End of Days

by Max Turner

  Another can and another and another were suddenly bouncing along the cement floor. Half a dozen of them were pouring thick yellow vapor into the air. A gas mask landed near my feet. I put it on, then had to duck as a body went flying past me. Then someone grabbed hold of my collar and tossed me through the air. I flew over the other officers, the ones who were crouched at the far end of the hall. My appearance was so sudden, several had to duck to get out of my way. One shot at me with a pistol, and a bullet grazed my shoulder. Then I hit a door and took it right off the hinges.

  I got up running. Somehow my gas mask was off. I’m guessing my unexpected trip through the door had ripped it loose. More shots echoed behind me. As I approached a set of stairs, a second bullet nicked my thigh. I stumbled. I might have tumbled down the steps, but Mr. Entwistle took hold of me again and I shot forward toward another set of doors. I was about to stumble through them, but they exploded into pieces just in the nick of time. Mr. Entwistle had darted past at the last second and taken them off the hinges. He was now in front of me, dressed like a one-man assault team, body armor and all. In the haze, with a gas mask on, he looked like one of them.

  “The hall turns left,” he said.

  I slowed to take the corner.

  “Oh, no, you don’t.” Mr. Entwhistle grabbed me by the arm and pushed me forward. “The hall goes left, we go straight.”

  We did. Right into the wall. I turned and took most of the impact on my shoulder. A sharp jolt shot down my arm and I fell to my knees. Then Mr. Entwistle started a Bruce Lee routine that would have seen him nominated into the martial arts hall of fame. He hit the wall furiously with his fists. Cracks appeared in the mortar, then he rammed several cinder blocks out of place. In an instant, he’d made a hole. He widened it with his foot until it was big enough to duck through, then he grabbed me by the back of my shirt and pulled me along behind.

  I found myself in an underground parking lot. Police cars were everywhere: SUVs, vans, cars, and paddy wagons.

  “Are you all right?” he asked.

  I had landed face-first on the pavement. Pain shot down my arm, and the bullet wounds in my leg and shoulder burned. I groaned.

  “Is that aaahhhhh as in good, or aaahhhhh as in bad?”

  “Bad,” I muttered.

  He reached down to help me to my feet. “Well then, boy,” he whispered in my ear, “let me make it up to you. Pick any car in the lot, any car, and it’s yours.”

  I took a quick look around. I remembered our last ride together. It had ended with the car falling apart and the two of us spiraling into the Otonabee River.

  “You leaning towards another Ford Mustang?” he asked.

  I shook my head.

  He snorted. “Been there, done that, eh? Well, I can respect a man who learns from his mistakes. I try to do likewise. The Ford does have muscle, but perhaps we need something with a little more heft. Just give it a minute, I’m sure the car you want will leap out at you any second now.”

  No sooner had he spoken than I heard a rumble like an earthquake. The garage doors in front of us burst inward. Something enormous punched through and bounced over the front end of a cruiser. It looked like a cross between a monster truck and an armored personnel carrier, the kind you see troops driving in missions overseas—angled plates of thick metal. Dust, cement, glass, and steel went flying everywhere. The car was coming straight for us. I fell to the pavement. Right beside me was a Humvee. I tried to roll underneath it, but the only person I know who can move fast after he’s been shot twice is Will Smith. Then the armored car skidded to a halt in front of Mr. Entwistle.

  He tucked the gun behind his back. “You coming?”

  I didn’t answer. My mouth was hanging open. He helped me to my feet. “This is yours?”

  “Yup.” His eyebrows rose and he smiled. “A testament to my near infinite capacity to err and learn. Quite something, isn’t it?”

  “I’ll say.”

  He looked at me and laughed. “Well, just wait till you see my chauffeur.”

  — CHAPTER 13

  MR. ENTWISTLE

  The old vampire reached down and took hold of my pants at the waist. Then he tossed me on top of the car. An instant later, he landed beside me. A round hatch was between us. He twisted a handle and pulled it open, then lowered me inside. The air smelled like motor oil and steel. I looked around. There, in the driver’s seat, grinning ear to ear, was Charlie.

  “Man, you look awful,” he said. “Don’t tell me you tried the prison food?”

  I felt awful. Before I could say so, Mr. Entwistle dropped down between us.

  “How did I do?” Charlie asked him.

  “Ten out of ten, boy. You’re a natural disaster.” Then Mr. Entwistle turned and helped me over to a row of seats along the inside wall. “See. Told ya you’d be impressed.”

  I was incredulous. Charlie was the last person I expected. I didn’t know he could drive.

  “Here. Sit down.” Mr. Entwistle eased me onto one of the molded side benches, careful to avoid the blood stains on my shoulder and thigh where the two bullets had grazed me.

  “They’re just nicks,” I told him.

  “The bleeding hasn’t stopped on this one.” He was looking at my leg. “I’d better take care of it.” Then he turned to Charlie. “Get us out of here.”

  Charlie sat down. There was no windshield, just two viewers, each like the butt end of a pair of binoculars. Charlie pressed his eyes up against one, then reached down and took hold of two handles that stuck up from the floor, one on either side of his chair. “It’s just like Cyber Sled,” he said, laughing. That was a video game with two joysticks, one for each tread of your tank. The engine revved. It sounded like a hungry crocodile. Then it started pinging. I wondered if it was about to explode.

  “What’s that noise?” I asked.

  “Bullets. They’re shooting at us.” Mr. Entwistle must have seen the concern on my face. “Don’t worry, boy, the only thing that can penetrate this armor is parked in my underground garage.”

  Was he kidding? Before I could ask, Charlie pulled one lever and pushed the other. The car spun. The sudden movement pressed me hard against my seat. Then we lurched forward with a deafening rumble. Mr. Entwistle swayed on his feet, then turned and started nosing through a red case that was stuck to the wall. He pulled out a bandage, wrapped it carefully around my thigh, and cinched it tight. As I was figuring out how to quietly scream, he pulled a harness down around my shoulders, the kind stock car drivers wore on TV. I felt like a space marine. I looked at him. He smiled and winked.

  “I thought you were dead!” I told him.

  “I thought so, too. But it turns out, I was only at the Olde Stone Brewing Company. Best beer in town. You can’t imagine my disappointment when I learned it wasn’t heaven.” He walked to the front, waved Charlie out of the seat, pulled a harness over his shoulders, then took over the controls.

  “Didn’t my uncle blow you up?” I asked.

  “He tried. But why bother having visions if you can’t see when the building you’re in is going to explode?”

  Visions. Mr. Entwistle sometimes saw glimpses of the future. And the past, too, if my memory was correct. It was his talent. I’m not sure how it worked exactly. He glanced back at me and smiled again. “You’ve been drinking the good stuff, I see.”

  The good stuff. With Mr. Entwistle that could have meant one of two things, human blood or Crown Royal. My guess was, he meant blood. When he met me in the mental ward last year, I’d never fed as a true vampire. Ophelia kept me alive feeding me hemoglobin from farm stock. Mostly cows. But the human stuff takes us to the next level. The longer we drink it, the tougher we get.

  My friend walked back and strapped himself into a seat across from me.

  “How did he find you?” I asked.

  “I went back to the rave,” Charlie said. “I didn’t know where else to go. I was hoping my friends would still be there so I could find a place to crash. Figure ou
t what to do. But Entwistle was there waiting.”

  “How did he know to go there?”

  “Best way to find someone,” Mr. Entwistle said, “go to a place they’ve already been. We are creatures of habit.”

  I looked at Charlie and he shrugged. I guess his theories about hiding needed some work.

  “I still don’t get it,” I said to Mr. Entwistle. “How did you know to go there?”

  The old vampire glanced back over his shoulder. “To the rave? I was there earlier, following another vampire. You can imagine my surprise when you two young bloods ran out of the place.”

  “He was the one outside,” Charlie added. “The one who dropped from the roof.”

  “Then who was the other vampire?” I asked.

  Mr. Entwistle pressed his eyes to the viewer in front of him. “The one inside. He was a Coven agent.”

  I looked at Charlie and swallowed. His pupils were expanding to a more frantic size. “They sent him to kill us,” he said. “When we took off, he went straight to your house to wait. Entwistle got there before us, and the two of them started fighting.”

  “Is that why there was so much blood?” I asked.

  The old vampire, grunted. “Not exactly. I was hoping to talk some sense into him. I guess I was bleeding a little. Then Mr. Hyde showed up and tore him to pieces. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

  “Who’s Mr. Hyde?” I asked.

  “That thing from the zoo,” Charlie answered.

  “What was it? It moved so fast, we could hardly see it.”

  Mr. Entwistle answered. “Mr. Hyde? I’m not sure, but I have my suspicions.”

  “Is it a vampire?”

  “I doubt it.”

  “How do you know his name?”

  “I don’t, but we need to call him something. Thank God he hates the water. I damn near bled to death getting away. Even after a few pints of the good stuff and a day of sleep, I’m still not quite myself.”

  Well, Mr. Entwistle looked exactly the same as he had last year. A little messier perhaps. But not a day older.

  “Where have you been all this time?” I asked. “I don’t understand.”

  “Vampires my age are hard to kill, boy. Fire and sunlight might be the only sure ways. When that bomb of your uncle’s went off, it buried me in rubble. I dug in deep. It insulated me from the worst of the heat. But I had to wait a few weeks to surface. My body was a mess. Burnt. Broken. It took weeks to heal. . . . The trouble was over by then, so I went home.”

  “Where’s that?” Charlie asked.

  “Merry old England. I needed information. But as soon as things started to fall apart here, I came back. That’s John Entwistle in a nutshell—the best foul-weather friend you’re likely to find.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?” I said.

  “What? That I was alive. I’m telling you now. You’re doing fine, aren’t ya?”

  The correct answer was no. I’d been gassed, shot twice, thrown through two sets of doors, and run full bore into a cement wall. My eyes stung from the tear gas, and the rumbling of the armored car had my body shaking like a pebble in a tin can. Everything but my eyebrows was sore. Still, I didn’t want to complain. He’d just broken me out of jail.

  “Do you have any blood?” I asked.

  “No,” Mr. Entwistle said. “I used the last of my stash after getting trashed by the fleabag in Round-Two-at-the-Zoo. I lost the first round near your house on Hunter. So my store is all tapped out. Except what’s flowing in my veins, but that would probably kill you.”

  “Why? I’ve never understood that.”

  “I don’t know exactly. I imagine it’s because the pathogen behaves differently in different people. It changes us. And some changes just aren’t compatible.”

  It made sense. Kind of. He eased up on one lever. I felt myself shift sideways as the car turned a corner.

  “What was with the wolves?” Charlie asked.

  “Reinforcements,” Mr. Entwistle said. “I needed the help. But that creature is something else. Stronger than anything I’ve ever seen, and I’ve been to Venice Beach.” He glanced back at me. “You sure you’re all right? You look a little woozy.”

  He was starting to slide out of focus, but I didn’t say anything. I had too many questions. “How did you know I was in jail?”

  “I have a few contacts in the department. And I monitor the police radios.”

  “What was going on with that boy they brought in?” I asked.

  Mr. Entwistle sighed. “Poor Shawn. I told him he could borrow my car, then called the cops and reported it stolen. Not very neighborly of me. But they wouldn’t let you have any visitors. Some new terrorist legislation. So I needed to get someone else inside so I could visit them and scope things out.”

  That didn’t seem fair to Shawn, and I said so.

  “Oh, it won’t do any permanent harm,” Mr. Entwistle said. “I’ll have the charges dropped, but it probably won’t be necessary. The cops will put two and two together. They’re not stupid. But don’t lose any sleep over this. We’ve got bigger problems.”

  “Where are we going?” Charlie asked.

  “Little Lake.”

  That seemed like an odd destination. There was nothing there but water. “Why?” I asked.

  “This is an aquatic car. They won’t be able to follow us.”

  “Are you joking?”

  “You’ll know when I’m joking. It will be funny. Didn’t you notice the tires on this thing?”

  I had. They looked big enough for a tractor. “Where did you get it?”

  “The shell is military, special order. The tires are designed for a bulldozer. The electronics I did myself. The engine, too. One of the perks of being around since the preindustrial era. I’ve been able to follow the evolution of the engine from the steamship to the nuclear sub. Same for computers. It’s what you have to do. Keep up with the times. An old dog who can’t learn new tricks gets mired in the past. Then you get buried with it.”

  It was an odd message to hear from a guy who looked as if he’d walked straight off the set of Oliver Twist—with a detour through a mudslide. But I had no doubt it was true. If you were stuck in the past, and the past disappeared, where did it leave you? Floundering in an unknown world. That wasn’t Mr. Entwistle. I’d once been in his house. For every old book on his shelf, he had a dozen magazines scattered on the floor. Computers, cars, science, business. Like Ophelia, he was interested in everything. It must have been how they stayed connected to the present.

  The car lurched left, then right. We hit something hard and it tossed me back against the wall. Fortunately, a padded headrest was mounted right where it was needed.

  “What was that?” I asked.

  “Roadblock.”

  “Are we through?”

  “Easily.”

  The car dropped and I heard a splash. The rumble of the wheels stopped. So did the jostling. We were bobbing, instead. “We’re on the water now,” Mr. Entwistle told me.

  . . . on the water now. That sounded as comforting as “we’re going back to jail.” It wasn’t that I hated the water. I just really, really, really didn’t like it. Really. I unbuckled myself and walked to the front for a better view. When I pressed my eyes over the lenses, everything looked green. I could see the far shoreline, but that was it.

  “Is there a way to see out the back, or to the side?” I wanted to know what kind of mess we’d left behind, and what the near bank looked like, the one that was closest to the police station.

  “There are small windows on each side. You can take the helm in a second and I’ll check things out.” He started unfastening the harness that held him in place.

  I put my eyes back to the lenses, then I started to get dizzy. The bleeding in my shoulder and thigh had stopped, but I was still sore. I was going to need blood. And a week of sleep. Charlie took hold of my arm. I hadn’t even noticed him get up and step over.

  “You look like you’re about to pass out.�
�� He stared at me for a few seconds, then helped me into my seat.

  The car was moving ahead by itself. Behind us, Mr. Entwistle removed something from his coat—the bottle of whiskey he’d brought into the police station.

  “Saints preserve us!” he said, raising it to his lips. When he was finished, he walked over to the side of the cockpit and lifted a thin screen. It covered an elliptical porthole set above the bench. “Dammit,” he snapped. He walked to the other side, uncovered the window opposite, continued to curse, then did the same at the back.

  “What is it?” I put my hands on my knees and tried to push myself to my feet, but I wasn’t feeling steady, so I stayed, unbelted, in the seat.

  “The shore to either side is being monitored. Cruisers are everywhere. I’d hope to float down the river and exit farther along, where they couldn’t be waiting for us, but there’s a boat on the water. They can follow our every move. How could they have managed that so quickly?”

  “It’s the summer,” Charlie said. “They always have a boat out this time of year. And usually a few Jet Skis.”

  “We can’t outrun them in this. It’s designed for power. Not speed.” Mr. Entwistle took another sip of whiskey. “That Ford Mustang is looking pretty good right now.”

  “We wouldn’t have made it out of the garage,” I said. “And that roadblock would have stopped us cold.”

  “Quite right.”

  “Should we abandon ship?” Charlie asked.

  Mr. Entwistle looked horrified. “There are twenty-four hundred horses under this hood. I’m not abandoning this treasure. That’s blasphemy.”

  I stood up and looked through the window that faced the downtown. Under the streetlights a row of police cars were lined up bumper to bumper, their red and blue lights flashing across the neighboring buildings. We were crawling past.

  Charlie edged in beside me to take a look. “We don’t have a chance. We’d be better off getting out to swim. You can paddle a canoe faster than this thing.”