The End is Now (9 page)

And Pastor Colby was right.

Amy had been in God’s Plan B since that night of her junior year. It wasn’t that she didn’t love Jeff and the kids — she adored
them all very much, they were everything to her — it’s just things had always been so difficult for all of them from that
moment forward. And today, in the principal’s office, was just another example of her trials.

“Mrs. Henderson,” the principal said. “We saw that you excused your son from school today.”

“That’s right,” Amy said.

“Well then, let me tell you how your son trespassed onto school property and caused a lot of needless fear and panic,” the
principal said.

“He didn’t trespass,” Amy said.

“Being on school grounds during an excused absence is trespassing.”

“Oh. I didn’t know that,” she said.

Amy sat in there for what seemed like an hour, listening to the principal and the police officers go back and forth, scolding
her and telling her their concerns about Will.

She tried to explain, but they wouldn’t listen. They said he had to be suspended. They said they had to take dramatic measures
to make sure he didn’t leave the house for the next couple of days. She was trying to carefully listen to everything they
were saying, but the whole time she couldn’t stop wondering if she could ever get out of the path that she’d made for herself
— she wondered if she could ever get back into God’s Plan A for her life.

Two hours after Amy had taken Will home, the phones were still ringing. She didn’t know if they’d ever stop. Cell phones,
home phones, and text messages all chimed and blipped and beeped, and on the other end was some parent asking, “What is your
son doing?” They wanted to know why Will had freaked out their kids. They wanted to know where he got off saying the school
was going to be destroyed. They wanted to know how he knew this, or, if he was making it up, they wanted to know what his
problem was. Did he think it was fun? Was it amusing to needlessly worry other children and parents?

Amy stopped answering after the fifth call.

What was there to say? Why answer when every conversation went the same? She tried to explain herself initially, she tried
to let the other parents know that she was freaked out too, that she didn’t understand this either, that as they were speaking,
her son was being put on house arrest. She asked if they knew what it felt like to watch the police put a tracking device
on your son. They said they had no idea what that was like because their children were well behaved. Their children weren’t
crazy prophets creating mass hysteria.

Amy didn’t expect all of these phone calls by the way Will painted the events on the playground. Will said the kids just laughed
at him, they all thought it was some kind of joke. But that was only the half-truth. The older kids laughed at him, but the
younger ones, the first and second graders, were deeply concerned. After all, Will was a fifth grader. Fifth graders were
at the top of the totem pole at Jefferson Elementary. When they spoke, the younger kids listened. When a fifth grader said
something was going to be scary, a first grader’s only response was, “How scary?” By that afternoon, no one who was on the
playground talked about the laughing; they only talked about how their classmate,
their friend
, was dragged off screaming, “The school is going to be destroyed!”

Some of the fifth graders actually did remember the laughing. But they were laughing when they thought this was going to be
no big deal. When they realized that this whole situation was getting traction, that if they acted worried they could get
a day off, they decided to play right along. They said they didn’t feel comfortable going to school tomorrow because they
thought Will was right. The school was going to be destroyed. He seemed so convinced — how could they not believe him?

Additionally, to make matters worse, some of the men who’d discovered Will the night before were siding with him. When they
heard what went on at Jefferson Elementary, they said it made perfect sense. They expected something like this. They told
their wives, kids, and neighbors about what had happened in the cornfields. Many of the men said something to the effect of,
“That boy’s telling the truth. I don’t care what he’s saying. It’s true. You should have seen him when we found him. That
wasn’t no boy speaking. His voice, his eyes, there was something there, I’m telling you. It was like Jesus was talking. Or
maybe the Antichrist.”

And this endorsement from men, trusted men like Gus Wiley from city council and Curt Benson the veteran, forced everyone to
reconsider. Everyone started to think there was a chance that Will was actually telling the truth. And perhaps they shouldn’t
be yelling at anyone in the Henderson family, but instead figuring out a way to protect the children that God had given them.

When tourists (which Goodland has very few of — most are family members looking to kill time or travelers on I – 70 who have
been trapped in town because of a snow/ice storm) visit The Goodland Museum of History and Culture, the wing that always gets
the most attention is the one dedicated to the rapture.

Now, Goodland doesn’t have an actual museum with a curator and a budget and all of the other scientific and logistical processes
that go into making exhibits. Instead, the Goodland Museum of History and Culture is just May Brown’s old bed and breakfast
that she turned into a museum five years ago when she realized that people weren’t looking to go to Goodland for a romantic
weekend getaway.

The museum mostly consists of western Kansas oddities; tourists can buy keychain-sized sunflower paintings (which are replicas
of Goodland’s prize largest easel painting in the world) and T-shirts that say, “Kansas, There’s No Place Like Home.” The
tourists are mildly interested in all of these things, but what they love is walking down the hallway and into the room that’s
dedicated to the rapture. Because inside that room there are facts and pictures and exhibits that explain why Goodland is
convinced the rapture is coming in their town before it hits the rest of the world.

A question one of the tourists always asks is, “Why is everyone in Goodland so willing to believe in the rapture in the first
place? And not only the rapture — but the rapture happening
only
here? Isn’t that a little weird?”

And May Brown always uses this as an opportunity to jump into her explanation of the history of the rapture in Goodland. She
tells the room full of tourists that Goodland has long been fascinated with looking for the apocalypse and the end of the
world. They’ve been anticipating it for nearly 167 years.

Still, Goodland hasn’t always been looking toward the sky. Once upon a time the town didn’t even know they should be waiting
for anything. Rather, the town was simply founded by traveling farmers who could see how fertile and profitable the ground
was. They were people of faith so they planned on planting churches and crops out West.

The founders settled, constructed cabins, formed a city government, and tried to build a life for themselves. They needed
a city name, but sadly they did not have a marketing director or PR manager that could help them be forward thinking and create
a memorable brand for their town. So they called their town “Goodland” simply because the land was good to farm. The men liked
the name because it was to the point; the women thought it sounded charming.

But they quickly discovered the land was anything but good.

It started with the natives. At night, when the moon was the shape of a fingernail, the settlers would huddle together, clutching
their rifles and listening as the Navajos and Apaches came near their town. The settlers saw that these natives were not wearing
normal things like bonnets and trousers, so they assumed that these natives weren’t humans at all. Maybe they were demons
or warlocks or witches. It was tough to say exactly what they were, but the people of Goodland considered the possibility
that Satan had sent them to destroy their town. Some of the town’s theologians thought that maybe the western plains of America
were the new earth, and maybe they’d been chosen to fight some sort of supernatural epic war. Goodland was being attacked
for a reason. They were being singled out.

Of course that was nonsense.

There was no reason to think Goodland was
that
special. People all around the country had been having troubles with natives/demons. But then they saw something no one could
explain. It was sort of like the cloud that’s described in Exodus — the one shaped like the pillar that the Israelites followed
around in the desert for forty years — only this cloud looked more like an ice cream cone. Not that they had ice cream cones
back then, which is really too bad because that’s the perfect way to describe the shape. However, on further thought, maybe
ice cream cone is a horrible word to describe this cloud. Because then you might think it was friendly.

It wasn’t friendly.

It destroyed whatever it touched. It turned cabins into piles of splinter, barns into rubble, and livestock into dinner. Nothing
survived the angry, twisty cloud. And no one had ever seen anything like this, let alone
heard
of anything like this. Surely, this was a miracle — this cloud was the hand of God. Perhaps God was angry. Perhaps once again
he wanted the earth destroyed. The end was near and it was starting at Goodland. The beginning of the end would happen in
this fair town. They were being targeted for something special. After all, when they wrote their friends and family out East
about the destructive clouds, their friends had no idea what they were talking about.

It was all the talk at church services. They were a chosen people. Jesus was coming back for everybody, sure, but what if
he was coming for them first? The mantra of the town became “Stay a Night, Stay a Lifetime.” Posters and preachers and just
about everything else repeated the mantra. Everyone knew it wasn’t a sure thing, but many asked, “Isn’t it possible God takes
us before everybody else? God has favorites, doesn’t He?” And these ideas became something grandparents told their grandchildren.
“God is watching Goodland closely. He is waiting to take us home.”

In the 1930s, Oscar Thomas got so inspired by these stories that he wrote a radio drama about them. The drama was presented
as a newscast and it gave an account of the rapture coming instantly and leaving many in the town behind. Oscar thought the
rapture drama would be a wonderful homage — a delightful, spiritual experience that would highlight all that Goodland had
to look forward to. But he was wrong.

The radio dramatization had disastrous consequences. Most in the town didn’t know it was a drama; they thought these events
were actually happening (and who could blame them; it was being presented as a newscast). Many thought they were surefire
candidates for the rapture and were horrified to discover they’d been left behind. If that wasn’t frightening enough, when
the newscaster started to describe the four horsemen of the apocalypse descending on Goodland, everything went crazy. Model
T’s wrecked, stores were looted, and violence and mayhem spread throughout the town. Many of the town’s citizens made brash
decisions. Couples got married because they figured they could love, honor, and respect one another until the world came to
an end. Others called their bosses and told them where they could stick their jobs. Few thought to look up at the sky to see
if there was any accuracy to the rapture account, and those who did would later swear they saw something.

It wasn’t until the next day that the citizens discovered the whole thing was fictional. It took months for the people of
Good-land to rebuild their town, get marriages annulled, and find new jobs. And during the reconstruction the cynicism started
to set in. That’s when some started to think that all of the apocalyptic talk was nonsense. The rapture became taboo. Talk
of it dissipated, and believing in it made a person seem archaic and foolish.

And for a while Goodland forgot all about its fascination with the end of the world.

But thoughts about the rapture were ingrained too deep to simply disappear. As Goodland entered the twenty-first century,
there were so many things that seemed fragile. Technology was linking everything together but that only made it easier for
everything to crash. Modern conveniences like chat rooms, text messaging, and eHarmony made everyone more connected yet somehow
all the more isolated. The world was getting smaller, but the threat of annihilation by weapons of mass destruction was only
growing.

It just seemed like things couldn’t go on forever.

It seemed like God had to come sooner or later.

When May Brown finished talking, everyone was always dead silent. They were a little frightened by how she ended her story.
Then she’d smile from ear to ear as if to let everyone know, “It’s okay, it was just a ghost story,” and they’d politely clap
for her. Some would say, “You had us there for a moment. You actually had us believing the end of the world was coming.” Everyone
would be so relieved the apocalypse was not coming that they would buy lots of keychains and T-shirts.

Of course May Brown didn’t tell everyone what she really thought about the subject, that Goodland
would
be raptured first. They would be the warning sign God used to tell the world about the end. There were still people — a lot
of people — in Goodland who believed that. And rumors of the Henderson boy seemed to make the clock tick louder than it ever
had before. She wouldn’t be giving these little presentations very much longer. Soon she’d be on the other side and it would
be up to police and FBI agents and scientists to figure out why half of Goodland had just up and disappeared.

Emily Henderson knew about the history of the rapture, but it was always in the back of her mind. Something for other people
to think and worry about. Today was no different; it just hit a little closer to home.