PART TWO
MARCHING TOWARD ARMAGEDDON
Chapter 38
I LANDED ON my butt in front of what used to be the Chrysler Building, just up Forty-second Street from Grand Central Terminal.
I knew it was the Chrysler Building because I recognized the bashed-in steel beaks of the eagle-head gargoyles that used to stare out at the city from the ledges of the sixty-first floor. The eagles were replicas of Chrysler hood ornaments from 1929. Talk about a time warp: I was sitting in tomorrow, staring at a relic of yesterday.
The streets, which before had been so crowded with throngs of jostling New Yorkers elbowing and stiff-arming one another as they ran down the subway stairs, were now totally deserted. So I had a sneaking suspicion that I wasn’t in exactly the same space-time continuum I’d occupied a second earlier.
After gaining my bearings I noticed that I wasn’t completely alone. A man was scavenging his way across the scrap heap of the Chrysler Building, digging through the debris, looking for anything edible he could find. He danced a little jig when he rolled over a boulder and uncovered what had once been the lobby’s snack shop.
While he helped himself to a whole carton of plastic-wrapped Oreos packets, I climbed over the rocky remains of the collapsed art deco masterpiece to talk to him.
“Where is everybody?”
My voice startled the guy. He whipped his head around while nibbling his way around the black edges of the cookie like a rat working its way around a wheel of cheese. I couldn’t help making the rat comparison, since a squealing pack of wiry-tailed rodents scurried around his ankles, helping themselves to the treasure trove of crushed candy bars, cookies, and chips he had just uncovered.
The man didn’t answer. He just kept staring at me with a terrified look in his eyes.
So I asked again. Louder this time. “Where did everybody go, sir?”
“Who are you, kid? Where’d you come from?”
“I’m Daniel. And let’s just skip the where. It’s complicated. Who are you?”
“Bob,” the man replied. He had a week’s worth of stubble on his cheeks, not to mention a week’s worth of grime on his clothes. He wore a tattered raincoat, a soiled shirt, baggy pants belted by a frayed rope, and bundles of plastic bags on his feet for shoes.
“Did you see that mob of people at Grand Central?” I asked.
“Yesterday.”
“Where did they all go?”
Bob pointed a shaky finger toward the scrap heap that had been the railroad terminal. “Below. Down with the horseman. Yesterday was the end of the world, unless you were sleeping inside a Dumpster.”
That’s when I fully understood what had happened. Somehow, a single blow from Number 2 had sent me spiraling forward through time, something I had never done before and, frankly, wasn’t really interested in doing again anytime soon.
“He rode a red horse!” Bob shouted. “The second seal has been broken. He was the second horseman of the Apocalypse.”
Maybe, I thought.
I had seen all four steeds, but I hadn’t yet put two and two together to figure out that the alien invader was trying to terrify the world by aping the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, who, the Book of Revelation predicted, would ride a white horse, a red horse, a black horse, and a pale (or puke-green) horse.
“ ‘Then another horse came out, a fiery red one,’ ” Bob ranted, recalling the ancient text. “ ‘Its rider was given power to take peace from the Earth and to make men slay each other. To him was given a large sword!’ ”
My turn to nod. I had seen Number 2’s sword, too.
And if this really was tomorrow, I had lost more than a day.
I had also lost Number 2. The second-most-lethal alien outlaw on Terra Firma (or what was left of it) had at least a twenty-four-hour jump on me.
I needed to talk with Xanthos. After all, it was my spiritual advisor who had advised me to be on the lookout for a red horse. Maybe he could drop me a few more hints. Like how to end Number 2’s world by giving him his own personal Armageddon.
“Nice meeting you, Bob,” I said. “Maybe I’ll see you again.”
“When? There will be no more tomorrows!”
“Well, then maybe I’ll see you yesterday, because that’s where I’m going.”
Hey, I may not know how to pull a fast-forward without someone sucker-punching me in the chin, but I’m an old hand at time-traveling backward!