Ambriel sat down beside me on the rock and draped an arm around my shoulder. I stubbed out my cigarette and stared at my feet until she took my face in my hands and pivoted my head to look upon her.
“You are a good man, Reaper,” she said with a degree of warmth and compassion I clearly didn’t deserve. “It was one of the last things I said to you in life. What you did for me then, what you’re doing for Charlotte now; this is what makes you good. You could walk away but you don’t.”
I raised a finger. “Yeah, but I’m not a man in the true sense of the word. I’m more or less a body snatcher with dark powers that I don’t entirely understand, you know? And when I met you, well, everything changed. I fell in love with you. You died because I screwed up. I let my guard down and couldn’t protect you and —”
Ambriel pulled my head against her breast and gently ran her fingers through my hair. I listened closely thinking that I’d hear a heartbeat and instead, all I could hear was the gentle hum of Holy power that flowed through the angel’s body.
“I fell in love with you too, Reaper,” she admitted. “You showed me kindness that I’d never encountered before. You didn’t want anything from me and you were there when I needed someone. I still do love you very much. Do you understand?”
I pulled away and gazed into her emerald eyes. I nodded and said, “But you aren’t in love with me and even if you were, you’re an angel and I’m an idiot. So, there’s that.”
She took the gun out of my hand and placed it in my shoulder holster, smiling warmly the entire time. She stood up and took both of my hand in hers; brushing the centre of my palms with her thumbs. “You are not an idiot. I know that you are hurting inside. I know that you blame yourself for my death at the hands of Jael. You have to move past that now, Reaper. Your job is to protect Charlotte. It’s still early days for me and I am learning the ropes as I go, but I want you to know that you are blameless in my death. I am here for you and will always be here for you. Do you understand?”
I nodded sharply as my throat began to tighten up and a burning sensation started to build in the back of my eyes. “I miss you so much,” I said in a broken voice. “But you’re right. I need to focus and what I need more than anything is to know why Charlotte can do the things that she does. She can see the base code of everything that ever happened or will happen. She can make people disappear just by touching them. I’m starting to think she might be an angel herself, you know? Maybe one of your kind got angelically knocked-up and then deposited a newborn baby angel on her late mother’s doorstep.”
Ambriel snickered. “That’s not how it works. New guard angels are just beings like me. Former humans who are rewarded for their deeds in life, though I’m not entirely sure what deeds I did to be rewarded myself. The old guard ones, though, they can be problematic.”
“Old guard?”
“The ones that have been there since the beginning,” she said in a near whisper. “The ones that attacked you when I came rolling in to rescue you? They were old guard.”
A gust of wind rolled across the lake and against my back. Icy fingers brushed against the back of my neck and I could feel my skin prickling. “I don’t know anything about old or new guard angels, but there is a hell of a lot of weird ass shit happening in the Halls of the Holy. First Jael and Sariel and the whole thing about wiping out humanity and reuniting with the Fallen. Now we’ve got old guard angels trying to whack an eight-year-old kid because she’s some kind of threat. At least with them arseholes down below, you expect this kind of bullshit but from Heaven?”
She nodded. “There is factionalization among many old guard. We new guard angels simply do as we are told by the creator. I don’t entirely understand the politics of Heaven but I’m glad that I am a divine creature on God’s good side. I could have wound up in the other place.”
I glanced at my watch. Sunlight filtered through the trees and cast long shadows across a landscape that had received a light dusting of snow that would likely melt by midday. I took a deep breath of clean, fresh air and then exhaled slowly. “Ambriel,” I said with a note of dread in my voice. “You know that He is coming in less than two days, right? Is He coming with an army of your kind to wipe everybody out or is this just a visit to his great science project known as mankind?”
“What are you on about, Reaper?” asked Ambriel with a look of disbelief on her face.
“The big guy is coming. That’s what Charlotte told me and, as mentioned, she sees everything. Unfortunately, she won’t tell me anything more than that. You wouldn’t happen to know why He is coming, would you? And while you’re at it, you wouldn’t happen to know why the old guard wants this kid dead?”
Ambriel dropped my hands and they flopped at my side. She took a few steps back and unfurled her wings. The look of disbelief I’d seen on her face only a few seconds ago dissolved into one of sharp-edged fear and that took me by surprise because angels weren’t supposed to be afraid of a damned thing.
“I don’t know why Charlotte thinks that He is returning to Earth anytime soon, but everything He does is cloaked in mystery. If He were coming back it would be in accordance with prophecy. The Son is supposed to make the return, not the Father.”
I raised a hand. “Wait … aren’t they one and the same?”
Ambriel started to flap her wings. Her feet lifted off the ground as Holy light shrouded her visage and she took to the skies.
“I must talk to the new guard. Something isn’t right and if old guard angels are trying to kill Charlotte and she’s telling you that He is coming to Earth … I have to go. I will contact you when I learn more. Protect Charlotte at all costs!”
And with that, Ambriel disappeared from sight. I turned around and started heading back toward the girl’s dorm; my head swimming with emotions at having opened up to Ambriel about my feelings combined with the cold realization that her abrupt departure meant there was a real possibility of very bad things happening to the world of man.
Soon.
15
I arrived back at the girl’s dorm on edge. The Man with the Big White Beard was coming and Ambriel was so surprised at the news she headed back to the Halls of the Holy awfully bloody fast. I have never been to heaven or Valhalla or whatever reward one gets for living a righteous and proper life. For all I know, Heaven is either a celestial cloud city or it could simply be just a big warehouse where they store the souls of people who weren’t massive shits during life. I’ve never seen God, never heard the guy speak. I’ve never read any of His stuff because the bible wasn’t written by Him. Since the beginning, I was just a cog in a big machine called life and death. I didn’t think. I didn’t know. I didn’t care to know because for me, for all reapers, our existence didn’t require thought. Everything changed for me when I began to question the nature of death and particularly the matter of fairness.
It wasn’t fair that destructive assholes who used their wives as punching bags got to live the good life right up until their end while their wives suffered. And if that wife was, for example, an atheist, she would wind up heading to Tartarus alongside her arsehole husband for all eternity. How fucking fair is that, right? And what bothered me most was when I had to claim children’s souls. If anyone is innocent, it is children. I’d claimed thousands of children since the very beginning and over time, I questioned why death should come to those so young at all? In my mind, that too wasn’t fair.
And it wasn’t fair that an eight-year-old little girl who could see everything that ever was or will be was wearing a big sign on her back inviting all comers to kill her because of the knowledge she possessed.
I walked in the dorm to see Sparks and Charlotte playing video games on Sparks’ smartphone. The sounds of police sirens and rapid-fire gunshots blasted out of the tiny electronic device along with screeching tires and no shortage of four-letter words.
“Wow,” I said, deliberately channelling my almighty reserves of snark. “The cop is playing a video game where you steal
cars and shoot people. That’s totally not a good example for Charlotte, Sparks.”
“Whatever,” she said. “This game is awesome. You can actually go around and rob convenience stores. And the cops are stupid. They just chase you and shoot at you but there’s no investigative stuff. This game is all about the bad guys and right now I’m having fun playing the bad guy. Charlotte’s pretty kickass with a shotgun too. We’re taking turns.”
I arched my eyebrows and padded over to the common area where the pair were playing. I dropped onto a plush leather armchair and said, “Wait a minute, kid. You told me earlier that you don’t know anything about shotguns.”
“Duh, this is a game, Mister R.,” she said while her hands swiped and tapped away at the screen “It’s not real.”
“Can’t argue with that logic,” I reckoned. “How long now unto He shows up? I want to synchronize my watch.”
Charlotte paused the game. She handed the phone back to Sparks and slipped on her pair of gloves. She grabbed my hand and led me back to the wall where Sparks had stapled sheet after sheet of paper to create a writing surface big enough for the girl’s formula.
I stood next to her and gaped for a moment at what she’d produced. Instead of complex mathematical formula, the entire wall was covered from floor to ceiling with hundreds and hundreds of sentences. I leaned closer and read aloud:
“Dear God: Please let my dog get better from his cancer. He’s my best friend. If you can cure him I will make sure I don’t do any jokes at Sunday School … what’s this?”
“Keep reading, Mister R.,” she said.
I ran a finger along the left side of the canvas, slightly amazed by the neatness of the girl’s penmanship. “Help me stop drinking, Lord. Please, God, I want to stop drinking. I don’t want to lose my family.”
Sparks strode up beside me and read aloud. “Dear Lord, I don’t know how I am going to make it. I am so alone now. I feel so very alone. I know it’s a sin to end my life. Please, God, help me. I am so lonely. Nobody understands. Please, God, help me. Please.”
Each notation was a prayer to God. Every last one of them was a little bit sad, a little bit tragic or had an edge of despair to them.
“These are in my head sometimes,” said Charlotte. “Like hearing voices from the TV when the cable goes out. I can hear people’s prayers and I don’t know if God gets them because I hear them so I just write them all down as they come in. Then I take a picture of them with my Mom’s phone only now she’s dead and I can’t do that anymore.”
“What were you planning to do with the pictures on her phone?” asked Sparks
Charlotte scratched the side of her face and then ran her hand through her hair. “I don’t really know,” she said as she gazed at all of the prayers. “I thought it might be cool to just post them to a Tumblr or Instagram or something. A secret place to post secret prayers.”
A sceptic might have called bullshit and said the girl has schizophrenia because each prayer was attached to a mysterious voice, but Sparks and I knew better. Charlotte seemed to be linked to The Man with the Big White Beard somehow.
See, this is the problem with gods. They’re invisible. They don’t fit the modern world’s science-based view of things. Since the beginning, human beings have worshipped gods. It didn’t matter if it was a Judeo-Christian god or an Egyptian Sun god or the many Roman gods which existed throughout their empire. Actually, the Romans got the whole god thing right: whenever they defeated an enemy and added their territory to the empire, they let those people carry on with their religious traditions. So long as the Emperor was venerated, people could worship in any way they damned well pleased.
The Romans had it right.
I decided it would be a long two and a half days until the big guy showed up. Yes, it was true that we were holed up in a bible camp and there were protective wards carved into the wood of each building. We had satellite television and video games. There was a ton of food in the mess hall either on shelves or in the freezer. I should have felt at least a tiny bit relaxed after machine gun-toting priests and artillery dropping angels, but I wasn’t. It’s not like I can switch off my internal vigilance mode at the drop of a coin. I’m always keeping my eyes and ears open for threats whether supernatural or human contrived.
“Charlotte,” I said as I ran a hand through my blonde hair. I noticed it was greasy and then I realized I couldn’t remember the last time I had a shower. “I can’t imagine how you’re able to handle all this stuff happening inside your head. Prayers … that’s amazing. Maybe you have some unknown psychic abilities that allow you to connect with the spiritual plane. That’s my hunch anyway.”
And an interesting thing happened. Charlotte flashed me a toothy grin and cracked a joke. “Spiritual plane? It’s like an airline for people who have died.”
“Except nobody has any luggage to lose,” Sparks said, throwing in her two cents. “Is there hot water in this place yet?”
I glanced at my watch; more than an hour and a half had passed since I got the boiler going and I could hear the tick tick tick of the baseboard radiators. The dorm was even a bit toasty inside. “Yeah, everything should be good to go now. Maybe you can take the kid to the shower and you both can get cleaned up. I’ll keep watch out here and then I’ll shower after you both are done.”
Sparks and Charlotte looked at each other and shrugged. “Sounds good to me, Mister R.,” said Charlotte.
And with that, the pair headed to the showers as I strolled over to the front door and stepped outside for a cigarette. I gazed around the camp, it was a pretty enough place. Nestled in a forest clearing overlooking one of the multitudes of lakes that dot the map along the south shore. It wasn’t the most defensible place I’d ever visited; of particular concern was the fact there were no high points on the property that would give a person a view of what might be coming. I spotted something black and shiny in one of the trees overlooking the mess hall.
“Security camera?” I said to myself as I walked the fifty or so feet to the tree. I gazed up and saw that it was indeed a closed circuit security camera. “Well, now I’ve got something to do for the rest of the day.”
Of course, Barbie Ross had security cameras all over the place and that meant there had to be a bank of security monitors somewhere nearby. I glanced over at the administration building and decided that would absolutely be the place for them, so I strolled over, feeling particularly pleased with myself. I slipped key after key into the deadbolt until I found the right one. I unlocked the door and stepped inside to find a large white board with activities and dates written in neat columns. Another column looked to be a shift schedule for this past summer’s staff. There were a collection of desks and then a short hallway at the back of the building.
It didn’t take me long to find the security monitors. There were eight of them with a label on top of each blank screen identifying the location for the camera.
“Hmmm … Lake, Girl’s Dorm, Boy’s Dorm, Admin Building, Front Gate, Mess, Utility and Sports Field. I need to get some power going here,” I said to nobody in particular.
I knew the camp was running off a municipal power supply as I saw the lines running adjacent to red shale roadway on the way in from the highway. I was ready to bet the contents of my wallet there would be a circuit panel for the entire camp in the utility building; a Quonset that was behind the administration building. I decided I’d go there next and get some juice going because I wanted the camp well lit and every security camera functioning before nightfall. Weird ass shit happens when the dark rolls on in. I wouldn’t have been surprised if some of it made its way to the Life Anchor Bible Camp.
I left the administration building and headed over to the utility Quonset. It took a minute to get the right key but the deadbolt unlocked with a snap and I stepped inside to see a dark room filled with canoes, swimming paraphernalia, a softball kit inside a large canvas bag, bases, badminton nets, rackets and shuttlecocks. There were tents and cots and coo
lers for camping out. Backpacks and life jackets. Bug spray and sunscreen. In the back of the Quonset, I spotted the circuit panel. I walked the length of the building and saw the main breaker switch was in the on position but all the breakers save for the mess hall were off. I switched all the power back on and instantly there was light inside the utility building.
I headed back to the administration building and saw the security monitors were all up and running. I allowed myself a satisfied smile because now I could camp out inside the administration building and keep watch for anything that might be coming our way. With a little luck, all that I would see on any of the screens would be the occasional white-tailed deer as opposed to really bad evil shit from the pits of you-know-where. On the plus side, if we wound up getting attacked again, at least I knew there was a large canvas bag full of aluminium softball bats back in the utility building we could use to bash them in the heads with.
Hopefully, it wouldn’t come to that.
I snooped around the administration building for a few minutes now that I had lights. It was a pretty generic affair inside. A small group of desks. A large bookcase filled with Bibles and hymnals. Posters of Barbie talking to white Jesus while a throng of children gathered around the pair. Again, Barbie was dressed to kill and Jesus was wearing a white robe and sandals. Nothing out of the ordinary save for some rodent droppings on the dusty floor.
I went back to the girl’s dorm to bask in the glow of being the provider of electricity. Sparks and Charlotte were both seated on the leather loungers playing their video game again; both were wearing towels on their heads.
“Hey, hey … I got us some electricity,” I said, turning on the television. “We’ve got power by the hour. Plus there are security cameras and monitors so I think we should all consider moving over to the administration building to sleep there.”
Sparks looked up. “That’s where the monitors are, right?”
The Girl On Victoria Road: A Tim Reaper Novel Page 14