Apocalypse Crucible

imagine going home. He would have been adrift without his mission. He would have gone mad with missing his son every day. Delroy had never allowed God to quiet the pain that filled him after the loss. Delroy’s grief over his son’s death filled the intervening years—or emptied them. That pain had estranged him from his wife—whom he’d cherished—and from the rest of their family. He hadn’t been home to see any of them in years.
Well, he was headed home now.
Hurt and despairing and confused, Delroy Harte was finally coming home. He knew he should have returned to USS Wasp and joined in the efforts to resupply the struggling marines and Rangers holding
Sanliurfa against the coming Syrian invasion. But once he realized what had happened all around the world, that the Rapture had taken away a huge portion of the world’s population, he hadn’t been able to go back to his ship. More was at stake now than Turkey. The world hung on the brink of disaster, and millions of lives—and souls—would be lost over the next seven years.
Delroy knew his own efforts to help would be insignificant in the face of the global chaos that had resulted from the Rapture. The people who had been left behind needed a man who believed in God. Delroy was not yet that man. He had questions and needed answers. He hoped God would forgive him for not being strong enough to simply believe. No, he wasn’t the man the troops needed, and he had to face the possibility that he never would be again.
Delroy gazed through the darkness ahead of him. His unabated and unbearable grief had taken him far from Marbury, where he had been born and raised, where his father had preached and ministered to a small but dedicated Baptist flock. They had needed a firm and generous hand to keep them aware of the Lord.
Delroy was afraid of what he would find in Marbury. He hoped that it would be nothing at all. He prayed silently, but he knew the words that tumbled through his mind were noise to fill the empty silence in his head. For the last five years, he’d served his ships with the same kind of dazed sincerity, giving lip service to something he couldn’t believe in after losing Terrence.
Guilt for those failures nearly overwhelmed him. During the last five years, there had been a number of soldiers, sailors, and marines who’d deserved better counsel than he had given them. And they had deserved better prayers, too. He should have retired, but he hadn’t been able to. Still, he was being honest with himself right now: Only doubt and fear drove him on through this rainy night, not belief.
Highway 111 rose slightly again. Although Delroy couldn’t discern the rise in the darkness, he felt the extra effort necessary to keep going burn through his back and calves. If he hadn’t been so fatigued, he might never have felt the slightly increased strain from climbing the incline. In the beginning, he had hoped that some kind of public transit still existed in the area.
He wasn’t dressed for an all-night hike, although he had made preparations for a short trek. He wore black slacks and a black turtleneck under the olive drab rain slicker marked with bright yellow stripes. All-terrain, weatherproof hiking boots covered his feet and provided an amazing amount of comfort even after the long distance he’d covered since leaving U.S. Highway 231. He carried a backpack that contained a couple changes of clothes as well as his uniform, high-energy bars, and bottled water. He knew he didn’t look like a common hitchhiker.
He breathed out, clearing his lungs in a great gray gust that rolled away from him in the chill of the night, then gripped the backpack’s straps to change their positions on his shoulders. The straps were cutting into his flesh, and he was so tired he hadn’t noticed until his arms had started going numb. He thought about Marbury, lying only a few miles ahead of him, and tried not to let the ghosts of the life he’d led there in happier years haunt him.
Thunder cannonaded again, racing up to him like a beast breaking the cover of the wooded land to his right. He broke his stride, darting away and half turning toward the trees and brush with his hands lifted defensively before him.
He heard only the wind and the rain. Nothing lunged for his throat. He stopped to take a few breaths. It was unsettling that it was stranger to him that nothing was there than it would have been if something had come for him.
Getting tired, Delroy. You need rest. The flesh is getting weak, and— Lord, help me—your spirit gave up on you a long time back. For a moment, he considered hunkering down under one of the trees at the roadside and taking his chances that the rain wouldn’t pick up again or that lightning wouldn’t strike the tree.
But the fire in his belly, the knotted ball of worry and doubt and fear that churned there, wouldn’t leave him. Marbury and the horrible truth that lay there pulled him on. He turned his face toward the rain and started walking again. After standing just that short time, his boots felt leaden.
The low drone of a motor ate into the sound of the drizzling rain hissing like acid across the highway pavement. Delroy didn’t know how long the noise had been there before he became aware of it.
Even as he recognized the chugging as the sound of an approaching vehicle, dim yellow lights chopped through the rain and the night around him. The wet pavement turned silver in front of him, becoming a two-dimensional surface that seemed fragile. His shadow stretched black and long across it, a scarecrow caricature of a man.
Hope lifted Delroy’s spirits as he turned to face the vehicle coming slowly down the highway, but the feeling ebbed away almost as soon as it appeared.