Apocalypse Dawn by Mel Odom

feet away. Known him well and admired him greatly. He shifted and gazed at the body bag, hoping that an answer would somehow appear there. But it didn’t.
    His father had been ten times the pastor Delroy had turned out to be. Josiah Harte had watched over his congregation and his family with love and wisdom, leading them with a stern hand and a gentle touch, guiding so many of them to fulfilling lives enriched with a sense of purpose.
    Tense and fatigued, a condition that was hard to get into and almost impossible to escape, Delroy stood and stretched his legs. He stood six feet six inches tall. In high school, he’d been a power forward, one of the greatest basketball players the school had ever seen. People had believed he’d never make it through college without being drafted by the NBA. But that had been before he lost his father. Somehow in the deep and terrible confusion of that loss, Delroy had found the Lord in ways he had never imagined.
    But you didn’t stay walking close to the Lord, did you, Delray? No, you turned away from Him. And you are too afraid to tell anyone because you don’t know what would become of you without this mission in your life.
    He rubbed his chin. The stubble that had grown there let him know he’d been at his task much longer than he would have guessed.
    His eyes burning with exhaustion, he gazed at his blurred reflection in the stainless steel table where he’d been working. His skin was dark, nearly blue-black, and his image flowed like a dark pool across the metal surface. His hair was cut military style, high and tight, as it had been for thirty years, since the day he’d entered the navy. He wore his chaplain’s service dress blue uniform, but he’d left his white gloves and his tie in his pocket. The tie would go back on before he left this room.
    Officially, he was off duty right now. Writing the letter to the dead man’s family was something he was doing at the request of the dead man himself. Back in sick bay, before the emergency surgery that had been ordered after Dwight had complained about severe chest pains and shortness of breath late last night, Dwight had asked him to take on this task-just in case …
    Waiting in the medical department while the medical personnel worked on his friend, Delroy had expected to sit for hours till the doctors and nurses performed the surgery and got Dwight stabilized. The medical staff told Delroy there was nothing to worry about outside of the normal risks of bypass surgery-and given Dwight’s comparative youth and overall fitness, those were pretty small. At least, that was what they told him before they started cutting.

    Delroy had believed them. Dwight had been in great shape, he was only fifty-two years old-only three years Delroy’s junior-and the doctors were top-flight military surgeons tempered by previous service in combat conditions. When she was in home port in Norfolk, Virginia, Wasp was counted as the fourth largest hospital in the state. She was part of the state’s disaster relief plan. Military medical aid didn’t come much better than the facilities on USS Wasp.
    But the doctors were wrong this time. Fifteen minutes into the surgery, Chief Petty Officer Dwight Mellencamp had died on the table. Thirty minutes after the surgery had begun, the surgeon had been out in the waiting room, explaining everything to Delroy, and despite his personal grief, the chaplain had followed most of the medical jargon. The docs had done their best.
    But it was still nearly impossible to understand that Dwight was gone. No longer would he play chess or share historical mystery novels or argue religion with the chaplain. Dwight had been a Christian of the old school-believing every word of the Bible as the literal truth. The book of Revelation had been a hot topic between them as they tried to imagine what the world would be like after the Rapture. Dwight was convinced that they were living in the end times, that the world had reached