Sin Chaser: Terror from the Heavens (AFTER: A POST-APOCALYPTIC SURVIVOR SERIES)

by S. O. Green

  Idly, Ness wondered if there were any of those folks left. Had any of them survived the Reaping? Or had they clung to their falling kingdoms, because they couldn’t see a place for themselves in the world after?

  The car was off the station. Everyone else had set up shop in the old buildings or on the platform proper. No one lingered at Archangel’s back end. Ness lifted her fist to knock.

  A powerful arm curled around her throat. Another trapped her head. She tried to fight the choke, adrenaline surging. She smelled the ash, the desolation, of a Reaper.

  A Reaper she knew.

  “How are you here?” she snarled, as her vision started to blacken.

  “Have you not realized yet, Vanessa?” he asked. “You cannot escape from me. No matter where you run, no matter where you hide, you still belong to me.”

  “I wasn’t running,” she growled. “I was chasing.”

  Atop the train cars and the platform roof, she saw the nephilim still on guard, standing at rigid attention. Watching. Uncaring.

  Her existence dimmed to a singularity of straining muscle and clenched teeth and fingernails piercing skin and growing darkness.

  And then, just darkness.

  Chapter Nine

  What You Keep Alive

  “God’s love. Is that what we feel, when we sing to high Heaven above? Do we feel him in the warmth of a loving heart? And what about when we’re sitting at the graveside, weeping into our hands? What about when we watch the life we knew burn down around us? Can we feel his love then? We are all in God’s heart, but his is a heart of thorns. And that, Faithful, is the true essence of the Struggle.”

  One hand switched off the radio. The other pulled the bag off her head. Ness blinked in the greasy light of a concrete garage. Fluorescent paint and junk totems, tools and tires. The only car was a battered, old Ford, the one she assumed she’d been kidnapped in. Not much in the way of luxury, but it got the job done. His taste hadn’t much changed.

  This place had belonged to a road crew once. Judging by the bloodstains, it didn’t belong to them anymore.

  The Reaper settled on a metal folding chair. He’d lashed her to a battered, old office chair with thick, plastic cable ties. He sighed. Dark hair and dark eyes, just like she remembered from a lifetime ago. About Faith’s lifetime, come to think of it. Only she recalled something softer than this. All the gentleness had vanished, leaving only hard angles and a promise of violence. The red flicker in his eyes and the sharpness of his teeth removed all doubt.

  “Hello, Vanessa.”

  “Fuck you!”

  Her voice sounded thick in her own ears, hoarse from where he’d half-strangled her. He took a breath, like he was trying to steady himself. Then he grabbed her around the throat so tight she choked.

  “I have been patient. I have given you the opportunity to come back to me. Time and again you have spurned me. My patience has now run out.”

  “Boohoo,” she spat, as his hand slipped from her neck. “Do Reapers get lonely too?”

  “We are bound by a promise, Vanessa. Nothing you do can absolve you of that.” He held up a steel band, the double of the one around his own finger. “I am still your husband.”

  “No,” she growled, “you aren’t. You’re a fucking demon wearing the face of someone I loved more than anything else in this piece of shit world. He died and then you crawled inside him like a parasite, but you’re not him. You’re nothing like him.”

  “I remember what he remembers. The love you shared. The way your skin felt on his. The shape of your body in his hands. The taste of you on his tongue.”

  “Shut up!” Rage boiled up inside her, chasing away the cold fear stirring below her guts. “You think I give a fuck about your stolen memories? You’re just a Reaper. Do you know how many of you I’ve killed?”

  “Of course. I’ve been watching you, Vanessa. Following you. You know this. And it has all been leading to this moment.”

  He grabbed her left wrist, pinned it to the arm of her chair. He lifted the ring she’d worn once, years ago, and reached for her third finger. She curled it tight into a fist—so often her response—but he pried it free. She held it from him with every ounce of strength, hissing and spitting through clenched teeth.

  The snap when it broke shot up her arm and hit her in the chest. She bit down on a scream.

  He tried to force the ring back into its place, but her finger had already swollen too thick with bruising to accommodate it. Through the pain, Ness started laughing.

  He seized her under her chin. She felt the bite of cold steel against her carotid, just under her left ear.

  “There is another option,” he told her. “Perhaps I should simply follow the course of expediency, empty you as a vessel for another like myself. A Reaper might choose to honor the promise that you have willfully forgotten.”

  All of Ness’s bitter laugher, all of her anger, curdled with the sudden image of this thing wearing her husband’s face sucking her soul out through her mouth, stripping her of everything that made her who she was, leaving her a sack of meat ready to be joyridden like a stolen truck by something that couldn’t tell right from wrong, or love from obsession.

  “You really think that’d work?” she asked, eyes narrowing dangerously. “You really think it’d give a fuck about you?”

  He stepped away, stuck the knife point-down in a workbench with half an engine resting on it. He tapped the tools hanging from the racks—hooks and picks, wire strippers, heat guns and torque wrenches.

  “I am sure I could exact some…influence over it, given time.”

  “Going to torture my dead body into loving you? Sounds like a plan.”

  “You have left me little choice, Vanessa.”

  Ness rolled her eyes. “I don’t have time for this. I made a promise.”

  “To the girl?” He stepped closer, crimson eyes mocking. “Are you going to save her from her brothers and sisters?”

  “Or die trying.”

  “I will not allow it.”

  “You don’t get to decide that anymore!”

  He lunged for her, and Ness couldn’t tell if he was finally coming for her soul. She wondered what it would taste like as he dragged it over her tongue. Would she even be able to taste? Or would she already be dead?

  She smashed her forehead into his chin and lurched back. Her chair toppled and the ties on her ankles burst from the impact. She kicked up as he tried to hold her down and caught him in the throat, sending him slamming back into the workbench. She rolled out of the chair, wrists still bound to it, and planted her feet. He grabbed the knife, but she rammed into him, pinning him to the wall with the wheels of her seat.

  He slashed at her, expression livid, eyes murderous. She twisted and he hacked the cable tie off her left wrist. Pain lanced up her arm and blood streamed from where he’d cut the edge of her hand. She grabbed a panel beater off the wall and smashed him in the temple with it. Blood sprayed the concrete.

  “You’re not him!” she snarled, striking again, again, again. “You’re a Reaper! You’re just a fucking Reaper!”

  And the only good Reaper…

  His hand snapped out, seizing her by a fistful of hair. He slammed her against the Ford’s driver door. Her head punched the glass out of the window. Blood ran out of her hairline, into her eyes. Literally seeing red. He swung a wrench at her and she blocked on reflex. She felt her radius shatter and the pain washed over, threatening to drag her under.

  She cracked an uppercut off his jaw. He rocked back, gave her enough space to snatch a screwdriver from the board of tools. She stabbed for his heart. He caught her wrists, even as she kicked his feet out from under him. They went to the floor, her on top.

  They fought, deadlocked, the point of the screwdriver poised over his heart. He glared up at her, but the mess she’d made of his face reveal
ed only the Reaper that lurked behind it. The eyes, the teeth, the fury—none of it belonged to anything human.

  “You’re not him,” she choked out, and drove the metal spike down between his ribs.

  He kept struggling, kept trying to push her off, but she held the screwdriver in place. She twisted it, tearing him inside, until the blood soaked through his shirt and between her fingers and it would never wash off.

  The fight went out of him all at once. The light and the rage died in his eyes. Drops of water spattered on his cheeks, cutting clear trails through the blood. Ness sat back and scrubbed her eyes with her sleeve.

  “Fuck…”

  She felt so tired, she could have lay down right there and slept forever, but she forced her head up. She’d made a promise.

  She spotted the stack of jerry cans in the corner of the garage, the pile of oily rags, the heat gun on the wall.

  She hadn’t owed the Reaper shit.

  But she owed the man he’d once been a cremation. And a final farewell.

  Chapter Ten

  My Sacrifice

  Cut, bruised, broken and reeking of smoke, all of which she could deal with later, Ness floored the old Ford all the way to Archangel. The plume of dust she left behind was nothing compared to what she saw on the horizon.

  The beasts had to be at least a mile wide, both of them, one a slithering, aqueous glob with a surplus of eyes and grasping tentacles, the other a lumbering quadruped made of nothing but claws and tooth-filled mouths, churning the dirt into its many throats with each step. They were moving slow but with unerring purpose, straight towards the train station and all the people that called that string of cars home.

  And Faith. They were heading towards Faith.

  The Big Seven never appeared so close together, but these two were on a collision course.

  The news got worse when she tuned in to the Sin Chaser frequency. Frantic reports of Sins rising from the ocean or crawling down from the mountains, changing their course like nothing anyone had ever seen before, and their bearings were all taking them to the same place, like a noose tightening.

  They were all heading to Archangel.

  She hammered the wheel and begged the piece of junk she was driving to go faster. If she didn’t get there soon, she’d miss the train, assuming the people of Archangel hadn’t already realized they were fucked. No matter which track they took, no matter which direction they went, eventually they’d run too close to one of the Seven and they’d crash and burn. Maybe they’d murder each other on the tracks in the grip of wrath, or they’d rip chunks off themselves trying to fill bellies turned empty by the most overpowering gluttony. One way or another, the sin would kill them all.

  Somehow, she arrived with time to spare. The people of Archangel were assembled on the platform. If they’d noticed the Seven bearing down on them, they weren’t showing it. Instead, nephilim and humans faced off, something small caught between them.

  “Oh shit…”

  She fought her way up and pushed through the crowd. Worst fears confirmed. Faith was there, at the heart of it all.

  “They’re almost here,” a woman told Elim. She had one side of her head buzzed to skin, the other combed over in a turquoise flick. She wore a leather jacket and a Circle around her neck, and Ness thought maybe if more Faithful looked like her she’d have considered religion sooner. “Two of them, with more on the way.”

  “Yes,” Elim said grimly. “It would appear so.”

  “But this is what you’ve been training for, right?” the woman asked. “What you’ve been gathering weapons and armor for? What you’ve been building your forces for? That’s why you came here. To protect us. Forty years, nothing, then you just show up and take control? It had to be for a reason.”

  “It is not our decision.”

  “We don’t stand a chance against those things! People died so you could be born. Good people. Your father sacrificed those women to bring you into this world to fight the Sins. Right?”

  Elim didn’t respond to that. He was holding a crying Faith by her wrist so tight he’d bruised her. He snatched the Circle from around her neck and scrutinized it. It glittered in the light, all different colors. It hadn’t done that when Chip had worn it.

  “This is the beacon.” He shook her, and most of the Faithful looked away in disgust. “You have allowed yourself to become tainted. You have become an agent of our enemies. I am disappointed in you, sister.”

  “Leave the kid alone!” Ness yelled, elbowing her way to the front row.

  “You came back,” Faith breathed, eyes lighting up, before the pain came back.

  “Put her down. Now!”

  “She allies with our hated foes and brings death to our doorsteps, and you would have me show mercy?” Elim boomed.

  “Isn’t that what angels do?”

  “This…totem,” he spat, “is a lure, bringing the Sins to our Father. Lailah has put her touch upon it. This was her intention all along. To use the Father’s own child to destroy us. She knew we would accept her among us, and that we would only realize once it was already too late.”

  “But you’re immune, right? Just like she is.”

  “Immune to the sin. But not to the destruction they will rain down once they reach here. You have seen these creatures only as forces of nature, inexorably moving across the surface of the Earth, but they will reveal their true purpose in battle against us and against the Father. There is only one course of action remaining.”

  In unison, the nephilim unfurled their wings. They burst from their backs in blooms of white light, feathers pristine, with wingspans that could have encompassed half a dozen people. Everyone stared, speechless. Even Ness.

  For a moment, hope bloomed in her chest. They could take the icon, corrupted by Lailah, away and save every person in Archangel. Just as they had always been, every life on that platform was in their hands.

  Elim dropped the Circle on the ground at Faith’s feet.

  “The Father has spoken,” he told them. “The time is not right.”

  He soared skywards. The other nephilim followed.

  In their wake, the golden carriage began to glow, dull red at first, rising to a blinding white. The heat and light beat the humans back like the sting of a roaring fire. Then the box erupted, and something radiant and inhuman, towering and impossible, rose to its feet in the ruins. It was vaguely humanoid, but sexless and golden-skinned. Ness didn’t even come up to its knees.

  It didn’t look down at the ants around its feet. Instead, it loosed immense, golden wings from its back and rose into the atmosphere, following its fleeing children.

  Leaving the humans to die.

  What were a few more sacrifices for the glory of the Father?

  In the silence that followed, the only sound was the seismic rumble of the approaching Sins. And Ness’s angry breathing.

  “You piece of shit,” she muttered, and then the rage took over. “You absolute son of a bitch! Get the fuck back down here! Don’t you run away from this! I’ll find you, asshole! You hear me!”

  She grabbed an empty bottle in her good hand and hurled it into the air. It fell well short of the diminishing flock that was their last hope. She stared after them—the Father, Elim, all of them—seething, then realized that everyone was staring at her.

  She saw the dejection in their eyes. The defeat. They were all dead and they knew it. Worse, they knew their savior—the angel in their midst, whom they’d worshipped as a god—had turned his back on them.

  Well, fuck him too.

  “Stay here,” Ness ordered, and snatched the icon from Faith’s feet.

  She jumped from the platform, the eyes of the Faithful following her, and ran for the truck they’d driven all the way from Sanctuary. She dragged herself behind the wheel and fumbled the key into the ignition, just as Faith jumpe
d in beside her.

  “Kid, get out!”

  “We don’t have time for this, Ness. Please, just go.”

  She wanted to put her foot down, wanted to refuse, but there were too many lives at stake. She threw the truck into reverse and wheeled around in the lot outside the station, steering one-handed, scattering dirt from a dozen tire tracks left by others peeling out at the first sign of danger.

  “I’m immune, remember?” Faith was saying, as they bounced back onto the highway. “If the worst happens, I can keep driving. I can try to lead them away.”

  “I don’t know what’s going to happen if we get too close. I might claw my own eyes out and eat them.”

  “I won’t let that happen.”

  Ness flicked a look at Faith in the rear-view, saw the steel in her eyes.

  “Why’d you do it, kid? Why’d you agree to work for Lailah?”

  “She said she’d kill you if I didn’t,” Faith whispered.

  “So much for always honoring her agreements. Bitch.”

  “I didn’t know, Ness. She just wanted me to go to Archangel. That was all she said. I figured it wasn’t a problem, since we were going there anyway. If I’d known, I wouldn’t have-“

  “I know, kid. I know.”

  Faith’s eyes fell to the corrupted Circle Ness had tossed in the ashtray. “I knew it belonged to your friend. I begged her to give it back to me. I should have figured it out, the way she smiled…”

  “Don’t beat yourself up. She’s a tricky fucking Reaper, no matter what she says.”

  Ness flicked a look in the rear-view. The Sins had changed bearing quicker than she’d ever seen before. It was hard to tell which end was their front, but she was pretty sure they were both pointing in their direction. Moving away from Archangel.

  “Don’t know if I’ll have the chance to say this later, so listen up. There are people in this world who’re only in it to get what they think they deserve. People like Elim and his fucking murder-daddy, people like Lailah and her enclave. Doesn’t matter if you’re human or a Reaper or an angel, being a piece of shit is universal. It’s what you do that decides if you’re one of the good ones. Sin Chasers, we’re not angels and we don’t have even half the shit nephilim do, but we get by. And the only way we do that is by helping each other, working together, doing right every chance we get. You could be one of the good ones, kid. Better than your daddy, because he made one big mistake when he looked at this world. He assumed it was all about him.”