What in the world was going on?
“Something happened to Mandy,” Jill said, unable to tear her gaze away. Anything at all going wrong over there brought the sobering effects of her waking nightmare.
They all jumped when the phone rang.
“Get the phone!” Rick barked.
“I’ve got to go see if Mandy’s okay,” Tina said, clambering to her feet and staggering to the door.
The phone rang again.
“For the love of God, man! Get the phone!”
“Settle down,” Ray snapped, crawling toward the computer table. “You could always get up and get it yourself, you know!”
Jill watched Tina shuffling between parked cars, hair already wet and sapped to her face, the wind buffeting her sideways as she crossed the street without looking. The wind shifted too quickly, hammering the window with raindrops that sounded like hail, then ripping them away on the same breath.
“Hello?” Ray answered, sliding beside Jill to watch his girlfriend out the window. Tina was across the street and on the lawn now. She held her right hand over her eyes to shield them from the rain. “Oh… Hi, mom.”
“Something’s wrong,” Jill said, her hand trembling as she pulled the curtains further back.
“No, I haven’t. We’ve been—”
The wind picked up with a roar, nearly knocking the group of girls from their feet. Tina started to fall, but caught herself on Sarah’s shoulder. Jill could only think of her vision…of corpses piled atop each other where her sorority sisters stood at that very moment. She reached out and touched the glass over Tina.
It was warm.
“No way!” Ray said, turning from the window and clapping his free hand over his left ear. “You’ve got to be—”
Static buzzed in his ear.
“Mom…?” he whispered, then louder: “Mom!”
“What is it?” April asked.
“Come on, Gorman. It’s your turn,” Rick said.
“Mom?” He hung up the receiver. “We got cut off.”
“Is everything alright?” April asked, tension forcing its way through her voice.
Ray had noticeably paled.
“My mom…she said terrorists hit LA.”
“Seriously?” Rick shouted. “Turn on the TV!”
Ray looked past Jill out the window. Tina was hurrying back across the street, arms wrapped around her chest, face down to shield it from the pounding rain.
Darren grabbed the remote control from the coffee table and turned on the television.
“…in an unprecedented attack on the most powerful nation in the world…”
Darren switched the channel.
“…Al Qaeda operatives have already claimed responsibility for…”
Click.
“…the devastation. All we can clearly see through the massive wall of smoke is that there are no buildings left standing in downtown Manhattan.”
“Mom?” Ray gasped.
Click.
“Turn it back!” Ray shouted.
Click.
“…five boroughs, roughly thirty times the population of Hiroshima in 1945, when nearly one hundred forty thousand people were killed. The crater is estimated to be roughly six miles in diameter, with the shockwaves from the blast being felt hundreds of miles to the north past the Canadian border.”
“Oh, God,” Ray sobbed, dropping to his knees.
Tina burst through the front door, the wind rushing past her.
“Mandy just found out that terrorists nuked Atlanta,” she said, spitting through the sheen of water soaking her face. “Her family lives down there.”
She looked to Ray, who was curled in a fetal position on the floor.
“They got New York, too,” Darren said softly.
“Ray…” she cried, dropping atop him and wrapping her arms around him.
“…details are still unclear, but massive amounts of radiation exposure should be expected within five miles from the edges of the blast zone. Late effects may be felt as far west as Philadelphia, and there’s no way of knowing how long it will take the biological damage to manifest itself.”
“They’re probably fine,” Tina whispered, stroking Ray’s hair. She looked to the others with tears mingling into the streams of rainwater draining down her face.
“Guys…” Jill whispered.
“…officials have vowed that reprisals will be swift and proportionate…”
The bug zapper flared with blinding light and a sound like stomped bubble wrap.
“…reports indicate that nuclear-armed warships are already in place in the Middle East and awaiting the order…”
“Guys!” Jill screamed.
“What is it, Jill?” April shouted, whirling to see what had her friend so panicked.
What looked like a baseball bounced in the middle of the street, followed quickly by two more. The front yard was already dotted with them.
There was a bang on the roof. Then another.
The crash of a shattered window and the immediate wail of a car alarm.
The banging grew so loud that it was all they could hear. Even shouting over it proved to be to no avail. Hailstones bounced from the hoods and roofs of the parked cars outside, leaving dents that could hold grapefruit halves.
A loud boom from upstairs.
Ray whirled in time to see a ball of ice bounce down the staircase onto the landing.
One of the upstairs windows shattered.
“Everyone get away from the window!” Darren screamed, but not even he could hear his own voice.
He grabbed April by the arm and yanked her from the couch, sending her sprawling to the floor. His next move was to reach for Jill, but before he could even extend his arm, the window shattered, dropping piles of wicked shards onto the couch, throwing smaller fragments into the room.
Jill screamed and whirled away, covering her head with her arms. Streams of warm blood already coursed down her forearms from slanted gashes.
Hail the size of fists fired through the open window, striking the soft flesh of their hunched backs and thighs hard enough to draw unheard wails of agony.
The drumming from the roof was deafening.
Slowly, the barrage of hail tapered off until it sounded like a dripping faucet from the heavens slapping what remained of the tattered roof, cracking on the sidewalk outside like a hammer on a skull.
Jill rose, glancing across the demolished living room. Tina lay atop Ray, moaning. There was a tangle of hair knotted with blood where one of the stones had bludgeoned her above the right ear. Darren had managed to scurry across the shattered glass to cover April, his bleeding hands trembling atop his head.
She didn’t see Rick at first, not until she took her first step toward the remnants of the shattered window and noticed his wide eyes peering up at her from beneath the coffee table.
White balls covered the floor in a room filled with meek sobs and pained groans.
Jill crawled across the couch, knocking dozens of cue balls to the floor, glass fragments grinding beneath her knees, slicing open the thick skin covering her kneecaps.
A few straggling hailstones struck outside like the last lingering effects of a meteor shower.
There was so much hail that it looked as though there was a good three inches of snow covering the lawn and cars.
Car alarms were drowned out only by sirens rising from the night.
Jill screamed.
Across the street, Mandy, Liz, and Sarah lay still on the lawn, piled atop each other. Crimson flowed freely from a hole in Mandy’s head like a toppled bucket. The bruises were already blossoming on her skin like spots on a Dalmatian. Neither of the other two moved, though from the way Liz’s lower leg bent to the side, revealing the sharpened ends of the splintered tibia and fibula, Jill didn’t suspect that they might any time soon.
“Is everyone okay?” Rick asked sheepishly from under the table, finally summoning the strength to crawl out.
“Tina!”
Ray yelled, rolling out from beneath her and slapping her cheek. Twin rivulets of blood rolled from the wound down to her chin. “Wake up! Don’t you leave me like this! Tina!”
The bug zapper still glowed a sickly blue, the frame broken in a dozen places, the wire enclosure smashed. One of the thin vertical bulbs flickered and died.
With a loud snap, a spark popped between the lights. Then another. And another, until it started to more closely resemble a fountain firecracker.
Jill looked quickly to the shattered window frame, jagged shards protruding from the rubber seam like a wolf’s teeth.
The bodies across the street. Still. Unmoving.
Her vision assaulted her.
“We have to get out of here,” she whispered, chest starting to heave.
She whirled and faced the others, oblivious to the blood running down her forehead from the seam along her hairline.
“We have to get out of here!” she screamed at the top of her lungs.
Chapter 4
I
Northern Iran
IN ANOTHER LIFE, DEATH HAD KNOWN THIS RANCH WELL. HIS GRANDPARENTS had toiled in the sand trying to grow vegetation where it had never been meant to grow, instead herding goats through the barren desert, leading them from one small pocket of wild grasses to the next. As a child, he had never been this far down the dirt road, especially this close to the main house. The memories of that long ago life were now only spectral reminders of a world now dying, and what he had become did not come back to the site of his childhood to reminisce.
He led them past the side of the house that now appeared far smaller and more insignificant than it had through the wide eyes of his youth. The masters were within behind boarded windows, cowering beneath the floor in shelters that would never withstand what was to come. He didn’t feel pity for them, nor did he feel anger. Though they had whipped his body to within inches of the afterlife on several occasions, he didn’t wish what was to come upon them. They were simply flickering flames atop candles down there in the dusty darkness, and with a single breath they would be extinguished.
Even the bleating child, whose cries he could feel beneath the sand under foot as his mother tried to comfort him, held no emotional sway. Their souls would soon be released to join with God, where there would no longer be any pain.
Death led the others past the house toward the structure behind, listening to the scuffle of their tread across the windblown sand.
A long barn stood at the rear of the homestead, a rickety wooden structure more than a hundred feet long, surrounded by a split-rail fence that had to have enclosed more than an acre of sand and weeds gnawed all the way to the ground. He had never been allowed here as a child, yet he knew this was where he was supposed to come. Frantic neighing and whinnying erupted from inside as the occupants sensed their approach.
They moved like shadows, dust blowing sideways from their heels, leaving scorched earth in their wake.
The thunder of pounding hooves echoed from within amidst equine screams.
Death stopped before the front doors of the stable, where he lowered his black head and knelt before the structure. The others stayed behind him, their long shadows stretching past him before rising again against the barn doors.
He raised his right fist to the sky, which responded with a crash of thunder. The clouds grew darker overhead, racing in circles around them in the stratosphere, grumbling angrily.
Death slammed his fist straight down into the ground, which parted easily for his passage, allowing his arm into the crusted sand well past his elbow.
He jerked it back like a rattler from a gopher’s den, a circular clay disc clasped tightly in his palm.
Reverently, he held it from his body, symbol-etched side to the sky, and laid it before him on the well-tread sand.
The sky roiled and coughed, causing the ground to tremble.
A bolt of lightning stabbed from the clouds, striking the center of the seal. Connected to the sky, the stream of electricity snapped back and forth, warring between the earth and the heavens. The ground shuddered and the sky boomed, the lightning trying madly to tear free, jerking from side to side.
With an explosion of thunder, the seal split down the middle. The electrical lance drilled into the ground, splitting the hard tundra, a crack racing away from the point of impact toward the barn door, and then beneath. The earth opened behind it in a soundless scream, molten lava spilling forth like blood.
The lightning bolt vanished back into the clouds, which slowly dissipated like ripples from a cannonball.
Flames caught on the weathered wood, quickly racing up the doors toward the roof.
Death rose from his knees, planting one foot to either side of the seething fissure. Reflected flames flashed across his serpentine eyes, shimmering on his scaled flesh.
Frightened, the animals within bucked and thrashed, kicking hooves through the decrepit walls.
Their screams sounded almost human.
The desert trembled beneath the contained stampede. Smoke poured out the small windows from each stall, flames creeping up the outer walls toward the roof, where the raging tongues already chased the thick black ashes fifteen feet into the sky. Sections of the charcoaled thatch crumbled inward, releasing a swell of curling blackness into the sky, showering the hay-lined stables with fiery embers.
The smell of burnt hair crept out from beneath the closed doors, followed rapidly by the mouthwatering aroma of cooking meat.
“Rebirth,” Death said. “Baptism by fire.”
The doors exploded outward, blasting flames and smoldering chunks of burning wood across them where they stood. An enormous stallion charged through the billowing smoke, flames rising from his long mane.
Death moved fluidly: taking a step to the side and then reaching for the burning strip of hair. He was jerked from his feet, but before the burning beast could rise to buck him, Death was astride him, fists curled into his burning mane, legs gripping his smoldering sides. The steed bolted another ten yards before his front legs crumpled beneath him, driving his snout into the sand.
Dust swirled around them, blending with the ashen smoke.
Though it laid still, the stallion still burned, issuing flames up Death’s arms, small fires burning from the beast’s long tail and eyelashes. Its heaving breaths and pounding heart shuddered and then stilled between Death’s thighs. As the flesh cooked, it blackened and sloughed off, breaking apart and disintegrating on contact with the sand. Yet Death still sat atop his back, engulfed in flames as muscle gave way to bone, burning until there was nothing of substance left to consume. A smoldering, scorched skeleton, held together by knotted joints of cartilage, knelt beneath its master as though praying before an altar.
“Arise Harbinger,” Death said in a voice that boomed like an avalanche.
Flames burst from the blackened eye sockets, flaring with sentience. Snorting twin plumes of smoke from what remained of its nostrils, the stallion rose to its feet with Death perched on its exposed vertebral column, knees pressed to its scapulae. Wisps of fire crackled from the spinous processes of its long neck where once the lush mane had grown, a matching tail flaring from the stub of the terminal end of the spine.
Death grabbed hold of the flames with his reptilian claws and gave them a stern tug.
Harbinger made a screaming sound like wind through a tunnel and rose to its full height on bony hind legs, exposing its vacant abdomen, the charred ribcage enclosing nothing but emptiness. It flailed at the air with its front legs, capped with the smoking remains of its hooves, before slamming them to the ground with force enough to cause waves in the sand.
It lowered its head and blasted steam from above its bared teeth, melting the sand to glass. Tendrils of flame crawled over the ridges of its brow from the white-hot orbs within the sockets.
Death trotted the beast in a circle until he again faced the blackened barn, drifting in and out of the smoke that consumed it.
War rode from th
e flames atop an enormous mare, his crimson armor scored with scorch marks. Spikes jutted from the beast’s neck where the mane had once been: twin sharpened rows forming a ridge of V’s like so many gazelle’s horns. He held a pair of the spines underhand in his fists as though he intended to curl them, razor-sharp ridges protruding from his knuckles. Flames lapped from the mare’s frontal bone from sockets that burned redder than a branding iron. It exuded power with its wide stance, the burning eyes seeing everything at once.
The sand caught fire where its hooves stabbed the earth.
With War upon it, the mare towered over Death and his steed. Its name was Thunder, for with each fearful stride, the heavens shook.
Famine followed through the belching midnight cloud atop a skeletal mare. No fire burned in its hollow sockets, only a rich blackness that sucked in the light with ebon rays like tendrils. Smoke as black as the breath of a charnel fire poured in a steady stream from its nostrils. Bramble filled its mane, riddled with thorns and barbs, snaking around its master’s ravaged wrists like reins. Thistle trailed as a long tail from its haunches, dragging along the ground like a bridal train, grinding even the smallest grains of sand to dust. Scourge was its name, for in its passage the earth itself grew infertile for all but the most feral of vegetation; lush greenery metamorphosed into inedible briars.
Locusts crawled beneath Famine’s taut flesh like wriggling tumors. The smaller mare clopped forward, sending a wall of dust along the wind in its wake, sidling up to the others with a snort and a shake of its head.
Pestilence was the last to emerge from the burning stables before the roof collapsed with an explosion of fiery embers. The walls toppled behind the transformed steed, blasting a gust of smoke and flames across the stallion and its diminutive rider. Its master’s mummified body perched atop its strong back, from which an inordinate amount of ribs emerged, enclosing not just the thoracic region, but the abdomen as well. Serpentine tails grew from its skeletal neck like so many hairs, slithering all the way over the crown of the skull between eyes like the reflective surface of a placid mountain lake, held in spherical drops despite gravity. Ripples crossed through the water as though something swam beneath. Its long tail was crocodilian, swishing from side to side as it dragged through the sand. Twin ridges tapered from the pelvis to where they joined at the tip of the tail, which lightened in color steadily until it became indistinguishable from the desert sand.
The Fall Page 18
