Anna Schumacher - End Times

Doug steeled himself the way he did before a big motocross race, shaking his head and throwing back his shoulders.

“Fine.” He grabbed one of his Nike high-tops and shoved a foot inside, not bothering to tie the laces. He quivered with adrenaline, his burly arms puckered with goose bumps even as sweat ran down his forehead. Janie shrank back on the bed, and a snarl started deep and low in Doug’s chest. It burst from his throat with a loud roar as he leapt onto the snake, bringing a heavy sneaker down behind its head and crushing its neck onto the floor.

The snake hissed hideously, lashing its tail from side to side like a fresh-caught fish flopping on the pier at Hatchet Lake. Pink maternity tops and balled-up socks and long-forgotten homework assignments scattered.

“Die, damn it, die!” Doug screamed, stomping on the snake again and again. Its tail flailed, jerking back and forth in a spray of glittering scales. As Doug brought his foot down one last time, the jerking stopped and the snake stiffened. For a second, it looked like it was levitating off the ground, all of its coiled muscular energy propelling itself into one final moment of life. And then it lay still.

“Gross-ass snake,” Doug spat, shaking his foot. The viper lay half-flattened, glistening muscle and guts spilling from its neck.

“My goodness, what happened in here?” Janie’s parents looked blurry in the doorway, and she realized there were still tears in her eyes. Now that the shock was over, she could let them fall freely.

“Oh, Mom, it was awful!” she sobbed. Bella leapt onto her lap and began licking her tears, and Janie held the dog tight, weeping into her soft fur. “This snake just popped out of nowhere, and Bella started barking, and I was so scared it was going to get the baby!”

“Whatever, it was no biggie.” Doug had fully regained his composure. “I took care of it.”

Janie’s dad, Floyd Peyton, knelt to examine the carcass. His eyes weren’t so good after forty years sorting nuts and washers at the hardware store, but he’d never gone to get a prescription—too much money—and only wore cheap reading glasses from the local pharmacy.

“My Lord.” He leaned in for an even closer look. “Don’t go placing money on it, but this looks to me like a Djinn viper. I thought they were extinct around here—the last one I ever heard of was when my father was a boy.”

“A what viper?” Doug asked.

“Djinn. D-J-I-N-N. It’s related to the western rattlesnake, which I’ve sure seen plenty of in my time. But never this.”

He reached down and ran a finger over the snake’s lifeless tail. “See these black markings—almost like spades. That’s how it got its name. ‘Djinn’ means ‘devil.’”

Even in the warm trailer, Janie felt her skin go cold.

“What does it mean?” she asked. “Is it a sign?”

“Whatever, no,” Doug laughed. “Stop being so superstitious. It’s just a big-ass stupid snake.”

Doug was no help in situations like these. The Good Lord Jesus Christ himself could probably show up on his doorstep requesting an invitation for dinner, bloody palms and all, and Doug would call him a dirty hippie and turn him away. He was a believer in his own way, of course, but he didn’t always see the meaning in things like Janie did.

She turned to her parents instead. “Mom, what do you think?”

“I think it can mean whatever you want it to mean.” Karen Peyton’s voice was warm and comforting. “But maybe we should all pray a little extra hard tonight and try our best to shun temptation when it comes knockin’ on our door.”

She smiled that smile that made everyone in Carbon County trust her with their gossip and fears and secrets, but her eyes were on Janie’s belly. As if Janie needed reminding that her mother didn’t exactly 100 percent approve of her going and getting herself pregnant while she was still just seventeen. Temptation come knockin’, indeed.

“Whatever it means, I want it out of my room.” Janie pulled Bella closer. “Doug, will you take it outside?”

Doug wrinkled his nose. “No way am I touching that thing. It’s all oozing guts and stuff.”

“C’mon, baby!” Janie tried her sexy pout again, but Doug wouldn’t budge. That’s what she got for dating a spoiled mama’s boy never made to do a chore in his life: Sometimes Doug could be an even bigger princess than she was.

Her dad sighed. “I got it,” he said. “Guts or not, I may stick ’im in the freezer for a bit, till I can get over to the ranger station down at Medicine Bow and see if someone there can identify it for real.”

“Ew!” Janie squealed.

That seemed to break the tension, and all of them had a good, long laugh before Floyd went to get a stiff piece of cardboard and a plastic bag.

OWEN leaned hard into the curve. His elbow nearly brushed the earth as he slammed through the bend, straightening just long enough to dip deep and low in the other direction, riding the natural twists in the track.

He was ahead by a good six lengths as the motor on his bike, a vintage Husqvarna that he’d been souping up since he was fifteen, screamed into the dying evening. He knew it without looking back—and he didn’t plan on slowing down until he crossed the finish line, taking home the top prize in Olympia, Washington, that day. The rest of the motocross riders swarmed in his wake like a pack of angry bees, engines whining in collective frustration. It was like this at every race: He’d start out slow, letting them think they had a chance for a lap or two before pulling out his throttle and blowing past them in a cloud of churned earth and curses.

Those first few laps, where he sized up his competition while riding with the pack, were like a tease for him, the hot promise of speed tickling his nerve endings until the desire grew like a cloud of pressurized gas and he finally ignited, shooting out ahead. More and more often lately, that moment when he overtook everyone was the only peace he knew. In the roar of triumph and flurry of dust, the searing jolt of adrenaline that propelled him forward, he was able to forget the nightmares that had begun to taunt him the night of his eighteenth birthday, the fiery visions of destruction that woke him each night to soaked sheets and fear still surging in his blood. Owning the track was the only way to calm the visions of dark specters dancing around a bonfire piled high with bodies, the only way to quiet the gravelly voice whispering in his ear to find the vein .

He gunned into a long jump, clearing three high mounds of earth in one go, the astonished shouts from the bleachers a dim roar through his helmet. The bike was an animal below him, one he knew better than any human, one he’d tamed well. He’d always loved to ride, had picked it up just shy of his seventh birthday and been hooked ever since, giving up friends and parties to spend days and nights at the local track back in his Kansas hometown, driving himself and his metal beast past spills and breakdowns and exhaustion until the two of them became a single steel bullet zinging through the air. But ever since he’d left home a few months before, it felt like something more than skill propelled him through each race. When he rode he was more than Owen, a lone wolf from Kansas with grease under his fingernails. Now when he rode he was all fire tornadoes and dust devils; he was pure speed and molten light.

He couldn’t help gooning a little on the last jump before the finish line, showing off with the kind of stunt usually reserved for freestyle competitions. He sailed over the jump and, at the height of his trajectory when the bike was weightless beneath him, stood up straight and hooked his toes under the handlebars, arms stretched over his head. A cliffhanger, the move was called—not that there was any suspense over who was going to win this particular race.