Free The Fourth Trumpet by Theresa Jenner Garrido

a worn little cloth-covered bible.
    Keith shook his head and barked out a laugh. Grabbing the flashlight lying on the coffee table, he headed toward the kitchen.
    Andrea jumped to her feet. “Where’re you going?”
    “Down to the creek to fill that damned bucket I dropped earlier and get the one you left behind. We need water.” He shot a look at Carrie, but she remained cocooned in her blanket, legs folded under her, wide-open eyes glued on the reverend.
    “Oh. Okay. Right. Do you want me to go—” Andrea swallowed, “—to go with you? You can’t carry both buckets and the, uh, flashlight.” She was trying very hard to squelch her rising apprehension.
    “I’ll manage. I don’t need you. I’ll be fine. If I have to, I’ll make two trips. And if I see or hear anything, you can bet I’ll come right back.”
    The young man disappeared. Andrea resumed her seat on the floor. The three left in the living room didn’t talk. Eleazar and Andrea waited. And listened. Each poised, alert, ready to spring into action if Keith needed them. Carrie, on the other hand, burrowed deeper inside the folds of her blanket.
    Andrea heard the grandfather clock again. She found herself counting the tick-tocks as they grew louder and louder in the unearthly silence. Soon, she couldn’t separate the ticking from her own heartbeats. This was insanity.
    Tick-tock, tick-tock, tick-tock . Puh-thump, puh-thump, puh-thump— the beats swelled, reaching crescendo. Without thinking, Andrea placed her hands against her ears and bit her lip to keep from crying out. Pastor Eleazar interpreted her growing distress. Reaching down, he patted the top of her head.
    “‘Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for you are with me, your rod and your staff, they comfort me.’”
    Andrea dropped her hands and let them fall into her lap. Still chewing her lower lip like a small child, she looked up at the elderly black man, looked into kind, brown eyes. “Aren’t you afraid?” she asked.
    He smiled. “Yes. Of course I am afraid. I am only a weak, humble man, made of flesh and blood. I am afraid. But not of death.”
    “You seemed pretty scared when you pounded on our door. You were screaming something awful then.”
    “I was very much afraid. I had walked so far. In such darkness. Surrounded by unseen beings who were suffering untold anguish. But, it was not I who was screaming, my dear. I do not know who was doing it, but it was not I.”
    “All that wailing wasn’t coming from you?”
    “No. I admit I was terribly disoriented and fatigued beyond my normal endurance, but I was not weeping. The voices followed me as I made my journey from the church. They were the ones crying out. Yet, I saw no one and nothing touched me.”
    “You didn’t see the monsters? Big cat-like humans with horrible yellow-green-slit eyes?”
    “No. I saw nothing but darkness, a darkness that wove its way in and out through the trees and appeared like thick smoke from a fire such as I cannot even imagine.”
    “You walked all the way from your church to our house? In that horrid darkness?”
    “Yes, as remarkable as it may seem, I walked—hobbled, really—all the way here. I was drawn to the light.”
    “The light? What light? We have only a few candles burning and the fireplace. How could you possibly have seen any light coming from this house?”
    “I guess it was a miracle, my dear.”
    “If you say so.” Andrea fidgeted. The subject bordered on the insane. The last thing Andrea wanted to talk about was miracles. The poor old man had nothing else to hang to, so let him have his delusions. She would focus on reality. She pushed up from the floor and cracked her stiff neck. “I wonder what’s keeping Keith. I think I’ll go stand on the back porch and wait for him.”
    Leaving the old minister to sit with Carrie, who remained lost in her voluminous blanket, Andrea groped her way into the kitchen without bothering