Armageddon (20 page)

Suddenly, a last-ditch idea came to me.

Like all those about to enter the arena to face their fiercest rivals, I needed to study my opponent’s game films.
I flashed back to what my father had said when he’d filled the walls of the barn with flickering images of Number 2’s evil exploits:

Study him, Daniel. Study everything he does—and I mean everything. Every movement, every gesture, every telling smile. Look for his weaknesses.

It was time, once again, to follow my father’s advice.

So, first I said a quick prayer that Number 1 hadn’t (as he had in the past) put up a disruption field around the planet to prevent time travel.

And then I dove under the rippling surface of the temporal plane and zoomed back to 1942, when Abbadon rode with the Nazis in Amsterdam.

I WAS HOPING to meet Miep Gies.

Hey, I knew that studying Abbadon’s past actions (killing, looting, plundering, and causing global devastation) was going to be pretty tough. At least I could try to restore my faith in humanity by seeking out one of history’s heroines while I was at it.

Miep Gies was one of the Dutch citizens who hid Anne Frank, her family, and several other Jews from the Nazis during World War II. She was also the woman who found and preserved Anne Frank’s diary after the Franks were arrested in their hiding place—a secret attic above Mr. Frank’s spice factory in Amsterdam.

Gies and her helpers could have been executed if they had been caught hiding Jews. But they did what they knew was right. You don’t find those kinds of souls wandering around in Abbadon’s circles of doom.

I was walking up Amsterdam’s Prinsengracht, the longest of the city’s main canals, toward number 263—the
building where Mr. Frank had his spice mills and warehouse. I glanced at a newspaper drifting across the cobblestones. It was August 4, 1944.

Not the date I would have picked.

“Why not?” crooned a voice behind me.

I whipped around.

It was Abbadon. He was right on my tail!

“Did you really think you would find my weaknesses in the past, Daniel? Such a foolish boy. The past contains some of my greatest victories! This day in particular has always been one of my favorites,” he sneered. “This is the day in the Frank family saga that clearly proves my point: evil always triumphs. If it didn’t, hell wouldn’t need so much real estate.”

I heard a commotion up the street. Nazi soldiers and gestapo men in black trench coats were storming into canal house 263.

August 4, 1944, was the day Anne Frank and her family—after hiding from the Nazi occupiers for two years—were finally captured. Anne and her sister were taken to the concentration camp at Bergen-Belsen, where they both died a few weeks before the British Army liberated the camp.

Three weeks earlier, she had written what would become the most quoted entry in her famous diary: “It’s really a wonder that I haven’t dropped all my ideals, because they seem so absurd and impossible to carry out. Yet I keep them, because in spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart.”

My feelings exactly.

But it was hard to picture people being “good at heart” with the Lord of the Flies himself, Abbadon, standing there, grinning triumphantly at me. He was dressed up in an appropriate period costume: a black fedora and a black leather trench coat with a swastika wrapped around its left sleeve. The red of the armband matched his sinister eyes. He laughed mercilessly when the German secret police roughly removed the Frank family from 263 Prinsengracht.

“Poor little Annie,” he said with a sigh. “It seems a petty thief who has fallen on hard times called the authorities this morning. Ratted her out. Can you blame the poor soul? He desperately needed the reward money.”

“There is good in this world!” I shouted.

“Oh, I suppose you will find a bit of it scattered here and there, Daniel. But when all is said and done, these accursed creatures would gladly watch you die if it meant
they
might live another day. Why do you think so much of humanity has already fled to my side while you were left to fight for the planet’s future with, what? Four make-believe friends and a pathetic, hodgepodge assortment of over-zealous soldiers?”

“This wasn’t the day I came here to see!”

“No,” sneered Abbadon. “But it was the one you
needed
to see.”

“You sent me here?”

“For your own good, Daniel. After all, we’re cousins.”

Things just kept getting worse.

How could Abbadon’s creative powers override my own? How could he continue to force me to see things I had no desire to see?

I had time-traveled into the past hoping to find his weaknesses.

Instead, I found another one of his strengths: He could redirect my own creative abilities. He could mess with my mind!

I definitely needed more information on this creepy cousin before I went up against him in a death match. I could think of only one place left to find it: our common home.

Alpar Nok.

So while Number 2 stood there disgustingly admiring the Nazis, who would someday be joining Abbadon in the circles of hell, I streaked off into outer space.

MY FIRST STOP back home was an unbelievable zoo I know inside a hidden park beneath the universe’s biggest shatterproof solarium.

I went to a vantage point overlooking a grasslands field filled with herd upon herd of elephants. The friend I was seeking saw me first. She approached my viewing platform very gracefully—especially for an elephant that weighs forty, maybe fifty thousand pounds. She extended her telephone pole–sized trunk to me and I gently stroked it.

Welcome back, Daniel
, she said in my mind.

This was Chordata. I had known her as an infant and met up with her again when I set out on my first alien-hunting adventure.

Why do you look so anxious, my young friend?

I need your help.

Then my help you shall have.

Remember how you told me an elephant never forgets?

Well, if I couldn’t remember saying it, how could it possibly be true?

I grinned.
Have you ever heard of another two-legged Alpar Nokian who calls himself Abbadon? He’s been on Earth for centuries, maybe since the dawn of human history.

Ah, yes. The Fallen Soul.

You knew him?

No. He is far older than I. But I have heard the stories. It is a cautionary tale we still tell our children. A story of one who was given tremendous talents and powers, who, instead of using those gifts for a greater good, chose instead to selfishly enrich and prolong his own life. You see, Daniel, the one known as the Fallen Soul was granted not immortality but a vastly extended life by an evil god known as The Prayer. So long as the Fallen Soul did that god’s bidding and provided him with constant amusements, he would be granted life.

I had wondered how Abbadon could’ve hung around Earth for so many years if he was truly an Alpar Nokian, like me. Yes, we live a very long time. But thousands of years?

Well
, I communicated to Chordata,
he’s been keeping up his end of the deal, putting on quite a horror show for The Prayer’s amusement. But now he’s upping his game. He aims to wipe out the entire planet. And he’s doing a pretty good job of it. Now he’s eager to destroy me, too.

You say he destroyed the planet?

Yes. The civilized parts. I saw buildings topple. Whole cities were leveled. The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse rode across the rubble.

Are you sure of this, Daniel?

I saw it with my own eyes.

Ah. Then perhaps it did not happen.

I shook my head to clear out the bafflement.
Huh?

Always remember, Daniel—the fallen one has the same powers you do. He can conjure up a reality and make you see it through the sheer force of his destructive imagination—especially if certain fears already lurk in your subconscious.

My father had said something very similar about Abbadon:
Trust none of what you hear, and less of what you see.

So the cities of Earth aren’t really leveled?

They might be, Daniel—so long as the one you call Abbadon imagines that they have been.

I was beginning to understand.

The things I create with my imagination only stay that way as long as I focus my creative energies on them. If I release an object or person from the grip of my transformative powers, they go back to being what they always were. I could not alter their essence, only their substance. Trust me, it’ll make sense one day, after you’ve read Aristotle’s
Metaphysics
or spent a little time in Plato’s Cave.

I leaned down and gave Chordata a quick kiss on her wet snout.

What was that for, Daniel?

Hope. You’ve given me hope!

Talking to Chordata, I finally realized that if I could defeat Number 2, then all the destruction he had conjured up with his twisted imagination would be erased the instant I erased him!

There was only one problem: How could I do that?

How could I defeat him?

There was only one place I hadn’t looked for the answer: the future.

Yes, it was a pretty sketchy, highly questionable idea, but I figured it might be my last chance to find some flaw in my nemesis. Maybe I could go just far enough into the future to watch our fight and see how he’d come at me, and then flip back to the present knowing how to foil his attack. Maybe I could see him kill me and then zip backward in time to stop it from actually happening on the do-over.

Yes, it was complicated, but then again, saving a whole planet from imminent annihilation usually is.

I concentrated every fiber of my being, every molecule in my body, every ounce of my creative powers on recalling exactly how it felt when Abbadon had sucker-punched me into the future. It was time to re-create that moment.

Using cellular-level sensory recall, I blasted forward….

Into the future.

I WAS NEW at fast-forwarding, and unable to completely control exactly when (or even where) I reemerged in the time line.

So I didn’t end up in the abyss, Number 2’s chosen arena for our final confrontation.

Instead, I was once again in Kentucky. In the barnyard.

“Daniel? Are you going to wear
that
for our ride?”

Mel, looking maybe three or four years older than I remembered her (okay, looking like the cutest high school girl you can imagine), came out of the farmhouse in her riding clothes. “Seriously,” she joked. “You look like an Abercrombie & Fitch catalog… from five years ago.”

So far, except for my geeky clothes, I liked what I saw in the future.

For one thing, Mel was there.

“Have you saddled up Xanthos?” she asked.

Don’t forget my blanket, my brudda
, said a familiar voice in my head.

Awesome thing two about the future: my trusty white steed and spiritual advisor, Xanthos, was alive again. What Chordata theorized was true: once I destroyed Abbadon in our death match, I also erased all his destructive imaginings.

“Hey, kids,” shouted Agent Judge from the back porch. “I packed you a picnic lunch.” He was holding a little wicker basket.

Awesome future thing three: Agent Judge, and hopefully most of his strike force, had survived their trek out of the underworld.

“I put in a couple of cartons of that new Coke you both love.”

Awesome future thing four? A new kind of extremely refreshing organic Coca-Cola in eco-friendly, biodegradable packaging.

“We’ll come back for it, Daddy,” said Mel. “We don’t want the food to get all wet when Daniel falls in the creek again.”

“Hey,” I protested playfully, not completely recognizing my own voice. It was deeper. Richer.

Awesome thing five: I’d conveniently skipped all that awkward puberty junk. Guess I was all grown up, too. Probably a high school senior, like Mel appeared to be. I definitely wanted to find a mirror so I could make sure my last few pimples had faded away like everybody promised me they would.

Okay, there wasn’t much in this future to help me fight Abbadon back in the past except, of course, the knowledge
that good (me) had somehow triumphed over evil (him). Plus, I saw flowers blooming. Heard birds chirping. Smelled the sweet smell of newly mown grass in the air.

And, standing over by a greeting card–caliber wishing well, I saw both my mother and father.

They were holding hands and waving at me. I swear there was a rainbow in the sky behind them.

“Did you really think we could stay away forever?” joked my father. “Oh, and by the way, Daniel, I’m reading an incredibly interesting book about antigravity. It’s impossible to put down.”

Yep, it was definitely him. The corny pun sealed the deal.

I dashed across the barnyard.

“How about we have pancakes for supper tonight, Daniel?” said my mother, sounding perky and chipper, the way I remembered her. “Your sister will join us.”

“Is Pork Chop here?” I asked eagerly, even though she could be the most annoying little sister in the galaxy.

“Not yet,” said my dad. “She had some sort of after-school water-ballet recital with the sea lions back home on Alpar Nok. But she’ll be coming down for dinner.”

“I’ll tell Agent Judge to set another place.”

As I said that, I glanced down into the well, hoping to check out my reflection in the smooth, glassy water.

But when I looked down, I didn’t see myself.

I saw him.

Abbadon.

He had followed me into the future, too!

“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.