Buck rose slowly, suddenly aware of what the roller-coaster ride through the earthquake had done to his joints and muscles. He surveyed the damage to his vehicle. Though it had rolled and been hit from all sides, it appeared remarkably roadworthy. The driver’s-side door was jammed, the windshield in gummy pieces throughout the interior, and the rear seat had broken away from the floor on one side. One tire had been slashed to the steel belts but looked strong and held air.
Where were Buck’s phone and laptop? He had set them on the front seat. He hoped against hope neither had flown out in the mayhem. Buck opened the passenger door and peered onto the floor of the front seat. Nothing. He looked under the rear seats, all the way to the back. In a corner, open and with one screen hinge cracked, was his laptop.
Buck found his phone in a door well. He didn’t expect to be able to get through to anyone, with all the damage to cell towers (and everything else above ground). He switched it on, and it went through a self-test and showed zero range. Still, he had to try. He dialed Loretta’s home. He didn’t even get a malfunction message from the phone company. The same happened when he dialed the church, then Tsion’s shelter. As if playing a cruel joke, the phone made noises as if trying to get through. Then, nothing.
Buck’s landmarks were gone. He was grateful the Range Rover had a built-in compass. Even the church seemed twisted from its normal perspective on the corner. Poles and lines and traffic lights were down, buildings flattened, trees uprooted, fences strewn about.
Buck made sure the Range Rover was in four-wheel drive. He could barely travel twenty feet before having to punch the car over some rise. He kept his eyes peeled to avoid anything that might further damage the Rover—it might have to last him through the end of the Tribulation. The best he could figure, that was still more than five years away.
As Buck rolled over chunks of asphalt and concrete where the street once lay, he glanced again at the vestiges of New Hope Village Church. Half the building was underground. But that one section of pews, which had once faced west, now faced north and glistened in the sun. The entire sanctuary floor appeared to have turned ninety degrees.
As he passed the church, he stopped and stared. A shaft of light appeared between each pair of pews in the ten-pew section except in one spot. There something blocked Buck’s view. He threw the Rover into reverse and carefully backed up. On the floor in front of one of those pews were the bottoms of a pair of tennis shoes, toes pointing up. Buck wanted, above all, to get to Loretta’s and search for Chloe, but he could not leave someone lying in the debris. Was it possible someone had survived?
He set the brake and scrambled over the passenger seat and out the door, recklessly trotting through stuff that could slice through his shoes. He wanted to be practical, but there was no time for that. Buck lost his footing ten feet from those tennis shoes and pitched face forward. He took the brunt of the fall on his palms and chest.
He pulled himself up and knelt next to the tennis shoes, which were attached to a body. Thin legs in dark blue jeans led to narrow hips. From the waist up, the small body was hidden under the pew. The right hand was tucked underneath, the left lay open and limp. Buck found no pulse, but he noticed the hand was broad and bony, the third finger bearing a man’s wedding band. Buck slipped it off, assuming a surviving wife might want it.
Buck grabbed the belt buckle and dragged the body from under the bench. When the head slid into view, Buck turned away. He had recognized Donny Moore’s blond coloring only from his eyebrows. The rest of his hair, even his sideburns, was encrusted with blood.
Buck didn’t know what to do in the face of the dead and dying at a time like this. Where would anyone begin disposing of millions of corpses all over the world? Buck gently pushed the body back under the pew but was stopped by an obstruction. He reached underneath and found Donny’s beat-up, hard-sided briefcase. Buck tried the latches, but combination locks had been set. He lugged the briefcase back to the Range Rover and tried again to find his bearings. He was a scant four blocks from Loretta’s, but could he even find the street?
Rayford was encouraged to see movement in the distance at Baghdad Airport. He saw more wreckage and carnage on the ground than people scurrying about, but at least not all had been lost.
A small, dark figure with a strange gait appeared on the horizon. Rayford watched, fascinated, as the image materialized into a stocky, middle-aged Asian in a business suit. The man walked directly toward Rayford, who waited expectantly, wondering if he could help. But as the man drew near, Rayford realized he was not aware of his surroundings. He wore a wing-tipped dress shoe on one foot with only a sock sliding down the ankle of the other. His suit coat was buttoned, but his tie hung outside it. His left hand dripped blood. His hair was mussed, yet his glasses appeared to have been untouched by whatever he had endured.
“Are you all right?” Rayford asked. The man ignored him. “Can I help you?”
The man limped past, mumbling in his own tongue. Rayford turned to call him back, and the man became a silhouette in the orange sun. There was nothing in that direction but the Tigris River. “Wait!” Rayford called after him. “Come back! Let me help you!”
The man ignored him, and Rayford dialed Mac again. “Let me talk to Carpathia,” he said.
“Sure,” Mac said. “We’re set on that meeting tonight, right?”
“Right, now let me talk to him.”
“I mean our personal meeting, right?”
“Yes! I don’t know what you want, but yes, I get the point. Now I need to talk to Carpathia.”
“OK, sorry. Here he is.”
“Change your mind, Captain Steele?” Carpathia said.
“Hardly. Listen, do you know Asian languages?”
“Some. Why?”
“What does this mean?” he asked, repeating what the man had said.
“That is easy,” Carpathia said. “It means, ‘You cannot help me. Leave me alone.’”
“Bring Mac back around, would you? This man is going to die of exposure.”
“I thought you were looking for your wife.”
“I can’t leave a man to wander to his death.”
“Millions are dead and dying. You cannot save all of them.”
“So you’re going to let this man die?”
“I do not see him, Captain Steele. If you think you can save him, be my guest. I do not mean to be cold, but I have the whole world at heart just now.”
Rayford slapped his phone shut and hurried back to the lurching, mumbling man. As he drew near, Rayford was horrified to see why his gait was so strange and why he trailed a river of blood. He had been impaled by a gleaming white chunk of metal, apparently some piece of a fuselage. Why he was still alive, how he survived or climbed out, Rayford couldn’t imagine. The shard was embedded from his hip to the back of his head. It had to have missed vital organs by centimeters.
Rayford touched the man’s shoulder, causing him to wrench away. He sat heavily, and with a huge sigh toppled slowly in the sand and breathed his last. Rayford checked for a pulse, not surprised to find none. Overcome, he turned his back and knelt in the dirt. Sobs wracked his body.
Rayford raised his hands to the sky. “Why, God? Why do I have to see this? Why send someone across my path I can’t even help? Spare Chloe and Buck! Please keep Amanda alive for me! I know I don’t deserve anything, but I can’t go on without her!”
Usually Buck drove two blocks south and two east from the church to Loretta’s. But now there were no more blocks. No sidewalks, no streets, no intersections. For as far as Buck could see, every house in every neighborhood had been leveled. Could it have been this bad all over the world? Tsion taught that a quarter of the world’s population would fall victim to the wrath of the Lamb. But Buck would be surprised if even a quarter of the population of Mt. Prospect was still alive.
He lined up the Range Rover on a southeastern course. A few degrees above the horizon the day was as beautiful as any Buck could remember. The sky,
where not interrupted by smoke and dust, was baby blue. No clouds. Bright sun.
Geysers shot skyward where fire hydrants had ruptured. A woman crawled out from the wreckage of her home, a bloody stump at her shoulder where her arm had been. She screamed at Buck, “Kill me! Kill me!”
He shouted, “No!” and leaped from the Rover as she bent and grabbed a chunk of glass from a broken window and dragged it across her neck. Buck continued to yell as he sprinted to her. He only hoped she was too weak to do anything but superficial damage to her neck, and he prayed she would miss her carotid artery.
He was within a few feet of her when she stared, startled. The glass broke and tinkled to the ground. She stepped back and tripped, her head smacking loudly on a chunk of concrete. Immediately the blood stopped pumping from her exposed arteries. Her eyes were lifeless as Buck forced her jaw open and covered her mouth with his. Buck blew air into her throat, making her chest rise and her blood trickle, but it was futile.
Buck looked around, wondering whether to try to cover her. Across the way an elderly man stood at the edge of a crater and seemed to will himself to tumble into it. Buck could take no more. Was God preparing him for the likelihood that Chloe had not survived?
He wearily climbed back into the Range Rover, deciding he absolutely could not stop and help anyone else who did not appear to really want it. Everywhere he looked he saw devastation, fire, water, and blood.
Against his better judgment, Rayford left the dead man in the desert sand. What would he do when he saw others in various states of demise? How could Carpathia ignore this? Had he not a shred of humanity? Mac would have stayed and helped.
Rayford despaired of seeing Amanda alive again, and though he would search with all that was in him, he already wished he had arranged an earlier rendezvous with Mac. He’d seen awful things in his life, but the carnage at this airport was going to top them all. A shelter, even the Antichrist’s, sounded better than this.
CHAPTER 2
Buck had covered disasters, but as a journalist he had not felt guilty about ignoring the dying. Normally, by the time he arrived on a scene, medical personnel were usually in place. There was nothing he could do but stay out of the way. He had taken pride in not forcing his way into situations that would make things more difficult for emergency workers.
But now it was just him. Sounds of sirens told him others were at work somewhere, but surely there were too few rescuers to go around. He could work twenty-four hours finding barely breathing survivors, but he would not make a dent in the magnitude of this disaster. Someone else might ignore Chloe to get to his own loved one. Those who had somehow escaped with their lives could hope only that they had their own hero, fighting the odds to get to them.
Buck had never believed in extrasensory perception or telepathy, even before he had become a believer in Christ. Yet now he felt such a deep longing for Chloe, such a desperate grief at even the prospect of losing her, that he felt as if his love oozed from every pore. How could she not know he was thinking of her, praying for her, trying to get to her at all cost?
Having kept his eyes straight ahead as despairing, wounded people waved or screamed out to him, Buck bounced to a dusty stop. A couple of blocks east of the main drag was some semblance of recognizable geography. Nothing looked like it had before, but ribbons of road, gouged up by the churning earth, lay sideways in roughly the same configuration they had before. The pavement of Loretta’s street now stood vertically, blocking the view of what was left of the homes. Buck scrambled from his car and climbed atop the asphalt wall. He found the upturned street about four feet thick with a bed of gravel and sand on its other side. He reached up and over and dug his fingers into the soft part, hanging there and staring at Loretta’s block.
Four stately homes had stood in that section, Loretta’s the second from the right. The entire block looked like some child’s box of toys that had been shaken and tossed to the ground. The home directly in front of Buck, larger even than Loretta’s, had been knocked back off its foundation, flipped onto its front, and collapsed. The roof had toppled off upside down in one piece, apparently when the house hit the ground. Buck could see the rafters, as he would have had he been in the attic. All four walls of the house lay flat, flooring strewn about. In two places, Buck saw lifeless hands at the ends of stiff arms poking through the debris.
A towering tree, more than four feet in diameter, had been uprooted and had crashed into the basement. Two feet of water lay on the cement floor, and the water level was slowly rising. Strangely, what appeared to be a guest room in the northeast corner of the cellar looked unmolested, neat and tidy. It would soon be under water.
Buck forced himself to look at the next house, Loretta’s. He and Chloe had not lived there long, but he knew it well. The house, now barely recognizable, seemed to have been lifted off the ground and slammed down in place, causing the roof to split in two and settle over the giant box of sticks. The roofline, all the way around, was now about four feet off the ground. Three massive trees in the front yard had fallen toward the street, angled toward each other, branches intertwined, as if three swordsmen had touched their blades together.
Between the two destroyed houses stood a small metal shed that, while pitched at an angle, had nonsensically escaped serious damage. How could an earthquake shake, rattle, and roll a pair of five-bedroom, two-story homes into oblivion and leave untouched a tiny utility shed? Buck could only surmise that the structure was so flexible it did not snap when the earth rolled beneath it.
Loretta’s home had shrunk flat where it sat, leaving her backyard empty and bare. All this, Buck realized, had happened in seconds.
A fire truck with makeshift bullhorns on the back rolled slowly into view behind Buck. As he hung on that vertical stretch of pavement, he heard: “Stay out of your homes! Do not return to your homes! If you need help, get to an open area where we can find you!”
A half-dozen police officers and firefighters rode the giant ladder truck. A uniformed cop leaned out the window. “You all right there, buddy?”
“I’m all right!” Buck hollered.
“That your vehicle?”
“Yes!”
“We could sure use it in the relief effort!”
“I’ve got people I’m trying to dig out!” Buck said.
The cop nodded. “Don’t be trying to get into any of these homes!”
Buck let go and slid to the ground. He walked toward the fire truck as it slowed to a stop. “I heard the announcement, but what are you guys talking about?”
“We’re worried about looters. But we’re also worried about danger. These places are hardly stable.”
“Obviously!” Buck said. “But looters? You are the only healthy people I’ve seen. There’s nothing of value left, and where would somebody take anything if they found it?”
“We’re just doing what we’re told, sir. Don’t try to go in any of the homes, OK?”
“Of course I will! I’m gonna be digging through that house to find out if somebody I know and love is still alive.”
“Trust me, pal, you’re not going to find survivors on this street. Stay out of there.”
“Are you gonna arrest me? Do you have a jail still standing?”
The cop turned to the fireman driving. Buck wanted an answer. Apparently, the cop was more levelheaded than he was, because they slowly rolled away. Buck scaled the wall of pavement and slid down the other side, covering his entire front with mud. He tried wiping it off, but it stuck between his fingers. He slapped at his pants to get the bulk of it off his hands, then hurried between the fallen trees to the front of the fractured house.
It seemed to Rayford that the closer he got to the Baghdad airport, the less he could see. Great fissures had swallowed every inch of runway in all directions, pushing mounds of dirt and sand several feet into the air, blocking a view of the terminal. As Rayford made his way through, he could barely breathe. Two jumbo jets—one a 747 and the other a DC-10, apparently fu
lly loaded and in line for takeoff on an east-west runway—appeared to have been in tandem before the earthquake slammed them together and ripped them apart. The result was piles of lifeless bodies. He couldn’t imagine the force of a collision that would kill so many without a fire.
From a massive ditch on the far side of the terminal, at least a quarter mile from where Rayford stood, a line of survivors clawed their way to the surface from another swallowed aircraft. Black smoke billowed from deep in the earth, and Rayford knew if he was close enough he could hear the screams of survivors not strong enough to climb out. Of those who emerged, some ran from the scene, while most, like the Asian, staggered trancelike through the desert.
The terminal itself, formerly a structure of steel and wood and glass, had not only been knocked flat, but it had also been shaken as a prospector would sift sand through a screen. The pieces were spread so widely that none of the piles stood higher than two feet. Hundreds of bodies lay in various states of repose. Rayford felt as if he were in hell.
He knew what he was looking for. Amanda’s scheduled flight had been on a Pan-Continental 747, the airline and equipment he used to fly. It would not have surprised him if she were on one of the very aircraft he had once piloted. It would have been scheduled to land south to north on the big runway.
If the earthquake occurred with the plane in the air, the pilot would have tried to stay airborne until it was over, then looked for a flat patch of ground to put down. If it occurred at any time after landing, the plane could be anywhere on that strip, which was now fully underground and covered with sand. It was a huge, long runway, but surely if a plane was buried there, Rayford ought to be able to sight it before the sun went down.