Tribulation Force: The Continuing Drama Of Those Left Behind by Tim Lahaye, Jerry B. Jenkins Read Free Book Online Page B

said.
    “About what?”
    “About how you have to cut me some slack. I was never very good at this parenting thing, and now I’m having trouble treating you like the adult that you are. I’m sorry I called you a schoolgirl. You handle Buck any way you think is right, and ignore me, all right?”
    Chloe smiled. “I was ignoring you already. I don’t need your permission for that.”
    “Then you forgive me?”
    “Don’t worry about me, Dad. I can’t stay mad at you for long anymore. Seems to me we need each other. I called Buck, by the way.”
    “Really?”
    She nodded. “No answer. I guess he wasn’t waiting by the phone.”
    “Did you leave a message?”
    “No machine yet, I guess. I’ll see him at church tomorrow.”
    “Will you tell him you called?”
    Chloe smiled mischievously. “Probably not.”

    Buck spent the rest of the day tweaking his cover story for [_Global Weekly _]on the theories behind the disappearances. He felt good about it, deciding it might be the best work he had ever done. It included everything from the tabloidlike attack by Hitler’s ghost, UFOs, and aliens, to the belief that this was some sort of cosmic evolutionary cleansing, a survival-of-the-fittest adjustment in the world’s population.
    In the middle of the piece, Buck had included what he believed was the truth, of course, but he did not editorialize. It was, as usual, a third-person, straight news-analysis article. No one but his new friends would know that he agreed with the airline pilot and the pastor and several others he interviewed-that the disappearances had been a result of Christ’s rapture of his church.
    Most interesting to Buck was the interpretation of the event on the part of other churchmen. A lot of Catholics were confused, because while many remained, some had disappeared—including the new pope, who had been installed just a few months before the vanishings. He had stirred up controversy in the church with a new doctrine that seemed to coincide more with the “heresy” of Martin Luther than with the historic orthodoxy they were used to. When the pope had disappeared, some Catholic scholars had concluded that this was indeed an act of God. “Those who opposed the orthodox teaching of the Mother Church were winnowed out from among us,” Peter Cardinal Mathews of Cincinnati, a leading archbishop, had told Buck. “The Scripture says that in the last days it will be as in the days of Noah. And you’ll recall that in the days of Noah, the good people remained and the evil ones were washed away.”
    “So,” Buck concluded, “the fact that we’re still here proves we’re the good guys?”
    “I wouldn’t put it so crassly,” Archbishop Mathews had said, “but, yes, that’s my position.”
    “What does that say about all the wonderful people who vanished?”
    “That perhaps they were not so wonderful.”
    “And the children and babies?”
    The bishop had shifted uncomfortably. “That I leave to God,” he said. “I have to believe that perhaps he was protecting the innocents.”
    “From what?”
    “I’m not sure. I don’t take the Apocrypha literally, but there are dire predictions of what might be yet to come.”
    “So you would not relegate the vanished young ones to the winnowing of the evil?”
    “No. Many of the little ones who disappeared I baptized myself, so I know they are in Christ and with God.”
    “And yet they are gone.”
    “They are gone.”
    “And we remain.”
    “We should take great solace in that.”
    “Few people take solace in it, Excellency.”
    “I understand that. This is a very difficult time. I myself am grieving the loss of a sister and an aunt. But they had left the church.”
    “They had?”
    “They opposed the teaching. Wonderful women, most kind. Most earnest, I must add. But I fear they have been separated as chaff from wheat. Yet those of us who remain should be confident in our standing with God as never before.”
    Buck had been bold enough to