Nicolae High (7 page)

O
N
the way to his last class before lunch, Judd saw the two senior boys whose Bibles had been confiscated during the assembly. One was tall and blond, the other stockier and dark-haired. He didn’t know their names, but if his memory was right, they were smart kids—science club, honor roll types. “Hey,” he said, approaching them, “are you believers?”

They looked wary. “Why? Are you?”

He had to take the chance. “I am.”

“How do we know you’re not playing us, trying to get us in trouble?” the blond said.

“You don’t.”

“Well,” Dark Hair said, “how did you become a believer?”

“Lost my family,” Judd said. “I knew the truth all along.”

“Then you should know what Christians are called during this period.”

“You mean tribulation saints?”

The two looked at each other and smiled. They extended their hands. “John,” the blond said.

“Mark,” the other said.

“You’re kidding, right?” Judd said. “John and Mark?”

“We’re cousins.”

“But I mean—”

“We know what you mean. Yeah, we were named after the disciples. Churchgoers all our lives. We lost everybody in our family except one aunt. We’re living with her and going to a church in Arlington Heights. What’s your story?”

Judd ran it down quickly. Then, “Gotta go, but let’s talk again. We should get our church groups together sometime.”

“That’s for sure,” John said. “Especially if they’re not going to even let us carry our Bibles to school. Coach Handlesman said we might not even get them back.”

“What? You’re kidding!”

They shook their heads.

“Are we going to be in a police state or what?” Judd said.

“It’s like martial law,” Mark said.

Judd waved as he headed toward Current History. “See ya tomorrow.”

“Yeah,” John called after him, “if we’re still free men.”

“Not funny, John!” came the gruff voice of Coach Handlesman.

Judd began to wonder if he and Vicki, and even John and Mark, should be more covert and lie low. It was one thing to be a bold witness, but if they got kicked out or were known as dangerous people to be seen with, what good would they be?

His history teacher, an old spinster named Miss June, looked as if she had been through a war. Normally tidy and fastidious, today she looked disheveled. Her shoes were scuffed, her blouse wrinkled, her hair pinned in place without much thought. Her fingers trembled, and she sat behind her desk rather than standing as usual.

“Well, class, I have been through some things in my day, but I never would have dreamed that hearing everyone’s stories would have been nearly as traumatic as experiencing this tragedy one’s self. I’m wondering if you might agree that we have had enough talk on this subject by now, and perhaps we can talk about the rest of the quarter.”

No one said anything.

“All right then?” she said.

“Um, no,” a boy said from the back row. “What’s to talk about? You’re going to streamline the course because of the time we missed, and we’ll start getting assignments tomorrow. What else is there?”

“We could talk about what we’re going to be studying,” she said.

“We already know that. Current History is current history. Let’s talk about who’s not coming back to this class.”

Miss June pursed her lips and gave the boy a disgusted look. She studied her attendance printout, but when she began announcing the names of seven students who were either confirmed disappeared (four), whereabouts unknown (one), and ill (two), her voice broke. Soon she could not continue.

“What in the world is wrong, Miss June?” a girl said. “How many people did you lose?”

But she could not speak. She just pressed a hand to her mouth and shook her head.

“This I’ve got to hear,” the boy behind Judd said, and Judd glared at him.

“Give her a break,” he said. “If you didn’t lose anybody, at least be sensitive to those of us who did.”

The boy pantomimed as if playing a violin.

“Can we talk about it among ourselves?” a girl said. Miss June nodded. “Because I know it wasn’t a religious thing.”

“We’re not supposed to talk about that!”

“Oh, who’s going to stop us?” the girl said. “Anyway, I’m saying it
wasn’t
that. How can they have a problem with that?”

Judd’s resolve to keep quiet disappeared. “You
know
it wasn’t a religious thing?” he said.

“That’s right,” she said. “Not one person in my church disappeared. So what does that tell you?”

“That you don’t believe in Jesus!” a husky guy in the back called out, and several laughed, including him.

“But we do!” she said. “We all do! We believe in all the sons of God.”

“What does that mean?”

“We’re not supposed to be—”

“Put a sock in it! I want to know what her church believes!”

“We believe that everybody’s a son of God, like Jesus. Buddha, Confucius, Muhammad, Jesus, all the great moral leaders and great teachers.”

Judd said, “So you believe Jesus is
a
son of God but not
the
Son of God.”

“Not the only one, no. We’re all children of God.”

“So Jesus isn’t God.”

“Of course not, silly. God is God. There is only one God.”

“So you don’t believe the Bible.”

“Of course we do. We accept all the sacred writings.”

“Like what?”

“The Bible, the Torah, the Talmud, the—”

“And they all say that Jesus is God and is the only way to God?” Judd said.

“No! None of them say that! God is not the exclusive property of Christianity. There are many roads to God.”

“The Bible says Jesus is God and that he’s the only way to God.”

“I don’t believe that.”

“That it’s true or that the Bible says it?”

“Either one!”

“Then that’s why you’re still here.”

“Oh!” someone shouted. “He burned you! But he’s still here too, ain’t he?”

“That’s enough,” Miss June said, rising and wiping her nose. “This is the very reason we’re not to be getting into this aspect of it. Now if you’re going to insist on discussing this, let’s keep it nonsectarian.”

“What does that mean?”

“Keep religion out of it, especially specific ones.”

“Yeah,” someone said, “like those ones where everyone was left behind!”

Miss June was weeping again. “I don’t see any humor in this! Aren’t you people the least bit scared? I’m terrified! I can make no sense of this, and there seems no recourse. If someone would come forward and take credit for it, make some demands, tell how he or she did it, we could get our minds around it. But this . . . this . . . crazy, unexplainable mystery! Every morning I wake up and pray it was a dream, that it will end, that it will all be made plain. Talk about it, kids. Talk about how it made you feel.”

That served to silence the class. It was clear they didn’t want to talk about it. Judd glanced around. The kids were somber again. No wisecracks. “It scared me to death,” he said. “I was on an airplane when it happened.”

The classroom was deathly still as Judd spoke. “The guy next to me disappeared while I was dozing. He was a big, heavy guy, and I couldn’t figure out at first how he could have climbed over me without waking me. Then I saw his clothes there in a pile. Everybody else was discovering people missing at the same time. What a mess! I’m amazed there wasn’t more panic. People thought their seatmates had gone to the bathroom, but too many were gone, and what was with all the piles of clothes and shoes and jewelry and glasses?”

Judd told how he had lost his whole immediate family, but he said nothing about how he knew what had happened. He just wanted to get kids talking, trying to find out who leaned his way and who might already be a believer. His own high school had already been named after the Antichrist, and he knew he and Vicki were going to need all the friends they could get.

At lunchtime Judd looked for Vicki. Juniors and freshmen shared the cafeteria, but he had not known her before and had no idea where she sat. He finally spotted her in a corner with a bunch of girls who looked the way Vicki described herself before the Rapture. They must have been friends from her trailer park.

Judd wanted to talk with her, but he didn’t want to barge in either. He sat near their table and heard some of the conversation. The girls were telling Vicki they missed her and wondered what had happened to her. “I’ve been hammered every night since,” one said. “How else do you cope with something like this?”

A heavyset girl sitting next to Vicki said, “Apparently you change your life and get preppy all of a sudden.”

The others smiled. Vicki didn’t. “I lost my whole family, you know,” she said.

“You lost your mind too,” the girl said. “Look at you.”

Judd decided it was time to give Vicki an out. He walked past her table so she could see him. If she didn’t want to acknowledge him, that was all right too. Maybe she didn’t want to confirm that she even ran with a crowd that looked like him. That would make her transformation too complete.

Vicki was thrilled to see Judd, and she jumped at the chance to escape. “Judd!” she said. “Can I sit with you? We need to talk.”

“Sure.”

“What’sa matter?” a girl said. “We’re not good enough for you anymore?”

“I’m not good enough for you anymore,” Vicki said. “Since I’m wearing borrowed clothes and they don’t look like yours—”

“They look like somebody’s mother’s clothes,” the big girl said, but Vicki didn’t respond. She and Judd took their trays outside.

“There’s a reason these look like someone’s mother’s clothes,” she whispered.

He nodded. They brought each other up to date on their mornings. “This is going to be hard, isn’t it?” he said.

“You’re telling me. But, Judd, I just feel like this is where we’re supposed to be, doing what we’re meant to be doing.”

“Out loud or in secret? Sounds like neither of us got very far by being open.”

“I found a few people I think might be with us, and those two seniors—”

“John and Mark,” Judd said.

“Yeah. We’ve got to stick together somehow.”

“We need more people. We can’t just be a secret, private club. We’ve got to do something.”

“I’ve been thinking about that, Judd,” Vicki said. “I think there’s something we can do.”

“That won’t get us kicked out of Nicolae High?”

“If we do it right. Your computer is the latest thing, right?”

“There’s not much it can’t do.”

“Including publishing?”

“Desktop publishing? ’Course. It was made for that.”

Vicki started gathering up her stuff. “Walk with me,” she said as she took her tray inside. “And let’s talk to Lionel and Ryan about this when we get home.”

“About what?”

“An underground newspaper. We’ll have to think of a good title for it, but it will tell people’s stories without giving away their identities. We can use lots of prophecy and stuff from Bruce, and we can just leave piles of them around where anyone can get them. They don’t have to be long, but we have to keep them coming. If Bruce is right and we can put a few predictions in there that actually come true, kids will want these. Who knows how many kids might become believers?”

Judd slid his tray onto the retrieval rack and stood back, looking at Vicki. “Why didn’t I think of that?” he said.

“You like the idea?”

“It’s perfect!”

“That’s another thing we need more of in the Young Trib Force,” she said.

“What,” he said, “more perfect ideas?”

“I was thinking of more women,” she said. “Same thing.”

Jerry B. Jenkins
(
www.jerryjenkins.com
) is the writer of the Left Behind series. He owns the Jerry B. Jenkins Christian Writers Guild, an organization dedicated to mentoring aspiring authors. Former vice president for publishing for the Moody Bible Institute of Chicago, he also served many years as editor of
Moody
magazine and is now Moody’s writer-at-large.

His writing has appeared in publications as varied as
Reader’s Digest, Parade, Guideposts,
in-flight magazines, and dozens of other periodicals. Jenkins’s biographies include books with Billy Graham, Hank Aaron, Bill Gaither, Luis Palau, Walter Payton, Orel Hershiser, and Nolan Ryan, among many others. His books appear regularly on the
New York Times, USA Today, Wall Street Journal,
and
Publishers Weekly
best seller lists.

Jerry is also the writer of the nationally syndicated sports story comic strip
Gil Thorp,
distributed to newspapers across the United States by Tribune Media Services.

Jerry and his wife, Dianna, live in Colorado and have three grown sons.

Dr. Tim LaHaye
(
www.timlahaye.com
), who conceived the idea of fictionalizing an account of the Rapture and the Tribulation, is a noted author, minister, and nationally recognized speaker on Bible prophecy. He is the founder of both Tim LaHaye Ministries and The PreTrib Research Center. He also recently cofounded the Tim LaHaye School of Prophecy at Liberty University. Presently Dr. LaHaye speaks at many of the major Bible prophecy conferences in the U.S. and Canada, where his current prophecy books are very popular.

Dr. LaHaye holds a doctor of ministry degree from Western Theological Seminary and a doctor of literature degree from Liberty University. For twenty-five years he pastored one of the nation’s outstanding churches in San Diego, which grew to three locations. It was during that time that he founded two accredited Christian high schools, a Christian school system of ten schools, and Christian Heritage College.

Dr. LaHaye has written over forty books that have been published in more than thirty languages. He has written books on a wide variety of subjects, such as family life, temperaments, and Bible prophecy. His current fiction works, the Left Behind series, written with Jerry B. Jenkins, continue to appear on the best seller lists of the Christian Booksellers Association,
Publishers Weekly, Wall Street Journal, USA Today,
and the
New York Times.

He is the father of four grown children and grandfather of nine. Snow skiing, waterskiing, motorcycling, golfing, vacationing with family, and jogging are among his leisure activities.