One Minute to Midnight (12 page)

Peter and I began to spend weekends
together when his father and I were in town. The economy, having
been propped up by fiat currency, finally collapsed in the fall of
2052 and it was a worldwide pandemic. Life became more drastic and
dangerous after that, so my services were in ever greater demand.
Money became worthless, but I continued to do my job to protect the
father of my love, who was working to stabilize the economic
disaster we were all living under. Martin only needed my watchful
eye when he conducted business in other cities due to the high rise
in muggings and murders in metropolitan areas across the country.
Travel was very dangerous now. There were highwaymen laying in wait
to hijack cars and looking to kill the unsuspecting for food.
When the grocery stores ran out of food, and industrial meat
farming ground to a halt, desperate people turned to cannibalism
for survival. There were also reports of raiders storming homes
where doomsday preppers had been squirreling away food for years
only to have it stolen by gangs with more guns and ammunition. A
lot of the people who had saved food for their families ended up
getting shot trying to protect it. Functional hospitals were
non-existent anymore, because there was no money to pay the power
bills, or to hire doctors. We were living in a real Mad Max world,
and the only difference between his desert wasteland world and us
was that our homes were still standing and we had not begun to drop
bombs on each other. That would come later.
Martin stopped travelling about four months after the collapse when
the people in power realized that unlike the Great Depression of
the 1930's, this one was not going to bounce back. There would be
no road programs, no social outreach, and people would keep their
homes this time because the banks had all folded up and left town.
The fiat currency we had all been using since 1971 lost its
confidence, and when marks were called in, debtor countries didn't
have the capital to pay back what they owed.

We were left out in the cold, on our
own, and totally screwed worldwide. For their protection, I began
to train Peter and Cynthia—his sister—how to shoot and fight. Our
love continued to grow despite increasingly difficult
circumstances. I can still smell Peter's skin and hear him call my
name on the wind. So, gangs got bigger, religious hysteria grew
louder, and the cauldron boiled as a world spoiled on instant
gratification turned from uneasy to hostile. Soon, human life
became very cheap and bodies piled up in the streets from the
starving dead, left to rot if there was not enough meat on their
bones for the cannibals to cart away.

Martin invited my father to move onto
the Breswell Estate because the two men had become friends and the
property meant protection for my family. My father and I lived in a
cottage beside the tennis courts where we had privacy, and we were
all protected by a ten foot high brick wall with iron spikes on top
that, until they noticed us, sealed the world out. On occasion,
someone would figure out there was a house out in our woods and try
to scale the wall. The cameras and alarm systems operated on solar
power, so if anyone came within ten yards of the wall I knew about
it and would head to the roof with Fate, my .50 caliber rifle.
Click, boom, another one bites the dust. Of course, I knew my
previous killings had been building up bad karma like a man using a
credit card without a job, but when you’re good at something and
you need to protect your people you do what you have to. I had been
building up a great debt in souls with no idea how much pain would
come back to me from my actions.

One day we ran out of meat to eat, so
I headed out early in the morning with a 30.06 rifle and a penlight
and wandered for hours, looking for a deer or a rabbit, or anything
else. Although I was an expert marksman, I had never been a hunter.
However, we agreed that we would never resort to something as evil
as cannibalism. While I was out, I stumbled upon an ancient
graveyard that had been lost in the woods long ago, and in the
center was a large mausoleum that looked like it was meant for an
extended family member. Curiosity got the better of me, and my luck
had been terrible on the hunt thus far, so I walked through the
moss-covered headstones.

I cleared the dirt from
one stone and it read
Genova Holvern 1671
- 1692 Tried and found guilty of witchcraft
. I looked at another one, and the same inscription was
beneath the name of
Selena Delano 1669 -
1692
, and another
Hanna Fries 1669 - 1692
. I was
standing in a graveyard full of dead witches and the dates were
from the exact same time the Salem witch trials had been carried on
in Massachusetts. If these poor women had been buried out here in
the yard, then why was there a mausoleum, and who was in it? I
sidestepped the headstones, as late afternoon shadows began to fall
over the ancient stone garden and came closer to the mausoleum. It
had been well constructed by someone with a lot of money and looked
like the Roman Pantheon but much smaller. Mist crept in around my
feet, obscuring the ground the closer I came, and I began to hear
whispers, like static from a radio transmission out of range. This
building, where an unknown number of dead were interred, should
have scared me I suppose, but instead I was intrigued. Moss dangled
from the roof, swaying in a light breeze while darkness embraced me
in her ethereal arms.
The steel gate was locked from the outside with a rusty chain and
padlock. I thought about how to get in and my mind turned to the
gun slung across my back. Something moved in the yard just to my
right, and I swung around in a fluid motion with my rifle drawn,
but I saw no target. Whispering voices continued to call to me as I
stood at the gate wondering what lay beyond. Suddenly, as if my
body were guided by an unseen force, I stepped back into the
darkened mist, raised my rifle, and shot blind at the lock. My aim
was true, and the lock fell to the concrete platform with an
audible
chunk
. I
approached and opened the gate. Inside there was a stairwell
constructed of granite leading underground, and I used the penlight
in my pocket to illuminate the passageway. The high walls were made
of limestone, lined with torches about every fifteen feet, and I
felt like I had descended for an hour before reaching the
bottom.
A large steel door lay at the bottom of the stairs. On the face of
it was the engraved image of a gargoyle, its faced contorted in a
silent scream, and what looked like hieroglyphs at each corner of
the door. I assumed that whoever, or whatever lay inside was meant
to be left alone. I found a small handhold on the right edge of the
door and pulled back. The door squealed and creaked as it dragged
on the granite floor. I was inside. The whispers were louder now as
I searched the tomb with my tiny light and found a coffin in the
center of the room. On the lid were the words
Here lies Abigail Thorne necromancer and whore of
Satan.

"Ooooopen it!" Someone whispered. I
was in a trance.
I found a latch and opened the coffin. What happened next was both
terrifying and exhilarating. The room filled with a violent shriek
as if the gates of Hell had been opened and legions of demons set
free.
"ALIIIIIIVE!"
I jumped and raised my rifle, turning in every direction, and
backed toward the door.

"Don't go. You freed me from
imprisonment."" A female voice spoke.

"Who are you?" I said.

"In life I was Abigail Thorne, a
healer of the sick, but now I am vengeance upon the world, a
sharpened blade draining the blood of men."

"What are you going to do to me?" I
struggled to remain calm.

"You are a warrior queen, and we are
in your debt, Suki. Thank you for releasing me at the time of
judgment. Your world will burn, we have seen it and that is
gooooood." Abigail said.

"Ashes to ashes" A voice whispered
from behind.
"Dust to dust." Whispered another.

Eight cloaked figures materialized,
forming a ring around the room behind me. The coven had risen.
Abigail's corpse lay still in her coffin as her voice filled my
head, and then her specter appeared before me. She pulled back the
hood of her cloak and what I saw was a beautiful young girl with
blood red eyes swirling with clouds of mist. She flashed a haunting
grin at me.

"Go now. You'll find a slaughtered
deer outside the graveyard for you and your family. For releasing
us from imprisonment, we'll fight with you when the time comes. We
are one now."

Abigail bid me farewell and vanished
with the rest of her coven. I almost asked Abigail what had
happened to her, but decided against it, because intuition told me
that meeting could have gone far worse. I found the deer as she
predicted, hanging from a tree, its throat slit ear to ear, and
drained of blood. I dragged it back home through the forest, and
when I arrived we cleaned the deer and ate well for the first time
in days. I kept my experience in the woods to myself, but what the
witches had said continued to haunt me. What did they mean when
they said our world would burn?

We struggled onward as society
continued to decay over the coming weeks, and my ordeal in the
graveyard faded from memory. Lootings, arson, and random killing
were on the rise, and I believe the breaking point came when the
prisons, already overcrowded and unfunded, began to release their
convicts into society. The state and federal governments could no
longer afford to feed and house these people, so they were turned
loose. The U.S. prison system was anything but a rehabilitation
center; instead it turned petty thieves, drug addicts, and potheads
into hardened criminals. Teenagers, and young men and women
convicted of petty crimes were thrust into a world of fear, pain
and violence run by murderers, the mentally ill, and rapists. The
American prison system was the ultimate terrorist training camp,
and now the inmates were free. A federal corrections facility was
located near the estate where we all lived, and so it was no
surprise to me when one morning a large crowd of men began scaling
Martin's walls.

I headed to the roof and began doing
my thing with Fate, while the others took up positions along fourth
floor windows. One, two, three, they dropped as more came over
using ladders to get past the spikes. Somewhere along the way these
men had come across the ingredients for Molotov cocktails, and must
have raided a gun store, because they were strapped and fires were
erupting all over the property. We were being sieged by madmen. I
escorted my father and Martin out the back door after the first
flaming bottles crashed through the windows downstairs. I
remembered the witches’ promise.
Overwhelmed, we had to ditch or burn, so Martin, Peter, Cynthia and
my father followed me as we fled to the forest, and I rediscovered
the graveyard. I could hear men in the woods behind us and could
smell their fires burning as we all ran into the tomb. I led the
way downstairs, and this time the torches were already ablaze. The
door was still ajar and inside I could see Abigail’s coffin.
Resting on her skeletal chest was a medallion in the shape of a
wolf’s head. The mouth was snarling and it had glowing red
eyes.
"Suki, take my talisman and put it on." Abigail’s ghost
said.

Her voice crept out of the darkness
like unseen fingers raking my spine. I reached into the coffin and
took hold of her necklace and as soon as I did her skull fell to
the side. The wolf’s head had a demonic, powerful, and terrifying
appearance, and I grinned as those blood red eyes glowed with the
fires of hell. I put it on and saw the frozen eyes of death in my
mind’s eye. A moment later, Abigail and her cloaked coven appeared
in the room with us. They became like mist and entered the talisman
around my neck.
“You are the harvester of sorrow, make them pay!” Abigail
screamed.

Her voice was inside my head as I
dropped to my knees in an all-consuming inferno. Fire spread
through my body as if I were a field of dry wheat in high summer. I
screamed and convulsed on the floor for several minutes, but the
sensation felt like an hour. When the pain subsided and my eyes
opened my father had his hand on my arm.

“
Suki, are you alright?”
He said. His eyes were wide with concern.

“
Yes… I think so, what
happened?” I asked.

“
You put that necklace on
and fell to the floor screaming. I was terrified for you.” He
said.

I stood and looked him in the eyes,
watching his face form an expression of fear and disbelief.
“What happened to your eyes? My god, it’s like you’re crying
blood.” He said.

I felt power surge through me as the
souls of the women infused with my spirit.

“
Wait here, everyone.” I
said.

I walked up the stairs as tiny bolts
of electricity danced on my fingertips. Men were gathering near the
door with rifles, and torches. They had already begun to torch the
woods. I walked out of the door and into a circle of a dozen
convicts who laughed and slapped each other on the
shoulder.

"Look boys, a little girl. I want her
first. I ain't had a woman in twenty years." One screamed. The
others laughed and began to place wagers on who would have their
first go at me. I waited calmly. For a few moments nothing
happened, and then the leader told his men to get me. I throat
chopped the first man who came near me and he dropped to the dirt,
gasping and clawing at his broken neck. More of them came, and I
easily countered their attacks. Men fell around me like broken
cordwood as my arms grabbed, tossed, and punched. I was in a
murderous trance until I heard a deafening gunshot ring out. A
tall, lanky man had fired over my head into the doorway, and as I
turned, I saw my father drop to his knees, his mouth working like a
puppet, but without speaking. He held his stomach and I saw the
crimson blossom spread out on his white shirt before he fell over.
My mind could not comprehend the horror. What had he come out of
hiding for?