The Left Behind Collection: All 12 Books (114 page)

The ground shifted and broke up. A huge section of sidewalk pushed up from the ground more than ten feet and toppled into the street.

The sound was deafening. Buck had never raised his window after listening to the animals, and now the thunderous crashing enveloped him as trucks flipped over and streetlamps, telephone poles, and houses fell.

Buck told himself to slow down. Speed would kill him. He had to see what he was encountering and pick his way through it. The Range Rover bounced and twisted. Once he spun in a circle. People who had, for the moment, survived this were driving wildly and smashing into each other.

How long would it last? Buck was disoriented. He looked at the compass on the dash and tried to stay pointed to the west. For a moment there seemed almost a pattern in the street. He went down then up then down then up as if on a roller coaster, but the great quake had just begun. What at first appeared as jagged peaks the Rover could handle quickly became swirling masses of mud and asphalt. Cars were swallowed up in them.

Horror was not a good enough word for it. Rayford could not bring himself to speak to Carpathia or even to Mac. They were headed toward Baghdad Airport, and Rayford could not keep from staring at the devastation below. Fires had broken out all over the place. They illuminated car crashes, flattened buildings, the earth roiling and rolling like an angry sea. What appeared a huge ball of a gasoline fire caught his eye. There, hanging in the sky so close it seemed he could touch it, was the moon. The bloodred moon.

Buck was not thinking of himself. He was thinking of Chloe. He was thinking of Loretta. He was thinking of Tsion. Could God have brought them through all this only to let them die in the great earthquake, the sixth Seal Judgment? If they all went to be with God, so much the better. Was it too much to ask that it be painless for his loved ones? If they were to go, he prayed, “Lord, take them quickly.”

The quake roared on and on, a monster that gobbled everything in sight. Buck recoiled in horror as his headlights shone on a huge house dropping completely underground. How far was he from Chloe at Loretta’s? Would he have a better chance of getting to Loretta and Tsion at the church? Soon Buck found his the only vehicle in sight. No streetlights, no traffic lights, no street signs. Houses were crumbling. Above the road he heard screams, saw people running, tripping, falling, rolling.

The Range Rover bounced and shook. He couldn’t count the times his head hit the roof. Once a strip of curb rolled up and pushed the Range Rover on its side. Buck thought the end was near. He was not going to take it lying down. There he was, pressed up against the left side of the vehicle, strapped in. He reached for the seat belt. He was going to unfasten it and climb out the passenger’s-side window. Just before he got it unlatched, the rolling earth uprighted the Range Rover, and off he drove again. Glass broke. Walls fell. Restaurants disappeared. Car dealerships were swallowed. Office buildings stood at jagged angles, then slowly toppled. Again Buck saw a gap in the road he could not avoid. He closed his eyes and braced himself, feeling his tires roll over an uneven surface and break glass and crumple metal. He looked around quickly as he took a left and saw that he had driven over the top of someone else’s car. He hardly knew where he was. He just kept heading west. If only he could get to the church or to Loretta’s house. Would he recognize either? Was there a prayer that anyone he knew anywhere in the world was still alive?

Mac had caught a glimpse of the moon. Rayford could see he was awestruck. He maneuvered the chopper so Nicolae could see it too. Carpathia seemed to stare at it in wonder. It illuminated his face in its awful red glow, and the man had never looked more like the devil.

Great sobs rose in Rayford’s chest and throat. As he looked at the destruction and mayhem below, he knew the odds were against his finding Amanda.
Lord, receive her unto yourself without suffering, please!

And Hattie! Was it possible she might have received Christ before this? Could there have been somebody in Boston or on the plane who would have helped her make the transaction?

Suddenly there came a meteor shower, as if the sky was falling. Huge flaming rocks streaked from the sky. Rayford had seen it go from day to night and now back to day with all the flames.

Buck gasped as the Range Rover finally hit something that made it stop. The back end had settled into a small indentation, and the headlights pointed straight up. Buck had both hands on the wheel, and he was reclining, staring at the sky. Suddenly the heavens opened. Monstrous black and purple clouds rolled upon each other and seemed to peel back the very blackness of the night. Meteors came hurtling down, smashing everything that had somehow avoided being swallowed. One landed next to Buck’s door, so hot that it melted the windshield and made Buck unlatch his seat belt and try to scramble out the right side. But as he did, another molten rock exploded behind the Range Rover and punched it out of the ditch. Buck was thrown into the backseat and hit his head on the ceiling. He was dazed, but he knew if he stayed in one place he was dead. He climbed over the seat and got behind the wheel again. He strapped himself in, thinking how flimsy that precaution seemed against the greatest earthquake in the history of mankind.

There seemed no diminishing of the motion of the earth. These were not aftershocks. This thing simply was not going to quit. Buck drove slowly, the Range Rover’s headlights jerking and bouncing crazily as first one side and then the other dropped and flew into the air. Buck thought he recognized a landmark: a low-slung restaurant at a corner three blocks from the church. Somehow he had to keep going. He carefully drove around and through destruction and mayhem. The earth continued to shift and roll, but he just kept going. Through his blown-out window he saw people running, heard them screaming, saw their gaping wounds and their blood. They tried to hide under rocks that had been disgorged from the earth. They used upright chunks of asphalt and sidewalk to protect them, but just as quickly they were crushed. A middle-aged man, shirtless and shoeless and bleeding, looked heavenward through broken glasses and opened his arms wide. He screamed to the sky, “God, kill me! Kill me!” And as Buck slowly bounced past in the Range Rover, the man was swallowed into the earth.

Rayford had lost hope. Part of him was praying that the helicopter would drop from the sky and crash. The irony was, he knew Nicolae Carpathia was not to die for yet another twenty-one months. And then he would be resurrected and live another three-and-a-half years. No meteor would smash that helicopter. And wherever they landed, they would somehow be safe. All because Rayford had been running an errand for the Antichrist.

Buck’s heart sank as he saw the steeple of New Hope Village Church. It had to be less than six hundred yards away, but the earth was still churning. Things were still crashing. Huge trees fell and dragged power lines into the street. Buck spent several minutes wending his way through debris and over huge piles of wood and dirt and cement. The closer he got to the church, the emptier he felt in his heart. That steeple was the only thing standing. Its base rested at ground level. The lights of the Range Rover illuminated pews, sitting incongruously in neat rows, some of them unscathed. The rest of the sanctuary, the high-arched beams, the stained-glass windows, all gone. The administration building, the classrooms, the offices were flattened to the ground in a pile of bricks and glass and mortar.

One car was visible in a crater in what used to be the parking lot. The bottom of the car was flat on the ground, all four tires blown, axles broken. Two bare human legs protruded from under the car. Buck stopped the Range Rover a hundred feet from that mess in the parking lot. He shifted into park and turned off the engine. His door would not open. He loosened his belt and climbed out the passenger side. And suddenly the earthquake stopped. The sun reappeared. It was a bright, sunshiny Monday morning in Mt. Prospect, Illinois. Buck felt every bone in his body. He staggered over the uneven ground toward that little flattened car. When he was close enough, he saw that the crushed body was missing a shoe. The one that remained, however, confirmed his fear. Loretta had been crushed by her own car.