One In A Million (The Millionth Trilogy Book 1) Page 21

  Kyle doubted she’d return to the Starbucks until morning. Since he had no way of knowing what time, he’d have to get there early and just wait. For now, he needed a place to stay.

  He’d cleaned up well at the YMCA. His mustache and beard were growing in nicely, and he’d decided not to shave. He hadn’t had facial hair since college, so Kyle imagined that whatever pictures of him might be out there would show him clean-cut. Between this and the hat, he hoped he would be almost unrecognizable.

  The change of clothes felt great and they fit nicely, for the most part, though between the stress of this ordeal and his lack of eating, he’d lost some weight already, forcing him to use his dress belt from his work outfit.

  As the night came on, the light afternoon fog morphed into a dense lather, carrying with it a biting chill. Kyle immediately remembered Tully’s, which was nearby and had the best clam chowder in Monterey.

  The crowd on the pier was thinning, with the exception of Bubba Gump’s, which still had a line out the door. He didn’t want to seem conspicuous, but by now he probably was. It was time to get some food and find a bed somewhere. The bed part was going to be a problem. He didn’t know if any of his cards still worked, but using them to check into a hotel was obviously not an option.

  At Tully’s, he took a seat at the bar and ordered the clam chowder, a shrimp plate with rice and, though he was sure The Gray Man would frown upon it, a Heineken.

  Once his beer arrived, he took a long swig and began thinking over his plan so far, probing it for weaknesses. He’d ditched his old clothes in a trash bin behind the building next to the Y, along with all the stuff he bought at CVS, including the unused scissors and hair dye. Hopefully, the cops would see the security footage from the CVS and assume the opposite, figuring he’d cut his hair and dyed it.

  Beyond these items the receipt would show the purchase of the calling card, and once they’d traced that, it would show calls to Mexico near Beaury. This would hopefully have the cops thinking, along with his San Diego searches on the library computer, that Kyle was making a run for the border. Whatever. He’d done his best. He could only hope it worked.

  The dimly lit bar had a huge sixty-inch flat-screen television centered over the liquor display, and it showed the Sunday night football game between the 49rs and the Bears, which was just now reaching halftime.

  When his chowder arrived he finished it with vigor, his teeth chewing into the crackers and chunks of clam, the creamy texture warming him with each swallow. The shrimp and rice was next, and it didn’t last long. The rest of the beer was surprisingly hard to get down, as if he’d lost his taste for it, so he ordered a glass of water.

  He speared the last of his shrimp as the halftime show started, but instead the NBC News broke in, reporting on a hurricane that was making landfall in Hawaii.

  At first the weekend news anchor seemed a little too animated about the whole thing, but as the facts started rolling across the screen, it became more understandable. It was a Category 5 storm, with winds in excess of 180 mph, and because hurricanes were rare in Hawaii, the coastal communities were not properly prepared. Death counts were already rolling in.

  The images of the storm began to flash across the screen, making Kyle freeze, the shrimp still dangling on his fork as his eyes locked onto the television. A woman a few seats down from him gasped, putting her hands to her face as other patrons began to murmur, quietly at first and then a little louder. The bartender stopped what he was doing and turned around to watch as well, a frosted beer mug stuck in one hand as his jaw went slack.

  An NBC crew had gotten into a small resort town that was being crushed by the winds, rain and rising seas. Cars were being pushed around like Hot Wheels and buildings were being washed away. The reporter on the scene sounded beyond panicked, as if being in the middle of the entire situation was far beyond his pay scale and he wanted desperately to just get off-camera and get out of there.

  “Oh my God!” someone exclaimed from the back of the room.

  Unbeknownst to the reporter as he tried to yell over the wind and stay facing the camera, a series of bodies washed by over his right shoulder, floating like driftwood, some face down, others face up. Then a few more came, along with a hut of some kind, and then, of all things, a cow, which rolled to one side and was kicking desperately for a shore it would never see.

  Evidently the cameraman tipped off the reporter to what was going on, and when he turned to face the nightmare behind him he uttered the understatement of the year. “Uh. The situation is only getting worse here, Tom.”

  The picture zoomed in on the raging river sweeping through the town. At first it was unclear what the cameraman was after, but then it became apparent. A wave of moans rolled through the bar as the images showed live people among all the dead bodies, bobbing up and down in the chaos, struggling for help. A man in a collared shirt grabbed frantically at some branches of a tree that had been knocked over, and then futilely at the hood of a car, before he went under. Three people clutching each other—a man, a boy and a woman—came next. Kyle imagined that they were a family, because they couldn’t swim to safety this way, not like that, with only one arm chopping at the water and the other holding onto someone else.

  They’re going to go out together, Kyle thought.

  The camera panned left as a man on a low terrace plucked someone out of the water, then it swung further left towards a hotel in the distance, where a few people were trapped in a courtyard; a tour bus dislodged from its parking spot and began slamming into a storefront, and a girl who looked to be a teenager was clinging to a newspaper stand.

  But to Kyle these images were unreal, because they weren’t the real images.

  His eyes filled with a fluid too thick to be tears, and he had a good guess what that fluid was. He wondered if his eyes were glowing light blue right now.

  At first the TV screen became blurry, and then, as if someone had slipped an old Kodak slide into the projector of his mind, an overlay image of what was really happening came into focus.

  There were angels and demons everywhere.

  Hundreds of them.

  Kyle gasped and dropped his fork. Everything that had happened to him over the last few days should’ve prepared him for this moment, but it didn’t. His heart stopped and his lungs clutched at whatever air was still left in them.

  Mixed scenes of horror and hope unfolded before him: the man who had missed the trees and tried to grasp the top of the car earlier came up one more time, a final, desperate effort against death. But Kyle could see now that he had no chance. Some monstrosity, half-human and half-dog, had wrapped itself around the man’s neck and shoulders, like a millstone, and was dragging him under for the last time.

  Meanwhile the man on the low terrace, flush with victory at having saved one person, was trying to save someone else: a little boy who was clinging to a piece of patio furniture. The man reached out, but the boy was caught in a tug-of-war between an angel, glowing in white and trying to pull him towards the man, and a demon, fat and bald, who clawed at the angel and tried to push the boy away, out of reach.

  The family that was fighting the water arm-in-arm was surrounded by angels ushering them through all the debris and fending off demons that kept trying to flow in and break them apart. One momentarily succeeded, knocking the boy loose, before it was attacked by an angel who flew down from the sky and struck the thing with what looked like a hammer of some kind. The boy spun off, away from the man and woman, but one of the surrounding angels pushed him hard against the current and back to the woman’s grip.

  There was an explosion of some kind, a white-hot light filling the camera lens for a second, and then sparks rained down on the street and water below. The camera panned up to reveal the source: a transformer on top of a utility pole had blown and was now teetering, nearly falling off into the water, the power cords still attached to it swinging menacingly over the terrified people below.

  The cameraman zoomed in on
the box, giving Kyle a close-up that he would have rather not seen. The culprits were four demons, two with small horns and mangled faces and two others that looked like charred circus clowns, bits of melted skin hanging off their ears and chins. They were all pushing hard to topple the box when out of nowhere came a female angel with bright eyes and a look of desperation on her face. She rushed in, threw her wings wide and used her body like a battering ram, knocking all four demons off balance. It had the desired effect; their grip on the transformer was lost, but now they all grabbed for the angel, and…

  “No,” Kyle pleaded in a whisper.

  … the demons began to claw and bite the angel, tearing at her and chomping at her flesh and wings, dragging her down to the ground, down to…

  “Oh God. No.” Kyle was suffocating in the immensity of what he was seeing. A very real and visible battle between good and evil was taking place before his eyes, and it was too much.

  He began to weep bitterly, his mind unable to understand reality anymore. Love and hate, just feelings before, were now real things, living embodiments of the heavenly host and the minions of hell struggling for mortal souls in the midst of this storm, as they must in the midst of everyday life. It was true then, all of it. Up to this point he’d been given glimpses at the truth, but now he was being nearly struck blind by the immensity of it.

  He pushed away from the bar and stumbled towards the door, the blue fluid in his eyes dissipating a bit as his human tears diluted it. That was good. He didn’t want to see anymore. No more. It was better before, when he hadn’t known any better. He wanted to go back to being ignorant to it all. Just a guy who went to church a few Sundays each month. God help him, but he did.

  “Hey, buddy! Your tab?” the bartender shouted, irate at first, until he saw the look on Kyle’s face. “Hey man, you okay?”

  Kyle wiped his arm across his eyes and turned around. “Yeah. I’m fine. What do I… Never mind, here’s forty. Keep the change.”

  The bartender scooped up the two twenties. He was fat, with salt-and-pepper hair and a mostly pepper goatee. “You know someone there?” he asked, motioning with his thumb at the TV screen.

  Kyle shook his head, then thought of The Gray Man. I hope not.

  “Look at how huge that thing is!” yelled an old man in jeans and a blue t-shirt.

  Kyle didn’t want to look, but when he saw the bartender shaking his head at the screen, he couldn’t help but follow his gaze. The reporter was turning things back over to the anchor in the studio, and the cameraman, in a parting shot, zoomed out as far as he could and angled the camera up, into the darkened and tumultuous sky, showing the storm’s gray and black mass.

  To them it was just a storm.

  But Kyle saw more: in the sky were thousands of demons moving counter-clockwise, urging the storm on, opposed by thousands of angels moving clockwise, colliding with the demons and trying to slow the storm down. In a boiling sky, bodies of white and red swam in and out of the storm clouds, wrestling, grappling, struggling and battling in a fight to the death. It was the chaos and tragedy of unbridled war. Kyle swallowed hard. There was no mistaking it: on this night, in that place, evil was winning.

  Kyle spun around and tried to make his way to the door but tripped on the edge of a barstool and fell to the ground instead. He felt people looking at him. He hadn’t wanted to be conspicuous here in Monterey, but so much for that idea. Getting to his feet, he rushed out the door, terrified of seeing even just one more image, sure if he did his mind would snap forever.

  He ran down the steps next to the pier and to the sand below. The beach was tiny, and the air on his tears only made the night, which had arrived full force, seem colder. Nearby, a lone sea lion barked in the darkness. The waves came in, spreading out thinly across the shore, one after another in a timeless march.

  Kyle tried over and over to get the image of the angel who had stopped the transformer from falling out of his mind, especially her face at the end. Never in a million years did Kyle imagine that an angel could be afraid. But he understood why: it was because she knew what was next.

  Humans had no real idea what hell was like.

  But angels did. And that’s where they had been dragging her.

  A fogbank rolled in like a wall of revelation, and Kyle Fasano couldn’t help himself. He cried into his hands and wished to God he hadn’t seen any of it.

  HAVING NEVER GONE to high school, Tamara was flipping page by page through the yearbook before she remembered that an old friend, anxious to share pictures of her cheerleading team one day, had shown Tamara that at the back of a yearbook there was usually an index that listed each student’s name and the pages they were featured on. Her friend also explained how the index was the shorthand way of telling who was popular in high school and who wasn’t, and woe to the poor kid who was only featured on the class photo page. The whole thing made Tamara happy that she’d been homeschooled.

  So she wasn’t surprised to see that Kyle was on five pages: 18, 120, 134, 137 and 172. She thumbed them in order, the first page showing Kyle in a nonchalant pose at a lunch table with a pretty girl who had a faint smile. The caption below the photo read: Kyle Fasano and Victoria Duncan. Pay dirt.

  Tamara felt a small twinge of jealousy. It was silly, but it was there nonetheless. Kyle had hardly ever spoken of her, and maybe that was an early warning sign. Had he seen her since high school or since he’d gotten married? Was Caitlyn the only secret that Kyle had been keeping?

  Walling off her suspicion, Tamara pushed on. The second page that featured Kyle included a photo of him along with a few other jocks, posing with some cheerleaders who’d made them banners with their names on them. None of the girls was Victoria.

  The third photo was Kyle’s varsity football team picture, the fourth an action shot of him playing on the field, and the final photo was his senior picture.

  Only one photo of them together.

  Yet, for some reason, he was now going to visit her after whatever the hell happened with Caitlyn, instead of turning himself in to the police. Was Victoria somehow involved? Did she have some piece of information that would help Kyle? It didn’t make any sense. Tamara ran through options, theories and guesses in her head before it occurred to her to use the index to lookup Victoria Duncan as well.

  She ranked three photos. Tamara had already seen the one of her and Kyle at lunch. The second one revealed that she was a member of the modern dance team. She had the classic dancer’s body, taut and lean, and was posed off to the side of her group, her head tilted back, her ponytail falling to the middle of her back. The third photo was of her with a group of people at prom, one of whom was Kyle. This one hurt Tamara more. The two of them were smiling, Kyle hugging Victoria around the waist from behind, his chin nestled into her cheek and neck.

  Prom was the one thing about high school that Tamara always envied, never having had a prom of her own to go to. Victoria was tan, in a strapless mint-green dress with a corsage on her slender wrist.

  Tamara turned her attention to Kyle. His smile was so big in this photo and he seemed so happy. She’d seen his smile thousands of times, but it had never been this big or this genuine. Not even on their wedding day.

  She chastised herself again for being silly. Victoria was pretty, but side by side, Tamara felt she was the prettier one. The friend who taught her about yearbooks said it was too bad Tamara had been homeschooled because she probably would’ve been homecoming queen. Tamara had blushed at the comment then, but now she clung to it as a shield against her mounting insecurity over this stupid girl from Kyle’s high school days. Besides, Kyle had married and had a family with her, not Victoria.

  “Mommy?” Janie asked from the living room.

  “Yeah, baby?”

  “Can I skip my bath tonight? I’m tired.” She was standing next to the couch, rubbing her eyes.

  Prying herself from the yearbook, Tamara stood. “Sure. Your brother needs one though. Bad.”

  “He’s a
sleep,” Janie mumbled.

  “What?” Tamara glanced at the clock in the kitchen and was stunned to see it was almost nine. “Wow. Okay. Go to your room and get your jammies on. I’ll be right in after I tuck in your brother.” Janie nodded and shuffled off to her room as Tamara scooped up Seth, his arms limp and his lips pursed like a little angel’s. Stopping for a second, she just looked at him. His face, his forehead and dark hair were all the same as his father’s.

  After she’d spent almost eleven hours in labor, he was born into the world with his little hands curled to his chest as if to ward off the cold, his fingers so close they were nearly interlaced. Since they’d kept the gender a surprise, Tamara remembered how Kyle had nearly danced around the delivery room when the doctor announced it was a boy.

  Days later, Tamara’s mother told her the story of how she’d stood next to Kyle as he lifted Janie up to the delivery room window to see her new baby brother. Janie was strangely sad.

  Kyle asked her what was wrong, and she asked him why daddies liked having little boys so much. Janie said one of her friends told her little girls are not so special to daddies once they have a little boy.

  Kyle smiled, and the way Tamara’s mother explained it, he seemed totally unsurprised, as if he’d expected this. “Honey,” he said to Janie, “daddies may love little boys, but their hearts always belong to their little girls.” He then produced a little box from his jacket pocket and handed it to her. Janie opened it and pulled out her first necklace, a small gold chain with a solid gold heart. She hugged her father tight around the neck and squealed with joy. After that, having a little brother became a tad more tolerable.

  Tamara felt her heart splitting apart again. After carrying Seth to bed, she laid him down and quietly pulled the covers over him as he stirred briefly and rolled over.