Apocalypse

by Paul Lalonde

  As he stared in wonder at the empty auditorium before him, McNamara wondered if they had been right after all, and that the Rapture had, indeed, come to pass. He would have to make a few telephone calls. He would have to find out how widespread this was and talk with other clergy. He would . . .

  It was then he realized that the others might actually be gone, that he was alone among the televangelists who had remained behind . . . still not raptured, if that was truly what had just happened.

  For the first time in his life, Easton McNamara stared into the cameras and didn’t know what to say.

  The 18-wheeler barreled along a lonely highway in the Wyoming wilderness as the sun began to rise. It was going to be a perfect day for driving, Dan Mansfield told his passenger, Kevin. “What say come around six we pull off at some motel?” Dan added. “I’m too tired and achy to sleep in the cab another night. It’s worth fifty bucks to get a good night’s sleep.” He looked over at the young man. “I’d be happy to share a room with you if you don’t smell too bad and you don’t snore. Besides, if I’m still awake enough, I think I’ll go see if I can have a little fun.”

  “You’re going to get a girl?” asked the hitchhiker. “I didn’t think you were the type, what with all those pictures of the wife and kids you got in this rig . . . Or is that just for show?”

  “I said fun,” replied the driver. “Adultery’s a lot of things, but fun isn’t one of them. What I meant was that in these small towns there’s usually one church or another’s got a Bible study. Reading Scripture refreshes me more than just sitting in front of the tube. Want to come along?”

  “Not my style,” replied Kevin. “I got nothing against religion, but life’s what you make it. You do good to people, they do good back. What goes around comes around. I don’t need some preacher condemning me.” He stared out the window at the rugged terrain and thought he’d be bored to tears if he stayed in a place like this for more than a week.

  The rig began slowing and Kevin looked out the windshield. The road was straight with no accident or hazards in sight. The truck’s speed continued dropping and he glanced at the radar detector, but it was silent. “Something wrong, Dan?” he asked, for the first time looking over to the driver, but Dan had disappeared, with only his clothing, neatly folded, left behind on the seat.

  At that moment the rig began moving off the road. At the same time, a driverless car heading west crossed the median, spinning out in a gully while another driverless car slowed a hundred yards in front of them. Kevin grabbed the steering wheel and tried to move into the driver’s seat before it was too late.

  They walked him to the small, sterile room wedged between the exercise yard and the prison infirmary. His hands were cuffed and a chain was wrapped around his body through the belt loops of his prison jumpsuit. He offered no resistance. Johnny Amsterdam had caused the warden no trouble in the last year and a half he had lived on death row. He had even been one of the intermediaries during the prison riot that, for a tense several hours, threatened to become a violent conflagration. But Johnny was a reluctant hero. He refused to see himself as special. More than a dozen years earlier he had murdered three people during a botched holdup and received the death sentence.

  Then, for want of anything better to do, Johnny began assisting the prison chaplain, reading some of the books the chaplain brought, as well as tackling a study guide on the Bible. He had learned about Jesus, and His love for the lowest of society, and realized that Jesus had been a death row inmate just like himself. Johnny also knew that if he had lived in ancient time, his punishment would also have been the cross. He might have been placed next to Jesus, might have been the one to whom Jesus promised a room in His Father’s house.

  Johnny never talked of his change. The chaplain knew, and some of the guards, but Johnny felt that if the Lord wanted him to spread the Word, it could happen even on death row. And so he studied, prayed, and talked quietly to anyone who wanted to listen.

  Behind a glass partition, in a viewing room several of the victims’ family members had chosen to watch the execution and he took a moment to look into the eyes of each one, a look of deep sadness and regret. They wept as the cuffs were removed while he lay on a gurney. The chaplain recited the Twenty-third Psalm. Asked if he had anything to say, he only thanked the chaplain and the guards for their kindness. “This isn’t easy for you, I know,” he said quietly. “I understand that. The Lord God has brought us all to this place, just as He brought His Son to that hill so long ago. May we all know the peace of the Lord in Jesus’ name.”

  The doctor administering the drugs attached an intravenous line. “I’m starting the Pentothol drip,” said the doctor, quietly opening the valve and glancing at the IV bottle.

  He was startled to see the line suddenly dangling, the liquid dripping onto the floor. The straps were in place, but they no longer encircled the prisoner’s wrists and ankles. All that was on the gurney was the prison uniform of Johnny Amsterdam. The condemned killer had vanished.

  It was not a weapon, of that Judith Shimowitz was certain. Despite her grief over the loss of her family in Tel Aviv; despite the shock of the reports Bronson had been preparing; despite the nightmare of falling aircraft and out-of-control automobiles and trucks, this was not war.

  As a college student in New York City, Judith had been an old science fiction movie buff, watching dozens of films from the 1950s, with scenes of death rays vaporizing people, and saucers coming down from the sky. She thought they were good for a laugh, naively simplistic and paranoid. But this was real.

  One moment the people were there, the next all that remained were neatly piled clothing and personal effects. They had just disappeared.

  She was frightened for the first time since the war began. She had lived too many years in Israel to be intimidated by war and terrorist bombings. She had grown cynical and pessimistic and believed in living for the moment. There had been times when she drank too much, said “yes” to things when “no” would have been the better answer. But actual fear . . . This was the first time. It was as though the world had gone out of control.

  No. It was worse. It was as though the world was in someone else’s control—someone evil.

  Chapter 11

  THERE ISN’T ANY RIGHT ANSWER TO THIS,” Bronson Pearl had told Bill Farkas the last time they had lunch together. It had been weeks earlier, before Bronson began shuttling between the Middle East and New York. “Those of us who make careers in broadcast journalism have a thirst for knowledge and we’re paid to be nosy, but it’s more than that. Even the worst, most biased newspeople, still seek the truth. It’s just that some of them don’t know it when they see it.”

  “I can relate to that,” replied Bill. “But it’s not the business. It’s . . . Well, Lainie wants me to leave WNN. We’ve been trying to start a family, and though she hasn’t said anything yet, I think she’s pregnant.”

  “Do you want to leave broadcasting?” Bronson had asked.

  “Not now,” replied Bill. “Not when there are so many stories breaking and I’m getting a chance to be in the middle of them. It’s all I ever wanted growing up. I’m not ready to make the change.”

  “Is your job worth your marriage?” Bronson probed. “What if Lainie wanted you to choose between the network and her?”

  “She wouldn’t do that,” Bill insisted. “She’s never had any illusions about the pressures of the industry. She knows she comes first.”

  Bronson sighed. “You have no idea how I envy your being able to go home to the woman you love each night.” He reached out and touched his friend’s arm. “If you’re going to be a father, you need to be home.”

  Bill had agreed with Bronson. But he also knew he wasn’t going to quit his job with the network. Lainie had wanted him to stay at home. “Call in sick,” she urged. “Take a personal day.”

  “To do what?” he had asked, putting on his necktie.

  “Take a walk in the park,” she had pleaded. “Go to
a coffee shop for lunch and just talk. Make love to me. I don’t care what we do as long as we do it together.”

  “We can be together this weekend,” he replied.

  “If there is a weekend,” Lainie had said ominously.

  The remark had made him pause. “You’re really scared about all this, aren’t you, Lainie?” he had asked, not really wanting to hear her answer.

  “Of course I am,” she replied. “Neither one of us is thirty yet. We’re just at the start of our adult lives. I don’t want to miss the joy of growing old together.”

  He reached out to hug her. “We’ve been through this kind of brinkmanship before,” he reminded her. “And nothing’s ever happened. Millions were supposed to die from biological warfare during Desert Storm. The North Koreans were supposed to overrun the South and start a nuclear war.”

  Lainie had been adamant. “This is different. It’s not a time for a husband and wife to be separated.”

  He had kissed her then, tender, lovingly. He loved her and she loved him. Nothing could ever change that.

  Later that day Bill was scheduled to go live with man-on-the-street interviews when suddenly it was as if the world had gone mad. Cars swerved out of control, smashing into light poles, jumping curbs, breaking through department store windows. A police officer directing traffic suddenly vanished, only his uniform, shoes, and equipment belt piled neatly in the center of the street where he had been.

  Two men washing windows on the thirty-second floor of a nearby building were startled when an attractive young secretary suddenly vanished from her desk. A bus traveling down Main Street turned a corner with approximately half the passengers it had previously been carrying, the driver striking an out-of-control car whose driver had disappeared.

  Broken fire hydrants spewed geysers into the air and car alarms sounded their alert. Ambulance and police sirens began wailing in the distance and people in shock clutched at their chests with the onset of heart attacks.

  Inside the nearby Bank and Trust, a robber demanding money fled in terror when the teller, the branch manager, and three of the customers suddenly disappeared. In the midst of the cacophony and mass confusion, Bill Farkas got a message from the studio to stand by for live broadcast.

  “Helen!” shouted the floor director moments after several WNN staffers had vanished. “Helen, where are you? What is going on around here?”

  He was livid. One minute everyone was in place, lighting people, sound, camera operators . . . Then there was a sound and everyone was gone.

  There was a scream and the director saw Helen Hannah on the floor by her desk. The scream had come from an intern who watched as a light pole one of the technicians had been setting into place had dropped when he disappeared, smashing the computer terminal, then striking Helen a glancing blow to the side of her head. “Somebody call 911,” the intern shouted, grabbing some tissues to wipe the blood on Helen’s face.

  “Is she hurt?” asked the director, running over to help.

  “Two minutes,” he heard in his earpiece. It was the engineer’s countdown to their return to the air.

  “Throw in a commercial,” he instructed.

  “I’m okay,” said Helen shakily. She kept her eyes tightly closed against the light.

  “Stay still, Helen. The paramedics are coming,” the director ordered.

  “To do what?” she asked, raising her hand to touch the wound, and opening her eyes enough to see her fingers lightly spotted with blood. Wincing, she said, “I’m not going to die,” and, trying to sit up, paused as a wave of nausea overwhelmed her. “But I’m not going to be able to go on air for a few minutes. I’ll go to the lounge and lie down.”

  As Helen was helped from the studio, she glanced up at the catwalk where the lighting technician had been working when the pole dropped. It was then she realized that he was gone, and all that remained were his neatly piled clothes and his walkie-talkie.

  A face appeared on a nearby monitor. “This is Ellie McPherson of WNN News substituting for Helen Hannah. While our bureaus in Washington, London, Moscow, and elsewhere try to get official statements, we will continue our broadcasts from the streets. Right now we’re live with Bill Farkas, who has been talking with passersby in downtown Houston.”

  Farkas’s face came into focus.

  “Ellie, it’s unlike anything I’ve ever seen,” he reported. “It’s not a bomb, or if it is, . . .” He was interrupted as a hysterical woman ran past, shouting the names of her missing children. The camera turned away from him and followed the woman. The woman fell to her knees, wailing, in front of three small piles of neatly folded clothing just below the window of a toy store. The television screen filled with her image, eyes wide yet sightless, overwhelmed by shock, clutching the clothing to her chest and moaning.

  “This is unlike any weapon I’ve ever seen,” resumed Farkas as the camera returned to him. “There was a sound like an explosion. At least I think there was. What I remember for certain was talking to people who then just disappeared, leaving piles of clothing where they had been standing a moment earlier.”

  “But is this some kind of death ray?” Ellie asked.

  “I was hoping you could tell me,” Farkas replied. “Nothing I know about would cause a human to simply vanish.”

  “It’s happening all over the world, Bill,” Ellie interjected. “Several have even disappeared here in the studio.” In the back of the room, Helen had come back on the set and was anxiously asking, “Has anyone heard from Bronson?”

  Franco Macalousso stared out the window of the helicopter flying him to the Mount of Olives near the Western Wall in Jerusalem. It was there that he would at last ascend to his rightful place.

  This is the land where the One who came before me walked and taught and healed the people, he thought. Parlor tricks. He had no power. His time was then and they murdered Him. My time is now, and those who oppose me will be shamed when they see I am the bringer of peace. They will understand that true happiness will only come through living within my will.

  But he still felt oddly uneasy about the Rapture. It had to come, of course. He understood the Bible at least as well as the One who came before. The Rapture had been fore-told, and what was foretold would be fulfilled. But what of those who were left behind?

  Macalousso knew that all believers in the One who came before would be caught up to heaven. Otherwise he would have faced an army of believers, whose opposition would be unstoppable.

  He also knew that those who rejected the One who came before, “who believed not the love of the truth,” as the Bible stated, would be his most ardent supporters. It was they who would support his actions. It was they who would be his strongest allies. It was they who would be blinded by his powers as he brought peace to the world.

  It was the others, those who had never heard the gospel before now, that worried him. He would need to keep such people from hearing the story of the One who came before. The homes of the raptured must be sealed and a search mounted to locate and destroy videotapes, books, and, of course, all Bibles. Detention camps had been prepared for those who might have heard the Word for the first time, football stadiums, ringed with razor wire and land mines.

  “I have read the prophecies, too, President Macalousso,” his assistant Len had told him. “And I know you are more powerful than any who can come against you. The Rapture eliminated your enemies.”

  But Len did not understand what the disappearances really meant. He did not understand that, while many would follow a new leader who could make them safe with his awesome power and seeming compassion, others might not. They might discover what they had not previously known. They might read what they had previously ignored.

  But, he reassured himself, such thinking was counterproductive as he neared his moment of glory. His kingdom would soon be at hand and he basked in his triumph. It might take a while for some of those who were left behind to understand where the raptured had gone. By then he would have solidified his contr
ol and any opposition could be savagely suppressed by his new followers, the ones who had not believed the Word, who likened the life of the One who came before to mythology. “Franco Macalousso has brought a lasting peace,” they would say. “We owe to him our total loyalty.”

  Macalousso inhaled and exhaled slowly, calming himself as the helicopter touched down. Overhead missiles were ready to strike their targets—an unimaginable military force was poised to unleash massive devastation. He could sense the worldwide panic of impending doom.

  And he was pleased.

  The first missile was seconds away from detonation when Macalousso stepped to the ground, faced the waiting cameras, raised his hands over his head, and shouted, “ENOUGH! WE WILL HAVE PEACE!”

  His words were instantly broadcast throughout the world. Millions of television screens captured the image of Franco Macalousso, arms flung wide like a sorcerer unleashing his most powerful spell.

  “ENOUGH!”

  It was at that moment that air traffic controllers across the globe noticed several fast-moving blips disappearing from their screens. Pilots of long-range bombers radioed in to report that their bombs had disappeared from their holds. Their missiles had vanished and their controls no longer worked, except to guide them safely back to base.

  The unthinkable horror about to be unleashed on the world was no longer possible. It was not that the hearts of world leaders had been changed. It was not old enemies who had become friends. But the threat was over. A new age had dawned, the age of Franco Macalousso.

  Chapter 12

  HELEN PACED THE PRODUCTION AREA like a caged animal. She had asked permission to fly to the Middle East, to join Bronson.

  “There’s no way, Helen,” her producer insisted.

  “But I’m talking ratings!” Helen retorted. It was a lie, of course. Overseas communications were down. Too many people had disappeared. The New York operation was barely holding together and Helen was one of the only anchors skilled enough to explain breaking stories to the viewers. But what she wanted was the assurance that Bronson was safe.