Apocalypse Crucible (4 page)

Well, he was headed home now.

Hurt and despairing and confused, Delroy Harte was finally coming home. He knew he should have returned to USS
Wasp
and joined in the efforts to resupply the struggling marines and Rangers holding

Sanliurfa against the coming Syrian invasion. But once he realized what had happened all around the world, that the Rapture had taken away a huge portion of the world’s population, he hadn’t been able to go back to his ship. More was at stake now than Turkey. The world hung on the brink of disaster, and millions of lives—and souls—would be lost over the next seven years.

Delroy knew his own efforts to help would be insignificant in the face of the global chaos that had resulted from the Rapture. The people who had been left behind needed a man who believed in God. Delroy was not yet that man. He had questions and needed answers. He hoped God would forgive him for not being strong enough to simply believe. No, he wasn’t the man the troops needed, and he had to face the possibility that he never would be again.

Delroy gazed through the darkness ahead of him. His unabated and unbearable grief had taken him far from Marbury, where he had been born and raised, where his father had preached and ministered to a small but dedicated Baptist flock. They had needed a firm and generous hand to keep them aware of the Lord.

Delroy was afraid of what he would find in Marbury. He hoped that it would be nothing at all. He prayed silently, but he knew the words that tumbled through his mind were noise to fill the empty silence in his head. For the last five years, he’d served his ships with the same kind of dazed sincerity, giving lip service to something he couldn’t believe in after losing Terrence.

Guilt for those failures nearly overwhelmed him. During the last five years, there had been a number of soldiers, sailors, and marines who’d deserved better counsel than he had given them. And they had deserved better prayers, too. He should have retired, but he hadn’t been able to. Still, he was being honest with himself right now: Only doubt and fear drove him on through this rainy night, not belief.

Highway 111 rose slightly again. Although Delroy couldn’t discern the rise in the darkness, he felt the extra effort necessary to keep going burn through his back and calves. If he hadn’t been so fatigued, he might never have felt the slightly increased strain from climbing the incline. In the beginning, he had hoped that some kind of public transit still existed in the area.

He wasn’t dressed for an all-night hike, although he had made preparations for a short trek. He wore black slacks and a black turtleneck under the olive drab rain slicker marked with bright yellow stripes. All-terrain, weatherproof hiking boots covered his feet and provided an amazing amount of comfort even after the long distance he’d covered since leaving U.S. Highway 231. He carried a backpack that contained a couple changes of clothes as well as his uniform, high-energy bars, and bottled water. He knew he didn’t look like a common hitchhiker.

He breathed out, clearing his lungs in a great gray gust that rolled away from him in the chill of the night, then gripped the backpack’s straps to change their positions on his shoulders. The straps were cutting into his flesh, and he was so tired he hadn’t noticed until his arms had started going numb. He thought about Marbury, lying only a few miles ahead of him, and tried not to let the ghosts of the life he’d led there in happier years haunt him.

Thunder cannonaded again, racing up to him like a beast breaking the cover of the wooded land to his right. He broke his stride, darting away and half turning toward the trees and brush with his hands lifted defensively before him.

He heard only the wind and the rain. Nothing lunged for his throat. He stopped to take a few breaths. It was unsettling that it was stranger to him that nothing was there than it would have been if something had come for him.

Getting tired, Delroy. You need rest. The flesh is getting weak, and— Lord, help me—your spirit gave up on you a long time back.
For a moment, he considered hunkering down under one of the trees at the roadside and taking his chances that the rain wouldn’t pick up again or that lightning wouldn’t strike the tree.

But the fire in his belly, the knotted ball of worry and doubt and fear that churned there, wouldn’t leave him. Marbury and the horrible truth that lay there pulled him on. He turned his face toward the rain and started walking again. After standing just that short time, his boots felt leaden.

The low drone of a motor ate into the sound of the drizzling rain hissing like acid across the highway pavement. Delroy didn’t know how long the noise had been there before he became aware of it.

Even as he recognized the chugging as the sound of an approaching vehicle, dim yellow lights chopped through the rain and the night around him. The wet pavement turned silver in front of him, becoming a two-dimensional surface that seemed fragile. His shadow stretched black and long across it, a scarecrow caricature of a man.

Hope lifted Delroy’s spirits as he turned to face the vehicle coming slowly down the highway, but the feeling ebbed away almost as soon as it appeared. Fear lingered inside him that the thing he was certain followed him could be driving the vehicle. At times, the thing had chosen to resemble a human being, which it
definitely
was not.

Anxious, Delroy stepped from the roadside, retreating to the trees that he had feared only a moment ago. Since he’d left U.S. 231, no vehicles had traveled Highway 111 in either direction. He couldn’t help but be suspicious of the one that closed in on him now.

The vehicle turned out to be an ancient Chevy pickup—early fifties, Delroy guessed—with blistered paint and a sticking valve that gave the engine a distinct clatter. Ruby beams glowed from the taillights as the pickup slowed to a halt in front of Delroy.

Wooden sideboards lined the truck bed, scarred from heavy use. Yard equipment—shovels, hoes, and rakes—stood in a neat row along the starboard side, held securely by clamps. A flicker of lightning revealed the white hand-lettering against the dark green paint of the passenger-side door. LUTHER’S YARD WORK. Smaller lettering below declared BY THE JOB OR BY THE HOUR.

Weak amber console light shimmered over the ancient black man seated behind the large steering wheel. He looked small and starved, clad in bib overalls. A ragged straw hat festooned with fishing lures covered his head.

The old man stared at Delroy through the window, then leaned across the seat and cranked the glass down. Lightning flared again, showing the pink of the man’s tongue and the rheumy yellow of his eyes.

“Boy,” the old man said in a hoarse voice, “you plan on standing out in that there rain all night? Why, I reckon that’d be a foolish thing for a growed man to do.”

“Sir?” Delroy was taken aback. Decades had passed since someone had addressed him as
boy.

The old man crossed his wrists on the steering wheel and leaned forward. He shook his head sorrowfully. “Ain’t nobody never teach you when to come in outta the rain? That was one of the first things my momma done went and taught me.”

“Aye, sir,” Delroy responded out of respect to the man’s age.

“Come ahead on then,” the old man said. “You’re gonna catch your death standin’ around out there in all that cold and wet.”

“Aye, sir.” Still a little numb with surprise, Delroy shrugged out of his backpack and approached the pickup. The saturated ground of the small incline gave way as he walked toward the road’s shoulder.

The pickup’s wipers moved back and forth across the windshield like an arthritic metronome. The rubber blades pushed water over Delroy.

He stood in the open doorway of the truck and tried to kick the mud from his boots. He didn’t want to drag any more problems than he had to into the cab. The grime, at least, he could try to wipe off. John Lee Hooker blasted through one of his defiant, upbeat tunes on the dashboard radio, his voice seasoned by whiskey and a knowledge of heartbreak.

“Step up on in here, boy,” the old man advised. “That mud you got on them boots, ol’ Betsy, she’s seen worse. She’s a workin’ gal. Ain’t no gentrified lady what watches her skirts none too close.” He patted the weather-cracked dashboard affectionately. “Me an’ this ol’ girl, why, we been together a lotta years. Gotten right comfortable with one another, we have.”

Still feeling a little reluctant, Delroy swung into the vehicle. The pickup leaned hard to the passenger side as his weight hit the seat.

“My, my,” the old man said, his eyes widening, “you are a big ’un.”

Despite the fatigue and the tension that warred with the anxiety inside him, Delroy smiled. He’d endured comments about his size all his life. He couldn’t remember a time when his size hadn’t drawn attention. “Aye, sir,” Delroy replied.

“Your folks must have felt plumb relieved when you left the house.” The old man smiled, revealing a few yellowed teeth in his wrinkled prune of a mouth.

Delroy grinned and dropped the wet backpack on the floorboard between his feet. “Aye, sir.”

“Don’t keep sirring me,” the old man said. “Only officers get sirred like that.”

“Were you in the military?”

“Army,” the man declared proudly. “Infantry in World War II. I was at Normandy.”

Delroy looked at the man.

“Don’t you be starin’ at me, boy.” The man took a tin of Prince Albert and a book of rolling papers from his top bib-overalls pocket and built a cigarette with quick, simple movements that showed a lifetime of experience. He licked the paper’s edge and sealed it together to hold the tobacco. “You ain’t no spring chicken your own self.”

“No,” Delroy agreed. “Thank you for the ride.”

The old man took a lighter from his overalls, cupped his hands, and lit the cigarette. The sweet smell of tobacco flooded the pickup’s interior. “Been out here long?”

“Hours. Haven’t seen a soul since I left 231.”

Waving the cloud of smoke from in front of his face, the man said, “Name’s George.” He stuck out a hand.

Delroy took the old man’s hand, surprised at the strength in a hand that had gone almost fleshless with age and felt more like a bird’s claw than a hand. “Says Luther on the truck.”

George squinted at Delroy through the cigarette smoke that coiled restlessly inside the cab. “Luther was a friend o’ mine. Up an’ lost him in ’91. He left me this truck. Swore her off to me while I was holdin’ his hand an’ he died. Only fair since I worked with him an’ we paid her off together. Burned her note over at Mabel’s Café in ’62. ’Course, we mortgaged her now an’ again to keep our business open durin’ hard times. We went back to Mabel’s an’ burnt them notes, too. Mabel always counted on us for regular business. Me an’ Luther, we lost a lotta skin from elbows an’ fingers between us keepin’ ol’ Betsy up an’ runnin’.”

“Must have been quite a friend.”

“He was more’n that, boy,” George said. “Luther, why he was the onliest thing I had for family, time I got back from the war. Lost my daddy while I was over there, an’ my momma got hit by a milk truck before I got back. I was the onliest chile they ever had.”

“It’s hard to lose family.” Delroy settled back in the seat but had a hard time getting comfortable because a spring threatened to poke through the cover. Strips of gray duct tape appeared to be the only thing keeping the seat together.

George pulled the column shift down into low gear. The transmission groaned and whined as the gear teeth fell together. The radio crackled and spat, and John Lee Hooker faded away as B. B. King flowed from the speakers. The windshield wipers strobed across George’s reversed amber reflection in the glass.

“My smokin’ bother you, boy?” George put his foot on the accelerator and let out the clutch. Betsy ground grudgingly into motion.

“No.” Aboard
Wasp
as well as at other posts, Delroy had gotten used to men smoking.

“Want a cigarette?”

“No, thank you.”

“Only carry roll-your-owns.” George shifted into second gear. The truck still felt like the makings of an avalanche gathering momentum.

“If you don’t know how to roll a cigarette, why, there ain’t no shame in it. Be glad to roll you one.”

“I don’t smoke.”

George looked at him again, the cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth and ash dribbling into his gray whiskers. “You got a name, boy?”

“Delroy.”

“That your onliest name? Most folks I know gots two names.”

“Harte,” Delroy said. “Delroy Harte.”

“I knowed some Hartes in my day. Still do. Josiah Harte, now he was a fierce-preachin’ man. Could set a congregation on fire, he could. An’ wasn’t a man in town what could set at a pianer the way that man could. He could flat tickle them ivories when he wanted.”

“Aye, sir,” Delroy agreed. “He could.”

George nodded, remembering. “Now, Josiah, come a Sunday morning, he’d play the Lord’s music. Played it right loud and proud, he did.”

Memories threaded through the pain and confusion that paraded through Delroy’s mind. He saw his father again, standing at the pulpit, hammering home a message to his parishioners; taking a lazy father and husband to task for drinking up the family’s rent and food money; working in the garden he kept behind the church.

“But come Saturday,” George said with a grin, “why, Josiah would sometimes show up at the domino hall an’ play the pianer. All us reprobates an’ no-accounts, like me an’ Luther when they wasn’t no yard work to be done, we knew the price we’s gonna have to pay for listenin’ to them sweet blues. After he got through layin’ out the hottest licks he could, after he sung Muddy Waters an’ Robert Johnson an’ Lightnin’ Hopkins, why then he’d commence to preachin’ an’ savin’ souls.”