It Happened One Doomsday

by Laurence MacNaughton

  She marched to the corner of the room, where the wall safe installed by a previous tenant was hidden behind a framed photo of Ming the Merciless. Over his enormous, smooth forehead, someone had drawn a word balloon on a yellow sticky note that read, “Pathetic Earthlings! Who can save you now?”

  Opal looked up from the book she was reading and followed Dru’s gaze to Ming’s forehead and back. “Oh, no. Tell me you’re not breaking that thing out.”

  “I have to,” Dru said firmly. Ignoring Opal’s warning look, she took down Ming’s picture and started working the combination dial on the safe.

  Opal stood up. “For real? It’s not bad enough we had to outsmart a two-thousand-year-old sorcerer’s ghost to lock that thing away. What was his name again?”

  “Decimus the Accursed,” Dru muttered.

  “Decimus the Accursed,” Opal repeated. “Now why do you want to go and get that bad mojo out again and risk blowing up the city?”

  Rane looked from Opal back to Dru and lifted her chin. “So who’s this Decimus dude?”

  “Sorcerer in ancient Rome. Not exactly a swell guy.” Dru got the safe open and pulled out the thick black rubber Hazmat-certified gloves she kept in there. “He built an impenetrable palace in Pompeii, surrounded by walls of magic warding spells.” With a grunt, Dru pulled out a crushingly heavy lead-lined box and set it down on a nearby end table, making it creak. “Decimus drew his evil power from infernal spells that scores of generations of sorcerers had placed on Mount Vesuvius. His enemies were so desperate to stop him that they wiped out the entire city to get him.”

  “The entire city?” Rane said. “How?”

  “With this.” Dru undid the latches on the box with a sound like gunshots going off, one by one. She lifted the lid, wrinkling her nose at the musty smell that left a sharp, metallic taste in the back of her throat.

  Inside the box, sitting in a square nest of foam rubber, sat a fist-sized angular crystal formed of thousands of stacked hexagonal layers, each one paper-thin, as dark as the darkest tinted glass. Dru carefully reached in with her gloved hand and picked up the crystal. Its black angles glittered with menace. “It’s called biotite. It’s a little bit radioactive.”

  “Radioactive?” Rane’s eyes opened wide.

  Opal gave her a look that said, I told you so.

  “Only a little teensy bit radioactive. Not even enough to require a federal permit or anything,” Dru said, hating the way it made her sound defensive. She had nothing to hide. “Look, there’s no safe way to dispose of the biotite. And since this particular crystal has been charged with a huge amount of negative energy, I didn’t want it falling into the wrong hands. It’s not like I ever expected to actually use it myself. But this is an emergency.”

  Rane’s lips twitched into a frown. “So this is your plan? Nuke the Horsemen?”

  “Let’s call it plan B. If all else fails, we can use this.”

  Opal, arms folded, slowly shook her head side to side. “Nothing good is gonna come out of this, I’m here to tell you. You’ll be lucky if you don’t blow yourselves up.”

  “True. Not the world’s neatest idea.” Dru swallowed and explained it to Rane. “Biotite, if it’s charged up with enough power, can release destructive vibrations on a colossal scale. It literally reverses the bonds of magic, obliterating everything around it in a blast of total destruction. You want to talk about an uncontrolled chain reaction, this is it. Utter annihilation.” She held it out to Opal. “Here.”

  Opal stood stock-still. “Don’t think so, no.”

  “Fine.” Dru put the biotite crystal back in the box and latched it shut. The sudden relief in the room was almost palpable. She stripped off her gloves. “We’ll take this with us.”

  Rane looked like she’d just come face-to-face with a very large and poisonous insect, but she grabbed the box anyway. “Whatever. Where’s Greyson?”

  Opal pointed toward the back door.

  Rane headed that way but paused for a second in the doorway. Over her shoulder, she said, “Hey, when are you going to tell your dude what we did to his car?”

  For a split second, Dru thought she was referring to Hellbringer. And then she remembered Nate’s car. Smashed to pieces in the middle of the New Mexico desert.

  Oops.

  “I’ll figure something out,” Dru said. But right now, there was no time to worry about that. If they were going to fight the Horsemen, she needed to do more research. She pulled down a stack of leather-bound tomes from a narrow space just below the yellowing ceiling tiles.

  First The Grimoire of Diabolical Consorts. Then The Cyclopedia of Fallen Angels.

  While she was at it, she grabbed a trio of thick matching folios. A hand-lettered card clipped to the top book’s spine read, “Scioptic Whitchcraft and Calamituous Inscriptions Most Noxious.”

  “Sure,” she decided aloud. “Why not.”

  Staggering under the weight of the books, she headed up front, Opal following along. “Opal, do you remember those doomsday books we got from the Puritan Museum, the tall, smelly ones?”

  But instead of answering, Opal stopped by the cash register and stared out the shop’s front windows, a mystified look on her face.

  As Dru opened her mouth to ask what was wrong, bright lights shone through the night-darkened windows, illuminating Opal’s face. Outside, an engine roared, tires squealed, and Dru realized that the lights she was seeing were actually headlights. Aimed straight at them.

  The next instant, the entire front of the shop imploded.

  34

  THE END OF EVERYTHING

  The old white truck punched through the front of the shop like a giant metal fist, smashing everything in its path. Headlights blazing, it obliterated the front windows of the shop, then the shelves carefully stocked with glass jars of herbs, rare and delicate crystals, lovingly handcrafted good luck charms, and everything else Dru had accumulated over the years.

  Gone. Every bit of it, in an instant. Crushed, smashed, tossed aside in a tidal wave of destruction before the white Bronco.

  Bookshelves toppled and burst apart against its steel front bumper, one after another, falling like dominoes and flinging their contents into the air.

  Opal stood frozen at the counter, directly in the onrushing path of destruction.

  Dru had no time to plan, only to act. She dropped her books and sprang into motion, arms outstretched. Her legs churned, feeling as if they were stuck in mud. Even though Opal stood only a few strides away, it seemed like an endless stretch of distance. Dru couldn’t cover it in time. She couldn’t move fast enough.

  The growing wave of wreckage, driven by the headlights and chrome grill of the Horseman’s Bronco, rushed straight at them. The air filled with flying wreckage.

  Dru barely noticed. Her vision narrowed down to a single focus: saving Opal.

  She wrapped her arms around Opal, tackling her just as the avalanche of wreckage crashed down around them. The truck drove through the space where Opal had stood a half second before. Some unseen part of the truck caught Dru’s foot as it went by, twisting her in midair.

  Then the weight of broken shelves and falling debris buried her in darkness.

  For a few agonizing moments, Dru didn’t know whether she was dead or alive, which way was up or down, or if she was trapped in some kind of horribly vivid nightmare. But the pain of dozens of sharp objects digging into her body was all too real.

  She struggled to move, but she was pinned beneath crushing weight, pressed against the soft mass of Opal, whose tightly curled hair tickled her nose with the scent of knock-off Chanel.

  “Are you okay?” Dru said, but she couldn’t hear herself over the jagged roar of things falling and breaking. Dust choked the air, and the pressure on her back made it nearly impossible to breathe.

  “Opal?”

  No response.

  Dru got one arm free and shook Opal, carefully at first, then with frightened urgency. “Opal! Wake up!”

  T
errible thoughts swirled around her mind, but at a distance, as if they couldn’t make any impression on her. The destruction around her was too vast, too total, to comprehend. It floated on the surface of her consciousness like oil on water, unable to mix.

  The Horsemen were here. Her shop was gone. She was trapped. Opal could be dead.

  None of it registered.

  A scream built up inside some numb part of her, but it felt as if it belonged to someone else. She clamped down on it. She had to fight, even if she had no chance of winning.

  She had to fight right now.

  She twisted beneath the rubble until she worked her legs loose. After a couple of false starts, she pulled them in underneath her and pushed for all she was worth.

  The weight on her back resisted at first, then started to budge. A crack of flickering light shone in from beside her, brightening as she forced the gap wider. The light fell across Opal’s motionless form, her face turned sharply away, blood running across her cheek.

  Seeing Opal lying there, so still, sent a brutal rush of adrenaline coursing through Dru’s veins. She heaved with all her strength, lifting up against what she realized was a toppled bookshelf. Her whole body trembled with the effort.

  “Dru!” Greyson called to her. “Dru!”

  “Here!” she grunted.

  A moment later, two strong hands clamped on the edge of the bookshelf and lifted it, freeing her.

  She looked up into Greyson’s stubbled face, smudged with dust, red eyes wild. He pulled her from the rubble. “Dru!” he shouted. “Are you okay? Are you hurt?”

  Her glasses had been knocked loose, and she pushed them back up her nose. “Never mind me. It’s Opal.”

  Greyson’s jaw set in a grim line, and he shoved the bookshelf away, letting it topple to the side with a crash.

  Dru felt Opal’s warm neck for a pulse, but her hands shook so badly she couldn’t tell anything.

  Greyson knelt beside her and took over. “She’s breathing. We’ve got to get her out of here.” As he got his arms beneath Opal and lifted her free of the rubble, Dru turned to look in shock at all that remained of The Crystal Connection.

  The lights overhead flickered with a spastic crackle of electricity. The white Bronco had come to a stop in the center of her shop, surrounded on three sides by heaps of wreckage. Behind, its path was swept almost completely clean, from the gaping empty front windows all the way to the cash register, where the truck had finally stopped.

  The driver’s door creaked open, thumping against a broken wooden cabinet. Out of the driver’s seat stepped a hulking white creature, shiny and colorless as newly cleaned teeth. He loomed over the still-rumbling truck, his massive head turning left and right until his glowing sapphire-blue eyes focused on Greyson.

  Jagged horns jutted out from every part of the thing’s gnarled body, from his tree-trunk legs up to his colossal shoulders. More horns ringed the top of his head, each one curving out and up to a deadly point, the circle of horns forming an infernal crown.

  The hellish creature extended a single clawed finger at Greyson. He opened a mouth lined with knife-sharp canines, releasing a string of ropey drool as he spoke two words in a voice like fracturing rock.

  “Join. Us.”

  Dru turned immediately to Greyson, and the unwavering determination in his eyes blew away any doubts she had about him. He wasn’t about to complete the set and become the fourth Horseman, bringing about the end of the world.

  He had a plan, she could tell. Which was good, because right now, she had nothing.

  More car headlights flashed across the wreckage of the store. On the night-darkened street out in front, the red Mustang pulled up with a squeal of tires. The curvy silver Ferrari glided to a stop behind it. The other two Horsemen had arrived.

  She recognized the red reptilian Horseman from the mansion, the one that had erupted from the pit. As he stepped in through the gaping hole where the front windows had been, he produced a sword composed entirely of flames. Its flickering light reflected off his shiny scales and the carpet of broken glass. A sinuous purple tongue slipped between his jagged teeth and switched back and forth through the air.

  Close behind him came a translucent, skeletal creature with shimmering green eyes. This one scurried on lanky legs. His entire body seemed to be formed of glassy needles, fused together in a malformed mockery of a human skeleton. As he approached, he twitched fingers nearly as long as his forearms. The air between his finger bones wavered, rippling with intense heat or unholy energy.

  All three of the Horsemen stared hungrily at Greyson, who slowly lowered Opal’s limp form to the floor.

  “Wait, wait,” Dru said, her throat tight with worry. “What are you doing? Pick her up!”

  He shook his head, eyeing the Horsemen closing in on them. In a low voice, he said, “There’s no way I can get Opal out of here safely, not with them after me. Our only chance is if I distract them, lead them away.”

  It took her a second to find her voice again. “That won’t work.”

  “I can get them to chase me.” He tensed. “Ready?”

  “No. No!” This was a terrible plan, but she had nothing else. They needed to fight their way out, together. They needed Rane.

  Dru cupped her hands around her mouth, about to yell Rane’s name. But a blur of movement from the back of the shop beat her to it.

  The flickering fluorescent lights illuminated a streak of motion. Rane charged out of the darkness, gripping a rust-dotted length of iron pipe in both hands like a super-sized baseball bat. The flashes of light caught her in midstride as her body transformed into rust-mottled metal.

  With a flying leap, Rane came straight up behind the white Horseman, her lips drawn back from her teeth with savage fury. She swung the pipe around and down in a deadly arc with enough force to crush any mortal creature.

  Without turning his burning sapphire gaze away from Greyson, the white Horseman raised his horn-studded arm and swatted Rane’s blow aside.

  But Rane had fought demons and monsters all her life. And what the white Horseman hadn’t anticipated was that the metal pipe was a feint. A mere distraction.

  The real weapon was Rane herself.

  In one fluid motion, as the metal pipe spun away, Rane drove all of her mass and velocity fist-first into the base of the white Horseman’s skull, plowing him facedown onto the floor.

  He toppled with a resounding crash, Rane astride his back.

  “I’m on this,” Rane said, her voice ringing like empty pipe. “You two grab Opal.”

  Before Dru could respond, the red Horseman came at Rane with his flaming sword, swinging a fiery crescent at her head. She ducked under the blade, the crimson flames shining off the muscles flexing in her iron body. She stepped beneath the infernal sword and brought her fist up, twisting into the force of the blow.

  The impact lifted the red Horseman off his feet, hurling him into his pale skeletal companion. The two of them flew into the far wall, crushing one of the few shelves left intact.

  Greyson didn’t hesitate. He scooped up Opal again and motioned to Dru with a jerk of his head. She stumbled over the rubble, following him away from the fight, toward the back door.

  As Rane closed in on the other two Horsemen, ready to strike, the white Horseman stirred. He got one spiky arm beneath him and pushed himself upright. He stretched out his other arm, his empty fist pointed directly at Rane’s unguarded back.

  Dru didn’t know what that move meant, but it looked dangerous. “Rane! Behind you!”

  Rane turned, crouching down just as one of the white Horseman’s spiky horns shot out as if fired from a crossbow. It whistled across the open space of the demolished shop, missing Rane’s head by inches, and punched a hole through the far wall with a wicked splintering sound.

  Immediately, another horn sprouted into place on his arm.

  Rane dodged to the side, ducking and leaping as the white Horseman rapidly fired more horn spurs, chopping apart the wrec
kage around her.

  The other Horsemen got to their feet and closed in on either side. Suddenly on the defensive, Rane was quickly surrounded.

  “Keep going!” Greyson barked to Dru as he carried Opal toward the back of the shop.

  Sparking electrical wires hung down from the ceiling. The lights flickered on and off, illuminating the Horsemen of the Apocalypse fighting through the destroyed remains of her shop. Nothing was left standing, other than a few shelves of crystals along the periphery of the shop.

  The Horsemen were all surrounded by crystals, Dru realized. If only she could power them up.

  Dru quickly looked around. She needed copper wire, but there was no telling where her spool of wire had gone. Probably crushed under the white Bronco.

  She spotted an orange electrical extension cord. The wires in it were copper. There was no time or tools to strip the insulation off them, but it would have to do. She climbed over the massive pile of wreckage to where her biggest amethyst crystal still sat against one wall.

  “What are you doing?” Greyson shouted. “Come on!”

  As fast as she could, she tied one end of the cord into a loop and fastened it around the huge rock, then jabbed the three copper prongs at the end into the purple crystal.

  At the front of the shop, the red Horseman howled in triumph. Rane let out an agonized gasp, retreating from him with a sizzling red-hot gash glowing on her arm.

  “Dru!” Greyson waited for her. “Come on!”

  “I need your help!” Dru charged across the shop, stumbling over debris. The cord wasn’t long enough to reach the knee-high mountain of smoky quartz in the other corner. “Greyson!”

  He left Opal somewhere in back, out of sight, and ran to Dru, looking as if he was about to drag her off by force. “We need to go!”

  “Not without Rane.” She put as much fierceness into her voice as she could, and Greyson stopped short. She held out the electrical cord to him. “Take this.”

  Though obviously puzzled, he took the cord.

  “You remember the circle I put under your car? This is a big, ugly version of that. When I say so, grab my hand. But not until I say.” She stepped up to the monstrous smoky quartz and put her palm flat against its cold, rough-hewn point. She drew in a deep breath and shouted, “Rane! Bail out!”