Walter Williams - The Rift

“Robin?” His other friend, the one who wasn’t Epps, seemed surprised. “Your name is really Robin?”

“Yeah.”

“Robin Hood? Robin Redbreast?”

“Robin Lawrence, Moffett” Muppet said.

“Pleased to meet you,” said Jason.

Muppet looked at Jason. “What did your mom do?” Muppet asked. “Did she ground you or anything?”

“No. She took away my skates, and she said I couldn’t use the Internet for the rest of the month.”

“That’s tough. ’Course, there’s no place to skate anyway.”

“I know. And I can sneak some online time when my mom is at work, at least for email, but I can’t stay online too long, because if she calls there’ll be a busy signal, and if the busy signal goes on too long, she’ll know what I’m doing.”

“You and me can come over to the store,” said Epps, “and use the computer there. It would have to be after hours, though.”

Jason looked at him. “You’ve got an Internet connection?”

“Oh, yeah.”

Jason smiled. “Thank you,” he said.

His future, suddenly, did not seem quite so bleak.

And all he had to do to secure a place in the community was to take a little ride in a police car.

*

Seven Indians were swallowed up; one of them escaped; he says he was taken into the ground the depth of 100 trees in length; that the water came under him and threw him out again - he had to wade and swim four miles before he reached dry land. The Indian says the Shawnee Prophet has caused the earthquake to destroy the whites.

Lexington Reporter

“Verily I say unto you,” said Noble Frankland, “There shall not be left here one stone upon another, that shall not be thrown down.” He nodded into the microphone as if it were a member of an audience. “That’s Matthew 24:2. What could be plainer than that?”

He leaned closer to the microphone, raised his voice. “Not be left one stone upon another! That is the voice of our Lord! And what he said came to pass, for in the Year 70 a.d. the Temple was thrown down!”

Frankland scanned the rows of dials and potentiometers before him. His station, steel-walled, bolted down to a concrete foundation he had poured himself in Rails Bluff, had been designed so as to be operated by only one person. He and his wife Sheryl were the owners, the chairmen, the programming directors, the disk jockeys, the talk show hosts, the advertising managers, the engineers, the electricians, and usually the janitors as well. They did it all, together with a little volunteer labor from Frankland’s parishioners.

Money rolled in, from the syndication of his daily Radio Hour of Prophecy program, and from the Tribulation Club members across North America. But it was all spent as soon as it arrived, on maintaining the station and his small church, on the supplies necessary to survive till the arrival of God’s Kingdom, and on the weather-proof, disaster-proof bunkers he’d dug on his ten Arkansas acres in which to house the supplies till the Tribulation Club members needed them.

Frankland leaned closer to the mic again.

“And what else did our Lord tell us that came to pass?” he asked. “Wars and rumors of wars! — verse six. Famines, pestilence, and earthquake! — verse seven. Betrayal! — verse ten. False christs and false prophets! — verse twenty-four. And that’s only the Book of Matthew! You want more? Let’s look at Luke 21:10!”

His stubby, powerful fingers ran down his notes, ticking off the quotations one by one. Citations spilled from his lips in a cascade of verses, interpretations, commands. The Spirit was rising in his heart.

It usually took him a while to get warmed up. It was harder when he was talking on the radio, because he didn’t have the feedback from a live congregation before him. Alone in the steel-walled studio, Frankland had to imagine the audience before him, imagine their responses to his calls, the love they sent him, a love hot as a flame, that he used to kindle the Spirit.

“The Word of God isn’t hard to understand!” he said. At his sudden burst of volume the needles jumped on the peak level meters, but this was no time to drop his voice. “It’s in plain language. Just read it, Mr. Liberal God-just-wants-us-all-to-get-along! I’ve got news for you- God doesn’t want us to just get along! God doesn’t want us to be nice ! God doesn’t think that obedience to the Antichrist is just another lifestyle choice ! God wants us to obey his word !”

The needles on the level meters had just about maxed out, and Frankland, concerned that some of his listeners’ speakers, if not their eardrums, might be about to explode, decided it was time to attempt sweet reason. He lowered his voice.

“But let’s just look at the evidence,” he suggested. “Let’s look at Matthew 24:29. ‘Immediately after the tribulation of those days shall the sun be darkened, and the moon shall not give her light..’ And then afterward, in verse 30, the Son of Man appears in the heavens, in clouds of glory, to bring His Kingdom!”

“What do you think of that, Mr. Pre-Tribulationist Rapture Wimp!” Frankland realized he was shouting again. “The Tribulation happens first ! It’s right there in plain English! And if you don’t believe that, if St. Matthew isn’t good enough for you, let’s look at the Book of Revelation !”

The hell with his listeners’ eardrums! What was more important, eardrums or God’s Word?

The Spirit had taken command, as the Spirit so often did. And as the Spirit rolled on, the words flowing from his mouth without his conscious thought, he wondered if his colleague, Dr. Lucius Calhoun of the Pentecostal Church of Rails Bluff, was by any chance listening and resented the characterization of “rapture wimp.” He hadn’t meant to offend Dr. Calhoun, to whom he sold air time at a bargain rate and with whom he agreed on just about everything but the timing of the Rapture in relationship to the Tribulation. But when the Spirit took hold, Frankland just couldn’t hold back. It was all so obvious.

“The arm of prophecy smiteth the wicked,” he said, “and exalted shall be the prophet among his kind.”

In the back of his mind, Frankland wondered if that last phrase was actually in the Bible. The unfortunate truth was that he was not very good at memorization, a fact that put him at a serious disadvantage as a preacher. The stock of biblical quotes he could summon from memory, without the notes he usually kept handy, was not very large.

Perhaps that is why he had not made it to the big time. His Radio Hour of Prophecy did well enough, and he was thankful that he had been allowed to bring people to God in this way, but he had always hoped to graduate to television, to gain the huge audience that worldwide syndication could bring. Yet despite several attempts to make the leap to video, he’d never quite managed it. He looked all right- he was a big sandy-haired man, and his overbite wasn’t too large a problem, even though it did have the tendency to make him look the least bit like a rodent- but the sad fact was that he and television had somehow never connected.

The closest he’d come had been a three-month stint as a TV preacher in El Dorado, Arkansas, before his move to Rails Bluff. First, the program director had asked him to vary his message a little, to talk about something other than the end of the world. Frankland had tried to comply, but somehow when the Spirit seized him, the Spirit swerved right back to the Apocalypse.

And the other problem was the biblical quotes. “You can’t go on making this stuff up,” the program manager had told him. “People in Arkansas know their Bible.”