Revealing Revelations (13 page)

I didn’t ask any questions as I set my weapon down beside him and climbed on top of the elevator. I saw a surveillance camera mounted on a two foot high sturdy rod with a gray chord spiraling from its base up around to the rear of the camera. “Okay, now what?” I ask the little Einstein.

“Do you think it is able see the entire roof from its current position?” he asks me as I continue to hear sparks pop out from the box as he pokes around.

“Yeah!”

“Okay, look under the camera and push the reset button. It’s the only button under there, so you can’t miss it.” He instructs me.

I look under the camera and see a single button, I push it in and a red light comes on for a few seconds and then turns green. “I did it,” I tell Jessie. I hear footsteps run inside the elevator.

“Well, are you coming?” he asks again with sarcasm.

I hop down, grab my weapon and walk around the side into the elevator. “Kid, it’s clear you need a good foot in the…” I paused for a moment and chose to pick a proper word to say to the kid other than what I wanted to say. “Keaster.”

He smirks as he pushes the button that read LL for lower level.

“Jessie, I understand why we need cameras, but why on the roof? And where’d you learn to deal with electrical wiring?”

“I learned from paying attention. We had a handyman that comes to the group home all the time, so we just used to learn from him. It was either that or hang out on the streets out here in Dade County,” he said.

I understood that. Crime and violence in Chicago wasn’t too different. “But, what about the camera? What was the point of that specific one?” I ask him.

He stomps out of frustration. “All these questions, you’ll see soon enough, soldier boy,” he says to me. The elevator doors open and I see the black S.W.A.T. truck. He runs out and to the left. I follow after him and hear that clanking sound again. They must be unlocking the doors. The other twin opens the doors.

“We got good visual on the roof down here?” Jessie asked his brother as he walked ahead of me.

“Yeah, Jerome is going out in the morning. We all just need a minute to think for the night,” he tells Jessie. We walk down a long hallway with navy blue brick walls and a cement-like floor. At the end of the hall were two doors on either side of the hallway.

“So what’s your name?” I ask the yet to be identified twin.

He turns and looks back at me as he walks ahead of us and answers, “James.” He turns his head back around as he almost stumbles over his own foot. “And what’s your name?” he asks me.

“Thomas,” I answered.

“But you can call him, soldier boy,” Jessie blurts out.

“Jessie, don’t be so rude,” James tells him in a mellow tone. It’s clear they’re identical in appearance but attitude wise they couldn’t be any more different. We finally reach the doors and we all enter the door on the right side of the hallway.  Everyone was inside sitting on the floor with blankets, with Vienna sausages, bags of Doritos and other miscellaneous small food portions. This room was just an empty room, maybe a twelve by sixteen in space. But there was a bunk bed in the corner to my left and surveillance monitors on the far wall with three chairs in front of it. It was basically designed with the same design as the hallway, a cement floor and dark blue bricks.

I guess it was used for exactly what the door reads, “Secuity”. I lean against the wall and slide down into a sitting position, removing the magazine out of my weapon and setting it down beside me. I cover my face with my hands and slide them down as I yawn. As I look around, I notice we all have the same expressions on our face. Lost and confused still even here away from the perils of being out there. We still don’t know what is going on. I felt mad inside only because I didn’t know what to do. Or even what step would be next to find out what’s happening where could we get any answers for this present event in chaos. That’s when it hit me. “Auron!” I yelled out as I scanned the room for him. I jumped and the others looked at me startled. “Where is he?” I asked everyone. The door beside me opened and in came the man of the hour.

“I’m right here, Thomas. There’s no need in getting loud and creating an uproar,” he said closing the door behind him.

“Look, I’ll ask you this once and once only.” I pause taking my eyes off of him and looking down at the cement floor to prepare myself for whatever answer he may have. “Do you know what’s going on in this city?”

Baaap!
He slammed something on the desk where the monitors are. It’s a book, a thick black covered book with red pages. He eases into the computer chair next to Dana. “The Rapture has come,” he says with a look I never expected to see on his face. The fear has now even consumed him. “I assure you it isn’t just this city. What has happened in this city has happened all over the world.” I walk over and look at the book he slammed down. It’s the Bible. Auron continues on, “Because you have kept my word about patience and endurance, I will, I will keep you from the hour of trial that is coming on the whole world, to try those who dwell on earth. Scripture from the book of Revelations three and ten,” he concludes.

“I’m not going for this!” Jefferey says grabbing the Bible and turning with frustration to that exact scripture. He pauses and gets quiet as he reads the scripture, slowly closes the book, bows his head and sheds tears down his cheeks.

“What do you mean
rapture
?” the blonde waitress asked him, pushing me out of the way. She was already a wreck since the dinner.

“The term Rapture is God’s merciful rescue of those who were true to his word and will. Those he had chosen based upon their actions in their life of faith and service unto Him, Julie,” Auron answered.

“No.” Jefferey sniffles as I still see tears come down his face. “No, it’s not possible. I don’t believe it,” he says.

I see Auron lift up his head and look at Jefferey. “Dear boy, then how do we explain the vanishings of people all over the world?” Auron’s face becomes red with frustration as he directs his hand at the door. “Or the vanishings at the diner of people we saw with our own eyes one second and only a pile of garments the next. Do you believe in this so-called reenactment of this so-called Croatoan that the news and media suggests? Or did Houdini come back to life and pull one last vanishing act?” Auron yells over the room with such anger in his voice. “C’mon, we are actually in the prophetic events of the book of Revelations. We… are the people of the last days.” He concludes in less dramatic tone.

“So we all have basically fallen short of being loved enough by God that we’re gonna die here?” Julie asks Auron with a sinister grin almost.

“Wait, you came straight from the Roman Catholic church, why are you left behind instead of on that swinging low chariot?” Shane asked him.

Auron began to have the same calculating look on his face from before as he drops his head low.

“Rapture?” I ask myself feeling my heart almost fade into nothingness as I try to grasp the concept, but more importantly, why was I left as well.

Feeling like crying out, I close my eyes and grind my teeth, but no tears will fall.

“What can we do to convince God to come back and get us?” Jefferey asks opening the Bible once more, turning pages as he looks for a specific answer.

Auron stands up placing a hand on Jefferey’s back, and the other he reaches out for the Bible in Jefferey’s hands. “It doesn’t work like that,” Auron says. I continue to pay attention to the two, we all are. “So how does it work?” Jefferey asked. Auron looks at all of them, bows his head for a second and then looks Jefferey in the eyes and says, “We pray and ask God to have mercy on our souls.”

“No, there has to be a trick to it, it has to be.” Jefferey continues on.

“Is there really?” Auron asks him. “Or are we just tricking ourselves believing that.”

“Yes, I am here as well as you, but we were left behind because we did something wrong or we had wrong beliefs,” Auron tells the room.

“Believe?” Shane bursts out. “I don’t believe in God, the Rapture or anything that you try to tell me without any proof!”

“Ah, yes! Shane the believer of what only falls before his own eyes!” Auron has obviously become aggrevated. I can see the veins pulsate in his forehead. “You’re quite the strong one, aren’t you? Never fell for any fool’s ransom, have you? You just answered your own mystery haven’t you?” Auron asks, rhetorically focusing his attention solely on Shane. “You simply choose not to believe in God. What’s the saying you combat vets use? If you survive war you either thank God or war’s evils show you there is no God. It is written, ‘Whosoever confesses my name unto man his name will I bring to my Father’.”

Shane becomes pale in the face and shuts down in Auron’s scold-filled lecture. The pulsation in Auron’s forehead slows down suggesting he’s calmed down as well. “Listen, everyone, I will hold nothing back any longer. We have a journey unlike any other we’ve ever faced before in life. Nothing, I mean absolutely nothing, has nor can prepare us for what awaits us in the next coming of days. Nothing but our faith, prayer and the grace of God. So if you ask will it get harder? I answer yes. If you ask will we be attacked and harmed? I answer yes. If you ask will we…” Auron pauses and I see his jaws flex as he grinds his teeth as his eyes scan over the room. “Die. I will answer yes. But, death was always the crossroads in life, wasn’t it?” Auron asks us.

I look at Dana who returns the look for a split second before she asks Auron, “What do you mean crossroads?”

“What I mean is death is the inevitable factor in these bodies… with these vessels there is a date of expiration. The crossroad is the point afterwards that our lifestyles will lead us.”

Shane asks in a low tone, “So heaven and hell are real, huh?”

Auron leans back and places hands on knees and lets out a deep breath. “For it is written, ‘Enter by the narrow gate for broad is the path to destruction.’ Heaven and hell is very much real and it should be obvious now at this point.”

“So where do we go from here, Auron?” I asked.

A voice butts in and says, “We clearly have two missions at this point.” It was Bazz who’s leaned against the door beside me. “One, we all have something God holds against us that we need to individually realize and spiritually fix. And two, we need to stay alive long enough to do that.” The room gets quiet, but even in the silence a lot is being said. Fear is an emotion that speaks best when no words are being used. I know everyone feels the same even now more than before, I mean, our worlds have all come to an obliterating crash in this present reality that we are now living in.

“So let’s start off with this. Who doesn’t believe in God?” Auron asks.

Julie raises her hand. “My family was always in church, that’s where I met James when were little kids.
Sniff!
We did everything together, but when I grew up I stopped going to church and just believed if you were a good person that anyone could make it to heaven,” Julie said, sitting Indian style in the far corner.

“For it is written, ‘No one is good except for God the Father in heaven.’ My dear,” Auron says softly to her. “I used to believe that, too.”

Jefferey said squatting directly in front of me, grabbing and wrapping himself in a cover on the floor.

“Me, too,” Dana says in agreeance to what Julie said. I see her rocking back and forth just staring off into space like she’s losing it.

“Bazz, what about you? You’re a United States Chaplain, a servant of God. Why aren’t you a pile of clothes right now?” Shane asks. 

I look up at Bazz who still leans against the door beside me. He looks down at me and with one finger pushes his glasses higher up on his nose. “I’m a Chaplain but there’s a chaplain requested for every religion. I’m a Chaplain for Muslim soldiers, so I … guess I simply put my faith in the wrong religion. So much dedication and discipline devoted to a…” His body begins to tremble and he slides down next to me and all his emotions begin to flare out through sobbing and tears. He tries to cover his face with his large hands but it’s clear he was in an angry state of pain right now. All this time I knew Bazz I never would’ve thought he was a Muslim chaplain.

“For it is also written, my friend, ‘I am the Lord thy God, thou shall have strange gods before me,’ the beginning words of the ten commandments.”

I look  around the room and see the twins who look confused. It’s hard for grown ups to handle and accept so they must be even more clueless than us. “What about them!” I aim with an open palm and extended my hand towards James and Jessie. “You sit there all knowing Auron quoting scripture and text. Isn’t there a scripture in there that says God loves the little children, or something saying he won’t hold the young accountable?” I ask Auron. “These two are only ten years old!” I continue on with a loud voice.

“I understand your concern and what you are trying to say, but even in Proverbs 20:11 it is written, ‘Even a child is known by his actions, by whether his conduct is pure and right ,’ these children are children in age, but they amaze me how intellectually advanced they are. Even you see that.”

“Everyone is counted for except for the two you,” Julie says with her head down in her chest. She lifts it and points with both hands, one at me the other at Auron saying, “Auron and Thomas, it’s down to you two.”

“I guess I’ll go first I have to be just as honest with myself as you all were.” Auron throws his head back hiding the tears in his eyes from the others but I see them trying to fall from the corners of his eyes. “I was at one point in time a priest of the Church. Catholic, until I saw my so-called brothers in faith… kill a child. Sacrificed her at her own will. But that fact that underneath the Vatican streets by high level church officials these type of sacrieledgous actions take place have brought me to the light that this was not just actions made by individuals, but the will of the Roman Catholic ambassadors. That’s when the present existence of secret societies controlling this world was revealed to me. I came to the conclusion that this was a trick of the enemy a way of using religion to control the people of the world. Ever since then, I sought out the one true religion and fancied Christianity. But the fact that Jesus Christ was so much more than a prophet…Well, we know the truth now don’t we?” Auron asks rhetorically.