As Ashton Rickman wondered through what remained of his parents house, he realized that he felt totally alone. He could still hear GC fighters doing their recon over the bombed out remains of Chicago. How foolish he felt at how he had blown Thompson and the pastor off at Lisle's Coffee Shoppe.
It didn't seem so long ago that he was just starting out Columbia University while his girlfriend attended Harvard--how he yearned for a normal life but since Nicolae Carpathia took out New York, Washington D.C., Chicago, and San Francisco that was never going to be possible ever again.
Richman now realized that it was all a miracle that he had decided to visit Sabrina down in Cambridge on the exact day of the bombing and it had been a quiet ride to Chicago with Ashton at the wheel of his camaro and Sabrina in the passenger, each was equally worried about their parents of siblings. All he kept of thinking was that jerk Judd was right and he had to get right with God for he knew that he was a sinner just as Judd told him he was and all the way to Chicago, Rickman kept saying the sinner's prayer to himself over and over again.
As he finally pulled onto the winding private that would take him up to his parents multi-million dollar estate, Ashton got a bad feeing in the pit of his stomach and it worse when he saw the house or what was left of it. The large manor that had been in his mother's family for seven generations was now nothing but rubble. He would later find the bodies of his mom and dad in the breakfast nook and one of his thirteen year old twin sisters dead. Yes, everything that Judd and that pastor Barnes had said was right and he had lost everything that was important to him--his mom and dad and Jennifer were dead but what about Jessica. "oh God, please let Jessica be alright. I know that mom and dad and Jennifer died in unbelief but not Jessica. Please God", prayed Rickman.