Please Jesus . . . remember me. Please . . .
Then her eyes open and she sees Dan smiling at her. Skylar knows it’s almost time to go. Each breath is a strain. She can’t move, can barely speak, can barely even see.
But I can believe. I can do that.
Poor Dan. Poor Dan.
“Hi, sweetie,” she barely manages to get out.
“Sky, I’m here. I’m here.”
Allison and Sam approach the bed as well. They seem to be in disbelief that she’s still coherent.
“Are you hurting?” Dan asks.
I’ve been hurting my entire life in one way or another but no more.
“I don’t feel anything,” she utters.
“That’s good.”
He brushes her hair. She knows Dan would have been a good husband. He would have been there for her at all times. He would have provided for them. He would have been a good father. She smiles at him, and in response Dan starts to cry. She doesn’t want him in any more pain.
“Dan?” she whispers.
“I’m still here.”
She thinks of the crosses, of the man in the middle. This person who was very much a man, this man who could very much die. A God who allowed him to do just that.
God’s Son.
It’s unbelievable and always has been.
Until now.
“If you didn’t go to church where I grew up, people looked at you funny. You know that. It was a thing—maybe a Southern thing. So that’s what I did. But I never really believed. I never really, truly thought there was a Jesus who came down to save me. I never really understood that I had all these sins that needed forgiving. But I get it now. I get it and I want you to know—it’s okay. I forgive you because God forgives me.”
Dan looks at her. “How did—?”
“I heard you tell the others,” she says. “We all make mistakes. There’s a place we can take those to. There’s a thing we can nail them to.”
Her eyes close for a moment and she sees the cross in the shadows of the fading light.
“You can nail it to the cross and let it go, Dan. You can let someone else take that burden.”
She breathes out. She’s scared. Yes, scared and uncertain. But the peace inside her soul balances that. She ties that peace around her heart.
“I can see it now,” she tells them. “It’s . . . beautiful. It’s so . . . bright.”
It’s the bright light of sandy, warm shores and morning sunlight and reflecting snow and shining stars. It’s glorious. She sees it all and it welcomes her with a glowing smile.
“She can’t breathe,” Dan says.
His voice echoes from far away.
I need to leave you.
“Stay with me,” he calls out. “Please—Sky—stay with me. Please.”
The restlessness. The confusion. The never-ending intensities. The fears. The longing. The desperate, needy, selfish longing for more.
It’s all gone now.
“Please. No!”
With all the strength she has left, she squeezes his hand.
Death is not about despair. It’s not about disappearing. It’s about finally knowing and declaring that there is a heaven and an eternity.
It’s not too late, Dan. It’s never too late.
She feels like the thief who slipped in just in time.
She feels joy.
She finally feels free.
47
HOPING AND PRAYING
“Why?”
The voice scratches across Allison’s heart like grinding fingernails on a chalkboard. She stands staring at Dan and the distress on his face. Not even twenty-four hours ago, the same face stared at the girl of his dreams and pledged to be there for her in sickness and health till death separated them. But death isn’t supposed to be here. Not so soon. Not now.
“Breathe with me,” Dan yells to the empty body. “Someone help me.”
She puts a hand on his arm. “There’s no one here to help her.”
Dan keeps trying, holding Skylar, not giving up.
“Breathe.” Between sobs. “Breathe.”
He soon sees that she’s nothing more than a corpse. Tears run down Dan’s cheeks as he shakes his head in disbelief and anger. “No.”
She sees him clench his fist and his jaw.
Still shaking his head, he looks toward the window. “I hate You!” he shouts.
Allison doesn’t ask whom the comment is directed toward. She’s thought the same things, but that’s only because it’s too late.
It’s too late for all of them.
In the darkness, still clinging to the faint hope that they can save their friend, Tommy and Jack look through another room. Jack is searching a closet when he stops for a moment and turns to Tommy.
“Why do you have to get to a point where something’s going to be taken from you to realize how important it is?”
Tommy nods. He doesn’t know.
“It’s sad,” Jack continues. “That it had to take the end of the world for me to wake up.”
“You don’t have to explain. I know you love her.”
Jack stares at him for a minute. There’s no anger on his face. Just exhaustion and bewilderment.
“Thanks for being there for her.”
“Don’t screw it up,” Tommy says, breaking the serious mood with a little levity.
They both laugh. They’re okay. They’re cool again.
Neither of them knows that things are far from cool back in the hospital room they’d left. Things have gone from bad to worse.
And things are only going to continue downward.
Allison sits on her knees by the bed holding the body of her closest friend. She closes her eyes to pray but can only see Skylar’s smile and Lauren’s big, bright eyes. Laughing as they walked, the three of them, hand in hand on the beach. The sun hovering in the sky, the future staring at them with a smile. So many plans talked about. So many dreams shared.
All gone. Forever gone.
She knows her parents are gone. The rest of her family. Whatever friends weren’t at the wedding. All gone. All dead. All taken by God.
But I was left behind. I didn’t deserve to be taken.
So she silently prays. There’s nothing left to do. She can weep for Skylar or she can curse God or she can sit there dumbfounded but she chooses to ask—no, beg—for forgiveness. For another chance. For hope. For grace.
God I’m sorry I never thought of You.
For nearly three decades, Allison has only thought of herself. Of her plans and her career. Her love for Jack and her place in the world with him. Her friends. Her things. Her, her, her.
Please God help me. Help us all.
She knows she deserves to be down here with the rest of the remaining souls. Those who didn’t bother to find time or energy or care to have a real relationship with God. Who never thought anything of his Son and who never really even believed in his Spirit.
I know You’re the only way, God. Please. Please help me. I want to believe. I want to see the light. I want to know there’s still hope and still time. Wash away all my mistakes like the cold creek water rinsing muddy feet. Make me clean, Lord. Make me Yours.
Dan curses behind her. Her body shakes and the tears lining her cheeks won’t stop.
I ask that You save me, God. I believe in You and believe that Your Son can take away my sins. Please, God. Please, Jesus. Please.
“What are you saying to the Man Upstairs?” Sam asks behind her.
Allison turns and stands, seeing the Goth girl looking at her with skepticism. “Apologizing for what it took for me to realize the truth. Hoping he’s taking Sky into his arms right now. Hoping—praying—that there’s room to take me as well.”
Dan paces the room and curses as he listens to her words. “How can you sit there and pray to a God that would let this happen? Seriously, she was your friend.”
“Dan—”
But he storms out and leaves them.
Al
lison understands. She could be angry. She is angry. But she has no right to be angry at God for supposedly abandoning them when they’ve spent their lives abandoning him.
She sighs. Then has an idea.
There’s not much time left.
She knows the clock is ticking and there’s just not enough time to say the things that need to be said.
“Will you do something for me?” Allison asks as she picks up Sam’s phone.
Sam nods and looks curious.
“It won’t take long,” Allison tells her. “But it’s important. Life-or-death important.”
48
ALLISON
I want more than a simple statement that I believe. I want to belong to someone.
I want to stop trying to rationalize my existence away. I want a relationship.
I want to hear something and have it bring some life to this soulless, meaningless world we live in.
I want a Spirit that doesn’t fail me or flunk me or frustrate me but rather fills me.
I want to experience the feeling of being on my knees and knowing the meaning. Of falling before my Maker and knowing and realizing that he wants me and he desires me and he really, truly loves me.
God loves me.
God is waiting. For me.
I know this now and all I want is to finally be at peace.
49
FORSAKEN AND FORGOTTEN
And so it comes. The rush. The fall. The breakdown.
Another empty, ransacked room.
Another dead end.
Tommy feels something and stops for a moment, looking around the white hospital room with an empty bed and even emptier cabinets.
“Do you hear that?” he asks Jack.
It’s obvious that the screaming is coming from outside. Jack and Tommy hear the voice and instantly they recognize it. They rush to the window and tear at the cheap miniblinds.
Dan . . .
He’s outside on the lawn of the hospital. Screaming and shouting at the sky. Waving his fist.
“I hate You! You hear me?”
Tommy can hear him fine and knows if there’s a God above he can hear Dan too. Not that he’ll pay any attention. Not that he’ll care.
But others will. Others like those weird winged devil creatures out there.
“No,” Tommy says.
“Stop!” Jack screams at him through the glass. “Be quiet!”
Dan falls to his knees. They can see he’s crying. Screaming and spitting out his words. Furious.
Skylar’s dead.
Tommy knows that.
But where are Allison and Sam?
Dan is depleted, destroyed.
“Do You hear me?” he shouts. “Do You? Are You even listening to me? I’m right here. Come on.”
But he just kneels there, this lone figure on the grass in his tux pants and stained white, tattered shirt resembling what his heart must feel like.
Tommy and Jack continue to scream at Dan but he doesn’t hear them or doesn’t care.
Much like God must be toward Dan’s complaints.
Then Dan’s angry face turns to something else. Sorrow.
“Please, God. Just take me.”
Dan cries and mumbles some more words that Tommy can’t hear.
“Oh no,” Tommy says.
Everything about Dan suddenly changes.
The anger subsides.
The wrathful look turns to a look of peace.
Dan is mumbling something under his breath.
He’s asking God to save him. To forgive him. The whole thing.
They continue to pound against the window. Dan needs to get off the lawn and back in the hospital. He needs to get out of clear view of anybody and anything.
No no no this is not how salvation comes not like this not this way.
A breath. Then Dan turns and sees them for a moment.
No please God no not—
Then something sharp and long and curved slices through Dan’s chest, spewing blood all over the white of his shirt. His body is crushed against the lawn.
The guys scream.
The creature hovers above Dan, giant, sickly, coiled, black-gray, and grotesque.
Dan’s face hangs just above the grass, his mouth spilling blood, his eyes lifeless, his heart and soul gone.
Screaming doesn’t help. Pounding on the windows doesn’t help.
The thing—the hovering huge beast—whips back up into the sky and takes Dan with it.
Tommy bends over and wants to cry and wants to throw up.
Dan.
Gone.
Skylar.
Surely gone.
Leaving Allison and Sam.
“We have to get back down there to the girls,” Tommy says.
Jack is not with him anymore. He’s there but he’s gone. Just like Tommy feels. Just like everything.
“Come on, Jack,” he says. “Come on. We don’t have much time.”
They don’t have much of anything left.
Allison.
She can still be saved and they can still get out of here and find whatever kind of relief is left in this godforsaken, God-forgotten place.
Running.
The hospital a cemetery full of sleeping zombies.
The halls deserted shadowlands.
A trip and a fall and back up again.
Everything blurry. Everything heightened and messy and broken.
Tommy turns and takes the stairs two at a time.
He remembers everything.
All the laughter and the smiles and the late nights and the talks and the dancing and the drinking and the dreaming. So much joy. So many moments. Stuck now in a place just like this. Empty rooms full of empty cabinets. Ransacked and stolen and taken away. Chipped, fractured, pulverized, destroyed.
Everything filling his mind and his heart, not going away and not leaving him.
It’ll be with him forever.
However long forever might be.
The body in the bed is the first thing Tommy sees. It doesn’t move and doesn’t look good. He touches Skylar and knows for certain.
“She’s gone, man,” he calls out to a breathless Jack. “She’s gone.”
Jack is next to him.
It’s too much it’s way too much and there’s more there can’t be more right there shouldn’t be.
“Where are the girls?” Jack asks.
“Maybe they went to look for us?”
Please yes.
“Allie!” Jack’s beginning to lose his voice from all the screaming. Yet he continues to call out her name.
“We have to find them,” Tommy says.
He doesn’t want to leave Skylar here alone in this room, but he knows they need to leave the dead in order to find the living.
They head to the front of the hospital, where the sliding-glass door is still slightly open and broken. The dead bodies are just like window dressing now. It’s odd how you can get used to things so quickly in this life. The overturned chairs and the papers and the empty supplies on the floor and . . .
What is that?
Next to a broken mirror is a phone.
It’s Sam’s phone.
Tommy breathes in. Surely this can’t get worse. Right?
“No, please no, no, no.”
Surely they’re outside waiting on them.
Surely. Yes, right. Surely?
Jack is down the other hallway and calls out, “She’s not here. Allie’s not here.”
For the first time since everything started, Tommy feels defeated. He picks up the phone but he knows. He already knows.
His fearful heart feels something new.
It feels crushed like the glass he’s stepping on.
He sees the phone in his shivering hand. Then slowly he turns it on to see what it might reveal.
But Tommy already knows and is already prepared.
He shuts his eyes for a moment.
50
HOPELESS PRAYERS
His finger
s open up the playback app on the smartphone and find the video that waits there. Tommy pushes Play.
It’s Allison, running, the phone jerking from side to side as Sam runs beside her, the ground flashing by beneath them, the cries and screams of the girls, the sounds behind them. Awful sounds, scurrying steps following, following, until there’s a thud. The camera slamming to the ground.
Suddenly the camera is turning and then stays put only to show a blur and a figure in violet being shaken and then thrown into a wall behind a counter.
Tommy has no more air inside him. He feels like choking but can’t breathe.
“What did you see?” Jack says behind him. “Where are they? What’s wrong?”
Tommy scans the room without saying anything. Then he sees the cracked wall and the torn debris around the counter. He goes over there with Jack following.
Allison’s body is mangled in the corner beneath the crushed wall she landed on. Streaks of blood line her face and her arms and her dress.
Jack vaults over the counter and goes to her side but then hesitates. It’s almost as if he’s afraid to touch her.
He kneels and begins to wail, screaming out her name.
Tommy just stands there in an almost dreamlike stupor. “Allison,” he says in disbelief. “This doesn’t make sense.”
He goes over to hug both Jack and Allison but Jack fends him off with a curse and violent reaction. “Get away from her,” Jack shouts. “I should have never left.”
Tommy slumps to the floor as he watches Jack blubber, not wiping away his tears. It’s a striking, haunting thing, this full-of-life, full-of-answers jock becoming a whimpering mess whispering to his dead girlfriend.
Dead.
Dead.
Tommy fights his own tears by doing something. By moving. By searching the room.
Sam was with her.
He knows she’s gotta be somewhere.
“Sam’s not here,” Tommy says. “She must have run or something. We have to find her.”
Jack is cradling Allison’s broken and bloody body. His tears fall off his face onto hers. Tommy doesn’t know where to go. He doesn’t want to leave Jack, not like this. He’s afraid of what his friend might do.
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