STARTLED, ZEBOUL DROPPED me and turned to face the voice. I couldn’t believe what I saw.
My father.
Only he was 170 feet tall.
I heard the crunch of bones. Zeboul was making itself taller. Matching my father, inch for inch.
“YOU!” it screamed as it grew. “You are not allowed to return to this realm!”
“I know,” said my father. “But I did it anyway.”
“You will lose your immortal soul!”
“Only after you lose yours! You should never have come after my son!”
My father started running straight for Number 1, the same way the Legions of the Light went charging at the forces of darkness. He had to be moving 500 miles per hour. Number 1 was matching him, stride for stride. They were two blurs: atomic-powered freight trains racing toward a head-on collision.
“No, Dad!” I screamed. I couldn’t take losing him again. “Don’t!”
But he kept charging.
So did Number 1.
The two of them made impact.
The whole world shuddered and quaked and went blindingly white in a burst of blistering light.
I heard my father’s final triumphant words: “I love you, Daniel. Always.”
And then there was nothing but a cloud of sparkling dust drifting down in a collapsing silhouette of the enormous space the two giant warriors once occupied.
They had both imploded into oblivion.
The sparkling remnants of their earthly existence weren’t gold or violet. They were flawlessly clear, icy crystals of nothingness. A gusty wind swirled across the plains and they were both gone.
Forever.
The ultimate good and the ultimate evil had canceled each other out.
Because my father, the best man I have ever known, had come back. He had sacrificed his own afterlife of happiness to avenge what happened here all those years ago.
He came back to Kansas and took down his own killer.
He protected Terra Firma.
He saved me.
My father was, and always had been, my very best backup.