End Times Read online

  Bella whimpered from the corner. Fear had puffed the poor, sweet dog up to twice her size, so her brown eyes and button nose were nearly invisible under her trembling fur.

  “Doug, please!” Janie started to cry. “He’s going to eat Bella and bite me and maybe hurt our baby! You have to do something—now!”

  The snake swayed back and forth, beady eyes darting from Janie to Bella and back again, as if trying to decide which of them to attack first. It filled Janie with a cold dread that ran deeper than fear, as if the devil himself had sent a dark and bloodthirsty messenger to her room. Its head was at least two feet off the floor, and there was who-all-knew how much of it still coiled under the pile of laundry.

  Doug steeled himself the way he did before a big motocross race, shaking his head and throwing back his shoulders.

  “Fine.” He grabbed one of his Nike high-tops and shoved a foot inside, not bothering to tie the laces. He quivered with adrenaline, his burly arms puckered with goose bumps even as sweat ran down his forehead. Janie shrank back on the bed, and a snarl started deep and low in Doug’s chest. It burst from his throat with a loud roar as he leapt onto the snake, bringing a heavy sneaker down behind its head and crushing its neck onto the floor.

  The snake hissed hideously, lashing its tail from side to side like a fresh-caught fish flopping on the pier at Hatchet Lake. Pink maternity tops and balled-up socks and long-forgotten homework assignments scattered.

  “Die, damn it, die!” Doug screamed, stomping on the snake again and again. Its tail flailed, jerking back and forth in a spray of glittering scales. As Doug brought his foot down one last time, the jerking stopped and the snake stiffened. For a second, it looked like it was levitating off the ground, all of its coiled muscular energy propelling itself into one final moment of life. And then it lay still.

  “Gross-ass snake,” Doug spat, shaking his foot. The viper lay half-flattened, glistening muscle and guts spilling from its neck.

  “My goodness, what happened in here?” Janie’s parents looked blurry in the doorway, and she realized there were still tears in her eyes. Now that the shock was over, she could let them fall freely.

  “Oh, Mom, it was awful!” she sobbed. Bella leapt onto her lap and began licking her tears, and Janie held the dog tight, weeping into her soft fur. “This snake just popped out of nowhere, and Bella started barking, and I was so scared it was going to get the baby!”

  “Whatever, it was no biggie.” Doug had fully regained his composure. “I took care of it.”

  Janie’s dad, Floyd Peyton, knelt to examine the carcass. His eyes weren’t so good after forty years sorting nuts and washers at the hardware store, but he’d never gone to get a prescription—too much money—and only wore cheap reading glasses from the local pharmacy.

  “My Lord.” He leaned in for an even closer look. “Don’t go placing money on it, but this looks to me like a Djinn viper. I thought they were extinct around here—the last one I ever heard of was when my father was a boy.”

  “A what viper?” Doug asked.

  “Djinn. D-J-I-N-N. It’s related to the western rattlesnake, which I’ve sure seen plenty of in my time. But never this.”

  He reached down and ran a finger over the snake’s lifeless tail. “See these black markings—almost like spades. That’s how it got its name. ‘Djinn’ means ‘devil.’”

  Even in the warm trailer, Janie felt her skin go cold.

  “What does it mean?” she asked. “Is it a sign?”

  “Whatever, no,” Doug laughed. “Stop being so superstitious. It’s just a big-ass stupid snake.”

  Doug was no help in situations like these. The Good Lord Jesus Christ himself could probably show up on his doorstep requesting an invitation for dinner, bloody palms and all, and Doug would call him a dirty hippie and turn him away. He was a believer in his own way, of course, but he didn’t always see the meaning in things like Janie did.

  She turned to her parents instead. “Mom, what do you think?”

  “I think it can mean whatever you want it to mean.” Karen Peyton’s voice was warm and comforting. “But maybe we should all pray a little extra hard tonight and try our best to shun temptation when it comes knockin’ on our door.”

  She smiled that smile that made everyone in Carbon County trust her with their gossip and fears and secrets, but her eyes were on Janie’s belly. As if Janie needed reminding that her mother didn’t exactly 100 percent approve of her going and getting herself pregnant while she was still just seventeen. Temptation come knockin’, indeed.

  “Whatever it means, I want it out of my room.” Janie pulled Bella closer. “Doug, will you take it outside?”

  Doug wrinkled his nose. “No way am I touching that thing. It’s all oozing guts and stuff.”

  “C’mon, baby!” Janie tried her sexy pout again, but Doug wouldn’t budge. That’s what she got for dating a spoiled mama’s boy never made to do a chore in his life: Sometimes Doug could be an even bigger princess than she was.

  Her dad sighed. “I got it,” he said. “Guts or not, I may stick ’im in the freezer for a bit, till I can get over to the ranger station down at Medicine Bow and see if someone there can identify it for real.”

  “Ew!” Janie squealed.

  That seemed to break the tension, and all of them had a good, long laugh before Floyd went to get a stiff piece of cardboard and a plastic bag.

  OWEN leaned hard into the curve. His elbow nearly brushed the earth as he slammed through the bend, straightening just long enough to dip deep and low in the other direction, riding the natural twists in the track.

  He was ahead by a good six lengths as the motor on his bike, a vintage Husqvarna that he’d been souping up since he was fifteen, screamed into the dying evening. He knew it without looking back—and he didn’t plan on slowing down until he crossed the finish line, taking home the top prize in Olympia, Washington, that day. The rest of the motocross riders swarmed in his wake like a pack of angry bees, engines whining in collective frustration. It was like this at every race: He’d start out slow, letting them think they had a chance for a lap or two before pulling out his throttle and blowing past them in a cloud of churned earth and curses.

  Those first few laps, where he sized up his competition while riding with the pack, were like a tease for him, the hot promise of speed tickling his nerve endings until the desire grew like a cloud of pressurized gas and he finally ignited, shooting out ahead. More and more often lately, that moment when he overtook everyone was the only peace he knew. In the roar of triumph and flurry of dust, the searing jolt of adrenaline that propelled him forward, he was able to forget the nightmares that had begun to taunt him the night of his eighteenth birthday, the fiery visions of destruction that woke him each night to soaked sheets and fear still surging in his blood. Owning the track was the only way to calm the visions of dark specters dancing around a bonfire piled high with bodies, the only way to quiet the gravelly voice whispering in his ear to find the vein.

  He gunned into a long jump, clearing three high mounds of earth in one go, the astonished shouts from the bleachers a dim roar through his helmet. The bike was an animal below him, one he knew better than any human, one he’d tamed well. He’d always loved to ride, had picked it up just shy of his seventh birthday and been hooked ever since, giving up friends and parties to spend days and nights at the local track back in his Kansas hometown, driving himself and his metal beast past spills and breakdowns and exhaustion until the two of them became a single steel bullet zinging through the air. But ever since he’d left home a few months before, it felt like something more than skill propelled him through each race. When he rode he was more than Owen, a lone wolf from Kansas with grease under his fingernails. Now when he rode he was all fire tornadoes and dust devils; he was pure speed and molten light.

  He couldn’t help gooning a little on the last jump before the
finish line, showing off with the kind of stunt usually reserved for freestyle competitions. He sailed over the jump and, at the height of his trajectory when the bike was weightless beneath him, stood up straight and hooked his toes under the handlebars, arms stretched over his head. A cliffhanger, the move was called—not that there was any suspense over who was going to win this particular race.

  He felt the wild awe of the crowd as he slid back into the saddle and whizzed across the finish line, cutting at a hard angle to send up a cloud of dust and clotted earth. There he waited a moment, letting his heartbeat cool as the tingling thrill of competition drained from his fingers. By the time the rest of the riders puttered across the line, their faces set in that stony scowl of envy he’d come to know so well, the rush was already starting to wear off. It was just another race, just another trophy he’d toss in the dumpster on his way to the next town. Sure, he could use the prize money—it was what got him from track to track, what paid for repairs and cheap diner meals and gasoline—but it wouldn’t quiet that horrible, gravelly voice in his head, telling him to find the vein until he wondered if he was crazy or suicidal or both.

  It wouldn’t stop his dreams.

  • • •

  “THAT was some race you ran there, son.” The race organizer—Tyler, according to the name stitched across the front of his American Motocross Association jacket—handed Owen a check for three hundred dollars, his first-place winnings. The sun had started to set over the cragged pine tree line in the distance, and the last of the contestants had already packed up their bikes and families and were driving away under an eggplant-colored sky. “You were like a bat outta hell on that track—I swear, in all my days, I never saw anyone take corners so tight.”

  “I just got lucky.” Owen folded the check into his back pocket.

  “That was more than luck, son.” Tyler gathered a sheaf of papers from the folding table with hands as thick and dirt-streaked as hot dogs left too long on the grill. His metal folding chair screeched as he pushed it back against the pavement. “I guess I’ll be seeing you on the pro circuit before too long.”

  He stood to leave.

  “Hey,” Owen said quickly. “Got a sec to answer some questions?”

  Tyler paused. He was a bulky man in his midfifties, squat and square as a fireplug, his hair gray and more than a little greasy. He had the leathered face of someone who had spent his life in the Pacific Northwest, tacitly accepting sharp winds and salt water and endless rain as a matter of course.

  “I doubt there’s anything I can tell you. But try me.”

  “It’s not about motocross.” Owen knew that everything he needed to know about that was coiled in his muscles, racing to leap to life on the track. “It’s about this area. Have you lived here long?”

  Tyler furrowed an eyebrow. “Only since I was half your size and twice as stupid. Why d’you ask?”

  “I’m looking for some info on a place that used to be around here.”

  “Try me.”

  Owen kept his voice cool. “It’s an old commune, called Children of the Earth.”

  The name, and the fact that it was somewhere near Olympia, were all Owen knew about the place he was born. As a child, his questions about it had deepened the lines around his mother’s normally lively eyes until he learned, reluctantly, not to ask anymore. He guessed, but never knew for sure, that her time at Children of the Earth was the reason she sometimes trailed off in the middle of sentences, her eyes misting and growing faraway before he or his sister or stepdad could wave their hands in front of her face to draw her back. He wondered, sometimes, if the snippets of old tunes she sang, songs he’d never heard on the radio or found through online searches, came from there. Most of all, he wondered if the Children of the Earth had something to do with his dreams.

  Tyler’s wrinkles arranged themselves into a quizzical road map. “I remember it, sure. Hasn’t been around for years, though. Must have shut down when you were barely old enough to piss standing up.”

  Owen’s pulse quickened, struggling toward answers. “Any idea what happened?”

  “Gosh, let’s see.” Tyler rubbed a hand over the stubble on his face. “It’s been well over a decade since it got shut down. Nobody really knew why, but it wasn’t pretty. Lot of rumors about that place. They say the Feds came and picked up their leader—what was his name? Murphy? Murdock? Something like that.” He paused, staring off into the foggy peaks in the distance. “Anyway, most of ’em skipped town. A few stayed, though, ladies with kids, mostly. Got jobs around town.”

  “Are any of them still here?” Need pulsed at Owen’s temples. He suspected, sometimes, that the Children of the Earth were the dusky figures dancing by the bonfire in his dreams. Sometimes, he drew close enough to glimpse a wild grin of dark ecstasy or the glint of an emerald eye; but their faces always receded into the darkness of his memory before he awoke, leaving him grasping at shadows.

  “Well, there’s one, Pam, who was around until just this past year. Worked at the laundromat. Nice lady, kinda quiet. But she finally went back to her folks in—oh, I dunno, one a’ them eastern states. Connecticut or something. Guess she got sick of trying to keep a lid on that daughter of hers.”

  “Daughter?” Owen felt his ears perk up.

  “Oh, Luna.” Tyler chuckled softly. “She’s still around—hard to miss, that one. Though if you want to know about that commune, she may be your best bet.”

  Luna. The name roared through Owen’s head, a distant siren song from his dreams.

  “Any idea where I can find her?”

  “Let’s see.” Tyler scratched his head. “I think she still performs with Ariel Crow’s band—the Fine Feathered Family, they’re called. You can check and see if they’re still in town; they usually put posters up outside the food co-op when they have a gig.”

  “Thanks.” Owen stuck out his hand. “I appreciate your time, Tyler. You’ve been a real big help.”

  Tyler pumped his hand up and down. “What’cha want with that Children of the Earth place, anyway?” he asked as Owen turned to go.

  Owen froze. “No real reason,” he said, not meeting the older man’s eyes. “I read an article once, and I was curious.”

  “If you want my two cents, son, you’d do better to steer clear of any commune business and keep your eyes on the prize.” Tyler nodded down at the motocross track, which was silent and dusky in the gathering night. “I know pro when I see it—and, son, mark my words, within a year you’ll be pro.”

  “Thanks for the vote of confidence,” Owen said. But he suspected, as he turned and made his way toward the parking lot, to his truck and Luna and the future, that in a year it wouldn’t matter anymore. In a year, everything would be different.

  DAPHNE jerked awake. A brassy blast filled the Greyhound bus, the note long and sustained. A moment later it was followed by another, lower note, sounding a deep brass fanfare.

  She craned her neck, sore from sleeping kinked and curled against the cold plexiglass window, and looked around at the handful of other passengers, wondering if someone had turned on a radio or taken the opportunity to practice the trumpet. But everyone else was silent, peering up and down the length of the bus as they tried to find the source of the sound.

  “Is that your radio?” a rumpled woman who’d been eating coconut flakes from a bag since they left Cheyenne asked the driver. He shook his head, eyes confused in the rearview mirror. He even turned it on to check, shuffling through country stations and classic rock and static.

  “I think it’s coming from outside,” he surmised.

  Daphne pressed her ear to the window and the notes grew louder, their tones simultaneously bright and muted, exciting and monotonous. It sounded like they were trying to introduce something, like a line of sentries sounding the arrival of a king. They made her want to keep listening even as she pressed her hands against her ears, w
ishing they would stop.

  “Is it trumpets?” a guy in an army uniform asked.

  “Might be a sax,” suggested a grandmother with a big bag of knitting in her lap.

  The bus driver shook his head. “The sax has more groove,” he insisted.

  “And it ain’t no tuba, either,” the woman who’d been eating coconut flakes said firmly. “Not low enough.”

  “It’s trumpets,” the army guy said firmly. “Sounds just like ’em—and I’d know. I used to be in a marching band.”

  The bus sputtered through a turnaround, past a sign welcoming them to the town of Carbon County (pop.: 3,901; elev.: 6,394 ft.), and into the dusty parking lot of Elmer’s Gas ’n’ Grocery. A recent rain had washed through town, and a single, golden ray of sunlight peered through the still-steely sky.

  “You got a bag under here?” the driver asked as Daphne climbed off the bus, the trumpet blasts growing shriller with the first cool breath of fresh mountain air.

  She nodded.

  “Well, hurry up and get it out—those horns are starting to give me the creeps.”

  Daphne grabbed her duffel from beneath the bus and stretched her legs. A sudden high note sounded as she glanced around at the parking lot’s cracked pavement and the tree growing through the window of the abandoned Sleep-EZ Motel across the street.

  “There she is!” Uncle Floyd called from across the parking lot. He lumbered toward her, his face open in a wide, affable grin, and wrapped her in a bear hug. His hair had gone gray around the temples, and he walked with a bit of a limp, but he still had the same broad shoulders and mile-wide smile she remembered from her childhood. The same as her dad. “Just in time to witness this miracle from God. Good to see you again, niece!”

  Burying her face in the wood-smoky smell of his plaid flannel shirt, Daphne felt her shoulders relax for the first time in months. To Uncle Floyd, she wasn’t a burden or a victim or a murderer. To him, she was still just Daphne.