Armageddon (9 page)

AROUND MIDNIGHT I was at the wheel of the ATV, driving us back to Agent Judge’s horse ranch. Agent Williams and Mel’s dad were grabbing some much-needed shut-eye in the back of the truck. Mel was up front with me, trying her best to stay awake and keep me company as we rolled through the George Washington National Forest on the Appalachian border between Virginia and West Virginia.

Welcome to a typical day in my life: one minute you’re chatting with George Washington, the next you’re driving a high-tech Alien Tracking Vehicle through a forest named after him.

I had taken over steering-wheel duties from Agent Williams because, even though I’m not sixteen, I’m quite skilled at piloting all sorts of vehicles, many of which can travel faster than the speed of light. If necessary, I could also instantaneously generate an official, government-issued, hologram-stamped driver’s license for whatever
state an overzealous trooper might happen to pull us over in. Also, FYI, Alpar Nokians make excellent long-haul drivers because we need very little sleep. Especially after we chug a couple of Red Bulls.

“You okay, Daniel?” Mel asked through a mouth-stretching yawn.

“I’m fine. Get some sleep.”

“No thanks. I’d rather stay up and keep you company.”

“We still have another four or five hours till we reach Kentucky.”

“Really?” Mel leaned over to check out the speedometer. “Even though you’re doing, like, ninety in a fifty-five zone?”

“Don’t worry. The highway patrol has other things to worry about tonight besides writing me a speeding ticket.” It was true that the roads were completely empty—no cops, cars, even truckers.

“That’s not what I’m worried about, Daniel.” Mel’s brow furrowed with concern. “I’m worried about
you
.”

She reached over and placed a very warm, very comforting hand on my knee.

“It seems like this Number 2 is dead-set on destroying you,” she continued. “For whatever twisted reason, he seems to be doing all…
this
… just to get at you.”

“Not gonna happen,” I said, even though I wasn’t sure.

“Promise?” said Mel.

It was only one word, but I hadn’t heard that much care and concern in a voice since the time I was two years old and my mother thought I had vanished from my crib.
(That was the day I accidentally discovered I could turn myself into inanimate objects and had become a stuffed monkey so I could chat with Schnozzy, my stuffed elephant.)

I raised my right hand to make a pledge: “Cross my heart and hope to have a water buffalo squat on my face.”

“Huh?”

“It’s something people used to say up on Alpar Nok. It’s like a solemn vow.”

“Well, I’m going to hold you to it.”

“Hey, other aliens have tried to take me down before. They didn’t have much luck. Neither will Number 2.”

“Good,” Mel said, settling back into her seat, resting her head against the pillow she’d made out of her jean jacket. “Because if that
thing
destroys you, well, that would totally destroy me.”

Wow.

If I may be allowed to paraphrase a famous Oscar winner: She liked me. She really, really liked me.

I guess that’s why, in the middle of the night, on a winding mountain road, I was loving this planet more than I had ever loved it.

Mel had her own amazing superpower: the uncanny ability to stir up emotions that had never been stirred before. For years, no living creature (except the ones I had cooked up in my imagination) had cared so much about me. Daniel X. The alien orphan kid with no last name, no
real
friends, no one to lose sleep worrying about him.

Until I met Mel.

Then again, I’d also have
no future
if Number 2 and his army of alien thugs had their way.

So, as much as I wished I could morph into a typical teenager and have my biggest burden be how to ask Mel to go horseback riding with me again,
saving the planet
was what I needed to focus on.

And with good reason.

IT WAS 7
AM
in New York City and 7
PM
in Beijing when Abbadon struck next.

Amazingly, he was in both cities at the same time.

Astonishingly, he was also simultaneously in London (where it was noon) and Moscow (where it was 3
PM
).

“I hope you are near a television, Daniel,” Abbadon whispered to the winds whipping around him on his elevated posts in all four locations. “This is going to be
delicious
.”

In New York Abbadon stood atop the Empire State Building; in Beijing he was out on the observation deck of a super-tall skyscraper called China World Trade Center III; in London he stood in an office window on the seventy-second floor of the unfinished London Bridge Tower; and in Moscow he chose the Naberezhnaya Building, which, at 881 feet, afforded him an excellent view of the chaos and destruction below.

“Witness my powers, Daniel! Fear me and bow down to me!”

In all four locations, buildings seemed to topple at his whim. Glass and steel and concrete slid down the sides of structures and crumbled to the ground as if the edifices were mammoth lizards losing several thick layers of skin.

In all four cities, Abbadon made the same bargain with the millions of panicked survivors filling the streets: “Serve me and live. Refuse me and die.”

“What would you have us do?” pleaded the terrified leaders of the four metropolitan centers.

“Leave your families. Destroy your halls of justice. Burn all your books and abandon your churches. Take whatever you want from whomever you want to take it and join me in the underworld. And bring me the boy called Daniel!”

“Yes, Master!” a million voices cried out in reply.

“This is my planet now!” said Abbadon. “Only those who descend into the abyss to be my slaves shall escape the coming cataclysm.”

“Yes, Master!”

Abbadon had never felt so close to total fulfillment.

All was now as it was always meant to be.

EVERYBODY WAS WIDE awake when I parked the ATV in front of Xanthos’s barn.

Our video monitors had just exploded with images of violent, catastrophic destruction.

Buildings toppled over. Fires raged. People rioted and looted and turned on one another.

If hanging out with Mel that day we went horseback riding was, according to my spiritual advisor, “experiencing humanity at its best,” then what we were currently witnessing in high-definition surround sound was the flip side of that same coin: humanity at its absolute worst.

“He’s hitting New York, London, Moscow,
and
Beijing!” exclaimed Agent Judge. “All at the same time.”

Grainy images of mayhem from the four far-flung locations flickered across the screens. My eyes darted back and forth to verify what I was seeing. I could hear his voice cooing “Surrender to me!” in English and Russian and Chinese.

And then Number 2, cloaked in a black cape and seated in the saddles of four horses of different colors, rode triumphantly into the four live news feeds.

“This can’t be happening,” said Mel. “He can’t really be in all four places at the same time. This has to be trick photography, or… or he’s totally defying the laws of physics.”

“Yes,” said her father. “This guy just
loves
breaking every law he can.”

Number 2 also appeared to love quantum mechanics. Decades earlier, Earth scientists had discovered that it was, indeed, possible for subatomic particles, like electrons, to be in two different locations at the exact same instant. My guess was that Number 2 had figured out how to do the same thing on a macro scale.

And I had a hunch that maybe I could pull it off, too. I’d just have to concentrate on rearranging my own matter in four different directions.

Maybe. Theoretically.

And Mel
definitely
could not come with me this time.

Heck, I didn’t even know if
I
could come with me. It’d be a brand-new, not to mention extraordinarily taxing, power.

“Don’t worry,” I said to Mel and Agent Judge. “I’ll be back in a flash.”

“Where are you going?” Mel asked. “Moscow? London?”

Her dad jumped in: “Beijing? New York?”

I just smiled at them both and said, “Yes.”

BEING IN FOUR places at the same time would be absolutely incredible if you could simultaneously watch a movie, catch a concert, eat a pizza, and, I don’t know, scale a rock wall. It’d even be great if all you could do was go to the multiplex and watch four different movies at once.

But heading out to do battle with an archfiend in four different geographical hot spots?

Not so much.

Besides being a space-time aberration, it was a total multitasking nightmare. I was afraid my brain circuits would either fry or freeze up. Visually, it reminded me of that time I had turned myself into a housefly. But this time I wasn’t just seeing kaleidoscopic images of the same thing repeatedly stacked up on top of itself.

Having achieved four-way-split teleportation, I was now seeing four very different real-time scenes simultaneously.

In London I could see Number 2, dressed in a tattered
black cloak like the grim reaper. He was carrying a crossbow and charging across the far horizon on the back of a white steed (I could tell the horse wasn’t Xanthos because my spiritual advisor’s eyeballs don’t glow like red LEDs).

Number 2 must’ve just looted the fallen ruins of the Tower of London, because on his hooded head I could see the glistening diamonds, pearls, sapphires, emeralds, and rubies he had obviously stolen from the Tower’s Crown Jewels collection.

“I have crowned myself your conqueror!” he cried out to the masses scurrying through London’s narrow lanes. “Serve me and live. Refuse me and die!”

Across the ocean, on the island of Manhattan, I couldn’t catch up with Number 2 as he rode a fiery red horse up Broadway and, swinging a sword over his head, helped his scorpion-tailed henchbeasts cattle-prod a herd of terror-stricken New Yorkers up the street to the nearest subway entrances.

“You are the spoils of war!” he shouted. “Serve me!”

He was also on horseback in China, where the galloping stallion was black. For some bizarre-o reason, in Beijing Number 2 carried a pair of market scales instead of a weapon and cried out, “Slaves will find food in their bellies; resistors will starve!” Hungry multitudes raced after Number 2’s minions and followed them down into the Beijing subway stations.

Moscow was even worse. For just an instant, I saw Number 2 as he trotted through what was left of Red
Square. The spiral onion-dome towers of St. Basil’s Cathedral lay atop a heap of rubble like multicolored swirl cones somebody had dropped on a litter-strewn boardwalk.

In Moscow I could also smell Number 2 something fierce.

The black-caped creep carried the scent of a rotting side of beef jammed into a refrigerator that had stopped working weeks ago.

He smelled like death.

To complete the death theme, the pale horse he rode through the Russian wreckage was the color of a corpse—a sort of sickly yellowish green with pus-colored blotches all over its hindquarters.

“I am death to those who do not heed my call!”

The me in Moscow didn’t chase after the extremely grim reaper as his horse leaped over the shattered red star that used to top the turret of the Vodovzvodnaya Tower.

Because there was another problem within spitting distance.

A
gopnik
.

A street gang of tough young males with razor-cut hair and glazed “I don’t care” eyes. They were decked out in jogging suits and had just circled a babushka, a little old lady with few good teeth and a headscarf tied under her chin.

I sensed what was about to happen.

This Moscow street gang was going to have some end-of-the-world fun by mugging, and maybe murdering, somebody’s grandmother!

I IMMEDIATELY SHUT down the whole quantum-leap experiment and pulled myself together on the mean streets of Moscow.

I couldn’t let these hooligans hurt the defenseless old woman, not if I ever wanted to face myself in the mirror again. For now, I needed to concentrate all my powers in this one location: Red Square.

I also needed my friends.

“What’s up?” said Joe, when he, Willy, Emma, and Dana materialized.

“We need to teach these young Muscovites a thing or two about respecting their elders,” I said as the five of us surrounded the two dozen bad dudes circling the babushka.

“Might be time to call in the heavy artillery,” suggested Willy.

“Yeah,” agreed Dana. “Make these tough guys cry Mayday.”

An excellent suggestion, I thought, since Mayday is the
international distress signal, and May Day is also very close to Victory Day in Russia, a holiday when the old Soviet empire used to parade rocket launchers and tanks and goose-stepping troops through this very same square. I skipped the soldiers and concentrated on the big guns.

Twenty-four tanks and twenty-four nuclear-tipped rocket launchers rumbled into the square, one of each aimed directly at each of the twenty-four thugs threatening the defenseless granny. Clanking tank treads and rumbling truck tires crunching across chunks of concrete definitely got the bad boys’ attention. All twenty-four of them twirled around to face us and our newly arrived backup.

“Give it up, guys,” I called out. “You’re seriously outgunned. Let her go.”

“Who are you?” jeered their leader. “Are you with the horseman?”

“No,” said Dana, swaggering forward. “We’re the good guys.”

Now the leader violently grabbed the babushka and wrapped his arm around her throat. “Then call off your tanks!” he snarled. “Pull back your missiles. Or I will kill this old woman! I will kill her now!”

“You don’t want to do that, my friend,” said Willy, stealthily moving forward, ready to pounce the second I gave him the go signal.