Last of the Mighty by Phineas Foxx Read Free Book Online Page B

working on her just-get-to-the-point look and this was the best I’d seen. Stern, but not too harsh, with a little understanding tossed in.
    Uncle Will got it. “Personal research tells me the Flood of Noah began on the fifth day of the second month of two thousand eight hundred sixty-one B.C.”
    â€œOr somewhere around there?” Merryn was messing with him now.
    â€œYour garden variety flood researcher generally makes use of a standard fudge factor between sixty and ninety years. The great Dr. William Caffrey, however,” he threw his arms up like an Olympic gymnast who’d just landed a perfect dismount, “doesn’t do fudge factors.” Then he bowed to Merryn, me, and a vast imaginary audience that was apparently applauding him. “Thank you. Thank you. Mercí. Gracias. Arigato.”
    â€œAnd what about a generation?” Merryn grinned as Uncle Will continued to blow kisses to his adoring masses. “According to the Bible?”
    Generations. Merryn’s angle was beginning to make sense.
    Book of Enoch said the Watchers were to be imprisoned in the earth for seventy generations, a prison term that began at the time of the Flood.
    Here’s the logic: The archangel Michael was told to imprison Shemja-za and his Watcher buddies after they had “seen their loved ones die.” The forty-day flood was the final blow to the human wives and children of the Watchers. So if the Watchers witnessed these deaths, they had to be on earth when the flood began. That meant the Watchers were bound in the earth soon after the rains had stopped in two thousand eight hundred sixty-one B.C. Assuming Uncle Will’s flood date was correct.
    â€œSeventy years,” said Uncle Will, “is widely accepted as the length of a Biblical generation. Surprisingly, this time, I concur with the ignorami.”
    I did the math. Seventy times seventy was forty-nine hundred. Flood at twenty-eight sixty-one B.C., carry the two…minus the square root of pi…divide by April…
    If the great Dr. Caffrey’s numbers were correct, then the Watchers would be trapped in the earth for another forty-five years. Then how was it that Shemja-za was already free? I mean, he had to be on earth to sire Chool, right? And if Shemja was free, did that mean all two hundred Watchers were also roaming the earth, making more little Chools?
    Merryn gave me wide, urgent eyes. She typed Flood Date + Fudge Factor = 1980ish! into her laptop and tilted it toward me. I nodded, but wasn’t about to bring up Shemja-za, Chool, and the probability that the Watchers had already been let out of their prison. Merryn and I had made a pact not to tell her parents anything about that stuff. Not yet anyway. They’d wig. For sure. Especially since their daughter had just gotten the shiitake mushrooms beaten out of her by a demon-possessed kid.
    I scolded myself for not putting the pieces together. I’d been so consumed with Tucker and Chool that I hadn’t seen the big picture—all the Watchers were free.
    Aunt Laurel showed up two minutes later. Not once did she and Uncle Will leave the room so Merryn and I could talk about our newfound info.
    Not that I was complaining. It was nice hanging out with them. Uncle Will ranted about some unfair goings-on with “the blow-hards” at work. Aunt Laurel bought some snacks from the hospital vending machine, and we all rock-paper-scissored for the best treat. Merryn won. She always won. I came in last, got the granola bar. We told jokes. Made fun of Merryn’s slit-mouth speaking style. Talked about wrestling, college scholarships, and a bunch of other things that didn’t matter. But they did matter.
    Because for a second, it felt like I was part of a family again.

Chapter Fifteen
    The next morning, I got up before the sun to train before school. My workout du jour focused on speed and strength. It was a program designed by Masutatsu Oyama in the