End Game (Harbingers Book 20) Read online

  End Game

  Alton Gansky

  Contents

  Introduction

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  Published by Amaris Media International.

  Copyright © 2017 Alton Gansky

  Cover Design: Angela Hunt

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any other means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other—except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without prior permission from the publisher.

  For more information, visit us on Facebook:

  https://www.facebook.com/pages/Harbingers/705107309586877

  or www.harbingersseries.com.

  HARBINGERS

  A novella series by

  Bill Myers, Frank Peretti, Jeff Gerke, Angela Hunt,

  and Alton Gansky

  In this fast-paced world with all its demands, the five of us wanted to try something new. Instead of the longer novel format, we wanted to write something equally as engaging but that could be read in one or two sittings—on the plane, waiting to pick up the kids from soccer, or as an evening’s read.

  We also wanted to play. As friends and seasoned novelists, we thought it would be fun to create a game we could participate in together. The rules were simple:

  Rule #1

  Each of us will write as if we were one of the characters in the series:

  Bill Myers will write as Brenda, the street-hustling tattoo artist who sees images of the future.

  Frank Peretti will write as the professor, the atheist ex-priest ruled by logic.

  Jeff Gerke will write as Chad, the mind reader with devastating good looks and an arrogance to match.

  Angela Hunt will write as Andi, the brilliant-but-geeky young woman who sees inexplicable patterns.

  Alton Gansky will write as Tank, the naïve, big-hearted jock with a surprising connection to a healing power.

  Rule #2

  Instead of the five of us writing one novella together (we’re friends but not crazy), we would write it like a TV series. There would be an overarching storyline into which we’d plug our individual novellas, with each story written from our character’s point of view.

  If you’re keeping track, this is the order:

  Harbingers #1—The Call—Bill Myers

  Harbingers #2—The Haunted—Frank Peretti

  Harbingers #3—The Sentinels—Angela Hunt

  Harbingers #4—The Girl—Alton Gansky

  Volumes #1-4 omnibus: Cycle One: Invitation

  Harbingers #5—The Revealing—Bill Myers

  Harbingers #6—Infestation—Frank Peretti

  Harbingers #7—Infiltration—Angela Hunt

  Harbingers #8—The Fog—Alton Gansky

  Volumes #5-8 omnibus: Cycle Two: The Assault

  Harbingers #9—Leviathan—Bill Myers

  Harbingers #10—The Mind Pirates—Frank Peretti

  Harbingers #11—Hybrids—Angela Hunt

  Harbingers #12—The Village—Alton Gansky

  Volumes 9-12 omnibus: Cycle Three: Probing

  Harbingers #13—Piercing the Veil—Bill Myers

  Harbingers #14—Home Base—Jeff Gerke

  Harbingers #15—Fairy—Angela Hunt

  Harbingers #16—At Sea—Alton Gansky

  Volumes 13-16 omnibus: Cycle Four: The Pursuit

  Harbingers #17—Piercing the Veil—Bill Myers

  Harbingers #18—Interesting Times—Jeff Gerke

  Harbingers #19—Into the Blue—Angela Hunt

  Harbingers #20—End Game—Alton Gansky

  There you have it. We hope you’ll find these as entertaining in the reading as we are in the writing.

  Bill, Frank, Jeff, Angie, and Al

  Chapter 1

  My name is Tank and this is the story of my death.

  I hate to start things off with such a bummer, but such is life … or in this case, death.

  To be honest, I’m not very surprised by my loomin’ demise. I’ve known it was comin’ for a long time. To be honest again, I’m a little surprised I’ve lasted this long. If you’ve followed my—I should say, our—adventures over the last two years or so, then you know I’ve been called on to jump off a high-rise building, fight off a beast that wasn’t nuthin’ but fur, claws, bloody teeth, and meanness. I’ve faced off with flying orbs that meant the world no good, demonic critters, and a dozen other unbelievable horrors, many of which visit me in my dreams (although until now I’ve refused to mention it). I’ve lived through about nineteen such missions. Sometimes I come through without so much as a scratch; other times I’ve nearly bought the farm. But God has been good to me, to us, and I spring back. In each of those impossible cases, I’ve faced death with at least a spoonful of optimism.

  But not this time.

  I’m stuck in a dark tunnel beneath the ice of the Antarctic. Our space is lit by a single flashlight. We each have lights, but we’re tryin’ to save the batteries.

  I’m not alone. Sitting next to me is my friend— Since I’m about to check out of this life, I might as well just say it—my friend and the girl I love, Andi Goldstein. We’ve never kissed, never held hands in a romantic way, never said the things lovers say. She has kept her distance; kept our relationship professional. I learned to live with it. But now that we’ve probably come to the end of the road, she has pulled down the barriers. She sits on the ice floor next to me. Close. She holds my arm. My dream for so long. So very long.

  Brenda is here, her head hung low, her arms wrapped around her adopted son, Daniel. Daniel is my little buddy and he may be the smartest and most powerful of us all. Looking at him now presses my heart through a meat grinder.

  Chad stood off by himself muttering and pacing. He’s changed in the last hour. He’s a different man.

  The professor is with us. Was with us. He had been absent for so long, but he came back. He too was a different man. I say was because I just watched him sacrifice his life for us. Honorable to the end. And a very brave man.

  Also with us is Zeke—a red-headed navy guy with classic movie hero looks and build. He is our guide. Boy, did he choose poorly. Zeke has spent the last half-hour trying to radio the surface. We had descended over a thousand feet through an ice shaft drilled for that purpose. Radio contact would have been pretty easy if moving ice over our heads hadn’t crushed the shaft and sheared off our communication line.

  At the end of the tunnel waits Azazel, an evil creature that is as old as the earth itself. Maybe older. He killed the professor. He did more than kill him: He crucified the old man and there was nothing we could do about it but run.

  So here we are. Our exit iced in. There are only two choices. Sit here and die, or go back down the long ice tunnel to Azazel’s domain and face off with a creature the world has not seen since before Noah’s flood.

  Death waits for us here.

  Death waits for us there.

  So there you have it.

  I do the impossible. I pull myself away from Andi and rise. My joints are stiff from the cold. We all wear the latest in cold weather gear but it can’t keep us warm forever.

  I cleared my throat. “This is where I usually say something encouraging. I got nuthin’.” I looked down the ice tunnel. “Best I can tell, this is the end of the line for us.” Those words barely made it past my lips. “But you know me. I was born without the ability to give up, so I gotta do somethin’. I
don’t want to die sitting on my butt.” I picked up my backpack. We still have our gear and our explosives. I’m going to go back to the chamber and let Azazel know my opinion of him.

  Andi rose with a grunt. “I’m going with you.”

  “I can do it by myself.” I couldn’t tear my gaze from her.

  She stepped close, leaned in and kissed me. My heart ground to a stop. I couldn’t breathe. I didn’t care. I returned the kiss. For a long moment, I was in heaven; and for that same long moment, I was all warm and toasty inside.

  She pulled away, and stroked my cheek. “I wasn’t asking permission, Tank. I was informing you.”

  That was my Andi. Smart. Able to see patterns in anything and everything, but she wasn’t too good on taking orders from anybody, especially me.

  “I’m going too,” Chad said. “I can’t let Sweet Cheeks—”

  I cut him a glance that was colder than the ice that threatened to swallow us. He liked to call Andi Sweet Cheeks and put the moves on her. He was, or had been, a lady’s man. He got no encouragement from Andi, and I sure wasn’t gonna encourage him. I hated the pet name Sweet Cheeks more than Andi did, and she despised it.

  Chad cleared his throat. “I mean, I can’t let Andi show me up. Bad for my ego.”

  Daniel rose from the ice and started for me.

  “What do you think you’re doing?” Brenda snapped.

  Daniel shrugged. “There’s only one way out, Mom, and Tank is gonna blow it up. I wanna see.”

  “No, you’re not. You’re gonna stay right here with me.”

  Daniel shuffled a few feet in her direction, but stopped before reaching her. “Mom, what difference does it make?”

  Brenda shook her head, but it lasted only a moment. There was no arguing with her boy. She pushed to her feet. “Fine. Just fine.”

  Zeke grabbed his backpack. “Okay, it’s a party then.”

  That was good to see. Zeke had a special job to do, and we all knew it.

  “Before we go make martyrs of ourselves, Cowboy,” Brenda said. “Maybe you could, you know, say a prayer or something.”

  Brenda had never asked for prayer before.

  Never.

  Ever.

  So I prayed.

  “I’m the worst mother ever,” Brenda said after my amen.

  You gotta understand something about our team. We each have powers we never asked for and go off on missions for a group we call the Watchers; missions nobody with half a brain would consider. Still, we go. We go because we know the world needs us to go, even though most of the time we don’t know why. Over time, we’ve learned a few things, but we don’t know what all the connections are. The one thing we do know, we’re fighting an evil that ain’t good for the world and the people who live in it.

  “I hate missions like this.” Chad stepped to my side and looked down the ice corridor to the faint light in the distance. There was an extra measure of fear in his voice. He was bold, brash, mouthy, arrogant, and full of himself. But he was also smart and tuned into everything around him. A late addition to our team—a replacement for the professor who had gone missing for quite a while—he had managed to tick off everyone in the team but Daniel. He also did more to pull us into a team than any one of us could have managed.

  I was pretty sure I knew what he meant, but I took the bait. “Missions like what?”

  “Oh, you know, the ones with monsters and ghouls and screaming and pain and blood and no hope of survival. Missions with no way out and no way of succeeding.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “We’ve had a few of those.”

  More quiet. We stood like a pile of stones. I should take the first few steps down the path. The others would follow me. I knew that, but my feet wouldn’t move.

  “I assume you got a plan, Cowboy.” Brenda’s normal cockiness was missing. None of us was feeling any too cocky.

  “Well?” Chad asked. “How ’bout it, big guy? What’s the play?”

  My original thought was simple. I was thinking of taking one of the backpacks full of explosives and putting all my football training to use. The answer seemed obvious: set the charges and run for Azazel’s throne room, bulldozing through anyone or anything that stood in my way. The bombs would go off and that would be the end of Azazel and his under-ice lair.

  Or would it?

  “Somethin’ ain’t right,” I said.

  “Duh. You think?” Chad relapsed into his forever annoying self. “Nothing about this is right. If that thing is what Andi says it is, a fallen angel, then there’s a very good chance our explosives aren’t going to kill him and his buddies. I mean, can angels die?”

  “Probably not,” I said. “The Bible never mentions dead angels, just angels in heaven and angels bound—”

  “Mom?”

  I didn’t like the sound of Daniel’s voice. It was drippin’ with concern. I looked behind me, expecting to see Brenda standing within arm’s reach of Daniel.

  A moment ago she was on her feet, now she sat on the ice, hunched over the ice floor and running her fingers over the uneven surface.

  “Mom, what’s wrong?” Daniel stepped to his adopted mother. She didn’t look up.

  That was unusual. Brenda loved that boy so much I think she would have carried him in a pocket if she could get him to fit.

  She cocked her head to one side, then snapped it back up.

  “She sees something,” Andi said.

  The only light came from the one flashlight, its beam reflecting off the scalloped ice. Time to burn a few more electrons, or photons, or both. I clicked on my light and directed the beam to Brenda’s face. She didn’t react, didn’t lift her head. She kept her gaze down on the ice. I shone my light at the ice in front of her.

  “I don’t see anything,” I said.

  “Not on the ice, Big Guy, in her head.” Andi moved to Brenda’s pack and retrieved a small sketch pad. Brenda always had a sketch pad. She’d sooner go out in public without her clothes than leave the house without something to draw on.

  Andi knelt at Brenda’s side and held the pad up for Brenda to see. “Here you go, girlfriend—”

  Brenda snatched it before Andi could finish her sentence. Brenda began patting her parka like a nicotine addict looking for a smoke.

  “Here.” Andi retrieved a pencil from Brenda’s back pack. Brenda snapped that up, too.

  “Is this how she normally works?” Zeke asked.

  “Not usually.” I moved a couple of steps closer to Brenda and directed my light on the pad, though I had no doubt she could have drawn her mental image in the pitch dark. “She gets pretty lost in the process, but this is over the top for even her.” I didn’t bother mentioning that I bear one of Brenda’s tattoos on my arm. That’s what started this whole thing.

  We gathered around our friend and kept our mouths shut.

  Whatever Brenda draws tends to come true. In a sense, she sees the future. She’s almost always right, and the few times events didn’t match up was because we had done something to change the future. Andi said it was like in that story by Dickens, A Christmas Carol. Scrooge is visited by three ghosts and shown his past, the present, and future. When he saw the future, he asked the ghost if what he saw was what could be or what had to be. He wanted to know if he could change his own destiny.

  Sometimes we change the future. I didn’t want to say it out loud, but I was praying she was drawing something that showed a better outcome than the last one she drew—the one that showed all of us except Daniel dead. I would really enjoy seeing somethin’ else.

  I leaned over Brenda and stared at her drawing. She had made short work of the image. After several moments of studying the lines she had penciled on the paper, I wished she had spent a little more time on the work. Normally we had no problem figuring out what she meant.

  Not this time.

  Chapter 2

  “Anyone want tell me what I’m lookin’ at?” I kept my light on the sketch pad.

  No one spoke. At least not
at first.

  “I got no clue.” Brenda was back with us. “I take it I zoned out a bit?”

  “A bit?” Chad said.

  Brenda studied the image she had drawn. “Don’t ask. I don’t know.”

  “It just looks like a bunch of parallel lines,” Chad said. “Well, they’re not all parallel, but each line has a companion.”

  I looked at Andi. “You got anythin’?”

  “Yeah, Pattern-Girl,” Brenda said. “I draw ‘em; you interpret them.”

  Enough light spilled over for me to see Andi shake her head. She hated it when Brenda called her Pattern-Girl. It sounded too much like the name of some comic book hero.

  Andi reached for the pad. “Let me take a closer look.”

  “Sure, but someone help me up, this ice is freezing my tochus.” Brenda handed the sketch pad to Andi and I helped our frozen artist to her feet.

  “I need more light, Tank.”

  “Glad to oblige.” I moved to Andi’s side and stood close. I didn’t need to be that close to shine my light on the paper, but…hey, it’s Andi.

  Andi held the drawing at arm’s length. She tilted her head from one side to another, then tilted the pad. More than once she had found patterns in things; patterns that helped us, even saved a life or two.

  “See anythin’?”

  “Hush, Tank. Let me think.”

  I hushed.

  A moment later she nodded. “Maybe. Possibly. Perhaps. Yes.” She raised her gaze. “Zeke, I want you to look at this.”

  Zeke was a navy man and clearly used to taking orders. He stepped in close enough to see Brenda’s sketch.

  “What do you think?” Andi tilted the pad in his direction.

  “Think? I don’t think anything. It’s a bunch of almost straight lines.”