End Times

by Anna Schumacher

  “They’re leaving!” one of the floorhands cried.

  A sense of loss tugged at Daphne as she watched them go. She wished she could fly with them, borne along on whatever invisible breeze they’d ridden in on.

  “Okay, all right everyone, birds’re gone, back to work!” Dale barked. “You think I pay you all to loaf around playing amateur ornithologist all day?”

  Uncle Floyd stayed as the rest of the crew scattered, staring into the sky where the birds had been.

  “This is another sign, I’m sure of it,” he said to himself. He turned and saw Daphne looking up at him. “Don’t you think?” he asked.

  She gulped. The birds had stirred something powerful in her, a strange cocktail of joy and emotion. They made her want to believe in something. But she wasn’t ready to accept God the way Uncle Floyd did. The concept was still too alien, too far from the misery she’d known for most of her life. How could she approach the purity of her uncle’s belief with her stepfather’s blood on her hands and the truth she’d concealed from the Peytons still stuck in her throat?

  “I don’t know,” she said quietly. She didn’t want to disappoint her uncle, but she didn’t want to lie, either.

  “You will,” Uncle Floyd said. He gave her a quick kiss on the forehead before turning and walking away from her, back to the admin shed.

  A LOUD blast of a terrible country song smacked Owen in the face as he walked through the smoked-glass door of Pat’s Bar. He’d been hauling gravel all day, and his shoulders felt like they were being branded with hot irons. He was exhausted, ready to fall into bed. If only he had his keys.

  The air in Pat’s was blue and stale, lit only by the neon signs that buzzed on every wall, advertising brands of beer that not only were no longer served but probably no longer existed. It smelled strongly of old beer and industrial-grade floor cleaner, and water stains spread ominously across the white office-style ceiling tiles.

  Despite the lack of atmosphere, the bar was packed with prospectors. They tossed darts at a dingy board and played half-hearted rounds of pool, clutching sweaty bottles of Bud as they sat heavily around feeble card tables, commiserating over the day’s failures. So far, Luna had confided in him, not one of them had even come close to striking oil. But that hadn’t stopped anyone from trying.

  Owen pulled up a barstool and waited to get Luna’s attention. She was down at the other end of the bar, pouring shots for a grizzled pair of men in grease-stained jumpsuits. They pointed at the bottle and then at her, insisting she join them. Luna slid her eyes slyly left and then right, checking to make sure the coast was clear and the eponymous Pat wasn’t around. Then she winked at the men and grabbed another shot glass, filling it to the brim with amber liquid. A naughty smile slid across her face as the men clinked their glasses against hers. But when they upended the whiskey into their mouths, Luna quickly tossed hers into the trash behind her. A moment later she was eye to eye with them again, laughing and wiping her mouth with the back of her hand, saying something that made them roar and slap each other on the back. She collected their money, blowing a kiss as she slipped a few generous bills into her tip jar. Then she turned and saw Owen.

  “Hey, Earth Brother.” She glided over to him, grabbing a beer and uncapping it and setting it on the bar in front of him with a single, effortless motion, like a dancer curtsying at the end of a ballet. “What’s a handsome devil like you doing in a place like this?”

  “I left my keys at home this morning,” he explained, too tired to play along. “Can I borrow yours?”

  Luna leaned on the bar, grinning. “Sure thing. I’m on break in twenty minutes—I can run next door and let you in. In the meantime, drink up.”

  He eyed the beer. “Is that for me?”

  “Mmm-hmm. On the house.”

  “Thanks.” He hadn’t planned on drinking, but he’d learned that when it came to Luna, it was often easier to just give in. He wrapped his hand around the bottle, letting the cool condensation soothe his calloused palm.

  Luna wiped the bar down with a rag until he could see his reflection in it, the hollows in his cheekbones and dark circles under his eyes. “You look tired, Earth Brother,” she said. “Are you getting enough sleep?”

  “Of course not.” He looked up sharply. “I’m still having the dreams. Aren’t you?”

  She smiled. “Every night.” Just mentioning them sent emerald flames dancing in her eyes, and he wondered for the millionth time if they bothered her the way they did him. She always spoke of the dreams as if they were sacred, in the same reverential tone she used to describe her childhood at the Children of the Earth.

  He scratched at the label on his beer bottle, peeling it off in pieces. “Are the figures still there?” he asked. “Dancing around the fire?”

  She held up a finger, signaling for him to wait while she poured a shot of tequila and handed it to a salivating goldfish of a man with round, sallow cheeks. Then she was back, leaning forward so their faces were level, her eyes mirroring his. “Are they still there for you?” she shot back.

  He sighed. All he wanted was a straight answer, and he was too tired to play her games. “Yeah,” he said dully. “And I’m starting to remember their faces.”

  He couldn’t admit the terror that each reveal struck in him, the fear that paralyzed him as the figures turned, one by one, to show the faces that had always eluded him upon waking. Now they haunted him well past dawn and all through each day: The sharp chins and bony noses, the cheekbones like broken glass, and the eyes, always green, always slanted, always an eerie mirror to his.

  The eyes that now, on Luna, lit like fireflies. “But that’s wonderful,” she exclaimed softly. “You’ll know them when they come.”

  “They’re coming?” Her words made him go as cold as the beer bottle in his hand.

  “Of course.” She rolled her shoulders back, tilting her head to the side. “Don’t you see? It’s the rest of us, our Earth Brothers and Sisters. He’s calling them here, just like he did with us.”

  “Who’s calling us here?”

  “You know who. Our father.” She smiled like lava boiling inside a volcano. “The God of the Earth.”

  Owen stood hastily. “You don’t really believe that crap,” he said. Of her many quirks and eccentricities, Luna’s steadfast insistence that their conception was a mystical ritual instead of a skeezy orgy in the woods was the most irritating.

  But her gaze still sent a cold knife of panic slicing through him, a steel-bladed reminder that he hadn’t come to Carbon County to hang around chasing enigmatic girls on an oil rig. He could have been touring the country on his bike, pocketing first-place winnings every weekend. But he was here, driven to the desolate valley by a voice in his dreams.

  “It’s not crap—and you believe it, too, Earth Brother.”

  “I don’t believe anything,” he said. As the words left his lips, he could almost hear the horrible, raspy voice in his head, the one that had woken him in a tangled sweat from countless nightmares. He couldn’t deny that the dreams were real. The only question was where they were coming from—and why.

  “You will soon.” Luna’s voice wrapped around him like a many-tentacled beast, moist and quiet in the din of the bar. “When the rest of us arrive to lead our army.”

  “What army?” Owen wanted to reach across the bar and grab Luna by her dreadlocks, to shake her until she started to make sense.

  She smiled coyly. “You’re looking at them.” She spread her arms wide to indicate the prospectors downing beers and exchanging off-color jokes all around them.

  “These guys?” Owen looked around the bar in disgust. “An army?”

  “Our army.” Luna’s eyes gleamed. “I’m gathering them for him, getting them on our side. You’d be surprised how easy it is to manipulate guys like this. Guys with no other purpose in life but to get rich quick.”

/>   “You’re going to manipulate them into becoming your army?” Owen asked sarcastically.

  She gave him a long, withering look. Then she backed away slowly, the tree on her back shimmying as she oozed to the other end of the bar, every head turning to stare longingly.

  She leaned over the polished bar top, close to a man with shaggy yellow hair and an unapologetic gleam of lust in his eye. Her teeth glinted as she smiled, and her bare shoulders gleamed in the light.

  “You look like you could use a drink,” she purred. His head jerked up and down like a puppet, his eyes fixed desperately on the taut, proud stretch of her collarbone.

  “I think you want a Coors . . . and I think you want to pay double for it. Is that right?”

  “Yessss,” he hissed, reaching for her with trembling, yellowed fingernails. “Whatever you say.”

  She spun away from him, fetching a beer from the fridge under the bar, his cheeks sinking with loss as she disappeared momentarily from his line of sight. As she slapped the bottle on the bar in front of him, her eyes alighted on Owen’s, holding them in her gaze.

  This is how you do it, her eyes seemed to say.

  THE wedding was the next day, the sky an endless, earnest blue, cloudless as a dream. The temperature stayed at an obedient 73 degrees Fahrenheit, and the birds of paradise took turns sailing through the air, gliding effortlessly on a faint breeze before alighting in the trees at the edge of the Varleys’ property on Elk Mountain.

  Janie, delighted that the birds had stayed in town, had made them the centerpiece of her wedding, and the coordinator, thrilled with the tropical color palette and Vince Varley’s wide-open wallet, had transformed the mountaintop construction site into something worthy of Western Bride magazine.

  From their “dressing room” inside an empty construction shed, Janie and her bridesmaids watched the guests swoon over the lavish decorations: the fuchsia feathers trailing from flower arrangements in vases the size of pickle barrels, the vast parquet dance floor surrounded by tables that glittered with crystal and silver, and the cerulean satin aisle runner embroidered with Doug and Janie’s initials that led to an arch of flowers at the edge of the cliff, overlooking the gaping valley below.

  “I think this is the fanciest wedding this town has ever seen,” Madge said to Eunice as the two old ladies accepted glasses of tropical lemonade from a server in a shiny blue tuxedo.

  “I expect we’ll start seeing a lot more fancy things now that they’ve got that rig up.” Eunice adjusted the fake lilacs on her hat and smiled broadly, revealing a blur of lipstick on her front teeth.

  “Yes, but this will always be the first,” Madge said authoritatively. They bobbed away, Eunice’s lilacs trembling with every step.

  “Did you hear that?” Janie turned to Daphne, flushed through her mask of foundation. “The fanciest wedding this town has ever seen—and it’s mine!”

  “We’d expect nothing less of you.” Behind them, Hilary fanned herself with one of the programs, Doug and Janie’s senior prom picture grinning from the cover. “You think we can get those caterers to bring some champagne back here, or what?”

  Janie ignored her and went back to peeping through the shed’s tiny window. When she turned she reminded Daphne of a snow globe, her belly big and round in a formfitting white dress that glittered with sequins. A fluff of feathers lined the scooped neckline, and longer plumes trailed from the train, shivering like a winter snow squall whenever she moved. “Oh, Pastor Ted is here!” she bubbled. “He looks so good—am I glad I got him that suit!”

  “This I have to see.” Hilary crowded in next to her, the pink taffeta on her bridesmaid dress rustling. Her curls had been shellacked into place and secured with a fascinator of teal and fuchsia feathers—identical to the one that sat awkwardly atop Daphne’s head, jabbing into her scalp and threatening to fall off with every movement.

  But the fascinator was nothing compared to Daphne’s bridesmaid dress, which poked at her rib cage and flared out from her waist in a stiff A-line that ended mid-thigh. The first time she’d tried it on, Janie had burst into tears and sworn that Daphne looked as elegant as a model. But Daphne had written it off as pregnancy hormones. When she looked in the mirror all she saw was a long, gangly pair of legs and a farmer’s tan from her long days on the rig, the muscles in her arms taut and strong from lifting and hauling. She looked like someone who would always be more at home in a hard hat than a bridesmaid dress––and she was perfectly happy to stay that way.

  “Dude, Pastor Ted looks like an Elvis impersonator,” Hilary guffawed. “You got his suit to match the blue on those birds, huh?”

  “I got everything to match the birds,” Janie reminded her. “When something this beautiful shows up, you don’t just ignore it!”

  Hilary shifted back and forth on her high heels. “Especially if you need a theme for your gazillion-dollar wedding,” she said.

  Outside the shed, the buzz of arriving guests grew louder. The band, a six-piece country-western ensemble, struck up an enthusiastic tune, and the birds of paradise chirped along merrily. There was a knock on the shed’s door, and the wedding coordinator poked her head in, her dyed-red bun pulled so tight the corners of her eyes slanted toward her temples.

  “Five minutes to the ceremony.” She quickly surveyed the room. “So bridesmaids, start lining up. Oh, and put some powder on the bride.” She turned to Daphne and handed her a compact. “We don’t want her to be shiny in the pictures, do we now?”

  “Five minutes!” Janie’s smile quavered as the bridesmaids bustled around her, collecting their bouquets and fixing their lipstick. “It’s so soon.”

  “Come here.” Daphne fumbled with the compact. As she patted powder onto Janie’s face, she noticed that her cousin had gone pale.

  “Are you nervous?” she asked.

  “No!” Janie said. “I mean—maybe?”

  “It’s okay to have some jitters.” Daphne swiped the powder over her cheeks. “It’s a big day.”

  “Yeah.” Janie’s eyes were far away. Her hand shot out suddenly as a pinball and gripped Daphne’s, the skin around her fingernails white.

  “Daphne?” she whispered. Her blue eyes were huge, her lashes trembling.

  “What?” Daphne was caught off guard. She’d been looking for a place to put the compact, and wishing for the millionth time that the bridesmaids’ dresses had pockets. How did girlie girls manage to carry all their stuff?

  “I’m doing the right thing, right?” Janie whispered. Her eyes, so full of laughter and excitement ever since she’d come home from Cheyenne wearing Doug’s engagement ring, looked like the aftermath of a storm at sea, dark and turbulent.

  In the space of ten seconds, Daphne thought of a dozen possible answers, none of which she could have said out loud. Of course she didn’t think Janie should marry Doug—seventeen seemed too young to marry anyone, let alone a verified slimeball. But it would be wrong to say that just minutes before Janie walked down the aisle. At that moment, her cousin needed her support more than anything else.

  “Of course you are.” She hoped she sounded convincing, that her face didn’t reveal the way she really felt. “You’re doing the right thing for your baby, and that’s what matters.”

  “I guess.” Janie let go of Daphne’s wrist, but she still looked troubled. “But what if Doug doesn’t get better? What if he hurts me . . . or the baby?”

  The skin on the back of Daphne’s neck prickled. “Has he threatened to?” she asked.

  “No.” Janie’s eyes were dark. “Well . . . not really. But he’s been drinking so much since Trey died, and he raised his arm once like he was going to hit me. Sometimes I just don’t know.”

  Daphne took Janie’s hand in hers, holding it tight. “It’s not too late to back out, you know,” she said. She couldn’t help picturing Jim’s tomato-dark face as he pummeled her mother, Myra
cowering and sobbing against the kitchen cabinets. Just the thought of Doug’s abuse turning Janie into a sniveling shell of a person like her mother made her quake with rage. “If you really think he’s going to hurt you, you shouldn’t marry him.”

  Janie’s lip trembled as she looked out at the assembled crowd. It seemed like most of Carbon County had turned out for the wedding, their festive clothes bright as lollipops under the cerulean sky.

  She turned back to Daphne. “I can’t,” she said. “They’re all here. It’s about to start.”

  “You can,” Daphne insisted.

  But the storm in Janie’s eyes had already turned to steel. She took a great, heaving breath and collected herself, fixing Daphne with a determined smile.

  “Don’t even listen to me,” she said as the first strains of Pachelbel’s Canon filled the air. “You were right—it’s just wedding-day jitters.”

  She leaned in and gave Daphne a hug that smelled like powder and hair spray and flowery perfume.

  “Thanks,” she whispered in her ear. “And please—forget everything I just said.”

  “If you insist.” Daphne squeezed her back, then knelt to arrange her train. She knew she could never forget what Janie had just told her. She was still shaking at the confession, the thought of Doug threatening her cousin sending livid rivers of rage through her veins. She wanted to grab Janie’s ankles and force her to stay, to run out in front of the crowd and tell them all that the wedding was off. But the first bridesmaids had already begun their journey down the aisle, stepping in careful time to the music as the sea of heads in the audience bowed and murmured.

  Daphne took her place behind them, her palms slippery around her bouquet as she counted slowly to ten just like the coordinator had instructed at the rehearsal dinner the night before.

  Right before she took the first step, she turned and snuck one last glace at her cousin. Janie’s head was high, and the smile shellacked onto her face belied any evidence that there had ever been a storm in her eyes.