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  “Not quite Ivy League, but I get what you mean. Yeah, those fuckers.”

  Mary Lou shook her head and laughed again.

  Zeke replayed the last thing he’d said in his mind and shook his head, too. Mary Lou was rubbing off on him. In a few more days he wouldn’t be able to complete a sentence without saying ‘fuck’ or ‘fuckin’’ or ‘motherfucker’.

  As they started down the road, Zeke raised his head to get a good look at a huge billboard that overlooked the fork in the road. The ad was the cover of some female country singer’s newest album. She was pretty and looked remarkably like Zeke imagined Mary Lou would look with clothes on and her hair styled in a chic modern way. The billboard woman’s face was frozen in a typical come-hither look.

  But what really got to Zeke was the name of the woman’s new album: SALVATION ROAD.

  He didn’t know whether it was a good omen or an ironically bad one.

  * * *

  Captain Flash Wheeler emerged from his hiding place behind a blue metal desk in one of the Ford dealership’s service bays and took up a position behind the Ford Explorer the departing intruders had tried in vain to start. He watched the naked woman and her boyfriend amble down Broadway. He recognized the man. He was that VNC guy, Zeke Johnson, the one who disappeared the day before the world died. A boob tube false prophet and idol, a man whose very existence had been a symptom of the sickness that had doomed the world. A blasphemer in the face of the One True God.

  An entity also known (to himself) as Captain Flash Wheeler.

  Flash had become aware of his divinity, and of his true identity, after surviving that long day of cleansing. Prior to that day, he had been employed by the car dealership as a mechanic. The name on his uniform was ‘Jeff’. As in Jeffrey Wheeler. He had lived his life as the son of Bo and Julie Wheeler, as the third of five children, two of whom had died young after getting mixed up with some bad elements. He reckoned the rest of his mortal siblings were dead now, too.

  He always felt a small tug of sadness when he thought about his earthly family. But the hurt never lasted too long, because he knew his true family was comprised of all the living things in the universe(s). He was their Creator, missing from this realm for millenia but returned now to shepherd home the survivors of the Great Cleansing. thirty-some years ago his essence had embedded itself in the womb of Julie Wheeler, and in all the years since he’d remained blissfully unaware of what he really was.

  Until the day of Awakening.

  At the dawn of that day he’d been standing with a customer in the lot outside the service bay, the two of them discussing work to be done on the man’s Taurus. His only clue that something momentous was about to happen was the sky’s unusually dark hue. He’d thought a major storm front was moving in, which should have struck him as odd because the forecast the night before had called for sunny skies all day.

  Then he heard that high screeching sound for the first time and looked up in time to see one of those huge winged demons dropping out of the sky. In those first moments, he’d been too shocked to run for cover, or to do anything other than stand there and meet his fate. The demon swooped over him, close enough that he could clearly make out its face, which had features like a cross between a gargoyle and a bat. A very, very large bat. The wind from its huge, leathery wings blew him to the ground and he nearly lost consciousness as the back of his head struck the Taurus’s rear bumper. When he was able to see clearly again, he sat up and watched the demon’s teeth a fellow employee’s throat apart.

  He was possessed then by a foolish heroic notion. He got to his feet and stumbled a step or two toward the doomed man and his ghoulish attacker. Then two pairs of strong hands gripped him from behind and pulled him into the service bay. Mac and Stu, two fellow mechanics, were his saviors. They were yelling things at him, words of panic and terror that were lost to him now. The three men and a handful of other dealership employees took cover in the dealership’s offices. Eight of them survived that day. Mac and a secretary named Cindy Brewer left the next day to go looking for their families. The rest of his companions soon fell ill and died, victims of a mysterious and fast-acting malady that induced convulsions of intense agony for a period of hours before finally, mercifully robbing its victims of life.

  By the time the last of them perished Flash had experienced the first of his revelations. It came to him in a dream on that second day, when Dean and Stu and Bobbi Jo had still been alive. In that dream a white-robed man with a long, flowing beard stood atop a great mountain and spoke to him in a booming voice. This man, it soon became clear, was an earlier incarnation of himself, speaking to him now through a kind of mental pre-recorded message. The dream image of his former incarnation told him the truth of how he had come to be reborn in the guise of so outwardly ordinary a man. He further revealed that Jeff’s true name was Captain Flash Wheeler.

  Which sounded like a strange name for a god—especially the One True God—but apparently it was true that God, meaning himself (or Himself, whatever), worked in very mysterious ways. But Jeff—Flash, that is—chose not to indulge in skepticism. Instead, he embraced his new identity with enthusiasm. He logged onto the internet via the departed secretary’s computer and started spreading The Word about the second coming of the One True God via message boards and mass emails. But preaching the new gospel that way proved frustratingly ineffective. It was like screaming into a great, echoing void. Either there was no one at all left in the world, or, more likely, those left alive were a tad too busy struggling to survive to surf the web.

  Then the computer just stopped working. One day it had been running smoothly, the next it was just dead. Flash found this annoying. Despite the lack of anyone online to interact with, the internet access had kept him occupied. When it was gone, he became too keenly aware of an encroaching emptiness. This feeling intensified as every piece of man-made equipment began to follow the computer into technological oblivion. The phones stopped working. Though he couldn’t call anyone, he’d been in the habit of lifting the office phone off the cradle just to hear the dial tone. Then the power went off, vanquishing both the heat and the artificial lights that made nights alone in the office marginally bearable. He considered just driving away. Hell, he had his pick of cars, and a plentiful supply of gasoline. He could leave this place and search for a city with people and a functioning power grid. The people part of that equation was of utmost importance. What good was a God without people to follow Him?

  But none of the cars worked. Turn the key in the ignition and all you got was a dead click. If you could even turn the key, that is, or get the keys into ignition slots crusted with rust. Flash couldn’t figure it out. It was as if he’d gone to sleep one night and when he woke up it was a thousand years later.

  He’d been on the verge of utter despair when he was visited again in his sleep by another vision. In this dream the white-robed man was standing not on a mountain like some prophet out of the Old Testament, but instead stood atop the huge billboard where Broadway branched off from West End. He looked funny up there, walking around in his robes atop the billboard and waving the huge old wooden staff around. Flash had giggled in his sleep at the image.

  The man stopped pacing and glowered down at Flash, who was somehow simultaneously asleep here on the office floor and was also standing in the street below the billboard. And when the man leveled that fierce glare at him, Flash knew the ancient diety had heard his laughter. He experienced a moment of searing terror, then reminded himself that this was only a dream, or a vision, and that the man couldn’t hurt him in a dream. He wasn’t Freddy fucking Krueger, for fuck’s sake. And besides, the man up there was just an earlier version of Flash. Why should he fear himself?

  “Because you are the One True God,” the man’s booming voice intoned, his eyes going wide and his hand curling tighter about the staff. “You have a destiny to fulfill. You must venture out into the world and meet your motherfucking destiny, Flash!”

  Flash was alm
ost jarred awake by the outburst. He’d read the Bible a time or two when he was younger and as best he could recall no one had ever used the word “motherfucking”.

  The white-robed man rolled his eyes. “I’m merely trying to communicate to you by utilizing a modern vernacular. Is that okay with you?”

  “Uh…” Flash didn’t really give a damn about profanity issuing from the mouth of a possible biblical figure, but the knowledge that the guy could read his mind creeped him out. Earlier version of himself or not, that was just wrong. “I…suppose so.”

  Some of the anger left the man’s face, but his gaze was no less fierce. “Listen to me very carefully, Captain Flash Wheeler.” His voice had dipped to a lower register but remained just as compelling. “You already know what you are. You may not feel it yet. You likely wonder why it is you cannot perform miracles, heal the sick, and whatnot.”

  Flash was nodding along with every word. “Now that you mention it…”

  “The reason for this is inextricably linked with your destiny. Your divinity lies dormant within you, a ripe seed hidden away in your soul, biding its time to flower in the light of revelation.”

  Flash frowned. “Rev…you mean like in the Book of Revelations? That would make sense, I guess, what with all this end of the world shit.”

  The white-robed man sighed. “No, Flash.” Then his brow furrowed. “Well, maybe. But that’s not important right now. I merely meant that your true nature, that of the One True God, will become manifest when you accomplish a special task. I’m talking about the very thing for which you were returned to this realm in this form.”

  “Uh huh.” Flash was nodding again, but not necessarily in agreement this time. “Could you be more specific, please?”

  “No.”

  “Oh.” Of all the possible answers Flash had considered, that had not been one of them. “Okay. I guess.”

  Then a flash of light encompassed all of existence for a moment. Flash jerked in his sleep and stepped backward in the street. When he could see again, the white-robed man was no longer atop the billboard. He was standing on the street now, maybe a dozen yards from where Flash stood. The man raised his staff and pointed it toward the Broadway side of the road split.

  “Your destiny awaits you here, Flash, down Salvation Road.”

  “Er…actually, that road’s Broadway.”

  The old man smiled, just barely, the corners of his mouth dimpling as a sound vaguely like a chuckle rumbled out of his throat. It was the first time Flash had seen a less than completely serious expression on the man’s face. Seeing it eased his fear a little.

  “So it is, Flash.” The man lowered his staff and regarded Flash more soberly. “But it is also Salvation Road. Know this, Flash, and know it well. You are a deity. You are you as I am me and we are all together. I’m paraphrasing, of course, but you get my drift.”

  “No.” Of this at least Flash could be certain. “I don’t.”

  “Have you never listened to the Beatles, Flash?”

  “They were a little before my time, I guess.”

  The old man shrugged one shoulder. “Oh, Flash. Have you not been paying attention? I merely mean that we are parts of a greater whole, interlocking pieces of a larger truth. The body you inhabit is mortal flesh. It can be hurt. It can be killed. But that piece of you that is of the divine can never be extinguished and so you have no reason to fear what lies ahead.”

  Flash blinked rapidly. “Uh…”

  “Don’t try to process it all just now, son. You have lived thirty-some years as a mortal. As a human being. And now the survival of what remains of your race is in your hands.” The old man nodded in the direction of what he called Salvation Road. “A momentous thing will happen somewhere down there. A force that loves chaos and revels in bloody death lurks there. The darkness overtaking this world was unleashed by it. You, Flash, will shine a holy light into that darkness and turn it back.”

  Flash wasn’t sure about this. Being the One True God seemed a lot more fun before this Moses-looking motherfucker started in with the sacred duty crap. Part of him, the significant part that was still an ordinary guy, a mechanic and a fan of the WWE, wanted to wake the hell up and get the fuck out of Dodge. But another part of him was growing stronger by the moment, that bit of glowing consciousness that instinctively recognized the truth of what the scary man was telling him. There was something noble in that part of him, something brave and resolute, and it was eager to embrace this higher calling.

  He sighed. “Fine. But how exactly am I supposed to do that?”

  The man smiled again, but there was a deeper shade of sadness in the expression this time. “You will know when the time comes. Just as you will know when the time has come to begin your journey down Salvation Road.”

  “If you say so.”

  “I do.” The man’s image was becoming fuzzier as he talked. He was disappearing. Flash could see the outlines of buildings through his ephemeral form. And his voice took on an echoing quality. “One more thing. Two travelers will appear on the morrow. A man and a woman. You are not to approach them. Remain in hiding until they are gone, and do not follow them when they have left.”

  “Why not?”

  But the old man was gone.

  When Flash awoke on the office floor, he tried his best to convince himself that it’d only been a dream and not a vision. He told himself the whole One True God thing had been a delusion from the beginning. He’d been through a lot, and he had simply cracked under the strain. In a still-functioning world, they’d be fitting him for a straightjacket and sending him to the loony bin.

  It sounded good. It sounded believable, even.

  But he knew he was sane.

  He felt in his gut that everything the man in his visions said was true, even the stuff he hadn’t been able to understand. Especially that stuff, maybe. The realization alternately depressed and scared him, but what could he do?

  And today the final, irrefutable bit of evidence had arrived to cast away all remaining scant traces of doubt.

  The two travelers.

  Flash watched them disappear down Broadway, sending a prayer in their direction as they moved down a dip in the road and out of his sight. Then with a heavy sigh he returned to the office to meditate and wait for guidance.

  To wait for that moment or subtle signal that would tell him it was time.

  Time to go meet destiny.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Nashville, TN

  October 2, 9:00 a.m.

  They were arguing again. The same goddamned argument they’d been having for three days now. There’d been times when Emily had felt her anger rise up to a degree that frightened her. In those moments she wanted nothing more to drive a fist into the middle of Jake Dunham’s face. There had been a time or two when she might actually have done it, but he was so tall that attempting it would have been a comical exercise in futility. Ah, but there was the aluminum baseball bat in her hands, her blunt instrument of choice. She could sure shut him up with one swing of this fucking bat.

  Emily replayed that last thought in her mind and felt a strong surge of self-loathing. What had become of her? She couldn’t allow this anger to consume her.

  Still…the emotion stubbornly refused to recede. Nor did the desperation fueling it. She chewed hard on her lip a moment and refused to look Jake in the eye. They were on an external second floor landing of an apartment building in Hillsboro Village. Her gaze swept over the parking lot, over the array of useless cars and motorcycles, and over the roofs of the densely packed neighboring apartment buildings. Over the course of the last few days they’d methodically searched every unit in many of those buildings. The ones they hadn’t gotten to yet, they soon would, because so far they’d found no trace of Abby or her abductor—and Emily would not abandon this search so long as she was drawing breath.

  She sighed and reluctantly allowed her gaze to drift back to Jake. She looked into his sharply gleaming eyes. She saw anger there, too.
But not just that. There was concern there. Concern not just for the missing girl, but for Emily. And more than a little bit of fear. He was worried she was on the verge of cracking. Well, he was right. What he failed to grasp was that she didn’t care. Not one little fucking bit.

  “Look, you know I’m right.” The anger was still there, was just the merest breath away from exploding outward, but Emily managed to at least sound calm and level-headed. “Every second we waste is another second Abby is with that man. If she’s even still alive.” Here her voice wavered slightly, but she recovered quickly and pressed on. “This whole process is too goddamned slow. It’ll go a hell of a lot faster if we split up and search two apartments at a time.”

  And already Jake was shaking his head just as vigorously as he had every time she voiced this opinion. And again Emily felt that insane surge of anger. This time she was perilously close to slipping over the edge. She didn’t want that to happen. Oh, God, she didn’t. And Jake, damn him, didn’t seem to realize how precarious her grip on sanity was.

  “Nuh uh,” he said, still shaking his head. “We just can’t do that, Emmy. You know how dangerous he is. Hell, we don’t even know if he’s in any of these apartments. I don’t know why you’re so convinced he is.”

  A fever began to burn behind Emily’s eyes, and a dollop of perspiration appeared and rolled away from her left temple. Couldn’t he see she simply couldn’t take this any longer? This bullheadedness of his made her want to scream. Instead she said, “I’ve told you. It’s very simple. He didn’t have a big head start on us. He simply had to have taken refuge nearby.”

  Jake sighed. “You say that like it’s fact, but it’s not. He could be far away from here. But, God forbid, if he is here, and you happen to barge into his hiding place alone…”

  Breath hissed through Emily’s tightly clenched teeth. “I. Can. Handle. Myself.” Each word was a terse burst of menace and impatience stretched too far. Wild-eyed, she brandished the baseball bat like a serial killer stepping to the plate. She was pleased to see Jake take an involuntary step backward. Maybe it meant she was finally getting through his thick fucking skull.