The Rapture happens. That's the premise of the book. Like, 2 percent of the world's population disappears in an instant, and they don't like, float up. Their clothes aren't left behind. They're just gone. You go, "Two percent of the world's population? That's not a lot." But it's 170 million people, and if you think about big things that have happened like 9/11, which changed the world forever: [almost 3,000] people died. One hundred seventy million people disappearing is a pretty big deal.
But it's not the Apocalypse. There aren't zombies walking around, and it's not a postnuclear wasteland, so essentially, tomorrow morning, you've still got to wake up and go to work and pay your taxes and put food on your table. And so the book starts three years after this thing that they call the Sudden Departure; religious people believe it was the Rapture, but the world at large refers to it as the Sudden Departure, because the people who disappeared there doesn't seem to be any selection process. The Pope disappears, but also Gary Busey disappears. So it's sort of like, in the Venn diagram of Pope and Busey, what are the intersections?
