by Lis Wiehl
“Hold on tight,” he called over his shoulder. “If I hit a bump, you might be airborne. We both might be airborne.”
Half a mile down the road he found Detective Casey’s car, tipping precariously where the water had eroded away the road beneath the passenger’s side wheels. He turned off the pavement and headed cross-country, following paths and trails he’d run hundreds of times in high school. As he sped, it seemed as if the night was growing brighter.
“Tommy,” Reese said. “Stop for a second.”
“No stopping,” Tommy shouted. “We don’t have time.”
“Well, then at least slow down,” Reese said. “I really think you’re going to want to see this.”
He slowed the ATV to a walking pace and turned around to look behind him. What he saw took his breath away. He heard a voice in his ear. It sounded like Dani’s.
He realized he was still wearing the Bluetooth earpiece. As Dani spoke, the drone flew low overhead.
“Tommy,” she said. “I’m right above you.”
“I wish you were. I wish you were here to see this.”
“See what?”
He hesitated, wondering how to put into words the glorious sight before his eyes. A sky filled with angels, shining white, too many to count, following him into battle.
“Tommy?” Dani said. “See what?”
“Lord, please let her see,” Tommy prayed. “Let Dani see your glory too.”
42.
December 24
6:28 p.m. EST
From the rain-soaked commons in the center of East Salem; from the steps of the church where white paper luminaries were being positioned in preparation for the midnight service; from the town’s grand estates and horse farms, where CEOs and financiers and investment bankers were gathered around their elegant and expensively appointed dinner tables with their families; from the upper-middle-class homes of Willow Pond Estates and the more humble dwellings on Lake Kendall’s shores, festooned with outdoor Christmas lights, inflatable lawn Santas, and snowmen reduced by the rain and the warm temperatures to clumps of slush; from multiple vantage points, the battle between good and evil was—partly—visible. Anyone gazing into the night in the direction of Bull’s Rock Hill would have seen a spectacular display of lightning, accompanied by a raucous symphony of thunder that shook the rafters and echoed from the hillsides, with gusts of wind that made the strings of white LED holiday lights on the trees downtown toss and sway like pom-poms. Onlookers might have thought they were witnessing an extreme weather event, a storm of the sort that came along once every thousand years. According to the Channel 12 weatherman, that was what was happening: a collision of weather systems, a mass of warm, damp tropical air moving north, meeting a nor’easter heading inland and a winter storm moving south from Canada.
But the weatherman was wrong.
Tommy told Reese to hold on tight, then jumped a shallow ravine where the runoff had eroded the gravel and skidded to a stop in the mud. He and Reese dismounted from the ATV just short of the bull-shaped outcropping that gave Bull’s Rock Hill its name.
“Put these in your pockets,” Tommy said, handing Reese two boxes of shotgun shells, then a Mossberg 590-A1 shotgun with a 14-inch barrel. “These are police model riot guns. They don’t have a lot of range, but anything you point at within a hundred feet or so, you’re going to hit. You’ve got one in the chamber and eight in the magazine. So keep track, if you can, because after that, you’re going to have to reload.”
“I’ll just pretend I’m Prince Charles, shooting grouse,” Reese said. “Really ugly grouse.”
Above and ahead of him, Tommy saw Satan’s army, black and deformed spirits crowding the sky, preparing to mount their attack, while opposed to them were God’s angels, themselves divided into three groups. The main part held the central position while smaller groups of angels split off to either side, flanking the enemy. Tommy shone his flashlight into the sky, his bright beam forming a cone of light in the falling rain.
“Is this it, then?” Reese asked.
“Is this what?”
“It,” Reese said. “The final battle. I’ve read Revelation, you know. Wharton and Ghieri could very well be the False Prophet and the False Teacher that Scripture talks about. I suppose you’ve thought of this.”
“I won’t pretend I haven’t,” Tommy said. “But Scripture didn’t mention the False Prophet turning up dead in my fishing pond. There’s a lot that doesn’t fit. Scripture also says Satan, in his drive to replace God, is going to win some battles before losing the final one.”
“Indeed,” Reese said, following Tommy as he moved toward Bull’s Rock Hill. “Which do you suppose this one is? One he loses, or one he wins?”
“Would it change what we do if we knew?”
“I don’t suppose it would.”
Tommy watched as the Lord’s shining white angels, so perfect in form, their flaming swords held high, easily repulsed the demons’ first attack, slaughtering them in great numbers. The air around him seemed to sizzle, as if charged with an electrical excitation he could feel in his teeth, and the night smelled of sulfur and rust, a scorched metallic kind of stench. The demons, as they fell, dissolved into nothingness, their faces masks of agony and despair as they paid for the choices they’d made.
To Tommy’s right, an angel chased down a fleeing demon and swung him by the tail before dashing him against the rocks. Above him, a smaller angel dispatched a demon three times his size with four quick blows before the black thing could raise an arm in self-defense.
These creatures had no loyalty to each other. They were all fighting as individuals, while angels working in pairs or teams closed off their escape routes.
All at once an angel dived straight at him, sword raised high above his head. Tommy ducked reflexively as the heavenly being swooped over him. Tommy turned and saw the angel cut down a Gevaudan beast that had been approaching Tommy from behind. A half dozen other beasts rushed toward him as well.
“Here we go!” Tommy shouted to Reese. “Behind you!”
He dodged the first beast coming at him, turned and blasted it, then swung the barrel of the shotgun as he pumped and shot a second creature in the throat. A third knocked Tommy down, but he took the blow and rolled with it, grabbing the thing by its oily fur and throwing it off him, where Reese shot it dead.
Tommy repaid the favor by destroying a beast racing up on Reese from behind. The air began to reek of noxious fumes, as if the beasts had already begun to decay.
Reese shot three more in quick succession, including one that turned and ran.
Tommy raised the barrel of his gun, only to see two of the creatures stepping aside to make way for a demon of another kind entirely, a beast three times larger than any of the noxious cave weasels they had yet encountered. The monster rose up on its hind legs, spread its arms wide to display its might, and roared into the night, snarling at Tommy and Reese, eyes wild with fury. His breath smelled like the bottom of a garbage can.
Tommy smiled at Reese, who nodded.
“Welcome to the twenty-first century, Einstein,” Tommy said, and then both men fired three quick blasts each directly into the beast’s head. The lifeless carcass tumbled backward into the weeds; the other beasts turned and ran. Angels from above swooped down and caught all of them; the last fell, struck down with a single slash of a blade.
The battle above was now a rout, the main body of demons reduced to a few score, huddled together, at last attuned to the virtues of fighting as one, but too late.
A flight of angels circled the trembling cluster, flying faster and faster, closer and closer. There was no forgiveness here, no redemption, no repentance—just the full measure of God’s wrath. One of the angels swooped out from the ranks, severing a demon from the larger group and cutting it in half. The other demons whimpered, cowering behind each other. Another angel dived down, piercing the cluster, leaving a half dozen slain demons in his path. The demons scattered, but the angels followed q
uickly behind them to finish the battle Satan had started. A battle the Great Deceiver had now lost.
Tommy felt awe, and then an afterglow as the awe slowly faded, leaving a sense of wonder. What he’d seen was far more magnificent than anything he could have imagined. As the images dissipated in the night, he suddenly heard a gurgling noise behind him.
He spun around and saw that someone was standing behind Reese, pressing a knife to the boy’s throat. Tommy shone his flashlight on the pair. Amos Kasden, or rather his twin brother, Marko, was threatening to slice into Reese’s carotid artery.
“Let him go,” Tommy said.
“Throw your weapon over the cliff,” Marko commanded.
Tommy complied.
“Now that one,” Marko said, pointing at the weapon that had fallen out of Reese’s hands. Tommy picked up the second shotgun and flung it out into the night.
“Now let go of him,” Tommy said. “Your fight is with me.”
“My fight is with both of you,” Marko said. Unlike Amos, who’d been adopted at a young age, Marko retained a strong Russian accent.
Tommy wondered how long the boy had spent in Russian orphanages, or perhaps prisons. He was breathing rapidly, not because he was out of breath, but because, Tommy guessed, he was amped up, with a manic sneer and a crazed look in his eyes. He’d taken the red version of the drug, the so-called “super-soldier pill,” Tommy had no doubt. He’d tried to subdue a kid on angel dust once when he’d tried to break up a bar fight after a game against the Steelers in Pittsburgh. He’d seen the kid on angel dust toss off two massive defensive linemen as easily as if they’d been Girl Scouts selling cookies. He suspected he had even less of a chance against Marko.
“I’m the one who killed your brother,” Tommy said.
“If you didn’t, I would have,” Marko said. “He was a little pissant. He thought small.”
“So you got the brains in the family?” Tommy said, smirking. “It didn’t exactly help you pick the winning side here, did it?”
“This is the trash talk thing American athletes do?” Marko said, tightening his grip. Reese looked like he was about to pass out from the pressure on his neck.
“Yeah, but I’m terrible at it,” Tommy said. “Let him go. Show me what you’ve got.”
Marko threw Reese aside, lifting him clear off the ground and tossing him ten feet before he landed and rolled, clutching at his throat and gasping for air on the ground where he lay.
Tommy took a step back, glancing to the left and to the right.
“You want to run?” Marko said, coming toward him. “I know you’re fast, football man. But you already know you can’t outrun me.”
Tommy had once been the fastest linebacker and one of the fastest players, period, in the NFL. But on the day his Mustang had caught fire, he had chased someone through the woods, and whoever it was had gotten away. He’d wondered, as he watched his car burn, if he’d lost more than a step since his prime. Now he knew who he’d been chasing. Marko was right—he couldn’t outrun him. He took another step back, but Marko closed on him.
“You really think you need that knife, Marko?” Tommy said. “I got nothing, and you’ve got a knife. Come on—man to man. And I can wait until you grow into one, if you want.”
He stepped back again as Marko stepped closer. Two more steps and Tommy would have his back to the cliff’s edge, with nowhere to retreat.
Marko tossed the knife to the side.
“After I tear you apart, I think I’ll feed the pieces to your friend until he chokes,” Marko said.
“You’ll have to catch me first,” Tommy said. From the time he’d started playing youth football, he’d realized that if you faked one way and went the other, you were less likely to get hit or hurt or blocked, and more likely to be successful. It had become virtually second nature to him, until commentators said he had the best feints and fakes in the game. It had also been his experience that the more hyped up and overexcited an opponent was, the more likely he was to fall for a false step.
He took a sudden step to his right, planted his right leg, then reversed direction and jittered quickly left, throwing in a spin move, just because he could. Marko lunged at him with great force and incredible speed, arms outstretched, ready to crush Tommy like a peanut shell, until his arms closed around nothing, and then he couldn’t stop himself. He rushed out over the edge of the precipice and into thin air.
Tommy had ridden his motorcycle off the same cliff at ninety miles an hour, clearing the rocks at the water’s edge below by almost half a football field. More to the point, there’d been an angel waiting to catch him and break his fall. Marko wasn’t moving at ninety miles an hour, and he most certainly didn’t have an angel to break his fall.
Tommy peered over the edge of the cliff to the rocks below, where he saw a body lying at an angle that told him the neck was broken. But that wasn’t good enough.
He crossed to where Reese had managed to sit up. Reese was coughing and holding his throat.
“You okay?”
“I will be,” Reese said. “What happened?”
“He tripped,” Tommy said. “I’ll be right back.”
He clambered down to the bottom of the cliff along a trail he’d climbed a dozen times as a boy, but never at night, and never in the pouring rain. When he reached the body, he rolled it over and shone a flashlight in Marko’s still startled eyes. The pupils didn’t dilate. He felt for a pulse. Nothing. He held the flashlight perpendicular to Marko’s mouth to illuminate any steam that might be coming from his lungs. Nothing. He searched the boy’s pockets, hoping to find a thumb drive or perhaps a bottle of pills they could analyze, but he found only a small key chain attached to a rubber dog. In that moment Marko became human again to him. Not the drug-addled, brainwashed fiend he’d thought him to be but, as Dani had said, just a kid. A boy with a rubber dog in his pocket.
Tommy wanted to cry for the loss of that little boy.
He put the key chain in Marko’s hand and closed his fingers around it, then climbed quickly back to the top of the cliff.
“Is he dead?” Reese asked.
“He’s dead enough,” Tommy said, catching his breath. The wind had died away. Tommy stood atop the rock in the downpour and looked down to the lake below and the town of East Salem beyond the lake—or where the town should have been.
There was no sign of it. Not a single light shone in the darkness.
There was a burst of static over his Bluetooth earpiece.
“Tommy! Tommy!” Dani shouted in his ear. “Answer me! A ou ay?”
“You’re breaking up,” he said. “Can you repeat that?”
“Are you okay?”
“I’m okay,” he said. “Reese is too. What happened to the town? I can’t see it.”
“All the power’s out. There are trees down everywhere. Your generator came on, so we’ve got power. Guess how much rain we’ve had in the last six hours?”
“A lot.”
“Ten inches. I’m glad you’re okay.”
“I’m glad you’re okay,” Tommy said. “Did you see it?”
“We saw it,” Dani said. “In infrared images, but we saw it.”
“Hang on a second …”
Tommy stopped to listen. A civil defense siren mounted atop a tower on the roof of the fire department sounded whenever there was bad weather, but the alarm Tommy heard now was different, an air horn giving three long blares, then three short, in a pattern that repeated; three long, three short, three long, three short.
As a member of the volunteer fire department, Tommy had been taught what that alarm meant. Indeed, every school child who grew up in East Salem had been taught what to do if they ever heard that pattern—evacuate and seek higher ground.
The dam holding back Lake Atticus was about to give.
“You hearing what I’m hearing?” Dani asked.
“I heard,” Tommy said.
“What does it mean?”
“It means evacuate,�
�� Tommy said. “Immediately. The town. Not you—you’re okay.”
“I’m coming to find you.”
“No. Wait where you are,” Tommy said.
“Tommy,” Dani said, in a tone of voice that would brook no debate. “My place is with you. Whatever happens. And don’t get all sexist on me—your place is with me. Fifty-fifty, side by side.”
“Agreed. But not tonight. Tonight you need to—”
He stopped talking, because the earpiece had gone silent.
Tommy kicked the ATV into gear and headed down the mountain.
43.
December 24
7:03 p.m. EST
He used the extra floodlight to show the way, retracing the path he’d taken, which worked fine until he suddenly found the way forward blocked by a raging stream of water that had completely dissolved the road—a river twenty feet across and too deep and too fast to ford.
“That wasn’t there before,” Reese said. “How deep is it?”
“Two feet,” Tommy said. “Maybe three. Too deep to drive across.”
“We could wade it,” Reese said. “You could carry me on your back.”
“Are you unable to walk?”
“I’m able to. But it looks really cold.”
“We don’t have time to walk.”
“What are we gonna do?”
Tommy had to think. He could try an alternate route, but it would mean a detour of several miles, and for all he knew, that way could be blocked too. There wasn’t time. He had to get across.
He saw a spot to his right where the pavement had buckled, creating an uplift of asphalt and a kind of ramp several yards across. He eyed the angle of the uplift and the width of the newly formed river, calculating. Dani had once commented that he possessed a remarkable “physical intelligence,” and it was true; all his life, he’d be able to physically execute anything he could mentally visualize.