2013: Beyond Armageddon Read online

  “I think I’ll stay.”

  “No, Reese. Go home to your family and hug them real tight. Maybe you can all say a prayer.”

  “We will do that.” He gently squeezed his friend’s shoulder and left.

  Zeke angled his chair so he could watch the line representing Leah’s heartbeat, the thin thread by which she clung to life.

  CHAPTER 11

  Zeke’s eyes popped open. He had dozed off in his chair and been dreaming that he was being watched. He looked at the clock on the wall. Two in the morning. Almost eight hours since the shootings.

  Leah was asleep and breathing normally. The beeping and clicking of the machines was steady. Moonlight pressed against the window beyond her bed.

  He closed his eyes and tried to go back to sleep, but couldn’t shake the feeling that he was being watched. He opened his eyes and looked toward the window.

  A dark shape slid into view. Its movement was unnatural, not like anything that could fly. Maybe it was the shadow of a cloud, drifting across the face of the moon. All at once it stopped in the center of the window and hung there, hovering. It wasn’t a cloud.

  What was that? A bird flown off course? No. A bird couldn’t hover like that.

  The heavy shadow loomed a few feet outside the window. Zeke rounded the foot of Leah’s bed to go look. The dark shape hung there, indistinct. He leaned closer and squinted, trying to make it out.

  A silver edge of moonlight outlined a shape vaguely like a man. Silhouettes of appendages hung where arms and legs should be, but their edges were fluttery, like a mirage. The shape drifted closer.

  Two small red spots of light glowed. It seemed impossible, but as they came closer there was no doubt.

  They were eyes.

  Staring back at him with pure malevolence.

  Zeke flinched. An armlike appendage came up and pointed at him, as if in warning.

  The shape dissolved into nothingness and Zeke was left staring at the moon, struggling to grasp this new madness. That night in the jungle, he’d felt something watching from the woods. Something evil.

  Had it come back? Or had it been with him all this time, waiting to strike again? The killer in the restaurant said Satan made him do it.

  A sudden metallic hum penetrated his fog. He bolted to the heart monitor. The zigzag line he’d been watching all night was straight. Medical personnel came rushing into the room. Seconds later they were wheeling Leah down the hall. He started to follow but a doctor he didn’t recognize put a hand on Zeke’s chest.

  Zeke pushed it aside. “I’m coming. Don’t waste time trying to stop me.”

  “You’ve got to stay out of the way.”

  “I will.”

  An agony of time later the ER doctor touched the paddles to her chest. “Clear!”

  Her body twitched but the line stayed flat.

  “Clear!”

  Nothing.

  The doctor muttered something and an assistant began preparing a needle. He applied the paddles again. Leah twitched violently. It triggered a memory. Zeke felt a tremor.

  Him on the table. Dead. Floating. Bathed in white light. A man’s voice. What was it saying?

  You are the beginning and the end.

  The agony of watching Leah fight for her life wouldn’t let him pursue the thought. He looked at the air above her, expecting to see her soul floating away.

  “Clear.”

  Again Leah’s body twitched. Nothing. “How long?” the doctor said.

  “Seven minutes.”

  He beckoned to the assistant with the needle. She emptied the contents into Leah’s chest. Her body arched upward in a violent spasm. All eyes stared at the heart monitor. The steady hum was like the voice of a robotic demon proclaiming its victory.

  The sound changed.

  A metallic beep. Then another. And another.

  Beep. Beep. Beep.

  A restrained cheer erupted, then the medical team resumed its work. Paralyzing tension released Zeke from its iron grip and he almost collapsed. His brain shut down and he just stood there, muttering “thank you” over and over and over.

  CHAPTER 12

  Zeke squinted at the first rays of sunlight coming through Leah’s window. What day was it? He had to look at his watch. Saturday. Barely twelve hours since the shooting. A lifetime.

  A doctor came in, not the same one who’d tried to stop Zeke from coming into the ER last night. This one was older, sixties maybe. He was clean-shaven and his white hair was brushed back and neatly trimmed. He looked well-rested.

  “She’s a tough cookie,” he said.

  Zeke’s short bark was a release of pent-up tension more than a laugh. “Tell me about it.”

  “I think she’s going to be fine.”

  “Think?”

  “Let’s give it the rest of the weekend to be on the safe side. Sometime tomorrow I should be able to take the ‘I think’ out of that sentence.”

  “I’ll be here.” Zeke blinked back a surge of emotion. “What’s your name, doctor?”

  “McBride.”

  “Thanks, Dr. McBride. For everything.”

  “Happy to do it.”

  Leah woke up a little while later and spoke her first words. “What happened?”

  He didn’t want to upset her with the grim news, but she needed to know. “How much do you remember?”

  “The man with the gun going crazy. Then you walking in. That’s it. Are you okay?”

  “I’m fine.” He groped for the right words. There were none, so he said it right out, as gently as he could. “He got my parents and sister. And thirteen other people.”

  A loud wail escaped and she collapsed into spasmodic sobbing. Zeke held her for a very long time until it passed.

  “I’m so sorry, Zeke.”

  “Me too. Thank God we have each other to help us get through it.”

  “What about…funerals, and everything?”

  “I’ll take care of it. You just have one thing to do: get well.”

  “I have to come to the funerals.”

  “You can’t. The doctor says it’s too risky to be out in the cold in your condition. Your system needs all its strength to heal. We’ll get you out to pay your respects as soon as we can. They’ll understand.”

  He held her through the rest of her grief until she fell back asleep.

  Zeke tried to read a magazine but couldn’t concentrate. He clicked on the television, lowering the volume so it wouldn’t disturb Leah. She didn’t stir.

  The first newscast of the morning came on. The lead story was the massacre at the restaurant.

  “In what is believed to be the worst mass murder in Washington’s history, last evening a crazed gunman walked into the popular Bipartisan restaurant on Capitol Hill and gunned down sixteen people. Several others were wounded. The police are withholding further information as they go about the grim business of notifying families. The killer was whisked away before reporters arrived. One witness outside the restaurant later said he heard the man shouting ‘I am Anton!’—apparently not his real name—and that he was acting on behalf of Satan. Experts say this delusion is quite common among deranged killers. Mark Chapman, for example, the man who killed John Lennon, claimed to be under the influence of Satan. There have been many others. In any case, we will be following this story closely in the days ahead.”

  After a respectful two-second pause, a slight smirk tilted the anchorman’s mouth. “Now we turn to the story that we know is on everyone’s mind, since we are less than three months away from December 21, 2012: will the world end this year? Don’t go anywhere. Caitlin Brewster will tell you everything you need to know, right after this break.”

  Zeke clicked off the television and rubbed his eyes. For him the world had already ended.

  Mid-afternoon the next day Dr. McBride came in to check Leah’s progress.

  “She’s going to be fine.”

  Zeke shook his hand. “That’s what I’ve been waiting to hear.”

&
nbsp; “I’ll have the nurse come in and start unhooking some of these contraptions. I’m going to keep her here the rest of today and tomorrow, just for observation. You can take her home Tuesday.” He saw Zeke’s look of concern. “It’s routine, Mr. Sloan, I assure you. She’ll be fine. You can go home and watch the ’Skins game.”

  Watching it without his father would only make Zeke feel worse. “I’m skipping this one. I’d like to stay here one more night, then I’ll be out of your way.”

  “You’re not in our way, Mr. Sloan. You stay here as long as you want.” He patted Zeke on the shoulder and left.

  Zeke began figuring out the timing of getting Leah home. The funerals were Tuesday at nine, the same day she would be getting released. He didn’t want to leave her here a minute longer than necessary, but the funerals couldn’t be changed, and he wouldn’t have time to get her home beforehand. He’d just have to come get her first thing after the funerals.

  He took Leah’s hand between his and watched her sleep, thinking that once this was all over, he never wanted to leave her side again.

  CHAPTER 13

  Zeke and Leah shared a hospital breakfast Monday morning before he headed home, eager for a hot shower and fresh clothes. He’d been allowed to take showers at the hospital, but the stink of death was still on him. Odors from Father Connolly’s hellhole and the restaurant had mixed with the hospital smell, and their combined stench was overpowering even the new car smell of the Ford hybrid he’d just bought.

  His spirits brightened a bit when he made the familiar turn off Independence Avenue at the Library of Congress. A few minutes later he pulled in front of his Capitol Hill townhouse, two blocks away.

  Zeke felt a twinge of annoyance when got out of the car and a blast of cold air shot down the back of his neck. The unprecedented early cold wave had refused to lessen its grip, and D.C. was getting cranky at being cheated out of one of its nicest times of the year. The sooty, pitted snow that still covered most of his front yard was like a taunt.

  He popped the trunk and got the jar with the scrolls, still wrapped in his winter jacket, and the briefcase with Father Connolly’s translations and notes.

  He wandered slowly through the house, half-expecting it to have been ransacked by whatever demon had destroyed his family. Everything was the same until he entered the spare room at the end of the hall that he’d converted to a workout room for he and Leah.

  The multi-station weight machine still stood in the middle of the room, and the free weights and stands were neatly arranged as he had left them. But there were three large unopened boxes against the wall that hadn’t been there before. He went over and read the labeling.

  Components for a home theater.

  Dad…

  His father had kept telling him to get with the home theater program. This had to be his birthday present.

  So that had been the plan. Leah was going to keep him at her place, while his father came over here to set things up.

  He looked at the names of the manufacturers. State-of-the-art. Of course.

  Good job, Dad.

  The boxes loomed like three tombstones.

  Happy birthday to me.

  A cocoon of death was smothering him and he needed to get it off. He headed upstairs, stripping as he went. Twenty minutes later he emerged from the shower, clean-shaven and scrubbed almost raw. He put on his favorite flannel lounging pants, a long-sleeved T-shirt, warm winter socks, and loose, comfortable slippers. Downstairs, he threw his clothes in the washer to get rid of the stench. He took the briefcase and the jar with the scroll into another first-floor room he used as his office.

  He needed to figure out what he’d gotten himself into. It was going to take a whole lot of fact-finding to even consider something as patently insane as going into Hell to confront Satan. There probably wasn’t enough fact-finding in the world to make that case, but he had promised Father Connolly he’d “look into it.” Immersing himself in research might even help take his mind off the horror.

  Eventually. But not now. The funerals were tomorrow.

  The grief he’d kept inside erupted as a long, shuddering moan. He stood for a long time, head in hand, eyes closed, a dull ache of sorrow beating through him, as though lead now flowed through his veins instead of blood. Finally he took the scrolls and the briefcase to his corner safe and locked them away.

  Satan would have to wait.

  CHAPTER 14

  Zeke lay naked on an operating table, hovering in black nothingness.

  The nothingness became a jungle. He was in the middle of a clearing. One by one, ghostly faces poked through the thick surrounding brush.

  Vietnamese faces.

  He was a cadaver about to be dissected. A dark figure, shrouded in the hooded cape of Death, was poised over him, ready to commence the autopsy with the scythe it held in its black skeletal hand. As the razor-sharp blade neared his chest, a face suddenly emerged from the cowl that had eclipsed it.

  Wolflike. The thing had four legs but there was something human about the face. It looked familiar. He struggled to place it. A face from the jungle.

  Slowly he was drawn into the eyes. He pressed himself flatter to get away from the inhuman hatred pouring from their gaze. Strings of saliva dripped onto his chest from bared fangs as the thing leaned toward him.

  It was too evil to be a wolf. Or human.

  He felt the point of the scythe on his flesh.

  An absurdly happy metallic jingle floated into his dream. As he struggled to rouse himself he thought he heard another noise.

  The clicking of a dog’s nails on tile.

  Was it the thing in his dream retreating? Or was it coming from somewhere inside the room? Could there actually be a dog loose in the house? The doors were locked. But it sounded so real—

  Still struggling to wake up, he tried to figure out where the music was coming from. It was the theme from The Sting. It sounded tauntingly cheerful, like music coming from a demonic ice cream truck. Finally it sunk in: his cell phone. He’d left it on in case anyone tried to reach him that way. He grabbed it from the nightstand and tried to focus. As he fumbled to find the right button, he heard a guttural whisper in his head: “You’re mine now.”

  It couldn’t be the caller’s voice; he hadn’t activated the call yet. The inane jingle kept playing. He found the button and angrily stabbed it, mumbling a greeting while flexing the kinks out of his back.

  “Zeke Sloan?”

  “Yeah.”

  “This is Michael Price.”

  The name jolted him awake like the swipe of a straight razor. “Did you say Michael Price?”

  “Yes.”

  “The same Michael Price from—”

  “Yes. Nam.”

  Instantly Zeke was back in that hut, staring in horror at the family Price had just gunned down.

  “How did you get this number?”

  “I know people at the FBI.”

  A cyclone of thoughts swirled inside Zeke’s head. Before he could begin to sort them out Price went on.

  “Listen, Zeke, I apologize for calling so early—”

  Zeke rubbed his eyes. “What time is it?”

  “A little before seven.”

  Zeke sat up. The funerals were in two hours.

  “Listen,” Price said, “I apologize, but I couldn’t think of a better way to reach you, and…we need to talk. The sooner the better.”

  “Why?”

  “I’ve been called in to interrogate the man who killed your parents.”

  CHAPTER 15

  The cemetery in Northeast was filled with statues of angels. Protecting the spirits of the dead, Zeke thought, staring out the window. Other than the chauffeur he was alone in the black limousine. It pulled up to the three freshly dug graves and he got out, wondering why his parents had chosen this as the family’s final resting place. Their plot was in the farthest corner, close to a chain-link fence, through which you could see the row houses of a rundown neighborhood. Maybe t
he area had been pretty when they’d picked it out. It was too late to ask them.

  Incredibly, it had snowed again last night. Not much, but enough to cover the ground with a fresh white blanket. In the cold, raw October morning, gnarled black branches of prematurely leafless trees groped starkly against the gray sky, like the tortured fingers of dead hands imploring for heavenly mercy.

  Good day for a funeral.

  Zeke stared numbly at the three silver-gray caskets waiting to be lowered into the ground, three burnished metal containers that held all that was left of his family. Reese came up beside him with his mother and niece. Paige’s respectful smile was like the flicker of a lightning bug in the black hole of his grief. He tried to remember how old she was. Seven, maybe.

  A few dozen other mourners straggled into position.

  As a veteran, Hank Sloan could have been buried in Arlington, but Zeke hadn’t wanted to separate the family. Still, to keep his military service from going completely uncommemorated, he’d arranged for a military funeral.

  A large flag covered the casket of Lieutenant Hank Sloan, a man who had helped end the Vietnam War. The members of the firing party stood awaiting the command to give the three-volley salute.

  The priest waited respectfully until everyone was in position, then began the graveside service. “No words can lessen the pain we all feel today. And yet they’re all we have.”

  As the priest tried valiantly to find meaning in death, Zeke heard only an unconvincing drone. Staring impassively at the three caskets, inside his head thoughts swarmed like angry wasps.

  His sister had given her life so that Leah could live. The bullet that lodged in Leah’s chest had gone through Valerie.

  That sacrifice couldn’t be in vain. He could never let any harm come to Leah.

  “And so, though these children of God have finished their work here…”

  From a nearby tree, as though to negate the priest’s attempts to extol the virtues of lives too soon ended, the unsympathetic “uh-uh” screech of a crow occasionally punctuated his words.