The Rapture: Evil Advances / Before They Were Left Behind Read online

  As Mr. Graham left the throne there approached a small band of men and women, and as their story began to unfold, Irene glanced at Raymie. Something told her that to him this would prove the most captivating of all.

  TWENTY-NINE

  FIRST OFFICER Christopher Smith had been gone only a few minutes when Rayford heard his key in the cockpit door and it banged open.

  Chris flopped into his chair, ignored the seat belt, and sat with his head in his hands. “What’s going on, Ray? We got us more than a hundred people gone with nothing but their clothes left behind.”

  “That many?”

  “Yeah, like it’d be better if it was only fifty? How the heck are we gonna explain landing with even one less passenger than we took off with?”

  Rayford shook his head, still working the radio, trying to reach someone—anyone—in Greenland or an island in the middle of nowhere. But they were too remote even to pick up a radio station for news. Finally he connected with a French jet several miles away heading the other direction. He nodded to Christopher to put on his own earphones.

  “You got enough fuel to get back to the States?” the pilot asked Rayford.

  Christopher nodded and whispered, “We’re halfway.”

  “I could turn around and make Kennedy,” Rayford said.

  “Forget it. Nothing’s landing in New York. Two runways still open in Chicago. That’s where we’re going.”

  “We came from Chicago,” Rayford said. “Can’t I put down at Heathrow?”

  “Negative. Closed.”

  “Paris?”

  “Man, you’ve got to get back where you came from. We left Orly an hour ago, got the word what’s happening, and were told to go straight to ORD.”

  “What is happening?”

  “If you don’t know, why’d you put out the Mayday?”

  “I’ve got a situation here I don’t even want to talk about,” Rayford said.

  “Hey, friend, it’s all over the world, you know?”

  “Negative, I don’t know,” Rayford said. “Talk to me.”

  “You’re missing passengers, right?”

  “Roger. More than a hundred.”

  “Whoa! We lost nearly fifty.”

  “What do you make of it? What are you going to tell your passengers?”

  “No clue. You?”

  “The truth,” Rayford said.

  “Can’t hurt now. But what’s the truth? What do we know?”

  “Not a blessed thing.”

  “Good choice of words, Pan Heavy. You know what some people are saying?”

  “Roger,” Rayford said. “Better it’s people gone to heaven than some world power doing this with fancy rays.”

  Why twenty people approached the altar and throne together, Raymie had no idea, until their unique story began to unfold on the panoramic screen in the theater of his mind. It was as if he had been carried to another century, living and breathing and experiencing the sights, sounds, temperatures, hopes, and fears of people from another generation.

  It soon became apparent to Raymie that these twenty people included five missionary men and their families at the time the men had been martyred. He—and he knew this was true of everyone else in God’s house—followed Jim Elliot, Nate Saint, Pete Fleming, Ed McCully, and Roger Youderian to the jungles of Ecuador in January of 1956 as their small plane landed on a tiny strip of land in the midst of a violent tribe, the Waodani.

  They were all aware of the danger. Jim Elliot told his wife, Elisabeth, that if it was what God wanted, he was ready to die for the salvation of the Waodani.

  The initial approaches seemed favorable. The missionaries were able to coax one of the first Waodani they met into their plane, and Nate flew him over his tribespeople, who waved and smiled as he waved down at them. When they landed, the man jumped out, clapping and smiling.

  But then Nate’s plane was discovered on the beach, stripped of its fabric. There was no sign of anyone, neither the men nor the Waodani. When the missionaries were reported missing to the American military, the news spread quickly around the world.

  After a search, the bodies of the missionaries were found in the river, speared to death. A Life magazine photographer arrived just as the last body was being buried by the overland search party, and the massacre became the most celebrated missionary story of the 1900s.

  Now as the five missionaries knelt before the altar and were then welcomed to the throne, Jesus praised them and their families, who had all continued in Christian work despite their grief and loss. The outcry from around the world had given voice to some who thought the men had died in vain. Yet their deaths created the biggest influx of new missionaries the world had ever seen.

  After the missionaries’ deaths, members of their families had moved in among the Waodani, and the children played with the children of the men who had killed their fathers.

  First one, then another of the six murderers became believers in Christ. “Jesus’ blood has washed my heart clean,” one told Rachel, Nate’s sister. “My heart is healed.” The other five killers soon believed.

  The five missionaries had not died in vain. Countless thousands who heard their story came to faith and dedicated their lives to mission work. God’s house resounded as billions celebrated the awarding of martyrs’ crowns to the missionaries.

  THIRTY

  CHRISTOPHER SMITH saw himself as a good ’ol boy, and that was the way he liked to portray himself to colleagues and passengers. He was no Rayford Steele; he knew that. Steele seemed to have his whole life together. Wonderful wife, beautiful family.

  Chris knew people saw him in much the same way, even though he frankly didn’t think his wife was much to look at, and he didn’t look the part either. He was slight and some might have said weak-looking. He didn’t have that great bearing that the six-foot-four and darkly handsome Steele had. Chris got his share of action though, and that was the problem. That was his ugly secret. Part of it, anyway.

  He’d grown up a nerd, had never been an athlete, not even close to being popular. So he buried himself in academics, had a scientific bent, and decided the shortest route to the kind of income and respect he wanted was in aviation. How could Chris know that with accomplishment and a uniform would come opportunities he had only dreamed of?

  He had married another academic type and at least knew enough to never tell her that he assumed her romantic prospects were as limited as his. She had never been described as cute by anyone but her parents, and Christopher couldn’t imagine even they had called her that since she was about nine years old. Her name fit. Jane. Plain Jane.

  What made Chris feel so bad, though, was that despite her virtual invisibility and a shrill voice that could make him cringe even after sixteen years of marriage, Jane had actually turned out to be a good friend and a good wife. She was efficient and hardworking, and she seemed to care for and about him, even though he had quit trying years ago.

  He had simply wanted more than he was capable of achieving, and it didn’t help to have other than a trophy wife. Chris knew he had no business even dreaming of one, but once he found that certain flight attendants and even some lonely passengers were impressed by his station and uniform, his wedding vows had flown out the window.

  A girl in every port? Sure. Any who really cared for him? Only one, from what he could tell, and he had treated her as shabbily as he had Jane. Chris had given up hoping that one of the attractive ones would really take to him for more than a salve to her own loneliness or the occasional gift he brought from faraway destinations. Those secret liaisons left him miserable and depressed, but not enough to get him to quit. In fact, he had made a huge mistake with the only one he thought really cared. He had married her too. Under a different name. Chris was living a double life.

  What should have been complicated he had found easy. His second wife thought he was an international cargo pilot, gone for days and weeks at a time.

  Since his sons had become teenagers and developed minds of t
heir own, Chris’s trysts—private and short-lived and with no futures—seemed all he was really living for. The bigamy was merely for convenience, and that hadn’t amounted to much.

  Now as he sat stunned in the cockpit with some sort of Twilight Zone cosmic phenomenon having affected not just Steele’s and his plane but also apparently all planes and every country of the world, Christopher Smith was overcome with fear and dread. Overhearing his captain discuss the possible religious aspects of all this didn’t do much for him either. All that did was remind him of his sons.

  Those boys had once been the joy of his life. Then in junior high school they had become troublemakers, both of them. He was constantly being called in to answer for them or to be informed of their latest mischief. On the one hand he liked that they had their own ideas, but he didn’t like what was happening to their grades and their reputations. His reputation.

  But what had happened with them lately was worse. They had found religion. One of their friends invited them to some sort of church activity, and while they got into trouble there too, they all of a sudden decided they wanted to go to summer camp the year before with that same bunch. That was all right with Chris and Jane, even though it cost them a little money. Maybe the kids would learn something. Maybe they wouldn’t. But at least they would be out from underfoot for a couple of weeks.

  Well, the worst happened. They came back Holy Rollers. There was no other way to put it. Now they were churchgoers, and not only that, they thought everybody else in the world—Chris and Jane included—ought to go too. But Chris knew better. Thankfully, so did his wife. They’d both had enough religion as kids, and the best they could hope for was that the boys would grow out of this.

  But they didn’t. It had been nine months now, and the boys were worse than ever. Carried their Bibles to public school, no less. Became known as church kids. Their grades perked back up. That was all right. But the cost.

  Oh, my, Chris thought, the terrible cost. Now he was the Pan-Con first officer with a long, boring marriage, a plain wife, two Christian-kook kids, and a guilt-inducing private life that included another wife. Why did it make him feel so bad when he didn’t claim any moral authority? He couldn’t say. He just knew that what he was doing on the side was something Jane—for whatever her shortcomings and weaknesses—would never do to him and didn’t deserve having done to her.

  Strange, Christopher barely thought of wife number two in this moment of crisis, but he found himself frantic to know how his real family was. The boys were supposed to be at some church thing tonight, and Jane was to pick them up when it was over. If these vanishings really happened at the same time all over the world, they could very well have been right out in the middle of it at the time.

  As a woman knelt before the altar of fire, Jesus stood and began to narrate scenes from her life depicted in Irene’s mind. She noticed that Raymie looked just as fascinated as she.

  First Irene watched as the woman, clearly from the first century, buried her husband. Then she moved from a comfortable home into a small room at the back of a hovel shared with two other families who seemed to ignore her. Irene watched her visit the Temple in Jerusalem and pray.

  The woman ate from gleanings of the fields she passed on her way to sweep out the home of a rich family in an area where she had once lived. Often she stopped to pray. At the end of each week the house owner pressed into her palm a single coin.

  Now she was visiting the Temple again, standing in line behind wealthy people making a show of dumping huge amounts of money into the coffers. In the background Irene could see Jesus sitting opposite the treasury.

  As the woman’s works were tested in the fire and resulted in precious metals and stones, Jesus said, “And many who were rich put in much. Then one poor widow came and threw in two mites—the least valuable Roman coins, two of which make a farthing. I called My disciples to Myself and said, ‘Assuredly, I say to you that this poor widow has put in more than all those who have given to the treasury; for they all put in out of their abundance, but she out of her poverty put in all that she had, her whole livelihood.’ ”

  Chris Smith hadn’t talked—really talked—to his boys for years. Oh, they’d had shouting matches, threats, reprimands, punishments. There had been a full complement of cold shoulders, slammed doors, epithets, and ultimatums. But in the end, just before the boys had found that old-time religion, Chris had given up. He’d been no prize as a teenager either, and look how he turned out. Yeah, just look.

  Did he want them to turn out as he had? A dishonest, cheating weasel? A bigamist? All Chris knew was that no matter what he did or said, he was no example to them and they were going to do what they were going to do, regardless.

  But he was curious. Could this, whatever it was, be a religious thing? a God thing? And if so, what did it mean? Would the boys know? They really seemed into church, and they were smart, but had they learned enough to know about stuff like what had happened now? Chris felt an urgent need to talk with them, to see what they made of it all.

  He also began having a crisis of conscience. Little from the real world had ever affected him to any significant extent. To Chris, news was news, something that happened to everybody else. But now he was the number-two man in a jumbo jet with a third of her passengers gone. This wasn’t going to be something he could watch on TV and gas about with his poker buddies.

  Worse, as the 747 made the huge turnaround and he set the coordinates to get them to ORD by early morning Central time, Rayford asked him to start twisting the dials to see if he could dredge up some news signal from anywhere. They were in one of the worst spots in the world for that, but it wouldn’t be long before they would come within range of Greenland and Canada and even the eastern seaboard of the U.S. If it was true that this was some kind of global phenomenon, Chris couldn’t imagine what the news would sound like.

  New emotions began to roll over him as he played with the dials. Captain Steele seemed preoccupied and wasn’t checking in with him for a progress report, apparently assuming that as soon as Christopher found something, he’d let Rayford know. But as Chris encountered solid static for several minutes, he couldn’t keep his mind from going where he really hadn’t wanted it to go. What was it about a natural disaster that seemed to focus one’s inner eye squarely on one’s self?

  Except for knowing that his private liaisons—and of course the other marriage—were not things he ever wanted Jane to know about—and especially not the boys—Christopher had rarely had a problem keeping his conscience at bay. There was much in his life he wouldn’t be proud to have made public, so he just rarely thought about it.

  That wasn’t working now. It was as if a black cloud was descending on Chris Smith, and he couldn’t get out from under it. What kind of person, what kind of man, was he? For whatever shortcomings his wife had, Jane was a good person, surely more than he deserved. She could even be sweet. And she was a servant.

  Guilt. That was what Chris was feeling. In one sense he was grateful that he had always been careful and that she had no clue what he did on the road. That was big of him, wasn’t it? To consider her feelings? That’s what he had always told himself. He deserved these secret pleasures, but he was considerate enough not to hurt or embarrass his wife. Hadn’t that been his motive?

  Of course it hadn’t, and he had known that all along. He had been covering for himself, but now this crazy worldwide-vanishing business was making him focus, keeping him from hiding behind his usual blather. He was feeling like the scoundrel he was.

  Chris shook his head and tried to block these thoughts and feelings by busying himself even more with his task. But it wasn’t rocket science. He was spinning dials hoping to lock onto some signal strong enough to bring the news into the cockpit. He could have done that in his sleep, and what a relief that would be.

  He had to admit that this was becoming a personal crisis. Chris found himself desperately wanting to talk with his wife, yet he knew that it would take an awful lot
longer to come within range of air-to-ground telephoning than it would to finally pick up some scratchy radio-news report.

  Christopher was actually shaking and wondered if it showed. What would he do if something had happened to Jane? And the boys? While they had become a nuisance and an embarrassment, he was suddenly overcome with the reality that they were his flesh, his life, his heart. What was this? Love? Was he loving his family, or was he just afraid for them . . . or for himself?

  The longer the plane droned on, the deeper Chris felt himself burrowing into a dark hole of despair.

  THIRTY-ONE

  IRENE AND RAYMIE sat fingering their crowns and—Irene knew—thinking the same thing without speaking. It was so joyous to be in the presence of Jesus, the lover of their souls. But just as Pastor Billings had predicted so many times in so many sermons on so many Sundays over so many months, there was something unique not only about their new, glorified bodies but also about the way their new, glorified minds worked.

  As wonderful as it had been to hear “Well done” from the only perfect man to have ever lived and to be welcomed into God’s house and to receive crowns of reward, none of that hit them as some cheap imitation as it might have on Earth. Irene had attended countless meetings where people were thanked and lauded and presented with plaques, trophies, cups, framed certificates, and the like for any bit of service they had rendered or accomplishment they might have achieved.

  But to be holding in one’s own hands a reward for your works in service of Christ would have been beyond comprehension and expression on Earth. This gold-and-silver amalgam was unlike anything Irene had ever seen. And the jewels embedded in it were so exquisite and dazzling that even her new eyes had to adjust to light reflected not from the sun or artificial sources but from God Himself.