Angel of Death

by J. Robert King

  But enough rumination. She’d been ruminating for months now. Her thoughts held only pain and turmoil. She turned on the radio. There was a catchy tune on the country-western station. She was tapping her toes before she had begun to puzzle out the words:

  There was a man who said he was an angel.

  He said that he went killing for the Lord.

  Then one bright day he killed my nuisance neighbor,

  And now I just believe his every word.

  Oh, hail and hallelujah,

  Just see what John does to yah.

  He’ll help you keep your head,

  lend you a hand.

  Hello and howdy-do-ya,

  They call him a hy-e-na,

  But as for me, I think he’s

  just a lamb.

  There was a sheriff’s daughter who got horny

  She knew the killer would do her no harm.

  So she got herself a little tiny baby,

  And he made quite a supper of her arm.

  Oh hail, and hallelujah!

  Just see what John does to yah…

  It was the final assault. The music and the windshield and the cockeyed headlight conspired with hills and curves and haunting woods. She heard the tires squeal before she knew she was losing control, saw the world suck away beneath her as though in revulsion, and glimpsed the tree – massive kin of the tree that had almost slain her in her bedroom window. There was no Azra to save her this time, though, no angel to stand between fate and mortality.

  “Mother of God, pray for us sinners–”

  The impact broke through the outer shell of the tree trunk and into the hollow core, bringing the whole tree down atop her car.

  This was not his cell. Azra was alone, yes, and the chamber was secure and about the size of the solitary confinement hole where he’d spent the last months. But this place was bright. He felt naked in it. He saw himself everywhere. His bright orange coveralls leant an umber cast to the yellow-gray walls. The stainless steel bunk and metal toilet reflected his human face back to him. There was even a dark sheet of bulletproof glass outside the holding cell, and it mirrored the whole tableaux of his pathetic incarceration. Beyond that glass wall was the squad room. The white shirted detectives were there, moving silently like kites in a dream. Heads, faces, hands, and pants blended into metal desks and gray walls. Only the shirts and the papers flitted in the darkness. The far wall held tacked bulletins, hanging diagonally. More kites, and more kites, receding into infinity.

  Then, white roses came between the cell and the world of the kites – white roses on green-black stems held in the fist of a guard. The man was thin and getting old. He extended the fist of flowers through the bars of Azra’s cell and flung the dozen long-stemmed roses down on the floor. They struck and rolled apart like a faggot of kindling. Little balls of blood speckled the man’s palm where he had clutched the thorns.

  “More flowers,” he sneered through large, uneven teeth.

  Azra stared at him. “More?”

  “There’re twelve other bouquets. They’re in the squad room, dying.”

  “Flowers from whom?”

  “You name it. Three different VFW branches, GALAW, the National Institute of Mental Health, a bunch of nut-jobs like yourself…”

  “What about these?” asked Azra, rising to stare down at the scattered pile. “Who are they from?”

  “That’s why I brought them.” The man bent to fish a small envelope from the stems and thorns. He lifted it, his blood smearing on the white paper. “It says: Congrat- ulations, Fuck-Head, on your latest kill. Burlington Police. ”

  Azra stared at the bloodstained card. “What does that mean?”

  “Didn’t you hear? The woman you knocked up ran her car into a tree a half-hour ago. No other cars, no alcohol, no nothing. I guess she didn’t want to live, knowing you’d been inside her. Congratulations, FuckHead.”

  Azra’s eyes did not meet the man’s. He watched the roses as though they were yet another body. He backed away until the bunk folded his knees, and he sat, eyes unmoving. His heart pounded.

  How can it be? How can she be…? The thought was inconceivable. It was as though someone had told him the sun would no longer rise, that the world would slowly cool over the next three weeks to absolute zero, that they would all die. How could she leave?

  “Oh, Donna, no.” He felt sudden terror for her, for whatever pain she had felt, for those last regretful moments spent alone. “Oh, Donna, no.”

  The cell closed in around him. There would be no more place of bliss. There would be no more refuge. Around him closed the very fist of God. That’s who had done this. God had wanted Donna dead. He had wanted her dead four months ago. He had tried to kill her at the bedroom window, but Azra had stopped him. But at last, God had found a way to kill her. He had compelled another tree to yank its roots from the sucking earth and fall on her and crush her and crush the child within her.

  “No matter what happens to me, as long as I have you, you and my child, I can be human and mad and in prison and still be in Heaven.”

  That was the main reason God had wanted her dead. She had dared to make Azra human, had dared, in defiance of divinity and mortality, to reach across the shredding fissure between the two worlds and touch him. She had become Azra’s heaven, and God suffered no heaven but his own.

  The roses were within easy reach. Azra retrieved them. He lay down on the bunk and sniffed the flowers. He saw Donna Leland, his guardian angel and his lover, floating in the dead heavy cement ceiling above him. Some of the thorns were very strong, as big as a dog’s claw but as sharp as a cat’s. There was one thorn that was very strong and very sharp, indeed. It felt right slicing into the veins of his arm. It felt right slicing into the veins of his neck. He lay there, blanketed in white blooms and warmed by his own blood seeping silently out onto cold steel and pooling in the indentation atop the bunk. A very human end. Perhaps not the right end for a serial killer, dying quietly, bedded in flowers and warm blood and safety. But perhaps there was no such thing as dying well. Perhaps humans just died.

  He would know soon enough.

  “I have been human for only weeks now. How can they stand it for year after Goddamned year?”

  He was both cold and hot. There was a thrilling darkness hovering just above his consciousness, an unraveling net beyond which lay endless nothing. He disowned his limbs, one by one. They became mannequin parts, sliding loosely away from him – feet, calves, thighs, pelvis, arms, trunk. At last, all that was left was the head, the damnable violent ceaseless head.

  It, and the scent of white roses.

  Wailing women and a blood-painted world that jagged and jarred around him, with white linens and restraints on hands and feet, the conveyance listing like a ship but too fast for water, with the swing and jolt of steel waves, and hands not of steel but of flesh and stinging needles on plastic tubes and held down with tape. There was. There was.

  Sirens. That’s what. Not women, but sirens. One was very close and muffled. On the roof. The back of the ambulance was crowded. Two police and an EMT and him and lots of drawers and compartments. There was lots of metal. Lots of hard, hard plastic. The cops watched his eyes, but he didn’t more than flutter them. The EMT watched plasma dripping from a bag and checked forearms made of cotton gauze and red juice. His neck was that way, too. The machines beeped, and so did the EMT, but the police were barking like watchdogs. They snarled through their teeth. The ambulance sheared a corner, and all swayed to the side and up a moment before the torquing springs fought the ambulance back between the lanes. The long high wail of sirens stretched out, too. Cop squads behind. The pink that flashed through the cabin was cops ahead.

  There was a clamp that held the stretcher to the wall – an old ambulance. The clamp was near his hand. It was easy to touch, but stiff.

  Why, though? Why do it, Azra? A moment ago you wanted to die. Why now try to live? And another voice answered in his head. There is no longer an Azra. O
nly a Samael. And why die? There is no need to die. Only to descend. He waited for the next wide corner, and then pulled hard. The stretcher slued sideways, ramming into the EMT’s knees and dumping him onto the gauzy arms. Stainless steel handles struck the cops, likewise, and one of them collapsed across Azra’s feet. The other had fumbled his gun out and pulled back the EMT and watched the patient’s eyes, but nothing.

  “Damn thing got me in the groin. Fuck!” said the cop on his knees.

  The one with the gun kicked the stretcher back against the wall, where it bounced and came back at him. The EMT caught the edge of it this time and heaved hard to get it against the wall. He lifted the lever and, with the help of the leaning gunman, got the cart in place. The lever snapped to, and they both backed up.

  “Where’s my gun?”

  A bullet went through his throat and shot out the top of the ambulance.

  The man gurgled in red bubbles as he fell back, and then there were three holes in the head of the other officer. The EMT pushed himself up but slipped on the bloody floor and fell beside the cot. It swung into him again, bringing with it a hot gun muzzle and a madman.

  “Release me, or you’re dead.”

  The EMT sat for a moment, stunned. The madman lurched on the cot and shot the EMT’s right ear off. Next moment, buckles came from the patient’s wrists and hands, and he undid the straps. The killer sat up and shot the EMT through the left eye. The ambulance’s brakes shrieked. The driver shouted into the radio handset. The gurney rolled up toward the cabin door and smashed into it. Samael shoved the gurney back, flung himself through the door, and shot the last round through the driver’s ear. Then he rolled him from the seat and scrambled spiderlike behind the wheel. Stomping on the accelerator, he pulled back out onto the road.

  Sergeants Davis and Carls couldn’t make out what the ambulance driver was saying except for “Pull over, pull over.” That’s what the other squads were doing, so Davis did the same, only to have the ambulance lurch out ahead of them all.

  “Jesus Christ, what’s he doing?” bellowed Carls, his eyes squinting beneath pudgy gray brows. Davis, a middle-aged black man, only shrugged. The squad roared out behind the ambulance. Other cars followed. The calls began crowing over the radio. “…driver said he was loose… shots fired… behind the wheel now, I’d say…”

  The last supposition was proven as the ambulance pulled away from them all, fifty, seventy, ninety miles an hour.

  “Kick it in, Davis. For God’s sake. This ain’t OJ.”

  The squad leaped in response, tires squealing at fortyfive miles an hour. Cars Seven and Eleven muscled up on either side of them, with Twenty-Two screaming up behind. Ahead, the ambulance mounted the long belly of an on-ramp.

  The captain’s voice came over the radio, “…yes, call ahead. He’s south-bound on Ninety-four… yeah, toward Kenosha. Current pace, he’ll be there in a few minutes. Roadblock, hell yes… and helicopters. Better call down to Chicago. If we let him slip, he’ll be in Evanston and Oak Park in twenty minutes. Got a fucking ambulance going a hundred twenty – easy enough to spot…”

  Without slowing, Davis sent the car hurtling up the ramp. The undercarriage struck ground. Eleven and Seven also bottomed out. Three bursts of orange sparks flashed beneath the thrumming machines and spun away crazily behind them. The squads bounced, still fender on fender, and speared their way into the sparse and sluggish stream of Wednesday evening traffic. Far ahead, past jittering cars and brake lights, the ambulance darted away. It shrank. Already its sides were scored from sideswipes. Even now, it rammed the back corner of a sedan, spinning it as though it were a child’s toy. The ambulance topped a rise and disappeared. Davis clenched his jaw and wove past an old man who apparently hadn’t heard the sirens or noticed the Broadway light show going on behind him. The lanes ahead were clearing to either side like the Red Sea before Moses. Into the breach the squads plunged.

  “…the dogs out from Madison. We’ve got to be ready for a manhunt… I hope we don’t, but I want them either way. Of all people, we can’t lose him… And ask them for hostage negotiators. Yeah, two officers, an EMT, and a driver.”

  Davis glanced at a mile marker. “Almost to Kenosha. I sure hope they could get a roadblock.” The squad leaped over a low rise and slid into a depression on the other side.

  Brake lights everywhere. Ahead, they thickened into an angry swarm, completely blocking the road. Beyond them, a tanker truck lay on its side, a yellow-green cloud rolling up demonically from its split tank.

  “Shit, shit, shit!” Carls shouted. “We’re out of this one. That’s got to be chlorine gas up there. We’ve got something even more deadly than the Son of Samael here.”

  “…Squads Eleven and Seven, set roadblock here…

  Twenty-Two, assist in evacuating the highway…”

  Carls grabbed the handset. “What about Samael, Captain?”

  “He’s Chicago’s man, now.”

  BOOK III

  S O N o f S A M A E L

  TWENTY

  It was an easy enough commute into Chicago. Once Samael tipped the chlorine tanker, he drove only another mile before finding a new ride. Ahead of him, a black sedan pulled to the shoulder to make way for the ambulance. Samael drove up beside the sedan and used the gun and the dead policeman to coax the motorist from his car. Samael and the dead cop got in. That was just the first hijacking. A string of other vehicle trades made dogs and helicopters useless. By the time he headed into the Loop, Samael was driving an ’07 Mercedes, his dead buddy beside him. They looked like any pair of brothers from Chicago. The cop paid for parking. In a seedy garage, Samael changed into the police uniform and put his brother under a blanket in the trunk. He drove to the South Side and found an ill-lit Stop ’n’ Shop. There he left the car running and walked away. Before he’d even crossed the street, the Mercedes roared off. The chop shop crew might not even notice the corpse until they’d gotten the chassis stripped. By then, it would be too late to go to the police.

  Samael spent the rest of the night on his feet, walking toward town. A white cop might have been a target on the South Side, but no one challenged him. Lucky for them. When dawn broke, Samael spotted the spire of St Charles on the horizon and headed for it. It was nine o’clock.

  “Time to make amends.”

  St Charles was a limestone megalith supported by massive buttresses, screened in statuary and wrought iron, and gabled in walnut. There were no yellow bricks. There was no clapboard rectory. In every way, it transcended the sort of building that St Francis was in Woodstock. Even so, Samael could not walk up the seventeen steps without remembering the time that Keith McFarland – that he and Keith McFarland – had killed a priest in a confessional.

  The sign out front said “Open Confession.”

  Samael smiled. He had come today not to kill a priest. He had come to be washed of his sins.

  He ascended the stairs. The cop clothes fit him tightly, forming him up, making him something he hadn’t been before – something much better than he had been in the defeated orange jumpsuit.

  Samael passed through the large central door. He remembered to take off his hat. It was slightly too large, and it had a bullet hole in its crease. The narthex was small and gray, with polished marble and maroon carpet. The pile was low, but it bounced as though made of springs. Beside the door was a smooth niche with a white basin. Samael touched his hand to the holy water, made the sign of the cross on his forehead, and then took a thin trickle of the stuff into his mouth. He felt better with that swallow and scooped up a second.

  Why don’t humans bottle holy water for their tables?

  Why not bathe in it? Samael felt clean with the very thought.

  Hand still dripping, Samael crossed the narthex and pushed through another set of doors. He stepped into the cool, magnificent silence of the sanctuary. The stained-glass lancets were ten men high. Beautiful statues of Mary, saints, and apostles stood in silent witness in niches around the chamber. Stately
shadows of marble columns fell across orderly rows of walnut pews. There, beside the pews, were the wardrobe-like compartments where the priests would be sitting. He crossed slowly to the pew adjacent to the open confessional and sat, waiting.

  “You can come in, my son,” came a voice from the metal screened box. It was the tone of an old man, thin and vulcanized by years of trial. “I am alone.”

  Samael nodded and rose. The police hat turned nervous circles in his grip. He entered the confessional and closed the door behind him. The close darkness within was soothing, comforting.

  “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. This is my first confession.”

  “Are you Catholic, child?”

  “I’m not sure what I am, but I might as well be.”

  “What troubles you, child?”

  “You will tell no one what we discuss?”

  “Of course not. On my honor.”

  A deep sigh. “I am the Son of Samael. I killed my guards, a paramedic, and an ambulance driver.”

  Silence returned from the other side of the goldpainted screen. The walnut box breathed the cold air of the sacred space. “You are he? The Son of Samael?”

  “I am,” Samael replied. “Are you frightened?”

  “Yes,” said the priest. Though soft, his tone had intensified. “Yes, I am.”

  “You needn’t be. I have not come to hurt you.”

  After a pause, the priest spoke again. “Go on, child. Tell me of these sins.”