Soul Harvest: The World Takes Sides by Tim Lahaye, Jerry B. Jenkins Read Free Book Online

his voice. Clearly, Mac was dubious.
    “I won’t stop looking until I know.” Mac nodded, and Rayford sensed something more. “Mac, what are you not telling me?” Mac looked down and shook his head.
    “Listen to me, Mac. I’ve already hinted what I think of Carpathia. That’s a huge risk for me. I don’t know where your true loyalties lie, and I’m about to tell you more than I should tell anyone that I wouldn’t trust with my life. If you know something about Amanda that I need to know, you’ve got to tell me.”
    Mac drew a hesitant breath. “You really don’t want to know. Trust me, you don’t want to know.”
    “Is she dead?”
    “Probably,” he said. “I honestly don’t know that, and I don’t think Carpathia does either, but this is worse than that, Rayford. This is worse than her being dead.”

    Getting into the garage at the wreckage of Loretta’s home seemed impossible even for two grown men. It had been attached to the house and somehow appeared the least damaged. There was no basement under the garage area, thus not far for its cement slab and foundation to go. When the roof had fallen in, the sectioned doors had been so heavily compressed that their panels had overlapped by several inches. One door was angled at least two feet off track, pointing to the right.
    The other was off track about half that much and pointed in the other direction.
    There was no budging them. All Buck and Tsion could do was start hacking through them. In their normal state, the wood doors might easily have been cracked through, but now they sat with a huge section of roof and eaves jamming them awkwardly down to concrete, which rested two feet below the surface.
    To Buck, every whack at the wood with his ax felt as if he were crashing steel against steel. With both hands at the bottom of the handle and swinging with all his might, the best he could do was chip tiny pieces with each blow. This was a quality door, made only more solid by the crush of nature.
    Buck was exhausted. Only nervous energy and grief held in check kept him going.
    With every swing of the ax, his desire grew to find Chloe. He knew the odds were against him, but he believed he could face her loss if he knew anything for sure. He went from hoping and praying that he would find her alive to that he would simply find her in a state that proved she died relatively painlessly. It wouldn’t be long, he feared, before he would be praying that he find her regardless.
    Tsion Ben-Judah was in good shape for his age. Up until he had gone into hiding, he had worked out every day. He had told Buck that though he had never been an athlete, he knew that the health of his scholar’s mind depended also on the health of his body. Tsion was keeping up his end of the task, whaling away at the door in various spots, testing for any weakness that would allow him to drive through it more quickly. He was panting and sweating, yet still he tried to talk while he worked.
    “Cameron, you do not expect to find Chloe’s car in here anyway, do you?”
    “No.”
    “And if you do not, from that you will conclude that she somehow escaped?”
    “That’s my hope.”
    “So this is a process of elimination?”
    “That’s right.”
    “As soon as we have established that her car is not here, Cameron, let us try to salvage whatever we can from the house.”
    “Like what?”
    “Foodstuffs. Your clothes. Did you say you had already cleared your bedroom area?”
    “Yes, but I didn’t see the closet or its contents. It can’t be far.”
    “And the chest of drawers? Surely you have clothes in there.”
    “Good idea,” Buck said.
    Between the two axes and their resounding thwacks against the garage door, Buck heard something else. He stopped swinging and held up a hand to stop Tsion. The older man leaned on his ax to catch his breath, and Buck recognized the thump-thump-thump of helicopter blades. It grew so loud and close that Buck assumed it was two or three choppers.