Chapter 79
“YOU SILLY, SENTIMENTAL sap.” Abbadon’s rippling image sneered up at me from the dark well water.
Suddenly I didn’t smell springtime anymore.
I smelled foul sulfur and raw sewage and rancid, maggot-riddled hamburger meat.
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!