Beautiful Chaos

End of Days

It’s some kind of sign.” I was driving Lena home, and we were tearing down Route 9. She kept glancing at the speedometer.

“Ethan, slow down.” Lena was as spooked as I was, but she was doing a good job of hiding it.

I couldn’t get away from County Care fast enough, the peach walls and sickening smell, the broken bodies and empty eyes. “His name was John, and he was writing ‘the world ends on the Eighteenth Moon’ over and over. And his chart said he was in a motorcycle accident.”

“I know.” Lena touched my shoulder, and I could see her hair curling in the breeze. “But if you don’t slow down, I’m going to do it for you.”

The car slowed, but my mind was still racing. I took my hands off the wheel, and it didn’t even swerve. “You want to drive? I can pull over.”

“I don’t want to drive, but if we end up in County Care, we won’t be able to figure this out.” Lena pointed at the road. “Watch where you’re going.”

“But what does it mean?”

“Well, let’s think about what we know.”

I dragged my mind back to the night Abraham showed up in my room. The first time I really believed John Breed was still alive. The night that started it all. “Abraham comes looking for John Breed. Vexes destroy the town and put Aunt Prue in the hospital. And I meet some guy named John there, who warns me about the Eighteenth Moon. Maybe it’s some kind of warning.”

“It’s like the Shadowing Song.” She was right. “And then there’s your father’s book.”

“I guess.” I still couldn’t bring myself to think about how my dad fit into any of this.

“So the Eighteenth Moon and John Breed are connected somehow.” Lena was thinking out loud.

“We need to know when the Eighteenth Moon is. How do we figure that out?”

“Well, that depends. Whose Eighteenth Moon are we talking about?” Lena looked out the window, and I said the one thing she didn’t want to hear.

“Yours?”

She shook her head. “I don’t think it’s mine.”

“How do you know?”

“My birthday is a long way off. And Abraham seems pretty desperate to find John.” She was right. Abraham wasn’t looking for her this time. He wanted John. Lena was still talking. “And that guy’s name wasn’t Lena.”

I wasn’t listening anymore.

His name wasn’t Lena. It was John. And he was scribbling messages about the Eighteenth Moon.

I almost swerved off the road. The hearse righted itself, and I gave up, taking my hands back off the wheel. I was too freaked out to drive. “Do you think it could be about John Breed’s Eighteenth Moon?”

Lena twisted her charm necklace around her finger, thinking. “I don’t know, but it fits.”

I took a deep breath. “What if everything Abraham said was true, and John Breed is still alive? What if something even worse is going to happen on his Eighteenth Moon?”

“Oh my God,” Lena whispered.

The car jerked to a stop in the middle of Route 9. A truck horn blared, and I saw a blur of faded red metal spin around us. For a minute, neither one of us said a word.

The whole world was spinning out of control, and there was nothing I could do to stop it.

After I dropped Lena off at Ravenwood, I wasn’t ready to go home. I had some thinking to do, and I couldn’t do it there. Amma would take one look at me and know something was wrong. I didn’t want to walk into the kitchen and pretend everything was okay—that I hadn’t seen Amma making some kind of deal with the voodoo equivalent of a Dark Caster. That I hadn’t spoken to Aunt Prue while she was lying, unresponsive, in her peach-colored prison. Or watched a random guy named John send me a message saying the end of the world was coming.

I wanted to face the truth—all the heat and the bugs and the driedup lake, the broken houses and busted roofs and cosmic Orders I couldn’t fix. The consequences Lena’s Claiming had brought on the Mortal world and Abraham’s wrath had brought on my town. As I drove down Main, it looked a hundred times worse in the daylight than it had a few nights ago in the dark.

The shop windows were all boarded up. You couldn’t see Maybelline Sutter chatting up her customers while she cut their hair too short or dyed it a shade of bluish white at the Snip ’n’ Curl. You couldn’t see Sissy Honeycutt stuffing vases full of carnations and baby’s breath at the counter of Gardens of Eden, or Millie and her daughter serving up biscuits and red-eye gravy a few doors down.

They were in there, but Gatlin wasn’t a town of glass windows anymore. It was a town of locked doors and stockpiled pantries, a town full of folks waiting for the next twister or the end of the world, depending on who you asked.

So I wasn’t surprised to see Link’s mom standing in front of the Evangelical Baptist Church when I turned down Cypress Grove. Close to half the folks in Gatlin were there, Methodists and Baptists alike—on the sidewalk, the lawn, anywhere they could elbow themselves a spot. Reverend Blackwell was standing in front of the chapel doors, underneath the words ONLY ROOM FOR THE RIGHTEOUS IN HEAVEN. The sleeves of his white button-down were rolled up, his shirt wrinkled and untucked. He looked like he hadn’t slept in days.

He was holding a bullhorn—not that he needed it. He called out into the crowd of people, who were waving their own cardboard signs and crosses as if he was Elvis back from the dead. “The Bi-ah-ble”—he always gave the word three syllables—“tells us there will be signs. Seven seals to mark the End a Days.”

“Amen! Praise the Lord!” the crowd shouted back. One voice stood out above the rest, of course. Mrs. Lincoln was standing at the base of the steps, her DAR lackeys huddled around her, arm in arm. She was carrying her own homemade sign, with the words THE END IS NEAR written in bloodred marker.

I pulled over next to the curb, the heat smacking me in the face the second the car stopped moving. The crooked oak shading the church was swarming with lubbers, the sun shining off the armor of their black backs.

“Conflict! Drought! Pestilence!” Reverend Blackwell paused, looking up at the pathetic, dying oak. “ ‘Fearful sights and great signs from heaven.’ That’s the Gospel a Luke.” He bowed his head respectfully for a second, then lifted it with a renewed sense of determination in his eyes. “Now, I have seen some fearful sights!”

The crowd nodded in agreement.

“A few nights ago, a tornado came down from the heavens like the finger a God! And it touched us, crushed the very framework a this fair town! A fine family lost their home. Our town library, home to the words a God and man, burned to the ground. You think that was an accident?” The reverend defending the library? That was a first. I wished my mom was here to see it.

“No!” Folks were shaking their heads, at rapt attention.

He pointed out into the crowd, moving his finger across the sea of faces as if he was speaking to each person individually. “Then I ask you, was it a great sign from heaven?”

“Amen!”

“It was a sign!” someone else shouted.

Reverend Blackwell clutched the Bible to his chest like a life preserver. “The Beast is at the gates, with his army a deeemons!” I couldn’t help but remember what John Breed had called himself. A Demon Soldier. “And he’s comin’ for us. Will you be ready?”

Mrs. Lincoln thrust her flimsy sign into the air, and the other disturbingly distinguished ladies of the DAR did the same in a show of solidarity. THE END IS NEAR knocked into HONK FOR THE HOLY GHOST and nearly ripped I BRAKE FOR REDEMPTION right off its taped-up yardstick handle.

“I’ll be ready to fight the Devil back to his own door with my bare hands if I have to!” she shouted. I believed her. If we were actually dealing with the Devil, we may have stood a chance with Mrs. Lincoln leading the charge.

The reverend held the Bible over his head. “The Bi-ah-ble promises there will be more signs. Earthquakes. Persecution an’ tortures a the e-lect.” He closed his eyes in rapture, a sign of his own. “ ‘And when these things begin to come to pass, then look up, an’ lift up your heads, for your re-demption draweth nigh.’ Luke 21:28.” He dropped his head dramatically, his message delivered.

Mrs. Lincoln couldn’t contain herself any longer. She grabbed the bullhorn in one hand, waving her sign in the other. “The demons are comin’, and we have to be ready! I’ve been sayin’ it for years! Lift your heads up and watch for them. They may be standin’ at your back door! They may be walkin’ among us now!”

It was ironic. For once, Link’s mom was right. The Demons were coming, but the folks in Gatlin weren’t prepared for this kind of fight.

Even Amma—with her dolls that weren’t dolls and her tarot cards that weren’t tarot cards, her salt-lined windowsills and bottle trees—she wasn’t ready for this fight. Abraham and Sarafine, with an army of Vexes? Hunting and his Blood Pack? John Breed, who was nowhere and everywhere?

Because of him, the end was near, and Demons were walking among us. It was all about him. He was the one to blame.

And if there was one thing I had become so intimately acquainted with that I could feel it crawling around under my skin, the way lubbers were crawling all over that oak, it was blame.