Harmonic: Resonance by Nico Laeser Read Free Book Online

truck without letting me respond, and I watched him move in the moonlight to the fire exit we had used for our escape. He pulled at the door, stopped, and searched his pockets, and after a slight hesitation, he carried on around to the front of the church and out of sight.
    At twenty-five after, I climbed out of the still-idling truck and made my way to the front entrance of the church. The blue-tarp staging tent had been blown, or torn, down, and the remnants of it hung limp from a two-by-four, lag-bolted through the mortar between the old bricks of the church wall. The blue sail appeared gray in the moonlight and flapped noisily. I hadn’t noticed the night’s gentle breeze before seeing its effect on the tarp, but it now caressed the stubble surrounding the stitched wound at the side of my head and found its way under my hair and down the back of my neck.
    The cold shiver completed its journey down the length of my spine as I turned and reached for the door handle. The door burst open while my hand hovered inches away, and a black shape stood, silhouetted in the doorway against the candle light from inside the hall. My body was frozen to the spot, but my heart and stomach jumped in sudden terror.
    “I thought you would have left.” It was the preacher’s voice, but there was something different in his tone.
    I breathed a shaking sigh. “Did you find her?” My words bounced over the beat of my thumping heart.
    The preacher stepped forward into the moonlight, his face appearing as a monochromatic mask with sparkling highlights that traveled slowly down the weathered gray of his cheeks. He shook his head. “Let’s go,” he said.
    I leaned to see around him, to see inside the hall, but he moved to obscure my view, shook his head again, and said, “Don’t.”
    The drive back to the house was accompanied by a silence so dense it seemed to swallow my questions before they reached my lips. The preacher had not found Margaret, but what he had found had changed him somehow.

 
     
     
     
     
     
    12 | ... to the converted
     
    The fireplace flames danced around a mentally projected image of the blackened man who had entered the church on a stretcher; somewhere in the back of my mind, I could still hear his lipless, gargling scream. I enjoyed the warmth from the fire, but the flickering beauty of flame had been exposed as a facade, a trap, a siren beckoning those ignorant of its true nature and destructive capability closer, while it tongued the air like a viper trying to smell out its food. Fire will eat until there is nothing left, feeding on anything that will burn, and stealing the oxygen from the space around it to fuel its insatiable needs, and anything that will not burn is used as a platform to reach its next meal.
    “Want me to bring in more wood?”
    I turned and waited for Powell’s face to materialize as the bright after-image between us slowly faded from yellow to green, to red, to nothing. “It’s fed for now. How’s Sean?”
    “He’s okay. Haley’s in there with him.” He shot a glance past the breakfast bar, separating kitchen and living room, and added, “Has he said anything?”
    I shook my head. “Not a word. I don’t know what he saw last night, but it must have been something terrible.”
    “This whole thing must be hard on a preacher. He’s probably got more to think about, or re-evaluate, than all of us. The rapture is supposed to take the living straight to Heaven, not deliver the dead back to earth,” Powell said.
    Gary cleared his throat, readjusted his position in what used to be my dad’s favorite chair, and resumed his subtle, yet steady, snore.
    “How did you sleep?” I asked.
    Powell shrugged. “Better than I have in a while, but that’s not saying much.”
    “What you said before, is that what you think this is, some kind of rapture?” I asked.
    “I’m just thinking out loud; I don’t know what’s going on. If Haley’s mom doesn’t have a clue about what’s