Promises of salvation and faith healing but in reality human sacrifice are the legacy of "The Way" as the revival crisscrosses The Heartland and Bakoda Pak pursues his nemesis Vidor Haines who is indeed murdering innocents again.
Excerpt:
He awoke in a cold sweat. The sheets were soaked and he had that fear, the fear that you feel when you awake from a vivid dream, a nightmare, the fear you feel that consumes your entire body and being. It's not just shivers down your spine--it borders on complete and total immobility.
He sat up in his bed and shook, first his head from side to side, then his entire body from the waist up, trying to find clarity, trying to pull back to reality, normalcy, shake it all.
But he couldn't; the dream had been so real, so terrifying, perhaps an omen or, worse, a harbinger. But it wasn't; those were simply indications of what was possible. What was so terrifying was that this, his dream, was what he knew was going to happen.
He had hoped that it was impossible. It couldn't be true, but in his gut, in his essence he knew that he was coming, coming like the eternal judgment that he had feared for almost six months ever since Mayer, Indiana, and his coming would be his doom, his Angel of Death who would bring an indescribably agonizing termination of his life on this earth and push him into the abyss of eternal damnation.
He rose, read the note from Timothy again.
Timothy had been executed with a wooden stake driven through his heart in his South Dakota home town where he had retreated to just weeks before. His arms frozen in the air above his body as if reaching out to implore mercy, but it apparently had not come.
Timothy watched as the hand sledge came down and hit the top of the stake, his last moment on earth being witnessed by himself after the words were uttered by his executioner, "Shut the f**k up!"
His and every execution of the ten before him had been recorded digitally and forwarded to the remaining disciples and to The Way, the final intended victim. They were all gruesome, without mercy, and after the victim or victims were dispatched a voice would be heard before the video ended naming the next victim in succession. Following Timothy's execution video, the name of John had been rendered as next.
The note which he read was written just days before Timothy's death, his execution. It read: ...
