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around, I’d say about a hundred. Fortunato, real emotional, calls for order. Then he claims he went crying and screaming down in the rubble along with everybody else. He said halfway down he was wondering if it was possible to get lucky enough to be wedged in somewhere where he could breathe and stay alive until rescuers might find him. He said he felt himself free-falling and smacking into huge chunks of building, then something caught his feet and flipped him so he was going straight down, head first. When he hit, he said, it felt and sounded like he’d cracked his head open. Then it was like the whole weight of the building came down on him. He felt his bones breaking and his lungs bursting and everything went black. He said it was like somebody pulled the plug on his life. He believes he died.”
    “And yet there he is, wearing a dusty suit and not a scratch on him?”
    “I saw him with my own eyes, Ray. He claims he was lying there dead, not conscious of anything, no out-of-body experience or anything like that. Just black nothingness, like the deepest sleep a person could ever have. He says he woke up, came back from the dead, when he heard his name called. At first he thought he was dreaming, he says. He thought he was a little boy again and his mother was softly calling his name, trying to rouse him. But then, he says, he heard Nicolae’s loud call, ‘Leonardo, come forth!’”
    “What?”
    “I’m tellin’ you, Ray, it gave me the willies. was never that religious, but I know that story from the Bible, and it sure sounded like Nicolae was pretending to be Jesus or something.”
    “You think the story’s a lie?” Rayford asked. “You know, the Bible also says it’s appointed unto man once to die. No second chances.”
    “I didn’t know that, and I didn’t know what to think when he told that story.
    Carpathia bringing somebody back from the dead? You know, at first I loved Carpathia and couldn’t wait to work for him. There were times I thought he was a godly man, maybe some kind of deity himself. But it didn’t add up. Him making me take off from the top of that building while people were hanging onto the struts and screaming for their lives. Him putting you down because you wanted to help that crash survivor in the desert. What kind of a god-man is that?”
    “He’s no god-man,” Rayford said. “He’s an anti-god-man.”
    “You think he’s the Antichrist, like some say?” So there it was. Mac had put the question to him. Rayford knew he had been reckless. Had he now sealed his own fate? Had he revealed himself completely to one of Carpathia’s own henchmen, or was Mac sincere? How could he ever know for sure?

    Buck spun in a circle. Where was Chloe’s car? She always parked it in the driveway in front of the garage that contained Loretta’s junk. Loretta’s own car was usually in the other stall. It wouldn’t have made sense for Chloe to move her car into Loretta’s stall just because Loretta had driven to the church. “It could have been tossed anywhere, Tsion,” Buck said.
    “Yes, my friend, but not so far away that we could not see it.”
    “It could have been swallowed up.”
    “We should look, Cameron. If her car is here, we can assume she is here.”
    Buck moved up and down the street, looking between wrecked houses and into great holes in the earth. Nothing resembling Chloe’s car turned up anywhere. When he met Tsion back at what used to be Loretta’s garage, the rabbi was trembling.
    Though only in his middle forties, Tsion suddenly looked old to Buck. He moved with a shaky gait and stumbled, dropping to his knees.
    “Tsion, are you all right?”
    “Have you ever seen anything like it?” Tsion said, his voice just above a whisper. “I have seen devastation and waste, but this is overwhelming. Such widespread death and destruction … .”
    Buck put his hand on the man’s shoulder and felt sobs wrack his body. “Tsion, we must not allow the enormity of all this