The Keepers of the Library Read Free Page A

like it was building up, pressurizing his chest. He tried to stand up, but he couldn’t.
    “Are you okay?” she asked.
    “I …”
    The pressure overwhelmed him, and he struggled for air. There was a sound in his ears like a train passing very close. He’d been in some tight jams in his life, he’d been in firefights with men intent on killing him, but he’d never felt the kind of panic washing over him now.
    He was dimly aware of Meagan’s fingers on his carotid, and a faraway voice saying, “My God, I think you’re having a heart attack.”
    Through the salon window the sky was still blue but darkening. He didn’t want to stop looking at it but he lost sight when he slumped onto the carpet.
    I’m BTH, he thought. I’m not supposed to die today.

What February 9, 2027 Means To Me
    An Essay by Phillip Piper
    As of today there are 394 days left until the “Big Day,” the “Horizon,” the “Last Day of School” as a lot of kids are calling it. Everyone is wondering what will happen, and people are going different shades of mental. Are we going to be blasted out of existence by an asteroid the size of Rhode Island? Swallowed up by a black hole? Fried by gamma rays from the sun? Or is February 10 going to be just another day?
    I’m no different from everyone else who’s been thinking about mankind’s fate except for one thing. My father is Will Piper, the man who told the world about February 9, 2027
.
    This essay is a little hard for me to finish because my dad is really sick. He had a heart attack, and he’s in the hospital. I know he’s BTH, but that doesn’t mean he’s going to be all right. No one knows if he’s going towalk or talk again or be able to respond to us. He’s on a breathing machine in intensive care. They’re giving him a new medicine, and we’ll see if it helps. But I know if he was conscious, he’d be all over me to turn this essay in by the deadline, so that is what I’m going to do
.
    I wasn’t even born when all this went down in 2009 and 2010. I found out about it and the part my dad played when I was twelve, I think. He wrote a book which I admit I never read. I saw the movie
, Library of the Dead,
instead. It was a pretty cool movie, but it was weird watching actors play your father and your mother. My mother always said she wished she was as pretty as the actress who played her, but my father was never interested in speaking about it. He said the movie was silly and filled with inaccuracies and that he wished he’d never let it be made. The truth is, he’s never been someone who wanted to be in the public eye
.
    In 2009, my dad was an FBI agent in New York. He got involved in a case involving someone called the Doomsday Killer. A man in Nevada was sending postcards to people in New York City announcing the date they were going to die, and all nine of them wound up dying on the exact date. No one could figure out what was happening since there was nothing to link the victims, and all of the “murders” were completely different. My dad was the lead agent on the case and my mother—she wasn’t my mother at that point—was a junior agent. They were a team, and I guess you could say they still are
.
    Nothing was making any sense and they kept hitting dead ends. But my mom and dad were really smart and figured out that the postcards were coming from a computer geek named Mark Shackleton who worked at a top secret government lab at Area 51 in Nevada. Not only that but my dad actually knew the guy from when they were freshmen roommates in college. Back in 2009, everyone thought that Area 51 was some kind of secret weapons facility or maybe a place where UFOs were studied. It turns out the real truth was even more amazing
.
    Area 51, as everyone knows now, is the storage vault for the famous Library of Vectis. In the year 777, on the seventh day of the seventh month a baby who was the seventh son of a seventh son was born in England in a place called Vectis (it’s now