The End is Now (32 page)

Everyone was coughing, gagging, and covering their mouths and eyes. The masses were screaming and running into each other
as they scattered for cover. The clouds got so thick that Will could no longer see what was going on. And then through the
clouds another officer appeared, dragging Will’s mom. He opened the door and threw her inside.

She was coughing and crying and she threw up on the floor of the car. Will had never seen his mom throw up before. But every
time he was sick, she sat there with him, rubbed his back, and held his hair off of his forehead. It always made him feel
better. So he parted his mom’s hair to one side, held it out of her face, and patted her on the back.

“It’s going to be okay, Mom,” he said. She threw up again. It smelled like coffee. Will wanted to do something more for her
and he remembered that whenever he was sick, his mom always got him some Sprite. Will pressed his face against the cage separating
the back from the front of the police car and shouted, “We need to get some Sprite!”

The officer didn’t acknowledge Will. He just flicked on his sirens, put the car in drive, and sped away from the scene. “Did
you hear me? My mom’s sick. We need some medicine. Or at least some Sprite.”

The officer still didn’t answer. He was completely focused on the road, on speeding away from the scene. Amy was still coughing
and hunched over. It seemed like she’d gotten really hurt out there. The officer didn’t seem to notice or care.

Once they’d driven for a few more minutes, Will asked, “Where are you taking us?”

The officer slammed on the brakes. He took off his helmet, slowly, like Darth Vader would. But when the man turned around,
it wasn’t an officer at all.

It was Will’s father.

“I’m taking you and your mother away from Goodland. We’re getting out of here forever. They can have this rapture without
us.”

Jeff Henderson put his helmet back on, stomped on the gas, and the police car sped down the highway like a bat out of hell.

THE
END

The Lord himself will come down from heaven, with a loud command, with the voice of the archangel and with the trumpet call
of God, and the dead in Christ will rise first. After that, we who are still alive and are left will be caught up together
with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air. And so we will be with the Lord forever.

1 T
HESSALONIANS
4 :16 – 17

It ain’t the parts of the Bible that I can’t understand that bother me, it’s the parts that I do understand.

M
ARK
T
WAIN

The Realists had a bumper sticker of their own. It read, “In case of rapture, can I have your car?”

They wanted the rapture to just go away. But it wouldn’t. One Realist had counted eighteen rapture predictions in the two-hundred-year
history of Goodland. Nearly one every ten years. But even the oldest members of Goodland couldn’t remember the town being
this worked up before. Sure, there’d been predictions that they’d seen in their lifetime. But nothing like this. They’d never
seen the whole town get so wrapped up, shut down, and halfway destroyed.

Which made every member of the Realists think the same thing — this has to stop. Now. The religious paranoia that has cast
a shadow over Goodland must come to an end. This was the twenty-first century. Hadn’t we moved past thinking the world is
flat, burning witches, and worrying about the sky falling?

The Prepared would say no, and insist that the floods, storms, fires, and violence were just getting more and more intense
as the years went on and would eventually lead to The End.

But this was nonsense. There were no facts to back this. If you looked back a short time ago you could see much more catastrophic
earthquakes, floods, fires, bubonic plagues, and wars where an uncountable amount of lives were lost.

The Prepared would also insist that, more than anything, morality was worse than ever.

But some Realists could remember a day not too long ago where segregation, racism, and sexism were common, if not encouraged,
practices. In those days so many people were treated like animals. Immorality was just manifesting in different ways nowadays.

The only thing that has changed has been the Prepared’s reaction to all these things. They have been getting more and more
adamant that the end is near. This time, they have been vocalizing every fear, and this lack of reality has affected public
policy and created an unstable economy. The Prepared were acting like a rock band, trashing the hotel room of Goodland because
they’d be checking out tomorrow.

The Realists were tired of it. It was time to push back. It was time to take a stand. It was time to send a message so that
tomorrow, when the rapture didn’t come, the Prepared would see how destructive and foolish this all was. So that they wouldn’t
try to pull this stunt again. Or maybe that was too much to ask, but at the very least, the Realists wanted to send a message
so the Prepared wouldn’t try something like this again in their lifetime.

That seemed fair.

Amy and Will had been sleeping for an hour or so after giving in to sleep about twenty miles on the other side of Hayes. At
first they didn’t want to sleep. They used all the energy they had left protesting. “Turn around!” “What are you doing?” “Let
us go!” “Take us back!” “Stop this!” and things like that. Jeff didn’t say anything. He just stared straight ahead.

Because what was there to say?

He had to get them out of Goodland. The time for discussion was over. Maybe if they said, “Dad, thank you so much for taking
us from Goodland!” or “Honey, you are so wise for rescuing us from that horrible, horrible place!” then Jeff would have said
something like, “You’re welcome.” But no one seemed to be in the complimenting mood. They couldn’t understand the bigger picture.

After a while no one said a thing. The only sound was the hum of the car sailing down the road. But once Amy was asleep, Will
asked a question Jeff knew he should answer.

“What’s going to happen to Emily?”

This was a fair question. Jeff had thought about stopping to get Emily, but she was at the mayor’s house. Lord knows what
stopping there would have meant. In his short time on the Emergency Police Force, Jeff had heard about Mayor Clayton’s place.
It was surrounded by rottweilers, armed guards, and infrared cameras. He couldn’t risk taking Amy and Will there in a stolen
police car. They were too high-profile. The guards would recognize them and they’d all be back in jail.

So Emily had to be left behind.

Jeff would call and check on her as soon as he could. She had chosen to leave the family. So be it. No one would harm a hair
on her head as long as she was in the mayor’s fort. That’s all he could hope for. He’d get his family out of Goodland for
a while, and in a couple of weeks he’d go back for Emily. But he couldn’t explain all of that to Will. The poor kid already
had been through so much. There was no need to worry him more. It was time to rest, time to look forward. They’d escaped from
Goodland and if they looked back they’d turn into pillars of salt. So he just told his son, “I know you’re worried about your
sister, but trust me, she’s going to be all right.”

Will didn’t say another word. He just hunched against the police door, defeated, and by the time Jeff looked back again he
was out cold. Jeff rolled down the window and let the breeze rush through his hair. Every mile made him feel more relaxed.
Liberated. Carefree. He was in high school again, cruising down the highway without a care in the world.

The tank didn’t run low on gas until Salina. Jeff wanted to make sure he refueled as far away from Goodland as possible, and
luckily he was deep in the eastern part of the state before he needed to stop for anything. It briefly occurred to him that
he should drive all the way into Missouri before he stopping, just so he could be sure other places in the United States actually
still existed. But the car wasn’t going to make it without gas. And running out of gas in a police car from Goodland would
raise a few eyebrows to say the least.

So he pulled into a Stuckey’s on the outskirts of Salina, Kansas. Whenever Jeff took road trips, Stuckey’s was the only place
he’d stop. Stuckey’s is an institution in Kansas — a combination of all the things a Kansas tourist could ever want. At this
particular Stuckey’s there was a gas station, convenience store, arcade with Miss Pac Man and QBert, DVD rental center (where
60 percent of the DVD collection consisted of Steven Seagal martial arts films — Jeff assumed the truck driving community
must worship Seagal), a Dairy Queen, and a souvenir store where tourists could buy small personalized Kansas license plates
with their names on them and
Wizard of Oz
T-shirts.

As he pulled up to the gas pump, Amy and Will awoke in a haze. They blinked, rubbed their eyes, and slowly looked around in
a way that people do after they’ve been passed out in the car for hours.

Jeff craned his neck towards the backseat and told the remainder of his family, “I’m going to the restroom. I’d recommend
you go too. After this we’re not going to stop until we leave the state. If you need anything to eat you can grab something
in there as well. You have five minutes.” Then Jeff opened the rear doors of the police car and walked into the Stuckey’s
without saying another word.

As Will watched his dad walk into the Stuckey’s, his stomach had the same feeling it did as he was plummeting down a roller
coaster at Worlds of Fun. My dad has lost his mind, Will thought. Where does he think he’s taking us? What does he think he’s
doing? How can we leave Goodland
now
— right before everything is about happen?

“Where are we going, Mom?” Will asked.

“Honey, I don’t know. I really don’t.”

“What is Dad doing?”

“I don’t know,” his mom said. Her face was green and her eyes were hollow. She seemed to have no energy left. She was always
the one fighting so hard for the truth of the rapture in Goodland, and all of a sudden it seemed like she didn’t care. Or
maybe she couldn’t care. Maybe there’s only so much a person could take and his mom had experienced all she could handle.

But still, what about Emily? If the rapture did happen tomorrow like everyone thought, then Emily would be grabbed and taken
into heaven just like everyone else. Like that, his sister would be gone. He wouldn’t be able to see her for the rest of his
life. This made Will want to cry. She wouldn’t be there to give him advice and joke around with and see him graduate. She
wouldn’t be able to interrogate his fiancée when he finally got engaged and he wouldn’t be able to know if he’d really found
his wife without Emily’s stamp of approval.

Was Will really supposed to just go into the gas station, go to the bathroom, get a Dilly Bar, and then hop back into the
car while his dad drove him away? Was he really supposed to just let his sister die? Well, not
die
, she’d be taken to heaven, but it was practically the same thing. Of course his dad wasn’t going to do anything about it
because he didn’t think the rapture was going to happen. His dad also hadn’t thought the school would be destroyed, so what
would have happened if he would have listened to his dad about that too?

Then Will realized something: Superheroes do the right thing no matter what. Superman helps the people of Metropolis even
when they’re ungrateful and Batman helps Gotham even when they think he’s a villain. What people say never, ever, dictates
a superhero’s actions. A superhero makes a choice only by what is right. And the right thing — the
heroic
thing — to do was to save his sister. Even if his dad didn’t want Will to save his sister, Will couldn’t listen to him. At
this point his dad was just like the ungrateful people of Gotham who had no idea what they were really talking about; his
dad would probably vote the Joker into power.

“I’ll be right back, Mom,” Will said.

He expected his mom to ask where he was going, but all she said was, “Could you shut the door behind you?”