Armageddon (21 page)

I yanked my head back.

Abbadon was standing on the other side of the wishing well, which had transformed itself into an express chute down to the underworld. A jet of gaseous flame rocketed up from the silo, charring the rune-inscribed stones circling the mouth of the well.

I looked back to the barn. It was on fire, roiling with flames and billowing black smoke. Beneath the roar of the blaze and the crackle of popping timbers I could hear Xanthos’s strangled screams.

Mel was gone. So, too, were Agent Judge and my parents. In their place, I saw a zombie army of wretched souls dripping sludge carried from the muck pits in the fifth
circle of hell, stumbling around the barren wasteland that had, seconds earlier, been lush meadows. Locusts and giant termites with wingspans the size of condors’ swarmed around the farmhouse and devoured it.

“I wanted you to see the future of your dreams, Daniel. That way it would hurt all the more when you realized you will never, ever live to see such things. The future, dear cousin, belongs to me!”

The four horses of the Apocalypse came charging out of the burning barn, their manes dripping fire. Abbadon pulled another four-way split and mounted his abominable steeds. The four hideous horses, each one spurred on by a different Abbadon, circled me in a dizzying blur of black, red, white, and pale green. I was trapped—penned in by a swirling wall of colored horseflesh, stomping hooves, and Number 2’s maniacal laughter.

Then, just as suddenly as it had started, it stopped.

Abbadon and I had made a joint leap in time and space to the windswept planes of the abyss beneath the dome of the underworld.

“Of course, Daniel,” my enemy cooed seductively, “your future doesn’t have to end up quite so bleak. I am more than happy to share this planet with you. Just renounce your silly solemn vow to wipe out the alien outlaws inhabiting Terra Firma.”

I shook my head. “No thanks.”

“Why are you so stubborn, Daniel? Surely you have seen that these pathetic humans crave the darkness more than anything else. They long to be rich and comfortable
and stuffed with food—to be just a little better off than their weakling neighbors. I can give them this, Daniel. And I can give it to you. Serve me and become one of Earth’s most pampered elites!”

An army of docile servants joined us in the abyss. Maids, waiters, and butlers. Coachmen, masseuses, and limo drivers.

Beneath the servant uniforms, I recognized many of the human faces I had seen in Washington and elsewhere, the ones who had been the first to stampede down into the safety of eternal slavery.

“Can I polish your shoes for you, Mr. Daniel?” groveled one of the eternally enslaved.

“No thanks. They’re Nikes.”

“Some pancakes, perhaps?” cried out a fawning woman in a maid’s uniform. She held forth a platter piled high with a stack of hubcap-sized flapjacks that were dripping with butter and syrup. “I used your mother’s recipe.”

“Sorry, but I’m pretty sure you left out her secret ingredient.”

“Tell me what it is, and I’ll add it!”

“Nope. Like I said, it’s a secret.”

Abbadon snapped his fingers. The submissive ones disappeared.

But a new man joined us.

I recognized him immediately: the leader of the
gopnik
in Moscow.

The young Russian street tough who had scarred Dana’s face with the broken vodka bottle!

“YOU REMEMBER YURI,” Number 2 cooed.

“Yeah,” I said. “We’ve met.”

“Would you like to kill him, Daniel?”

I felt something materialize in my hand.

It was Lieutenant Russell’s survival knife.

“An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, a cheek for a cheek,” said Abbadon.

“Actually,” I said, tossing the knife to the ground, “I believe they revised that one. If someone strikes me in the cheek, I’m supposed to offer him the other one, too.”

A second knife materialized in my hand.

It looked even more deadly.

“Forget all your antiquated morals, Daniel. In my new world, killing is not a sin. In fact, we encourage it. If someone strikes you, you are perfectly free to murder him.”

I tossed the second knife away, too. If I became who
Abbadon wanted me to be, sure, I’d be alive, but would I want to live with myself?

“This is your lucky day, Yuri,” I said to the Russian, who was leering at me with hate in his eyes. “I’m not going to kill you, no matter how much your new Lord and Master begs me to.”

Number 2 tsked. “Are you really that cowardly, Daniel? You won’t fight to defend your lady’s honor? Not much of a man, are you, boy?”

“You are a wimp,” the Russian said with a grin. “The wussy.”

Abbadon’s face filled with glee. “Did you hear what he called you, Daniel?”

I could feel my ears burning. Rage surged through my veins. Abbadon, who moved like a magician, waved his hand.

The Russian raised his jagged bottle and said, “I am going to cut your other girlfriend next.”

“Oh, ho, ho!” said Abbadon. “Should I let him have a few moments alone with Miss Judge, Daniel? Shall I take this Russian lad to Melody’s cell?”

“You leave her out of this,” I snarled.

“That’s it, Daniel. Feel the hate. Feed on it. Take your revenge for Dana. Protect Mel! Strike this useless bag of Russian bones dead. Do it now!”

I bent down and picked up the knife. The grip felt good in my hand.

“Before I mark the girl,” the Russian boasted, “she and I
will have some fun.” He puckered up his lips and blew fish kisses at me.

Okay. I seriously wanted to do in the Russian sleazeball.

More than anything in the world, I wanted him to pay the ultimate price.

REMEMBER HOW I said Abbadon moved like a magician?

Well, this wasn’t some kid’s birthday party, and I wasn’t going to become his willing volunteer from the audience.

That rage rushing through my limbs and up into my head? I knew who put it there: Abbadon. It’s an Alpar Nokian mind trick, where you make somebody think
they’re
feeling emotions when actually
you’re
the one making them feel that way. How do I know this? I’ve used it myself in the past. It’s highly effective. Unless, of course, your target knows they’re being targeted.

So I focused on the knife I held in my hand and transformed it into a Frisbee, which I flung at the Russian. He caught it with his left hand and, furious, came at me with the jagged bottle in his right.

When his fist came up toward my face, I grabbed his arm and locked it in place.

So it would be easier for me to sniff the lovely bouquet of flowers he was offering me.

Yeah, that’s right—I rearranged the bottle’s molecules.

“Flowers?” I said. “For me? Why, Yuri, I didn’t know you cared.”

The Russian thug didn’t look so tough clutching an FTD Sweet Splendor Bouquet.

“You dare mock me?” thundered Abbadon.

He swept his arms up over his head, and the imaginary Russian hoodlum crumbled into a heap of gravel.

“Trust me, Daniel, you will beg to join me before I’m through with you.”

“Doubtful,” I said. “But go ahead. This is your rodeo—show me what else you’ve got.”

That’s when the magician played the most hurtful card in his hand: Mel!

SHE WAS IMPRISONED inside a tiger cage of translucent force-field bars.

“Are you okay?” I shouted.

“I’m fine!” It was amazing to hear her voice. It had felt like centuries, somehow, since we’d talked for real.

I rushed toward the cage—

And was immediately blown back by a jolt of a couple thousand gigawatts.

It knocked me down, but I bounced right back up. Inching forward, I heard the surging throb of the high-voltage electrical charge. Mel was only ten feet away, but with the impenetrable force field between us, it might as well have been ten miles.

“I’m sorry, Daniel,” said Abbadon. “Until you fall to your knees and worship me, I can’t allow you to come any closer.”

“Don’t you dare do as he says,” Mel said, feisty as ever. “Don’t even listen to him!”

I gazed into her sky-blue eyes. For that instant, Abbadon wasn’t even in the room. It was just me and Mel.

“Has he hurt you?” I asked.

“No. But he lies like the devil.”

That made me grin. “Yeah. There’s a reason for that….”

“You know, Daniel,” snapped Abbadon, “you and Melody could be quite happy together.”

“We know that,” I said. “But having you around kind of ruins all the fun.”

“Not necessarily. If both of you swear your allegiance to me, then I give you my word: the two of you can go back to Kentucky and live like normal, ordinary teenagers. No more of this ‘protector of the planet’ nonsense. Why, you could prance about on ponies all day, every day. And then, when evening falls, you could hold hands and take long, moonlit strolls down to the malt shop.”

I arched both eyebrows.

So did Mel.

The malt shop?
Abbadon was showing his age. I don’t think anybody’s gone on a date to a malt shop since Archie and Jughead were chasing Betty and Veronica.

But Abbadon was playing this temptation through.

As Mel and I stood frozen in disbelief, we saw duplicates of ourselves riding white horses across a creek. The other Daniel and Mel were laughing, having a grand time.

I even fell out of my saddle, right on cue, and went splashing into the creek.

“Ride much?” said the duplicate Mel with a gentle laugh.

“Um, not really,” said alternate me.

“You know, Daniel, you’re even cuter when you’re soaking wet,” said duplicate Mel, giggling, as I started peeling off my T-shirt and flexing my chest muscles like a junior Schwarzenegger. Abbadon definitely needed to hire some new scriptwriters for his alternate-reality soap opera.

I’d seen enough. “You mean we could become puppets for your amusement. Strike two, Abbadon. No sale.”

“Fine,” said Number 2. “Have it your way!”

And then he attacked me with everything in his arsenal.

I GUESS YOU could say I had won the first two rounds.

Well, at least I
survived
. Abbadon couldn’t break me, mentally or emotionally.

So, for round three, he was just trying to break me.

As in,
every bone in my body
.

He hurled me off a cliff and down the jagged side of a mountain. My body was racked with pain as my limbs shattered, my spine crunched, my joints popped, and my head throbbed. All I could hear were my own groans and my internal organs smashing into one another.

Abbadon had transformed me into a rolling boulder.

“Surrender to me, Daniel!”

“
Never
,” I grunted, as best I could.

When my body—now made of rock, but somehow filled with all the sensation of a fragile human body—hit the boulder-strewn ravine five hundred feet beneath the jutting cliff, I bounced once, then burst into flames and became a rolling fireball. The pain was indescribable as
every bit of my body burned, an inescapable inferno. The punishment went beyond gruesome. This was sheer torture.

“And it will go on for all eternity, Daniel,” gloated Number 2. “After all, this
is
hell! And you haven’t even begun to know pain yet.”

When my rocky meteorite of a body finally came to a stop, Abbadon snapped his fingers and turned me back into myself. But the flaming boulder didn’t disappear. I lurched forward, no longer in control of my body, and started to push the boulder back up the mountain.

I almost preferred plummeting down the cliff to this unparalleled agony. Abbadon may have been forcing me to push, but he wasn’t helping me with the massive weight at all. My broken bones intensified the horror, the impossibility of it all.

Somehow—stumbling, falling, almost crushed by my task—I reached the top of the cliff, after a stretch of time that could’ve been minutes, hours, or years.

And then it got even worse.

Abbadon turned me back into the boulder and hurled me off the other side of the mountain, my punishment becoming a never-ending cycle of pain.

Up.

Down.

Up.

Why hadn’t Dante written about
this
circle of hell in his
Inferno
?

On my third crash down the cliff, I saw that Abbadon
had found yet another way to blast pain through my whole being.

It was Mel.

Like me, she was being forced to roll a boulder of jet-black onyx up the mountain. When she got to the top, her body transformed into rock, like mine had, and started rolling down the other side of the cliff.

I was so messed up at that point I thought I even saw her flattened face pressing against the glassy-smooth surface of the stone as she flew by me in a lightning flash.

One thing I
know
I didn’t imagine, though: I could clearly hear her anguished cries for help!

HEARING MEL’S WOEFUL cries ripped me up. Badly.

My spirit was nearly shattered, my will almost broken.

But, somehow, hearing Mel also reminded me of who I truly am.

The creator. The Protector.

The Alien Hunter who can do whatever I can imagine.

Mel had given me the strength to become myself again.

So when I rolled my boulder to the summit for the umpteenth time, I caught a glimpse of Abbadon, standing on a precipice with his arms akimbo, laughing triumphantly.

Hey, whatever he could do, I could do. Right?

So I imagined
him
becoming a boulder and cascading down the cliff right behind me.

But it didn’t happen.

On my return trip up to the summit, I imagined Number 2 blown to smithereens.

I mentally depicted every detail of his bodily explosion.

Still, it didn’t happen.

“Give it up, you weakling!” Number 2 shouted as I plummeted off the cliff again. “I can sense your feeble creations the instant you attempt to generate them. You are a disgrace to those of us who truly know how to use the gifts we have been given.”