“The day of the Lord is great; it is dreadful.
Who can endure it?”
-Joel 2:11
Chapter One
The world ended on the last Monday in September, three days after my sixteenth birthday.
I sat between my mother and my twin brother on a hard pew in the Roslyn Bible Church, a stone mausoleum built in the Dark Ages, watching my cousin Felicity marry Roger Freeman. I barely knew the bride. I’d never met the groom. As far as I could tell, neither of them cared whether I was there or not.
I cared.
The forecast called for snow that night, so my best friend, Alyson, and I wanted to grab a quad ride up to Crystal Creek before the park service closed the trail for the season. But, thanks to my mother, I had to sit through this lame religious ceremony first.
While the happy couple stood beneath a wedding arch of baby’s breath and white roses, pledging their undying love, I stared at the back of my hand and tried to figure out if a tribal or a color tattoo would look better against my pale skin and faint freckles. My mother noticed and nudged me with her elbow. I clenched my jaw, turning a dark scowl back to the spectacle in front of me. Why did anyone even bother with marriage anymore? It never lasted. Case in point: my own parents. They weren’t exactly happy these days.
My mom had taken my four-wheeler hostage to force me to this wedding. That had been—in baseball and felony terms—her third strike. Her second strike had been refusing to let me go to homecoming with Eric Hawk, something I’d never forgive her for.
No, because she said so.
I pictured myself—a sophomore—showing up at homecoming with Eric—a senior—in his black Mustang, his red-tailed hawk tattoo peeking out from under his rolled-up sleeve. It would have been awesome. Nope. My mom had found the perfect cruel and unusual punishment.
I wasn’t in love with Eric or anything. Like most high school jocks, he was kind of a jerk, but the day he’d asked me to homecoming, I’d gotten twenty-three new follows on Trill.
Mom used to be more chill. She had a 24/7 open-door policy, which meant my brother and I could talk to her about anything, anytime. But talking to her hadn’t helped much lately, not since she’d started going to church. That had been her first strike.
None of us understood why she’d done it, not even Dad. She’d been a rational human being her entire life, then one Sunday she’d gotten out of bed and gone to a service. My parents fought about it all the time. Dad tried to make her see reason; he asked why she needed religion, why we weren’t enough for her. Mom always answered the same way. She encouraged him to go to church, which none of us would ever do.
Her conversion really messed things up for me and my brother. She disapproved of everything we did: our music, our movies, our friends. She insisted on praying over every meal—even in restaurants, even in McDonalds. It was humiliating. If anybody from school ever spotted her praying over my McNuggets, I’d never hear the end of it.
I’d told her that last week when she asked why I refused to eat out with her anymore. At that point, she’d threatened to pull me and my brother out of Cle Elum-Roslyn High School and enroll us in Mountain Christian Academy. They wear uniforms and take Bible classes every day at that school.
I just didn’t get it. They say Christians have family values or whatever, but Mom’s new religion was tearing our family apart. Lately, my dad practically lived at work, my brother rarely came out of his cave in the basement, and I spent most of my time at Alyson’s house. At least my friend’s mother respected her kids enough to let them live their own lives.
Up front, the pastor—we’d heard a lot about Pastor Rick lately—droned on and on about love, commitment, faithfulness, and mercy. Every now and then the wedding guests shouted a passionate “Amen!” I passed the time wondering what my mom would do if I came home with a red-tailed hawk like Eric’s tattooed into the back of my hand.
Probably cut my arm off.
According to my mother’s new religion only heathens wore tattoos, which probably explained why she wouldn’t let me go to the dance with Eric. Thanks to Jesus and people like Pastor Rick, I was destined to remain a nobody who’d had a fleeting shot at popularity. My life was a wasteland.
I slumped down in the pew.
When the pastor started reading from the Bible, my brother David shifted beside me. He’d been fidgeting and chewing his nails since we sat down. He wasn’t any happier to be there than I was, but at least mom hadn’t forced him to wear an ugly purple dress she’d pulled off a discount rack. She’d even found a pair of flowery shoes to match the baby roses she’d jammed in my braided hair. I looked like a cake.
In contrast, David wore a classy pair of blue pants and a gray button-down shirt. Mom had even let him wear his black sneakers because she couldn’t find dress shoes to fit him. On rare occasions, my brother’s condition worked in his favor.
Although David had been granted the distinct honor of entering this world three minutes and twenty-three seconds before me, he’d been born with a rare bone disorder called achondroplasia. Among other things, it causes dwarfism. My twin brother stood only four feet four inches tall. I almost always felt guilty about being bigger, stronger, and more coordinated, but it was okay. His resentment balanced things out.
His back was too bent to play sports, his legs were too bowed to climb trees, and his arms were too short to ride a quad. But what my brother lacked in physical ability, he made up for in intelligence. He’d read his first book at two, become a chess master at ten, and made himself a fully functional jetpack at twelve. My brother David was the smartest person I knew. Since our father was a Nobel Prize-winning geneticist, that was saying something.
David caught me staring at his legs, which stuck straight out from the pew, and kicked me hard in the knee. He didn’t like being stared at. But I wasn’t trying to be mean, I was imagining what his legs would look like when they grew as long as mine, when our father finally finished working on the cure he’d been promising David for years.
My brother dreamed of growing straight and tall like me. Now Dad was close to completing animal trials. If all went well, David might begin treatment by the end of the year. Last week I’d caught him looking at basketball hoops on Amazon. Yeah, my brother was a little bit excited.
I retaliated by jamming my elbow into his ribs. He whimpered like an abused puppy, earning me a stern look from our mom. I expected my parents to take David’s side; they usually did. Today it gave me one more reason to be mad at Mom and I ran with it.
When the ceremony finally ended, the bride and groom kissed, turned to accept their applause, and then paraded up the aisle, arm in arm.
Our mother stood, gesturing for us to do the same. “Everybody stands when the bride and groom walk by,” she whispered.
Rolling our eyes in unison, my brother and I reluctantly stood. “Dead man walkin’,” David whispered. I bit my lip to hide a laugh.
BOOM! The deep sound broke the air. It shook the church, rattling the enormous stained glass window behind the stage. The giant bell banged in the steeple high above my head. I grabbed the pew in front of me, craning my neck upward. The plaster ceiling cracked.
The bride and groom stopped in the middle of the aisle. Felicity’s eyes went wide with shock; she dropped her bouquet.
Her new husband bent down to pick up the flowers. “Sorry, God,” he drawled. “It’s too late to protest now.”
The congregation fluttered with nervous laughter.
“It’s just a fighter jet from McChord, folks,” Pastor Rick assured us. “Nothing to worry about.”
A low rumble started beneath the floorboards. My feet tingled with the sensation. David looked down—he felt it, too. The rumble grew louder; the vibration grew stronger. Everyone in the church started talking at once.
David leaned past me and grabbed Mom’s hand. “We need to leave.” The urgency in his voice made the hair on my arms stand up.
Mom nodded, shuffling us toward the a
isle. The shuddering lurched into an all-out roll that knocked us back down onto the pew.
Car alarms wailed outside, sirens blared, shrieks went up from the wedding guests. The bride and groom fell to their knees halfway to the exit doors. No one knew whether to sit, stand, or run.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” the pastor called from the front of the church. “Please try to stay calm. We seem to be having a minor earthquake.”
I looked at David, staring into wide green eyes identical to my own, and a chill raced up my spine. My brother looked pale, nervous. That’s when I got scared.
We got back on our feet again. The bell over our heads clanged like crazy; the ground beneath us sounded like an engine accelerating. I half-expected a freight train to come barreling through the floor.
“This church has been here for a long time!” the pastor called out a bit louder. “We are perfectly safe!”
Perfectly safe?
The deep rumble of the quake surged up through the foundation of the building and bounced it like a toy. I watched, amazed, as the stained glass window behind the man of God rippled like a living thing. It expanded and contracted; its blue, green, and gold colors rolling like a shimmering wave.
“Mom!” David shouted above the roar. “We have to get out of here!”
The pastor lifted his Bible over his head. “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not—”
The stained glass window exploded from its casement. It shattered into a million pieces, a sharp hurricane of glass knifing across the stage toward the pews. Mom shoved us to the floor, then fell on top of us. My bare knees dug hard into the vibrating, polished wood. I heard screams—a baby crying—people praying. My brother’s ragged breathing echoed in my ears.
I squeezed my eyes shut and willed it to end. But this was only the beginning.
Mom pulled us to our feet. I steadied myself as the church rocked all around us. “Are you two all right?” she shouted over the thundering noise.
She gave us a frantic once-over, then turned toward the exit. She had tiny pieces of glass embedded in her back and shoulders. Droplets of blood oozed through her beautiful print dress and slid down her slender, bare arms. I opened my mouth to tell her, but she pulled us toward the aisle again.
Wailing, crying people, most of them covered in stained glass and blood, froze in shock. Others stared at the pastor, who had gone quiet.
My brain screamed not to look at him, but I did anyway.
Pastor Rick Cole had fallen to his knees, his Bible clutched in his hands, his eyes and mouth open in a look of surprise. For a moment I thought he was okay. Then I saw the long, jagged piece of golden glass jutting from the side of his neck. He gurgled and toppled to the stage.
That’s when all hell broke loose.
Screaming parishioners shoved each other aside and charged the aisles. Roger Freeman tried to escort his wife to the door, but the wedding party stampeded over her. A loud groaning pulled my eyes upward. The ceiling was gone. It lay in heaps all around us. I stared into the steeple—into the deep, dark underbelly of the heavy iron bell clanging madly against its frame. It rocked. It shuddered. And then it fell.
My mother grabbed the ruffles on the front of my dress and yanked me into the aisle beside my brother. The bell flew past, stealing my breath. It crashed down through the pews where we’d been sitting and into the basement.
The church was coming apart.
My instincts turned me toward the back of the building. Screaming people stacked up against the exit, pounding at doors that had shifted and refused to open. My mom hauled my brother onto her hip and pulled me in tight with her other arm. She dragged us down the aisle in the other direction. We clambered onto the platform where the elegant wedding arch had been, stepping on white roses and baby’s breath scattered across the crimson puddle of Pastor Rick’s blood.
Mom heaved open a trapdoor in the floor, revealing a deep baptismal font, and slipped my brother down inside. I went in next. The cold, hard porcelain bit into my legs as I scrambled in. My brother curled up in a tight ball. I felt the earth jolt, felt the font shift, and wondered if it would ever end.
A long, brassy note blended into the noise around me. I could barely hear it above the roar of the quake, but it grew in volume until it sounded like the piercing blast of a thousand trumpets. I crawled to where David huddled against the side of the font, molded myself against him, and covered my ears to shut out the terrifying noise.
A large piece of stone tumbled through the trapdoor. It slammed into the bottom of the font, filling the air with dust. I peered through the darkened gloom, wondering why my mom hadn’t closed the trapdoor behind her and sealed us all in. Suddenly, a white-hot light lit the font like a starburst. I flinched and shielded my eyes as it illuminated my brother’s grimy red hair and tear-streaked face. I turned to check on Mom. She wasn’t there.
David shot me a frantic look.
I scrambled to the trapdoor, thrust my head out, and froze. The earthquake blast kept coming, but I barely noticed the steady shower of dust and plaster falling all around. My eyes fixed on the horrifying scene playing out in front of me. The painful brightness came from everywhere and nowhere. It felt too hot against my skin; I wanted to crawl back under the floor and hide. My mother stood just feet away, surrounded by a bubble of snow-white peace that felt threatening and alien. Her lips moved. For a bizarre moment, I thought she was singing, but I couldn’t grasp the words.
Then she turned her head to look at me with an odd mixture of joy and regret glistening in her eyes. “Endure,” she called out.
I realized, with a jolt of panic, that she was saying goodbye.
I would not leave her.
Determined, I moved to climb out onto the stage. The white bubble rose, lifting my mother with it. A crack of thunder split the air. The earth shuddered. What remained of the ceiling above my head detached in free fall. I tumbled backwards into the font.
The bright light winked out. The trapdoor slammed shut. The world went quiet.
I lay there in the darkness, gasping, struggling with what I’d just seen. The light had left…and it had taken my mother with it.
Chapter Two
I opened my eyes to pitch blackness. The lurching and shuddering had stopped, blanketing the world in an unnatural silence that made my heart ache. I couldn’t see my brother, but I could feel his small body curled against mine. I could hear his breath hitching. He was crying.
“Mom?” he whispered.
I shook my head, still trying to work through what I’d seen.
“Sera?” he pressed.
He couldn’t see me shaking my head in the darkness. He couldn’t see my bloodless face, my haunted eyes, or my trembling hands.
He took hold of my arm. “Sera, did Mom get out?”
I tried to inhale past the constriction in my chest, but that only lodged it deeper. How could I tell him? Finally, I managed one simple word. “No.”
It was enough.
I held him as he sobbed. I felt numb, lifeless. Ten minutes ago, I was sitting next to her on a pew, counting strikes. Now, she was gone.
The font shuddered. I held my breath as the rumbling started beneath us again, swelling on all sides.
David sniffled. “Aftershock.”
CRASH! BANG! It sounded as if the world was trying to fall out from beneath us. I’d heard that aftershocks could be stronger than the initial quake, so I knew we weren’t out of danger yet.
I pulled myself together, sat up, and took off my shoes.
“W-what are you doing?” David stammered.
“Mom—” My voice cracked; I took a deep breath. “Mom risked her life to save us. I’m not going to just sit here and wait for the church to finish us off.”
I set aside my grief, knowing it would be waiting for me later. I rolled to my knees and felt above my head for the edges of the trapdoor. I pushed upward, but the door wouldn’t move. “Help me.” The air tasted stale. It was becoming hard to breathe.
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br /> I heard my brother stand up beside me. I planted my feet, put my palms against the door, and pushed with everything I had. “Puuuuush!”
David grunted and wheezed. “It’s stuck,” he groaned.
I adjusted my position and used my shoulder as leverage. “Again!”
We pushed and heaved until we were both exhausted, but we couldn’t budge the door.
David finally sat down with a thud. “Something’s blocking it. We’re safer down here, anyway.”
“I am not dying in here, David!” I bent forward, put my back against the trapdoor, and used my legs to push as hard as I could.
“We aren’t going to die.” His irritated tone did nothing for my growing anxiety.
Determined, I pushed and pushed some more, until my muscles ached and my legs went weak. The door wouldn’t move.
I sank back down onto the cold porcelain. “We’re trapped,” I breathed. Panic coiled itself around me. “Nobody knows we’re here. How are they going to find us?”
“We’re fine.”
“We’re going to die!” I shouted back. “Right here! Right where we’re sitting!”
“Just stay calm—”
“I can’t breathe.” A dark fog clouded my vision. The world slipped sideways. I clawed at the high neckline of my dress.
“You’re hyperventilating. Slow your breathing. Take slow, deep breaths.”
I was gasping, desperate for air. “I can’t—”
“Sera!” he shouted. “If I can breathe, you can breathe! Take slow, deep breaths!”
My head reeled. Nobody’s going to find us. We’re going to die in the dark. Our bodies will rot here. Wild animals will tear us to pieces.
I lurched upright, slamming my head into the trapdoor. Everything went black….
I’m floating in the water. A deep blue sky. Her silk print dress. A mountain of gold. A dragon rises from the sea. Red eyes burn through me. Sharp teeth sink into my neck.
I woke with a start, my throat dry, my heart pounding. The unexpected darkness disoriented me.
The Goliath Code (The Alpha Omega Trilogy) Page 2
