The Chosen

by John G. Hartness

  “I said, no. This is on the list of things that I can’t talk to you about, Dad. You’re just going to have to take that at face value. I know what Mom is saying, and neither of us can tell you about it. It has to do with her Choice, and yours, and we can’t say anything that might sway your decision. It’s one of the few rules the Father enforces directly. This is your free will, Dad. Whatever your Choice is, it’s yours. And nobody, not me, not Mom, not Emily, Lucky, Michael, or the man in the moon can stick our nose in. That’s just the deal. So please, don’t push. Just come with me into the den and give Mom a second or two to catch her breath. Then, we can go down to Lafayette Square, pick up Myra and the assclown angel, and we’ll blow this pop stand.” He handed me my drink, walked me into the den, and sat me down on the couch next to Emily.

  She looked up at Cain. “Are they gonna be okay in the park all alone? I mean, I’ve heard New Orleans has a crime problem, and Mom hasn’t been in cities very much.” She was obviously worried and wanted to get going as fast as possible.

  Cain gave her a lopsided grin and patted her on the top of the head. “They’ll be fine, kiddo. Remember who Michael was before he came down here slumming.” He ducked into his bedroom to grab a bag.

  “Oh, yeah, that whole flaming sword thing’s real, isn’t it?” She relaxed a little when she realized that, despite his looking like a skinnier James Marsters, he could handle himself. “But will he take care of my mom?” A little worry crept back into her eyes.

  Cain came out of his bedroom wearing a black leather jacket and with a duffle over one shoulder. He tucked a pistol in the back waistband of his pants. “He’s an angel, punkin. A real one. He could no more let an innocent mortal be hurt in his presence than I could let a snotty kid brother upstage me. It’s just not in our natures.” He shot me a sidelong smirk, and I shook my head. I’d let him poke at the scab now and then; it might heal a little messy, but chicks dig scars. I stood up and held out my hand.

  “What do you want, Pop?”

  “Something tells me that’s not the only equalizer you’ve got floating around this joint, and if you think you need the firepower, you’d better hook me up, too. I prefer something in a 9mm, Italian if you have it.” He went over to the upright piano, opened the bench, and tossed me a Beretta in a leather holster. I checked the action, chambered a round, and slid it into the small of my back.

  “You set for ammo?” I asked.

  “If he runs short, I’ve got us covered,” Eve said from the kitchen doorway. “I prefer the Glock, but I don’t have the wrist strength that you boys seem to have in abundance. Here, little bit, you should just tote my duffel. If we get into anything ugly, you’ll want what’s inside.” That confirmed my earlier suspicion about the sawed-off shotgun, but Emily shook her head.

  “I’m good. I don’t like guns, but I’ve got a pea-shooter in my boot as a last resort.” She then produced a throwing knife from somewhere I never saw and tossed it underhand across the room into a photo hanging on the far wall. The little knife quivered right between the eyes of the woman in the picture, and Eve looked impressed.

  “That doesn’t exactly improve the composition of the photo, Baby Sister.” Cain crossed the room to yank the knife out of the wall and return it to Emily.

  “Yeah, but sometimes you just have to make a point.” Somehow, I always found myself surrounded by women with a point to make. And all too often, I was on the receiving end of those points.

  I looked around at my little family assault team, then nodded at Cain. “Let’s roll, son.”

  “Lead the way. I’ll lock up.” I didn’t bother mentioning that I thought it was awfully optimistic to be locking doors.

  After all, the only reason you lock a door after you leave is because you expect to return to whatever you’re leaving behind. Until very recently, my family wasn’t exactly known for returning to things—or people—we’ve left behind.

  Chapter 25

  I didn’t know what I expected to find in Lafayette Square in the middle of the night, but Myra dancing in a drum circle wasn’t anywhere on the list. Michael beating a tambourine and singing folk songs was even further from what I thought we’d find. However, that was exactly what we encountered when we arrived.

  Michael sat at the base of the statue of Henry Clay, almost keeping time with a kid playing a battered Martin acoustic while a half-dozen or so dreadlocked white kids beat on djembes around a portable fire pit. Myra danced with two or three hippie chicks who looked like they hadn’t shaved legs or armpits since well before Katrina.

  As we walked up to the love-in, I looked on incredulously as Michael and a couple of college-aged kids sang, “A time to dance, a time to mourn, a time to cast away stones, a time to gather stones together…” Michael set the tambourine down beside Henry Clay’s bronze feet and came over to us, his face positively glowing. I could have sworn I saw an outline of wings around the angel made flesh.

  “Adam, isn’t it beautiful? They remember the old Books. They haven’t lost faith; these children of yours remember.”

  It was all I could do not to laugh in the exuberant angel’s face. “Michael, lemme ask you something. In all your time up there among the heavenly host, have you ever heard of a guy named Pete Seeger?” I tried to keep a straight face, but it was tough.

  “No, who is this Pete Seeger? Is he a minister? A man of God?”

  “Kinda. He’s a folk singer. He took the words from Ecclesiastes and set them to music. He made it into a protest song against a war a few decades ago.” As much as I disliked the archangel and all his brethren for meddling with my family for thousands of years, I hated to watch people’s illusions shatter, and that was what happened to Michael as he realized that those smelly kids weren’t holy after all, just a little dirty.

  He walked over to a park bench, looking as though he didn’t have a friend in the world. Since I had never considered myself a friend of his in the first place, I followed along more out of a morbid curiosity than out of any real concern for his feelings. I mean, let’s face it; I really didn’t like Michael on his best days, and this hadn’t been my most stellar week. He put his elbows on his knees and buried his face in his hands. If I didn’t know them to be cold emotionless bastards, I’d have thought the archangel was about to break down and cry.

  Myra came over, a little breathless from her dancing, and sat next to Michael on the bench. She looked from the shaken angel to me, and her tone was less than friendly. “What did you say to him?”

  “I just told him that Pete Seeger used the book of Ecclesiastes as a basis for a protest song from the Vietnam War. He got all weepy when he realized that the kids weren’t quoting scripture.” I noted with no small hint of irony that the song had changed. In the background, I heard a girl singing in a lovely soprano, “Imagine there’s no heaven. It’s easy if you try…”

  “Oh, Adam, what did you have to do that for?” Myra gave me a glance that was more pitying than accusatory. It read something like “You hapless bastard, why did you have to stick your foot in it up to the nuts this time?”

  “Well, aside from the fact that it’s the truth, I don’t really know!” I felt a little defensive. It wasn’t as if I wanted to turn the Sword of Heaven into a blubbering pile of goo in the middle of a public park in the wee hours of a Louisiana morning. But for the record, if I’d known that a little folk music was all it took, I’d have trotted out some old Buffy St. Marie records a long time ago.

  “The truth doesn’t matter; he was happy. And we need him. If it makes him feel a little better to think that people are still reading the Bible, then let him think that.” She patted Michael on the back for a minute before she got up and went over to join Emily, who was singing harmony with the soprano.

  I sat there for a minute, trying to figure out what to say to a distraught Seraphim whose faith in humanity had been restored for one brief, shining moment before I reached in and ripped it away. “Uh, Michael?”

  “Go away, Adam.”
He didn’t look up; he didn’t even take his hands away from his face.

  “I can’t. For one thing, Myra will kick my ass. For another thing, we kinda still need you. And we need you with your head in the game. Because, well, because you’re the only one who has any idea where we’re supposed to go next. We got Eve. We got some traveling money, and we’re all here, ready to roll. Except we need you to tell us exactly where to roll to.” Maybe not comforting, but at least it was all honest.

  “I don’t care. If the people have no place for the Book, or God, or angels, why should I even bother trying to help them? Why waste my time?”

  Wow. He had gone from zero to suicidal in point-four seconds. The situation might require some tough love. Or it would get me skewered on the flaming sword of heavenly retribution. One of those.

  “What else are you going to do with your time? Tune your harp?” I went for snide, hoping if I behaved the way he expected me to, he’d cut out the sniveling and behave the way I expected him to behave. Not that I really liked the way he usually behaved, but at least over the past few days I’d grown accustomed to that Michael. That Michael was an insufferable tight-ass with an Archangel complex—although I suppose it’s not really a complex if you really are part of the heavenly host—but at least he wasn’t a whiny little bitch.

  “You’re immortal, Michael. Immortality is something I know a little about. If there’s one thing the past seventy-five-odd eons has taught me, it’s that there’s nothing less precious to an immortal than time. It’s practically impossible to waste your time because you have so much of it that it’s meaningless. It’s nothing for one of us to put tape measures on the ocean floor and check it every hundred years to see if the earth is expanding”—Yes, I did. Yes, it is.—“It’s less than nothing for one of us to spend eighty-three years counting every grain of sand on a mile of sea shore.”

  Again, yes, I did, but no, I don’t remember the exact number. I also admit to having lost count a lot and become quite distracted by some of the scenery at the beach. It was Italy. It was several hundred years ago, and while the Italian women of that era may not have been as enhanced as young women are today, they were every bit as lovely, and every bit as unselfconscious at the beach. And that is all I shall share on that topic.

  “So, how can you waste your time? You’ve got nothing but time. Get your head out of your angelic ass, and let’s get moving.” I thought that was pretty good as far as motivational speeches went. For me, it ranked right up there, but Michael didn’t move. Okay, he raised one hand to flip me off, but he left his head bowed and never even looked over at me. I got up and headed over to Emily, figuring that she would be less likely to chew me out for getting us in this spot than her mother, and more likely to help get us out of it than Eve or Cain.

  “Em, would you go talk to Michael? He’s sulking.”

  “Why is he sulking? What did you do?” She looked so cute when she crossed her arms like that and glared at me. It was less cute when I realized that Eve and Myra were doing it, too. Cain, for his part, was sitting on the base of the statue picking out the opening notes to an Avett Brothers tune called Murder in the City. The song was written from one brother to another, telling him not to take vengeance if he gets killed. Cain definitely had the irony thing down cold.

  “I might have given him the impression that the youths, and probably most of humanity in general, were indifferent to religion.” I went for a sheepish grin at the end, but probably only looked queasy.

  She sighed the sigh of the long-suffering woman, which oddly enough has been quickly mastered by every female I’ve ever spent more than a couple of days with, and went over to talk with Michael. She sat on the bench next to him as Myra came over to stand with me.

  “I knew you wouldn’t be able to fix your mess, and I knew you’d come to Em for help. Everybody does eventually,” Myra said, putting a hand on my shoulder.

  “Then, why didn’t you just send her over to talk to him in the first place? Hell, Myra, I don’t even like the guy. Remember, I’m the one who decked him.”

  “Yeah, but you needed a little reminder that your words carry weight. Even with angels, Adam. Everybody pays more attention to what you say than you think. And probably more than we should. But we do it anyway.”

  “And why is that?”

  “Call it respect for our elders, if you like.”

  “Ouch.”

  “I’m kidding. But face it; you’re the Adam. You’ve been around forever, and even though Michael has been an angel a lot longer than you’ve been human, he’s only been on Earth a few days. You’ve been on Earth longer than anyone. So when you talk about human nature, he’s gonna believe you. And if you drop a bombshell, somebody’s gonna have to pick up the pieces. Lucky for you, Emily’s good at picking up the pieces.” There was something in her eyes when she said that, a little glimmer that she blinked away almost before I could notice it, but I filed it away under the heading of “things I want to ask about when we’re alone rather than in a park with our whole posse and a passel of unwashed kids wearing hemp pants.”

  Emily sat with Michael for a minute or two before he sat up and looked at her. Then, they sat there for a few more minutes before he straightened and began to assume a little of the officious shithead posture we were looking for.

  Finally, Emily waved at me. After a few seconds of the confused chest-pointing thing, I realized she really did want me over there, so I went. I walked up, a little nervously, to where my daughter and the Sword of Heaven sat on a park bench, her arm around his shoulders and him blotting his eyes with a blue silk hanky that I could have sworn he didn’t have when I had been sitting there.

  “Dad, I think you owe Michael an apology,” Emily said. Crap. They weren’t going to make it easy on me. I looked back at Eve and Myra, who both made “go on” gestures. Cain just shrugged and smirked a little as if to say, “I’m not the one who made the angel cry. I just invented murder.”

  “Michael, I don’t really know what to say, but I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to imply that people today didn’t believe in the Father anymore, and I didn’t mean to upset you. So, um, sorry.” I hoped that was all he needed to get going. It had gone from muggy to chilly, and if we stuck around the park any longer I was gonna need to pee before we hit the highway. Not to mention, I couldn’t really think of anything else to say.

  “What about my face?” Michael asked, his expression a perfect mask.

  “Your, uh, face?”

  “Yes. My face. You hit me, Adam. That just isn’t done. If I deserve an apology for anything, it’s for you putting your hands on one of the Host.”

  “You have got to be kidding me. You deserved every single punch you’ve taken since I saw you, and probably more besides. If you think I’m going to apologize for punching you in the face, then you can take your flaming sword and—”

  Michael was up off the bench with his arms around me before I could tell him exactly where I thought his sword would fit nicely.

  “Oh, you do like me! Emily was right. You put on this gruff exterior to hide your true feelings, and the nastier you are to people, the more you care about them. I knew there was no way you truly despised me. After all, I am an Archangel, the most Heavenly of the Heavenly Host. Oh, Adam, it is so good to know how you truly feel.” I glared over the angel’s shoulder at Emily, who mouthed, “Just go with it.”

  I took the high road and gently disentangled myself from Michael before he started to sport a chubby. The last thing I needed was an immaculately dressed angel feeling me up in a New Orleans public park in the middle of the night. I’d already been to the precinct house once, and that was a gracious plenty, thanks.

  “Well, now that we’ve got all that sorted out, can we go?” I asked Michael as the rest of our troupe gathered.

  “Of course. We must away at once to find the one who must make the Choice,” the angel replied. With me standing right there, I assumed he meant the other one who must Choose. Since he immedi
ately started down the street back toward Cain’s place, I had no real choice but to follow.

  “So, where are we going? And I’m not leaving my truck. Period.” Eve has always had such a way of making her opinions known, usually by stating them loudly and often.

  “Nashville. We’ll find the young man in Nashville, Tennessee.”

  Nashville. Okay, we were going country.

  Chapter 26

  The drive from New Orleans to Nashville was a long one for one day, but it was a pretty straight shot up Interstate 59. It helped that we were on the road before sunup in New Orleans. There wasn’t much in the way of a rush hour in Meridian, Mississippi, so passing through there around eight thirty in the morning didn’t do anything to hinder our progress. What held us up more than anything was the fact that we were travelling with three women, all of whom had bladders the size of walnuts. Also, travelling with an angel who hadn’t spent much time out of the ethereal plane in recent history—or in history at all—meant that every time we stopped for a pee break or a gas stop, he had to check out the most disgusting assortment of treats and congealed confections that could be purchased at a CITGO station on a southern interstate.