The Wrong Goodbye tc-2

by Chris F. Holm

  “What? No! Why the hell would you think–”

  “Why? Gee, Sam, I don’t know —maybe because when you came marching in here, you were pretty sure stealing Varela from you was my idea. Maybe because you blame me for the eternal predicament in which you find yourself. Maybe because despite all the havoc that you wreaked in life, and in the decades since you up and died, you still fancy yourself a Good Guy, and thought turning stoolie on me would be your fast-track into the Maker’s good graces. And here I thought you and I were getting on so well.”

  Dumas, a full head shorter than me when we crawled in here, dropped the torch he’d been carrying and grabbed me by my lapels, lifting me until I was a good foot off the ground and we were nose to nose. The room seemed to elongate as the torch lit it from below. Dumas’s face had elongated as well —to twice its normal size, it seemed —and when he spoke, I saw his mouth was now filled with row upon row of blackened, jagged teeth. “Tell me, Sammy,” he said, his striated, spiked tongue lashing at his front teeth with every word, and rasping out the sibilant in my name, “did you ring up one of your angel-friends before you sauntered over here, maybe let ’em know where you were going? Did you promise to deliver me if they’d make your missing-soul problem go bye-bye?”

  My feet cast wild shadows as they scrabbled for purchase, but it wasn’t any use. “I didn’t —I swear!”

  He slammed me into the rock wall behind me. My head hit so hard I thought I’d puke. Then I did puke, so, you know, yay for being right.

  “I think you’re lying to me, Sammy,” he said, and slammed me into the wall again, so hard my vision swam. Not that I minded much. In the best of times, Dumas wasn’t much to look at, and these weren’t the best of times. From what little I could see through the darkness and the circling cartoon birds, Dumas’s current visage put Psoglav to shame. “But it hardly matters, does it? Either you called in the cavalry, or you were so fucking incompetent in get ting here they tracked you. You’ll pay dearly either way, I assure you. But now, unfortunately, I have to delay the pleasure of flaying you alive, so I can deal with this fucking mess you’ve made. Don’t worry, though —I’ll be back before you know it.”

  A leathery rustle, the click of claws on stone, and Dumas was gone —gone so quickly that he was through the narrow aperture of Danny’s hovel and out of sight before I even hit the ground.

  Which I did.

  Hard.

  And then got whacked square in the back by a stone the size of a fucking cantaloupe falling from above.

  This week was not my favorite ever.

  The cantaloupe brought friends. Like half the fucking roof. Shit pelted me like this was a game of dodgeball and I was the last kid standing, only harder, meaner, and from above. OK, maybe it wasn’t so much like a game of dodgeball as it was a game of try-not-to-get-stoned-to-death. I’d never played that one before, but I hoped to God I’d catch on quick.

  Got up. To my knees, at least. Felt like an accomplishment, till I got knocked back down. Figured maybe up wasn’t the way to go. Figured instead I’d stay low.

  I protected my head as best I could with my bum arm. The tendons in my shoulder hurt like hell, holding it up like that, and the old bean still got clocked a couple times, but I deflected enough blows to stay conscious, so we’ll call that a win. Tried to snatch the torch with my good arm, but the steady rain of dust from above proved too much for it, extinguishing the flame.

  That was OK. I’d seen darkness aplenty those past two days. I was starting to get used to it.

  What was harder to get used to was the constant battery outside —like London in the fucking Blitz —and the deadly hail of rocks it set upon me.

  A stone dagger shook loose from the ceiling and sliced along my side, through fabric and skin both. The wound burned white hot, the only light in the room —and I could see it even when my eyes were closed. Hurt enough it made me lower my shieldarm for a moment. Then a quick shot to my temple reminded me why that was a bad idea.

  A crushing blow from nowhere set off fireworks in my kidney. Something inside me went all wet and loose. I’ll be pissing blood if I get out of here alive, I thought. The notion didn’t fill me with warm fuzzies.

  Now, I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking why didn’t I let nature take its course and say sayonara to this poor pathetic meat-suit? After all, just two days back I was rooting for the bug-monster to kill me, so why not? Why bother busting ass for the privilege of wandering smack into the middle of an angel/demon grudge match when I could take my chances with reseeding and hope I wind up possessing someone hale and hearty and way the fuck away from here? And believe me, I get where you’re coming from. But there’s a couple things I’m privy to that you’re not.

  Thing One: dying fucking hurts.

  Thing Two: dying really fucking hurts.

  How bad does dying hurt? So bad that even if shit’s hitting the fan full-on and you’ve got no other choice, you still stop and check the math to make sure it don’t add up another way. And yeah, OK, I’ll cop to trying to goad the bug-monster into killing me, but there were extenuating circumstances —namely the fact that I was (mistakenly, as it turned out) pretty sure he was going to kill me anyway. So I wasn’t so much rooting for death as I was for him to make it quick. Big difference.

  Besides, the key to a successful reseeding is luck, and lots of it. Luck’s the difference between winding up in a millionaire meat-suit with a private jet or an invalid in an adult diaper without enough spare juice to raise his head, let alone allow you to hop hosts.

  Now do I strike you as the lucky type?

  Yeah, that’s what I thought —which is why most times I’d just as soon take my chances in the here and now, regardless of the crappiness of said here and now.

  Sick of getting pummeled, I crawled toward where I figured the door was, but ran into Danny’s cot instead. I started to turn around, and then I got me the beginnings of an idea, so I stopped. My fingers traced the cot’s metal frame until I found the hinge. Then I folded it in half and climbed under. It was a tight fit, me hunched inside my makeshift Aframe tent, but it was better than being crushed to death. It was, at best, a temporary solution; the way this place was filling up, I had to get through that crawlspace and into the outer chamber fast if I wanted to keep this meat-suit breathing.

  I tried sliding the whole shebang forward, toward the door. Too damn many rocks in the way. I looped my hands around the frame and lifted, figuring I’d use it all umbrella-like and knee-walk over, but the uneven terrain required all fours to maneuver, which is to say I tipped over and wound up on my face.

  I won’t lie —tipping over hurt. Hurt enough it took a sec to realize I wasn’t getting pummeled anymore. I could hear shit falling, sure —louder every second, in fact, suggesting this room wasn’t going to be a room much longer —but it was no longer reaching me. Seemed the cot had gotten wedged against the wall, building me a little fort. But by the creaking of its frame, it wasn’t going to stay wedged for long.

  I clawed over rock and dirt and the still-hot cinders of the torch, mindful not of the scratches and burns I inflicted on myself in the process, only of the door, of freedom, of away. A few seconds of blind groping and I found it. The aperture was narrower now, and riddled with loose stone, but there it was.

  There it was.

  A sound like a thousand hoofbeats as the ceiling caved in, and the darkness around me imploded. I dove for the passage as the cot crunched beneath the sudden weight. Hot, stale, dusty breath chased after me as all the air in the heap of rock that used to be a room was expelled along with me. And then the ceiling of the crawlspace popped overhead like a crack spreading through glass, the sound zipping past me in the darkness and letting me know I wasn’t out of the woods yet.

  I scampered through the short passage and into the slightly larger outer chamber of Dumas’s socalled monkey house, only realizing I’d left the crawlspace behind when the echoes of its collapse reverberated off the walls arou
nd me. All I wanted was to collapse as well, bloodied and spent as my egress from Danny’s burrow had left me. But the muffled booms of the angels’ continued onslaught, and the constant patter of pebbles on the dirt floor, suggested that wouldn’t be prudent. Suggested that Danny’s hidey-hole was only the beginning. Suggested that if I didn’t get my ass out of these caves and into the open desert air, my ass was gonna get a whole lot flatter.

  So I kept moving.

  Finding the fissure that connected the monkey house to the main cavern wasn’t easy. Damn thing was only sideways-me wide, and in complete darkness, every nook and cranny in the cavern wall felt like pay dirt. I must’ve circumnavigated the chamber twice before I finally found it, and beat to hell as I was, squeezing through was no mean feat. But, halting though my progress was, it was progress, and eventually, I spilled from the crevice, tumbling to the dirt floor and squinting against the sudden light.

  Sweet Christ, was I sick of falling down.

  Turns out, though, much as it hurt, that fall was lucky as all get-out. Not like it was strategy or anything —I was just beat up enough I was having trouble supporting my own weight, is all —but still, it was lucky nonetheless. ’Cause when I fell, I wound up hunkered behind one of them rock formations that juts up from the floors of caves —stalagmite or stalactite, I can never keep them straight —and so I managed not to run afoul of the angry angel.

  I should’ve known that this light I stumbled into was too bright, too white —too pure to be cast by torches alone. Should’ve recognized it for what it was. Because I’d seen light like this before. Breathtaking. Painful. Glorious. Deadly.

  The light of God’s grace.

  The light that emanates from His most trusted servants —and from His deadliest assassins.

  Most times, were you to spy an angel topside, you’d never know it. They, I don’t know, seem to dim their natural light, and project a sort of vague suggestion of human form that your eyes slide right off of. I mean, you register the basics. Eyes? Check. Hair? Check. Two arms? Two legs? Yup and yup. But if I were to ask you what color those eyes were, or was the hair cut long or short, you’d have no earthly idea. Which makes sense, because an angel is a celestial being; there ain’t nothing earthly about ’em.

  This guy, though, he wasn’t bashful. Wasn’t subtle. Wasn’t hiding his true nature. Which, quite frankly, means me saying “guy” wasn’t quite accurate. But junk-having or not, tall and hulking as he was, “guy” and “he” seem closer than the alternative. Seem as close as this earthly, imperfect language of ours is gonna get.

  The angel stood naked in the middle of the hall, lit from within and shimmering like a mirage on the horizon. Like pavement on a hot day. Like a reactor on the verge of meltdown. He was eight feet tall if he was an inch, and he was so beautiful —and so goddamn terrifying —I didn’t realize until I heard his captive speak that he was not alone.

  The voice I heard was low and rumbling, and in a tongue I did not speak —a tongue I could not speak, full of sounds no human could ever hope to make. Though the canyon beyond the cave raged with sounds of battle —screams of anger and of agony, and countless explosions far less muffled than before —that voice cut through them all, and reached my ears as though from mere inches away.

  The voice was Psoglav’s.

  The horrid dog-beast was on his knees before the angel —a posture of necessity rather than penitence, given that the angel had in his hand one of Psoglav’s wrists, which he held twisted over Psoglav’s head, keeping him immobile and in no small amount of pain. Though if Psoglav’s acid tone was any indication, the hold still left him somewhere shy of accommodating.

  The angel struck out with his free hand —a chopping blow to Psoglav’s throat. An awful gargling sound, and Psoglav fell silent. The angel spoke then, its words in the same tongue as the demon it questioned, but where the latter’s words sounded horrid and perverse, the former’s were melodic and wellmodulated —serenity itself.

  Then, when Psoglav failed to answer, instead spitting at his captor’s feet, the angel ripped off Psoglav’s arm, which kind of put a damper on the Zen of the moment.

  Psoglav roared in agony. I’m talking shook-thefucking-walls roared. I thought my ears were going to bleed. Thought the place was going to come down around me. But the angel didn’t even flinch. Instead, he smacked Psoglav across the face with his own severed arm, spewing gore across the cavern wall, and asked his question again.

  Psoglav, now free of the angel’s wrist-hold on account of the wrist the angel was holding being no longer attached to him, picked himself up off the floor and launched himself at the angel —marshalling every ounce of strength and speed he had —his iron teeth bared for attack. If the angel had a face, I might’ve thought Psoglav aimed to bite it off.

  But he never got the chance.

  The fastest goddamn demon I’ve ever seen, and he didn’t even come close.

  Oh, sure, he started well enough, rocketing off the ground faster than my human eyes could follow. But a funny thing happened on the way to biting his Chosen brother. Two things, actually. The first was that Psoglav slowed to a halt in mid-air, his snapping maw scant inches from its intended target. The second was that the angel, I don’t know, expanded —growing bigger, taller, brighter —until he seemed less a person than a tiny, white-hot sun.

  It happened so fast, I nearly failed to react. Nearly. But when the corona created by the angel-sphere engulfed Psoglav and then collapsed back in on itself, I hit the floor, hiding behind my stalagamabob and burying my face in the dirt.

  Then the angel loosed God’s wrath, which set the very air around me ablaze, its blinding white light searing my retinas despite their being protected by closed lids and rock and dirt, while my ears rang with the most beautiful and terrible sound I’d ever heard. Once upon a time, a girl with cause to know told me it sounded like a chorus of children, painful in its beauty, and that strikes me as close to right as anything I could come up with. But even that can’t do it justice, because the whole of human experience has yet to invent the words to describe such agony, such ecstasy —and given the animal terror with which I trembled upon hearing it, I pray they never will.

  I pray they’ll never have to.

  I pray this infant war between heaven and hell dies in childbirth.

  Because the alternative is too frightening to imagine.

  I’ve no idea how long I spent, curled fetal behind that stone outcrop and weeping like a child, but when I came to my senses, I was alone. Aside from the charred black husk I assumed was once the demon Psoglav, the cave was empty —deserted —and most of the torches had burned out. All was still and quiet —not just in the cave, but in the canyon beyond as well. After the hue and cry of war, I felt as though I’d been struck deaf, but what few torches remained lit cracked and popped as they burned through the last of their accelerant, and as I found my feet and staggered along the cavern’s gentle upslope, my shambling gait echoed off the limestone walls.

  I walked without thought, without fear of discovery, with no intention but to be free of this subterranean hell and to feel fresh air upon my face. I suppose if I had the energy, I would have wondered who’d won, and whether I’d be greeted by a pissed-off Dumas or a legion of wrathful angels upon surfacing. I’d have wondered if it was day or night, or whether I’d been out an hour or twenty-four of them —the latter of which would leave me right screwed with regard to the bug-monster’s deadline.

  But I didn’t wonder any of those things. I was too tired. Too sore. Too bruised and bloodied to even care. And God help me for saying so, but as much as my every movement hurt —as much as I wondered where I’d find the strength to even take another step —the momentary absolution from caring bestowed upon me by my pain was bliss.

  For maybe the first time since I shuffled off the mortal coil, I felt free.

  26.

  You know the problem with self-delusion? It doesn’t matter if your escape-hatch from reality is drug or drin
k or —in my case —exhaustion born of repeated brutal ass-whuppings; whatever the method, the comedown is a bitch. It’s a lesson I’ve been privy to plenty in my life, but damn if this particular comedown didn’t blindside me all the same.

  Maybe if I’d stuck with the plan —get topside, feel the wind in my face —it could’ve been avoided. Though looking back at how it all shook out, sticking to the plan would’ve likely led to nothing more than two days spent wandering in the desert before Big ’n’ Buggy came to get me. But speculating now’s irrelevant. My plan went out the window the moment I saw the soul.

  It was the flicker I was aware of first: a pale graywhite playing across the right-hand limestone wall just up ahead, like moonlight reflected off of water. As I approached, I realized the light was coming from across the hall, spilling through the doorway left empty by dint of someone or something tearing the heavy iron door that once sat there clean off its hinges.

  The doorway, I realized, led to Psoglav’s little machine shop —the withered, pitch-black heart of Dumas’s whole operation. And that light was someone’s soul, left forgotten by the so-called good guys and the bad guys both.

  But not by me.

  I suppose on some level I must’ve known it was foolish of me to care. That even if I could lay the soul inside to rest, it was doomed to an eternity of torment —and Danny’s failed Gio-for-Varela bait-and-switch sure as hell taught me the point was moot, since my Deliverants wouldn’t accept it anyways. Still, I couldn’t just leave it there. A damned soul is still a soul; it deserved better than to be cast aside like so much garbage.

  Inside, the room was dark and quiet. The soul was still seated in the spindle of the massive lathe, and cast long shadows of the nightmare machinery on which it sat. The diesel engine that hung above the work surface was cold and quiet, and reeked of motor oil and overuse. Its scent did little to mask the pervasive stench of sulfur from the cistern in the corner, and from the copper pipes that snaked away from it, dripping rotten-egg water in plinks and plunks onto the lathe at random intervals.