14. The Omega Epilogue

Situated on the eastern bank of the Lackawanna River in Olyphant, Pennsylvania, Gray Auction House and Gallery was an Art Deco relic of concrete, bronze, iron, and steel — a testimony to the former might of Scranton and its surrounding communities. Erected in the 1920s, it had been a theater of stage and screen that died with coal in the middle of the Twentieth Century. In 1984, my father bought it, gutted it, and transformed it into an auction house and art gallery. He left only vestiges of the theater’s past glory on the inside, but insisted that the exterior’s original façade be restored precisely. The only thing he added to the outside were the lights. Dad asserted that the building’s geometric brilliance should not be hidden just because the sun went down. If only he could see it now, left in the dark by the apocalypse, its creeping disrepair illuminated by my pickup truck’s headlamps and door mounted spotlights.

As expected for the evening, Betty and I saw no zombies around the building. We shone the spotlights on windows and doors to see if they had been breached, but it looked as though all the bronze portals and iron bars had done their job. Satisfied, we buckled up our tactical vests and prepped our sidearms and blades. Betty tucked her blue hair under her antique Doughboy helmet and said, “Okay, let’s go.”

We exited the truck and made our way to the auction house’s main entrance under the marquee. Green patina had overtaken the once impeccably polished bronze double doors. Rust covered the chunky chain I had wrapped around their handles. Still, the padlock opened easily and door’s mechanism turned without hesitation.

It had been several years since we were inside. Our flashlights illuminated an auction that hadn’t happened. Fine antiques and objets d’art from the esteemed Coroniti Estate lined the sales floor. What would have been a highly anticipated event attended by collectors and dealers from all over the region was now a cobweb covered graveyard of impracticality and who-gives-a-fuck.

Dead people’s shit…

We made our way upstairs and crept down the hallway. We saw no evidence of zombies. We heard nothing that made us think that monsters were lurking in the shadows. We smelled only dust. But we had learned from many a nightly salvage mission. Don’t trust your eyes. Don’t trust your ears. Don’t trust your nose. Trust your fear.

We entered my father’s office at the end of the corridor. Everything was as Dad had left it right before he went fishing that day:

• his fedora on the coat tree
• a crushed cigar in the ashtray
• crossed out catalogue notes on the whiteboard
• shards of a thrown whiskey tumbler on the floor
• torn papers all over the room

Betty kept watch in the doorway as I moved to my father’s desk. There it was, lit up by my flashlight like a performer on stage, crawling with green patina just like the outer doors: the bronze statue of Saint Jude gifted to Dad by my twin cousin.

“Got it?” Betty asked.

“Yes, ma’am,” I said as I snatched it up.

I blew off as much dust as I could and inspected the statue with my flashlight. It was barely visible, but there was a seam that ran the circumference of the round base. I put my flashlight under my left arm and twisted until the halves of the statue’s base gave way like an Oreo cookie. I shook the hollow saint over my father’s desk. Nothing fell out. I flipped it upside down, pointed my flashlight inside, and saw a rolled up piece of paper. I was able to use my fingers to extract the scroll.

I unfurled it.

“Well?” Betty asked from the doorway.

“There’s no key,” I explained, “just this note.”

I cleared my throat and read it aloud.

Dear William,

After charging me with the “sacred task” of keeping safe this statue and the key within it, I’m afraid my curiosity got the best of me. As such, I used my connections and a pile of favors to gain access to just the right books in just the right libraries to come to just the right conclusion as to what the key unlocks. Shame on you, nephew. Only Our Lord the Father knows the hour of the End. Therefore, no mortal man has the prerogative to usher in Armageddon, not even Christ’s Vicar in Rome, and especially not with instruments so ghastly and unholy as thermonuclear bombs.

So, I have irrevocably disposed of the key. You will not find it, because I have left nothing for anyone to find.

I pray that Our Lord will likewise dispose of your arrogance.

Your uncle and brother in Christ,

Robert Phineas Gray

“Holy shit!” Betty grumbled.

“Unexpected,” I said.

“But comforting?” she shrugged.

I crushed the note in my left hand. It was quailty paper. Thick. Sharp at the edges. It cut me on that flap of skin between my thumb and forefinger.

“This building is a mortuary,” I growled. “It’s a memorial to absurdity and morbid irony where hope came to die. It is my own Dragon Tree.”

Betty left the doorway and opened my father’s liquor cabinet. She removed the bottles of whiskey and gin and vodka. She poured their contents on every curtain, every piece of upholstery. She emptied the last bottle over my father’s desk. The stench of stale spirits rode the disturbed dust particles to my nose. I held back a sneeze and my eyes watered.

“Go ahead, Jack,” Betty nodded, “kill your dragon.”

I pulled my lighter from my pocket, lit the crumpled note, and tossed it onto Dad’s desk. The office went up quickly. The flames followed us back through the hallway, down the stairs, and onto the sales floor. Twenty minutes later, Betty and I were sitting a block away in my pickup truck, watching Gray Auction House and Gallery burn to the ground. When the marquee fell from the building, I turned the truck’s ignition.

“Let’s go home,” I said.