Rise of the Beast (11 page)

“We had a packed house tonight,” noticed Pastor Martin, walking out of the chilly fog and into the old rectory with his visiting evangelists from America. “There is revival in Cornwall this autumn. Sometimes it takes a crisis to bring God’s people close to Him.”

“Like the possibility of Earth being hit by a comet?” said Serena Davis, almost jokingly.

“Or turning 40 next March,” joked her husband, Chris.

“You’re only two months behind me,” retorted Serena, laughing. “Get used to it, Chris. We’re not as young as we used to be.”

“You ought to try 62,” noted Pastor Martin. “On the issue of age, I can remember when the average age of my parishioners was probably about 60. Not anymore. There are young couples, teenagers, and children in the Church again. There is surely a spiritual awakening sweeping England, even as we speak. I’m thankful that I’ve lived to see it. It was a long time in coming. Eleven people gave their heart to the Lord at this evening’s meeting. Last night there were four. There was a time when I’d have been thankful if there had been a single individual come to the altar during the course of a year.”

“The latter-day harvest,” said Serena. “It has been wonderful to come to England and see it for ourselves.”

“When you can see it through the fog,” noted Chris.

“England in November,” said the pastor. “It wouldn’t be England without our pea soup fogs, I assure you. I’m sorry to see you go.”

“We’ve had a great three weeks here,” assured Chris. “We have to be on our way back to misty, rainy Oregon. We have a revival scheduled there in another two weeks. It’s back to London for us, and then we’re on our way to Portland by the end of the week. That will give us five days to tour jolly old London.”

The pastor smiled. “Well, I’d best let you Yanks get some sleep if you want to get an early start. Remember, you drive on the left side of the road here.”

“Yeah,” confirmed Chris, “I gotta remember that.”

“I do believe that you’re starting to get a few gray hairs,” noted Chris to Serena as they were getting ready for bed.

Serena just shook her head, brushing her long hair all the more vigorously. “A few months in Hell’s Great Sea of Fire will do it to you,” noted Serena. “Sometimes I feel like it added years to me. When I think of all of the people still there, oh, it sends shivers up my spine. If people only realized that they are only one heartbeat from eternity.”

“I can hardly imagine,” noted Chris, switching on his laptop and logging onto the Internet before bed.

They got a lot of email, mostly about their book,
Tears of Heaven
, the full account of their otherworldly adventures seven years ago. He had been so fortunate to have experienced it—nearly half a year in the realm beyond this life—in Heaven. He still cherished the friendships he had made on the other side of eternity in that glorious realm. His route there had been through a fatal auto accident that had never really happened—or had it? That aspect of the adventure still made his mind reel. His friend David Bonner could explain it. Then again, he was a genius, with the resources of all of Heaven at his disposal.

He sure missed David and the others. Surely, no human on Earth had ever been as blessed as he had been. He had interacted with the great men of science, Johann Kepler and Nikola Tesla, during his stay in Heaven. He had spoken directly to Jesus, even God the Father. He had walked the streets of gold in Zion and strolled through the meadows of Heaven. Now he had the responsibility of conveying the wonders he had experienced to the world. During the past six years, he had done his best to accomplish that.

Then there was his wife. Her task was not nearly so pleasant as his. He did his best to be sensitive to that fact. Even as he had spent half a year in Heaven, she had spent the same amount of time in Hell. As he spoke of the wonders of Heaven to the congregations, she spoke of the terrors and agony of Hell. She had witnessed and felt so much horror and pain for one so young. She had experienced the darkest place in all creation, and it had a profound effect upon her. She had witnessed the suffering of others and then experienced that same suffering herself. He couldn’t even begin to imagine what it must have been like to struggle amidst a vast, turbulent sea of scalding, black oil. Had it not been for her own courage and the assistance of the dark angel Abaddon, she might well have spent all eternity in that realm beyond God’s love.

Chris scanned their emails. As always, there was so much. His eyes caught the odd title on one email message: “Urgent apocalyptic event, need your help.” “Hey, Serena, do you know someone by the name of Will Reinhart from Canada West Petroleum?”

Serena had to think about that one. “I’m not sure,” she admitted.

Chris opened the email. “It is dated today, only about half an hour ago. He says that he met us at the crusade in Vancouver back in 2011. He said that he and his wife spoke to you for some time after the meeting. He was one of the
organizers of the crusade.”

“Oh yes, I think I do remember him,” said Serena.

As Chris continued to read the lengthy email over the next few minutes, he seemed to grow quite pale. “Serena, I think you’d better read this for yourself. I don’t know what to think. This is your area of expertise.”

Serena had a seat by her husband and started to read its contents. It was the story of oil well 14. It read like something out of the tabloids. She tried to remember back to their meeting with Will Reinhart. She didn’t remember much beyond his name and that he was a foreman for a petroleum exploration company. What sort of man was it who would write such a thing? It seemed so incredible, yet she couldn’t dismiss it.

“He has his cell phone number down here at the end of the email,” said Serena. “He said to call him anytime, that it is important.”

Chris glanced at the number. “We’ve gotten our share of weird emails over the years. There are a lot of nut cases out there. Do you think this guy is one of them? I honestly don’t remember him.”

“I do,” replied Serena, reaching for her cell phone. “I’m going to call him.”

Serena caught Will still at work, still in his office, though it was past midnight there. They spoke for over half an hour. During that time, he made a believer out of her. He was right; only she would be able to confirm his suspicions. It was crazy, but she needed to go to Kurdish Republic. Will would cut through all of the paperwork and red tape for her. She would be acting as a consultant for them. He would explain it all to his boss later. She and Chris would fly to Hamburg tomorrow and from there they would fly on the company’s biweekly supply plane to Kirkuk. Will Reinhart would meet them there.

“This is pretty crazy,” said Chris, as Serena put away her cell phone. “You know that we’re flying into a virtual war zone; you know that, right?”

“Yeah,” said Serena. “But we shouldn’t be there long, just a day. We’ll be back in London in time to catch some of the sights and the flight back to Portland.”

“So we trade the fogs of London for the deserts of the Middle East,” noted Chris.

“I have to do this, Chris. I’ve got to know. When Aaron came to visit me, he
said that the time was short, that Satan was right here on Earth. And you know how well Satan and I get along—not so well. I figure that eventually he will come looking for me. I’ve got to figure out what the score is, rain on his parade if I can.”

To anyone else, that would have sounded crazy, but not to Chris. He knew him too, and the last time they had crossed paths, the meeting hadn’t been exactly friendly. In fact, he had definitely rubbed him the wrong way. He was very certain that few humans had spoken as boldly to the Prince of Darkness as he had that day. He’d been downright caustic. “I think you’ve been raining on his parade for quite a few years now.”

“We both have,” noted Serena.

By the time they had turned in for the night, they had two plane reservations to Hamburg, Germany for the following morning. Chris thought back to the good old days, living with his mother in Heaven. How he missed her. He thought of the adventures he’d had there. In contrast, life on Earth seemed boring. That is, until now. He suspected that things were about to get interesting.

The following morning found Chris and Serena on the road to London, traveling through a dense English fog. They’d allowed plenty of time to get to Heathrow Airport; they needed every minute of it.

They touched base with Will Reinhart over the phone. Nothing unusual had happened at the well since the following night. The drill bit was in the hole once more and they were making depth. Still, Will was concerned. Had it been their drilling that had released the demons? Might they have just popped the cork on a Hell that was a mere two miles below the surface of the Earth?

Chris had tried to use the little hyper-dimensional physics he understood to explain to Will that Hell itself was not actually located within the Earth. The gravity well formed by the Earth simply made the depths of our world the most convenient exit point for demons traveling from Outer Darkness. In reality, Hell lay somewhat deeper down than the center of the Earth. Judging from Will’s puzzled response, he figured that his explanation had lost something in translation. Johann Kepler did a much better job at explaining this sort of thing.

Upon arriving in Hamburg, Chris and Serena were faced with more than
the usual problems in changing planes. They had to go all the way from the passenger terminal to the cargo terminal. They made it with less than an hour to spare.

As Will had promised, they were expected and got first-class treatment, such as it was. Their plane to the Kurdish Republic was not quite what they had envisioned. It was a 50-year-old, prop-driven, C-119, flying boxcar that looked like it was on its last engines. It did, fortunately, have three rows of wide, comfortable seats just behind the cockpit, first-class accommodations on a third-class flight. At least they wouldn’t have to sit on one of the crates.

The company wasn’t bad, either. The pilot, copilot, and engineer were true veterans of this run. They had been flying this route twice a week for the past eight years, and they had their share of stories to tell. Their tales ranged from dodging insurgent rockets to discovering a young woman who tried to get out of the country on their plane by hiding in a wooden crate.

When asked what they would be doing up at the oil field, Chris had simply said that they were guests of Will Reinhart and that they would be taking a tour of the operation. That explanation had sufficed until they were flying over the Black Sea. It was then that the flight engineer put it all together.

“Hey, wait a minute; I know who you folks are. Yeah, you’re the ones who wrote that book a few years back. It was a best seller, if I remember right.”

“That’s us,” confirmed Chris.

“Yeah, yeah, it was a book about a journey through Heaven and Hell,
The Tears of Heaven
, right?”

Chris nodded.

“My son read that book from cover to cover when he was in high school. He really loved it,” said the engineer. “It got him going to church again. I’m not that much into that stuff, religion and all. Still, I guess I read about a third of it.” There was a pause. “All of that stuff really happened to you?”

“It all happened,” confirmed Chris.

At this point, they had the attention of the whole flight crew, who suddenly realized that they had real celebrities on board.

“The Tears of Heaven,”
said the pilot. “I think I’ve heard of that book, too, a few years back.”

“Oh yeah,” replied the engineer, turning to Chris. “It sold a million copies or something like that, didn’t it?”

“One and a half million,” said Chris.

“That’s pretty cool,” said the pilot. “You’re about the most famous people we ever had on this plane.”

“Except for that House of Representative guy from Oklahoma,” said the copilot, glancing back. “What was his name?”

The pilot just shrugged.

The engineer’s attention turned to Serena. “The part I read was mostly about you, about Hell. It was like a vision, right?”

“Nothing like that,” assured Serena. “It was as real as being in this plane. Every sight, every sensation was real. I was actually there.”

“But it was a vivid dream, wasn’t it?” asked the engineer. “I mean, I read this book once, about a woman who traveled to Hell in her dreams night after night. She went though some pretty scary stuff too.”

“No, it wasn’t anything like that at all,” replied Serena. “I think I know the book you’re talking about. What she saw and felt wasn’t the same as what I experienced. You see, she experienced a vision, or a series of visions. I was actually there. For six months, I experienced the real thing, what it was like to be a damned soul in Hell. It seemed so much longer than that. Pain tends to make time drag out, and I could never have imagined that someone could feel so much pain for so long. Words can’t describe my time in that hot oily sea. I wanted to die, I wanted it to all be over, but it just went on and on. There was no death, and there was no escape.”

“Oily sea?” asked the copilot?

“Yeah,” said the engineer. “In the book, the Devil let her take a sort of tour of Hell. Only it wasn’t underground like you usually think of it. It was on this whole other planet. There were birds feeding on people chained to altars, people flailing around in boiling filth, burning skeletons in fiery pits, all sorts of stuff. At the end of it, she was forced to throw herself from this high cliff into a sea of fiery boiling oil, where she was supposed to spend the rest of eternity.”