Apocalypse to Go

  When he laid a finger on a yellow box, it sang one pure note, starting out loud, then fading away. Sophie caught her breath with a gasp. Ari and I exchanged a look.

  “They didn’t sing for you,” Ari said.

  “Nola’s not a world-walker,” Michael said.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Well, we just saw someone throw a blue-violet sphere onto the sidewalk. It created light and smoke, and when he ran into the smoke, he disappeared. Gone. Totally gone.”

  “Whoa!” Michael whistled under his breath. “Stinky nasty!”

  “Is that good or bad?” Ari said.

  “Good.” Michael grinned at him. “Real good.”

  “What I wonder is, are there spheres inside those boxes?” I said. “I’m afraid to just cut one open to look.”

  Michael picked up the blue-violet box and hefted it in one hand. His expression turned dreamy, distant, as if he focused on some other view.

  “I think they’re spheres, all right,” he said. “Orbs. That’s the name they like. Orbs.”

  A cold frisson rippled down my back. I walked over to the carton and looked down as Michael put the blue-violet box back in its place. Each box appeared to be a little taller than before, as if they were straining upward toward my brother’s hands. At moments I saw a flicker of glow from one or the other of them.

  “Mike,” I said, “move away from the carton for a minute. I want to see what happens when you’re some distance away.”

  Michael stood up and walked out of the living room to the head of the stairs. The boxes seemed to shrink. The flickers of glow disappeared, only to reappear when Michael returned.

  “I don’t suppose you’d let me have these,” Michael said. “Looks like a complete set.”

  “You’re right. I wouldn’t. No unauthorized experiments, buster.”

  “Yeah, I figured. You’d better put them somewhere, like, y’know, you can lock. Seriously.”

  “I couldn’t agree more.” For one thing, not that I said this aloud, I wondered if they were the female apparition’s stolen property. If so, I didn’t want her taking them back again before we figured out what they were—and who she was.

  Ari had bought and installed a sizable wall safe in our bedroom as part of the upper flat’s security system. I’d hung a framed print over the door, one of Monet’s water lilies sequence. Inside, we kept extra items from Ari’s weapons collection as well as some of his gadgets. I’d packed up the flash card containing Belial’s consciousness in a special antistatic wrap and put it inside as well.

  To this peculiar collection we added my father’s boxes. Since the carton was too large to fit, I let Michael take them out and place them on the floor of the safe. No matter which box he placed next to which, the colors rippled and changed to preserve the spectral order. As they did so, they sang to him.

  “I gotta wonder if the colors stay the same inside.” Michael looked at me with begging eyes. “Could we open just one?”

  “It isn’t Christmas Eve.”

  We shared a smile. As kids, we’d all been allowed to open one present on Christmas Eve, which gave our parents some extra sleep on Christmas morning.

  “Yeah, I figured,” Michael said. “But I had to try.”

  I shut the safe door with a click and spun the combination lock to scramble the numbers. As I was putting the print back in place, I heard a faint whisper of music from inside, a fragment of a sad melody in some minor key.

  “Did you hear that?” Michael said. “I don’t know what it is, but I bet it came from those boxes.”

  “So do I. Let’s hope they’re still there the next time we look for them.”

  “They will be. They’ve been waiting for Dad to come back all these years, haven’t they?”

  “If you say so, they probably have.” I shrugged. “I wouldn’t know.”

  With his hand on the doorjamb, Michael paused and looked back at me. “I do know,” he said. “They’ve been waiting, and they know I’m his son, too. Y’know, this is all hella strange. Seriously.”

  If understatements could get the Nobel Prize, that remark would have won him a medal.

  For our late lunch, Ari and Michael decided to go fetch take-out food from a nearby deli, which gave me a chance to talk privately with Sophie. In the time that she’d been living at Aunt Eileen’s, she’d put on a few much needed pounds, though her thin little face still showed her history. She’d been born on Interchange, then been abandoned by her mother. As a child she’d starved on and off for years. We sat down together on the couch.

  “So what’s the problem?” I said.

  “I dunno, and that’s part of the problem.” She gave me a weak smile. “Last month, I started feeling really weird, and it wasn’t female stuff, y’know?”

  “Okay. Weird, how?”

  “I wanted to go up the hill to the big park and run around through the grass and trees.” Her face colored a delicate pink. “Naked.”

  “Uh-oh. I’ve heard that symptom before. When was this, right before the full moon?”

  “Yeah. Mike was teasing me about it. He howled, kind of like a dog.”

  “He’s heard the symptom before, too.” I remembered a detail from Dad’s letter. “Can I take a look at the palm of your hand?”

  Sophie held out her right hand. I took it and looked at the pattern of lines. In the center of the palm, where a lot of people have Ms and Ws, she had a deep letter F. Otherwise her hand looked perfectly normal to me. I let go of it.

  “Well, I guess that doesn’t mean much,” I said. “Unless—” The CDS came to my assistance. “Fenris. Odin’s wolf.”

  Sophie began to tremble.

  “Do you ever dream about wolves?” I said.

  “Yeah.” Her voice was barely audible. “I did last month, anyway.”

  “At the full moon?”

  She nodded. Her eyes filled with tears.

  “I think you know what I’m working up to,” I said.

  She nodded again. “I don’t want to be a werewolf,” she whispered. “Not here, not where everyone’s so nice to me. I’d have to go back to Interchange.”

  “Why? Even if it’s true, you don’t have to go around biting people. That’s a choice some lycanthropes make. Others fight against the tendency and live reasonably normal lives. Father Keith can help you. You can trust him on that.”

  “But I’m so scared,” Sophie’s voice stayed at the whisper level. “If I lost Michael, I’d just die.”

  I could remember feeling the same about my first real love. Fortunately, her relationship with my brother had a much better chance of lasting than my first affair had.

  “You won’t lose him,” I said. “Sophie, haven’t you figured out just how weird our family is? If you do have lycanthropy, it means you’ll fit right in. Our brother Pat had it. It’s nothing new to the O’Gradys.”

  She covered her face with her hands and wept in an overflow of relief. I got up and hunted down a box of tissues in the bedroom. I brought them back and set the box down next to her on the couch.

  “You might not have it, anyway,” I said. “It usually manifests much earlier than this. You’re what, sixteen?”

  “Yeah, as far as I know.” She grabbed a couple of tissues and snuffled into them before she continued. “I don’t know when my birthday is, so I might be seventeen already.”

  “Then you should have started making the change a couple of years earlier. Unless the radiation on Interchange has an effect on lycanthropes, but you’d think that if anything it would make them more common.”

  “There were some around. Not many, and when the cops found one, they took them away somewhere. Poof! and the person was gone. I dunno if they shot them, but I bet they did.”

  “Well, nobody’s going to shoot you here. Ari won’t let them.”

  She managed a weak smile at that.

  “Let me think about this,” I went on. “I’ll see if I can come up with an answer for you.”

  But Sophie provided the an
swer herself, when Mike and Ari returned with bags of deli food. Although the two men would have eaten right out of the cartons, I insisted on putting the meal out on proper plates. I brought out utensils, too. Fingers are not good enough for potato salad, no matter what some males of our species think.

  Sophie came into the kitchen to help me carry the food out to the living room. When she saw the platter of pastrami and corned beef, her big dark eyes grew wide.

  “Look at all that meat,” she said. “I guess I’m still not used to it, yet, all the stuff there is to eat here.”

  “You didn’t get much meat back on Interchange, huh?” I said.

  “Almost never, yeah. It was so expensive there, but Aunt Eileen cooks some almost every day.”

  My mind poked me. “I bet that’s why you’re developing your talent late,” I said. “And furthermore, I bet it’s why I keep seeing more and more lycanthropes around here, too. The amount of meat we all pack away must trigger the gene or activate the virus.”

  We decided to reveal Sophie’s secret right away. I figured that the family needed to know before her first change. Pat’s lycanthropy had taken us all by surprise. The uproar that followed had injured him psychologically even beyond the normal stress of discovering that he had werewolf genes. Sophie sat down next to Michael on the couch.

  “I’ve got something to tell you,” she said. “Nola figured it out. When I felt so weird, y’know? You were right to howl.”

  Michael turned to her and grinned. “Are you telling me that you’re—”

  “Yeah.” Sophie’s voice returned to her near-whisper. “Nola thinks I might be. I’m just getting it late.” She was staring at Michael in honest fear, waiting for his reaction.

  Michael grinned at her. “That’s so cool,” he said. “I mean, like, it’s just so cool!”

  “It is?” Her voice became steadier by the word. “You like it?”

  “Sure. Y’know, I wanted to be a werewolf once myself.” He held out his arms. “That’s great!”

  Sophie nestled against him and began to snuffle once again.

  “You’re a werewolf?” Ari sounded utterly confused.

  Sophie nodded and wiped her eyes on a tissue.

  “Oh,” Ari said. “For a bit there I thought you were going to say you were pregnant.”

  Everyone laughed, even Sophie. Michael looked as if he was struggling against the impulse to kiss her right in front of us.

  Ari and I retreated to the kitchen on the pretense of bringing in the rest of the food only to find that someone had gotten there ahead of us, a little blue smelly meerkat-like being. Or-Something, Michael’s tame Chaos critter, was standing on the counter by the sink and chowing down in the cardboard container of coleslaw. When I yelped, it raised its wedge-shaped head. Strands of cabbage hung from its snaggly teeth. When I snapped my fingers, it disappeared.

  “So much for the vegetable course.”

  “What?” Ari was staring at the counter. “I saw the carton moving. And cabbage hanging in the air.” He turned to me with a look of sheer exasperation. “What?”

  “A Chaos critter.” I said. “I told you about those. This one was eating the coleslaw, so I scared it off.”

  “If these things can eat real food, why can’t everyone see them?”

  “I don’t know. It’s one of the questions the Agency’s research staff is working on. I’ll tell you if they come up with a theory.”

  Ari started to speak, then merely set his lips together with a sour twist. I threw the remains of the coleslaw into the garbage.

  “I got you some artichoke hearts, too,” Ari said. “I suppose they qualify as a vegetable, anyway.”

  “Barely, but thanks.”

  Before Michael and Sophie left, Michael admitted to me that he’d started working on the map of gates.

  “Sean’s helping me find them,” he said.

  “He can find anything,” I said.

  “But he can’t actually open them.”

  A little sibling rivalry there, I thought. “Have you actually spotted other gates?”

  “One, yeah, in a cemetery down in Colma, but it doesn’t go to Interchange. I dunno where.”

  “Both of you be careful, will you?”

  “You bet. Sean wants to talk to you. He’s uptight about when we get Dad back. I mean, he’s gay, and he remembers Dad being hella down on that.”

  I said an unladylike word. I remembered it, too. It also occurred to me that the Dad I was remembering would be less than thrilled to find me living with a man I wasn’t married to. “I’ll call Sean. Let’s not worry about this stuff until we actually have Dad home again.”

  “Yeah, it’s not a sure thing.” Michael paused for a gloomy interval. “I’ll call Father Keith tomorrow about Sophie.”

  “Good. Ask him about a group called the Hounds of Heaven. I think she’ll find them interesting.”

  CHAPTER 3

  BY THE TIME MICHAEL and Sophie drove off, the time stream had washed away all traces of the thief and his temporary escape gate. I spent a few minutes trying to pick up traces of the energy but found none. The sidewalk was only a sidewalk with a little chip missing where the guy had thrown the blue-violet orb.

  I went back upstairs and called Sean, but I only got his answering service. I left a message and clicked off. While I called, Ari paced up and down in the living room, but he stopped before he drove me crazy.

  “I was thinking of going to the gym,” Ari said. “But I don’t like the idea of leaving you here alone. There’s not much chance that our would-be thief will come back right away, but one never knows.”

  “That’s true,” I said. “I’m real glad you’re staying home.”

  “All right. I can do a few sets of push-ups and the like here.” He sounded genuinely pleased at the prospect, a tone of voice that brought back grim memories of high school gym teachers.

  “How many do you do?” I said.

  “Three sets of fifty each. One hundred fifty for each exercise, that is. Sit-ups, push-ups, and the one whose English name I never can remember. You start standing, drop to a crouch, do a plank, then back to a squat and up.”

  “No wonder you can’t remember the name. Your brain’s bruised from slapping against your skull a hundred fifty times.”

  Ari set his hands on his hips and scowled at me, just like the gym teachers used to do. “It’s actually quite invigorating.”

  “The very thought makes me feel faint. That’s what I used to do in gym class, faint. Constantly. It was real embarrassing.”

  “You probably fainted because you were starving yourself.”

  He had a point, not that I was going to admit it.

  “Have fun,” I said. “I’m going to sit here and read my notebooks.”

  “You could at least try a few—”

  “No.” I may have snarled.

  Ari gave me one last scowl, then stomped off to the bedroom to change into gym clothes. I put on a Lady Gaga CD loud enough to cover the sound of him repeatedly dropping to the floor.

  Later that evening we had unexpected visitors. I was catching up on routine Agency business at my desktop, and Ari was watching a basketball game on TV, when the front doorbell rang. I started to go downstairs to open the door, but Ari stepped in front of me.

  “I don’t feel any danger,” I said.

  “I don’t care. Just wait.”

  He picked up the new TV remote he’d acquired recently, a shiny black model, not the pizza-stained gray one I used to own. When the doorbell rang again, Ari clicked a couple of buttons. On the TV screen an image appeared of two men standing on the porch.

  “It’s just Sean,” I said. “And Al. His boyfriend, y’know?”

  “Oh,” Ari said. “I’ll go down and let them in.”

  When he set the remote down, the basketball game reappeared onscreen. I followed as he strode to the head of the stairs, where we kept a waist-high metal filing cabinet. I’d been planning on putting flower arrangements on
top to brighten up the space. Ari opened the top drawer and took out a pistol I’d never seen before, a blue-gray thing that looked less lethal than the Beretta but lethal enough.

  “Ari!” I snapped. “It’s my brother.”

  “I know, but I’m taking no chances. Someone might be lurking behind them.”

  I followed him down the stairs. When he opened the door with his left hand, Sean and Al both saw the gun in his right and put their hands up with a theatrical flourish.

  “Er,” Al said, “if you’re busy or something, we could just leave. You don’t need to fire warning shots across our bow. Honest.”

  “I just wanted to make sure it was really you.” Ari lowered the gun to point at the floor. “Next time, give us a ring before you drop by, will you?”

  “You bet,” Sean said. “Can we put our hands down now?”

  “Yes.” Ari cracked not a trace of a smile. “You’ve been vetted.”

  We all trooped back upstairs, Ari first, for which I was grateful. I’d been afraid he’d herd us at gunpoint.

  Al Wong and my brother Sean made a handsome couple, though Sean was so preternaturally beautiful, with his perfect features, wavy dark hair, and blue eyes, that Al tended to be ignored in the equation. In any other context people would have noticed him immediately, because he was as good-looking as any Hong Kong movie star. As it was, he got shoved into the background, which, luckily, he preferred to being on display. He tended to dress in flannel shirts and jeans, while Sean went for tailored slacks and beautifully cut shirts in fancy fabrics. That night Sean was wearing an emerald-green silk shirt with fawn slacks and a brown suede jacket cut like a sport coat. The color and sheen of the silk made his eyes glisten like sapphires.

  “What brings you to our neck of the woods?” I said.

  “The friends we were hanging with,” Sean said. “They live pretty close by. And so when I got your message, I thought we’d just see if you were home.” His voice shook as he continued. “Next time I’ll call ahead for sure. I know he’s a cop, but jeez!”

  By the time we returned to the living room, Ari had put the gun away. He flopped back down on the couch and turned on the TV sound. When Al noticed the basketball game, he shrugged out of his beaten-up canvas barn jacket, dropped it onto the floor, and flopped down next to Ari to watch.