End Times

by Anna Schumacher

  It was typical shit. They were acting like Doug didn’t exist, like he hadn’t just laid his entire damn future on the line for them, thrown his life away to marry Janie just so they could get their hands on a little extra dough. They’d put him up for sacrifice like a goat, dragging him to jewelry stores only to have Deirdre pick out a ring, orchestrating some farce of a perfect romantic dinner for him to propose, even calling the restaurant themselves to make the reservations, not once asking him what he wanted, whether he would choose to be tethered to Janie forever and ever just because he wanted to try it without a condom a few lousy times.

  Rage rushed in his ears, nearly blurring his vision as he remembered yet again that he was trapped. Rage at his parents, at Daphne, at Janie, at her family and the church and Pastor Ted for making fatherhood sound even more terrifying, as if being a dad at eighteen wasn’t scary enough. Now everyone was saying he’d be a dad to freakin’ Jesus Christ Jr. It was enough to make anyone want to polish off a bottle of Maker’s.

  He stumbled into his room and shut the door, glad to be away from the whole dumb world. Lying down on his bed in the semidarkness, he crossed his arms behind his head and stared up at his football trophies and girlie calendar and the old water stain on the ceiling. The anger lay down with him, covering him like a blanket.

  He hated everyone, and he didn’t know what to do about it. All he knew was that someday, somehow, he’d figure out a way to get them all back.

  DAPHNE’S knife sank into the plump flesh. It gave way beneath her, soft and pliant, yielding. Red juices spurted into the air, and she brought the knife down again and again, her movements precise and merciless, quick and efficient.

  Karen looked over from where she was grating cheese at the opposite counter. “Those tomatoes look perfect, honey,” she said. “Just toss them all into the pan and give them a good strong stir, okay?”

  It was nearly dinnertime, and the trailer was steamy with the scent of frying garlic and onions, a pot of noodles boiling merrily on the stove top and a news anchor chattering away on the television, his hair as motionless as one of Aunt Karen’s Precious Moments ceramic figurines. Janie sat on the couch, wrapped in an afghan, watching the news. She’d been jumpy since her wedding, always looking over her shoulder, her hands resting protectively over her belly more often than not.

  Daphne stirred the tomatoes in with the onions and garlic, watching the sauce bubble and pop on the stove top. Karen was teaching her to make her famous lasagna, the one she’d always demanded seconds and thirds of when she was a child. Daphne found herself wishing that Myra had taught her to cook—or had ever bothered to cook herself. Her childhood had been an endless parade of boxed mac ’n’ cheese and Chinese takeout, the oven in their apartment used so seldom that Daphne started hiding her toys there so Jim wouldn’t break them when he was drunk.

  “Holy guacamole,” Janie said from the couch, pointing a pink-tipped finger at the TV. “Is that Pastor Ted?”

  Daphne and Karen rushed to the living room. Pastor Ted’s familiar face grinned from the small projection television, where he stood next to a female newscaster with bright coral lips. They were in front of what looked like a construction site, and the text beneath them read: Carbon County Miracle: Ancient Tablet Found.

  Karen nodded, her mouth hanging open. “Turn it up!” she urged.

  Janie found the remote and turned the volume up as high as it would go.

  “. . . an unequivocal miracle, a true sign from God!” Pastor Ted was saying. His face had been heavily powdered, but there was no mistaking the wonder in his eyes. “We’ve been seeing a lot of miracles in Carbon County lately, but this is by far the most thrilling yet.”

  The camera panned out to reveal a hole in the earth wrapped in caution tape. It sat on top of a hill, surrounded by construction vehicles and bags of concrete fill, a shadowy valley visible in the background.

  “Is that Elk Mountain?” Daphne asked.

  “It is—that’s where I’m gonna live!” Janie exclaimed.

  “Do you think it’s real?” the newscaster was asking Pastor Ted.

  “I believe with my entire heart and soul,” Pastor Ted assured her. “I’ve believed my whole life that God has special plans for Carbon County, and today He’s sent us a special message. The wheels are already in motion, and the Great Change is coming—so, folks, hold on to your hats!”

  The newscaster tee-heed politely and turned to address the camera. “The tablet, which appears to be stone, was found during a construction excavation.”

  An image of the tablet appeared in a box behind the newscaster’s head. Daphne was able to make out a few of the words (fire, children, divide) before it flicked off the screen.

  “And what language is that?” the newscaster asked, her voice chipper.

  “It’s ancient Aramaic,” Pastor Ted replied. “Which is truly a miracle, since nobody has ever been known to read or write in that language in the vicinity of southern Wyoming.”

  Daphne’s head swam. Aramaic? But she’d just been reading it—the words on the tablet had appeared as clear to her as plain English. She flashed back frantically to the image of the tablet, trying to remember if she’d noticed the letters. She couldn’t recall: It had filtered through her brain as quickly as a message on a billboard. She silently begged for them to show the image again, but the newscaster was wrapping up her segment.

  “Archaeology and religious studies experts, currently gathered at an annual conference in Bethlehem, will be traveling to the area when they return to evaluate the tablet’s authenticity and, if it checks out, translate the message. Until then, remember you heard it here first. Now back to you, Frank.”

  The male anchor’s head filled the screen, rigid and jovial. “Thanks, Patricia—there’s been a lot of big news coming from that little town lately,” he burbled. “And now the weather . . .”

  Daphne turned to her aunt and cousin. “Did you—” she began, meaning to ask if they’d also been able to read the ancient text.

  “The sauce!” Karen cried. Acrid black smoke filled the trailer’s small kitchen as the tomato sauce Daphne had been so carefully stirring bubbled over, and the next few moments were lost to a flurry of pan-removing and window-opening, fanning the air and adding water to the sauce.

  “I think it’ll be fine,” Karen said once they had the situation under control. She rummaged in a cabinet for her lasagna pan and began laying out noodles. “And who can blame us for losing track with news like that on the TV? Can you believe it—an ancient tablet right here in Carbon County? It truly is a sign from God, don’t you think?”

  “I hope it’s a good one,” Janie fretted, patting her tummy. “Me and baby don’t want any more bad news.”

  Daphne bit her lip. As uncomfortable as talk of God still made her feel, she had to admit that some pretty strange things had been happening around Carbon County lately. She still couldn’t shake the image of the birds falling from the sky, raining down on the wedding as if flung from the heavens.

  Then again, what if it was a hoax? In Pastor Ted’s own words, nobody had ever read or written Aramaic in Carbon County, and it was suspicious that the tablet had been found at Elk Mountain. What if Doug had placed it there just to be a jerk, to get the town’s believers even more riled up so he could boost his ego tearing them down, or as a kind of twisted revenge for the chaotic death scene at his wedding? She had trouble imagining him pulling something like that off, but it wasn’t impossible.

  “What do you think it says?” Daphne asked, feeling the situation out.

  “Oh, I surely don’t know,” Karen clucked. “That ancient Aramaic just looked like squiggles to me.”

  “Maybe it’s more about how my baby will be a prophet,” Janie said hopefully. “It would be nice if it said something about no more dead birdies, too.”

  A hard shiver shuddered through Daphne’s bones, an
d she had to take a break from fixing the salad to grip the edges of the counter with both hands. Her head felt heavy and murky, like she’d been spinning in circles. So the language really hadn’t been legible to anyone else—Karen and Janie hadn’t seen the words in it that Daphne saw, the symbols spelling out fire, children, divide.

  Either she was going crazy, or she could read Aramaic.

  • • •

  SHORTLY after one A.M., Daphne snuck out of the trailer and across the road to the Global Oil equipment hut, her heart thudding in her chest. As exhausted as she was, sleep had eluded her, the image of the tablet flashing endlessly through her mind as she tossed and turned. Finally, she gave up. She had to see the tablet, to try reading the message with her own eyes.

  Guilt snapped at her heels as she lifted the keys for one of the Global Oil jeeps from its hook. She’d never so much as bent the rig’s rules, but with the image of the tablet looming huge in her mind, she saw no alternative but to borrow a company vehicle. It would take all night for her to walk to Elk Mountain and back, and the sound of his truck starting right outside his window would certainly wake Uncle Floyd. She was trying to save up for a car of her own, but between insisting on paying room and board to the Peytons and secretly sending checks home to her mother, the money wasn’t accumulating very fast.

  It was a clear, moonless evening as Daphne turned the key in the ignition, the stars hard and faraway, unblinking. On the radio a female pop-crossover star with a big voice and bigger hair assured Daphne she was doin’ better off without him, and thank you very much for askin’.

  She turned onto Elk Mountain Road, and the stars disappeared behind the overhang of trees. The mountaintop construction site was deserted and silent as a graveyard, and when Daphne cut the engine and stepped out into the night, she could almost feel the ghosts of everything that had happened there: the opulent wedding and her awkward not-date with Trey; a dozen beer-fueled parties around the bonfire pit; Janie losing her virginity to Doug; a sleepy team of lumberjacks clear-cutting the land; Vince Varley’s great-grandfather arriving on a covered wagon and surveying the valley below with a look of wonder; a Native American tribe consecrating the mountaintop with a tribal ceremony shrouded in mist; and long, long ago, in another time, a man in a rough-hewn robe standing with his arms aloft, bathed in a golden beam of light, accepting an urgent message from the heavens . . .

  She shook her head and the visions cleared like cobwebs, leaving her skin clammy and cold. She was on a mission, and the night wasn’t getting any younger. She flicked on her flashlight and ran its beam over the deserted landscape. A construction crane threw towering shadows across the ground, and something scurried away from her and into the underbrush, sending her heartbeat skittering.

  The tablet’s location was easy enough to find. It was back behind the main foundation, where the contractors had begun digging a decorative pond, and was covered in a blue tarp. Orange safety tape surrounded it, along with signs that read No Trespassing and Authorized Personnel Only. The flashlight jiggled in Daphne’s hand as she approached, sending the scene into a wavering underwater dance.

  She reached, trembling, for the edge of the tarp. Her fingertips brushed the surface, which was slick and frigid with dew, and the darkness crouched closer. Gripping the tarp firmly, she pulled the corner back, bracing herself at the plastic crackle that shattered the night’s silence. A large black spider, disturbed in its nocturnal activities, ran across the back of her hand, eight tiny feet tickling her flesh. She shook her arm hard, sending the spider flying, and instantly felt guilty: It had been minding its own business, doing what spiders do. She was the one trespassing.

  She ducked under the tarp and trained her beam around the earthen pit until she found the tablet. It was an expanse of bone-colored stone about the size of an encyclopedia, its edges worn and rounded from years spent buried in the earth.

  Seeing it, Daphne gave a small sigh of dismay and sank to sitting, the cold ground freezing her thighs through her jeans.

  Because even though the tablet was carved in ancient characters, even though her entire knowledge of foreign languages began and ended with two years of high school Spanish, even though she’d never been farther east than Ohio, even though she didn’t believe in God and went to church only to be polite, she could read every word.

  She clutched the flashlight with trembling fingers, ignoring the cold gravel poking into her legs and the wind whistling through the pines. She read the tablet once, then again, and again, the words clashing like thunderbolts in her head as she struggled to decipher the meaning.

  When the true Prophet reads this message, the tablet said, 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

  And yea, once these seven signs and wonders appear, 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.

  She read it yet again, a fifth time and then a sixth, struggling to decipher its meaning. Only one thing was clear: that if it was a hoax, Doug hadn’t planted it. The language was too sophisticated, the nuances too delicate, to have emerged from his thick skull.

  Another thought poked at her, unwelcome yet persistent. What if, in spite of everything, the tablet was real?

  The ghosts of Elk Mountain swirled around her, and her mind came to rest on the man in the rough-hewn robe, an image blurred and indistinct as a watercolor: a golden beam of light streaming down from the heavens, a bearded man with a rock and a chisel receiving the urgent message from above.

  Daphne climbed hurriedly from the pit, brushing the earth from her jeans as she tried to chase the vision away. She was careful to shake out each wrinkle from the tarp as she drew it back over the hole, to leave it looking exactly as she’d found it.

  The message haunted her as she started up the jeep and went rattling down Elk Mountain Road. Pastor Ted had mentioned a prophet, and so did the tablet. Were they related somehow . . . and did that mean that the prophet on the tablet was also Janie’s unborn child? Was the Great Divide on the tablet the same as the Great Change that Pastor Ted was always talking about in his sermons?

  I sound like Janie, she thought with a wry smile as she parked the jeep in the Global Oil lot and returned the keys to their hook. She was making wild assumptions, seeing signs and omens where there had to be a logical explanation, and practically taking Pastor Ted’s sermons as fact. If she kept this up, she’d be greeting everyone in town with “I believe” before she knew it.

  She fell into bed, the words from the tablet still thundering in her head. But as soft as the pillow was under her head, and as much as her body ached for sleep, it still wouldn’t come. The message blared in her mind, incomprehensible and disturbing. As she tried uselessly to untangle its meaning, four little words played over and over in her mind, a drumbeat underscoring her thoughts:

  What if it’s real?

  THE motocross track buzzed with Friday-night activity, bikes zooming and leaping over the jumps and berms, careening around curves and kicking up plumes of dirt until the riders were brown from head to toe. Dust and exhaust hovered in the floodlights like striations on a layer cake, leaving a thin coat of grime o
n Daphne’s jeans and the tang of metal and grease on her tongue. High above them, a crescent moon grinned a pale and sickly smile.

  “Who are all these people, anyway?” Janie asked, looking out at the dozens of riders dipping and churning around the track as more waited on the sidelines, pawing the dirt with leather boots. Even the bleachers, which had once belonged strictly to Janie and her friends, were scattered with stubble-cheeked men cradling forty-ounce beers and smoking Marlboros, politely trying to blow the smoke away from the ladies.

  “Uh—you noticed the giant new oil rig in town, right?” Hilary set down her half-empty can of Coors Light. “’Cause, trust me, these guys aren’t here for the culture and nightlife.”

  “I guess you’re right.” Janie was bundled in an old fleece pullover of Doug’s, the sleeves bunched in her hands to ward off the evening chill. “Maybe they came to see the tablet, though. I don’t know.”

  “Yeah, like old Vince would let them anywhere near it,” Hilary scoffed. According to the rumors whirling around town, Vince Varley had installed a twenty-four-hour guard to protect the tablet, which he was planning to get authenticated and sell for millions to the highest bidder. But despite all of Hilary’s prodding over the past few days, Janie refused to admit whether the gossip was true.

  “I just wish those experts would hurry up and finish their conference,” Janie sighed, snuggling deeper into the fleece. “I’m dying to know what it says.”

  “It probably says, Haha, suckers, this thing is as fake as Deirdre Varley’s Louis Vuitton handbag,” Hilary said.

  Janie gave her a sharp look. “How can you even joke about it? It’s another sign from God. Personally, I think it’s going to tell us all about how my baby will lead us through the Great Change so we can get our Eternal Reward.”