Rachel's Rapture Ch. 01

Exploring the main shack revealed a set of keys for every car in the lot. She selected a set from the board and then searched the lot until she found the matching vehicle for the keys, gassed up the car, and drove off of the lot with a huge smile on her face. Now, she had a much more reliable vehicle, and in obtaining it, she had earned a dose of self-confidence that told her that she could figure out and solve problems on her own.

Over the next week or so, Rachel explored Bakersfield for the first time in her life. She'd lived in this dirty town all of her short life, but she'd never really seen much of it; she'd mostly been restricted to a small slice of the east side where her home and church were located. Oh, she'd gotten to travel back and forth to the schools where the Government had forced her father to send her, and there had been those trips to the grocery or shoe store, but that was about all of it that she had seen.

At first, Rachel stuck to the public buildings, still looking for any signs of authority, but then giving up on that, she searched for any signs of life at all. She moved on to private buildings; she tried the local media centers, shopping complexes, and eventually she even searched the houses of worship of the other faiths, but she found the same thing wherever she looked- nothing.

She was especially curious about the big shopping malls that all the kids from school had mentioned, but she found them to be locked tightly as 'the event' had taken place at night when the large malls were closed, so she spent an entire day in her local Wal-Mart instead. She'd been there many times before, so exploring the store wasn't exactly a new experience for her, but as she walked through the deserted, yet fully stocked store, she began to realize that while she was surrounded by a couple million dollars worth of goods, and that while all of them seemed to belong to her now, no replacements would be forthcoming.

That meant that she'd have access to fresh milk and vegetables for another week or so, but after that, everything fresh would have begun to rot. It wasn't long after she'd had that realization that the lights flickered briefly and she understood that if... no, when the power went out, things would get worse rather quickly. Help wasn't coming. More supplies were not coming. There were no maintenance men anymore, no one would fix things that broke down; no one would replenish the fuel that kept the power plants providing her with electricity.

So she walked to the school supplies aisle and found herself a nice notebook and fountain pen, and then used them to make a list of what she would need to survive. It occurred to her that when God had told her to "search for others" that maybe it was so she could help them, rather than the reverse as she had been expecting. She resolved then and there to start thinking about how she could be part of the solution.

Food and water? Check. There were plenty of both here, enough to keep her alive for months, longer if the power were to stay on and all of the cold cases remained frozen.

Clothes and personal products? Check.

Medicine? Check. This store contained a pharmacy, so there were both prescription and non-prescription items available. This made her think once again...What would happen to her if she were injured? Without a doctor handy, as little as a broken ankle might kill her.

This realization scared her more than she wanted to admit. She could see herself dying in pain from an infection surrounding an unset bone. Then she examined the modestly long dress and women's shoes that she wore and she knew instantly that there was no one around to know whether she was dressing immodestly or not, and that just maybe her safety should override her church's teachings.

Rachel began shopping for clothes that were more utilitarian. It took her awhile as she had no idea how the current fashions fit or even which ones might be more durable than others. Added to this was the fact that she'd never really had the chance to select her own wardrobe before; her mother had made most of the family's clothing on her sewing machine. Rachel wasn't even really sure what sizes that she wore. As she tried on new things, she began to blush when she realized that she'd just stood naked in the middle of a Wal-Mart; there might not be anyone to see her, but it still felt wrong to her. She thought about using the changing rooms, but then she realized how silly that it would be, so she continued to try things on, but she still felt a residual shiver of shame.

When Rachel finally found a pair of slacks that fit her, she just filled her cart with the rest of the stack, not even considering the availability of different styles or colors. She had no desire for adornment, she was only thinking of what would provide her with the greatest degree of flexibility and safety. She located a stack of stretchy tops that fit her, as well as a couple pairs of hiking boots that she tossed into her shopping cart. She'd spent over an hour at this task when it occurred to her, "Why was she going home at all?" The only things that she needed from there were the family photographs. She'd just live here while she plotted her next move. She promised herself that she would go and get the family photos tomorrow.

In actuality, it was several days before she got around to visiting her childhood home again, and in truth, she probably would not have gone then if it had not been for the fire. She'd been taking her meals in the garden center as she found the trickling water from the fountains there to be quite soothing, even if the December weather was a bit cold. She had just begun to eat her lunch when she smelled the unmistakable smell of smoke. It wasn't coming from her camp stove though, so she walked to the front of the store and looked to the east where her home was located.

Black smoke filled the horizon, causing her to gasp; but she didn't tarry, instead, she ran to her police car and sped off of the lot. She knew she had to check on her house, and she prayed all the way there. It didn't take her long to get there and quite soon she found herself standing on the lawn.

Thankfully, her house was not on fire yet, but several of the neighboring houses were already aflame, and she knew that it was only a matter of time for her childhood home. She sprinted into her home and frantically began gathering whatever she could save. Money and possessions were even more worthless than they had used to be, so she gathered memories: the family photo albums, her mother's hair pins, and a picture that her brother had drawn. There wasn't much to save, most girls would have had jewelry to gather, or keepsakes given them by their boyfriend... or maybe a prom dress tucked into the back of their closet, but Rachel had none of that. Good girls didn't have those things, so Rachel saved her 'me and mommy' aprons and a pot holder that she had made for her mother at church camp.

She looked down at the paltry pile of keepsakes that she'd had gathered and she was disappointed that there was really nothing more that she really needed to save. The smell of the smoke was getting stronger, but her home had not yet caught fire, so she took one last walk through her childhood home, speaking to her now absent family.

"Goodbye father. I know that you meant well and even now that I'm beginning to see that you were wrong about a few things; I can still see that you honestly lived your beliefs."

"Mother, you were so quiet and reserved that I'm not sure that I really knew you at all. You must have had opinions... even ideas of your own; I sure wish that I knew what they were now. Maybe they could help me live through this. I'm leaving home for the last time and it is a new world here. I have no man to protect me, but Mother, neither is there a man here to tell me what to think. I promise that I will come back some day and tell you how that worked out for me."

"Sisters, brother, I hope that you all are alive and well, and that you are still with our parents wherever they are. I know that I was lucky to have had you in my life as long as I did. I hope that you remember me fondly. I love all of you!"

Then she made sure that she hadn't dropped any of her mementos and walked out of the front door. She never looked back. It was bad enough to know that she could never really return; she wasn't going to put herself through the pain of watching the only home she'd ever known burn to the ground. She could already smell the smoke. Instead, she belted herself into Bakersfield Police Department car number 14 and slowly drove away, with tears running down her face.

~~~~

In the weeks following the fire, Rachel redoubled her attempts to make herself self-sufficient. Her first goal was to become a passable locksmith. She was frustrated by the knowledge that many of the goods that she needed were readily available, but difficult to obtain because of steel locks and deadbolts. She wasn't a particularly strong girl and forcing doors was quite difficult for her; she figured that learning to pick locks would certainly be easier than constantly using a crowbar as her key.

Bakersfield Lock Express had been in business for almost one hundred years, so she started there, though in truth, it was a rather inauspicious start. Like most locksmithing companies, the proprietors had used only the stoutest equipment on their own building and it took her a couple of hours to break the door down. Adding insult to her injury, this block was one of the few that still had functioning power to operate the burglar alarms. Within the first minute of pounding on the door with a sledgehammer and crowbar, the alarm began to wail, and by the time she finally got the door open, she had a throbbing headache.

Upon pushing her way through the door, she immediately sought out the offending siren and used her sledge to beat the thing into silence. When the sound finally stopped, she felt strangely satisfied with herself even though she realized that her frustration had lead her to anger and that anger had caused her to lose control. That had never happened to her before. She wondered if this was the 'wrath' that Brother Eli had cautioned his parishioners against.

Then she looked at the shattered siren and grinned a satisfied smile; pounding that noisy thing had felt pretty good, and even though her head still hurt a bit, the satisfaction that she felt was pushing away the pain. As she sat her hammer aside, she saw that she had a trickle of blood running down her wrist from a small gash she'd managed to inflict on her index finger, and as a drop of blood fell to the floor, she began to laugh.

It was the very first time that she had laughed since the 'event', and she had to admit that it felt pretty good. There was no hysteria, nor did she fall into a guilt-wracked ball as she would have done previously. She laughed loud and long before looking to the sky and crying out in a mock-angry voice, "vengeance is mine. My righteous anger has found its target in the Siren from Hell!"

Still chuckling, she remembered why she'd come to the locksmith's in the first place; she hadn't come to the island to slay the evil siren, no, she'd come to explore, and to learn—and learn she did. Her teachers had always known that she had an agile mind, and this time, she was actually able to immerse herself in her studies rather than housework and Bible verses. Over the course of the next few days, Rachel familiarized herself with the tools of the locksmith trade. Progress was swift; she had little else to do. Wal-mart was taking care of her feeding and housing needs, and the Bakersfield P.D. was taking care of her transportation expenses.

It wasn't long before she found that she could open almost any kind of lock with ease. She had the right tools and she had learned how to use them; she knew that it was time for her next step. She understood that she was alone in Bakersfield; she would need to go on the road in order to find others. It was a very wide world; surely there would be a few others out there!

So she began to consider what equipment and supplies that she would need to survive on the road. Rachel understood that there should be plenty of supplies within the cities, but she worried about what would happen to her if her car broke down or she found that the now unmaintained roads had become impassible. Rachel had no skills in outdoor survival; she'd never even been camping in her back yard. It looked like it was time for more research.

Her first thought was that the library would be her best bet, but then she wondered if any of the internets was still functioning. She knew that she wasn't very knowledgeable about its use, as her family had shunned it as a corrupting influence, but she had taken the mandatory keyboarding class in middle school and had occasionally made use of it once she'd reached high school. She even attempted to convince father to allow her to accept a second hand computer from one of the families at church, telling him that many of the women from church bought their modest clothing online from one of the businesses that specialized in Apostolic and Holiness clothing. Father had refused to allow it however and now her 'net skills had atrophied.

Then it struck her, the high school computer lab! Its computers were not even password protected, and she was pretty sure that the power was still functioning in that part of town. She smiled as she realized that her new locksmithing talents would hardly be challenged by the industrial locks used by a large organization. She'd already learned that most large companies would only use three or four different keys throughout their entire facility, and besides that, Bakersfield Lock Express had owned the contract for Highland High School, so she knew these locks would be a snap to open.

It took her less than fifteen minutes to make the trip to her school, which was far more time than it took her to open the locks throughout the school and make her way into the still functioning computer lab. Finding what she was looking for took her far longer than that, but she threw herself into deciphering the internet with the same dedication that she had shown to everything else.

She hadn't been in the lab long though before she ran into a very unwelcome surprise, according to the computer clock, today's date was December 28^th. Tears began to stream down her face as she realized that she had completely forgotten about Christmas. Since her Rapture, one day seemed like another, and she had been completely oblivious to the fact that she had been alone for almost two months now. That fact stung, but her birthday was coming up as well, and she was aware that she had no one to share it with. She had missed the celebration of Christ's birth, and while she did feel enormous guilt about that, the emotion that really roiled through her- was loss.

Every bit of her world was gone. She missed the smiles of her mother and sisters; the playfulness of her little brother; even the ardent, but out of tune singing of her father; she missed it all. Somehow though, even though she'd lived through the last couple of months, the loss of Christmas finally brought it all home to her. Now she knew for sure that her whole world was gone, and that she'd have to leave this place and make a life elsewhere. There were just too many memories in this town.

Rachel wiped away her tears and instead immersed herself into her studies. Unfortunately, she was upset and largely unused to what one could do with the World Wide Web; she never considered that there might be others using it to locate her.

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Author's note: Sorry for the slight delay in getting this chapter out to you. The family has struggled through some health problems, but I think we are ready to roll once again. As always, thanks for reading!