Armageddon - By James Patterson Page 0,24
total fulfillment.
All was now as it was always meant to be.
Chapter 33
EVERYBODY WAS WIDE awake when I parked the ATV in front of Xanthos’s barn.
Our video monitors had just exploded with images of violent, catastrophic destruction.
Buildings toppled over. Fires raged. People rioted and looted and turned on one another.
If hanging out with Mel that day we went horseback riding was, according to my spiritual advisor, “experiencing humanity at its best,” then what we were currently witnessing in high-definition surround sound was the flip side of that same coin: humanity at its absolute worst.
“He’s hitting New York, London, Moscow, and Beijing!” exclaimed Agent Judge. “All at the same time.”
Grainy images of mayhem from the four far-flung locations flickered across the screens. My eyes darted back and forth to verify what I was seeing. I could hear his voice cooing “Surrender to me!” in English and Russian and Chinese.
And then Number 2, cloaked in a black cape and seated in the saddles of four horses of different colors, rode triumphantly into the four live news feeds.
“This can’t be happening,” said Mel. “He can’t really be in all four places at the same time. This has to be trick photography, or… or he’s totally defying the laws of physics.”
“Yes,” said her father. “This guy just loves breaking every law he can.”
Number 2 also appeared to love quantum mechanics. Decades earlier, Earth scientists had discovered that it was, indeed, possible for subatomic particles, like electrons, to be in two different locations at the exact same instant. My guess was that Number 2 had figured out how to do the same thing on a macro scale.
And I had a hunch that maybe I could pull it off, too. I’d just have to concentrate on rearranging my own matter in four different directions.
Maybe. Theoretically.
And Mel definitely could not come with me this time.
Heck, I didn’t even know if I could come with me. It’d be a brand-new, not to mention extraordinarily taxing, power.
“Don’t worry,” I said to Mel and Agent Judge. “I’ll be back in a flash.”
“Where are you going?” Mel asked. “Moscow? London?”
Her dad jumped in: “Beijing? New York?”
I just smiled at them both and said, “Yes.”
Chapter 34
BEING IN FOUR places at the same time would be absolutely incredible if you could simultaneously watch a movie, catch a concert, eat a pizza, and, I don’t know, scale a rock wall. It’d even be great if all you could do was go to the multiplex and watch four different movies at once.
But heading out to do battle with an archfiend in four different geographical hot spots?
Not so much.
Besides being a space-time aberration, it was a total multitasking nightmare. I was afraid my brain circuits would either fry or freeze up. Visually, it reminded me of that time I had turned myself into a housefly. But this time I wasn’t just seeing kaleidoscopic images of the same thing repeatedly stacked up on top of itself.
Having achieved four-way-split teleportation, I was now seeing four very different real-time scenes simultaneously.
In London I could see Number 2, dressed in a tattered black cloak like the grim reaper. He was carrying a crossbow and charging across the far horizon on the back of a white steed (I could tell the horse wasn’t Xanthos because my spiritual advisor’s eyeballs don’t glow like red LEDs).
Number 2 must’ve just looted the fallen ruins of the Tower of London, because on his hooded head I could see the glistening diamonds, pearls, sapphires, emeralds, and rubies he had obviously stolen from the Tower’s Crown Jewels collection.
“I have crowned myself your conqueror!” he cried out to the masses scurrying through London’s narrow lanes. “Serve me and live. Refuse me and die!”
Across the ocean, on the island of Manhattan, I couldn’t catch up with Number 2 as he rode a fiery red horse up Broadway and, swinging a sword over his head, helped his scorpion-tailed henchbeasts cattle-prod a herd of terror-stricken New Yorkers up the street to the nearest subway entrances.
“You are the spoils of war!” he shouted. “Serve me!”
He was also on horseback in China, where the galloping stallion was black. For some bizarre-o reason, in Beijing Number 2 carried a pair of market scales instead of a weapon and cried out, “Slaves will find food in their bellies; resistors will starve!” Hungry multitudes raced after Number 2’s minions and followed them down into the Beijing subway stations.
Moscow was even worse. For just an instant, I saw Number 2 as he trotted through what was left of