Tim LaHaye - Left Behind Kids 03 - Through the Flames

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Book 03
Through the Flames
LEFT BEHIND
> THE KIDS <
Jerry B. Jenkins
______________
Tim LaHaye
Tyndale House Publishers, Inc.
Wheaton, Illinois
_________________________
To Ryan Thompson
Welcome to the family of God
_________________________
_________________________
CHAPTER ONE
A Line in the Sand
JUDDThompson and the other three kids liv-ing in his otherwise abandoned suburban house sometimes
felt as if it was just them against the world. Judd, at sixteen, was the oldest. Then came the redhead,
Vicki Byrne, a year younger. Lionel Washington was thir-teen, and Ryan Daley, twelve.
They were the only ones left from their families. Judd's parents and his twin younger brother and sister
had disappeared right out of their clothes a few days before. Vicki Byrne, who had lived in a trailer park
with her parents and little sister, had seen the same thing happen at her place. Her older brother, who had
moved to Michigan, had disappeared too, according to one of his friends.
Lionel Washington had lost his parents, his older sister, and his little brother and sis-ter. His uncle, the
infamous andré Dupree, was thought dead, but Lionel now knew he was alive somewhere--- but where?
Ryan Daley had been an only child, and now he was an orphan. His parents had not disappeared. They
had died in separate acci-dents related to the worldwide vanishings of millions of people--- his father in a
plane crash, his mother in an explosion while in her car.
The kids knew what had happened. At least the three older ones did. Ryan wasn't sure yet. All he knew
was that he had been left alone in the world, and he didn't much like the explanation the other three had
come to believe.
All three of the older kids had had parents who were Christians. They believed not only in God, but also
in Christ. And they weren't just churchgoers. These were people who had believed that the way to God,
the way to heaven, was through Christ. In other words, they did not agree with so many people who
believed that if you just tried to live right and be good and treat other people fairly, you could earn your
way to heaven and to favor with God.
As logical as all that may have sounded, the parents of Judd and Vicki andLionel believed that the real
truth, the basic teach-ing of the New Testament, was summarized in two verses in the book of Ephesians.
Chapter 2, verses 8-9 said that a person is saved by grace through faith and that it is not as a result of
anything we accomplished. It is the gift of God, not a result of good deeds, so nobody can brag about it.
They also believed that one day, as the Bible also foretold, Jesus would return and snatch true believers
away in the twinkling of an eye, and they would immediately join him in heaven. That was what had hap-
pened, Judd, Vicki, and Lionel realized, since most of the people in their churches had dis-appeared too.
But what convinced them more than any-thing was that they themselves were still here. Judd had never
received Christ, though he had grown up in church and knew the Bible. Vicki had hated it when her
parents had become Christians two years before, and she didn't want anything to do with it, even though
her older brother and younger sister had also believed. She had seen the changes in her family and
realized there was some truth to what was going on. She had an idea they were onto something real, but
she wasn't willing to give up her lifestyle or her freedom to join them in their faith.
Lionel had been more like Judd, having been raised by a Christian family and having gone to church
every Sunday for years. He had not become a rebel as Judd did when he became a teenager. Rather, he
had pretended all along to be a Christian. It was his and his uncle andré's secret. They were not really
Christians.
Those oldest three kids realized their tragic mistake immediately when the vanishings had taken place. In
the midst of chaos, as cars crashed, planes fell from the sky, ships collided and sank, houses burned, and
peo-ple panicked, they had to admit they had been wrong--- as wrong as people could be. They were
glad to find out there was a sec-ond chance for them, that they could still come to Christ. But though that
gave them the assurance that they would one day see God and be reunited with their families, it didn't
keep them from grieving over the loss of their loved ones. They were alone in the world until they had
discovered each other and Bruce Barnes, the visitation pastor at New Hope Village Church who had
agreed to help teach them the Bible. He had given them each a Bible and invited them to the first Sunday
service following the disappear-ances, which the Bible called the Rapture.
But Ryan Daley was still a holdout. He was scared. He was sad. He was angry. And while he had been
hanging with Lionel since they had met, Lionel made him feel like a wimp. Well, he didn't justfeel like
one. Hewas one. Lionel seemed brave. He confronted his uncle's enemies, he had been to the morgue to
try to identify his uncle's body, and he had gone into Ryan's house after a burglary. Ryan couldn't force
himself to do any of that stuff, and it made him feel terrible.
Judd had invited everybody to live at his place. Vicki didn't have any choice after her trailer had burned
to the ground. Some of Lionel's uncle andré's "associates" had virtu-ally taken over Lionel's place, so he
needed somewhere to crash too. Ryan could have stayed at his own house and Lionel would have stayed
there with him, but Ryan couldn't make himself go inside. There were too many scary memories. It had
been just him and his parents in that house, and now they were dead. And then there had been the
burglary, so he wasn't about to set foot in the place. Lionel could make fun of him all he wanted, but
Ryan was glad to take Judd up on his offer.
Judd's family had clearly been the wealthi-est of the four. His house was a huge man-sion. Well, almost a
mansion. There were bigger and nicer homes around, but not many. In Judd's house, each kid could have
his own bedroom and lots of privacy.
No one knew what the future held, at least among the kids. Bruce Barnes sure seemed to know. He had
made it his business to become a student of Bible prophecy and must have been spending almost every
spare minute buried in the Bible and reference books. He told the kids that it was time to be on the
lookout for a man the Bible called the Antichrist. "He will come offering peace and harmony, and many
people will be fooled, thinking he's a good man with their best interests at heart. He will make some sort
of an agreement with the nation of Israel, but it will be a lie. The signing of that agreement will signal the
beginning of the last seven years of tribulation before Christ returns again to set up his thousand-year
kingdom on earth."
Bruce explained the Tribulation as a period of suffering for all the people of the world, more suffering
even than they had endured when millions of people had disappeared all at the same time. Bruce
promised to teach the kids all of the judgments that would come from heaven during those seven years,
some twenty-one of them in three series of seven.
Judd had called the kids together one evening after they had all received their Bibles from Bruce. "I'm
not trying to be the boss or anything," he began, "but I am the oldest and this is my house, and so there
are going to be some rules. To stay in this house, we all have to agree to watch out for each other. Let
each other know where you are all the time so we don't worry about you. Don't do anything stupid like
getting in trouble, breaking the law, staying out all night, that kind of stuff. And I think we all ought to be
reading what Bruce tells us to read every day and also going to whatever meetings he invites us to,
besides church of course. I mean, we're going to church every Sunday to keep up with what's going on."
Vicki and Lionel nodded. "Of course," Vicki said. "Sounds fair."
"Not to me," Ryan said. "I'm not into this stuff, and you all know it."
"Guess you're going to have to live some-where else then," Lionel said.
"That's not for you to say, Lionel! " Ryan said. "This isn't your house! Judd's not going to make me read
the Bible and go to church meetings just to stay here. Are you, Judd?"
"Matter of fact, I am," Judd said.
"What?"
"I can hardly believe I'm saying this," Judd said, "because just last week it made me so mad when my
parents said the same thing. But here goes. As long as you live under my roof, you follow my rules."
Ryan's face was red, and it appeared he might bolt out of there like he often did when he heard
something he didn't like.
"I'm not going to force you to become a Christian," Judd said. "Nobody can do that. Even Vicki and I
needed to decide that in our own time on our own terms. But I'm taking you in, man. You're staying here
because I asked you to. The least you can do is to join in with what the rest of us are doing. It's all for
one and one for all. We're going to look out for you and protect you and take care of you, even if you
don't believe like we do, and we're going to expect you to do the same for us. I can't even make you
read the Bible, but we're going to go to church and to Bruce's special little meetings, and we're going
together. You can plug your ears or sleep through them, but you're going."
"And if I don't?"
"Then you can find someplace else to stay."
"He'll never do that," Lionel said. "He's too much of a scaredy-cat."
"Shut up!" Ryan said.
"Lay off him, Lionel," Vicki said. "You're not going to win him over that way."
"You're not going to win me over at all," Ryan said. "Just watch."
"Well," Judd said; "what's the deal. You in or out?"
"I have to decide right now?"
"We have a meeting with Bruce tonight and church tomorrow morning. You go with us tonight and you
promise to go tomorrow, or you move out this afternoon."
"The man's drawing a line in the sand for you," Lionel said.
"Lionel!" Vicki scolded.
"I'm just sayin , the line has been drawn. You crossing the line, Ryan? Or are you with us?"
"I'll think about it," Ryan said, and he was gone. The others heard him banging around in the bedroom he
had been assigned.
"We need to pray for him," Vicki said. "It's hard enough for us, but imagine what it's like for him. We
know where our parents are. If he believes like we do that our parents were raptured and his weren't, he
has to accept that his parents are in hell. Think about that. He's going to fight this a long time, because
even if he wants to become a believer, that means he's accepting that his parents are lost forever."
"It sure would be nice if we could some-how find out his parents, or at least one of them, was actually a
Christian or became one before they died," Lionel said.
"Get real," Judd said. "That rarely happens in real life."
"I know."
Lionel was dealing with his own dilemma. His uncle had left a long message on Lionel's answering
machine, going on and on about killing himself and feeling so bad that he had influenced Lionel to not be a
Christian. He was clearly drunk or high or both, and Lionel had been convinced that andré had killed
himself. When Lionel and Ryan had ridden their bikes all the way to andré's neighbor-hood one night to
investigate, the cops had told them andré's body was at a nearby morgue. It had indeed been a suicide,
they told Lionel. Because andré, had had enemies to whom he owed money, and those guys had moved
into Lionel's house and kicked him out, Lionel figured they had murdered andré and made it look like
suicide.
But when Judd had driven Lionel to the morgue a few days later so Lionel could iden-tify the body, he
had run into a shocker. While the victim was the same height and weight as andré, and while he had
carried andré's wallet and wore andré's clothes and jewelry, the body was clearly not andré's.
Finding the truth about that mystery would be Lionel's mission over the next sev-eral days. Meanwhile,
he was as eager as Judd and Vicki to learn more about what life was supposed to be like, now that
Christ had rap-tured his church.
Judd agreed that they should pray for Ryan, and that in fact they should pray at the end of all their little
house meetings, the way Bruce had them pray at the end of their meetings at church. But first he asked,
"is there anything else either of you needs to talk about now?"
"Yeah," Lionel said. "I just want to say that I'm not really trying to put down Ryan. I'm trying to toughen
him up the way I did my little brother and sister and the way my sister did me. I don't want to make him
mad or feel bad, but he's such a wuss. It's time for that boy to grow up."
"It's hard to grow up this way," Vicki said. "I don't know about you guys, but I'm hav-ing trouble. I have
bad dreams, have trouble sleeping, find myself crying over my family as if they're all just dead and gone
and not in heaven where I know I'll see them someday. I know we're all going to be called back to
school one of these days, and I can't imagine sitting through class with all I know now. If this Antichrist
guy shows up soon and does sign some sort of a contract with Israel, we're gonna have only seven more
years to live."
Judd and Lionel sat nodding. "Anyway," Judd said, "Lionel, you do have to try to encourage Ryan. If he
decides against becom-ing a Christian, I sure wouldn't want to have it on my conscience that I pushed
him away. As much as you guys squabble, I still think he looks up to you."
"Really?"
"Oh, yeah," Vicki said. "I think that's obvi-ous. He wants your approval."
"Wow."
"You might want to encourage him."
"Hold up," Lionel said. "I'll do it right now."
Lionel hurried to Ryan's room, trying to decide what to say. When he peeked in and knocked, Ryan
whirled from what he was doing.
"Hey, little man," Lionel said.
"I thought I asked you to quit calling me that," Ryan said.
"Yeah, sorry. Listen, I just want to say that I'm sorry about getting on your case all the time."
Ryan didn't respond.
Lionel tried again. "I mean, uh, I'm just saying---"
Ryan approached the door, where Lionel stood, tongue-tied. "You're just saying you don't know what
you're saying, right?"
Lionel did not respond.
"Are you finished?" Ryan asked, his hand on the door.
"No, I---"
"Yes, you are," Ryan said. And he pushed the door shut in Lionel's face.
Lionel returned to Judd and Vicki, clearly troubled. He told them what had happened.
"We do need to pray for that boy," Vicki said.
But before they did, Lionel said, "You need to know he was packing up."
"Really?" Judd said. "He's leaving?"
"I don't know," Lionel said, "but he was getting all his stuff together."
And they prayed for him.
_________________________
CHAPTER TWO
Ryan's Escapade
RYANwas angry and confused. What else could he be? He had overheard Vicki trying to explain his
situation, and she was exactly right. In truth, he wanted to believe exactly what these other kids believed.
It all made sense. His friend, Raymie Steele, had warned him. And it seemed most of the people who had
disappeared were known to be Chris-tians. So many people from so many churches were gone that they
must have known something.
But if all this was true, his parents had not made it. But still they were gone. Dead. The only nightmare
worse than having your par-ents die, Ryan decided, was knowing that they had missed going to heaven.
Was that fair? What kind of a God did something like that to people as nice as his parents? Or to
someone like him
He wasn't a bad kid. Sure, he had done a lot of things wrong, but who hadn't? Raymie Steele was a
Christian, but he wasn't perfect.
The one thing Ryan couldn't get out of his mind was that if this was true and his parents knew it, they
would have believed. And for sure they would want him to believe before it was too late. But knowing it
was probably true, even believing it, didn't mean Ryan was accepting it for himself. Because what Vicki
Byrne had said was right. If he bought into it, it meant he was admitting that his parents had missed out
and were in hell. That was too much to take in just now.
Ryan knew something the other kids didn't know. Well, except maybe Lionel. Lionel seemed to know
Ryan better than Ryan knew himself. What only Ryan, and maybe Lionel, knew was that Ryan had no
intention of doing anything that would cause him to leave Judd's house. He had never felt or been so
alone in his life, and these kids were his new family. Whether or not he became a Christian, he was not
about to leave them or let them abandon him.
Yeah, they treated him like a baby and used names for him that made him feel even smaller and younger.
But hehad been acting like a baby. He had a right. He was an orphan. The others were enduring the loss
of their families too, but this was different. Ryan needed time away from the pressure, time to think, time
to do something to take his mind off everything. He had to admit he was afraid to go out alone at night,
so while it was still light, he headed out on his bike.
The others had seemed so concerned with his packing up his stuff that they would likely watch to see if
he took it with him. They would be relieved, he hoped, to find everything still in his room. It was packed
and stacked, though, so they could wonder if he was eventually going to leave, based on what decision
he came to. But his decision, at least about staying at Judd's, was already made.
It made Ryan feel a little better to know that the others seemed to want him to stay regardless. He knew
they wanted him to become a Christian, but that didn't seem to have anything to do with whether he
stayed around. Was it because they really cared for him? Were they actually worried about him and
looking out for him? He couldn't figure that one out. He had never cared about any-body else that much,
except maybe Raymie.
Ryan wanted to work on his courage. Could he ride into his own neighborhood and past his own house?
And if he could, could he also see what was happening at the Steeles'? He sure didn't want to ask them
about Mrs. Steele or Raymie, because he knew both Mr. Steele and Raymie's big sister Chloe had to
feel terrible about their vanish-ing. Maybe they'd be like his aunt was a few years ago, who seemed to
want to do noth-ing more than talk about Ryan's uncle at his uncle's funeral. That seemed so strange.
You'd think she would have been so upset she wouldn't want his name even men-tioned. But she had
talked about him non-stop. She even asked people to tell her their favorite stories about him.
"Sit here with me for a minute," she had said, taking Ryan's hand. "Tell me about that time your uncle
Walter was trying to teach you to fish and he fell into the lake."
"Oh, Aunt Evelyn," Ryan had said, feeling sheepish and awkward. "You know Uncle Wally did that on
purpose. I mean, I was only eight, but I knew that even then."
Aunt Evelyn had leaned back in her chair and laughed her hearty laugh, right there in the funeral home
with people filing past the body of her husband. Many turned to stare at the insensitive person who would
be guffaw-ing at a time like that and were at first shocked, then pleased to find it was Aunt Evelyn
herself.
"I saw the whole thing from the porch of the cottage," she had said, wiping away her tears of laughter.
Ryan thought it funny that she usually cried when she laughed, but of course maybe this time she was
covering her real tears of sadness. "I just knew what he was going to do because he had done it to me
when we were first dating. He stepped on one side of the boat and then the other, and he kept saying,
'No problem. No problem. Shouldn't stand up in the boat, but don't you worry, I've got it all under
control.' Right? Right? Didn't he say that in that big phony deep voice of his?"
"Yes, he did," Ryan had admitted.
"And then, pretending to adjust the fishing line or something, he just stepped back and flipped over the
side in his shirt and pants and hat and everything. Didn't he?"
"Yeah, but he had put his glasses in the picnic basket first, and he even took out his hearing aid."
That just made Aunt Evelyn laugh all the more, and soon everyone in the room was waiting his turn to tell
a favorite Uncle Wal-ter story. Just thinking about that crazy funeral made Ryan pedal harder as he sped
toward his own block. Aunt Evelyn herself had died not two years later. How he missed them both!
Why, he wondered, was he thinking about them now? Maybe because it reminded him that Raymie
Steele had not been the first per-son to ever tell him about God. Ryan had been to Vacation Bible
School a couple of times, but it was at Uncle Walter's funeral, when Ryan had worked up the courage to
ask Aunt Evelyn why she wasn't more sad, that she had said that confusing thing to him.
"That's an excellent question, Ryan honey," she had said. She almost always would call him that, even in
front of other people. "I'm sad and I'll have my bad days and nights, and I'll cry enough tears for the
whole family. But you see, I know where Uncle Walter is, and it's where I'm going to be someday. He's
in heaven."
"But how do you know?"
"The Bible says you can know," she had said.
But that was as far as the conversation had gone. Ryan had thought about that a long time and even
asked his mom and dad about it. Uncle Walter was Mr. Daley's much older brother, and Aunt Evelyn
was his second wife. "Your dad says your uncle Walter's wife has always been some kind of a religious
nut, Ryan," his mother had said. "But she means well. She's been good for Walter."
"Good for him?" Mr. Daley had chimed in. "Took all the fun out of him, if you ask me. Got him the
old-time religion, and he became a Holy Joe."
"He was still fun, Dad," Ryan had said. "He was always being funny."
"He kept telling us we need Jesus," Mr. Daley said. "But frankly, I don't feel the need for anything."
Ryan skidded to a stop in front of Raymie Steele's house. He couldn't tell whether Mr. Steele and Chloe
were home. So that was it, he realized about his thoughts turning to his uncle Walter and aunt Evelyn.
They had been Christians. They were in heaven. And they had tried to tell him and his parents about
Christ. He wondered how many other chances his parents had had. His dad always had some comment
when he saw a preacher on television. He thought they were all crooks, but he never kept the TV
channel on any church program long enough to hear what they had to say.
Ryan sat straddling his bike, pawing the ground with his foot. What he wouldn't give to have it be just a
week or so ago and to know that Raymie would come bounding out of this house for some fun. Man,
they had good times. They squabbled and argued and had often been jealous of each other, but not a day
went by when they didn't have more fun than any two kids deserved. They were best friends, blood
brothers, and had pledged to always keep in touch--- no matter where college or life took them. How
Ryan wanted to see Raymie again!
He pedaled slowly to the end of the block, where his house came into view. There was a pile of
newspapers on the stoop, and he knew he should get rid of them and call to cancel the paper. Making it
obvious no one was home was an invitation to more burglaries. The drapes were all shut, too. And
though there were lights on an automatic timer, all the power outages lately put them on a crazy schedule.
The lights were on now and would go off early in the evening. Ryan thought about going in and resetting
the timer and opening the drapes so it looked like the house was lived in. But as usual, he couldn't force
himself to even move up the driveway by himself, let alone approach the front door. What in the world
was he going to do when the lawn needed mowing?
Ryan headed off to the other side of town, where Lionel had lived. He would be scared to death to
approach that house with all of andré Dupree's so-called friends living there. But still, he wanted to see it,
to spy on it. He couldn't figure out what was happening with Lionel's uncle andré.
Ryan had been there when Lionel had played the answering machine message from andré. He had to
agree, the guy sounded ready to kill himself. Lionel was only kidding himself, Ryan thought, to think that
some-one andré owed money to had killed him and made it look like suicide. The two guys Lionel said
had threatened andré once were the leaders of the bunch that had moved into Lionel's house, supposedly
with andré's per-mission. And they talked about how great it would be when andré joined them. How
did that make sense, especially now that Lionel had discovered that whoever had been killed in andré's
apartment, in andré's clothes, wearing andré's jewelry, and carrying andré's wallet, was not andré at all?
Ryan was as curious as he could be, but on the other hand, he wasn't sure he wanted to know. What
would he do with that informa-tion?
He looked at his watch. He knew Judd Thompson had been serious, and that if Ryan was not back at
Judd's house and ready to go to the meeting with Bruce that night, he would no longer be welcome. He
still had an hour. Ryan rode idly up and down the sidewalk on the other side of the street from Lionel's.
There was little going on at the house across the street, but the van was there and lights were on in the
house.
At one side of the house was a wide drive-way that served the home next door. No one seemed to be
home there. Ryan wondered if he would be noticed if he parked his bike out of sight and just moseyed
over there, appear-ing to just be hanging around, playing. That would be a test of his courage, wouldn't
it? He didn't think anyone in Lionel's house would recognize him as the one who had sped away from
there on bikes with Lionel And if anyone didn't want him playing in a that area next to the house, he'd just
move along.
The plan sounded reasonable to Ryan, but he found himself petrified when he actually began walking
摘要：

Book03ThroughtheFlames LEFTBEHIND>THEKIDS< JerryB.Jenkins______________ TimLaHaye  TyndaleHousePublishers,Inc.Wheaton,Illinois    _________________________   ToRyanThompsonWelcometothefamilyofGod  _________________________  _________________________   CHAPTERONE ALineintheSand  JUDDThompsonandtheoth...

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