A Deafening Silence In Heaven

by Thomas E. Sniegoski

  Francis was gone now, and the unrest around Remy slowed. He was the center now; he was the one in control.

  Remy’s eyes again met God’s, and strangely he saw in the gaze of his Creator that everything was as it was supposed to be.

  This was as it was supposed to be.

  But what is this? Remy wondered as Unification failed around him. What. Is. This?

  The gun . . . the gun was still clutched in his hand, a hand now nothing more than bone with bits of bloody skin floating from the joints. And even though he no longer had eyes to see, Remy knew that he held the weapon—the gun that was called Godkiller.

  He held the gun as he had held it before, when . . .

  This was the gun forged from the power and rage of the Morningstar, an ultimate weapon to be used for the most dire of tasks. It was in his hand now, and he aimed down the length of the golden barrel at his target.

  He aimed at the calm in the center of the storm.

  The kindly old gentleman in the finely tailored blue suit.

  God.

  And Remy fired the gun, committing the atrocity that caused it all to come crashing down.

  He had done it.

  Remy had done it.

  He’d killed the Lord God Almighty.

  • • •

  It couldn’t be right. . . . It had to be wrong, but there it was, the memory becoming all the more clear as he replayed it—over and over again inside the theatre of his mind. He had taken the Pitiless pistol from Francis and renamed it with his actions.

  Godkiller.

  He and the weapon were God’s killers.

  The revelation was more than he could tolerate, and he felt himself shutting down, retreating so deeply into himself that the end of his existence was only moments away.

  Within the belly of the Queen, Remy surrendered. He would not fight it; he would allow it to happen.

  He did not deserve his life.

  And then the liquids that could have eaten away the horror and shame of what he’d remembered grew suddenly turbulent, rushing to escape the fleshy containment of the Queen’s body, rushing outward, carrying his stricken form with it in a wave of foul-smelling internal fluids. It was like being born, only this time he carried with him something far more loathsome than the curse of original sin.

  Remy wasn’t sure how long he lay there in the drying spew, wishing that he no longer existed.

  But he still lived, and as much as it pained him to do so, he opened his eyes to see that he was still in Eden. Rising up, he saw the body of the Shaitan Queen dead upon the ground, her bulbous belly torn open to spill the eggs of what was to be the next step in evil’s evolution. The eggs had already begun to rot.

  Remy stared at the giant corpse and at the grim expression of pain and perhaps fear that adorned her frozen facial features, wondering what could have caused this.

  He heard the growling sound from somewhere behind him and spun around, noticing for the first time that the Godkiller was still clutched in his hand. Remy aimed the pistol at the black mass that slunk toward him, lowering it to his side as he realized what—who—it was that approached.

  “Baarabus,” Remy said, watching in horror as the great demon dog collapsed to the ground at his feet. Dropping the Godkiller, he went to the animal, falling down to his knees and taking the giant dog’s head into his lap.

  “There you are,” Remy said, eyeing the dog’s body and seeing that his injuries were quite substantial. “I thought you left town.”

  “Hmm,” the dog grunted, coughing up thick black blood. “Who knew what trouble you’d get yourself into?”

  “You’re hurt,” Remy said, running his hands along the demon dog’s body.

  “Yeah, that bitch didn’t go down without a fight.”

  Remy’s eyes left the dog’s broken body to see the bodies of some of Samson’s children lying still upon the ground. “I didn’t want this,” he said with a shake of his head, the weight of what he now knew bearing down upon him.

  “It’s not about what you want,” the dog said. “It’s about what has to be.”

  “I don’t know this Remy. I never did. Thought it would just come to me naturally . . . that it would be obvious.”

  “Nothing’s obvious about this,” Baarabus said. He coughed again and his body trembled in pain.

  Remy held him all the tighter. “It’s all right,” he said, bending down closer to the dog’s head. “I’ve got you.”

  “You’ve got to finish this,” the dog said, his voice much softer now.

  “I’m not sure I can now,” Remy said, the horrible images of what he had done suddenly appearing in his mind.

  “Knowing what you know now, do you have a choice?”

  Remy gazed off into the jungle and what he knew existed beyond it.

  “No.”

  “That’a boy,” Baarabus said.

  They sat there like that for quite some time, Remy remembering the times that he and his friend had lain upon the couch, the dog pressed lovingly against him, reveling in the companionship that they shared. He wondered if Baarabus even remembered those times.

  “Don’t you think you should be going?” the dog asked.

  “I want to be here with you,” Remy said, stroking the dog’s thick black fur.

  “No,” the dog suddenly barked, lifting his head and snapping his razor-sharp teeth. “I want you to go.” Then his head slowly dropped back to Remy’s leg. “I don’t want you to be here when I . . .”

  Remy pulled the large dog’s body closer to him.

  “You don’t have to worry,” Remy told him. “I’ve learned my lesson.”

  The dog chuckled and then painfully coughed.

  “What’s so funny?” Remy asked.

  “I know,” Baarabus said, his voice little more than a whisper.

  “You know what?”

  “Why you did it.”

  Remy put his face down to the thick fur of the demon dog’s neck, taking the smell of him into his lungs.

  “Why? Why did I . . .”

  “It hurts so fucking bad . . . ,” Baarabus said, his body shuddering.

  Remy held him tighter.

  “. . . It hurts so fucking bad to say good-bye.”

  And with those last, whispering words, the great demon dog called Baarabus fought no more, giving up the life he had struggled so hard to hold on to.

  Finding some semblance of the peace he sought in death.

  Remy held the dog until his body grew cold. Then, gently, he laid Baarabus’ head down upon the ground and rose to his feet, saying good-bye to the animal and thanking him for being such a good friend.

  He went to the bodies of Samson’s children, kneeling down and thanking them as well for traveling with him and fighting beside him. He found Leila’s body within the bushes, propped up against the base of a tree, and felt those familiar pangs of sadness he’d always felt so strongly when he’d lost those whom he’d cared for.

  Remy gasped as Leila opened her eyes.

  “Give me a sec,” she said. “Just got to rest a bit, and then I’ll . . .”

  But he knew she wasn’t going anywhere.

  “You just stay here,” he told her.

  “Are you ditching me?” she asked.

  “Yeah, I am,” he said. “Where I’m going . . .” He gazed off into the jungle of Eden. “Where I’m going I have to go alone.”

  “Everybody staying back?” she asked, as if unaware of her brothers’ fates.

  “Yeah, everybody is staying back,” he assured her. “This is where I thank you for all that you’ve done.”

  “That’s all right,” Leila said. She seemed to be having a difficult time keeping her eyes open. “Wasn’t doing shit anyway . . . just hangin’ out waiting for the world to end.”

  “You rest now,” he told her, and leaned in to kiss her forehead. “I’ll take things from here.”

  She closed her eyes and Remy left her beneath the tree. He stopped and bent down to pick up th
e Godkiller from the ground, feeling a thrum of power vibrate through his arm, telling him that it was ready.

  “All right, then,” he said aloud, and stepped into the jungle in search of his destiny.

  • • •

  Linda stood at the edge of the roaring surf. She could have sworn there had been an old man standing with the woman, but now she seemed to be alone, smiling sadly and hugging herself against the harsh wind blowing in from the sea.

  She approached the woman and stood beside her. “You’re his wife,” Linda said. “You’re Madeline.”

  “I’m an echo of something very important to him,” the woman said, her eyes never leaving the approaching storm on the horizon.

  “Do you know where he is?” Linda asked.

  “Out there.” Madeline nodded toward the ocean. “At the center of the storm.”

  Linda looked as well, white flashes of lightning temporarily leaving the memory of jagged bolts on the surface of her eyes.

  “I need to get to him,” she said. “I need to bring him back.”

  Madeline looked away from the storm and at Linda.

  “Can you help me?” Linda asked, desperation in her voice. “Please.”

  Remy’s wife stared at her intensely, and then her features softened, and she smiled as her image began to fade.

  “No!” Linda cried, reaching to grab hold of the woman, as if she could somehow make the phantasm stay.

  But she was gone, leaving Linda alone.

  “Please,” Linda wailed over the moans of the wind. “I need help . . . please!”

  The storm seemed to be growing larger, rolling across the sky toward land, bolts of lightning and crashes of thunder causing the very air to tremble. Linda looked into the swiftly moving clouds and searched for the center, where her lover’s dead wife had told her he would be.

  “Remy,” she whispered, suddenly exhausted beyond words and falling to her knees.

  “Come back to me.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  Remy knew that he was getting close.

  Jagged pieces of stone hovered in the air before him, defying the gravity of the world.

  Pieces of Heaven—of the Golden City—as solid as the faith of a true believer but lighter than the air itself. He reached out to one of the stones as it spun gracefully in the air before him, and flicked it away, watching as it rolled through the humid jungle air, colliding with another, larger piece of rock that drifted through a curtain of leafy vines.

  He wondered what awaited him beyond the veil of vegetation as he moved toward it and pushed the tendrils aside. It was like an asteroid field, the air filled with stones of steadily increasing size. Remy advanced, moving the stones, disrupting their gentle orbit, creating a chain reaction of weightless rubble careening by his face.

  A wall of much larger pieces of yellow stone hung before him, rubbing together as they floated, making Remy think of an enormous set of teeth, grinding nervously. He stood before the wall, steeling himself for what he would find on its other side. Then, with a deep breath, he reached out and pushed at the center of the weightless rubble. The obstruction broke apart, the pieces spinning off in opposite directions.

  And what he saw filled him with an odd combination of awe and incredible sadness.

  The process of Unification frozen before him.

  Remy’s heart skipped a beat as his eyes fell upon the Kingdom of Heaven—the Golden City—at the center of it all.

  Frozen in the midst of becoming something else.

  Unified.

  It was like looking at a single frame of a film, a power act, frozen as it occurred. Remy carefully moved through the scene, using the floating stones as steps.

  And the closer he got to the city, the more carnage he observed. Bodies of angels clogged the air; all of the Heavenly hosts were represented there, frozen as they were when the horror had occurred.

  He stood upon a drifting platform of rock and took it all in, the lush Garden of Eden flowing in to rejoin the mass of Heaven and the City of Gold, towering spires of reflective black stone—the structures of Hell—reaching out fingerlike to take hold of the truce that was being offered, to step from the shadows into the light and be one.

  His mind became engorged with the imagery, powerful memories that hadn’t been there moments before.

  It was the Shaitan who had been the heralds of disaster.

  Remy opened his eyes to the reality before him, seeing some of the pale-skinned abominations frozen in the midst of attack as they swarmed from the Garden, their actions stopped by an act far more horrible.

  The shame he felt was crushing as he leapt from one floating piece of rock to another.

  He remembered the screams, the cries of shock at the audacity of it all.

  And as the gathered masses had screamed, he’d acted.

  The memories were far clearer—sharper now. As the Shaitan had swarmed, and the Heavenly hosts were distracted, Remy had reached into a pocket for something that was waiting there, something that pulsed with the power of potential, something that could either create or destroy.

  In his mind he saw it, and as he looked upon it, he knew its purpose.

  To murder.

  Remy remembered the feeling of the bullet in his hand, the warmth of the metal casing. The recollection terrified him, but for the life of him, he still could not understand why he had even considered performing the act that brought about the dusk of humanity, and the fall of the Kingdom of . . .

  A vision, razor-sharp, sliced its way into his tumultuous remembrances. He was there, the stranger with the pale skin and oily black hair. And he was smiling as he gifted Remy the bullet.

  Remy swayed upon the floating platform of rock, reeling as if the memories were a physical assault upon him. Who was this mysterious man who hid beneath the folds of his memories?

  Pulling himself together, Remy looked across a broad expanse of space to the broken stairs that would take him up to the front of the Golden City, where God had been when he’d . . .

  Behind the lids of his eyes, he saw himself tear the Pitiless pistol from Francis’ grasp, the look of utter shock upon the fallen Guardian angel’s face as Remy fired the gun into him. Remy’s fingers tingled and then burned as they remembered opening the gun’s chamber and placing the special bullet inside.

  Remy leapt from the platform of stone, landing on the shattered stairs. He followed them with his eyes as they ascended into the hall of Heaven, from where the Creator had once surveyed His kingdom.

  Slowly, he climbed those stairs, dreading what he would find at the top.

  And with each footfall, images exploded inside his mind, forcing him to recall what this other version of himself had done.

  He heard the chamber of the Pitiless pistol snap shut with a click so sharp it could be heard over the screams and cries of the Shaitan attack.

  And then he climbed these very same steps, raising the weapon, taking aim, and . . .

  Remy reached the top of the stairs and gazed upon a sight that froze him in place like those caught in the release of power when the Lord God was felled by an assassin’s bullet.

  It was a sight that defined it all, the physical representation of what this most holy process—this Unification—was all about. The Almighty, resplendent in robes of purest light, His holy visage appearing as the old man Remy had seen in his dreams, speaking of a coming conflict. He stared at Him as He floated in the air above the floor, petrified in the moment of His demise, and briefly wondered if God appeared this way to everyone, or if the image of the Creator differed for any and all who looked upon Him.

  And flying to His aid on wings as black as night was Lucifer Morningstar, the look frozen upon his flawless features reflective of the utter horror of being on the cusp of forgiveness and having that blessing savagely ripped away.

  Remy approached the scene and felt a kind of resistance in the ether around him, almost as if the surroundings somehow knew that he was the one.

&nbs
p; That he was responsible, and sought to push him away.

  Then he heard the gunshot, a sound so loud that it swallowed all other sounds, a sound that demanded one’s attention, a sound that said, Listen to me, for this is the end of it all.

  And that sound finally stole away his strength. Remy dropped to his knees before the moment frozen in infamy.

  “I’m so sorry,” he said, his eyes welling with scalding tears. He pulled the Godkiller from where he’d tucked it into the waist of his pants at the small of his back. “But I’m here now. . . . I’ve traveled so very far to make things right. . . . You just have to let me know . . . what I need to do to fix this. . . . Please . . .”

  And then there came a voice.

  “Do you think they can hear you? . . . That He can hear you? Oh, I certainly do hope so.”

  Remy turned his head to see a man—the man from his visions . . . from the memories that cascaded into his skull. He stood upon a piece of floating stone, a once fine suit dust-covered and torn, his skin deathly pale, and his hair as black as the night.

  “Who?” Remy began, but . . .

  The man raised a finger to his lips. “Silence,” he commanded, and the angel was compelled to be so. “I’ll be doing the talking.”

  Remy noticed a ring upon the man’s finger that seemed to pulse with an ungodly power.

  “You want to start with who, but really, it should be why,” the man said, stepping onto another floating stone, closer to Remy.

  Remy wanted to speak, to demand answers from the mysterious figure, but found himself unable to.

  “Why would anyone want to ruin something as potentially magnificent as this?” The man spread his arms, taking in the whole incredible, petrified moment. “It’s quite simple, really.”

  The man stood before Remy now, but his focus was on God.

  “He took something unbelievably special from me, and so I took from Him.” He looked back to Remy. “See? Simple.”

  Remy wanted to speak, but the words would not come—were not allowed to come.

  The man studied him, seeing how Remy strained against his commands.

  “Go ahead,” he said finally, giving the ring on the finger of his right hand a twist. “You may speak.”