The Chosen

by John G. Hartness

  “Pretty much. You must be the Chosen. Good luck with that. I’d drink more, if I were you. And once upon a time, I was. I’m sorry, how rude of me. I’m Eve.” Eve held out her hand to Sidney, who took it wordlessly. Of course, he couldn’t stay by the door like I told him to, that would make my life too easy. Instead, I had to make sure the Golden Child didn’t get his head caved in, too.

  I thought the whole scene might have been a little much for him. It was a little much for me, too, and it didn’t look like it was going to get any better when four mammoth bikers lurched over to our table, including the mountain of flesh and jailhouse ink that Eve said she had kicked in the balls. My night was getting better and better.

  “Hey,” the biggest one said as they stood in front of our table. He was at least six-four and three hundred pounds, if he was an ounce. He looked like a refugee from a ZZ Top video, if there was a video where some monster ate all the members of ZZ Top and wandered around wearing their beards. His gut was barely constrained by a Harley Davidson t-shirt, and he wore a black leather vest. All of them wore matching vests. Great, they were sporting colors. My mood continued to improve. I didn’t see any indications of firearms, but most of them had long hunting knives at their sides. I really hated getting stabbed. Aside from the pain and bleeding, it put big holes in my shirts.

  “Hey.” I didn’t stand, just turned around in my chair and looked up at him. Way up at him.

  “She your old lady?” He pointed at Eve.

  “Not so much these days, but she used to be. Why, you want a date?”

  He let out a laugh, making his massive belly shake not so much like a bowl full of jelly, but more like a Jell-O mold full of cottage cheese. “No. I wouldn’t fuck her with Tiny’s dick and Spider pushing. But she needs to learn some manners.”

  Tiny? Spider? Where did they get those names, out of a book? “I’ve been telling her the same thing for longer than I can remember. If you want to try, go right ahead. But I hear one of your boys already gave that a shot, and it didn’t work out so well.”

  “Yeah, and Tiny wants an apology.” He jerked a thumb at the one he called Tiny, and in a stunning fit of originality and irony, Tiny was the biggest son of a bitch I’d ever seen outside of professional sports. He was half a head taller than ZZ, whose name I’d never gotten, and if he could walk through a door without turning sideways, it was only because it was a double door. I could only imagine the pain and suffering his boots endured with his every step.

  “Well, tell Tiny to get in line because there’s a lot of people looking for apologies from that one, and they’ve all been disappointed for a long time,” I said.

  “Not from her. We got no hard feelings toward her. Tiny’s been insulted by him.” He pointed at Cain. Shit. I probably could have talked them out of a beef with Eve, but the new development was probably going to lead to someone getting hurt.

  “What did he do?” I asked before I could even think.

  “He put a knife in Tiny’s face and said some nasty things about Tiny. You don’t get to pull a knife on an Outlaw in our bar and just walk out. That just don’t happen.”

  “I understand. This shouldn’t have happened. Cain, apologize.”

  “I’m sorry, Tiny.”

  “There. We good? Cain’s apologized, Tiny feels better, and we can all just have another round, right?” I motioned for the bartender to set everybody up with another round.

  “It ain’t that simple.” Of course, it wasn’t.

  “Why not?” I figured I might as well keep playing ignorant, as long as it kept everybody’s blood on the inside.

  “Tiny’s been insulted. His manhood has done been questioned. And that just don’t happen. Your boy here is gonna have to take a beat down for that.”

  “Well, then we have a problem.” I stood, and Cain, Michael, and Eve stood with me. Emily moved Myra and the preacher-boy closer to the door, and I thought I saw her reach up her sleeve for something that might have been shiny.

  “I guess we probably do, don’t we?” Mammoth replied.

  I gripped the neck of the beer bottle in front of me, but before I could step forward and swing, I heard a thump beside me and looked over to see Sidney on his knees, reciting a Psalm.

  “ThelordismyshepherdIshallnotwant.Hemakethmetoliedowningreenpastures,” he recited quickly.

  In the second I gave him my attention, Mammoth stepped up and cracked a fist the size of a Honey Baked Ham across my jaw. I spun around and found my face unexpectedly pressed against the wall of the bar. I leaned there for half a second before I realized that the wall was what was holding me up, then I pushed off the wall and into the fray.

  A melee had erupted. Eve produced the fat end of a pool cue from somewhere, probably that big damn bag she carried everywhere, and laid into Tiny, obviously deciding that he was her bitch du jour. Michael was being soundly pummeled by the other one, which I supposed was Spider, because he had black spider tattoos on the backs of both hands. It made for an interesting picture as one spidered hand wrapped around Michael’s throat, pinning him to the wall, while the other spider bounced off his face again and again.

  Cain grabbed a pair of bottles off the table and beaned Mammoth with both of them. Then, he actually jumped onto the table for a second, which proved to be a poor choice when the center pillar of the table toppled, taking him to the floor with Mammoth underneath him. He kept pounding on the biker as they went down.

  I looked around, saw that I didn’t have anybody to hit for a second, and yelled at Emily, “Get those two outta here!”

  She didn’t wait, just grabbed the kid by his collar, and yanked him upright. She shoved Myra and Sidney toward the door and stepped in front of them to punt one of the bouncers square in the nuts when he made to stop their exit.

  Eve took a second from bludgeoning Tiny to throw her truck keys to Myra.

  “Get both cars running!” I shouted as I picked up the chair I’d been sitting in. I cleared my throat to get Spider’s attention, and when he took a second from pounding Michael’s face into tapioca, I broke the chair into splinters across his head.

  He fell backward almost in slow motion, taking out another table as he toppled like an obese redwood. Michael slumped to the floor, and I could almost see the little birds circling his head. It would have been a lot funnier if I hadn’t looked up just then to see a half-dozen more thugs heading our way, along with a pissed-looking bartender swinging a baseball bat. I thought for a second about pulling the pistol, but since none of them had done anything worse than a little bludgeoning so far, I figured I didn’t need to escalate things. After all, they couldn’t really do any lasting damage to any of the four of us, so it wasn’t worth it to me to kill anybody over a little bar scuffle.

  Then, four of them came back into the bar with Emily, Myra, and Sidney in tow. The preacher was unconscious over one guy’s shoulder, and it took two of them to hold Emily back.

  When I saw Myra with a bloody lip, I went a little nuts, not ‘Wolverine slashing people to pieces’ nuts, but close. I ran straight at the four of them, and that didn’t go well for the guy who got in my way.

  I just kind of grabbed him by the neck and walked through him. I wasn’t thinking too clearly, and it seemed that one minute he was in front of me, and the next I had stepped on his chest on my way to the door. I pulled up in front of the one holding Myra, and he let her go. Emily broke free of the guys holding her and helped her mother into a chair. The fourth one put Sidney down face-first on a table, and then I had four of them all to myself. I decided it might be fun after all.

  I pointed at Myra. “Which one of you hit her?”

  “Me. What you gonna do about it?” He was about five-eleven, maybe a hundred and eighty pounds, and looked like the type to hit girls and bash bigger guys over the head from behind. He had a patchy beard, green teeth, and close-cropped hair that needed a wash.

  “I’m gonna save you for last.” I swung at the one on my left, catching him full in th
e nose and completely by surprise.

  There’s a lot to be said for martial arts and flashy kicks and throws, but at the end of the day, if you break a guy’s nose, he’s out of action for the next few minutes, at least.

  The guy dropped like a sack of wet concrete, and I ducked as one of his buddies threw a big roundhouse punch at my ear. When I dropped to one knee, I was at eye level with his belt buckle, so I grabbed it and put my shoulder in his gut as I stood, taking the guy up onto my shoulder. I spun him around a few times to clear some space, then backed up fast into the nearest wall. That mashed his head between my back and the wall, and he stopped struggling. I tipped his feet backward over my shoulder, and he went down with a thump.

  I looked for the third guy, but he had all he could handle with Emily, who apparently carried pepper spray in her purse. It looked like it hurt when she got him in the face, but she’d obviously learned more hanging around the Prince of Darkness than just cards, because when the thug opened his mouth to scream, she squirted another shot right in his mouth. He clawed his way to the door with one hand on his mouth and another over his eyes, and I turned my attention to the little rat bastard who’d decked my girlfriend.

  He wore a wife-beater and no vest, so I knew he was just a hanger-on, a wannabe. Good. I didn’t want to take on the whole bar if I broke the little bastard, which was where my mind was headed. I reached out, grabbed him by the straps on his tank top, and pulled him to me.

  When his face was just a couple inches away from mine, I said in a low voice, “Tell me if this hurts.”

  Then, I kneed him in the balls as hard as I could. As he doubled over, I grabbed both ears and rammed his face into my knee, and then pulled him upright by his ears again. I had taken his chin in my left hand and reared back with my right to tee off on his jaw with a huge haymaker when I heard a huge crash from behind me.

  “Enough!” The Voice came from where I’d left Michael, but it didn’t sound anything like the meek Archangel I knew and usually wanted to run through a wood chipper. Instead, it was the Voice that commanded the armies of Heaven in the war against Lucypher, the Voice that meted out God’s own Justice across the land, the Voice that almost made me wet myself.

  I turned, slowly, and looked to where the Voice had come from, and there stood Michael. Well, to say it was Michael was kind of like saying that the Hulk was Bruce Banner, like Superman was Clark Kent. It was the Archangel Michael, which bore about as much resemblance to the thin, fair-skinned little man who had gotten his face pummeled in a few seconds ago as I did to Arnold Schwarzenegger.

  He was in full-on War Seraph mode, with twelve feet of angelic wings spread across the bar. He was almost seven feet tall and had ripped most of his clothes when he expanded, adding to the Hulk metaphor. Gone was the mild-mannered little humanoid, and in his place stood the Sword of Heaven. The sword wasn’t just a title; he held a six-foot long two-handed sword rimmed with white fire. I didn’t know if it was hot, but it had definitely shattered the table in front of him. Michael had apparently tired of the ruckus and decided to lay down the law.

  Nobody moved for a long moment as the immortal humans looked at the angel, the bikers looked at us, and Emily looked at Sidney’s bloody nose.

  Michael cast his gaze across the mute assemblage. “Good. Now that you’re done making such an awful racket, would it be possible for my companions and me to leave?”

  No one said a word, but anyone standing or lying anywhere near the door opened a wide path. Michael looked around again. “Good. I assume there will be no problem with the bill? Excellent. Have a splendid evening.” In a flash of heavenly light, his sword vanished, his wings folded into nothingness, and he was once again the nattily dressed British poof that had come upon me outside of Myra’s restaurant.

  He started toward the door, collecting Sidney, Emily, and Myra along the way. He stopped just before the door and looked back at Cain, Eve, and me.

  “Coming, children?” He sounded like a disappointed teacher.

  Cain and I let go of the guys we had been about to pound on and headed for the door. Eve took one last regretful look around, as if she could see in her mind’s eye all the pretty mayhem Michael was putting a halt to, then she gave one last clout to the guy she’d been pounding, put the pool cue back in her voluminous shoulder bag, and followed us out into the night.

  Chapter 33

  We got back to the hotel without any further incident, and Eve headed across the street to the gas station to pick up some beer. We were all still pretty wound up over the events at the bar, so Cain picked the lock to the outdoor pool, and we sat around outside drinking beer and soaking our feet for a little while to chill out after an eventful day.

  Sidney had started to come around while in the car, and he just sat there at first with his jeans rolled up, feet soaking in the pool, while the rest of us told lies about the size of the guys we beat up. Except Michael. He sat on one of those pool lounge chairs all by himself, looking down at his hands, then looking up at the sky as if he were waiting for an answer from Father. Eventually, his moping started to bring me down, so I went over to him with a fresh beer for each of us.

  “Nice job today. We really could have gotten our asses kicked if you hadn’t stepped in when you did. And worse, some of the mortals might have gotten really hurt.” I started there, figuring if that wasn’t what he was moping over, he’d tell me. Turned out, I got it in one. I decided I was starting to get a handle on this whole angelic therapy business.

  “I’m not supposed to do that.”

  “Do what? Keep people from getting hurt?”

  “Interfere with the lives of normal people.” I laughed so hard I almost fell off my chaise.

  “Are you kidding me? You guys have interfered with my life almost from the beginning.”

  “Yes, and you’re the reason for the rule. You and Eve. We were so involved in your lives early on that you were never really normal, so it was decided that we should remain aloof from humanity, to allow you to thrive or fail on your own.”

  “Yeah, but what you did today wasn’t like that. You didn’t cause any great changes in the fabric of space and time, or whatever junk the sci-fi dorks would spew about here. You just broke up a bar fight. None of us can die, and none of us were going to kill anybody, not even Eve. So there’s no butterfly effect going on, or any other really stupid Ashton Kutcher movie, either.” I could tell that hung him up a little, so I promised myself that if he stuck around after this whole mess was over, and if I was still feeling uncharacteristically charitable toward him, I’d sign him up for his very own Twitter account so he could be just as inanely involved with the lives of celebrities as anyone else.

  “But I didn’t get involved to save lives, or to avenge a wrong. I drew upon the power of Heaven because it felt good. Nothing more. I enjoyed it, Adam. I’m not supposed to do that. I’m supposed to remain aloof and impartial.”

  “Yeah, but that’s boring.”

  “What?”

  “If you’ve learned anything hanging out with us the past few days, it oughta be that it’s a lot more interesting to be right in the middle of things. Living life like it was meant to be lived. Being human, even if you’re not, is about living, not observing. Maybe the form’s getting to you a little. Maybe you’re getting some corruption by playing human so long, like an actor who can’t get out of character once the play’s over. But really, when you look at the big picture, other than some cheap bar furniture, what did we permanently damage?”

  “Well, nothing, really.”

  “So look, it was just another night for those guys. They’re a biker gang, Michael. They get in fights in bars. It’s what they do. It’s kinda like Eve irritating me; it’s her whole purpose in life. In a day or so, they won’t even remember you Hulking out or your flaming sword. They’ll chalk it all up to too many Jagermeister shots and too many comic books on the back of the toilet. No harm, no foul. All right?”

  “All right.”

&n
bsp; “So we done with the mopey angel face?” I made a goofy face like you would talking to a little kid, and the silly poof actually chuckled.

  “You know, you’re somewhat amusing at times, Adam.”

  “Yeah, and I’m sure there are days when you’re not an insufferable assclown yourself.” I pulled him up. “Let’s get another beer.”

  “I’ve been meaning to ask, how exactly can you drink this swill?”

  “You think this is swill? Try mead sometime. At least there are no obvious rat bits in the beer, anymore. I count anything without rat bits as downright palatable.” I led him over to the rest of my merry band of immortals, Chosen ones, and waitresses.

  “What did I miss?” I asked as I popped open another Keystone Light tallboy. It looked like Eve couldn’t decide what brand of shitty domestic beer to buy, so she bought an assortment of three or four cases. Probably a good move on her part. It was shaping up to be the kind of night that needed a lot of fortification.