enormous lump of flaming rock shooting down from the sky like it was fired from the gun of some omnipotent celestial being or something. I thought right away it might be Apophis, but my understanding was that the asteroid was going to miss the earth by a few thousand miles. Must have been a flaw in the calculations."

"Anyway," he continued, "it screamed down out of the heavens and slammed straight into God's Green Acres like it was on a mission or something. I can't believe everyone survived. It's such a miracle. Oh, except for that poor Pat Robertson."

By Ion Zwitter, Avant News Editor