Angel Radio

by A. M. Blaushild

  Be gone. Disconnect.

  I was unsure how to answer. Was I supposed to think back my answer?

  Go.

  The Metatron did not seem to have any trouble continuing to speak. In fact, their communication was continuous. They seemed rather irate, but this was simple interpretation from the words I heard. There was no tone to their voice.

  I could also sense the other separated angels listening in on their voice. Somewhere, still sensed, Fex and Gavreel understood every word. But I doubted their ability to speak to me in the same way the Metatron could.

  You there, girl. Disappear.

  Where was Midori, though? Where was her mind?

  “Where is Midori?” I asked aloud, but I doubted the Metatron’s ability to hear without having one of their angels acting as a link. So I thought it very hard. Where was Midori? Where was her mind stored?

  The girl who is our ideal is attaining perfection. Leave her be.

  But why would I want to do that? I concentrated until my head spun on what I knew—Midori couldn’t be alive, and she couldn’t be ideal. She was never going to be perfect. She was toxic. She had to leave this place.

  I wasn’t sure if the Metatron got my message, for they were quiet.

  No, they said at last.

  That couldn’t be right. Surely the Metatron would understand why I had to rescue Midori? Surely they had some sort of knowledge that something was wrong with Midori, and that it made perfect sense for me to take her and leave?

  She is our ideal. We have searched for her for a long time. She has the proper genetics. She has the proper attitude. She will become perfect when she becomes us. You may not remove her. We must complete the process. Leave.

  Why did attitude even factor in the decision process? But then again, I did remember the day I first met Midori, and how the angels were intent on testing our reactions to various events. I guess they were looking for someone compliant and even tempered, considering how Midori had reacted. After all, their chosen one was going to become the Metatron—it’d be a real shame if someone with the wrong sort of personality was granted all that power. And I guess when you accounted both for a certain type of personality and a specific sort of genetics, it really did narrow Earth’s population down a bit. Though you’d still expect there to be some backups.

  I tried to think these thoughts lightly, ever aware of the Metatron’s constant listening in. It did not work.

  There is no other. She is our ideal. She will attain perfection. Leave us.

  The Metatron seemed fairly set on their choice, and I decided it might be time to give up on this strategy and try consulting with Fex on the matter. He was the one who had been so certain I could remove Midori anyway. He had to have an idea.

  I let go of the support and made my way back to the Metatron’s earthly body and entered its mouth.

  Cease and desist.

  I was not as surprised as I should have been that the Metatron’s voice had followed me inside its body. I was just hoping our thoughts had disconnected.

  Go away.

  Their voice never seemed urgent, but the speed at which they repeated their words grew ever faster.

  Leave. Go. No. Remove yourself at once.

  As I came to the end of the first tunnel—which must have represented the throat in some way, though the anatomy was obviously very off—I came again to the large hollow room that stood in for some nonexistent organ. But it was no longer really empty; it was full of angels. More and more of them were filtering in from every surface, dragging themselves out from the walls, newly born. They had a certain spark-like glow as they adjusted to their new forms.

  I readied my bat. There was no way I could take them all, certainly not while the Metatron continued to pump more and more into the room. But I could try to run past them, at least once I created myself a path.

  Angels took a bat to the face in the same way I expected: they just sort of bounced away. Even the less gaseous-looking ones were light and empty. One of them, resembling a two-headed, six-legged white lion, was sent flying backward into the opposite wall, where it melted away.

  Soon all of them melted back into the Metatron, which seemed aware of my every move, and knew it was pointless to continue the strategy of overwhelming me with numbers. Quality over quantity. I advanced only a few steps before a great violet shape fell from the ceiling and blocked my path. It rearranged itself into its true form—something I recognized to be a Seraph, though adjusted for the size of the room. The lower half of its body was still stuck to the Metatron, but its blank face, like a masquerade mask, and eight arms leaned over me.

  It moved its head from side to side with motions like a snake. And the eyes that coated its body like pores, watched me and blinked. Its whole body was then on fire, one of its flaming paws darting suddenly in an attempt to crush me.

  I stopped moving and dropped to the floor, rolling out of harm’s way. I swung my bat at one of the Seraph’s arms and found it as unresponsive as trying to hit a wall. At least my bat didn’t break.

  I dodged another assault by the Seraph—its moves were heavy and seemed likely to kill me in one strike, but were very slow. As long as I watched closely, its attacks weren’t hard to dodge.

  Its head was somewhat high up, but it wasn’t exactly unreachable. It swept at me with three of its right arms, and I leapt into the air. Hot air from its burning limbs washed over my face, but I swung almost blindly at the Seraph’s face before landing poorly on the ground. Luckily, the Seraph was in too much pain to take advantage of my temporary weakness, and I recovered before it could attempt another attack.

  The white shell that protected its face had cracked open. Underneath was just blackness—perhaps it was just a glimpse of the inside of its body.

  But at least I had damaged it, even if that damage was currently doing nothing to slow it down. In fact, a couple seconds after I had cracked its face, a new one fell off the ceiling and attached itself over the hole I had created. Right. It was literally going to be impossible to kill any of them, not without first killing the Metatron.

  Which I wasn’t allowed to do. Right.

  I ran forward, skittering between the Seraph’s limbs and barely made it through without burning my hair. The Seraph followed me across the room, moving its body along the ceiling like some sort of claw-machine. I ran into the first tunnel I could reach, though I had no idea if it was the one I was supposed to go in. At least the Seraph couldn’t fit—

  Oh wait. It totally could. It shed some of its size like old skin until it was almost exactly the size of the round tunnel and began to run after me. It propelled itself by its arms, and it grew many more so that it could continue to drag itself along. Its head rolled back, extending its neck so that the head could hide behind the body and out of the reach of my bat. After the head came the torso, and with it the great jaws of the stomach that reached impossibly around it.

  The tunnel, too, began to change. I kept running and running, but the tunnel started to shake and quiver and shrink and grow in order to make me trip. I managed to keep my footing, barely, and luckily the Metatron seemed unable or unwilling to close the tunnel completely.

  Every time the Seraph came close to me it exhaled a breath of hot air, and soon I was sweating in the sweltering sauna that the tunnel had become. I was out of energy, and I had been for a while now. It was with only the smallest dose of adrenaline that I continued to throw myself forward. I was so dizzy, I needed to almost fall over just to force my body forward.

  But the end was in sight, and as I ran and panted my way forward, I became aware that the Seraph had ceased its pursuit. I stopped to look backward, and in my hazy vision I could see it there, waiting. It seemed like there was no reason for it to stop.

  As much as I wanted to fall to the floor and catch my breath there, I made myself stumble forward into the next room, where I allowed myself to collapse on the cool floor.

  The cool, wet floor. The floor itself was a pale teal,
like a swimming pool, and a perfectly clear layer of water about two inches high covered it. As much as I wanted to investigate, I took a couple minutes to lie in the water and just breathe. I closed my eyes and watched the white colors cloud my vision and listened to my heart slow down again.

  Only then did I get up, now feeling very sore and tired, and look around. And almost immediately I wished I hadn’t, because one more mystery had just been solved.

  Namely, where all the human bodies had gone. The room I was standing in was pale blue, and very, very high. I’d say impossibly high almost, because it didn’t seem like a room this size could even fit in the Metatron. I could barely make out the top of it.

  Along the walls were humans. Dead ones. Anything else would have been very unlikely. They were stuck to the wall in the same way that Midori was, though all of them had clearly been there much longer. The webbing that held them down covered most of their bodies, leaving just the top layer of their bodies exposed. Many of them had their entire heads covered, and just their stomachs or legs exposed.

  It was like some sort of spiderweb—though surely there was a greater purpose to it than just a collection. Maybe the Metatron used them to gather information? Or to determine the needed genetics?

  Out of morbid curiosity, I walked closer. They all looked so lifelike—the skin was perfectly preserved, and though some of them had had their eyes left open, many looked like they could have been asleep. Just resting in their beds of soft webbing, ready to wake one day, maybe.

  It was this that prompted me to reach out and take one of the bodies’ pulse—I just had to check. But of course, there was nothing to be felt. The dead are the dead, after all. And though these were all real people, with once real lives and once real places in the world…. Well, the world was a very different place now, and I was sure many of them were happier in death than they had been in life. No one wanted to wake up to the world now. So even if one of them ended up somehow being alive…. Well, I would be a humanitarian and just let them sleep. Surely anyone else would have done the same.

  I walked on. There was another tunnel ahead, and while the Metatron was sure to spring something else on me the moment I left the company of the humans, I was going to have to deal with it one way or another. My socks were soaking wet from sweat and from the cool tide pool that was the floor, and I was really, really tired.

  Oh well. All this was just another day. Just another problem to solve.

  29

  THE NEXT tunnel was identical to the first, though luckily a great deal shorter. The Metatron again tried to slow me down—shaking the floor and creating so many angels it became hard to move without tripping over one—but I kept my bat steady and my feet light, and I made it through tired but unscratched.

  The room I came out into was just as large and hollow as every other one. The Metatron had planned ahead for my arrival, and a pair of fiery Seraphs blocked me from advancing. The two of them were obviously cut from the same mold, and were completely identical. Their actions mirrored each other too, and when I cautiously moved closer to get a better look, I saw they were connected at the back.

  Despite having all the odds against me, I still wasn’t feeling that worried about my prospects of survival. The angels were all terrifying, and I definitely did not enjoy having to jump around so much to avoid getting burned to a crisp, but I held true to my heart that I always had my last resort of fire.

  The Seraphim’s attack scope was fairly limited too. All they knew how to do was claw, crush, or burn, and it didn’t take too long for me to learn the nuances of each of their attacks. As intimidating as they looked, they honestly weren’t much of a threat. I didn’t have a chance of harming them either, but at least I was capable of staying alive for a while.

  I ducked past another blow by the Seraph on the right. It slammed its entire body on the ground in a move that must have hurt, but did keep me on my toes. Then, rather suddenly, the two Seraphim stopped moving entirely. The one that had fallen on the ground stayed there, while the other had simply frozen in place. Even its fire had ceased movement.

  And then, with a fitting sound to match, the two of them were sucked into the ceiling, all at once losing their solid forms and becoming nothing more than a liquid for the Metatron to take back into themself.

  The room was now empty, but there was an odd noise coming from somewhere out of sight. I kept my singed bat ready, but as I traversed the endless tunnels, nothing seemed to be moving. At last I came to a dead end, and then I decided I might as well turn completely around and see if I could make it back to Vask before the Metatron got back to trying to kill me.

  I managed with relative ease to make my way back to the great hollow room near the entrance (or was it more appropriate to say mouth?) of the Metatron, and from there it was another round tunnel to Vask.

  The warning signs began to appear before I could quite grasp what had happened. There was an odd smell, and a growing sound of squeaking and groaning. It was pitch black in the tunnel, but I could feel the floor was changing. It was taking my weight differently, and once I came into the light of the other room, I could see it was black and airy.

  But I wasn’t looking at the floor when I came out of the end of the tunnel. I was looking straight ahead. Gavreel was still, but Fex’s body was moving and changing. His skin had begun to crumble, and black ooze replaced his missing limbs. In fact, he was almost wholly unrecognizable. The edge of the right side of his face was still intact, but now it looked like a mask—his eye was slowly dissolving from one side, melting and changing like wet paper.

  Gavreel was still stuck, and didn’t seem aware of what was happening. The black matter from Fex had caught onto his legs, and I could see it travel up his veins and spread rapidly.

  The whole chamber had turned black, though it was still somehow illuminated. Was Midori safe? She was likely still susceptible to the disease, even if she was inhabiting a human corpse. But first I had to worry about Fex and Gavreel. If I didn’t hurry up and kill them, the whole Metatron would collapse. Or was it maybe too late?

  I realized I had been standing still for too long when I felt a layer of the black semisolid creep over my shoes. On impulse, I ran past the two dying angels and toward Midori’s chamber.

  The blackness was starting to spread here too but only gradually. The room of angels was not yet gone, but the first half of the room had already been infected. Many were only halfway turned, but these were small and weak angels, and the front line of them had already become carapaces. Weak ones, sure, but the moment I stepped past the threshold they began to gather and reform in the same way the shadows had back in the void lands—and indeed, they soon took the shape of a great black serpentlike thing. It had legs, tiny ones that were honestly more like thousands of little feet that emerged from the body’s ooze for a few seconds whenever it wanted to move. The results were a spectacular bit of animal locomotion and a dizzying impression that the carapace was always moving.

  But hey, I still had my bat, and I was in a hurry. I swung with all the force I could muster, aiming right for the head, and the head went flying. It reformed into a smaller ball of darkness, which crawled over to reform with the main body. A new head took its place.

  Right. Creatures with no form were no fun. And surely impossible to really kill. I focused more on speed then, but the bat was a pretty hefty weapon to rapidly attack with. Even as I broke the carapace apart, its pieces either reformed or began to gnaw at my feet. I had to knock the ones that came close back into the main body, rather unfortunately.

  The blackness of the walls was still moving—twisting and spreading with a sort of square and veinlike movement. In the second I took to scope Midori’s safety, the carapace slashed at me with its tail, and I fell to the ground. I reactively grabbed the back of my ankle and found it to be bleeding. It had been cut who knows how deep, but it certainly had been cut. And it hurt like hell. I probably wasn’t going to be able to stand up on my own, and certainly not
walk.

  The carapace circled me. From its depths a single yellow eye emerged to stare me down. And what seemed like minutes later, a large mouth that appeared to extend forever emerged too. Was it honestly going to eat me? How long did it take to suffocate again? A minute?

  That seemed like far too long of a time to suffer. I dug in my pocket for my lighter, and lit a flame after a few frantic tries. The carapace backed off right away, aware of fire’s potential damage. I still needed to kill it, but it had moved a couple feet back and was out of my floor-bound reach.

  I threw the lighter. The flame went out as it fell, which probably shouldn’t have been as much of a surprise as it was. I had spares, tons of them, so I dug another one out and crawled across the floor to try and get close enough to the carapace to burn it.

  The carapace was still worried about the flame of my lighter, and it simply moved back a little bit more. Frustrated and still losing a lot of blood, I decided enough was enough, and I lit the floor on fire.

  As someone currently bound to the floor, this was not a good or particularly clever move. Everything began to burn. The carapace disintegrated, but now I had the very real risk of burning to death. I crawled to the nearest not-on-fire section of wall and very uneasily got up on my one good foot. My other foot could not handle me putting any weight on it at all, and I hopped across the floor the best I could until I collapsed in front of Midori.

  Her little raised platform was not on fire, and she had also successfully escaped risk of infection. But she was still unconscious. I traced the back of her head with my hands, and found it freed from the Metatron. But she was still not breathing—though this may have just been because she was an angel. Her body was warm enough.

  I had no way to carry her out, though. In fact, if anything I would need her to help carry me out. But as the room burned behind us, she sat there, unmoving as a doll.