“Is this the day?” Frankland demanded. “Is this the day? Is this the Day of the Lord?” The station was vibrating to pieces around him as he shouted into the microphone. Things tumbled off shelves: a stack of tapes slid off their metal trolley and spilled on the floor with a clang. Frankland’s chair was moving in wild circles across the tile floor, anchored only by his hand on the mike. He ducked into his collar as a fluorescent light exploded overhead.
“And I looked when He broke the sixth seal,” Frankland shouted, “and there was a great earthquake—are you ready for judgment?—and the sun became black as sackcloth made of hair—are you ready for Jesus?—and the whole moon became like blood—are you ready for God’s Tribulation?” Frankland, trying to hold on, was wringing the micro-phone as though it were the neck of the Devil himself. “Are you ready?” he howled as something in the outer office crashed to the floor. And then the lights went out. Frankland waited, in the rumbling darkness, for the emergency generator to kick on, but nothing happened.
Darn that diesel anyway. Frankland tried to stand, but he put a foot on something that had tumbled from a shelf and fell clumsily to his knees. Crawling, he made his way to the door, tugged it open, and then crawled through the office—all the shelves had fallen, all the furniture had moved—to the exterior door. Suddenly the shaking ceased, and the rumbling receded, like a train passing on to somewhere else. Frankland hauled himself upright by the doorknob. Vertigo swam through him. He needed to use his shoulder to drive the metal door from its bent frame.
As he burst open the door, sunlight and the smell of sulfur hit him in the face. Brimstone! he thought delightedly. The dirt parking space in front of the studio was torn clean across by a rent four feet across. He made his way around the building, one hand on the wall to keep him steady. The church, he saw, was still standing, though its windows were gone. He felt a grim satisfaction: he had built his station, and his church, to survive this and more.
His hands were trembling, and it took him a while to get the padlock on the generator room open. Once there, it only took a moment to start the piggyback electric motor on the diesel. The diesel coughed into life. The light in the shed winked on. Frankland staggered out of the shed and waved his arms at the heavens. “The voice of the Lord is back on the air!” he shouted. And the heavens answered. Frankland’s hair sizzled as it stood on end. There was a flash, a boom, the smell of ozone. Frankland tottered and fell to his knees, his mind swimming.
A lightning bolt, he thought, from a clear blue sky. What more sign did a man of God need?
He stayed on his knees, clasped his hands, began to pray.
“Thank you, Lord, for letting me see this day,” he said. “Thank you for this destruction out of which Your kingdom will be born. Thank you for giving me my mission.”
Heaven’s lightning rained down around him. He raised his hands in praise.
It was a new world, he thought, and he knew exactly what to do.
The Reverend Noble Frankland had come into his own.
TEN
We entered the Mississippi on the morning of the 14th, and on the night of the 15th came to anchor on a sand bar, about ten miles above the Little Prairie—half past 2 o’clock in the morning of the 16th, we were aroused from our slumber by a violent shaking of the boat—there were three barges and two keels in company, all affected the same way. The alarm was considerable and various opinions as to the cause were suggested, all found to be erroneous; but after the second shock, which occurred in 15 minutes after the first, it was unanimously admitted to be an earthquake. With most awful feelings we watched till morning in trembling anxiety, supposing all was over with us. We weighed anchor early in the morning, and in a few minutes after Zve started there came on in quick successions, two other shocks, more violent than the former. It was then daylight, and we could plainly perceive the effect it had on shore. The bank of the river gave way in all directions, and came tumbling into the water; the trees were more agitated than I ever before saw them in the severest storms, and many of them from the shock they received broke off near the ground, as well as many more torn up by the roots. We considered ourselves more secure on the water, than we should be on land, of course we proceeded down the river. As we progressed the effects of the shock as before described, were observed in every part of the banks of the Mississippi. In some places five, ten and fifteen acres have sunk down in a body, even the Chickasaw Bluffs, which we have passed, did not escape; one or two of them have fallen in considerably.
Father Guillaume Robitaille rolled over the Arkansas blacktop at 85 miles per hour, his radar detector alert to the presence of the state police. Traveling throughout his parish, if such it could be called, put at least 800 miles on his old Lincoln every week, and his policy was to spend as little time in the car as possible, which meant getting from one place to another as fast as the machinery permitted. The words to the old song “Hot Rod Lincoln” tracked through his mind as he squinted through the windshield. Commander Cody, he remembered, and His Lost Planet Airmen. It had been a hit when he was young.
Tonight he would say mass for his tiny congregation in Rails Bluff, all six of them—maybe seven, if Studs Morris had succeeded in raising his bond money.
He raised his 64-ounce Big Gulp and sucked on the plastic straw. The motivation with which he had spiked his Sprite warmed his insides.
Though whisky was his preferred drink, he used vodka when he was on the road. It wouldn’t fill the confessional with telltale fumes.
A cotton wagon blocked the lane ahead, drawn by a rusty old tractor and moving at ten miles an hour. The Lincoln swooped around it as if it were standing still. Father Robitaille drove one-handed, his Big Gulp in the other. He overcorrected, had to straighten out, felt the Lincoln fishtail. Only one way to fix that. Hit the accelerator.
The big car responded. Robitaille smiled.
At first Robitaille thought he’d blown a tire—maybe more than one. The car leaped as if each wheel was trying to go in a different direction, some of them no longer horizontal.
Robitaille lifted his foot from the accelerator, put his Big Gulp between his thighs, grabbed the wheel with both hands. Now he could see it wasn’t just the car—power poles and fence posts were dancing, and branches waved in the air. The cotton fields on either side of the road heaved up in waves. Robitaille fought to keep the car on the road. At times it seemed it was jumping out sideways from beneath him.