Times of Tribulation: Christian End Times Thriller (The End Times Saga, #7) by Cliff Ball Read Free Book Online Page B

preparing a sermon for the next time he preached at his church. He was going to tell his followers that it would be all right for them to follow Patriarch Karimi, because he was meant to the be the new leader of the world. Ryan wanted to assure his followers that Karimi was the one who would lead the planet into peace, harmony, and unity. There was no need to worry about the marks of loyalty and commerce, because the marks were meant to weed out the subversives in the world who would be a detriment to world harmony. Ryan would even encourage his followers to join the new world religion, so they wouldn’t find their heads missing from their bodies, if it ever came to that.
    Ryan decided to take a break, so he stepped out onto his balcony outside of his office. His house was on a hill facing the valley where Los Angeles was, so he could see downtown and all of its high rise buildings, along with the urban sprawl that spread out for miles. Ryan felt at peace here and the noise from the city rarely reached him. His wife, Tori, was down in that urban sprawl, doing a book tour of her latest non-fiction book, hoping that it too became a bestseller like the rest. She was touting the idea that God only exists to serve you, so if you want to be successful in this life, you must seize on that power, and then you’ll be as successful and as rich as the Whittier’s themselves. With no more mature believers in Christ able to challenge her any longer, because they were taken in the Rapture, and since the new ones wouldn’t be mature enough to do so, many of the lost accepted her ideas.
    Suddenly, Ryan felt the earth moving, and it wasn’t a mild earthquake that he and every other resident of L.A. usually felt, this one was a serious earthquake. While tempted to go inside to a safer spot than where he was, Ryan was shocked to see the skyscrapers downtown start collapsing. He could only think: They’re not supposed to do that! I thought those buildings were designed to withstand anything. I hope my wife wasn’t anywhere near there. I wish this shaking would hurry up and end already.
    His jaw dropped as he watched a large fracture open up in the ground not very far from the base of the hill his house sat on, with buildings falling into it, headed his way. The sky became darker with menacing clouds, since Ryan had no idea that volcanoes were going off around California because of the violent way Yellowstone erupted. Before he could do anything, his house began collapsing around him, while slowly sliding down the hill because the earth beneath no longer supported the house. The fast moving fracture opened up in front of the sliding house and Ryan Whittier went with his house down into the crack in the Earth, cursing and blaspheming God as he went, never to be seen or heard from again. In downtown L.A., Tori was signing a book when the building collapsed on her with no warning, along with the many hundreds of people waiting for her autograph. There were no survivors. After the earthquake destroyed L.A., the ash from the volcanoes in the area buried the remains of the city, killing everyone else the earthquake hadn’t killed.
    In Big Bend, the Robertson’s felt the earthquakes, although the quake wasn’t as strong as the earth shaking further north, but their buildings underground were setup to withstand the force of a nuclear bomb and could withstand the shaking. After twenty minutes, the shaking finally stopped, so Pete and the others went above ground to see what kind of damage the earthquake caused.
    As far as any of them could tell, the landscape around them hadn’t been seriously harmed, but they did see dark clouds on the horizon, west and south of them. Before too long, Dale Larson, one of the men who kept the ham radio operating, found his way to Pete, and said, “According to reports, Yellowstone blew up, causing fault lines and once dormant volcanoes across the former United States to activate. A great majority of the