Free Eternity by Heather Terrell Page B

to me. What did you find?”
    She passed me one of her famous binders. Flipping it open, I faced charts and graphs and statistics, as well as a few heavily highlighted newspaper articles. My head was still too muddled with anger at Michael to sort through it all.
    “Can you give me the layman’s version?” I asked.
    Ruth laughed; it was the first sign of levity from either one of us since we arrived at the Daily Grind. She whispered, “Sure. As you know, there are six seals left. If you disregard the final seal—the emergence of a very scary end-days leader—we have famine, widespread disease, economic depression, revolutions, and persecution of Christians.”
    She sounded like she was spouting off a grocery list. A very terrifying grocery list.
    “Wonderful,” I said.
    Ruth ignored my cynicism and plowed ahead. “I looked at worldwide trends and anticipated environmental events. And at first, nothing jumped out at me as a potential sign. Then I came across a few articles predicting a potentially catastrophic climatic event.” She pointed to the articles in the binder that were covered with yellow highlighter.
    “What was that?”
    “There’s this enormous volcano under a glacier on an island off the coast of Greenland. Most people ignore it, because you can’t see it and it has only erupted two times in the past couple of thousand years.”
    “Yes . . .” I said, waiting for the other shoe to drop.
    “Well, in the past few months, it began rumbling.”
    “Rumbling?”
    “Yes, rumbling. Even though the volcano’s workings are too mysterious to make definite predictions, the articles put together some scientific data suggesting that it will erupt. Very soon.”
    I thought back to Ruth’s tutorial on the Book of Revelation, and I felt relieved. Disease, famine, revolutions, economic crisis, and persecution of believers made the end-days list. Yet, I didn’t recall her mentioning volcanoes. “A volcanic eruption isn’t one of the seven seals.”
    Ruth shook her head, and the look in her eyes was of a quiet intensity. “No, it isn’t. But, if that volcano erupts, do you know what will happen?”
    I was almost afraid to ask. “What?”
    “The articles describe an enormous ash cloud that will drift over Europe and Northern Africa. At first, airline flights will be canceled across the two continents, since it’s unsafe to fly with all that debris in the air. It will seem a nuisance for travelers and a financial threat to the travel business. Then, a domino effect will occur. Necessary medical supplies will be unable to reach hospitals and doctors, resulting in the spread of disease. The food business, which depends on air cargo shipments to deliver its products to consumers and markets, will suffer; and vast quantities of produce and refrigerated products will spoil. If the ash cloud is thick enough, the sun will be blocked, leading to loss of crops and farm animals. This would inevitably yield a food crisis.”
    “Oh my God, the volcano will break open at least two of the seals at once: famine and disease.”
    “Potentially.”
    “How likely is this volcano to erupt? And when?”
    Ruth opened the binder and drew my attention to one of her many charts. “Very likely. Scientists think it will happen quite soon.”
    “Why haven’t we seen any of this in the news?”
    “No one is looking for it. Except us.”
    I took a look down at the articles. I’d been too engrossed in Ruth’s delivery to give them more than a cursory glance. “Hold on a second, Ruth. These articles are all from newspapers like Year 2012: End of the World .”
    She nodded. “I know. It looks like the ravings of some conspiratorial, doomsday kook, right?”
    I nodded back.
    “To be sure it made sense, I showed this stuff to my dad. He said that sometimes these publications are right on the money. They’ll take reporting risks that the big news houses won’t. Plus, he checked out the science, and he said it looked pretty