No food, no water, no exit from the city. He couldn't even find someone willing to help his crippled mother. He tried his best to get to a place where help would be provided, but they had set up checkpoints to keep folks like him inside the city and out of white neighbourhoods. They were stranded in a no man's land with reports of violence and rape reaching the ears of many. A large group of people set up camp on a highway near one of the checkpoints, hoping that the men guarding the road would eventually see reason. Remy carried his mother on his back and joined their number. They all thought that the government couldn't possibly let the suffering continue. Not in America. But Remy was starting to see things for the way they really were. They couldn’t sit back and rely on people from the outside world to do the right thing. He rounded up those that were able and went to fetch supplies for their group. If no one was going to take care of them, then they were going to take care of themselves. They hit the jackpot when they found a water truck, but the police and the media had branded them as looters and not people in need. Remy took a bullet to the shoulder getting that truck to the highway. The scar that formed on his shoulder when they pulled the bullet back out would forever be a reminder to him of how fast the world can turn to shit at any given moment.
His scar itched as he looked at the chaos that surrounded him years later. Smoke plumes billowed in the distance from buildings that had been set to torch, and yet the police were nowhere to be seen. Remy took their absence as a sign that some serious shit was about to go down. He put his thoughts towards his crippled mother and how he was going to get her out of the city and away from all of this. They had relatives in Austin, Texas. Maybe things would be better there. It couldn't be any worse.
Remy walked towards his house, and outside a man was getting shoved around by three others. The man rushed to break free of the circle but got punched hard in the face for even thinking of escape. He fell to the ground and then they were on him like a pack of jackals. All three of them punching and kicking with no sign of stopping. The man called out for help, but Remy turned his head and kept on walking. There was only one person he was interested in saving.
“Mom, where you at?” he said as he kicked open his front door. It was not his mother that answered.
“I shouldn't have trusted you.”
Remy instantly recognised the voice of Warren Cooper - the man who was with him when the angels made their first appearance. His heart sank at the sound of his words. Nothing good could come of him being here at a time like this. He looked to the side and saw that all his chickens were dead, murdered in their own cages.
“Show yourself, Voodoo King.”
Remy steeled himself against his emotions and took a confident step into the living room. He entered with a larger than life presence that he usually saved for his stage performances. Warren Cooper had a gun pointed at Remy, but the dramatic entrance made Warren back up a full step before he regained his composure. The gun shook in his very sweaty hand, and his eyes darted about the room as if he were expecting the very walls to open up and swallow him whole. Remy took a step towards Warren, and he responded by nervously jabbing the gun in Remy’s direction.
“Stay back.”
Remy stopped by his mother's wheelchair. It was empty.
“Warren Cooper, the man who wanted to buy silence. Why are you here? You got what you wanted. No one is talking about you now.”
“I should never have dealt in black magic. All this stuff that's happening, it's my fault. They told me so. I opened a door that should never have been opened. I need to make it right. I need to show the angels that I didn't mean to go against God. I am a good, decent, Christian man.”
Remy moved a step closer without Warren noticing.
“You have a very high opinion of yourself to think that you caused all this. You are just a man like any other.”
“You're wrong. They told me you'd lie. Devils like you always trick and deceive. Stay back!”
Remy had taken another step, but this one had been noticed. Remy was past caring.
“Where is my mother?”
Remy’s body was large, and his eyes were cold as he took another step forward.
“Another step and I'll shoot.”
Remy opened his coat and offered up his chest.
“The Loa protect me. You've seen what they can do. Your bullets will not hurt me.”
Panic set into the eyes of Warren Cooper. He really believed it. He almost fired the gun anyway, but Remy closed the last of the distance at a sprint and knocked him on his ass. Warren tossed his weapon to the side of the room and raised up his hands in surrender. Tears streamed down his cheeks as he pleaded for mercy.
“Please. Spare me. I don't want to die. I just want to make things right.”
“My mother?”
Warren visibly gulped, and it was all that Remy needed to know.
“Oh. I see.”
“I had to do it. They told me they'd forgive me. I'm so...”
Warren Cooper died mid-sentence as Remy unsheathed the serpent-headed rapier from his cane and stabbed the point of it right into Warren’s heart. Remy had never killed a man before. He stood there watching as Warren’s lifeless head lolled to the side. He died far too quickly for Remy's liking. He wished that he could bring him back and kill him again, but Warren, like all others, had only one life to give.
Remy looked in his mother's room and then his own, but there was no sign of his mother in either of them. That left only one room. Remy dropped the theatre act and felt his hand shake as he thought about what awaited him in that room. He wished that the chickens were still alive and clucking to distract him from the silence of his approach. On a held breath, he reached out and pushed. The door opened with a creak. His voice was a child's once more.
“Mom?”
It was her. What was left of her. Warren had stripped her naked and cut her open atop Remy’s island workbench. Her old and weathered breasts were sliced apart and flapped down into her armpits. Her chest cavity was a giant, gaping hole from which all organs had been removed. Her eyes had been gouged and in their former sockets burned two offering candles. The removed organs had remained in the room. Her eyes had been given to the altar of Papa Legba and her heart to Kalfu. Her lungs went to Ezili Dantor and her intestines to Loco. There was not a single altar in the room that did not have a blood offering. It was a sick affront to the practice of voodoo and everything it represented. Warren Cooper had died much too quickly indeed.
“Baron Samedi, lead my mother safe to the gates of Guinee and reunite her with her ancestors. Her time on this Earth has passed. For this, I offer all that I have.”
Remy knocked over every candle on every altar. The flames grew as they were fed the fuel of wood and cloth. Remy smashed his bottles of rum against the growing flames, and they rose ever higher. The orange light danced across the pain that was etched on his face.
“Everything that I have is yours. Take it!”
The flames spread quickly to the island where his mother rested. Spirits seemed to move in the shadows that travelled with the flames. He watched the fires rise up as if they were the hands of Baron Samedi himself. The flaming hands took Remy's mother into their embrace. She always believed in it more than he did, and perhaps that was enough to make it real.
“Goodbye, mom.”
Remy left before the flames took him as well, though they were not far behind him. He retrieved his blade from the heart of Warren Cooper and spat on his corpse. The only other thing that he took the time to rescue was his snake, Zombi. The rest was for the Loa to divide up as they saw fit.
Outside, Remy set Zombi down on the grass and watched a home that had survived the waters of Katrina die by the fires of Armageddon. An old childhood friend appeared at Remy's side. His name was Darnell Watson. He looked to the burning house and to the blood still dripping from Remy's blade.
“Remy? What's happening? Where's your mom?”
Remy continued to stare into the flam
es as he spoke. His eyes were wild and full of purpose. He couldn’t save his mother, but perhaps there were others that he could.
“Round up everyone that hasn't gone crazy and tell them to grab all the weapons they can find.”
“What are we gonna do?”
“We're gonna take back our city before it's too late. I'm not letting this happen again.”
Remy broke away from the burning house and marched towards the three men he had seen earlier. The man they had assaulted was dead at their feet, his head crushed. They laughed and joked about it like it wasn’t a thing of any consequence. Remy's first victim was mid-laugh when the blade was shoved through the back of his neck and out the front of his mouth. The other two fell just as quick as Remy became a blur of steel, stabbing left and right. As their bodies fell, he looked towards the heart of New Orleans and saw that there was work to do.
The crowd scurried out of the rear loading bay of the New Orleans Arena like rats, and Karina Katana was among their number. She focused all of her attention on staying upright as people pressed around her, panicked and frightened. Anyone who stumbled was certain to get trampled on and unlikely to survive. Karina's pursuers were easy to pick out of the crowd in their colourful wrestling attire. They tried to push past and get to her, but there were too many bodies between them. Once out of the arena's mouth, the crowd dispersed, and it was a chaotic mad dash in all directions.
Karina ran to put as much distance between herself and her pursuers as she possibly could before they emerged into the open air. Then she heard something that brought her great relief. The sound of many boots marching in unison. The police had arrived on the scene, and they were closing off the perimeter. All she had to do was make it that far, and she'd be safe. She saw them up ahead, dressed in full riot gear, and she picked up her pace. Many in front of her had the same idea. They all had dreams of salvation until the first volley was fired. The strangers in front of her fell like rag dolls as the bullets violently punched their way through flesh. Karina dropped to the floor to save herself as the police opened with a second volley.
“DO NOT RESIST!” a cop shouted over the loudspeaker. “STAY WHERE YOU ARE!”
People were screaming all around her. They scrambled away from the gunfire, crawling over the bodies of the fallen. Karina stayed on the ground and crawled on her belly. She grunted as one of the retreating people placed a heavy boot on her back. A second later she saw that same person take a bullet to the head and drop with his eyes facing towards her.
“DO NOT RESIST! STAY WHERE YOU ARE!”
She could hear the sound of their boots advancing once again. The sons of bitches had come to kill them all. With no escape route, Karina only had one option left available to her. Run and hide. She got up and ran as hard as she could back in the direction of the arena. The police thankfully did not fire. They were focused on tightening the perimeter that she was running further into. Soon there would be no place for anyone to run.
“There she is!”
A group of a dozen wrestlers all turned in unison and locked onto Karina. She blitzed past them and ran straight towards a production truck that was parked outside the arena. She ran up the steps that led inside and locked the door behind her. She was hyperventilating and desperately trying to get her breathing under control. It had just been one shock to the system after another with not a moment to process. She looked at the monitors inside the truck. Only minutes before they had been recording her match with Back Alley Sally, but minutes was all it took to dramatically change the image on the screen. The wrestling ring was a ruin of wood and steel. A man danced atop the debris, his face euphoric against a backdrop of the dead. Karina knew it to be the man who started it all. The one who threw the grenades like they were candy at a parade. He danced like a man who had accomplished his purpose in life.
The angel Uriel entered the shot and approached the man. He stopped dancing at the sight of the angel. Uriel embraced him and covered him with a hug of his giant, white wings. Uriel whispered something in the man's ear, and the man nodded with a distant, dreamy smile on his face. Uriel took a step back as the man took out the last of his grenades, pulled the pin, and waited. He lifted the grenade up to his own mouth and ate the explosion that followed. Karina jumped back, startled. Uriel turned towards the camera then, and she could feel herself being watched. He came forward with a casual grace until he was up close to the camera and his perfect face was all that she could see.
“You're going to die. You're all going to die.”
Karina screamed and put her fist through the monitor. There was no more Uriel after that. There was only the sound of gunshots in the distance and angry wrestlers outside the production truck door.
“I saw her go in there.”
She recognised the voice of Mike Hammer. The door of the production truck rattled suddenly as one of them tried the handle.
“It's locked.”
“Can you break it down?”
“No, but the Giant might be able to.”
“Hey, Giant. Get over here.”
“Mike, maybe we should just go. Those gunshots are getting pretty close.”
“The bitch killed Rex and Dora. Besides, Uriel told us to get this done. Do you want to disappoint an angel? Break it down, Giant.”
The Great Giant's ham fists beat down on the door hard. The door held, but Karina could make out fist-sized dents in its body. The Great Giant beat down again and again with increasing ferocity, but still the door held. Karina had travelled the country with these people, but now whatever hysteria had taken hold of the population had made them want to kill her. She cried silent tears as she thought about poor Lucy and what had happened to her. She remembered her own stepfather and the abuse that she had suffered at his hands. ‘You’re a good girl, aren’t you, Karina?’ he had whispered in her ear. No, she wasn’t a good girl. If good involved pleasing men such as these, then she’d much rather be bad. She’d much rather be a stone cold, painted bitch. She decided at that moment to give those bastards the fight of their life when they got through that door. If this was how things ended, then she was going to go out like a warrior.
“Hold it, Giant. Save your strength. I've got an idea. We're gonna smoke the bitch out.”
The men and women of the lower ninth advanced steadily into the heart of the city with weapons in hand. They had cleared every street along the way, acting as judge, jury, and executioner on the crazy people they came across. The more people they rescued from desperate situations, the more their numbers grew. The people they saved were grateful survivors of rapes, assaults, and attempted murders, and they were eager to join the fight so that they could stop being victims. The counter movement had officially begun as people sought to reclaim agency over their own lives. They took no prisoners. If a person in their path showed signs of violence, they were put down where they stood without a second thought. They would all murder their way back to sanity if that is what it took.
“Do you believe in the power of Jesus?” Remy asked as he put a shotgun to the head of a rapist.
“Of course,” said the rapist. “I know that he will forgive me.”
The blast of the shotgun was less forgiving.
“Do you carry out the will of the angels?” he asked of a child murderer.
“Fuck you.”
The murderer was murdered.
The mob rounded a corner and witnessed a terrified man trapped in his car as a thug beat down on the windshield with a baseball bat. They clipped the thug in the head while he was mid-swing and proceeded on their way. The man got out of his car and followed after the group without a word exchanged between them. Words were not necessary. Their purpose was contagious.
Further up ahead, a crazed man chased after an elderly woman with a fire axe as his weapon. He swung the axe at the woman and chopped her leg like wood for a fire. The axe embedded deep into her bone as she cried out in agony. He pulled the axe back out of her and looked to finish the job he started,
but he was promptly executed by the mob firing squad before he could carry out the task.
“I'm a doctor,” said an Asian woman as she took the wounded woman by the hand.
“What's your name, sweetie?”
The woman was trying to fight off her shock as she spoke in between deep gulps of breath.
“Beth... Beth Thompson.”
The doctor asked for someone to stay behind and assist in helping to get the bleeding under control. A blonde girl by the name of Nancy volunteered. The rest of the group pressed on to Bourbon Street where things were worst of all. That was okay though. Their guns were just getting warmed up.
Princess was going to get the fuck out of Louisiana. She didn't need a weather report to tell her which way the wind was blowing. There were just a few things she needed to sort out before skipping town. She entered Mister Sister for what she intended to be the last time and turned on the TV as she fixed herself a stiff drink. The television told a tale of horror that spanned the entire globe.
“The German defence minister says that there is nothing they can do to halt a Russian advance on Berlin. He advises anyone remaining in the area to evacuate immediately.”
The news anchor paused as some new information came into his earpiece. His jaw dropped momentarily before he regained his composure and addressed the nation with a sombre tone.
“The President is dead.”
Princess downed her drink in one gulp and quickly poured herself another.
Killing Angels Page 11