The Gates of Babylon (39 page)

“No, it’s fine.” Jacob hesitated. “I was asking the Lord to choose someone else.”

“What?”

“Just in case I really
am
the prophet and this really
is
the end. I can’t do this. I don’t know what to do, how to keep us alive. I have no idea. And if God has the answers, He’s not sharing them.”

“Fernie believes in you. David, Miriam, Lillian, Rebecca. Your children.” Eliza nodded. “So do I, Jacob. I believe in you, too, whether it’s the end or not.”

“I know you do. That terrifies me.”

“I need to make a choice,” she said. “I need to start believing, maybe not like Miriam or Fernie, but at least a little bit. If I don’t—” She had to stop and clear the lump from her throat before
she could continue. “If I don’t, then I’ll have to admit it. I’ll have to accept Steve isn’t coming back.”

“No,” he said. “I won’t let you give up hope.”

When she didn’t respond, he sat next to her by the stove. He put his arm around her shoulders.

Eliza lost it. A sob rose deep within her breast and came out in an awful, gasping honk. As Jacob embraced her more fully, she bawled, no longer caring about appearing weak, about hiding her emotions. There was only this deep, aching pain, and now it needed to come out. She cried until the tears ran dry then wiped her nose on her sleeve when it wouldn’t stop running. She sniffled and coughed a few times and then fell silent.

“Oh, Jacob,” she said at last. “I’m so lonely.”

Jacob kissed the top of her head. “Your time will come, Liz. If there’s any justice in this universe, any at all, you’ll be happy. You deserve it more than anyone.”

“I don’t need much. My family, my people. Safety and warmth and food. And Steve—I need him to be alive. I need him to come home.”

“He will. Trust me, he will.”

If only Eliza could believe that.

Blister Creek had no television, no Internet, no phone, no mail. As good a chance as getting a delivery from Sears & Roebuck by stagecoach these days as from
Amazon.com
. But nobody could cut out the radio waves, and so people listened to faint AM stations and learned about the chaos enveloping the outside world.

Millions dead already in Africa and India. China had blockaded Japan and was coercing the Australians to sell them wheat on favorable terms. If the Americans hadn’t been overwhelmed by conflict at home and wars over Suez and the Persian Gulf, they might have been more vigorous in their defense of their allies, but there was little actual fighting so they stayed uninvolved.

The main hope was that the weather seemed to be calming down as the effects of the volcano dissipated. Meteorologists were predicting another unusually cold, wet summer across North America, but not quite as bad as the previous summer. The Canadian prairies and the upper Midwest would see their crops wiped out again, but there were hopes for much of the rest of the North American harvest. A bit of luck, some sanity in the world, and it was possible the crisis would pass by the following autumn.

And then in March the Sulawesi volcano’s second magma pool blew out. Three hundred cubic miles of rock and ash spewed skyward, the equivalent of three hundred times the size of the Mount St. Helens eruption, and half again more than the entire previous year’s eruption. Three million people died on Sulawesi alone from volcanic bombs and suffocating ash clouds. Tsunamis from the eruption and the earthquakes that shivered around the Pacific Rim killed hundreds of thousands around the Indian Ocean, and on the Pacific wiped out seaside communities from Chile to British Columbia.

The people in Blister Creek listened to this news with every emotion from terror to sorrow to excitement. The end of the world was upon them. The coming of the Great and Dreadful Day had arrived.

And only God knew who would survive and who would perish.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to thank my agent, Katherine Boyle, and my team at Thomas & Mercer: Jacque, Rory, Danielle, Terry, Andrew, and David. Thanks to Ethan Carr for accompanying me on a road trip through the desert to visit some of the old haunts of my childhood in preparation for writing this book.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

David Garten, 2011

Michael Wallace was born in California and raised in a small religious community in Utah, eventually heading east to live in Rhode Island and Vermont. An experienced world traveler, he has trekked through the Andes, ventured into the Sahara on a camel, and traveled through Thailand by elephant. In addition to working as a literary agent and innkeeper, he previously worked as a software engineer for a Department of Defense contractor, programming simulators for nuclear submarines. He is the author of more than a dozen novels.