End of Days

by Max Turner

  Are you sure about this?

  I was. And I wasn’t. Our chances weren’t good. The words snowball in hell came to mind. But maybe two snowballs have a better chance than one, and a kind of certainty comes from having a purpose, even if the odds aren’t good that you’ll make it to the finish line. I knew that if I balked—if I ran and hid—then every bad thing that Hyde did would, in some way, be my fault.

  You aren’t to blame for any of this.

  No, I thought. I’m not to blame. Unless I do nothing.

  “You girls better get going,” Charlie said.

  Luna looked at me. Her eyes were burning. I’m coming with you.

  I shook my head. I remembered what she’d said on the roof. That if she were Charlie, I’d have different expectations. That was true, but what could I say? I had a double standard.

  Charlie was saying good-bye to Suki. He had his arms around her. Her head was tucked under his chin. He kissed her once, then let her go and walked over to the two of us.

  “Get her someplace safe,” he said to Luna. “Don’t let anything happen.”

  “She’ll be fine on her own,” Luna said. “I’m coming with you guys.”

  Charlie looked stunned. He glanced at me.

  I shook my head. “No, you’re not.”

  “Try to stop me.”

  “I don’t have to,” I said. “I’ll just outrun you.”

  I thought she was going to hit me.

  That’s not fair.

  Is it fair to Suki if she loses her boyfriend and sister in one night? You haven’t seen this thing. We have no chance.

  You have a better chance if I come with you.

  I didn’t think so. But she quickly reminded me of what had just happened back at the apartment.

  You had a brain freeze. What if that happens again?

  I grasped the handle of my two-handled sword and felt the leather grip twist and creak beneath my fingers. I understood what she was thinking—that my mind often strayed, so I wasn’t always in the moment. Well—that wasn’t going to happen again.

  I thought back to our meeting on the roof, when she’d asked me to teach her how to fight. I didn’t have anything to teach her. Fighting wasn’t my forte, and it certainly wasn’t hers. But I was the fastest and the strongest, so I had the best chance. And if I was going to be some kind of messiah—didn’t I have to earn it?

  Not by getting yourself killed!

  Getting killed wasn’t the plan. I wanted to find Detective Baddon’s son and bolt. But if Luna came, and she got into trouble, I wouldn’t be able to run. I’d have to stay and fight a losing battle. Did she understand? I could see her following my thoughts, but her mind was suddenly closed. I didn’t know how she’d done it, but I couldn’t hear her anymore.

  I handed Charlie my sword. He shot me a puzzled glance. Then I reached up and undid the clasp of my necklace. In nine years, I’d only had it off twice, once to show Luna and once when Vlad took it from me. I slipped the two ends of the chain from around my neck, then took hold of Luna’s hand.

  Don’t you dare give that to me! The sudden eruption from her mind was painful. She tried to pull her hand away.

  I grimaced but didn’t let go. Instead I put the necklace in her palm and folded her fingers around it. Give this back to me tomorrow.

  Her eyes closed. A deep breath followed. Just get the boy and get out. Don’t try to fight with Hyde. Promise me you won’t.

  I couldn’t promise her anything. I had no idea what might happen. I looked at Charlie. He handed back my sword, then nodded that he was ready. It was time to go.

  I love you, she thought, and I thought the same.

  As she looked up at me, I studied at her face. Her chin, her mouth, her eyes. Every line. Every contour. Just so I wouldn’t forget.

  She turned and got in the car. Her mind was closed again. A few moments later, she pulled away.

  “You didn’t even say good-bye,” said Charlie. “If I did that, Suki would kill me.”

  He jumped the ditch at the side of the road and started across the field.

  “Come on. We’re losing time.”

  I watched the car disappear down the highway, then followed him. We quickly found Hyde’s tracks. They led farther out of town. We ran like two wild wolves. Never had I set such a fierce pace and maintained it for so long. In the city, we were always having to slow down, but now we were in the darkness, with nothing around us but farms and fences and the cool night air. So we reached our destination with a few good hours to spare before sunrise.

  “I should have known,” Charlie said. “Where else would Hyde go?”

  Field had given way to forest. We crossed a road, then came to a parking lot. The sign at the entrance said WARSAW CAVES. I remembered what Mr. Entwistle had said about darkness. For a vampire, it is never total. The moon and stars are too bright. But the deep earth would be different. Dark like the grave.

  Charlie pulled up beside me, then reached out and slapped my arm gently with the back of his hand. I looked up. He was pointing to a black van. It was streaked. Poorly painted. The ambulance Mr. Entwistle had stolen from the hospital.

  “He’s here,” Charlie said.

  We rushed over. The parking lot wasn’t paved. I could see the marks of Mr. Entwistle’s boots where he’d stepped out onto the stone dust.

  “You smell that?” Charlie asked.

  I could. The faint trace of wine and sweat that clung to Mr. Entwistle’s body armor.

  Charlie looked at the ground carefully. “Do we follow Hyde or Entwistle?”

  Did it matter? They would probably take us to the same place. “Mr. Entwistle,” I said. “He might still be alive.”

  Charlie looked doubtful. He took the voulge from his back. I followed his lead and drew my sword. The metal, dark and scarred, made an odd rasping noise, like an angry serpent, when it rubbed against the leather sheath.

  “I’ll go first,” I said.

  Charlie nodded, then followed me into the woods.

  We weren’t running long before Hyde’s tracks and Mr. Entwistle’s overlapped. And soon after that we caught the smell of blood. The first splattering was across the rocks under our feet. More showed up on the trunk of an oak. Then on the soil and the carpet of needles underfoot. On low-hanging leaves and needles, and the long grasses that grew in clumps where it was too rocky for trees to take root.

  “They must have fought for hours,” said Charlie.

  It was impossible to know. The ground was torn up. Small trees had been uprooted or snapped at the trunk. Rocks were overturned. The bark of the tall pines was scarred. Lichen and moss were shorn loose. Every aspect of the landscape had been altered in some way.

  “Have you ever seen so much blood?”

  Only in a nightmare.

  We followed the smell, and their footprints. We looped back again and again. Soon our own tracks were everywhere.

  “We’re going in circles,” Charlie said.

  He was panting heavily. So was I. Neither of us had expected to do so much running. I would happily have traded my sword for an inhaler.

  “We must have missed something,” I said.

  “Yeah. The fight of the century.”

  We slowed and tried to follow their footprints more carefully. Still, we wound up back at the same rocky clearing.

  Charlie shook his head. “We need to do something. If we take much longer to find them, there won’t be time to get back before the sun rises.”

  I took out my phone.

  “Who are you calling?”

  I scrolled until I found Mr. Entwistle’s number, then I hit send. Ophelia had said he wasn’t answering his cell. It didn’t mean it wouldn’t ring.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Just listen.” I tucked my cell into my pocket to muffle the noise.

  I didn’t hear anything. Neither did Charlie. So I started running. After a few moments, I pulled out my cell phone, hit redial, then started moving again. Charlie fo
llowed. I listened. A far-off river gurgled gently. The wind swished through pine and oak, cedar and maple. Crickets buzzed, quieting only when our footsteps drew close. I could hear Charlie’s breathing, and mine. Our footfalls. Then I heard it. Electronic notes. Hallelujah.

  Charlie tapped my shoulder. “It’s coming from behind that rock.”

  We were in a clearing. Just one of the many areas where the rock was exposed. We’d passed this way several times already. A large lip of limestone rose up beside us, walling off the clearing from whatever lay behind. No prints led in that direction, but a leap would have taken Mr. Entwistle over the top. Or he might have been thrown. . . .

  Charlie zipped past and scampered up the rock face. It was about twelve feet high. Once he cleared the top, he looked back. “Call again.”

  I did, then bounded up after him. The ringing started again. We followed it down a tree-covered slope to the edges of the Indian River. And there, on the bank, chained to a huge stone, was the body of Mr. Entwistle, lifeless and bloodied, just waiting for the sun.

  — CHAPTER 39

  HYDE’S LAIR

  I stuck my sword into the soft earth of the riverbank, then bent to examine Mr. Entwistle. He was chained to the rock so that his hands were stretched out to the sides—as if he’d been crucified. The stone behind him was scorched. Ashes were all over the ground underneath him. His coat was torn in a dozen places. Blood was caked on his face and in his hair. The knife I’d been given by my uncle, the one with the dioxin, was buried right up to the hilt just below his chest. Teeth marks scarred his neck. Were they from Hyde? Mr. Entwistle’s words came back to me. That werewolves were blood drinkers, too.

  “He’s dead, isn’t he,” Charlie said.

  I nodded. The eyes were dull. Dry. Lifeless. I wondered who had actually died here—Mr. Entwistle or the Butcher.

  Charlie handed me something: Mr. Entwistle’s lucky top hat. Bloodstained, torn, crumpled. Its luck was spent.

  “He’ll go up like a Roman candle when the sun comes up.”

  “Unless we can move him in time.” To the east, the sky was still dark, but I could tell by the stars that dawn was only an hour or so away. By the look of things, more than a few vampires had been chained here. The rocks on the ground were stained black, the bushes nearby burnt. I reached out and took the pole-arm from Charlie’s hand. Then I set about breaking the chains. It was noisy work. And time-consuming. But I was furious, and hammered steel, even the old stuff, is tougher than poured iron, so the links gave way under my assault.

  “We’ll never get him back to town before the sun comes up.”

  I agreed. “We’ll have to find a cave and wait it out.” I handed him the voulge. The blade looked as if I’d taken a can opener to it. Somewhere in Western Europe, a medieval blacksmith was rolling over in his grave.

  “This was an antique,” said Charlie.

  “It still is.” I lifted one of Mr. Entwistle’s arms and drew it over my shoulder, then picked him up. “You still feeling confident about your plan?”

  Charlie shook his head. “Not really. I wasn’t counting on the mess of tracks back there. I felt like a mouse in a maze. It really slowed us down. And you just made more noise than a five-man electrical band. Unless Hyde’s got six inches of wax in each ear, he’ll know we’re here.”

  I figured as much. But the sun was certain death, so we had to get underground. “Don’t forget my sword,” I said. The tip of the blade was still stuck in the earth. It made the arms and the pommel of the hilt look like a cross. More like a grave marker than a weapon.

  Charlie pulled it out and wiped the blade clean in the long grass by the water. “Okay,” he said. “Let’s see if we can find that boy and scram.”

  The area around the river was dotted everywhere with caves. It didn’t take long for Charlie to find one.

  “What do you see?” I asked.

  He was peering down a hole that looked wide enough for us to hide in. “Ice.” Then he got on his stomach, slid the weapons down in front of him, and crawled into the darkness.

  It wasn’t at all what I’d expected. I’d only seen caves on television. It turns out Bruce Wayne’s Batcave was the Hilton compared to the dump we found ourselves in. It was cold. Moldy. Wet. The ceiling was three feet high, so it was impossible to stand. White ice covered the floor. Within seconds of crawling in, I was soaked.

  “Should we leave him here?” Charlie said.

  I nodded. Without a system of mirrors, the sunlight wasn’t going to get in. And I didn’t want to move him farther underground. It would have been too difficult in such a cramped space.

  “These weapons are going to be useless in here.”

  True enough. There wasn’t enough space to swing a flashlight, let alone a five-foot sword.

  Charlie was eyeing the knife still protruding from Mr. Entwistle’s chest. “We should take that.”

  I felt a bit squeamish about removing it, but he was right, so we worked the blade free. It was wedged between two plates in Mr. Entwistle’s armor. I examined the blade. No trace of the dioxin was on it.

  Charlie stared the slender wound the knife had left. “You know, you’re about the same height as him. A little shorter, maybe, but I bet that armor would fit.”

  I hadn’t considered it. It seemed wrong to take the clothes from a dead man.

  “He’d want you to have it.”

  I nodded. “Yeah, he would.”

  It wasn’t easy stripping down on an icy floor with a roof three feet overhead. And the armor was a bit tight. It amazed me that Mr. Entwistle could move so smoothly with it on. By the time I was finished, my fingers were frozen. Not a good sign. It meant I was tired.

  “I’ve never had more sympathy for penguins than I do right now,” said Charlie. He was shivering, “What happens now?”

  We had to find the detective’s son. We couldn’t look outside; the daylight was arriving. That left only one option.

  “Let’s move,” I said. “Maybe we’ll find a clue down here.”

  So we began to crawl. Eventually, we hit a dead end. Charlie started swearing. It poured out of him like gangster rap. I didn’t recognize half of the words he used.

  “Did we miss something?” he asked.

  It was too tight in the cave to turn around, so we had to creep our way backward. It was a good thing neither of us was claustrophobic. There was barely enough room for a mole rat.

  “This is worse than a coffin,” Charlie said.

  Then he found what we had missed. There was a scrape along the rocky floor where an enormous stone had been moved. I would have needed Yoda’s help just to lift it. A faint odour of wet fur clung to its surface. Judging by the smell, Hyde had dragged the rock away some time ago, perhaps several days. It exposed an opening barely large enough for us to snake through. The way the wall was angled, the hole was hard to spot when you were approaching from the front.

  Charlie looked at me, then down into the shadows below. I knew what he was thinking. We were wet, cold, tired, and underarmed. Anyone with a lick of sense would have stayed put.

  “Do you think that boy’s still alive?” he asked.

  I didn’t know. But it didn’t matter. If there was even a chance, we had to keep going.

  “I’ll go first,” I said. But Charlie was already ahead of me.

  We squeezed through the hole and emerged in a cavern. It was long, as if a giant worm had plowed its way through the solid rock. At least now we could comfortably stand.

  “This is more like it,” Charlie said. A trickle of water ran along a groove in the rock floor down the center of the tunnel. He put his hand in it, then shook the droplets from his fingers. “Freezing.” Then he looked around. “Must have been bigger at one time.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “This little stream. It must have been a full-blown river at one time to have carved this out.”

  I nodded.

  “Can you smell that?”

  I could. Like l
eather and wet dog. It was much stronger here.

  “I think it’s coming from that way.” The tunnel led in two directions. Up to the right or down to the left. He was pointing down.

  “Are you ready?” I asked.

  He held up the knife. The blade looked purple against the black cave walls. “Yeah,” he whispered.

  The patter of padded feet echoed up the tunnel. Long strides. Hyde was coming.

  I swallowed. “Is it too late to discuss strategies?”

  “How about you attack him, and I slip out the back?”

  “That’s not funny.”

  “Or you could distract him somehow. Why don’t you try dancing? You might as well do it once before you die. Or—die again.”

  I shook my head. This was no time for jokes. I needed Charlie to put his gladiator face on.

  “I think you should try to get around him,” I said. “See if you can find the detective’s son. I’ve got the armor. I’ll do my best to keep Hyde off your back.”

  Charlie nodded, then turned to look me squarely in the eyes. His teeth were dropping. “Zack.” He didn’t bother keeping his voice down. “You can’t make him good.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I know you. You want to make everyone good. You can’t. Do you understand? This thing is going to kill us unless we kill it first. All that talk of Entwistle’s about villains and evil. I don’t care about that stuff. This is about Hyde and us. You can’t hesitate. You can’t wonder if you’re doing the right thing. Attack, attack, attack. Like a berserker. Like Alexander.”