Apocalypse Crucible (27 page)

Delroy tried to scream but couldn’t. No one had told them that Terrence hadn’t come back whole, only that his wounds had rendered viewing impossible.

“The military didn’t tell you,” the thing hissed in Delroy’s ear.

“Didn’t get all the parts back. Couldn’t find them.”

Delroy wanted to escape but couldn’t.

“What is that, Preacher? When someone willingly doesn’t tell you something they know you would want to know? Lying by omission, right?”

Horror gripped Delroy as fiercely as the creature that held him.

“But it gets even worse,” the thing said gleefully. “Your son came back missing a few parts and he didn’t make it to heaven, but the worst thing of all is that he
knows
he’s lying in his grave.”

Even as the creature’s words registered in Delroy’s mind, mixing with his silent screams, Terrence opened his left eye. The other eye was a burned-out pit.

“Dad?” Terrence croaked. He tried to rise but could only move a few inches. “Dad!” His ruined face filled with panic. “Dad, get me out of here!” He pounded his fist against the top of the coffin. The rapidfire thumps filled Delroy’s ears. “Dad! Dad, help me!”

“Are you going to leave him there?” the creature asked over Terrence’s screams. “Are you going to leave him trapped, Preacher? Or are you going to free him?”

In the next instant the light inside the coffin dimmed. Delroy felt water and mud all around his face. He arched his back and rose, lifting his face clear of the water pooled at the bottom of the grave.

His breath came back to him in a rush. Terrified, he pushed himself out of the grave, swinging his body around and grabbing for the flashlight that remained at the grave’s edge. Mud caked his face and burned one eye.

He aimed the flashlight at the bottom of the hole where the creature had pulled him under. The beam reflected in the dark water that shimmied as it settled. There was no hole like he thought there would be.

“That’s impossible,” Delroy said, hoping that it truly was. Still, he couldn’t shut out the vision of Terrence trapped in the coffin under the muddy earth.

“Are you going to leave him trapped, Preacher?”
The creature’s words taunted Delroy, even from his memory.

The creature was gone. Or at least it was in hiding for now.

Delroy listened. He heard pounding, but he told himself that it was his heart, not his dead son’s fist slamming against the coffin top.

Breathing hoarsely, unable to calm down, Delroy played his beam over the cemetery grounds and spotted the shovel where he had dropped it during the fight with the creature. On his third attempt, Delroy got his feet under him and lurched out of the hole. He grabbed the shovel and headed back to the grave. He started to clamber back down, unnerved by everything he had experienced.

“Son.”

Delroy heard his father’s voice. He froze and looked at his father’s grave.
He’s not there. If anybody made it to heaven, my daddy did. That was just the wind. That’s all. Just the wind.
He returned his attention to Terrence’s grave. The image of his dead son—
wounded, God, he’s only wounded
—trapped in his grave filled Delroy’s mind. He felt compelled to start digging. He lifted the shovel.

“One thing you always gotta remember, Son. Satan, why, he was made for lyin’. He’s got his powers, terrible powers to do many things, but none of ‘em are as strong as his lies. Because when Satan lies to you, it’s gonna be when you most want to believe him. Nothin’ he’s gonna tell you ever gonna be the truth. See, he weaves lies outta your own hopes, fears, an’ dreams, outta what you think you saw an’ what you think you want to see. That’s how he works. That’s how he always works.”

The words weren’t new. Delroy remembered them from a conversation he’d had with his father when he was nine.

Delroy made himself look at the grave and reason things through.

There’s no way Terrence is down there. I know my son. He was a good boy. He went to church and he honored the Ten Commandments.
But at the same time he realized that Terrence might not have been a true believer. No man could ever really know another’s heart.

Captain Mark Falkirk’s warning about “pretty good Christians,” people who led good lives but still didn’t challenge themselves to fully trust and believe, echoed inside Delroy’s head. Was that what Terrence had been? A pretty good Christian? Was that what Delroy had been, too? What happened to those who died without ever truly believing, when God raptured the world? Were they left behind like Delroy, but remained dead and buried deep in the cold, hard ground?

Delroy’s heart ached. He didn’t know, and that was the worst of it.

No,
he amended quickly as the rain continued to fall from the black sky,
the worst of it would be if Terrence really was trapped down there.
He closed his eyes, feeling the pain that throbbed through his body from the beating he’d taken. He fully expected the creature to return and finish what it had started.

But it didn’t.

Weary and scared, feeling bereft and abandoned, Delroy dropped to his knees at the foot of his son’s grave with the shovel in his fists.

He bent his head to shield his face from the cold rain and told himself he was going to pray. Only he couldn’t find the words.

He knelt in the night only a few feet from where his child lay buried and reminded himself over and over again that the thumps hammering his eardrums were his heartbeats and not the sound of his son’s fist striking the coffin lid.

12

United States of America
Fort Benning, Georgia
Local Time 2234 Hours

Megan sat in the hospital waiting room between two MPs that Corporal Kerby had assigned to accompany her after they had left the Hollister home. Kerby hadn’t said that she was under arrest, but the way the MPs offered to get her coffee from the break area and followed her to the bathroom, dealing with the uncomfortable situation of her doing something they couldn’t do for her in a place they couldn’t go by standing guard over the ladies’ loo, made it clear that though she wasn’t technically under arrest she was at least being closely supervised.

She didn’t let the presence of the two young MPs bother her. Other MPs stood guard in the base hospital so she felt she almost blended in. The disappearances brought out full-blown cases of panic and paranoia as the people left behind tried to figure out what they were supposed to do. A quartet of young men sat quietly talking, each of them with a Bible in hand. One of the major concerns everyone had was that the disappearances would start again, maybe taking just as many people.

Hoarse screams shattered the steady undercurrent of whispering voices as a straitjacketed man was wheeled through the room on a gurney. Three orderlies and a nurse accompanied the screaming man. All of them looked worn-out.

General Amos Braddock, the base commander, had encouraged the staff to sleep in the hospital and have their families come visit them. The hospital staff shored up their diminished personnel with men and women on base, including the teens who were holding their own emotionally.

People sat in the waiting room to find out about friends and loved ones who had gotten injured when cars and trucks had gone out of control and airplanes had dropped from the sky. A number of casualties and losses had occurred at the post’s airfield. Thankfully the disappearances had happened late at night or more aircraft would have fallen.

The gurney slammed through the double doors on the other side of the room. The man’s screams faded as the doors closed and the orderlies wheeled him farther away.

“Man,” one of the MPs whispered to the other one, “wouldn’t want to be that guy.”

“Wouldn’t want to be one of the guys Kerby had with him tonight, either,” the other whispered back. “With that girl getting shot, they’re going to catch some serious—” He stopped speaking.

Megan felt their gazes on her as they realized they’d spoken without thinking. She didn’t look at them, didn’t give any indication she had heard the comments. There was no sense in all of them being uncomfortable.

Televisions hung from swivel mounts in two corners of the room. The blue-white ghostly reflections of FOX News on one set and CNN on the other hung in the windows in front of Megan. She didn’t want to watch because the stories that broke in the media seemed never to end.

Mostly the coverage consisted of canned footage of horrible crashes in huge metropolitan areas, passenger jets lying in flames in fields or across highways or buried in cities. The wreckage continued along major harbor areas in San Francisco, New York, New Orleans, Seattle, and other ports as suddenly unmanned ships crashed into bridges, docks, and other ships. The chaos and destruction never relented. Riots added fuel to the fire in several areas. Even Columbus, the city nearest the post, knew unrest and violence. Local television stations covered that, though few news teams ventured out into the hardest-hit areas.

The reporters sought out interviews with witnesses now. A steady parade of frightened people flashed across the screens, each with his or her own story of personal tragedy and loss. Even veteran politicians had trouble keeping their emotions together when they backed the president’s stance that everything was under control.

That was a lie, Megan knew, but it was a lie that a lot of people would want to believe. “No, it’s not going to hurt,” was the biggest lie of all, followed by “Everything’s going to be all right.” She wanted to scream.
Lie to me. Make me feel better.
Nothing was ever going to be the same again. She felt that. Everyone could. Not many were ready to deal with it, though. She’d thought she was prepared, even after losing Chris, until Leslie had shot herself.

On one of the television screens, CNN covered the press releases given by President Fitzhugh regarding the no-holds-barred investigation into the worldwide disappearances as well as Nicolae Carpathia’s junket to New York City to address the United Nations in a few days. No one, it seemed, yet knew why the Romanian president would make the trip now.

Despite the cold terror that she held locked up inside herself with iron control, Megan couldn’t help but pay attention to Carpathia. Over the past few days, the man had gained increased presence in the media, becoming linked more and more to the effort to recover from the disappearances. Nothing was said about what shape that recovery was going to take.

Carpathia was a youthful-looking man, appearing slightly younger than his early thirties. Cameras were generous to him. His blond hair looked like spun gold when it caught the light. No one knew exactly why Carpathia was coming to the U.S. to speak to the U.N., or why President Fitzhugh worked so hard to make the man feel invited.

Still, the few times that Megan had caught prerecorded interviews with the Romanian president, she had noticed the calm presence Carpathia seemed to exude. He seemed like a man who could get things done, a man who’d never known defeat, but she had no idea what his plans were. But whatever they were, they would have no impact on her life at the moment.

Somewhere in the hospital, Leslie Hollister fought for her life. The image of the young girl lying so slack and bloody on her bedroom floor never left Megan’s mind. After making certain that Megan wasn’t hurt, one of the hospital orderlies had given her a set of green scrubs and asked her to change clothes, telling her she couldn’t sit in the waiting room as bloody as she was. No one wanted the other occupants more upset than they already were.

Leslie’s blood had soaked into Megan’s underwear, her skin, and her hair. Clotted and dry now, the blood felt raspy against her skin. Even repeated washings in the bathroom hadn’t removed the stains. More blood etched her nails, dug in deep now where she wouldn’t be able to reach it without a cuticle brush. The smell of blood lingered on every breath she drew.

Megan blinked tears from her eyes and let out a long, low breath that attracted the attention of the MPs assigned to her. She ignored them and concentrated on the televisions.

On the other set, FOX News recapped the Syrian attack on Sanliurfa, using footage from OneWorld NewsNet. The icon of the soldier’s silhouette carrying another soldier caught her eye and made her think of Goose.

On the screen a photojournalist’s camera captured the image of a Syrian tank rolling through the wreckage of a street. The cameraman was evidently on a rooftop because the camera looked down onto the street. A group of soldiers stepped around the side of a building and fired a shoulder-mounted weapon at the tank. When the projectile hit the tank, red flames leapt up. A moment later, a heavily armed attack helicopter swung into view and opened up with its rocket pods, reducing the tank to a rolling pile of flaming wreckage. No one inside the vehicle could have survived those blasts.

Those watching the television set in the waiting room viewed in mute horror.

Casualties among the military groups, Megan understood from the earlier story on the radio on the way here from the Hollister home, ran high in Sanliurfa. Communications within the beleaguered city had suffered again as a result.

Megan prayed for Goose’s safety. But even as she did so, she felt even more uncertain whether the effort was worth the time it took. God, she felt, hadn’t shown up in Leslie Hollister’s room tonight. Guilt ripped through her for thinking like that, but she thought it anyway. If God had taken an interest there, she hadn’t seen it.