The Days of Elijah, Book One: Apocalypse: A Novel of the Great Tribulation in America

by Goodwin,Mark

  Kevin didn’t look like he was buying it. His forehead was heavily furrowed as he listened. “And all of this is in the Bible? The gates of hell being opened?”

  Elijah gave Kevin a graceful nod. “The fifth trumpet. Revelation 9 reads, ‘And the fifth angel sounded, and I saw a star fall from heaven unto the earth: and to him was given the key of the bottomless pit. And he opened the bottomless pit; and there arose a smoke out of the pit, as the smoke of a great furnace; and the sun and the air were darkened by reason of the smoke of the pit. And there came out of the smoke locusts upon the earth: and unto them was given power, as the scorpions of the earth have power.’

  “But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. You’ve got a little time on that one and there are other, more immediate threats that you’ll have to survive first.”

  Sarah put her fork on the table and sarcastically remarked, “Oh, that’s a relief. With all of the death and destruction we have to face right now, we’ll probably never live long enough to see the gates of hades flung wide open.”

  “I didn’t mean to distract from this delicious meal. Let us speak of more pleasant things. I saw some building materials on the side of the house. Will you be building a greenhouse?”

  Everett nodded. He was all for changing the subject. “Eventually, yes. But spring is right around the corner, so probably not until next fall.”

  Kevin joined the conversation, also seeming eager to talk about something else. “We scavenged those materials from the house where we were staying in Tennessee. The first thing we need is more storage space.”

  Elijah winked at Kevin. “And there’s a man with the fascinating ability to state the obvious.”

  Kevin began laughing and the others soon joined in for a brief chuckle.

  Everett smiled as he thought what an uncanny ability Elijah had to take them to the edge of panic and then turn it all around in a second.

  After the light-hearted lark, they all resumed eating and enjoyed the rest of the meal getting to know each other better.

  Once they’d finished their meals, Everett asked, “Is everything okay, Elijah?” He could see the old man had something on his mind. “You don’t seem quite as chipper as usual.”

  Elijah looked at the others sitting around the table as if he were weighing the thought of replying to Everett now or waiting until they were alone. He sighed. “I’ve received my instructions, at least for now.”

  “Oh.” Everett had a sudden sense of loss. He’d quickly grown to admire the old man. “Will you be leaving?”

  Before he could answer, Courtney placed a cup of tea in front of the prophet and asked in a distressed voice. “When are you going?”

  Elijah put a hand in the air. “Settle down, both of you. Hear me out. At some point, I’ll be leaving the country, to go to Jerusalem. When I leave for Israel, I won’t be coming back. But I’ve not been instructed on that matter yet. Before the amnesty period ends, I am to go to DC. I am to stand before Luz and pronounce judgement against him and the Global Republic.”

  “Then you’ll come back here?” Everett asked.

  “I presume, but I can’t be certain.”

  “Good, I feel like I have so many things to ask you before you leave.” Everett was relieved that Elijah would be coming back.

  “Yes, well, you may have more of an opportunity to pick my brain than you think.” Elijah sipped his tea.

  Everett chuckled at the remark. It sounded like another one of Elijah’s absurd comments. Finally, curiosity got the better of him and he asked, “Okay, I give up, when will I have this opportunity?”

  Elijah peered into Everett’s eyes over the top of his tea cup as he took another sip. “You are to accompany me on my journey.”

  Everett shook his head without speaking. His stomach sank. He’d just finished dealing with Kevin who wanted to knock over a GR supply truck. Now the crazy old man had in mind to drag him into the belly of the beast. Everett was on this mountain to survive, to keep his head low, and to ride out the coming storm. Why was everyone insisting that he put himself in harm’s way? In a flash, Everett’s opinion of the old man had evolved from honor and respect to thinking of him as a complete lunatic.

  Courtney grabbed Everett’s arm. “That doesn’t sound like a very wise thing to do. I understand that God has called you and you have a special mission, but what good would it do you for Everett to go along with you? I’m sorry Elijah, it just sounds like an unnecessary risk.”

  Everett put his hand on hers and smiled at her. At least Courtney hadn’t lost her mind, too. He wasn’t alone. “Yeah, I don’t have any skill set that’s going to increase your odds of success. I’d just get in the way.” He gave the prophet a condescending smile, as if he were talking to a senile elderly man in a nursing home.

  Elijah’s heavy hearted expression changed to that of light amusement. He laughed as he pointed to Courtney. “Oh, you are to come along as well.”

  “Me? Why me? What does any of this have to do with me?” She shook her head adamantly. “Oh no, absolutely not.”

  Elijah stood up. “I should be going. I’ve caused enough anxiety for one night.”

  Everett didn’t want him to feel bad. “Elijah, you’re welcome to stay. We’re not mad, but we’re not going to DC or New Atlantis or anywhere else. We’ve put a lot of effort into making this cabin our fortress.”

  “Exactly.” Elijah chuckled as he put his coat on. “The safest place you can be is in the center of God’s will. We leave first thing Monday morning.”

  “Elijah!” Courtney called out to him as he walked out the door.

  Kevin and Sarah said nothing during the entire exchange.

  Courtney turned to them. “I’m sorry. He’s not usually like this.”

  Sarah shook her head. “Don’t apologize to me. You didn’t do anything. Besides, I’ve had to raise the bar on what I consider weird these days.” She pointed toward the door that Elijah had just left through. “And that, just barely makes the cut.”

  Everett took a deep breath and exhaled. He hated that Elijah had left without talking the disagreement over, but had the man gone stark raving mad? What possible good could come of Everett and Courtney tagging along while Elijah made some wild attempt to aggravate the most powerful man on the face of the earth? Sure, none of them liked Luz, but Antichrist or not, he had the full power of the New World Order at his beck and call.

  CHAPTER 7

  I will say of the LORD, He is my refuge and my fortress: my God; in him will I trust.

  Psalm 91:2

  Late Saturday morning, Everett called out to Danger who was barking. “It’s okay, boy. It’s just Elijah.” Danger ran to the porch but continued barking. Everett walked out to pet the dog. “I know, I know, he scares me too sometimes.”

  Elijah pulled the old truck into the driveway which was now full with Everett’s BMW, Ken’s Camaro, Kevin’s green TWRA truck, and a Ford F-150 which had belonged to a man from Kevin’s group who’d disappeared.

  Everett walked down the drive to greet Elijah. “Sorry about last evening, I . . .”

  “Let us speak no more of it.” Elijah put his hand in the air as he cut Everett off before he could finish. “Today is a new day. The road is clearing up. I should think the rest of the road down the mountain will be clear if you’d like to go see the cave.”

  Everett looked in the back of Elijah’s truck. The old man had an extension ladder and some rope. “You must be figuring on some hard core spelunking.”

  “If you intend to put any of your supplies there, I’m sure you’d prefer them to not be overly visible nor readily accessible. Have you any coffee?”

  Everett smiled. For a crazy old man, Elijah certainly thought of everything. “I think we’ve got time to put a pot on. Come on in.”

  Everett put on a pot of coffee then tapped on Kevin and Sarah’s door. “Elijah’s here, but we’ve got a little time before we roll out to the cave. He’s going to have a cup of coffee before we go.”

>   Kevin called out through the closed door. “Great, we’ll be ready in about fifteen minutes.”

  Everett climbed up the ladder to tell Courtney. She was lying on the bed, reading her Bible and her face was as white as a ghost.

  “Are you all right? Your hands are shaking.” He sat down beside her and put his hand on her back.

  She shook her head and tears began to stream down her face.

  “Hey, what’s wrong?” He lay down next to her.

  She closed the Bible. “God, he’s talking to me!”

  Everett gritted his teeth. He remembered the feeling when Ken and Lisa had accepted Christ. How he’d felt abandoned by them and left with only him and Courtney who were thinking rationally. Now he had that feeling again, but this time he was the only one left. “Are you sure? What did he say? Could it just be your imagination?”

  “Everett!” She wiped the tear from her eye. “Don’t talk to me like I’m crazy. I know what you’re thinking. You have to quit being like that. You think you know everything and your reality is how it is. You think anyone who doesn’t see things your way is a kook. I’m not a kook, Everett. This is me talking to you. You know me.”

  He sat up and gave her some distance. “Okay. Just explain to me what happened.” She was right. It was that attitude that had guaranteed his reservation to the Great Tribulation; but still, he wasn’t about to admit it. “What did God say to you?”

  “Nothing, like I didn’t hear a voice.”

  He wanted to say, Work with me here. I’m trying. But instead he just nodded. He’d learned the hard way that it was sometimes better to just nod.

  “Everett, I know that look.” She pointed at him. “Okay, you’re right, that sounds even crazier.” She took a deep breath. “So, I was reading my Bible, just straight through the New Testament, like we’ve been doing since we read Romans and John, I’m in Hebrews, right? Chapter 11, I think. Anyway, the whole chapter is about all these people who basically do something crazy because God told them to do it. By faith, Noah builds an ark even though it has never rained, by faith Abraham leaves his home to go wander off in the desert looking for some place he’s never heard of, by faith Abraham is willing to sacrifice his son, by faith Moses chose to suffer with his people rather than enjoy the pleasures of Egypt. I read it over and over like five times. And do you know what else it says?”

  Everett shook his head, not really wanting to know. He could feel it in his bones. While he didn’t know the words she’d use, he knew exactly the meaning of what Courtney was about to say. A shiver ran up his back and he could feel the hairs standing up on his arms.

  “It says without faith; it is impossible to please God.” She began crying again. “We spent so much time not pleasing God, Everett.” She took his hand. “I want to please God; I want to have faith. If he’s calling us to do something, we have to do it.”

  Tears were streaming down Everett’s face as well as he pulled his wife close to himself. “I know.”

  She pushed him back to look in his eyes. “You mean it, Everett? You’re not just saying I know to shut me up?”

  “No, the same thing happened to me this morning.”

  “What? The same thing? You were reading Hebrews 11?”

  “No, different verse, but same type of experience. I wrote it off to my imagination, but after hearing you, I know it was God speaking. And he was telling me the same thing.”

  She dried her eyes. “Tell me about it!”

  “Last night, I said something to Elijah, I told him we weren’t going with him because this cabin is our fortress. And like he always does, he said something that made no sense. He said exactly. I mean, what kind of a response is that?

  “This morning, I’m reading my Bible, Psalm. For whatever reason, I’ve been reading a few psalms every morning before I read the New Testament” He picked up her Bible. “I’m reading Psalm 18 this morning, and right away I read, ‘The LORD is my rock, and my fortress, and my deliverer; my God, my strength, in whom I will trust; my buckler, and the horn of my salvation, and my high tower. I will call upon the LORD, who is worthy to be praised: so shall I be saved from mine enemies.’

  “Right after I told Elijah that this house was my fortress, I read that the LORD is my fortress. It’s the same thing that he’s telling you. I have to trust him. What did you say? It’s impossible to please God without faith? That’s exactly what I was feeling when I was reading this psalm.

  “But that’s not all, the psalm goes on to talk about all of this calamitous stuff, it says the sorrows of hell compassed me, the earth shook and trembled; the foundations also of the hills moved and were shaken, because he was wroth. This is exactly what we are about to go through. It sounds like a description of the Great Tribulation. The earth shaking, that’s the quake that’s coming! It sounds like this was written just for me; like it’s been in this book the whole time, for thousands of years, just waiting for me to read it. I thought I was just making something out of nothing, blowing it out of proportion, but then the same thing happened to you.”

  “Wow.” Courtney just sat at the edge of the bed. After a few moments of silence, she turned to him. “Then we’re going to tell Elijah that we’re going with him?”

  Everett huffed. “He didn’t really ask. He basically just told us when to be ready.”

  “Okay, then. We’ll be ready.”

  Everett took a deep breath. “I hope so.”

  An hour later, Everett and the others had the two trucks loaded with some supplies which they would attempt to stash and conceal inside the cave.

  “If you have a dolly or hand cart, you should bring it.” Elijah said as he got in the cab of his truck.

  “Why? How far is the cave from the road?” Kevin asked.

  Elijah rolled down his window and shrugged. “Maybe a half mile. First leg of the trip would be easy to use a cart. But the last hundred yards is pretty rugged terrain. It will require a fair amount of agility to get up a steep incline then a small cliff.”

  “Hmm.” Everett furrowed his brow as he looked at all of the supplies they’d loaded into the back of the trucks. “How much of this stuff do you think we can get moved in today?”

  Elijah put his truck in reverse and began slowly backing out of the drive as if to hurry them along. “It depends on how long you dilly dally.”

  Everett rushed to get a hand cart and returned to the truck. He started the engine. Courtney quickly got in the passenger’s side and closed the door. “I have a feeling that we are in for a workout.”

  Everett pursed his lips. “I should have picked up the clue when he told us to pack a lunch and bring plenty of water.”

  “Elijah is always full of surprises.” Courtney sighed.

  Kevin and Sarah followed Everett closely in the green truck as he trailed along behind Elijah. The convoy climbed the winding road up past Elijah’s home, on toward the peak of the mountain. They continued along the narrow pavement down the other side of the summit. As the caravan descended to a lower elevation, they crossed over into West Virginia. Another mile down the road was a mountain stream. Elijah pulled off the road and led the way toward the water. The stream was slow and calm with low cliffs where the water had cut through the rocks over the years.

  Elijah got out and closed his door. He hung the coil of rope around his shoulder and took his ladder from the truck bed. “We shall have to make several trips, so let’s get a move on.”

  Everett configured the dolly to be a low pushcart and stacked 2 five-gallon buckets on the flat surface. He then positioned two more buckets, one on top of the other next to the first two and secured them all with bungee cords.

  Elijah smiled. “We’ll see how far you get with that configuration. The narrow trail follows around the stream about an eighth of a mile then we leave the path and walk through the woods. You could probably push the dolly another 200 yards if you reconfigure it to roll upright.”

  Everett sighed and nodded. There was no use arguing about it. Kevin
and Courtney each took two buckets, one in each hand.

  Sarah slung her rifle over her back, carried a bucket in one hand and a walking stick in the other. “If I’m traveling on uneven terrain, I have to have something to steady myself when I step onto my prosthetic leg.”

  “You won’t hear any complaints out of me. People who have a lot more abilities than you find reasons to give up and do a lot less.” Everett patted his back pocket to double check that his extra pistol magazines were where they were supposed to be, before starting the cart along the trail. “You are an inspiration to all of us.”

  “Thanks. I guess giving up isn’t in my nature.” Sarah cracked a faint smile as she followed behind Everett. She didn’t seem the type that needed a constant barrage of accolades, but everyone likes a compliment now and then.

  Everett stopped when he saw Elijah leave the trail. He removed the buckets, reconfigured the dolly to roll upright, and reloaded it with two of the four buckets. It wasn’t the most convenient maneuver, but at least he wouldn’t have to go all the way back to the truck for the two additional food-storage buckets. He continued to follow behind Elijah, Kevin and Courtney, with Sarah trailing in the back as the rear guard.

  Just as Elijah had said, the utility of the dolly ran out in about 200 yards. The group paused for a break after carrying the heavy buckets and equipment this far. Everett unfastened the bungee cords and took off the buckets.

  Elijah instructed them on the next leg of the journey. “We’ve got some steep situations between here and the entrance of the cave. I’d recommend each of you using one hand to carry a bucket and the other to maintain your balance. The higher we go, the more detrimental a fall would be. Don’t try to be a hero. If you fall and injure yourself, you’ll be a serious liability to the rest of the group. Slow and steady; we’ll get it all moved. We have plenty of time. Sarah, I’d recommend that you leave your bucket here and focus on getting yourself up the hill. We can make a couple of trips back and forth, the cave isn’t far now.”