End Times (35 page)

All of the bubbles inside her, the bright playful happy bubbles from the drink in the pretty red can, popped at once. She felt herself melting into her feet, the popped bubbles dripping through her in thick slicks of sickly red gloop, the sugar crystals dissolving and clinging to her organs. She wanted to sink down to the ground and then through it, to disintegrate into the earth and become the lowly brown dirt she suddenly felt like. The only thing holding her up was Doug’s grip like claws on her shoulders.

She looked for the Doug she’d fallen in love with, the big silly vulnerable guy who always put his arm around her in the school cafeteria and touched her breasts as reverently as if they were ancient icons, the Doug who had proposed to her with a diamond ring on top of a slice of chocolate cake. But that Doug was gone, and the one in his place was a red-eyed monster, a roiling volcano of hate. He could have grown fur and fangs, have sprouted horns and branded her with a tongue made of molten iron, and she wouldn’t have been any more frightened. She whimpered, the sound of a lost child.

“You’re pathetic.” Doug abruptly let go of her shoulders, and she collapsed, slamming to the ground. She lay there in a pile of herself, sniffling, leaking tears and milk and down there, between her legs where it had flowed like a river after the baby came, blood. “And you know what?”

Her eyes were level with his ankles, bulging and hairy above dirty green sneakers.

“What?” she whimpered.

“I’m gonna divorce you,” Doug announced. “Once we’re done suing your family for that oil money, I’m not gonna have anything to do with you anymore.”

Divorce . . . suing . . . she wished she didn’t understand what Doug was saying, that she could go back to the world of pure white emptiness, the world where all she thought about was milk.

But the words were real, and she knew what they meant. They meant that her heart was useless, a once-shiny toy that her love had discarded when it was no longer new. They meant that all of her happiness, the joy that she’d held in her palms just days before, had slipped through her fingers and shattered.

She looked up at him, past the hairy ankles and the faded, sagging jeans and the elk head belt she’d unbuckled for him so many times. Above the burly expanse of his chest, above his creased and scarlet neck, above the curl of his lip like a wolf’s just after ripping into its prey, she found his eyes.

“I thought you loved me,” she whispered.

She was speaking to the other Doug, the old Doug, the Doug who had once filled her womb with a holy child. But his eyes didn’t change. They stayed red, and dark, and cold.

“I did once,” he said flatly. “Not anymore.”

He turned and strode back toward the fire, his heels and the wind kicking dirt into her face, leaving her in a pile of empty, useless flesh on the ground.

She put her cheek to the earth and wept.

THE sky was the color of graphite, the air thick with the pent-up electricity of a pending storm. A stiff wind blew the branches on Elk Mountain Road into their windshield, scraping the glass as Owen’s truck climbed the narrow driveway. Inside they were silent, Owen concentrating on the road through the growing mist, Daphne fixated on the tablet.

She could feel it drawing her in, calling her closer, its strange carvings like a force summoning her home. When she closed her eyes she could almost see it, the message dancing and shifting in flashes of light and darkness. She prayed that this time the meaning would click into place, that she would finally understand.

They pulled into the parking area. “There are cars here,” Owen said, surprised.

Daphne’s shoulders tensed. “That’s Doug’s truck.” She spotted the lightning down the side of his bright green pickup. “Are they seriously having a party
now
?”

“Looks like it.” Owen cut the engine, and the cab filled with the raucous sounds of a throbbing dance beat. “What do you want to do?”

She wanted to leave, to turn and put as much distance between themselves and Carbon County as possible, to drive fast through the night, pretending the town had never existed. But the clawing need in her gut wouldn’t let her. She had to have one more look at the tablet, to try one last time to put the pieces together before she gave up on Carbon County forever.

“I want to see the tablet,” she said firmly, one hand already on the door handle.

A howling wind ripped through their bodies the moment they stepped outside. It nipped at their ankles, sending small tornadoes of dust swirling around them and lifting Daphne’s hair from the back of her neck, tangling it behind her as she pulled her hoodie closer, trying to ward off the ominous chill. The trees around them shrieked and struggled, leaves clinging to their branches with tenuous fingers until the force was too great and they broke loose, somersaulting through the sky.

Beyond the row of parked cars, they heard yelps as the fire leapt one way and then the other, blown into a vortex by the wind.

“My eyes!” someone cried, and Daphne could feel the thick, acrid smoke stinging her own retinas, rubbing the already-raw skin on her cheeks.

“Let’s go,” she whispered to Owen. They snaked through the parked cars, cold metal brushing Daphne’s back and making her shiver through her sweatshirt until they stopped at the edge of the parking area, hovering in the shadows as Daphne tried to calculate their next move.

The partygoers were clustered around the campfire, skin like brass in the flickering light. They’d pulled up camp chairs and coolers and opened the back of someone’s SUV to pump tunes and lounge on the tailgate. Empty beers and large red cans littered the ground around them, and a big bottle of rum was being passed from hand to hand, its gold liquid sloshing. Their voices were loud, their laughter shrill and frequent, but underneath it there was something grim and hard, a fierce determination to forge through their sadness with reckless, defiant partying.

Daphne instinctively looked around for Janie, but she couldn’t see her. Her heart constricted as she pictured her cousin at home with her parents in the dim circle of light from the living room lamp, catatonic on the couch, mourning. Of all the things that hurt about the past few hours, losing her cousin stung the most.

Doug was there, though, standing with his hands on his hips in front of the fire, anger radiating around him like a blistered halo. The hulking black of his silhouette sent a cold finger of nausea creeping up Daphne’s gullet. She clenched Owen’s hand tighter, reminding herself that not all guys were terrible.

She turned and met his eyes, and Owen nodded. Tiptoeing, they crept around the shell of the house, its steel beams looming over them like sentries. The pit that had been dug for the decorative pond was still roped off, the
Do Not Enter
signs around it faded by sun and rain. The shack that had been set up for Vince’s security guard was mercifully abandoned: Doug must have bribed him to take the night off.

A gust of wind whirled by, rippling the tarp and sending a cacophony of plastic percussion toward the campfire. Daphne and Owen froze in their tracks, the sound like gunshots in their ears.

But the crowd by the campfire seemed oblivious. They were in the midst of a countdown, voices raucous and uneven, as someone chugged from the bottle of rum, followed by a long, loud belch that echoed dankly through the night.

Daphne and Owen ducked under the ropes.

“Are you sure you want to do this?” Owen whispered. “We can still turn back.”

Fear and need pounded through her. She knew that seeing the tablet again could reveal truths she didn’t want to see. Its meaning had been cloudy and incomprehensible the first time, the words mere echoes in her head. Back then it had spoken in riddles. But now, with the death of a firstborn, everything had changed. The tablet had hinted at a terrible event, and she couldn’t ignore its power any longer. She couldn’t keep pretending that everything was a coincidence. As reluctant as she was to believe, she knew it meant something more.

A tentacle of lightning split the sky, turning the landscape around them the silver of tinfoil. Owen tensed, and gasps came from the campfire, underscored by tipsy, nervous giggles. In the sudden burst of light, Daphne reached down and yanked back the tarp.

He followed her into the pit, the ancient rock glowing like moonstone in the darkness. The lines and squiggles that were gibberish to the rest of Carbon County leapt up at her, the words so clear they hurt her brain. She turned to Owen, her pulse racing.

“Are you sure you can’t read it?” she asked, hoping against hope that she wasn’t the only one.

He shook his head. “But you can.”

“All of it,” she admitted.

Thunder rumbled in the distance, and the sky blackened, storm clouds sweeping low across the mountaintop and blotting out the tops of the trees. As Daphne squinted to make out the letters, Owen reached into his pocket and whipped out his phone, illuminating the tablet in an eerie, electronic blue.

“Read it to me,” he urged.

A draft clawed at her face as she bent in close, reading the prophecy out loud.

“When the true Prophet reads this message,” she recited, “the era of the Great Divide is at hand. For on the eve of the Great Battle, seven signs and wonders shall come to pass, each in turn and none without the others. And these shall be:

“Clarion

“Blood

“Fire

“Plague

“Relic

“Death of a Firstborn

“Prophet—”

She broke off and turned to Owen, her face the ghostly gray of a spirit.

“The signs,” she said slowly, the shape of the words still in her throat. “They all happened. And they all happened
here
.”

“Are you sure?” His brow was a furrow of concentration as he looked from her to the tablet. “Let’s go over them again. You said ‘clarion.’ Do you even know what that means?”

“No.” She bit her lip. “I was too freaked out to even look it up.”

He bent over his phone, pushing buttons. A moment later, his head snapped up. “The dictionary says it’s a medieval trumpet with a shrill, clear tone. Does that mean anything to you?”

“The trumpets,” she said slowly. “The day I got here. Everyone kept saying they were a sign from God, but I thought they were nuts—that there had to be a logical explanation.”

He directed his light back to the tablet, allowing her to read the next word.

“Blood.” Their eyes met over the stone. “When you touched the oil that day . . .” she began.

“I knew it wasn’t a cut,” he finished grimly, confirming the fear she’d had all along: that there was something otherworldly about Owen, something that turned oil to blood.

She turned, shivering, to read the next word. “Fire.”

“The rig?” Owen guessed. “That explosion in the flare stack?”

“Or Trey.” Her voice dropped, his name almost lost to the screeching wind as the memory licked at her mind like flames: the burning bush. The bike igniting. Trey’s body twisted and blackened in the white-hot embers.

She forced her eyes back to the tablet, to the augur that had told her story centuries before she was born to live it.

“Plague,” she recited. “I don’t get that one. Nobody’s been sick.”

“What about the birds?” Owen’s voice was toneless.

Icicles of doom tickled the back of her neck as she remembered the birds of paradise falling from the sky, raining down on the wedding party in a hailstorm of destruction. “They died so suddenly,” she agreed. “Janie said it was a sign. I didn’t believe her then, but the tablet already knew.”

“Read the next one,” Owen urged. “It says they all have to happen in order—
each in turn, and none without the others
. What comes after that?”

The word
relic
floated up to her in the gloom. “That’s something old,” she thought out loud, “a piece of something bigger that was left behind.”

They both looked at the tablet.

“This.”

Owen’s skin glowed pale as Daphne continued. “They found it right before Janie gave birth. Her child was supposed to be the prophet.”

He nodded solemnly. That brought them to the next sign, the most horrible of all. The death of a firstborn. Grief brimmed in Daphne’s eyes.

“I should have told someone,” she said, a tear rolling off her cheek and onto the tablet, where it filled one of the carvings like a tiny lake. “I should have put the pieces together. Maybe I could have done something to stop it, made her go to a hospital or—”

“No.” Owen took her by the shoulders. “This isn’t your fault. According to the tablet, it was all preordained. It would have happened anyway, no matter what you did.”

“Preordained,” she repeated quietly. “So every word on it will come true?”

“I don’t know.” He shook his head. “But so far, it’s seven for seven. What’s next? In that big block of text?”

A loud thunderclap sounded overhead, rattling the tarp. Struggling to keep her tears at bay, Daphne turned back to the tablet.

“And yea, once these seven signs and wonders appear,” she read, “there shall be a Great Battle between the Children of God and the Children of the Earth. The Children of the Earth shall sow evil and discord wrought from the pits of Hell, while the Children of God turn to the heavens for strength from the One True Deity. The victor shall rule the land and the sky, the earth and the heavens, and forever hold dominion over the soul of humankind, and the loser shall be cast out forevermore into Eternal Nothingness—while those who fail to choose sides shall perish. Heed, for when this warning is uncovered and the true Prophet comes to light, the era of the Great Divide is at hand.”