Poppy swayed from side to side as he talked. “We were in the keep. Must’ve missed it. So there was a big aurora?”
“Not big — astronomical! The sky was on fire. The whole world saw it. You must be the only people alive who didn’t. I heard about this keep of yours. Everyone living up there now?”
“That’s right. I’m only down here to meet visitors.”
“My daughter was staying up there too?”
“Yep, we all lived in the same cottage.”
“I’d be glad to see it. Mind giving Rory and me a look?”
Poppy stroked his beard as though he had to think it over. “Actually, Rex, I do mind. It’s supposed to be our secret refuge, and the more people know about it, the less safe we are.”
“We’ll keep it to ourselves.”
Poppy shook his head. “Sorry you made the trip out here for nothing, and I pray you find your girl, but I can’t endanger my own family letting everyone inside the keep. I hope you understand.”
“No, I don’t understand. I don’t understand at all. I don’t see why we can’t just take a quick look around.”
Poppy sighed.
Rex said, “We might find some clue as to where she went.”
“I don’t know how many ways I can say no, deacon.”
Rex motioned to Rory they were leaving. “This won’t stand, Prophecy, and we won’t rest till we find her.”
Rex and Rory left the cabin and returned to their snowmachines in the yard.
“Where to now?” Rory asked his father. He held his phone up this way and that, searching for a signal. “We call the Troopers?”
“We will. Eventually.” Rex scanned the side of the mountain and pointed. “There’s the mine. Let’s go check it out on our own.”
They found the trail to the mine and tried to ride their sleds up the tailing, but the switchback turns were too sharp and steep to negotiate, so they parked at the bottom of the tailings and hiked up. Rex was out of breath by the time they reached the top.
“You okay, Dad?”
“Yeah, just a little winded.”
“Your face is like really red.”
“I said I’ll be okay.”
When they crested the trailhead and reached the mine adit, they stopped in awe.
‘Lordy,” Rex said. “It really does look like a mountain keep. The keep of an angry old troll or something. Will you look at that gate.”
They walked through the narrow stone slot of the adit. “Sniper ports,” Rex said, pointing them out overhead. “All of them shut, I see.”
They stopped at the sally door, and Rex pounded against the iron plating with the heel of his fist. It hardly made a sound.
“Hello!” he shouted, and Rory joined him. “Hello! Hello!” They shouted at the gate, shouted at the sniper ports.
Nothing.
“They must be farther inside,” Rex said. He reached beneath his parka for his pistol and hammered its butt against the iron. Clank. Clank. Clank.
“They’ve got to hear that, don’t you think?” He pounded some more, even harder, while shouting at the top of his voice. “Open up! Open up!” His face grew redder and redder.
“Stop, Dad!” Rory said, clutching his arm. “You’re gonna break something.”
Rex tried to calm down. “I swear, we’re not leaving without answers.”
“Listen, Dad. You heard him; they didn’t see the Skyburn.”
“So?”
“Ginger did. She texted about it the night it happened. Remember? And she mentioned it again when we were about to leave home.”
Rex looked at his son. “You’re right, she did. That means either she wasn’t here when it happened or that Prophecy is lying when he says they didn’t see it. But why lie to us if they already agreed to let us shelter with them?”
Rex holstered his gun and headed back down the trail. “Let’s go take another swing at him.”
POPPY SHOOK HIS head and set down his cup of soup. He gazed at Rex with kindly, old eyes. “You’re a good man, Rex, and a good father. But sometimes even a good father can be blind to his daughter’s secrets. He loves her too much to be objective.”
“What the hell you talking about, Prophecy?”
“Language, please, deacon. Now, I know this is hard to hear, and, frankly, I didn’t want to be the one to have to tell you . . .”
“Just say it already!”
“All right, I will. Why don’t you sit. Here, take my seat.” Poppy stood up and offered Rex his chair, the only chair in the prayer cabin.
“I don’t want to sit.”
“All right,” Poppy said and sat back down. “The fact is your Ginger is a troubled young woman.”
Rex frowned. That was patently false.
“And quite deceitful,” Poppy added. “I don’t know why she’d tell you to come stay with us when we never discussed it.”
“My daughter is neither deceitful nor troubled,” Rex said evenly.
“Do you want to hear this or not?”
“Just say it.”
“There was this man she met in town. A straggler from the summer season. They met a couple of times in town, though me and my boys tried to discourage it. The man didn’t look sanctified, if you know what I mean. But she wasn’t going to listen to me. Said I wasn’t her father. Said she was her own boss. I was fearful there was a demon sniffing around her, and I began to worry over the innocence of my own girls.
“It all came to a head when I denied her the sno-go to run into town one time, and so she just stole it and went anyway. After that I had to start removing the spark plugs so she couldn’t steal them again. I told her that such disobedience was the last straw and that I was going to put her on the next mail plane out. But there was a disruption of service.”
“The air crash,” Rex said. “We know about that.”
“Yes, the crash. Terrible, terrible. Ned Nellis. Father God bless his soul. Amen.”
“Amen,” said Hosea.
“Anyway, before the next flight this man comes out here on his sno-go to get her. He says he has a pickup parked in Chitina and he’s taking her out there to drive her to Glennallen where you could fetch her. He said it was all arranged with you and you signed off on it. We don’t have cell service out here as you might have noticed, so I couldn’t check, but I told them I was her guardian and I wouldn’t give my permission, but she just laughed in my face. My boys tried to stop him, but he pulled a gun on them.”
Rory said, “That doesn’t sound like my sister at all.”
Rex said, “He’s right. That’s not Ginger.”
Poppy threw up his hands. “Tell them, son.”
Hosea looked aghast to be put on the spot. “She did seem possessed,” he said. “Not like the girl we met in Wallis.”
“This man,” Rex said, “who took her, what was his name?”
Poppy said, “Gomez. Gonzalez. Something like that. Hosea, do you know?”
“No, lord, I don’t.”
“But he was Mexican?” Rex said.
“Could be,” Poppy said. “He was dark enough.
“Anyways, like I said, he worked last summer for some river rat giving float tours on the Chitina. Stayed behind after the season ended.”
Shaken, but unconvinced, Rex gathered himself up to leave again.
“Sorry your girl went astray,” Poppy said, seeing them to the door. “I pray she returns real soon.”
When the sno-gos fired up in the yard, Hosea said, “Gomez, lord? Gonzalez?”
“RIVER RAT?” DELL Bunyan said. “Never heard of them.”
“River rafting,” Scarlett said. Scarlett was thirteen and beginning to lose patience with adults.
“Oh, I see. still, we don’t meet many of the summer people. You could ask in town.”
The Bunyans had met Ginger, and they were saddened to hear that she had gone missing. The first time they met her was before Christmas when the family returned in the middle of the night from their big shopping trip to
Anchorage. And again the following day when Proverbs brought her over to use the phone.
Rex remembered that phone call. She had wanted to say they arrived safe and sound after multiple adventures on the road and that everything was good, and she thanked him again for not trying to stop her coming. Funny how things take on added meaning with time. What if he had stopped her?
It turned out that Rex and Rory were sitting at the very kitchen table she sat at when she made that call.
Rex and Rory continued their search in town and queried everyone they met. But most of the people they met were newcomers from Outside. Aside from the Bunyans, no one they spoke to had even heard of a Ginger Lawther, let alone met her. The locals did speak of black helicopters buzzing the town around that time; surely that must be related to the girl’s disappearance.
Rex and Rory rode out to the RAC under construction. A modest, minimally heated, corrugated steel warehouse stood next to a large gravel lot. A highway grader and bulldozer were parked outside the building, evicted from their garage space to make room for shelves and bins. A tractor trailer was disgorging its van load of food and supplies at the delivery dock, while a second van was waiting its turn. There seemed to be about three dozen campers and RVs parked on the lot. The Lawthers had followed some of them from Glennallen. Distant sounds of chainsaws filled the air, and a clutch of men and women huddled around a bonfire. Rex and Rory approached them with Ginger’s photo on their phones, but no one recognized her.
REX HAD PARKED his rig on Main Street in front of the shuttered hotel. When he and Rory returned from the RAC, Kelly Cobweal came out of his house to speak to them. The fuel drums in Rex’s trailer were drawing too much attention from all the Outside riff-raff. He advised them to get their rig off the main drag and invited them to use his lot behind the hotel. So that was what they did.
That evening, someone pounded on their camper door while they were eating dinner. It was a rough-looking young man wearing an eyepatch. Rex didn’t recognize him until Rory said it was Proverbs, the Prophecy boy who had had a crush on Ginger.
“Come on in,” Rex said, making way for Proverbs to climb into the back of the camper. To his astonishment, the young man threw his arms around him and hugged him tight.
“I heard you was in town,” Proverbs said, tears welling in his good eye, “and I came special to see you.”
Father and son Lawther watched in wonder. Wasn’t this the young man who Ginger had been compelled to set straight? It didn’t look like she’d been successful.
“I knew she wouldn’t leave on her own,” Proverbs went on. “I mean, we were betrothed. She was happy. Why leave?”
“Hang on,” Rex said. “You and my daughter were engaged to be married?”
“You would’ve been my father-in-law, and you my brother.” He put his arm around Rory’s shoulder and squeezed.
“Slow down,” Rex said, “and sit.” He drew Proverbs to the booth and urged him to start his story from the beginning.
“The beginning? I guess it all began with the ravens.”
“What ravens?”
“You know, ravens, like crows only bigger. No, now that I think about it, it started before the ravens. It started with the trumpet.”
“Trumpet?”
“Poppy found a trumpet sticking out of the ground on the flats after our trip to Wallis. You know, when she first came in with us on the bus. Poppy found this sparkly glass trumpet about ten feet long, and he dug it out of the ice and brought it home. He took it to the keep for safekeeping. Everyone saw it except Ginger and me, because we had been out.”
“Trumpet, as in musical instrument?”
“Yes, only not of this Earth. It was the trumpet of a herald angel, and not just any herald angel but the Fifth Angel of Revelation who holds the key to the bottomless pit of Hell. When I heard about it, I went up to the machine room where Poppy was working on it. The key to the pit looked like a tiny golden bass and was stuck in the mouthpiece. Poppy was trying to figure out a way to get it out so he could sound the trumpet and summon the angels. It was me who came up with the idea to blow the horn backwards. And when I did, the ball popped right out. But before we could get off any trumpet blasts, it crumbled into dust. The trumpet literally fell apart in my hands. It was my fault; I broke it.”
Rex frowned at Rory. Is this guy for real?
“Poppy was angry with me; and he had every right to be. You should know better than to blow an angel’s horn backwards, I guess. But at least we still had the key. Anyway, then the fifth angel shows up. Name of Archangel Martha, or so she says. She’s all bedraggled and injured in the War in Heaven, she says. Her wings are burned to a crisp, so she can’t fly. She’s a real mess.
“Around this time, we started to be tormented by demon ravens. They look just like real ravens, but they act weird. They act with malice. They’ll sit on a tree and study you all afternoon. And when you shoot one of ’em — say you blow it to bloody scraps — there’s no blood, only worms or snakes, and the worms stitch themselves back together just like new and off he flies.”
Rory said, “You say you shot one of these ravens?”
“I shot a few of ’em only to see ’em fly away. Poppy said you had to burn them, but not with ordinary gasoline. You have to make up a batch of poor-man’s napalm and use that. And then when you set ’em on fire, they go off like a road flare, only white hot and not red. And so, anyway —”
Rex cut him off. “Get to the part about my daughter.”
“Your daughter didn’t like to see me shooting these things. I killed one that was spying on her and my sister, and instead of thanking me, she accuses me of harming Alaskan wildlife. But I honor all life, except snakes and demons, and I tried to explain to her, but your daughter wouldn’t even listen. She said she was heading out and when she got back home she’d send the Troopers after me for killing protected wildlife. When all I was doing was protecting her.”
There was a queasy certainty, growing in Rex’s mind, that whatever horrible evil had befallen his beloved child, this young man had something to do with it.
“So when did she leave the compound?”
“What compound?”
“Your house, or cave.”
“We call it the keep. She was talking about leaving, but the angel told us that Ginger was in the thrall of demons. Seven demons to be exact. Martha said she already had one in her when she first come from Wallis. Sorry, Father, but you missed it at home. Name of Rath, a mouthy bastard, excuse my language. And Ginger picked up six more at our place, which shames me more than you can know.
“But then it turns out that Martha isn’t really a she, isn’t really an angel at all but the devil in disguise. She’s a he, and his name is Beezus, Bringer of Sorrow. He’s a powerful spirit of evil and the brother of Lucifer, and he was deceiving us because he wanted to have the key for himself so he could shoot down Father God’s plan for salvation.
“So Poppy got us together, and we tossed Satan out of the keep, kicked him right back to Hell. It was glorious.
“But Ginger was still infected. And so we prayed over her, and one by one the demons fled from her body, and the cloak of evil was yanked off her soul and she turned back into the sweetest and loveliest girl in the world.”
The boy sighed long and deep. He slipped off his eyepatch and pinned Rex with two crazy eyes. “She was herself again, sir. She confessed her love for me and proclaimed her desire to be my wife. She wanted a window over the kitchen sink because a sink without a window isn’t a kitchen.” The memory brought a smile. “She said she wanted her family to move into the keep with us.”
Rex jumped on that. “She did? She wanted us here? And how was your father with that?”
“Poppy?” Proverbs said. “He was still praying on it when she was kidnapped.”
“She was kidnapped?” Rex all but shouted. “By who? By Gomez?”
Proverbs gave him a funny look. “I don’t know who this Gomez is.”
�
�Then who? Who took my daughter?”
“Demons.”
“IMPOSSIBLE,” REX SAID. “He’s a madman. Ginger would never be interested in a boy like that.”
“I agree,” Rory said, “but tell the truth, didn’t she sound a little bit nuts when she called us? She didn’t tell us she wanted to marry Proverbs, but they both said the same thing about wanting us to join them in their cave. Remember?”
“Nothing makes sense. I think it’s time we get some help. Rex pulled out his phone and dialed 911. There was a strong cell signal in McHardy, and for once Rex was glad for Obama’s stimulation spending that created it. “Time we called the Troopers in on this.”
The phone rang and rang on the other end. Rex assumed that his call would be directed to a dispatcher of the State Trooper station in Glennallen, the nearest facility. The phone on the other end finally answered and a recorded message presented him with a branching menu of forwarding options. One for this, two for that, and so forth. But every choice he made rang a few times and was then dropped.
In mounting frustration, Rex kept redialing until the machine offered him the chance to record a voicemail. It was an infuriating compromise, but he accepted it and pressed six. Another machine picked up and told him that the mailbox was full and hung up.
He and Rory took turns redialing long into the night.
The Little Nudge
LN1 1.0
TWO SEPARATE CLOCKS were now counting down Earth’s final days and minutes. First and most terrible was the Doomsday Clock that measured the time remaining before the two planets met in fiery annihilation. This clock would stop at 4:09 UTC on March 8, 2013.
The second was dubbed the Deliverance Clock. It marked the moment that Earth would enter a bubble of newly created space, altering its orbit just enough to remove the planet from Pipnonia’s path, sparing both planets. This clock would stop at 10:00 UTC on February 2, 2013 (still February 1 in Alaska), only days away.
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