by Tim LaHaye
“Ouch.”
As the jet screamed east, Ritz wanted to know what Buck thought of the disappearances. “Funny you should ask,” Buck said. “I’ve got to start working on that in earnest today. What’s your read of it? And do you mind if I flip on a digital recorder?”
“Fine,” Ritz said. “Dangedest thing I’ve ever seen. ’Course, that doesn’t make me unique. I have to say, though, I’ve always believed in UFOs.”
“You’re kidding! A levelheaded, safety-conscious pilot?”
Ritz nodded. “I’m not talking about little green men or space aliens who kidnap people. I’m talking about some of the more documentable stuff, like some astronauts have seen, and some pilots.”
“You ever see anything?”
“Nope. Well, a couple of unexplainable things. Some lights or mirages. Once I thought I was flying too close to a squad of helicopters. Not too far from here either. Great Lakes Naval Station. I radioed a warning, then lost sight of them. I suppose that’s explainable. I could have been going faster than I realized and not been as close as I thought. But I never got an answer, no acknowledgment that they were even airborne. Glenview wouldn’t confirm it. I shrugged it off, but a few weeks later, close to the same spot, my instruments went wacky on me. Dials spinning, meters sticking, that kind of thing.”
“What did you make of that?”
“Magnetic field or some force like that. Could be explainable, too. You know there’s no sense reporting strange occurrences or sightings near a military base, because they just reject ’em out of hand. They don’t even take seriously anything strange within several miles of a commercial airport. That’s why you never hear stories of UFOs near O’Hare. Not even considered.”
“So, you don’t buy the kidnapping space aliens, but you connect the disappearances with UFOs?”
“I’m just sayin’ it’s not like E.T., with creatures and all that. I think our ideas of what space people would look like are way too simple and rudimentary. If there is intelligent life out there, and there has to be just because of the sheer odds—”
“What do you mean?”
“The vastness of space.”
“Oh, so many stars and so much area that something has to be out there somewhere.”
“Exactly. And I agree with people who think those beings are more intelligent than we are. Otherwise, they wouldn’t have made it here, if they are here. And if they are, I’m thinking they’re sophisticated and advanced enough that they can do things to us we’ve never dreamed of.”
“Like making people disappear right out of their clothes.”
“Sounded pretty silly until the other night, didn’t it?”
Buck nodded.
“I’ve always laughed about people assuming these beings could read our thoughts or get into our heads and stuff,” Ritz continued. “But look who’s missing. Everybody I’ve read about or heard about or knew who’s now gone was either under twelve years old or was an unusual personality.”
“With all the people who disappeared, you think they had something in common?”
“Well, they’ve got something in common now, wouldn’t you say?”
“But something set them apart, made them easier to snatch?” Buck asked.
“That’s what I think.”
“So we’re still here because we were strong enough to resist, or maybe we weren’t worth the trouble.”
Ritz nodded. “Something like that. It’s almost like some force or power was able to read the level of resistance or weakness, and once that force got sunk in, it was able to rip those people right off the earth. They disappeared in an instant, so they had to be dematerialized. The question is whether they were destroyed in the process or could be reassembled.”
“What do you think, Mr. Ritz?”
“At first I would have said no. But a week ago I would have told you that millions of people all over the world disappearing into thin air sounds like a B movie. When I allow for the fact that it actually happened, I have to allow for the next logical step. Maybe they’re somewhere specific in some form, and maybe they can return.”
“That’s a comforting thought,” Buck said. “But is it more than wishful thinking?”
“Hardly. That idea and fifty cents would be worth half a dollar. I fly planes for money. I haven’t got a clue. I’m still as much in shock as the next guy, and I don’t mind tellin’ you, I’m scared.”
“Of?”
“That it might happen again. If it was anything like I think it was, maybe all this force needs to do now is crank up the power somehow and they can get older people, smarter people, people with more resistance that they ignored the first time around.”
Buck shrugged and sat in silence for a few minutes. Finally he said, “There’s a little hole in your argument. I know of some people who are missing who seem as strong as anyone.”
“I wasn’t talking physical strength.”
“Neither was I.” Buck thought about Lucinda Washington. “I lost a friend and coworker who was bright, healthy, happy, strong, and a forceful personality.”
“Well, I’m not saying I know everything or even anything. You wanted my theory; there it is.”
Rayford Steele lay on his back, staring at the ceiling. Sleep had come hard and intermittently, and he hated the logy feeling. He didn’t want to watch the news. He didn’t want to read the paper, even knowing a new one had flopped up onto the porch before dawn. All he wanted was for Chloe to get home so they could grieve together. There was nothing, he decided, more lonely than grief.
He and his daughter would have work to do, too. He wanted to investigate, to learn, to know, to act. He started by searching for a Bible, not the family Bible that had collected dust on his shelf for years, but Irene’s. Hers would have notes in it, maybe something that would point him in the right direction.
It wasn’t hard to find. It was usually within arm’s reach of where she slept. He found it on the floor, next to the bed. Would there be some guide? An index? Something that referred to the Rapture or the judgment or something? If not, maybe he’d start at the end. If genesis meant “beginning,” maybe revelation had something to do with the end, even though it didn’t mean that. The only Bible verse Rayford could quote by heart was Genesis 1:1: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” He hoped there’d be some corresponding verse at the end of the Bible that said something like, “In the end God took all his people to heaven and gave everybody else one more chance.”
But no such luck. The very last verse in the Bible meant nothing to him. It said, “The grace of the Lord Jesus be with you all. Amen.” And it sounded like the religious mumbo jumbo he had heard in church. He backed up a verse and read, “He who testifies to these things says, ‘Yes, I am coming quickly.’ Amen. Come, Lord Jesus.”
Now he was getting somewhere. Who was this who testified of these things, and what were these things? The quoted words were in red. What did that mean? He looked through the Bible and then noticed on the spine, “Words of Christ in red.” So Jesus said he was coming quickly. Had he come? And if the Bible was as old as it seemed, what did “quickly” mean? It must not have meant soon, unless it was from the perspective of someone with a long view of history. Maybe Jesus meant that when he came, he would do it quickly. Was that what this was all about? Rayford glanced at the last chapter as a whole. Three other verses had red letters, and two of those repeated the business about coming quickly.
Rayford could make no sense of the text of the chapter. It seemed old and formal. But near the end of the chapter was a verse that ended with words that had a strange impact on him. Without a hint of their meaning, he read, “Let the one who is thirsty come; let the one who wishes take the water of life without cost.”
Jesus wouldn’t have been the one who was thirsty. He would not have been the one who wished to take the water of life. That, Rayford assumed, referred to the reader. It struck him that he was thirsty, soul thirsty. But what was the water of life
? He had already paid a terrible cost for missing it. Whatever it was, it had been in this book for hundreds of years.
Rayford idly leafed through the Bible to other passages, none of which made sense to him. They discouraged him because they didn’t seem to flow together, to refer to each other, to have a direction. Language and concepts foreign to him were not helping.
Here and there he saw notes in the margins in Irene’s delicate handwriting. Sometimes she simply wrote, “Precious.” He was determined to study and find someone who could explain those passages to him. He was tempted to write precious next to that verse in Revelation about taking the water of life without cost. It sounded precious to him, though he couldn’t yet make it compute.
Worst of all, he feared he was reading the Bible too late. Clearly he was too late to have gone to heaven with his wife and son. But was he too late, period?
In the front flyleaf was last Sunday’s church bulletin. What was this, Wednesday morning? Three days ago he had been where? In the garage. Raymie had begged him to go with them to church. He promised he would next Sunday. “That’s what you said last week,” Raymie had said.
“Do you want me to fix this four-wheeler for you or not? I don’t have all the time in the world.”
Raymie was not one for pushing a guilt trip. He just repeated, “Next Sunday?”
“For sure,” Rayford had said. And now he wished next Sunday were here. He wished even more that Raymie were there to go with him because he would go. Or would he? Would he be off work that day? And would there be church? Was anyone left in that congregation? He pulled the bulletin from Irene’s Bible and circled the phone number. Later that day, after he checked in with Pan-Continental, he would call the church office and see if anything was going on.
He was about to set the Bible on the bed table when he grew curious and opened the front flyleaf again. On the first white-papered page he saw the inscription. He had given this Bible to Irene on their first wedding anniversary. How could he have forgotten, and what had he been thinking? She was no more devout than he back then, but she talked about wanting to get serious about church attendance before the children came along. He had been angling for something or trying to impress her. Maybe he thought she would think him spiritual if he gave her a gift like that. Maybe he was hoping she would let him off the hook and go to church by herself if he proved his spiritual sensitivity with this gift.
For years he had tolerated church. They had gone to one that demanded little and offered a lot. They made many friends and had found their doctor, dentist, insurance man, and even country club entrée in that church. Rayford was revered, proudly introduced as a 747 captain to newcomers and guests, and even served on the church board for several years.
When Irene discovered the Christian radio station and what she called “real preaching and teaching,” she grew disenchanted with their church and began searching for a new one. That gave Rayford the opportunity to quit going at all, telling her that when she found one she really liked, he would start going again. She found one, and he tried it occasionally, but it was a little too literal and personal and challenging for him. He was not revered. He felt like a project. And he pretty much stayed away.
Rayford noticed another bit of Irene’s handwriting. It was labeled her prayer list, and he was at the top. She had written, “Rafe, for his salvation and that I be a loving wife to him. Chloe, that she come to Christ and live in purity. Ray Jr., that he never stray from his strong, childlike faith.” Then she had listed her pastor, political leaders, missionaries, world conflict, and several friends and other relatives.
“For his salvation,” Rayford whispered. “Salvation.” Another ten-dollar church word that had never really impressed him. He knew Irene’s new church was interested in the salvation of souls, something he’d never heard in the previous church. But the closer he had gotten to the concept, the more he had been repelled. Didn’t salvation have something to do with confirmation, baptism, testifying, getting religion, being holy? He hadn’t wanted to deal with it, whatever it was. And now he was desperate to know exactly what it meant.
Ken Ritz radioed ahead to airports in suburban New York, finally getting clearance to touch down at Easton, Pennsylvania. “You know,” Ritz said, “these are the old stompin’ grounds of Larry Holmes, once the heavyweight champion of the world.”
“The guy that beat Ali?”
“One and the same. If he was still around, whoever was takin’ people might’ve got a knock on the noggin from ol’ Larry. You can bet on that.”
The pilot asked personnel in Easton if they could arrange a ride to New York City for his passenger.
“You’re joking, right, Lear?”
“Didn’t mean to, over.”
“We got a guy can get him to within a couple of miles of the subway. No cars in or out of the city yet, and even the trains have some kind of a complicated route that takes them around bad sites.”
“Bad sites?” Buck repeated.
“Say again,” Ritz radioed.
“Haven’t you been watching the news? Some of the worst disasters in the city were the result of disappearing motormen and dispatchers. Six trains were involved in head-ons with lots of deaths. Several trains ran up the back of other ones. It’ll be days before they clear all the tracks and replace cars. You sure your man wants to get into midtown?”
“Roger. Seems like the type who can handle it.”
“Hope he’s got good hiking boots, over.”
It cost Buck another premium for a ride close enough to the train that he could walk the rest of the way. His driver had not even been a cabbie, nor the vehicle a cab. But it might as well have been. It was just as decrepit and unsafe.
A two-mile walk got him to the train platform at about noon, where he waited more than forty minutes with a mass of humanity, only to find himself among the last half who had to wait another half hour for the next train. The zigzag ride took two hours to get to Manhattan, and all during the trip Buck tapped at the keys on his laptop or stared out the window at the gridlock that went on for miles. He knew many of his locally based colleagues would have already filed similar reports, so his only hope of scoring with Steve Plank and having this see publication was if his were more powerfully or eloquently written. He was in such awe of the scene that he doubted he could pull it off. At the very least he was adding drama to his own memoirs. New York City was at a standstill, and the biggest surprise was that they were letting people in at all. No doubt many of these, like him, lived here and needed to get to their homes and apartments.
The train lurched to a stop, far short of where he had been told it would reach. The garbled announcement, the best he could make out, informed passengers that this was the new last stop. Their next jog would have put them in the middle of a crane site where cars were being lifted off the track. Buck calculated about a fifteen-mile walk to his office and another five to his apartment.
Fortunately, Buck was in great shape. He put everything into his bag and shortened the strap so he could carry it close to his body without it swinging. He set off at what he guessed was a four-mile-per-hour pace, and three hours later he was hurting. He was sure he had blisters, and his neck and shoulders were tired from the bag and strap. He was sweating through his clothes, and there was no way he was going to get to his apartment before stopping in at the office.
“Oh, God, help me,” Buck breathed, more exasperated than praying. But if there was a God, he decided, God had a sense of humor. Leaning against a brick wall in an alley in plain sight was a yellow bicycle with a cardboard sign clipped to it. It read, “Borrow this bike. Take it where you like. Leave it for someone else in need. No charge.”
Only in New York, he thought. Nobody steals something that’s free.
He thought about breathing a prayer of thanks, but somehow the world he was looking at didn’t show any other evidence of a benevolent Creator. He mounted the bike, realized how long it had been since he had been aboard one, and wobble
d off till he found his balance. It wasn’t long before he cruised into midtown between the snarl of wreckage and wreckers. Only a few other people were traveling as efficiently as he was—couriers on bikes, two others on yellow bikes just like his, and cops on horseback.
Security was tight at the Global Weekly building, which somehow didn’t surprise him. After identifying himself to a new desk clerk, he rode to the twenty-seventh floor, stopped in the public washroom to freshen up, and finally entered the main suites of the magazine. The receptionist immediately buzzed Steve Plank’s office, and both Steve and Marge Potter hurried out to embrace and welcome him.
Buck Williams was hit with a strange, new emotion. He nearly wept. He realized he, along with everyone else, was enduring a hideous trauma and that he had no doubt been running on adrenaline. But somehow, getting back to familiar territory—especially with the expense and effort it had taken—made him feel as if he had come home. He was with people who cared about him. This was his family. He was really, really glad to see them, and it appeared the feeling was mutual.
He bit his lip to keep from clouding up, and as he followed Steve and Marge down the hall past his tiny, cluttered office and into Steve’s spacious office/conference room, he asked if they had heard about Lucinda Washington.
Marge stopped in the corridor, bringing her hands to her face. “Yes,” she managed, “and I wasn’t going to do this again. We’ve lost several. Where does the grieving start and end?”
With that, Buck lost it. He couldn’t pretend any longer, though he was as surprised as anyone at his own sensitivity. Steve put an arm around his secretary and guided her and Buck into his office, where others from the senior staff waited.
They cheered when they saw Buck. These people, the ones he had worked with, fought with, feuded with, irritated, and scooped, now seemed genuinely glad to see him. They could have no idea how he felt. “Boy, it’s good to be back here,” he said, then sat and buried his head in his hands. His body began to shake, and he could fight the tears no longer. He began to sob, right there in front of his colleagues and competitors.