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Okay, enough preaching, now to the books.
Ryan escapes from GC security with the help of Our Buck and they discuss his upcoming story.
"I'm taking Bruce's message and turning it into a cover story," Buck said. "I've assigned reporters from offices in several countries to interview different religious leaders. I'll include their answers in my article."
"What are the questions?" Darrion asked.
"Just one," Buck said. "Will we suffer the 'wrath of the lamb'?"
Buck's idea of interviewing different religious leaders would be a good idea if he was talking about say, how different religions view Jesus, but this is completely different. Buck knows this earthquake is going to happen just like he knows the real cause of the disappearances. Yet rather than using his journalism status as a bully pulpit, he's keeping this knowledge to himself. This would be like if there was a church arson and he knew not only the names of the perpetrators but their social security numbers, location, and brand of gasoline they used, but still chose to keep it from the cops and talk instead about other causes of fires like oil-soaked rags.
Meanwhile Lionel is in a dark van when he notices two boys in there with him. And that's all that happens on his end. Judd meanwhile leads a boy named Pavel to Zod.
Lionel and the boys decide to make a break for it while the men are busy. Lionel manages to get to some bushes and hears gunshots and that's the end of the first chapter.
Next chapter, Lionel and the boys are escaping through the swamp. They make it out to a general store where they share a drink. When the van shows up again, the other boys make a run for it, but Lionel, the idiot, just stands there.
If you're wondering what the TF and YTF are doing right now, they're mostly hanging out in the Hole-in-the-Ground, which is about as exciting as watching paint dry. Again, at least with paint-drying you can get high off the fumes.
Turns out Lionel and one of the boys, Jake, were captured and now they're at a GC training center where they'll be turned into child soldiers.
End of chapter: Judd finally decides to risk leaving the hangar and Ryan comes to rescue him. Only someone as monumentally untalented as Ellanjay could make the apocalypse seem so boring.
I've decided to throw a third chapter in. Basically Lionel talks with this guy named Conrad who is Taylor Graham's little brother and Judd finally gets the safe open, but fails to escape the GC dragnet.
9 comments:
Huh - given the example Buck and Rayford set, I'm really not surprised Judd and Lionel act as they do.
Hmm, I should read this series and then write that AU with Judd and Vicki being nicer people. :)
As it is - lemme guess, the GC will give Judd ~a very stern talking to~ just like they did the other umpty times.
"Only someone as monumentally untalented as Ellanjay could make the apocalypse seem so boring."
*gigglesnorts*
If you're interviewing different religious leaders, shouldn't you try to phrase your question in relatively neutral terms rather than using something Christian-specific which won't even be recognised by many of them? Such as "will we suffer by divine intervention"?
I wonder about the Holy Hole's ventilation, but that's because I was recently reading a book in which a stuffy, airless underground temple is dimly-lit and heated by many charcoal braziers. I feel that this cult would not survive the first service...
Glad to see someone's still interested in my offer of fanfiction for this series, Apocalypse Review. I keep waiting but nothing appears in my inbox. :( I guess there's just so much wrong in Ellanjayland that no one feels like tackling it all. :pauses to promote my version on Right Behind:
I took a stab at starting an AU. Could use comments from people if they want to see it. :)
Okay, this is baffeling even by Buck's standards. He's asking about "Wrath of the lamb", which isn't such an obvious term that all non-Christian leaders will know what he's talking about. But Nicolae will, and I doubt he'll be happy. It's been mentioned before, getting the entire checklist out in the news is probably one of the best things that can be done. By proving they have advanced knowledge of every disaster, they can get more people to believe them. And Buck ought to be able to use his position to slip a single issue through Nicky's mandates with all that information. He'll have to go into serious hiding afterward, but it can work.
But this is the most extreme case of Buck being in I-told-you-so mode. He's going to ask them about a very specific item of belief, not in such a way it's likely to convince people, but in such a way that he can chuckle that they don't understand it and can record their denials of what he already knows will happen. He could just ask this question to Moses and Eliah on their big tour if he wants to pretend he's not writing about his own beliefs but just 'quoting religious leaders'. Since there are only two open religions, the GCF and the Jews-for-Jesus, I don't even see why he would want to interview multiple GCF leaders. And he still obviously outs himself as a Rapture-nut to Nicolae, so it's lose-lose. Ugh.
Oh and I know Nicky is supposed to be eeeevil, but since he has seemingly no shortage of adults that will trust and follow him without question (and he can always have the mind-whammy on standby) why does he even need Child Soldiers.
Come to think of it, according to L&J these kids were all old enough to be morally responsible for their sins, hence why they were Left Behind. If we were to accept that teenagers are equally capable of moral judgement just as adults are, aren't they mature enough to be soldiers?
In the hands of a better author... :P
The child-soldier thing that both sides (Tribbles and GC) engage in could be a real moral dilemma people like Judd or Vicki would be old enough to be able to explore in a fair bit of detail - and it's especially relevant to someone like Vicki, who's only 14 and kind of bridges the age gap between Judd and the younger kids.
I don't think, however, that it really ever gets explored in much detail in LB: The Kids except to make the GC look like a bunch of morons.
As I understand it from the Main Series, the whole "Buck writing about the 'Wrath of the Lamb'" is his Big Cool Idea to "preach the word" while pretending he doesn't believe it. He pitches the idea to the OWG Meedjah (and maybe Nicky Rockies too, I don't remember) as some sort of snarky "oh those silly Christians are/were so foolish, look at what hysterical nonsense they believe!," and a way to publicly seem to ridicule such things, but he's REEElly (No, Really!) "getting the Word out."
Or something Brave And Courageous And Martyriffic (/snark) like that.
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