Lee Child - Nothing to Lose

“Want me to take a look?”

Reacher said, “No.” He didn’t want the minister to see the drunk guy. From a distance he was out of sight on the reclined seat, below the window line. Close up, he was big and obvious. Abandoning a broken-down truck in the middle of nowhere was one thing. Abandoning a comatose passenger was another. “No point, believe me. I’ll have to send a tow truck. Or set fire to the damn thing.”

“I’m headed north to Yuma. You’re welcome to join me, for all or part of the way.”

Reacher nodded. Called up the map in his head. The Yuma road crossed the Hope road about two hours ahead. The same road he had come in on originally, with the old guy in the green Grand Marquis. He would need to find a third ride, for the final western leg. His ETA was now about ten in the morning, with luck. He said, “Thanks. I’ll jump out about halfway to Yuma.”

The guy in the dog collar smiled his wholesome smile again and said, “Hop in.”

The U-Haul was a full-sized pick-up frame overwhelmed by a box body a little longer and wider and a lot taller than a pick-up’s load bed. It sagged and wallowed and the extra weight and aerodynamic resistance made it slow. It struggled up close to sixty miles an hour and stayed there. Wouldn’t go any faster. Inside it smelled of warm exhaust fumes and hot oil and plastic. But the seat was cloth, as advertised, and reasonably comfortable. Reacher had to fight to stay awake. He wanted to be good company. He didn’t want to replicate the drunk guy’s manners.

He asked, “What are you hauling?”

The guy in the collar said, “Used furniture. Donations. We run a mission in Yuma.”

“We?”

“Our church.”

“What kind of a mission?”

“We help the homeless and the needy.”

“What kind of a church?”

“We’re Anglicans, plain vanilla, middle of the road.”

“Do you play the guitar?”

The guy smiled again. “We try to be inclusive.”

“Where I’m going, there’s an End Times Church.”

The minister shook his head. “An End Times congregation, maybe. It’s not a recognized denomination.”

“What do you know about them?”

“Have you read the Book of Revelation?”

Reacher said, “I’ve heard of it.”

The minister said, “Its correct title is The Revelation of Saint John the Divine. Most of the original is lost, of course. It was written either in Ancient Hebrew or Aramaic, and copied by hand many times, and then translated into Koine Greek, and copied by hand many times, and then translated into Latin, and copied by hand many times, and then translated into Elizabethan English and printed, with opportunities for error and confusion at every single stage. Now it reads like a bad acid trip. I suspect it always did. Possibly all the translations and all the copying actually improved it.”

“What does it say?”

“Your guess is as good as mine.”

“Are you serious?”

“Some of our homeless people make more sense.”

“What do people think it says?”

“Broadly, the righteous ascend to heaven, the unholy are left on earth and are visited by various colorful plagues and disasters, Christ returns to battle the Antichrist in an Armageddon scenario, and no one winds up very happy.”

“Is that the same as the Rapture?”

“The Rapture is the ascending part. The plagues and the fighting are separate. They come afterward.”

“When is all this supposed to happen?”

“It’s perpetually imminent, apparently.”

Reacher thought back to Thurman’s smug little speech in the metal plant. There are signs, he had said. And the possibility of precipitating events.

Reacher asked, “What would be the trigger?”

“I’m not sure there’s a trigger, as such. Presumably a large element of divine will would be involved. One would certainly hope so.”

“Pre-echoes, then? Ways to know it’s coming?”

The minister shrugged at the wheel. “End Times people read the Bible like other people listen to Beatles records backward. There’s something about a red calf being born in the Holy Land. End Times enthusiasts are real keen on that part. They comb through ranches, looking for cattle a little more auburn than usual. They ship pairs to Israel, hoping they’ll breed a perfect redhead. They want to get things started. That’s another key characteristic. They can’t wait. Because they’re all awfully sure they’ll be among the righteous. Which makes them self-righteous, actually. Most people accept that who gets saved is God’s decision, not man’s. It’s a form of snobbery, really. They think they’re better than the rest of us.”

“That’s it? Red calves?”

“Most enthusiasts believe that a major war in the Middle East is absolutely necessary, which is why they’ve been so unhappy about Iraq. Apparently what’s happening there isn’t bad enough for them.”

“You sound skeptical.”

The guy smiled again.

“Of course I’m skeptical,” he said. “I’m an Anglican.”

There was no more conversation after that, either theological or secular. Reacher was too tired and the guy behind the wheel was too deep into night-driving survival mode, where nothing existed except the part of the road ahead that his headlights showed him. His eyes were wedged open and he was sitting forward, as if he knew that to relax would be fatal. Reacher stayed awake, too. He knew the Hope road wouldn’t be signposted and it wasn’t exactly a major highway. The guy behind the wheel wouldn’t spot it on his own.

It arrived exactly two hours into the trip, a lumpy two-lane crossing their path at an exact right angle. It had stop signs, and the main north-south drag didn’t. By the time Reacher called it and the minister reacted and the U-Haul’s overmatched brakes did their job they were two hundred yards past it. Reacher got out and waved the truck away and waited until its lights and its noise were gone. Then he walked back through the dark empty vastness. Predawn was happening way to the east, over Kansas or Missouri. Colorado was still pitch black. There was no cell phone signal.

No traffic, either.

Reacher took up station on the west side of the junction, standing on the shoulder close to the traffic lane. East-west drivers would have to pause at the stop sign opposite, and they would get a good look at him twenty yards ahead. But there were no east-west drivers. Not for the first ten minutes. Then the first fifteen, then the first twenty. A lone car came north, trailing the U-Haul by twenty miles, but it didn’t turn off. It just blasted onward. An SUV came south, and slowed, ready to turn, but it turned east, away from Hope. Its lights grew small and faint and then they disappeared.

It was cold. There was a wind coming out of the east, and it was moving rain clouds into the sky. Reacher turned his collar up and crossed his arms over his chest and trapped his hands under his biceps for warmth. Cloudy diffused streaks of pink and purple lit up the far horizon. A new day, empty, innocent, as yet unsullied. Maybe a good day. Maybe a bad day. Maybe the last day. The end is near, Thurman’s church had promised. Maybe a meteorite the size of a moon was hurtling closer. Maybe governments had suppressed the news. Maybe rebels were right then forcing the locks on an old Ukrainian silo. Maybe in a research lab somewhere a flask had cracked or a glove had torn or a mask had leaked.

Or maybe not. Reacher stamped his feet and ducked his face into his shoulder. His nose was cold. When he looked up again he saw headlights in the east. Bright, widely spaced, far enough away that they seemed to be static. A large vehicle. A truck. Possibly a semi trailer. Coming straight toward him, with the new dawn behind it.