The Sunday Before!!! Part 2

Previously, in The Sunday Before!!!

Pedro Aguilar wasn’t looking for change. He was just trying to survive Oak Grove’s monotony—emails, cheap coffee, and the ghost of Cassandra in his inbox. Then Jenna, all auburn hair and mischief, said:

“One drink. Clock out before that watch of yours starts charging rent.”

That one drink turned into a jazz club, pancakes at IHOP, late-night Mario Kart—and a shadowed Cadillac that wouldn’t stop watching them.

Inside that Cadillac was Damien: a boy in a red tie who claimed Pedro owed him, who grinned like he’d been waiting all along.

“Pedro, what if I told you you’ve been drafted into a war?”

Then came the visions—the disappearances at Casa del Viento, people bursting into light while pan dulce turned to dust on the counter. Ed crossed himself, voice trembling:

“It’s like the Bible says. End days.”

Pedro tried to laugh it off, but the voices followed, whispering his name in steam and silence.

Now Oak Grove is changing—sirens cut short, cars moving with no drivers, children vanishing into trumpet-light. Jenna’s by his side, Damien waiting on the hill.

And Pedro? He’s starting to feel… different.

Part Two begins here.

Chapter 8- Pan Dulce & The Prophecy

Pedro’s eyes widened, the words End days hanging in the air. He didn’t swallow it whole—not yet—but the image of people bursting into light, shooting skyward like sparks from a bonfire, wouldn’t leave his head.

Outside, sirens howled past. For a split second, Pedro thought they were coming to check on the crash. Instead, the cruisers blew right by, tires slicing through puddles, lights spinning into the distance.

Ed’s hand landed firm on his shoulder—steady, but weighted.
“Pedro… those disappearances—you remember?”

Pedro nodded, still trying to slow his breathing. The car had missed him by inches, ribs strummed raw from the dive.
“Yeah. I remember.”

His mind jumped—Jenna’s girlfriend, gone without a trace. The dream. If it even was a dream. He hesitated, then said, “Actually, Jenn’s friend disappeared recently too.”

Ed’s mouth tightened. “Yeah… and to tell you the truth—”

Pedro shifted, voice dropping. “Last night I think I saw something. Felt real, like a warning.”

Ed’s eyes lit sharp. “Pedro, that was no dream. In biblical times, God spoke through sleep—visions meant to guide, or to warn. That’s how He reaches people.”

Pedro rubbed at his jaw, weighing the words. Finally: “If that’s true… then I’ve got a problem.”

Ed raised an eyebrow. “What kind of problem, hermano?”

Pedro glanced down, uneasy. Images of that hill. The gun. The kid’s red tie. He only shook his head. “Just… things I can’t explain.”

Ed studied him for a beat, then moved toward the counter, filling a paper bag. The smell of strawberry-sweet filling drifted through the fold.
“Take your coffee—and some extras for Jenn. Strawberry cheesecake pan dulce. First batch. She’ll love it.”

He handed the bag over but didn’t let go right away. His voice dropped, steady and heavy:
“Pedro, I know you don’t buy into all this… but prayer’s not about proving belief. It’s about being willing to listen. And if these really are the end days…” Ed glanced at the shattered window, the street beyond. “…you’ll want to be listening.”

Pedro set the bag down long enough to give Ed’s belly a squeeze, a grin tugging up despite himself.
“Thanks for the sweets and the coffee, Ed. You’re a true friend. I’ll let Jenna know you said hello. Take care—I’ll check on you later.”

As he turned to go, Ed’s voice carried out through the broken doorway:
“Pray, Pedro! ¡Oración!”

Pedro waved him off with a half-smile and stepped into the street.

The air was sharp with dust and burnt rubber. Shards of glass crunched under his sneakers as he skirted the wreck. The hood was still warm, ticking faintly as it cooled.

Somehow, despite the destruction, Casa del Viento still stood—warm light spilling from the doorway into the street.

For now.

Chapter 9- Pages That Burn

Pedro pushed through the apartment complex doors, the paper bag of pan dulce still warm in his hand. His steps were quicker, heavier than usual—as if something had shifted inside him. For the first time in years, maybe decades, he was starting to believe there might actually be a God. Not a polite, distant God, but one breaking into the fabric of his life.

His mother’s voice came back to him like a sharp echo. “Pedro, you are going to church.”
“Mom, I’m eleven, I don’t want to go ‘worship the Lord,’” he mumbled, half under his breath, half daring her to hear it.

He remembered the stubborn boy he’d been. Eleven years old, defiant.
Her reply had come like a whip: “What did you say?”
Before the moment could explode, his younger brother Julian called from the kitchen, trying to play peacemaker: “Hey, I just poured grape juice and crackers. Isn’t this what Sunday is really about?”

The tension broke. To Pedro’s surprise, their mother laughed. She took a sip of the grape juice, tore off a piece of bread. Then she knelt, eye-level with him.
Her eyes were light brown, soft as honey, but ringed with tiredness. She set the bread crust on the counter, wiped her hands on her apron, then looked him in the eyes.
“Son, going to church isn’t just about worshiping the Lord. It’s about growing faith. Faith is powerful. It can move any mountain—especially when you put it in something bigger than yourself. If you walk away from it, Pedro, I’m afraid you’ll lose sight of the bigger picture.”

He had never forgotten her voice that day. The mother he knew would’ve punished him. But instead she had given him a choice. Julian went with her to church. Pedro never set foot back inside. Until now, her words had felt like an old memory. Tonight, they flared alive.

He dropped the bag on the counter and paced the apartment, restless. He opened the microwave to warm the pastry. The microwave light blinked out. The fridge gave one last groan before silence filled the kitchen. “Aw, no way.”

He sighed, fished out a few scentless candles from the pantry, and lit them one by one. Shadows wobbled along the walls. The AC was dead too. The air sat heavy, stifling.
“Oh, come on,” Pedro muttered.

He tried to steady himself. Stay focused. Prove this to yourself.

Back in his room, he dragged out a battered cardboard box. Old t-shirts, a few magazines with half-creased supermodels, a picture of him and Cassandra. He held it up, smiling at the memory. “Things were different back then. You hadn’t got bored of me.” A short laugh, then the photo slid back into the pile.

Finally, his hand found it—the old Bible. Its spine cracked and dusty. He lifted it, exhaling.
“Haven’t opened this thing in ages. But if end times are here, maybe this is where the clues are hiding.”

He opened it—and his hands burned.
“Son of a—!” The Bible slipped from his grasp, thudding onto the floor. He shook his fingers, hot and raw, the sting like fire.
“What the hell…”

He bent, reaching again. The moment his fingertips brushed the cover, a force slammed him backward into the wall. His breath exploded from his lungs.
“Ouch…”

Groaning, he pushed himself upright. The candles flickered wildly as the pages whipped like a storm, then froze, slammed open to Isaiah 13:8.
Terror will seize them, pain and anguish will grip them; they will writhe like a woman in labor. They will look aghast at each other, their faces aflame.

Pedro’s chest tightened. He leaned closer, careful not to touch the book.

The pages turned again, faster, until another verse leapt forward:
Listen, I tell you a mystery: We will not all sleep, but we will all be changed—in a flash, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet.

Pedro ran a hand through his hair, pacing hard.
“The trumpet… so that’s the clue?”

He muttered, half to himself, half to the dark apartment. “Have I heard any trumpets? There was a trumpet player at the jazz club.”

The air thickened, dense, magnetic.

KNOCK. KNOCK. KNOCK.

The sound rattled the door like bone on wood.
Pedro’s head snapped up. A shadow stretched beneath the frame, dark, unmoving.
He swallowed, throat dry. “Yeah… nope.”
But the knock came again.

Chapter 10 — Lavender & Sirens

The knock came again—three quick taps, then one more, like the knuckles were arguing with themselves.
“Hello?” The voice was familiar. Jenna.
“Jesus Christ, Jenna.” He exhaled, undid the chain, and opened the door.

She slipped inside, already shrugging off her jacket. Lavender rose off the lining. Pedro took it, hung it on the rack, then opened his arms. “Good to see you. Feels like I just saw you.”
“Right?” She tried a smile. “Sorry to just barge in. It’s just… something happened.”

He guided her to the stool by the counter. Sirens stitched the distance, like their small town had rolled over in its sleep and decided not to settle again. Jenna did a slow spin on the seat, once, letting the swivel carry her.
“Glad the chair could cheer you up,” Pedro said, laughing.
She laughed too, then her face tightened again. “By the way, did the power go out? The candles are a little spooky.”
“Yeah. About an hour ago.” He lifted a blind slat toward the neighboring complex. “Looks like the whole block’s out.”

She nodded and set her hands flat on the counter, steadying herself. “Okay. So… I just got a call from Chamberlain Prison Estates.” She watched his face. “It was one of those Department of Corrections robocalls. Then a live person followed up.”
Pedro’s shoulders tipped forward. “Go on.”
“It said Renae—my sister—escaped. Her and fifty-eight others.” She swallowed. “They checked the cameras. There was… an explosion, and then the women broke through. Renae was doing so good. Three years left with good behavior.” Her eyes glazed, then sharpened. “No. This isn’t her. Something happened. Something weird is going on.”

They held each other’s gaze—friendship, closeness, agreement, all in one quiet beat. “I think so too,” Pedro said. The freckles across her cheeks brightened under the candlelight; without thinking, he tucked a curl behind her ear. It steadied her.
“There was something else,” she said, voice narrowing. “After I left your place yesterday. My cab.”

Concern slid into his tone. “What happened?” He poured her a glass of water, then reached under the sink and set a tiny propane burner on the counter. The match rasped; blue flame bloomed. “Coffee?”
“And you read minds now,” she said, a ghost of a smile.

He set a kettle on the burner and reached for a paper bag. “Also,” Pedro added, “Ed wants you to try the café’s new pan dulce. Strawberry cheesecake. He swears the filling is ridiculous.”
“Wow. You really do know how to cheer me up.” She wiped a tear with the edge of her sleeve and wrapped her hands around the warm mug when he passed it over. The steam gave her something to breathe. “Okay,” she said. “Yesterday morning…”

Dawn pared everything down to outlines: quiet streets, low buildings, her reflection pale in the window. The yellow cab smelled like vinyl, lemon cleaner, and a ribbon of aftershave.

In the kitchen, the kettle began a soft patter against its lid. Pedro nudged the flame lower.

“You been hearing about the disappearances?” the driver asked, catching her eyes in the rearview. Not idle chatter—bait shaped like small talk.
Jenna bit her lip. “Yeah. One of my friends—girlfriend, actually. Stephanie. She’s just… gone.”

A siren wound past outside Pedro’s window. The nearest candle guttered, then steadied.

He took a turn she didn’t love. Not wrong—just longer. “Actually, the other way’s faster,” she said, checking her phone: one bar, then none, then back again.
He grinned like he’d practiced. “Name’s Cruze. Brand-new to Oak Grove—moved in a couple weeks ago. Cab company was hiring.” Denim jacket over broad shoulders, well-groomed beard, black hair slicked back. A skeleton dragon tattoo climbed his neck toward his ear. When he smiled, a gold tooth winked.
“The road you pointed at? Can’t go that way. Closed. Besides, this way’s prettier.”
“I don’t need pretty,” Jenna said. “I need home.”
“Pretty doesn’t cost extra.” He drummed the wheel. “Hospitality.”
She watched the mirror. He watched her watching him.
“You’re not from here,” she said. “But you know about the disappearances.”
“Hard not to,” he said, easy. “Folks going poof.”
Her jaw set. “Don’t say poof. She was a person.”
“Fair.” The grin dimmed a notch.

Pedro slid a plate across the counter, set the pan dulce down, and tore a napkin in half. The kettle hissed; he killed the flame.

Another long way. Chain-link fences. Low warehouses. Empty lots pretending to be fields.
“This really isn’t the fastest way,” she said.
“Fastest isn’t always safest,” he said. “Or the nicest to look at.” Another wink—too forward to be charming, not enough to fight.
“Okay,” Jenna said. “So what do you think is actually happening?”
Cruze tapped the wheel, like he enjoyed the act of thinking. “I moved here from south of town, forty miles or so. Down there, it started before the news did. First a chill in the air, the kind that lifts the hair on your arms. People figured there was some terrible person on the loose. Then—” He flicked his eyes to her. “You said you wanted information.”
“I do.”

Pedro refilled her cup. A drip snapped on the burner’s metal and sizzled out.

“One night, late, I’m driving a drunk passenger. Guy gets loud and mean. I tell him to sit his ass down, and he pulls a gun.” His tone stayed almost conversational. “Says take him to the coast. Talks about revenge—how his wife left him, how God said marriage was supposed to be forever. Had a look in his eyes.”
“What was his name?” Jenna asked, feeling the answer before it landed.
“Drew. On the way, he cried about Sarah—two peas in a pod, then rage. Pistol at my temple.” A small, rueful laugh. “I say, ‘Put it down. I’ll get you where you need to be, Drew.’ He goes, ‘Nice try, asshole. Oldest trick in the book.’ He smelled like rum-cola and desperation.”

A breeze ticked the blind; the candle flame leaned and came back. Pedro’s thumb circled his mug’s rim once, twice.

The meter ticked. The wipers scraped once, then rested. The river line ghosted past the window.
“We get to a pier,” Cruze said. “Couple hours later. His plan is to end me, take the car, then end his ex.” He paused, hands steady. “He drags me to the water. ‘Thanks for the ride,’ he says. ‘Any last words?’ He laughs like everything’s finally going his way.”
Jenna held her breath without meaning to.
“So I get on my knees,” Cruze said, “and pull out my cross.” He tapped his chest, where a chain disappeared under denim. “Not afraid to die. Didn’t show fear. I bowed my head and prayed. ‘Dear Lord—’”
“And?” Jenna asked.
“And just as I finished ‘amen,’ the son of a bitch caught fire.” He said it flat—no relish, no horror. “It ripped over him like something cartoony. When it cleared, the sand had this written out in the ashes: ‘Matthew 24:40–41.’ I looked it up on my phone. ‘Then shall two be in the field; the one shall be taken, and the other left… Two women shall be grinding at the mill; the one shall be taken, and the other left.’” He shrugged, eyes back on the road. “God left me and took him. Punished him for his wrongdoings. More people will be disappearing.” A small, certain smile. “More bad people.”

Pedro cut the pan dulce. Strawberry filling winked in the candlelight. He pushed the bigger half toward her.

“Stephanie wasn’t bad,” Jenna said, heat rising under the words. “She was one of the kindest humans.”
“Listen,” Cruze said, not unkind. “You wanted information; I’m giving you what I know. Good, bad—that stuff never really mattered to me. I put my faith in Him and move like that. That’s why I’m still here, breathing.” The gold tooth flashed. “Anyway. You still want pretty, or you want home?”
Jenna watched his eyes in the mirror, then the road unspooling ahead—quiet, wet, unfamiliar. “Home,” she said finally. “And your card.”
“Serving smiles and quick rides,” he said, amused, plucking a card from the visor and passing it back. His photo winked on the glossy stock.
He dropped her at her building, tipped his chin like they’d shared a secret, and pulled away.

—
Back in Pedro’s kitchen, Jenna slid the card across the counter: Cruze’s grin, SERVING SMILES AND QUICK RIDES stamped in bright red, number at the bottom. Pedro set his hand over hers—warm, solid.

“Real quick—isn’t this pan dulce the best?” he said, excited. “Ed said the strawberry’s ridiculous.”

Jenna laughed once, then covered her mouth as tears still slipped through. She hugged him. “It is. I love Casa del Viento.”

They sat a moment, letting sugar and coffee sand down the edges of the day.

KNOCK. KNOCK. KNOCK.
Another visitor.
Pedro went still. Jenna did too.
“If this is end times and people are going berserk, we need to be on our toes,” she whispered.
Pedro nodded. He blew out one candle, slid the card aside, and stood. The knock came again—three quick taps, then one—like the knuckles had made up their mind.

Chapter 11 — The Whispering Doll: Enter Mia

Isaiah 11:6

“The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid; and a little child shall lead them.”

Matthew 10:34–35

“Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword. For I am come to set a man at variance against his father, and the daughter against her mother.”

“Then shall two be in the field; the one shall be taken, and the other left.” — Matthew 24:40

52 Days Earlier

The apartment felt different now—emptier in a way that didn’t just mean space. It felt like a breath held too long. Mia padded from room to room with Solomon tucked under one arm, his worn fur rasping her elbow, his button eyes steady as ever. Outside, the city had dimmed to a strange hush: traffic lights blinking to nobody, a television muttering in an empty unit down the hall, wind worrying a loose sign until it knocked a soft, patient clack against brick.

Her mother and father had gone to church and then simply… gone. Mia had been feeling a little under the weather, so she got to stay home—no slammed door, no goodbye, just absence. The pastor had promised the faithful would be saved. Ten-year-old math said that meant everybody you loved stayed. The math lied.

“Why did they leave me?” Mia asked the quiet. “Wasn’t I good enough?”

A voice she knew as Solomon’s folded into her head, not loud, just there—the voice she’d sometimes hear when she was afraid of dark hallways or clattering radiators. Perhaps. Or perhaps you’re meant to stay.

“Meant to?” She hugged him closer. His belly had a thin spot where the stuffing didn’t quite fill, a place her thumb had worried flat when she was three and couldn’t sleep. “What does that even mean?”

Sometimes the ones left behind are meant to see what others can’t, Solomon murmured from the place where her thoughts thinned to a whisper. Sometimes they’re the only ones who understand.

Understand what? The word bounced around the room and came back with no coat on. She didn’t press him. She just moved—checking the window latch twice, straightening the uneven stack of plates, counting the black tiles in the kitchen (thirteen) and the white ones (twenty-two), and then counting again to make sure numbers still behaved. Outside, distant sirens traced lines through the sky and then smudged out.

Days slid past in strange steps. She learned the shape of late afternoon by how the sun fell across the carpet and made a rectangle on the coffee table. She learned the sound of neighbors’ doors—most cracked, some wide, a few locked like teeth. A stroller sat at the end of the corridor with nobody to push it. One tennis shoe lay in the stairwell, pointed toward downstairs like it had someplace to be and changed its mind. The elevator froze between floors with its OUT OF SERVICE sign taped crooked, as if it had slumped in the middle of trying.

She stayed put. The voices on the street didn’t sound like anyone she knew. Sometimes they were angry, sometimes hungry, sometimes scared. Sometimes there was a voice that sounded almost kind and that, somehow, was worse. She ate what was left: crackers, a can of peaches, two cups of instant noodles she rationed like treasure. She rolled a washcloth under the door to keep out the draft. She slept with Solomon under her chin to keep out the rest.

“Why am I still here?” she asked one night, the question so soft it barely moved the air.

For a while Solomon didn’t answer. The silence got big and prickly. Then: Sometimes faith isn’t about being chosen. Sometimes it’s about finding your own way.

The sentence put a hollow in her chest and a small steadiness under it. “I don’t want to be alone,” she said, and there it was: the truest part.

You’re never alone, little one, Solomon said, gentle, almost warm. Sometimes it’s just you and the silence.

She pressed his face against her cheek until the button scraped. “Okay,” she lied.

It happened on a Tuesday, she thought. Or a Wednesday. The calendar magnet had fallen off the fridge, and time didn’t make clear promises anymore. Mia was dozing on the couch with her socked feet tucked into the afghan when someone knocked. Not a neighborly tap-tap. A beat with bones in it.

KNOCK. KNOCK. KNOCK.

Her eyes snapped open. The knock came again—three quick taps, then one more, like the knuckles were arguing with themselves.

She slid off the couch and tiptoed to the door, Solomon tucked tight. She pressed her ear to the wood. The hallway hummed with the building’s old electric, that thin mosquito line behind the walls. Then a voice bled through—thin, raw, a woman’s whisper pulled too tight.

“Please… let me in…”

Mia’s hand hovered over the lock. The chain trembled a little against the metal plate.

“Please… my baby… I don’t know where else to go.”

Her stomach flipped. She looked down at Solomon, at the thread that crossed his mouth in a small crooked smile, at the one loose stitch near his ear. “Do you think… she really needs help?” she whispered.

Some doors, Solomon said, his voice low in her head, are better left shut.

The air tasted like dust. The woman’s voice came again, softer, breaking. “Please… my baby… if there’s anyone, please.”

Mia pressed her forehead to the cool wood. “But what if she’s scared? Like me?”

Fear has many faces, Solomon said evenly. Sometimes shadows learn your favorite words.

Shadows. She thought of the stroller in the hall. The single shoe. The way the elevator was stuck in the middle like it couldn’t pick a floor. She thought of her mother’s hand finding hers during prayer, the squeeze-squeeze that meant Do this with me, even if you don’t understand yet. She took a breath until it hurt and then let it out slow.

“No,” she said. “I have to help.”

She slid the chain. The lock clicked under her thumb. She opened the door.

The hallway yawned back, empty all the way to the stairwell. Lights flickered and steadied. The stroller sat where it always sat, a curl of hair caught in the fabric canopy like a question mark. The air moved against her cheek—cold, then not.

“Hello?” she called, voice small but brave. “Is… anyone there?”

Her voice skittered along the walls and came back smaller. No answer. No baby. Just the hum of a building that didn’t know what else to do.

She looked down at Solomon. He looked back, same button eyes, same stitched smile. She waited for him to say something wise or annoying or both. Nothing. The place in her head where his voice lived was quiet as a dark theater after the reel burns out.

“Solomon?” She shook him gently like he was a sleepy friend. “Are you there?”

Silence.

It landed heavy. He’d been with her in long lines and noisy rooms and dentist chairs and storms that tried to rattle the windows out of their frames. He’d always had something to say—even if it was only hold on. Now he had none of it. Just his small body and his old stitches and the weight of not answering.

Cold licked along her arms. She backed into the apartment and closed the door with a soft click that sounded louder than it was. The lock slid. The chain settled. For a long minute she stood with her palm against the wood while her heart tried very hard to push its way out and then changed its mind.

The quiet took up its old seat. But it wasn’t the same quiet. It had a shape to it—like it had put on a coat and shoes and decided to be useful. She moved through it carefully, touching familiar things: the cup with the chip in the rim, the line of fridge magnets, the jar of pennies she and her sister used to tip into, counting out the copper for slushies. When she finally sat, she found the place on the couch cushion where the springs sagged in the friendliest way and let herself sink.

“Okay,” she told the room, “then it’s me.”

The decision didn’t explode or glow or change the light. It just stacked itself in her chest, one small brick at a time, until there was a wall she could lean on.

Chapter 12-Then It’s Me

She left at first light.

The sky was a pale coin over the roofs. She washed a cereal bowl and set it upside down to dry because that’s what you did. She packed a small backpack with what could be carried by a kid with thin wrists: a bottle of water, a can of beans, the manual can opener that bit her thumb if she got sloppy, the blue hoodie with the frayed cuffs, the pocketknife her uncle had given her two birthdays ago and told her to only use if she had to (she’d smiled like of course and then practiced opening it behind the sofa ten thousand times), two granola bars, a pack of tissues that smelled like aloe, a folded grocery bag, a faded map from the drawer that had coupons and rubber bands and the tape that never stuck.

She put Solomon on her pillow. Then she picked him up. Then she put him back.

“I can’t carry you,” she said, and her voice sounded like someone else’s. “But I’ll come back.”

He smiled his stitched smile. Maybe that was enough.

In the hallway, the stroller watched her go. On the corkboard by the stairs, the LOST CAT flyer with its curling corners had been joined by another sheet: WE STILL MEET ON THURSDAYS. The stairwell smelled like bleach and someone’s rice left too long on a burner. On the ground floor, she paused at the glass door and held very still, the way you do when you’re trying to see if the day is safe. The street stared back—car doors ajar, papers fossilized in puddles, a wind chime on a second-story balcony making a small, stubborn sound.

She kept her head down and walked.

A half-gutted supermarket slouched at the block’s far end, one window punched out, the other webbed with cracks like ice. Inside smelled like cardboard and old fruit. Most of the shelves were stripped, but not all. She took what made sense: a can of peaches (peaches again—she decided that must mean good luck), a small jar of peanut butter, a plastic spoon still in its sleeve, a pack of raisins, a box of matches with two strikes left. She found a pair of socks in the aisle with the cheap toys and slipped them into her bag like a secret.

The hum of an engine rubbed the air outside. She froze behind a shelf and peered around the end cap. An old Honda rolled into the lot and coughed twice before it settled. The doors opened. A man and a woman stepped out—tired in the face but soft around the mouth in a way that said they’d still say please, still say thank you. The woman wore a denim jacket with a heart sewn badly on the elbow. The man’s T-shirt read EAT LOCAL in letters the size of a shout.

“Hey,” the woman called through the broken window, gentle, like you call to a stray dog you actually want to meet you halfway. “You okay?”

Mia nodded, then remembered they might not catch a nod and said, “I’m… I’m trying to get to my uncle’s. He’s in the next town over.”

The man and woman looked at each other and had one of those grown-up conversations without moving their mouths. The man spoke first. “We can give you a lift,” he said. “At least close.”

“Or back to ours,” the woman added, but not like a trap. Like a door she was leaving open on purpose.

“Thank you,” Mia said, “but I need to find him. He’s all I have left.” Her throat pulled tight on the next sentence. “He never went to church like the others. I thought maybe…”

“Maybe he’d still be there,” the woman finished, not unkind. “I’m Cee.” She tipped her chin toward the man. “That’s Liam.”

“Mia,” Mia said.

Cee smiled a little. “Sometimes the ones we least expect to stay are the ones left standing.”

They rode with the windows cracked. The car carried a thread of cigarettes and whiskey braided with something cleaner—laundry soap, maybe. Cee sat half-turned in her seat so she could keep an eye on Mia without staring. Liam watched the road like it might change its mind if he looked away.

“You got family near Oak Grove?” Cee asked.

“My uncle,” Mia said. “Pedro.” Saying his name out loud was like pushing a pin into a map: here.

“You know how to use that knife?” Liam asked after a few minutes, nodding at the pocket clipped to her hoodie.

Mia nodded. “I practiced. Behind the couch.” She felt her ears go hot. “Don’t tell.”

He huffed what might have been a laugh. “Looks like the right amount of careful to me.”

They passed a field where the scarecrows had lost their hats and a billboard that said REPENT on one side and EAT AT MARGIE’S on the other, which felt like mixed messaging. They passed a gas station with the numbers stuck at a price that didn’t make sense anymore. The road hunched under them and unrolled again.

As they neared the edge of the next town, the world jammed up: cars nose-to-tail across the asphalt, cement chunks and pallets and old tires thrown into a clumsy wall. A suitcase had burst open near the front, clothes fanned like somebody had expected to go somewhere sunny. The barricade was ugly and effective and said, Turn around, in every language.

Liam eased the Honda to a stop. The engine idled and then gave up. He kept both hands on the wheel and looked at Mia in the rearview like he was trying to memorize her. “End of the line,” he said.

Cee reached back and rested her palm on Mia’s shoulder. Her hand was warm in a way that made Mia want to sit very still so it wouldn’t move. “Are you sure you don’t want to come with us?”

Mia wanted two lives at once. She wanted a kitchen with someone’s coffee already made and she wanted the road with her uncle at the end of it. She swallowed. “Thank you,” she said. “But I need to go.”

Cee’s nod was small and complete. “Okay,” she said. “Then we’ll wish you good luck, and the kind that sticks.”

Liam fished in the glove box and came up with a crumpled pack of crackers. “Take these,” he said, not looking at her when he held them out, as if that would make it less like charity and more like trading. “We don’t like them.”

She took them like treasure. “Thank you.”

She climbed out. The car’s door thumped shut, and for a second she wanted to ask them to wait while she climbed the barricade so she could look back and wave. She didn’t. She raised a hand anyway. Cee saw it and raised hers in return, palm open, a blessing if you wanted one.

The Honda rolled away, its tailpipe rattling a small, apologetic song. The sound thinned, then faded. The quiet that came after was thicker than the quiet she knew from her apartment. It had outside in it.

Mia studied the barricade. She could do this. She’d climb where the suitcases made a slope. She’d mind the glass. She’d hold her backpack strap in her teeth if she had to. She’d land on the other side and keep walking. She set her palms against the cool metal of a car hood and felt the dust print lines into her skin.

“Okay,” she told herself. “Then it’s me.”

She started up.

Chapter 13-We Did What We Had To

In the Honda, the road settled back into a low, steady hum. Neither of them spoke for a while. Cee watched the lines slide under them and disappear into the soft afternoon. Liam’s knuckles had gone pale on the wheel.

“Do you think we should’ve done more?” he asked finally, voice steady and small at the same time. He didn’t look away from the road to ask it; he asked it like it was to the road.

Cee traced the seam in the seat with one finger. “We did what we had to,” she said softly.

He nodded, like he wanted to glue that sentence to the inside of his skull. “Yeah,” he said. “Just like before.”

That word sat between them and unpacked a box. Before was the night the vanishings started on their street, the night the power flickered and the air felt charged like after lightning. Before was their next-door neighbor’s porch light jittering moths against the glass. Before was the neighbor’s wife on the stoop with her baby in the crook of her arm and that look—terrified, yes, but fixed on something over her shoulder with a stare that had too much attention in it.

They had both seen the shape in the corner behind her. Not a person. Not a lamp’s shadow. A presence. It leaned when you breathed and stilled when you held your breath. It didn’t belong to a story either of them liked.

“Please,” the woman had said, not loudly, like saying it quiet might keep the thing from noticing. “Don’t leave us alone with it.”

They had backed away because something heavy had stepped into their house with them and sat down on the couch without asking. They had closed their door because the world made it so doors meant safety even when they didn’t. They had told themselves a hundred practical reasons and believed five.

That night, the presence had arranged itself in their hallway as if it had always known the floor plan. It moved by not moving. It waited by not waiting. Cee had slept with the lamp on and her Bible open on the dresser and hadn’t read a word. Liam had checked the locks every twenty minutes until he finally fell asleep standing and woke with his cheek against the door.

They never said the obvious thing out loud. They folded it into the laundry and the dishes and the thin jokes. They changed routes to avoid porches that had stories. They practiced the sentence We did what we had to until it sounded like something you could live with.

Now, as the Honda carried them past a house with a playset nobody would climb again, Cee turned the sentence over once more to see if it sparkled anywhere. “We did what we had to,” she repeated, very soft.

“Yeah,” Liam said. He hunched his shoulders like he was trying to get his bones to settle right inside his shirt. “We did.”

The road went on like roads do—forward, forward, forward—under a sky that couldn’t decide whether to brighten or go to sleep. And somewhere behind them, a girl slid down the far side of a barricade, brushed dust off her hands, and started walking toward Oak Grove.

Chapter 14 — The Girl at the Door

Mia was ten, shoulder-length waves curling at the ends, in a faded Gotta Catch ’Em All tee and jeans that had already survived a few summers too many. Dust clung to the frayed cuffs like it belonged there.

She walked toward Oak Grove—hours if she kept her pace. A month since her parents went: one minute home, the next… gone. Just like that. Her thumb hooked under the backpack strap; the knife’s weight rode her hip like a secret promise.

Hope pinned itself to one person. Uncle Pedro. Surely he hasn’t vanished. He hates going to church. The thought made her snort mid-step, breath snagging on the rise of the gravel path.

People had whispered end times like weather you could ignore. The whisper had teeth now. She wiped her brow and kept climbing. Pebbles slid under her Converse.

Halfway up, a seam of sunlight split the clouds and warmed her face. A white butterfly wobbled down and rested on the bridge of her nose. For a few heartbeats she went still—breath and pulse slowing to the soft clap of its wings.

“It’s gonna be okay,” she whispered, not checking if she believed it.

The butterfly lifted. The sweetness cracked. She tipped her head back and groaned, long and theatrical. “Ohhhhhh, cut it out.”

Her voice sharpened, honest as a bruise. “Why was I left behind?” She jabbed her middle finger at the sky. “I went to church every Sunday. I prayed for the nonbelievers. And you did me like this, God?”

No answer. Just air and the far hum of sirens.

From the ridge she caught Oak Grove—scattered roofs, two thin threads of smoke, the faint whoop of emergency riding the wind. “Oh, would you look at that—they still have a town.” Quieter, to herself: “But by the looks of it… the disappearances started here too.”

The sun slid behind a gray bank; the light went flat. The air settled heavy, like the last place right before it emptied.

Down past the tracks—rusted rails, weeds gone to seed, a single shoe pointed nowhere—Mia cut across lots she half-remembered. She didn’t need a slip of paper. Landmarks stacked in her head like hopscotch squares: the mural with the blue heron, the crooked streetlamp, and then the glow she’d been aiming for—the 7-11 sign buzzing in the late light, one tube flickering like it couldn’t commit to open.

The door sighed as she passed, exhaling a mix of hot rubber from the pumps and the cold-syrup breath of ICEE machines. She slowed, because this part was muscle memory: Pedro’s laugh, his “Pick a color, kiddo,” the way he’d warn her about brain freeze and then get one anyway. The posters on the glass were new; the smell was the same.

Next door, the complex she knew rose steady and square-shouldered. Not fancy—charm instead. A string of mismatched lights sagged across the courtyard like a smile that had tried. A wind chime made of old keys clicked softly. Someone’s potted aloe sent up stubborn green spears from a cracked blue pot. And the smell—there it was—the one treaty everyone here honored: roasted coffee. Somebody always had a percolator going, morning and night, like a lighthouse you could drink.

She breathed it in. Relief fluttered and steadied.

Inside, the stairwell carried that coffee warmth, cut with the faintest thread of laundry soap and yesterday’s cumin. A radio somewhere drifted through a doorway—boleros or an oldies station, she couldn’t tell. A TV upstairs tried to sell a laugh track to an audience that wasn’t buying.

She knew the turns. Down the short hall, past the corkboard with the lost-cat flyer that had been there forever, past the doormat that said WELCOME in letters worn down to soft ghosts. She counted doors—one, two, three—and didn’t need to double-check this time.

Her heart went fast in the soft places at the base of her throat. She wiped her palms on her jeans. The loaf of bread bumped her hip inside the pack like a small, warm animal.

She drew a breath big enough for bravery, made a fist, and lifted it to the wood.

Knock, knock knock..

Chapter 15 — Homecoming

“And he shall send his angels with a great sound of a trumpet, and they shall gather together his elect from the four winds, from one end of heaven to the other.” — Matthew 24:31
“For they are the spirits of devils, working miracles… to gather them to the battle of that great day of God Almighty… And he gathered them together into a place called in the Hebrew tongue Armageddon.” — Revelation 16:14, 16
“And I saw heaven opened, and behold a white horse; and he that sat upon him was called Faithful and True, and in righteousness he doth judge and make war… And the armies which were in heaven followed him upon white horses… And out of his mouth goeth a sharp sword, that with it he should smite the nations.” — Revelation 19:11, 14–15

Three knocks—clean, deliberate—and then stillness.

Pedro and Jenna froze, palms slick against the cool wood. The apartment was a hush of candle-breath and distant sirens threading the city’s night. Jenna’s eyes found his. She set a steadying hand on his shoulder.

“Don’t worry, Pedro,” she said, voice gentle but sure. “I’m right behind you.”

“Thanks,” he breathed, though the word felt too small for what he meant.

He slid the chain back. The lock popped soft as a knuckle. When he cracked the door, the hallway’s stale light spilled in, and a face tipped up to meet it: a girl in tattered blue jeans, ponytail scraped into a rubber band, eyes wide and glassy as marbles.

For a heartbeat, Pedro thought he was dreaming again—like Damien’s Cadillac, like the Bible pages turning themselves, like the grave on the hill with his name on it. Then Mia’s weight hit his chest, small and desperate and real.

“Mia?” The name broke out of him in two pieces. “How on earth did you— Where’s your mom? Is my bro—Julian—did he—?”

She didn’t answer. She slammed herself into his arms and clamped tight, cheek crushed to his sweatshirt, bony little forearms cinched around his ribs as if she could hold herself together by holding him.

“Uncle Pedro,” she gasped, and it all came in a single wet rush, “it’s just me now. Mom and Dad vanished nearly two months ago. I waited… I waited for them to come back, Uncle Pedro, but… but…”

The rest crumpled under a sob that shook her shoulders. Tears bled into the cotton at his chest. Her breath hitched, hitched, then shuddered out again.

He closed the door with his heel without taking his arms off her. The guilt was quick and hot, no time to dress itself up. She’d been alone for weeks, and I wasn’t there.

“I’m here,” he said into her hair, which smelled like rain and dust and a little like old shampoo. “I’m here now, Mia. I’ve got you.”

She nodded against him, a small, frantic bob, like agreeing was the only way to keep the floor from falling.

Mia peeled her face from his sweatshirt long enough to glance past his shoulder. Her gaze snagged on the woman by the door, made bold by tragedy and ten years old. “Uncle Pedro, who is she?” Mia blinked at Jenna with frank appraisal that would have been rude in any other life. “She is beautiful. Is she your girlfriend? Mom said it was only a matter of time before you found someone. She said good looks and charm run in the family.” A fragile laugh trembled into being, a scrap of light breaking through drenched clouds.

Before Mia could tumble into more, Jenna moved. Not showy—just decisive. She stepped to the counter, snagged a paper towel to dab the salt at Mia’s lashes, then broke a sugar-glossed edge off the strawberry pan dulce cooling on a small plate.

“Emergency pastry,” Jenna murmured, dropping to a knee so her eyes were level with Mia’s. Without making a fuss of it, she tipped the bite to the girl’s lips.

Mia startled—then let it in. A little sound escaped her throat, halfway between a sigh and a hum. “Oh my God,” she said around the chew, honest as only kids can be, “this is the best pan dulce I’ve ever had.” She swallowed, wiped her nose with the back of her hand, and swung back to Pedro with solemn urgency. “Uncle Pedro,” she asked again, more insistent, “is this your girlfriend?”

Pedro chose not to say anything, Jenna looking to him to see how he would react.

Jenna made an amused little choke noise. Pedro, who would have choked on air if asked to define what they were to each other even yesterday, chose the only safe path available. He put an arm around Mia’s shoulders and guided her toward the couch.

Jenna made an amused little choke noise. Pedro, who would have choked on air if asked to define what they were to each other even yesterday, chose the only safe path available. He put an arm around Mia’s shoulders and guided her toward the couch.

He got her onto the couch and draped the blue throw over her legs. The fleecy weight swallowed her thin shins, the fabric pilling in a way that suddenly looked holy. Jenna tucked herself beside Mia, a careful six inches away until the girl leaned, and then there was no space to mind. Jenna’s arm folded around her shoulders in a one-armed hug, fingers combing through the damp curls at Mia’s nape in a rhythm steady enough to breathe to.

“It smells safe here,” Mia whispered into the blanket. “Coffee and… something nice.”

“Mia, I’m so sorry you’ve been alone this whole time,” Pedro said. “You should have called, I would have—”

She shook her head before he could finish. “No, Uncle Pedro. That’s no good.” There was steel under the softness. “Whatever’s causing the disappearances is messing with tech. Phones and electronics within forty miles of New Jericho are cut off, and the jam bleeds into the other counties. It’s like it’s… on purpose.” New Jericho—the town Pedro’s brother had decided to raise a family in.

“New Jericho,” he repeated, hearing the name like a door closing. “That’s where you were?”

She nodded, hair catching on the blanket’s nap. “At first I thought it was just our building. The elevator froze, and the lights in the hall did that flicker-flicker thing and then… nothing. But outside the streetlights were stuck too, and people’s car alarms went off for no reason, and Mrs. Kim’s TV was talking to nobody.”

Jenna’s eyes flicked to Pedro. He saw the surprise there—not at the facts, but at the small, fierce person delivering them in a voice that had learned not to break. Jenna stroked Mia’s hair again, and for a second even she felt surprised at how natural it came—like the girl had been waiting for her, too.

Pedro watched his niece’s face through the candlelight and thought of all the faces it had been. He was nineteen the first time he held her, red-faced and furious at the world’s brightness, a soft fist furious about being so small. He’d sworn, in a stupid, private ceremony only he attended, not to drop her, not even a little. At her third birthday party, she’d demanded Oreos and he’d smuggled her two under the table, hissing conspiratorially while Julian shot him a look and their mother pretended she didn’t see. She’d been the kid who laughed at the wrong place in the movie because once she realized the blood was actually ketchup, she couldn’t stop cracking up.

She’d been the kid who once asked, completely sincere, “If God is everywhere, is He inside the cereal box?” He had loved her for the way her brain tilted at the world.

“Do you remember,” Mia said suddenly, turning her head toward him, “when you’d sneak me Oreos when Mom said no? You used to pass me one like a spy, and you’d go, ‘Operation Cookie Drop.’” She offered a sleepy half-smile. “I kept thinking about that. Like you’d find a way to sneak back to me.”

Pedro’s smile arrived and broke into two pieces at once. “Operation Cookie Drop,” he echoed, and had to scrub a hand over his eyes so the sting didn’t spill. “I’m here now. I’m not going anywhere.”

“Okay,” Mia said, as if he’d just confirmed gravity.

A thicker quiet folded over the room; outside, somewhere, a siren wound up and then dropped away to nothing. The wax in the candles was low enough now that the flames made little inward caves in themselves. Mia’s breath slowed, brushing the blanket in gentle lifts.

Pedro’s mind should have been empty with relief; instead, everything from the last twenty-four hours jostled for space. Ed’s café window exploded inward, the hood of the driverless car wedged like a metal fist in the pastry case. Scripture leaping like a live thing from the pages of a book that hated his hands. The way the sky had looked stranger today, as if it knew a secret. And the boy—Damien—grinning from the sea-green dash of a Cadillac that shouldn’t have had a ten-year-old behind the wheel.

Maybe it hadn’t been a dream. Ed had said God spoke through dreams. But Damien’s grin hadn’t felt like God.

He wasn’t aware he’d spoken aloud until Jenna tilted her head. “What?” she asked. “What did you say?”

He replayed his own voice, sounding like someone else’s from across a room. “A war is coming,” he’d said, mimicking the kid’s cadence without meaning to.

“Pardon?” Jenna’s eyebrows had a way of having their own conversations. “Did you say a war?”

Pedro realized he’d thrown the thought into the room without warning. He glanced at Mia, who had slumped heavier into Jenna’s side, eyelids dragging like curtains. The moon sat in the dark like a coin. The building across the courtyard was a handful of silent windows. The candles made their own small weather, shadows trembling just a little each time the wax popped.

“Jenna,” he said, “I need to tell you something. It’s about last night.”

“You mean when I kicked your butt at Mario Kart?” She gave him the grin she used for trouble, the one that started just on one side and climbed. “Because I will happily tell Mia that story when she wakes up.”

“Be serious—just for a second,” he said, and his voice had no room in it for anything but what it carried. “After we fell asleep, I woke up to pee and saw a car outside—same one from IHOP, I think. I felt like we were being followed.” He watched the shape her face took as he spoke, the way she read him like a page she was afraid to turn too fast. “Only the driver wasn’t an adult. It was a kid.”

“You’ve got to be kidding me.” Jenna’s voice landed somewhere between disbelief and a laugh that didn’t want to come. “A kid driving a car?”

On Jenna’s lap, Mia’s head lifted at the word kid like a plant turning to light. Her eyes cracked, a sliver of hazel showing, then sank again. She tucked her chin and settled deeper under the blanket, breath evening out.

“Yeah,” Pedro said softly, so as not to shake the quiet. “But that’s not the craziest part. I got into the kid’s car.” He winced, anticipating the chunk of lecture coming his way and weirdly grateful for it. “He introduced himself as Damien. Said I owe him. Said I’ve been drafted into a war. Then, before I could argue, the kid—”

“The kid what?” Jenna asked, not moving, as if the answer might spook if they shifted.

Pedro heard it again: the click of the revolver, obscene and precise in the night, and the flash like a magnesium flare. The hill unrolled in his mind, the cross, the brass plate with his name hammered into it as if the earth had been waiting.

“He wasn’t a regular kid,” Pedro said. “He told me the disappearances are going to pick up. He… recruited me to help fight back.” He scrubbed a hand through his hair and found he was tangling in the curl he always forgot to cut. “I know it sounds—”

“—like the kind of thing you tell your best friend right away,” Jenna finished, and there was no sting in it, just a soft chiding that landed like a blanket rather than a slap.

He huffed a laugh that didn’t go anywhere. “Yeah. I should’ve told you earlier.”

Jenna slid a pillow beneath Mia’s head with the tenderness one reserves for sleeping animals and slid down to the floor beside Pedro. The coffee table made a small dais for their knees. The candles drew a warm circle around them like a secret club. Jenna’s hand found his thigh and rested there, not teasing. Grounding.

“I would’ve believed you,” she said. “That’s what best friends are for.”

He looked at her hand, then at her mouth, then back at the candles because it felt safer, which made neither thing safer. The room felt both too small and exactly the right size.

“These disappearances,” Jenna went on, voice a thread not to be yanked, “Stephanie. My sister, Renae. Mia’s parents. And the people you and Ed saw… go.” She didn’t say vanish or rapture or taken. She said go like the word had its own dignity. “Moving forward, you have to trust me with everything you learn. Because, you know what? I believe you. The kid, the war, end times… as crazy as it sounds, it’s beginning to feel like the only thing that makes sense.”

He didn’t realize until then how much he’d been bracing to be laughed at. Something in his chest eased, like a knot deciding there was no point in being a knot after all. “Thank you,” he said, which wasn’t enough, but it’s what he had.

They let that settle. They let themselves be two people sitting on a floor with a sleeping child within reach and the universe maybe changing its rules outside the window.

“There’s another thing,” Pedro said. “Earlier today, I went looking for clues. I found my old Sunday Bible.” He held his hands up, palms out, where the irritated red still kissed his fingers. “When I tried to open it, it burned me, Jen. Like the pages repelled me.”

Her eyes widened. She leaned in before she remembered to whisper. “Pedro… you mean, like he put some kind of curse on you?” The word curse sat between them, familiar and absurd at once, the way a childhood game feels if you play it in an empty house.

“Maybe,” he said. “Or maybe I’m just… not the intended audience.”

She reached up without thinking and cupped his cheek, thumb near the corner of his mouth. The simple warmth of it made the rest of the room go quieter. “He told you where to find him?”

Pedro nodded. “Damien gave me directions. A place. A time.”

“Then he wants to be found,” Jenna murmured. “Maybe this kid does have some kind of leadership skills.” She took a breath, and it fluttered in his face in a way that felt like a promise to one day laugh about everything or cry about it or both. “So what’s the plan, Pedro? Looks like we’re a group of three now.”

“Makes us sound like a sitcom,” he said, because the alternative was saying family out loud and hoping it didn’t crack. “But yeah. Three.”

On the couch, Mia made a small sound, not quite a word. Her hand, sprawled on the blanket near Jenna’s knee, twitched, and then she murmured, half under a dream, half in the true place where children go when they finally trust sleep, “If she’s your girlfriend, Uncle Pedro… don’t screw it up.”

Jenna clapped a hand over her mouth, eyes wide, and the laugh that burst out anyway had both a squeak and a snort in it. Pedro let his head tip forward and his shoulders shake, quietly, so as not to wake the one wise person in the room who dared to speak plain. The laugh left a warmth in its place they both pretended not to notice.

The room settled again. Outside, the wind jogged the bare branches of the courtyard’s lone tree; they tapped the building like fingers testing for hollow spots. Somewhere, a neighbor moved a chair and then went still. The candles guttered lower. A bead of wax made its slow, perilous climb and then tipped, spilling down the side in a thin, white river that set and cooled into a frozen drip. The blanket rose and fell with Mia’s breaths. Her hair had dried in soft arcs that fanned across the pillow’s edge, the ends fuzzy from the rain.

For a fleeting moment, it almost felt like family again.

Pedro stared at the shadows on the wall, how they layered over the old paint like stories laid on stories. He had the sudden, irrational thought that if he didn’t blink, this could last. That the room could stay this small and warm; that the city could decide trouble was a thing for later; that the book on the table was only a book, and a kid in a Cadillac was only a brag with bad taste; that the three of them could fall asleep where they were and wake to a morning so ordinary it would feel like a miracle.

He was still not blinking when the night changed.

It began at the edges, a pressure building in the bones of the room, like the air had mass now. The windows in their frames hummed—a high, harmonic shiver, as if someone were drawing a bow across the glass. A sound rolled in, low and layered, the way thunder sometimes does when the storm is too large to fit in one sky. Then the trumpets. Not like metal—not exactly. More like every brass instrument ever made had been taught a language and told to speak at once. The notes braided into one another: a call and an answer and a warning and a welcome that no one in the room had asked for.

The candles didn’t flicker so much as lean, flames shoved sideways by the vibration. The coffee in the cold mug drew uneasy circles. The floorboards carried the sound up through their knees, into the cartilage, into the lungs.

Mia jerked awake with a small cry, pillow imprint stamped on her cheek. Her eyes tried to find the ceiling and then gave up and looked for Pedro instead. He was already looking back. Jenna’s hand found his without needing to look for it; their fingers locked like people do in a crowd when the crowd starts to move in a way you don’t like.

The sound swelled. Somewhere far but not far enough, something let go—a window shattering, a transformer popping, a dog howling until it wasn’t. The trumpets carried on, not in a song you could hum, but in something the body knew anyway, like standing at the edge of the ocean and realizing the water has plans for you.

“What is that?” Mia breathed.

“The thing I was hoping could wait,” Pedro said, and his voice didn’t fool anybody.

Jenna squeezed his hand until their knuckles found the same pain. “Three knocks,” she whispered suddenly, as if they’d only now remembered to rewind the tape. “Back at the door. Not three-and-one.”

“Right,” Pedro said, grateful for any code that still felt like code and not chaos.

The light outside changed without getting brighter; the world had found a new color and was trying it on. The trumpets found another layer under themselves, a deeper throat of sound that thrummed against the teeth. In the distance, a chorus rose—people. Some shouting in fear, some in something like joy, some calling names into wind that did not carry.

Pedro stood before he knew he’d stood. The room had shrunk and expanded at once, old apartment physics overturned by a rule more ancient than rent. Jenna stood up when he did, adjusting the blanket around Mia without looking, as if she had always moved through rooms like that, making small, necessary corrections while the universe threw chairs.

He looked down at his niece and saw the kid who had asked about cereal-box God and the kid who had climbed a barricade to get to him and the kid who had noticed that coffee can smell like safety. He kneeled and touched his forehead to hers for a second that was only theirs.

“We’re three,” he said quietly, to prove it. “Remember?”

Mia nodded, jaw set, the kind of nod that says this is a bad idea but it is also the only idea we have.

The trumpets didn’t stop. The apartment didn’t fall. The candles kept their small jobs. The thin safety they’d stitched for one hour snagged and tore down the middle. And still—three people in a room, hands found, breath held—they made a shape against whatever came next.

Chapter 16-The Trumpets

The trumpets did not stop.
They rolled through the bones of the building, a braided thunder of brass and something older, prying at the window glass until it hummed. Mia jolted awake, eyes wide, already pushing herself upright like a kid who knew instinctively this wasn’t a nightmare you slept through.

Jenna was moving before words caught up—unzipping a backpack, sweeping in what mattered: first-aid kit, a half-bottle of vodka, a fistful of paper towels, granola bars, three waters that thunked against each other. She cinched the pack, glanced to Mia, and watched the girl sling on the small canvas bag she’d arrived with, the one that had been a lifeline for fifty-two lonely days.

Outside, sirens that had hiccuped all afternoon went silent. The darkness swallowed the block whole. From somewhere out past Pichon, people shouted each other’s names and then ran out of breath.

Pedro shoved his arms into his bomber, ducked into the bedroom for gear he didn’t have. The Bible lay on the dresser where he’d dropped it, pages angled like a mouth that had just bitten him. For a second—just one second—he considered it again.

“I might be able to use this,” he muttered. “Fight back with whatever… this is.”

Then he remembered the way the touch had hurled him into the wall and snorted. “On second thought.”

His eyes slid to the sunglasses beside it—cheap, ridiculous. He popped them on, finger-gunned his reflection, and gave himself a grin he didn’t entirely feel. “This is all I need.”

He came back to find Jenna at the living-room window, voice dropped to a whisper. “Hey, you two. I’ve been watching.” She lifted a slat, then added, “Pedro, those glasses—what’s with them?”

“What, you don’t like them?” Pedro laughed, mock-offended.

“Don’t you think this situation is a little more serious than sunglasses?” she retorted.

Pedro shrugged. “Ah, no situation is ever too serious for cool-guy sunglasses. Bonus points when worn indoors—or, you know, during the end-days apocalypse.”

Mia gave them both a long stare. Then all three burst into laughter at once.

Several blocks away, something towered over a row of low houses. At first Pedro’s brain called them cranes, construction equipment gone feral. Then one shifted. Not a crane. A body—segment upon segment rising out of itself, pale as bone in the storm-light. An insect, but wrong-sized, biblical-sized, its antennae questing in slow, deliberate sweeps. It moved with intention, probing at rubble, nosing under collapsed roofs as if sniffing for a heartbeat.

Mia’s hand closed around the small blade in her pack. “If I have to use it,” she said, steady, “I will.”

“Where did these creatures even come from?” Jenna breathed. She glanced at the knife in Mia’s grip, then added, to the room and the girl both, “Sometimes the last resort is force—but it’s still last.”

Pedro almost agreed, then watched the thing tilt, consider, and tear a porch upright with a tidy snap of its mandibles. “We can’t fight that,” he said.

Jenna wrapped her jacket around her waist like a field medic, eyes still tracking. “Look.” She pointed. “That alarm. That car with the horn that won’t quit? They’ve been stuck on that house for minutes. I’m willing to bet they’re mostly blind. Sound’s drawing them.”
Each time the stalled sedan’s horn bleated, every antenna snapped toward it in unison—compass needles to a magnet. Not sight. Vibration.

“How can you be sure?” Pedro said. “That’s one hell of a risk.”

The answer roared up from six blocks away: an engine climbed into a scream. Every antenna on every creature in view pivoted. The nearest giant lifted one segmented leg, then another, then all of them at once in a skittering blur that turned the street to a threshing floor. It lunged toward the sound, all precise angles and terrifying speed.

“They’re distracted,” Jenna said. “We’ve got to go.”

“All right, kiddo.” Pedro crouched, and Mia hopped up without being asked. He swung her onto his shoulders, felt her arms hook around his forehead like reins, and nodded to Jenna. They stepped into the night.

They tiptoed at first, out of old habit, feet training themselves to find dry places that didn’t squeak. It didn’t matter. The city was louder than any misstep they could make. Somewhere, an electrical transformer popped like a giant knuckle. Somewhere else, a gas main exhaled and then caught. The air tasted of sulfur and wet copper, and under it all the cold powder of pulverized brick—the town’s red clay ground into breath.

“Pedro,” Jenna said as they hugged the shadow of a brick wall, “you said your dream told you to get to the hill by the cemetery. The one on the edge of town?”

He nodded. “Yeah. Other side. Nine miles.”

“Nine miles now is…” She didn’t finish the sentence. She didn’t need to.

Another wave of trumpets washed through Oak Grove. This time Pedro watched what followed. At the end of the block a man stiffened like a wire pulled taut and then lifted, not jumping, not flying—taken—his outline shivering with light. Shoes fell back to the sidewalk without him. A woman across the street reached for his ankle and caught air. She turned in a circle without sound, then looked straight up and screamed a name that melted into the storm.

“This is like New Jericho,” Mia said quietly from his shoulders. “The trumpets played and then people just… burst into light.”

“Just like earlier,” Pedro said. “I was at Casa del Viento with Ed—people flashed white and were gone.” He could still smell the sugar and the hot metal of the hood shoved through the pastry case, the way Ed had said end days like it was both a warning and a welcome.

They reached the stairwell door. Overhead, something heavy negotiated the roof—weight shifting, testing. Dust sifted down in fine curls. A hairline crack spidered across the ceiling paint and began to flake.

“It’s now or never,” Jenna said.

She cracked the door. The hallway lay in a shallow pool of emergency light, the kind that makes everything look like a memory of itself. They moved—quiet, quick—then slipped out the front of the building into air that felt watched.

A shadow moved to their left, and Jenna’s hand flew up—a stop signal. In the street, barely twenty yards away, one of the giant insects craned its head low, antennae tasting the wind. Its legs moved independently, intelligent fingers of bone and cartilage finding purchase on glass-slick asphalt. Between its pincers a man wriggled and screamed, “Help!” The scream cut off in a strangled crunch. The creature paused, as if listening for a second course.

Pedro’s heart tried to climb his throat. He forced it down.

They slid between parked cars, kept their heads low, and let a busted hedge swallow them whole. An insect foot stabbed through the hood of a sedan two cars down, and the horn blared once, twice. The creature’s head snapped to, and in that instant Mia hissed, “Go,” and pulled them across a strip of lawn into the next yard.

The town had become an alien battleground—grotesque and alive. Antennae combed the air like needle-thin searchlights. Mandibles tested metal and found it wanting. And somewhere inside the coils of thunder and the braided notes of trumpet, Pedro heard Damien again—not with his ears, not exactly. When the war begins, you will come meet me at this hill.

“Why me?” he muttered.

They zigzagged across two more blocks, the three of them a single long breath. Pedro carried Mia until his thighs burned and then handed her down without ceremony; she took her own weight and trotted, knife in one hand, backpack bouncing. Jenna stayed close enough to shield her with her body, eyes always working, counting corners, counting cover.
Mia hurled a rock through a storefront. The motion sensor coughed awake—alarm screaming. Antennae pivoted as one. “Go!” she hissed, yanking them into the alley.

By the time they reached the back of Casa del Viento, the storm had sagged into a steady, mean rain. The café’s front looked wrong in the dark—boards nailed across the shattered window earlier that day, the bell that used to jingle now buried somewhere under glass. The sign over the door had lost the del, so it read Casa Viento, which felt true in a way Pedro didn’t like.

He stopped in the alley, chest heaving. “Ed,” he said.

Jenna followed his gaze to the dark second-floor windows where the Hernandez family slept when the ovens ran late. “Pedro, do you want to check? It’s dangerous, but…” She didn’t finish he means a lot to you. She didn’t have to.

He looked at the café’s silhouette, imagined Ed’s laugh, Ed’s daughter’s pink party, the way Ed had pressed the bag of pan dulce into his hands and said, Pray, Pedro. He felt Mia’s fingers hook into the fabric of his jacket. He felt Jenna’s breath at his shoulder.

He swallowed. “No,” he said finally, and the word hurt. “We’ve got to get to the hill. I’ve got to make sure you two are okay.” He forced a smile that wasn’t a lie, just not the whole truth. “Ed’s a good man. Resourceful. He’ll be okay.”

He didn’t believe it entirely. The refusal sat in his throat like a stone he’d chosen to swallow. He turned away before his eyes could make a scene his mouth would have to explain. “He’s okay,” he said to the night. “We keep going.”

They kept going.

The longer the trumpets played, the stranger Pedro felt. It crept up on him in small betrayals: a sound he could hear before it happened, a flash of movement telegraphed in the air like a drawn line, a weight gathering in his muscles as if gravity had changed rules for him alone.

Half a block from the river road, a shop awning tore loose and scythed toward them. Before he knew he’d moved, Pedro shoved Jenna and Mia into the shelter of a doorway and took the canvas edge full across his forearms. The impact drove him to a knee. The metal struts clanged and spun down the sidewalk. He stared at his hands. The next trumpet note thrummed his tendons like a plucked wire. His irises had darkened to near-black, veins rising ink-blue under the skin; a faint hum lived in his bones.

“Uncle Pedro, are you okay?” Mia asked, dropping to a crouch, her small palm hot on his shoulder.

Jenna’s face hovered in his periphery—concern edging into something else. “Can you keep going?”

He stared at his trembling fingers. “Ever since the trumpets went off, I’ve been feeling… off.” He dragged a sleeve across his forehead; sweat stung his eyes. He forced himself upright, jaw set. “I don’t know what’s happening. But we’ve got to get out of here.” His voice roughened, iron finding its way into it. “I don’t care if it’s end times. We are getting out of end times alive.”

Jenna wiped the sweat from his face with her sleeve, quick and tender. For a second, the rush around them stilled—Oak Grove dismantling itself in slow motion, a mural peeling from a brick wall as if it were shrugging. Somewhere on the next block, a streetlight threw sparks like a Roman candle until it died.

Mia’s gaze flicked past him, and her face changed. “Pedro,” she said, then louder, “Pedro!” Her finger stabbed the air over his shoulder.

Jenna spun, then pointed behind them. “We’ve got to move. NOW. Move!”

Not an insect.

It came low, hugging the street—silver and impossibly long, a serpent like something out of a fevered painting. As it moved, streetlamps reflected in its scales and then didn’t, like mirrors that had already forgotten what they’d seen. It ripped a parked car onto its side as if turning a pillow, sent a fire hydrant cartwheeling, and the geyser that followed arced into the rain and came down in a hiss. It didn’t slither so much as decide to be elsewhere, its body collapsing and extending with a speed that mocked the idea of lanes.

“Go!” Pedro barked.

They ran north down Pichon, feet slapping water, breath sawing. The serpent took out a newspaper box behind them and a blossom of damp pages scattered like white birds that never figured out wings. The next trumpet note punched through their chests and turned their legs to questions.

“We aren’t gonna make it!” Jenna shouted, not for panic but for planning.

“No,” Mia spat, tears bright and furious. “I didn’t come this far to get eaten by a snake!”

Pedro skidded to a stop.

“Keep running,” he said. “You go on ahead.”

Jenna almost didn’t turn—her body went still the way you do when you’re deciding to fight the person you love. “No,” she said, quiet and fierce. “Please, Pedro. Don’t do this.”

“Uncle Pedro!” Mia cried. “Don’t be a hero. Please. I need you.”

He reached for Jenna and pulled her close fast—no polish, just raw need. “Take Mia and run,” he said, and there was a calm in it that scared him even as it steadied her. “I will meet you on that hill by the cemetery.”

He slid an arm around her waist, palm to the small of her back, the other hand lifting to her cheek. He kissed her—soft, quick, real—and they both pulled back with their eyes already locked like they were stitching something that might not hold.

“Don’t you dare die out here,” Jenna said. “I’ll take care of Mia.”

He nodded once.

Mia didn’t nod. “Uncle Pedro!” she sobbed, as Jenna grabbed her hand and hauled her forward. “Please stop!”

Their footsteps faded into the hiss of rain and the hum of the impossible.

Pedro turned to the serpent.

Up close, it was worse. Its scales were not scales but overlapping glass plates with something moving behind them—shadows, lights, the suggestion of a thousand little rooms. Its eyes were wrong: irises a bruised violet threaded with metallic flecks, pupils that widened and narrowed without regard for light. It opened its mouth, and the smell that came out was not rot but ozone, like the first breath after a lightning strike.

He squared his shoulders.

“Hey!” he shouted, voice raw. “I won’t die here.”

The serpent came on, the world narrowing to its yawning dark. Pedro ran—not away from Mia and Jenna but at a hard angle that pulled the thing with him, dragging it down a cross street, away, away, away. He could feel it choosing him, feel the trumpet’s next note buzzing his teeth like a lie detector. He made himself a target big enough for a god to hit.

For a heartbeat, he thought he’d done it. The serpent followed, ignoring everything else—the toppled light poles, the wheeled dumpster it obliterated with a shrug, the shower of sparks from a downed line. It bore down, mouth opening, a cathedral of bone and glass.

Pedro didn’t flinch.

He looked straight into those purple-threaded eyes and smiled something that wasn’t bravado so much as surrender plus a dare. “Come on,” he said. “Come and get—”

The serpent’s jaws closed—then his sunglasses skittered to the curb, unbroken. No blood; only the sting of ozone and, deep in its throat, a brief sea-green lattice flared and went dark. Pedro vanished from the face of the earth.

End of Part 2.