End of Days

by Max Turner

  “What do you mean reorganizing?” I asked.

  “Vlad’s underlings are all fighting to see who gets to be the top dog. Vlad would have a lot to do to bring them back under control. Ophelia and I thought their lack of leadership would keep you out of trouble for a while.”

  Obviously not.

  “So what happens now?” Charlie asked. He made his way over to the game console under the television.

  “You two stay out of sight,” the inspector said. “There’s a phone by the bed, but I don’t want you calling out. And don’t answer it unless it’s me. When I call, I’ll let it ring twice, then I’ll hang up and call again. Two rings, pause, pick up on the next one.”

  “Don’t we have caller ID?” I asked.

  “Yes, you do. But someone else might be using my phone. You never know. . . . Two rings. Pause. Then pick up the next call. Got it?”

  “Yeah. I got it.”

  He grunted, then looked us over again. His head tilted forward a bit. I’d seen his expression on a lot of adult faces. Be careful, he was saying. Well, how much trouble could we get into in a one-room basement? I nodded back and he turned to go. Then he remembered something.

  “One more thing. The alarm. It’ll be on upstairs. If you try to leave the house, it will go off. So stay put. Is there anything else you’ll need?”

  “Yeah,” said Charlie. “Could you send for some backup? Someone to watch the place from outside—raise the alarm if trouble arrives. We aren’t going to see anything from down here. And once the sun comes up, we’re toast if someone breaks in.”

  The inspector grunted a negative. “We’re out of backup. Every cop I know in the Underground is dead or missing. And I can’t get anyone else involved on short notice. I have to keep you guys off the radar.”

  He walked over to me and reached into his coat. From the holster around his shoulder he took out his gun, a semiautomatic. He handed it to me. “The clip is full. The safety’s on. You ever fire one of these things?”

  I took the gun and shook my head. I’d never even held one before. Then a jolt of pain ran down my arm. It took root in my chest. My heart began to burn. I pinched my eyes shut, and when I opened them, everything was an agonizing haze. All I could see were spots. It was a few seconds before I could speak.

  “Take it back,” I whispered.

  “I’ll take it,” said Charlie.

  The inspector glanced down at the gun and removed it from my hand. Instantly, the pain began to ebb. Nerves stopped burning. My blurry eyes cleared.

  I watched him reholster it. He was watching me intently. “You okay?”

  I didn’t know how to answer that, so I didn’t. After a few seconds, he grunted a good-bye and started hobbling to the stairs.

  “Two rings, pause, pick up,” he reminded me.

  I nodded and he closed the basement door. Then his footsteps clumped across the floor above. The back door opened and closed. The house shuddered. Dead bolts followed. A minute later, I heard his car roar. I could picture every animal in the neighborhood running for cover.

  “What was that all about?” Charlie said.

  “What?”

  “With the gun. Your face . . .”

  I rubbed my arm. It was still pins and needles. “It didn’t feel right.”

  “You should have given it to me!”

  I had no answer for this. I trusted my instincts. Something about that gun was just wrong.

  “You want to play some?” Charlie turned the game console on. Then he started opening drawers in the TV cabinet, no doubt looking for games.

  I wandered over to the desk. It was covered with open books. Loose-leaf pages were scattered everywhere. “There’s a note here.” A yellow sticky was pressed to the bottom of the computer keyboard: Knowledge is your best defense. The writing was tight and neat. I recognized it as Ophelia’s right away.

  “What does it say?” Charlie didn’t look up from the drawer he was sorting through. “Man, all these games are old. We’ve finished them already.”

  I read him the message. “It’s Ophelia’s writing,” I added.

  “How long ago did she write it?”

  “Beats me.” He walked over and I handed it to him. He glanced at it, then down at the desk, and froze. I followed his gaze to the open book. There, staring at us from the page, was Vlad Dracula.

  — CHAPTER 7

  PROPHECIES

  Charlie and I stared at a picture of the vampire who had almost killed us.

  “A little light reading, I guess,” Charlie said. “Man, that dude is scary-looking.” He closed the book.

  Underneath was another note. The handwriting was larger than Ophelia’s. Messier. More frantic.

  Charlie picked up the note, read it over again, then handed it to me. “What kind of gobbledygook is this? The End of Days—isn’t that an Arnold Schwarzenegger movie?”

  It was. Not his best work. I started leafing through the other open books. One showed a page full of ideograms.

  “Is that Chinese?” Charlie asked.

  I shrugged. It might have been Martian. I couldn’t read it, but Ophelia obviously could. Notes were in the margins. The writing was hers. I looked at the shelves. There were hundreds of other books. And more open on the desk, Geschichte der Moldau und Walachei The book beside it had a passage underlined: i nu este revelat omul nelegiuirii . . .

  It meant nothing to me. I started looking at the others. I needed to know what the note meant. What the End of Days referred to.

  “Oh, no, you don’t,” Charlie said.

  “What?”

  “Zack, it would take you ten years to read through this stuff.”

  I sighed. “Then I guess I’d better get started.”

  I didn’t have much luck at first. Of all the volumes on the desk, only one was in English—the phone book.

  After a couple of minutes, Charlie started walking back to the television. “I need to get doing something or I’m going to start gnawing on the furniture.”

  I gathered up Ophelia’s notes. “Just wait a second. Give me a hand. I have a feeling . . . There’s got to be something here.” Charlie turned back and I handed him half of the pages.

  “What am I doing, exactly?”

  “Just look for something useful,” I said.

  “Like what? A recycling bin?”

  I started flipping through the sheets. Charlie held his first one up. The page was covered in curvy letters that wound all over one another.

  “What is this? Snake?”

  “I don’t know. Persian maybe.”

  Charlie gave me a look. “Zack, I’d have an easier time translating a Klingon war manual. Let’s do some gaming.”

  “No. Wait wait wait.” The words came out like machine-gun bullets. “I’ve found something.”

  Charlie reached over and pulled the top page down. The words on it were in English. Typed. A letter. It started in midsentence. I set it flat on the desk so we could both read it.

  “. . . bears a shocking similarity to 2 Thessalonians, chapter 2, verse 3, “for that day will not come until the rebellion occurs and the man of lawlessness is revealed.”

  The man of lawlessness . . . Who could that be?

  Charlie nudged me. I read on silently.

  The verse goes on to say that this man, presumably the Antichrist, is doomed to destruction, which is missing from Baoh’s prophecy. The chapter continues by suggesting that the Antichrist will claim to be God, which Vlad has never done.

  I hit the name Vlad and stopped again. So did Charlie. He looked at me. “Does this make sense to you?”

  Not yet, so I kept going.

  Regarding the other symbols, I have taken great care to translate them. I see definite parallels with the Revelation of Saint John the Divine, but there is no doubt in my mind that the prophecies of Baoh do not concern the Great Beast, the Antichrist, or the End of Days.

  “Who is Baoh?” Charlie asked.

  I shook my head. I’d never hea
rd of him. But he sounded like a kind of prophet. Maybe he was a friend of Ophelia’s.

  Charlie pointed to the text at the end of the last sentence. “There’s ‘the End of Days’ again.”

  I nodded and kept reading.

  . . . but there is no doubt in my mind that the prophecies of Baoh do not concern the Great Beast, the Antichrist, or the End of Days. Not as it pertains to the human world and the Second Coming of the Messiah. Rather, I think these prophecies concern the fate of carriers, and more specifically, your ward.

  Carriers. That was the word my father used for “vampires.” Carriers of the pathogen. Those who were infected. My eyes gobbled up the rest of the text.

  I have included my translations below. They are in no way complete. Even with the help of modern recording devices, we have been unable to decipher most of what Baoh said. I will forward more should we manage to transcribe them.

  “The great hunter shall be sacrificed and make his son an orphan. The sun shall be given the power to scorch him with fire.”

  “The orphaned son who is and was and is to come shall not be hurt by the second death, though the sun will beat upon him.”

  “The Lamb will be their shepherd [indecipherable muttering follows] . . . a scourge. He will lead them to springs of living water . . . to destruction. Behold, he is coming soon.”

  And that was it. Charlie finished. We looked at each other.

  “Are there other pages?” he said.

  I started looking.

  “We need to find more.” He searched around the desk. On the floor.

  I rifled through the stack one more time to be sure I hadn’t missed anything. I came up empty. Charlie didn’t. He found another from the mess I’d handed him. He waved the page like a winning scratch ticket.

  “It must come right after.” He spread it on the desk.

  All of our far eastern agents are aware of Baoh’s disappearance. Given his power and resources, it is unlikely we will find him. Rather, he will emerge at a time of his own choosing, though the Coven may possess the power to drive him out of hiding and compel his service. Whether they can do this without Vlad is doubtful. His whereabouts remain a mystery. No sign of him has been seen by any of our agents, in any corner of the world. If he has risen from his most recent death, he has chosen not to reveal himself.

  The future of the Underground is uncertain. This would seem a prudent time to seek out those carriers with the power of prophecy and those who travel the Spirit Planes.

  Be careful. You are now the rock upon which our future rests.

  May God’s blessings be upon you.

  The name at the bottom was handwritten and difficult to read.

  “What does it say?” Charlie asked. “Who’s it from?”

  I lifted the paper. Turned it sideways. Squinted. “I think it says Mutada.”

  “Mutada? Isn’t that from The Lion King?”

  “No, that’s Mustafa. This is one of my father’s friends. They hunted vampires together in Afghanistan. My father mentioned it in his journal.”

  “And this Mutada guy knows Ophelia?”

  “It looks that way. We need to find the first page.” I flipped through the rest of my pile. “I can’t find it.”

  “Maybe she has it with her. Or it’s in one of these books.”

  There was no way to know without a lengthy search.

  Charlie was still staring at the pages. He spread them out so they were side by side. “I can’t believe this stuff. This is about you, isn’t it? You’re the orphaned son. The Lamb. Ophelia’s ward.”

  “Do I look like a lamb to you?”

  “No. More like a reject from Planet of the Apes.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Don’t mention it. I wonder who this Baoh character is?” he asked.

  I did, too. He was obviously important.

  Charlie elbowed me gently on the front of my shoulder. “You’re off in la-la land again.”

  “Sorry. I was just wondering who he could be.”

  He picked up the note we’d found under the book on Dracula.

  “That’s the end of the world, isn’t it?”

  I wasn’t sure. “We need to find Ophelia to see what all this means.”

  He nodded, then walked over to the phone. “Johansson said they’d be here soon. Why don’t you call her?”

  The inspector didn’t want us calling. Not with the landline. But he didn’t say anything about my cell. I picked it up and hit redial. Her voice mail came on straight off.

  “It’s me again. Please call me right away.” I followed this with a text message, just for good measure.

  “No luck?” Charlie asked.

  “She must be talking to someone. I’m sure she’ll call right back.”

  Charlie plopped down on the sofa and put his feet up. “We should phone the girls.”

  The girls. He meant Luna and her older sister, Suki. She and Charlie had fallen in love last July. If Stony Lake had been blessed with a tabloid, the two of them would have made the weekly cover. But she wasn’t doing well, and it was largely my fault.

  The past summer had ended in a night that belonged in a hack-and-slash horror movie. One of Charlie’s close friends was brutally murdered. Shortly after that, I went berserk and got arrested. Suki had a front-row seat for most of it. Then, when it seemed things couldn’t possibly get any worse, Charlie and Luna were abducted by my uncle Maximilian and handed over to Vlad, who wanted to impale them. Ophelia saved the day. I turned Charlie, and he turned Luna. But Suki was still human. And she was a mess.

  I’d spoken to Luna about Suki many times since, and I know Charlie sent her lots of e-mails and called as often as he could afford to. But she just wasn’t the same after that night. She felt like an outsider. With her living so far away, in Newark, New Jersey, there wasn’t a lot we could do. I felt awful about it because I’d gone to Charlie for help. If I’d done the right thing and stayed away from him and his friends, everyone would still be nicely tanned and living on easy street. Instead, I’d turned his world upside down. Suki’s, too. There was no quick fix for this.

  “You want to send her a text?” I said.

  Charlie shook his head. “I could . . . I’d rather hear her voice. I haven’t talked to her in a few days.” He took my cell and started scrolling for the number.

  It looked as if he was about to say something, but then the other phone rang—the landline that Johansson had told us not to use. We waited. Counted two rings. The pause was supposed to come next. It didn’t. The phone just rang and rang and rang. Then it stopped. I waited to see if it would fire up again. It didn’t. I snatched it out of the cradle.

  “What does it say?” Charlie asked.

  “One missed call.”

  “Can’t you see who it was? There’s a call display.”

  “All it says is unavailable.”

  “Who would call us?”

  It obviously wasn’t Johansson. Someone else from the Underground maybe. I set the phone back in the cradle. Then a loud boom shook the house.

  Charlie and I stared at each other. “That came from upstairs,” he said.

  A second later the front door crashed in. Several people entered. Their footfalls were loud, as if they were wearing Frankenstein boots. An alarm started ringing. That had to be the home security system. They didn’t have the password. Not good. Voices started shouting.

  “What do we do?” I whispered.

  “Look for something we can use.”

  We both glanced around the room. Charlie grabbed a table lamp. He unplugged it and wrapped the cord around the neck. Then he swung it, testing its weight. Ophelia’s note sprang to mind. Knowledge is your best defense. What did that mean? Was I supposed to hurl books?

  The alarm stopped. More people came inside. It sounded like an open house. “Should we go upstairs?” I asked.

  Charlie was still thinking. Listening. All I could hear was muffled chatter. And my heart. It was winning the Kentucky Derby. S
everal sets of footsteps walked across the floor above. They stopped at the door by the top of the stairs. It opened with a creak and the lights flicked on. First one police officer, then another started down the stairwell. Both were wearing bulletproof vests. And both had their guns drawn. The first officer saw me and aimed at my face. Another took aim at Charlie.

  “Put that down,” he said.

  Neither of us moved.

  The first kept his gun trained on me. The second stepped down into the room, then spoke into a radio attached to his vest near the shoulder.

  “They’re in the basement. We’re going to need a few more bodies down here.”

  “Are you Daniel Thomson?” the first one asked me.

  I nodded. Daniel was my first name. Only people who didn’t know me used it.

  “Get down on your knees and put your hands behind your head.” The officer’s voice was louder this time. He pointed to Charlie. “And you, drop the lamp and do the same. On the ground, hands behind your head.”

  “We haven’t done anything wrong,” I said.

  “That’s for the courts to decide,” the policeman replied. “Now do as you’re told. Down on your knees. Hands behind your head. You’re under arrest for the murder of Everett Johansson.”

  — CHAPTER 8

  ARRESTED DEVELOPMENT

  I’m sure you’ve seen this in the movies or on police shows. The bad guys or, in this case, our two innocent heroes get down on their knees, put their hands behind their heads, then get cuffed and hauled away to be interrogated. Things didn’t quite follow the script. They never did with Charlie.

  He set the lamp down and got on his knees. So did I. A second later, I felt the cold steel of handcuffs circle each wrist. Two other officers were coming down the stairs so that four were now surrounding us. I heard a loud ziplike sound and watched while Charlie’s hands were cuffed behind his back.

  “We didn’t kill Johansson,” he said. The end of his tongue was rubbing underneath his upper gums. I’m guessing his teeth were dropping. By the look on his face, he was trying to stay calm. I couldn’t actually tell if he was nervous or scared. Then I realized he was angry.