This month, I bring you the first chapter in my Kingdom's Keys Series. Hope you enjoy!
PART I
The Earthquake
Mark 13:8 For nation shall rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom: and there shall be earthquakes in divers places, and there shall be famines and troubles: these are the beginnings of sorrows.
CHAPTER ONE
It was three in the morning when the earthquake hit. Eleven-year-old Noah Humphrey might well have slept through the quake without realizing the immediate danger, but his mother stood in his doorway screaming shrill as a loon. Her golden-blonde curls, normally pulled up into a high ponytail, tangled around her shoulders and she wore a bright fuchsia pajama top with a garish green pair of shorts.
“Noah, get in the door frame,” she screeched. “It’s an earthquake.” The walls began to tremble and she braced herself by holding onto the wooden framework around his door.
Noah swung his legs over the side of the bed and rushed to his mother’s side. Was he dreaming? They’d never had an earthquake that he could remember. Earthquakes were something that happened out in California, not in Indiana. The floor seemed to heave beneath his feet, almost as though something was trying to push through the wooden floor boards and into his room.
Plaster rained down around them, filling the house in a cloud of dust and drywall smoke. A pungent, burning smell filled the house. It was unlike anything Noah had ever smelled before. His mind tried to grasp the scent, to explain what it could be from, but the smell brought to mind things so horrible that a door slammed inside his brain and he refused to contemplate it any further.
“Mom?” He didn’t want to admit he was scared—he was supposed to be growing up—but he wanted nothing more than to bury his face in her shoulder and hide. “It’s okay, Noah.” She smelled of whiskey sours and nail polish.
“Where’s Dad?” I hope he’s okay.
She frowned. “Don’t know and don’t particularly care.”
Noah sighed. Ever since his father had an affair two years ago, his mother did nothing but bad mouth him. In fact, Noah didn’t think they loved each other at all. More like they hated each other. He wondered why they stayed married when all they did was fight. He hoped it wasn’t because of him, because he hated the screaming matches that went on until three in the morning, the slamming doors, and the long cold silences that followed.
The shaking seemed to go on for hours. Noah stared in horror as the outside wall of his bedroom began to crack from the floor up to the roof. A gaping hole appeared and the starry sky was now visible through his bedroom ceiling. What on earth was going on? A soft whoosh caught his attention as a pure white owl slipped past the crack in his ceiling. Noah stared. He’d never seen a white owl before. He’d seen a tiny, barn owl once. The owl tilted its head, amber eyes locking on the scene below. Noah shivered.
“It’s global warming.” Ivanna Humphrey frowned. “We’ve been warning them for years and now it’s come to this.”
His mother was a staunch environmentalist. She believed people should drive alternative fuel cars, and she herself drove a tiny hybrid, ignoring the fact that it was made in another country and had probably forced twenty people in the United States to lose their jobs. She didn’t use aerosol spray cans and had once snatched a can of hair spray out of his grandma’s hands and screamed at his sweet, gentle grandmother for destroying the environment. He’d wanted to say something to his mother that day about her behavior, and many times since, but he hadn’t. He’d just stayed silent. When she was finished shrieking at Mamaw Humphrey, she’d stomped from the room, taking the can with her. He’d looked at his grandmother and seen one lone tear trail down her soft, powdered cheek.
“Don’t cry, Mamaw.” He moved to her side and patted her awkwardly on the arm and then the back, not sure what to do to make her feel better.
“Oh, sweetie. I’m not crying for myself. I’m crying for your mother. She’s so lost. If only she would listen to the truth about Jesus Christ, I think she’d be a new person.”
Noah had shrugged away her words and many others she’d shared with him over the years about God and Jesus. His mother proclaimed herself a proud pagan—a white witch, she said. His father said he’d once believed but had decided after studying science in college that there couldn’t be a God if there was evolution and since there seemed to be evidence for Darwin’s theory…
Noah didn’t know what he believed. If there was a God, the man must be pretty mad at him, because he’d had a rotten childhood so far. A loud crack filled the room and the floor under their feet heaved up and then back down, sinking slightly into the earth under the concrete slab. Again, a putrid scent, as though living things were being burned, filled the room. Noah held his T-shirt over his nose to try to escape the scent, but it seemed to fill every fiber of his being.
After what seemed like hours, the shaking slowed and eventually stopped. Silence filled the air. A lone dog barked. A car horn sounded. More silence. His mother pushed him away.
“I have to phone Tori.” She rushed for the phone on the side table.
Tori was his mother’s best friend and she didn’t like kids—especially Noah. Dislike bubbled up inside him, creating a burning sensation in his gut. They’d just survived a mega earthquake and his mother didn’t stop to see if he was okay. No, instead she phoned Tori.
“Tori? Are you okay?”
Noah sighed and moved through the other rooms in the house to see if they’d been damaged as badly as his bedroom. Cracks had left gaping holes in several rooms and the roof had caved in on the far east corner of the living room.
He hoped his grandmother, who lived two streets over was okay. He glanced back toward his bedroom. His mother now sat on his bed, the phone cord twisted around her fingers as she chatted and laughed with Tori. She’d never even miss him if he slipped out and checked on Mamaw Humphrey. She’d be on that phone for hours.
Letting himself out the front door and closing it with a quiet click behind him, he stopped for a moment and stared at the changed landscape before him. In mere minutes the inner city street he lived on that was usually filled with loafing youth and games of street hockey had been turned into a barren wasteland of cars half swallowed by the earth and huge cracks in the concrete.
The familiar path he’d walked hundreds of times to his grandmother’s house had become an eerie obstacle course. As he neared a cavernous trench in the sidewalk that horrid scent filled his nostrils again. He threw his hand up over his nose and tried to breathe through his mouth. Sulfur hung heavy in the air and the temperature seemed warmer than it had a minute ago. He moved into the street and passed over the crevice in the narrowest spot, moving as quickly as he could away from the area. Every hair on his neck stood on end. He glanced back over his shoulder, half expecting some creature to crawl out from that trench, but there was nothing there. Picking up his pace, he rushed toward Spring Street and Mamaw Humphrey’s.
The sidewalk that was graced on either side by her well-tended beds of flowers was now riddled with cracks. Her prize tulips lay bent over as though they were trying to touch their faces to the ground. From where he stood, her house looked intact. Noah rushed up the steps and rang the doorbell.
He could hear the slow shuffle of her feet and breathed a sigh of relief. She was still alive. Noah couldn’t imagine life without his Mamaw. His mother didn’t care all that much about him, as she’d just proven yet again by phoning Tori before making sure he was okay. His father was too wrapped up in trying to make amends for his affair to bother much with Noah. As an only child, his days were lonely. Mamaw Humphrey was his one escape in a world that seemed bent on his destruction.
She swung the front door open and held out her arms to him. “Noah, I’m so glad you’re okay. Bless you child.”
He fell into her arms, feeling safe for the first time since the earthquake hit. She ushered him inside and gave him a nudge toward the kitchen.
“Come have some cookies and milk. Is everything okay at your house?” She pulled out a chair and Noah sank into it.
“No. There are huge cracks. It’s a mess.”
“Oh my.” Mamaw clucked her tongue. She poured him a large glass of milk, placed two homemade chocolate chip cookies on a plate and laid her offering before him.
Noah sank his teeth into one of the chewy gooey cookies and closed his eyes for a minute as he savored the taste. Mamaw’s cookies were special. He’d had hundreds of different chocolate chip cookies but none compared. Mamaw said her secret ingredient was love.
“Everyone is okay though?”
Noah nodded, pushing away the thought that if his mother had been hurt, he could have moved in here. That’s bad to think like that, Noah. He didn’t really want anything to happen to his parents. What he really wanted was for them to love him; to realize he existed. It would never happen. They were so wrapped up in their arguments and spending time with their friends that they’d almost forgotten he existed.
“Noah…” His grandmother paused and closed her eyes as though trying to think of the right words. “I was listening to the radio, child. This quake isn’t the only one. There are earthquakes hitting various areas around the world—California, Alaska, Indonesia, Japan, Iran…”
“Mom said global warming—“
“Ridiculous!” Mamaw interrupted with a slash of her hand through the air. “Global warming wouldn’t cause earthquakes.”
Noah swallowed another bite of his cookie and nodded. His grandmother sighed and offered him a small smile.
“I’m sorry, dear. Your mother and I have very different ideas at times, but I love her. She’s a good person in many ways and she was hurt very badly by your father—my son.” Mamaw shook her head. “I raised him better. I took him to church every week and taught him right from wrong.”
“He cheated on my mom.” The cookies suddenly tasted like sawdust. Noah set the half eaten circle back on his plate and washed the last bite he’d had down with a swig of milk. Mamaw kept whole milk, not that watered down stuff his mother used on her high fiber cereal. This milk actually had some flavor.
“Noah, God will forgive Joshua, if he asks.”
Noah nodded. His grandmother claimed to love the Lord with all her heart, all her soul and all her mind. He didn’t doubt it because she lived her life for God. She wasn’t the type of person who only went to church on Sundays and did what she wanted the rest of the time. She was the kind of person who would give back an extra ten dollars a cashier gave her once when they were buying candy at the local drugstore. She was the type of person who gave her last few dollars to the homeless person on the corner and then walked home instead of using the money for bus fare. Mamaw helped in the soup kitchen at Thanksgiving and spent time every day reading the Bible and praying. No, she was no Sunday Christian.
“My parents don’t believe in God.” Noah knew his parents didn’t want him talking about God and Jesus with Mamaw but after such a terrible disaster as they’d had tonight, he figured it was special circumstances.
“What do you believe, Noah?”
He shrugged. He didn’t know.
“Noah!” His mother’s shrill cry reached his ears.
Oh, no! He jumped up from the table and knocked over the metal chair, which skidded across Mamaw’s Spanish tile floor. He’d left the house and hadn’t told his mother where he was going. She’d been worried.
Ivanna entered the kitchen a bit breathless and fluffed her blonde hair. Somehow she’d found time to change into jeans and a shirt that said, “White Witches Do Good.” Even her hair was pulled up into its usual high ponytail. He was fairly certain the T-shirt was to irritate his grandmother, but Mamaw didn’t say anything about it. She just stood up and shuffled over to Ivanna, giving her a hug and a pat on the back.
“I thought you said you were coming over here,” his mother said to him. She fell into a chair and Mamaw placed some cookies in front of her.
She didn’t even remember whether he’d said he was coming over here or not. Had her phone call with Tori been that intense? Noah frowned. What if he hadn’t been here? Would she have cared? Or would she have just assumed he’d gone to a friend’s house and not even really known where he was? It wasn’t the first time something like this had happened. He had basically raised himself for the last couple of years. It was almost like he didn’t even have parents or he himself was the parent.
“I shouldn’t eat this, but after tonight I’m not worrying about my diet,” Ivanna said as she bit into one of Mamaw’s cookies. “Yum.”
“Have you heard from Joshua?” Mamaw set a glass of milk in front of his mother.
“Not yet.”
“I sure hope he’s okay,” Mamaw said.
“Oh, you know Josh—he always lands on his feet. I’m sure he’s around somewhere—who knows where.” His mother bit into her cookie almost angrily and chewed ferociously.
Mamaw laid a hand on his mother’s arm. “I love you Ivanna. You need to get rid of this anger before it consumes you. Either forgive him or let him go.”
“You want us to get a divorce?” His mother’s voice hit a new octave.
“Of course not. Not only do I think you and Joshua still love one another, but I know that Noah loves you both. But I have never seen two unhappier people in my life.”
“We manage.” She shrugged.
“I won’t meddle,” Mamaw said. “But you can do so much better than just ‘managing’.”
“Good, don’t meddle then.”
“Mom—“ Noah took a deep breath. “Don’t talk to Mamaw that way. She’s only trying to help.”
“Don’t talk to me that way, young man. I am your mother and I demand respect. If our house wasn’t in shambles, I’d take you and walk out of here right now.”
“You’re welcome to stay here as long as you need to, Ivanna,” Mamaw said.
“Thank you.” It almost seemed as though she’d choke on the words. “I’m afraid we’ll have to. I managed to gather a few clothes and things—they’re in the front hall—but the house is barely standing.”
“I just hope Joshua calls or shows up soon. I’m very concerned.”
Noah stared out the window where a heavy rain had begun to fall. Streaks of lightning lit up the sky creating instant flashes of sunset. The first flash showed a deep pink background with black clouds. The next flash showed orange and pink. His father should have called by now and Noah worried that he might be hurt or worse.
