PART THREE
WELCOME TO THE APOCALYPSE
Chapter 58
WHEN I WOKE up, I smelled pancakes. It was quite a contrast to the horrors I’d learned about the night before from Dad.
I rolled out of the bed in the Judges’ guest room and made my way downstairs to the kitchen.
I was relieved to see that the walls in Agent Judge’s house displayed the usual sort of framed pictures—not the horror show I had witnessed when my father turned the walls of the barn into the multiplex from hell. But seeing so many pictures of Mel—riding a pony in the paddock, winning her first horse-show ribbon, crossing our creek on horseback—bummed me out nearly as much.
Mel was still missing, of course.
And now I knew who had her: the devil himself. Going down the list of baddies you could be kidnapped by, it doesn’t get much worse than that.
I stepped into the kitchen.
“Good morning, Daniel.”
It was my mother, cooking up a storm. Like my dad, she is a total manifestation of my imagination and shares his uncanny ability to show up exactly when I need her most. And, like most moms, she also knows exactly what to make for breakfast when life gets tough. In addition to the pancakes I had already sniffed out, there were a dozen eggs sputtering in a skillet; bacon, sausage, and ham sizzling on the grill; cheese grits simmering in a pot; biscuits and cinnamon buns in the oven; pitchers of juice (orange, apple, grape, and grapefruit); and, of course, toast.
Hey, it’s just not breakfast without toast.
“Erm, are we expecting company?”
“No, dear. This is all for you. Your warrior’s breakfast.”
It’s a tradition in cultures everywhere: Before you go off to do battle, you pig out with one last feast. Either that or you fast in the desert to give yourself a lean, mean edge. Personally, I prefer the feast to the fast.
I settled in at the kitchen table and secured a checkered napkin in the collar of my T-shirt. Then I tucked into the mountain of food Mom had piled on my plate. When I was halfway through my second stack of pancakes, my mother sat down at the table with me.
“Daniel, do you know why your father never did battle with Number 2?”
“I guess because I was like three years old and he didn’t want to risk losing his death match with the devil, which would leave you a single parent and me a fatherless child. Of course, the way things worked out, I turned into a total orphan instead.”
My mother smiled and shook her head. “That’s not why he refused the fight, Daniel.”
I put down my knife and fork. She reached across the table to touch my hand with hers.
“Going up against the devil is not a task to be taken lightly. You only get one chance. If you lose, the consequences are dire.”
“Wasn’t Dad ready? Was he afraid?”
“Your father has not been afraid of anything or anyone since the time he was two years old and his mother accidentally dropped him in the middle of an elephant stampede during mastodon mating season.”
“So why didn’t he take down Number 2 when he had the chance?”
“Because he knew a stronger warrior was coming along. One better suited to the task than he.”
“Who?”
“You, Daniel. You have more powers than your father and I combined. You are the one whose destiny has always been to deal with Number 2. I sometimes think creating you was the reason fate decreed that your father and I fall in love. Now we need to pray that you are ready for this fight.”
Then, right there at the kitchen table, my mom and I locked hands and bowed our heads to pray.
Hey, if you go up against evil alien baddies on a regular basis, prayer can be extremely useful. Sometimes you just need to call on a power greater than yourself—even if you, yourself, have all kinds of great powers.
But I never prayed like this before. And my mother? Her intensity was off the charts.
When we were finished I couldn’t help but ask, “Why did you pray so hard, Mom?”
“I’m trying to prepare you—and me—for the possibility of your death.”
“You think I’m gonna die when I go up against Abbadon?”
“Death is always with us, Daniel. None of us is immortal. Eventually, we must all depart this realm and move on to the next.”
Okay, even after biscuits and slabs of ham, that was probably the heaviest thing my mom could have served me for breakfast. And she wasn’t finished.
“Someone close to my heart is going to die soon, Daniel. I can feel it. The feeling is so strong there is an aura of certainty surrounding it.”
Something else you should probably know about my mom?
Her “feelings” are never, ever wrong.