Doomsday

1. The Warning

KATIE SCARLETT

An army of footsteps. Deep in the woods. They shook the trees, getting louder and louder. Katie Scarlett woke up in her tent, alert and afraid. As far as she knew, there were no roads or houses in that direction, so where would so many people come from? Katie had pitched her tent well off the winding path out of sight from anyone who didn’t know it was there, and she had spent hours camouflaging it with dead branches and leaves. Without the campfire scars, she had trouble finding it herself. Still, was she in danger?

A group of people stomped past her site through the crisp, brown November leaves. She listened as they continued along the path, then abruptly came to a halt. She held her breath, straining to hear. Had they seen her tent? Some crows cawed in the distance, but that was all she heard. As noisy as they’d been walking, the people had become as silent as the dead. Pulling on a thick blue sweatshirt, some white jeans, and her tennis shoes, Katie crawled out of the tent to have a look.

Toward the creek and the cul-de-sac, she saw seven men and two women standing in a line as if waiting for something. Each of them had an identical rifle slung over one shoulder, and army-style belts with ammunition pouches strapped around the waist. They weren’t military, and they didn’t seem organized as they waited. One man examined the sole of his shoe as if searching for something he might have stepped in. Another vigorously scratched his back with the barrel of his rifle. A third gnawed on the trunk of a leafless tree that grew along the path. Katie made a face when he bit off a mouthful of bark, chewed it up, and swallowed.

All the men had a ragged-looking beard and unkempt black hair. They even wore the same clothes: worn blue jeans and a long-sleeved yellow polo shirt. Katie blinked. The men didn’t just resemble one another; except for their body types, they were identical.

The women were lookalikes, too, from their scraggly brown, neck-length hair to their filthy white blouses to their shredded black slacks. If their clothes hadn’t been so ratty looking, Katie thought they might have been dressed to go to work in an office. Each woman carried the same weapons and ammo belts as the men. Though the bizarre scene raised her fear level, it also hiked up her curiosity. She needed to see more.

Stepping onto the well-worn path, she heard a squeaking, crunching sound approaching from the deepest parts of the woods. She backed up again and froze, pressing her body against a nearby tree. She was still in plain view, but somehow touching the tree made her feel less conspicuous.

Another bearded man approached, but this guy pushed a wheelbarrow that carried a tall stack of sandbags. The man must have been as strong as a bull because he had no trouble moving the load, though the wheel squeaked loudly with every turn as it snapped through dead tree branches like breaking bones. Three more identical-looking men pushing similar wheelbarrows loaded with sandbags followed him. Katie watched, expecting the worst, but they ignored her as if she was invisible. Were they part of a construction crew? Was she going to have to leave the woods and find some place else to live? Why would a construction crew carry guns?

Four more armed women followed the wheelbarrows, each hauling two backpacks that looked overstuffed and cumbersome. One after the other, they glanced at her as they passed, but her presence meant nothing to them. Katie was shocked. Even close up, the women looked the same.

Something slipped out of a backpack and landed at Katie’s feet. She pretended not to notice, but it didn’t matter because the women hadn’t seen it either. When the women caught up with the others, the group continued toward the creek.

Katie scooped up the object. It was a loaded magazine for a g*n. The backpacks must have held a ton of ammunition.

She stayed off the path as more men approached from the dense woods, all armed and carrying heavy backpacks. She discreetly counted them as they went by; it was one of the strangest things she’d ever seen in her life. She noted six women and thirty-seven men—forty-three armed clones.

Katie rushed into her tent and got her cell phone. She kept it charged in an outdoor receptacle that was hidden by shrubs at the McCormicks’ house. She’d gotten it earlier that morning to text some of her homeless friends to see how they were doing. Since none of them had heard a word about their former magician leader for the last seven months, they figured he had to be dead; the followers had nobody to follow. What Jon Bishop had told her after the show at R. F. K. must have been true. It seemed impossible, but apparently, a high-school kid with a fancy sword had killed the Street Wizard.

Then she realized. Were these armed men and women going to Jon’s house? Was that why the McCormicks had built a brick wall and put up razor wire? If they were after Jon, she needed to warn him. It was the least she could do for him. She found his name in her contacts and dialed. It was mid-morning already, and she had no idea what day of the week it was.

JON

Jon frowned at the email on the computer screen. It was the seventh rejection letter from a college with a film school, and the dean who wrote it said the same thing they all had: finish a year or two at a community college and apply again. He may have graduated with his original class in high school, but his general diploma and mediocre grades roadblocked his goals. That settled it. Jon would apply to the nearest community college and begin school in the spring semester. He could go to summer school and have a year under his belt about the time Brandon was ready to start college. What choice did he have?

He got up from his desk and went to the window. A stiffening breeze swayed the trees, dropping more and more leaves every day. Soon most of the trees would be bare, and the beautiful many-colored leaves would all be dead and brown. What would it be like to be a tree, knowing you’d have to drop all your leaves and go dormant every winter? That’s a pretty long time to sleep. Would it seem like death? If so, being dormant was almost appealing.

Leaves covered much of the windshield of his silver Mustang parked in the driveway. The windshield wipers were like leaf magnets, and whenever it rained, and he turned on the wipers, there was a leaf stuck in them, smearing the view.

Joey Petulla’s pickup truck was parked in the cul-de-sac. He’d come by early to get Lindsey to go for a ride in the mountains to see the leaves, but they hadn’t left yet. Most people did that kind of thing on weekends, but Joey played football for the University every Saturday in the fall, so they were skipping classes for the day. A familiar SUV was in the driveway next door at Dr. Parrish’s place. Anton Edwards, Jon’s former English teacher, was there. Jon thought about stopping by to say hey, but at the moment, he wanted to be alone.

A fifteen-foot metal pole stood in the front yard, between the houses. Chris and Travis were building a purple martin house to mount on the pole. Through his feet, Jon could feel their hammering and the vibrations of the power saw and knew they had to be working in the garage. He also sensed the vacuum cleaner running on the steps. Angie was doing her weekly home sterilization. That woman wanted a clean home like nobody else he knew. Jon didn’t know how he could feel vibrations in his feet while hearing nothing at all, and he didn’t understand how he knew what was making them. Was it some kind of genetic thing? Had his dad passed a similar sense down to him? Or was he just a freak of nature? It didn’t matter. Whatever caused his new “sixth sense” had come in handy more than once.

Dr. Parrish had paid Joey Petulla’s dad big bucks to brick up the exterior of his house. And then he’d paid Mr. Blandford a bundle to make it extra secure. The windows and doors were bulletproof, and they had attached ¾-inch sheet metal to the floor joists under the house to help keep out demons. Then they’d built up the foundation with nearly four layers of cinderblock and brick. Jon had a feeling Angie and Chris had probably helped Parrish pay for much of the work, and that was cool. But he wondered if Mr. Blandford understood the real reason so much work had been done on both houses.

His cell phone rang. He took it out of his pants pocket and looked at the caller ID. Katie Scarlett, one of the street people who had followed the Street Wizard before Jon killed him. Oh, hell. He’d given his number to her months ago and hadn’t heard a word. She hadn’t called or texted, not once. He had a bad feeling about answering, but he did anyway.

“Hello?”

“Jon Bishop? It’s Katie Scarlett.”

“Katie,” he said, dreading whatever she had to say next. When they’d last spoken—the only time they’d spoken—he’d gotten the feeling that she liked him a lot. Admittedly, she was a hottie, but he’d felt no chemistry with her at all. For Jon, the chemistry was important. He and Maria had had perfect chemistry when they’d been together. He frowned. Why had he thought about Maria?

“Jon, forty-three armed men and women are headed your way. They should come out of the woods at any moment. They look like clones or something. I think they mean trouble. Be careful.”

“They’re armed?” He went back to the window and glanced out. Sure enough, a line of bearded men emerged from the trees and headed in different directions. Some went out of sight behind their house, following the brick wall—several pushed wheelbarrows up the road that appeared to be carrying sandbags. Most of them approached Parrish’s house and surrounded it. He recognized the guns: AK-47s. They all carried backpacks and ammo belts, too.

“Who are they?” He waited a moment before he realized she’d hung up. “Oh, hell!” He stuffed his phone in his pocket and ran from his room, yelling at the top of his lungs.

“Chris! Angie! Dante! Get your guns! We’ve got trouble!”