They waited for him. Spat curses with wry, mocking grins and cast phantom stones with unseen alacrity. Called him “bones.” “Flesh puppet.” “Toy.” The children on the playground cursed him too, called him “weirdo” and “freak”; made fun of the kid staring off at nothing. But the children’s words weren’t as creepy as those from the voices out of nowhere. No. The children who beat him black and blue were a blessing; the teachers could see their taunts, occasionally punishing the juvenile offenders who wronged him. At least for a while they did, until he just became known as the troublemaker and the altercations were shrugged off with the best of elementary school indifference.
Every day at recess the otherworldly torturers waited for him. Soon they came to know him by name, or at least by the names the children called him. Oh, how they delighted in his misery; seemed to lap it up with waiting lips, every breath that of anticipation for the coming tears. He cried. A lot, really.
Then the pretty one came, fluttered down with the aura of kindness from Heaven’s parting embrace, the clouds separating into two soft banks of velvety pillow plush. She landed before him and smiled the way his mother had before she took to the bottle and beat him as badly as the schoolyard savages. Leaning close, she peered at him with inquisitive eyes.
This was the most beautiful woman he’d ever laid eyes upon, with the curves of the models that splayed out in the pages of his father’s magazines and eyes of deep azure like the sky. Her teeth glimmered ivory beneath a quartz veneer, and her hair was flaxen silk, spun upon the looms of some distant dream.
She leaned closer and puckered two delicate lips, a quiet hush to her virtuous kiss. Instinctively he leaned in to return it, his heart thundering like a kettledrum, mouth dry and throat closed taut in mid-swallow. As fearful as he was, a strange rush of adrenaline thumped his foot feverishly upon the gravel below him. His leg spasmed and jerked. For a brief, wonderful second, he found Heaven, pressed between the lips of a tender, resplendent angel.
Then the rock hit him square in the back of his skull. “Look!” one of his classmates shouted. “Freak’s kissin’ the air!”
“It kiss good, freak?” another quickly followed. “You pretending to kiss your mommy?” Laughter, always the pervasive laughter. Then they beat him. Within an inch of his life. He could have sworn the whole time his angel was laughing the loudest, cackling harshly out of her sweet mouth.
It was his fault. Again. It was always his fault. That made it easier on the teachers and on the principal. Blame the bad kid, the one whose parents won’t kick up a fuss.
The Walker pulled the bullet away from his lips like a piece of rancorous meat, scowling as he shook the memories from his head. As long ago as it was, the sting of the rock still pained him, and the laughter echoed in his ears.
He sat up ever so slowly, keeping his head low so as not to alert the angel. Angels could sit upon a perch for hours, so there wasn’t much worry of his prey flying off before he turned around to tag it—as long as it didn’t see him. From his waist pocket he withdrew a small leather pouch and opened it. Dipping his fingers inside he pulled out a pinch of earth, taken from his shelter beneath Quixote Bridge, which he sprinkled over the bullet, whispering, “Walk not in the eyes of man, then fly not out of his sight. Bless this round that it indeed fly true and find its home this night. Not to an angel of god, but of one that’s been cast down, lest he continue out into darkness and haunt this sacred town. Amen.” Then he kissed the bullet once more before quietly loading it into the chamber of his rifle.
Rolling back over, the Walker took his position, rifle raised, his eye to the lens of the scope. The orange tip of the cigarette, now nearly to the filter, blazed from the shadowy roost like a tower beacon. He focused the crosshairs a foot below the embers and clenched tight the trigger.
The shot sounded very much like the first shots he’d taken, when he first dared strike out against his phantoms. Then he’d held the .45 caliber tight and squeezed off six shots at the taunting cherub. Each bullet should have found the angel’s chest, yet they passed through unhindered and instead took out chunks of the plaster in his bedroom. That, of course, was just before his parents threw him out for good, leaving him in the streets for the angels to taunt some more.
This time, however, his aim held true. From the distance he could see the burning remains of the cigarette topple end over end toward the street. There was a brief flutter, as if a thousand pigeons were trying to escape God’s wrath, and then a lonely shadow spun out from the darkness, racing the cigarette to the flickering lamplight below.
The angel won with a swift, face-first belly flop into the unforgiving pavement. It made no sound. Not to scream or cry or wail or beg. Not even as it met the sidewalk; just one hollow, silent fall into eternity. And no one wept; not a tear. Not even God.
Angels fell all the time, especially on the more hellish nights when the Walker would see two or three of them cascade down from the heavens, stripped of their status and grace, to wail for hours in the darkness. He had taken to putting these out of their misery as soon as they arrived. It was quite simple, really; they almost always fell to their knees and begged for hours before giving up, never paying attention to who might be standing behind them and not yet adept enough to know the sound of a rifle chambering a round.
One less child tormented. That was his motto; and he spoke it quietly on hushed breath the moment he saw the angel bite the pavement. It was part of his ritual. But not the end.
With a flurry of movement, the Walker was up and wrapping his rifle in the blanket he’d lain upon, crouching as he scrambled across the rooftop to the staircase back down. With his rifle concealed beneath the blanket, he secured it to his back in a makeshift leather and twine holster before quietly tiptoeing through the door and back down the steps to the street.
This always seemed to be the longest, most torturous part. He’d had angels who’d survived before, who waited patiently below to strike. He never showed any pity for those wounded creatures, but beat them mercilessly until the job was done.
The street teemed with shadows, as if they were watching him, a lynching party ready to feast on human flesh, to gorge themselves on a hunter’s pride. The Walker steadied himself, feeling the reassuring heft of the sacred dagger he kept strapped to the back of his leg. He rounded the corner to find the body twisted up in itself, a postmodern sculpture of flesh and ink-black fluids, no breath on its lips, no life in its eyes. He nodded to himself in grim satisfaction. This was a good, clean kill.
There it lay peacefully, draped in dirtied white robes, a small black bloodstain in the center of its back and its hair pinned into a roguish ponytail. Its skin was fragile porcelain, delicate and spider-webbed with bluish cracks just beneath the surface. The angel’s lifeless eyes peered into the dark abyss, wondering why his Lord had forsaken him.
Eager to finish the ritual, the Walker leapt upon the back of the corpse, placing his heavy black boot upon the small of its back and grabbing firm in each hand a large, feathery wing. He cried out, pulling as hard as he could, the sound of slowly tearing flesh whispering before there came the powerful snap of bone and rip of tendons. The Walker raised the wings in victory, a black blood oozing down the feathers toward his hands as he offered them up into the light of the streetlamp.
In that moment of triumph, the Walker knew for certain that God was watching.
Then he cast the wings aside, flinging them in opposite directions. In his right hand he still held a single plucked feather, the edges ratty and tattered. He smiled, slid it carefully into his jacket, and walked slowly north along the street, leaving the corpse to dissolve into a milky black muck from which the morning pigeons would feed.
There was a quiet peace to the night, and his lover, the city, spun lazily beneath the orange haze of a pollution-shrouded sky, holding him in her cold arms once more. The traffic was light and he knew that the sun would soon peek over the horizon to once again illuminate his wife’s glaring imperfe
ctions. But there was no sadness, no regret in his long walk home. He had triumphed once more for the sake of the children, for childhood, for his childhood. One by one he would rid the night of its monsters. This purging had become his destiny, his life’s work, and there was no sorrow in that. Only the satisfaction of a job well done.
Then, a few blocks beyond the kill, came the familiar flutter of a host of mighty angels’ wings, beating in anger against the crosswinds of the skyscrapers. The Walker looked up with little trepidation, smiling a cynical, confident grin. The angels cried out in despondent voices of ire, thick bass to their tone and sharp wit to their words, but the Walker only shook his head and turned to meet them, not a trace of fear looming in his bloodshot eyes. “Not tonight, boys,” he said with a hint of arrogance. Then he flung open his coat to reveal a plush white lining—hundreds, maybe thousands of feathers neatly tucked together into a velvet bosom within the jacket. “My coat’s warm enough. But don’t fret, your time will come. There are millions of children that need saving. Millions.”
And if ever those angels felt fear it was at that moment, before with distant looks of apprehension, they stormed off back into the night, weeping bitter tears for their fallen brother. “Fucking angels,” he muttered to himself as he tied his coat back in place.
Then he continued his long slow trek back to his quiet little box beneath Quixote Bridge to sleep off another day’s dreams, waiting once more to make love to his city at night and keep safe another child’s dreams from the silent tyranny of fallen angels.
Hell Creek
Sixty-five million years ago the creeping death came like ghosts in the night sky. Comets like stars with smears for tails. Thousands of them appearing all at once, the spirits of some ancient brontosaurus herd migrating from one side of the sky to the other. For weeks they loomed, every night growing ever larger, the smears swelling into brushstrokes, the brushstrokes swelling into rivers, until at last they arrived. And when the creeping death came down to earth, it came with the fire and the fury and the thunder and the anger and the might and the wind and the lightning and the rumble and the roar of a hundred thousand storms at once. The spirits were angry. They streaked down, their tails glowing as bright as the sun, growing puffy and black and as long as the sky itself. And when they slammed headlong into the sea, they glowed brighter still, raining hell from the other side of the world.
Chaos. The whole world fell into chaos. Heat blasted the land, so that beasts boiled inside their skins. Dust storms rent flesh from bones. Molten rock pelted down from the heavens. The earth shook so violently that every upright living thing was knocked clean on its side. Tsunamis three hundred meters high carved new mountains, then dragged millions of limp, broken creatures back out to sea. But that wasn’t the worst of it. That was just the announcement, the preamble, a brutal wiping out of generations before settling in to wipe out the rest.
Shards of a forgotten world—long since spun out of its orbit, frozen and fractured—slammed into the ocean, vaporizing instantly, with millions of tons of water, vast eruptions of steam thrust into the atmosphere, the sea boiling, belching out a million tons of angry hate. While the days that followed were a nightmare only a handful of beasts would survive, it would be neither the heat nor the fire nor the stone nor the quakes nor the poison gas nor the volcanic eruptions that would ultimately do them in. It would be something far, far worse. Because once the earth had settled and the seas receded and the skies stopped spewing fire, the rains came. And those rains brought with them the end of the world. The creeping death.
Triceratops was hungry. Starving. But she dared not leave the safety of her cave. Not yet. She could still hear the crackling of the searing forest fires burning away acres of food just outside. The air was cooler in here, fresher in here. And she wouldn’t be burned alive. Not like the others. She tried not to think about them. Her herd had been small but kind, and she didn’t want to think about how she last saw them, their eyes wide, their legs scrambling for footing before the side of the hill shifted, sending them plummeting down into the fires below. The sound of their screams still lingered in her thoughts. They deserved better than that.
She’d seen quetzalcoatlus—the giant pterodactyl scavengers of the sky—fall from the air, flailing their charred black wings pockmarked by burning debris. Their shrill screams were mighty, but at least they died instantly, splattering against the ground. They weren’t roasted, writhing, begging her to help them up. That was the truly awful part.
At first the thunder was far off, sporadic rumbles trailing into the cave. But the sound grew. The tremors sharpened. The bellows deepened. And it was clear that this wasn’t a storm of the earth, but an even more terrible one of the sky.
By the time the rains reached the cave, the thunder shook its walls, reverberated through the ground, blasted and cracked with a tumultuous echo. It had never rained so hard in all her life. The skies were scrubbing clean the earth of all the hate that had preceded it. It wanted to wash away the fires, smooth out the hillsides, fill in the rough new gaps with rivers and ponds. The sound was deafening, the rain’s abrasive static almost as loud as its thunder. Water pooled at the base of the upward slope into the yawning maw of the cave, growing at a rate that worried Triceratops, who feared she might soon become trapped in its narrow throat.
She poked her head down the passage, out toward the light, sniffing. Nothing coming. She shuffled closer, nearing the opening. It was dark out. Not night dark, but darker than she’d ever seen a storm. The clouds above swelled black and pendulous, the rain so thick it softened into a fog and she could see little past the mouth of the cave.
There was only one thing of which she could be certain—the fires were out.
Now she waited again, this time for the storm to pass. There was no telling how long it would take. So she settled down, curling into a ball in the far back corner of her shelter, falling into a shallow, troubled, nightmare-ridden sleep.
Horns thrashing, orange and purple flesh broiling a deep black in the smoky pits below—the smell of cooking meat wafting upward. Hollow, shrill screams. Help! Help! Help! The kinds of cries heard only from unfortunate prey, still breathing, braying, feasted upon by larger beasts.
Herds walking through fire, millions of them, flesh dripping from their corpses, their bellies hollowed out, carbonized skeletons shambling through smoke. Trees burned like matches, smoldering slowly from the tops down.
Thunder cracked so loud that everything shook, knocking loose dirt and rock from the ceiling, walls. Triceratops shivered, still trembling from the dream, wrestling to sleep against the crisp images that lingered. No sooner had her eyes closed than she was . . .
. . . once again in the fields, grazing on tall grasses and sweet, minty leaves. Her herd surrounded her, back from the dead, delighting in the fruit and greenery of the wide-open expanse. It was safe here. Could see for a mile out. Nowhere to sneak up from. Always a place to run; several more places to hold your ground, standing with the herd. Safety was a rarity out here, but they’d found it.
The flash. Brightening the sky, blinding to look at, lighting the whole world like it had emerged from the blackest cave into the noonday sun. Couldn’t see anything more than a smudge of green and white, but she could hear the herd flailing and stamping, feel the fear washing over them. A second flash.
Lightning, so close that it lit the inside of the cave. There hadn’t been a second flash. It was only the storm, the cave still snarling with the sound of its thunder. The rain still pounded, lightning flickering through the insides of the clouds. It seemed that this would never end.
She listened. And waited.
And then the rain thinned. The static became a staccato; then the staccato became a patter. Soon it stopped entirely, ending with a faint, listless drizzle evaporating into nothing.
The storm had finally rained itself out.
She staggered to the mouth of the cave, dropping her head into the largest puddle, lapping up the fr
esh rainwater. It was sweet, refreshing. But her stomach groaned, sloshing, empty, aching for something solid.
The rain had chased away the fires, but not the smoky, charred odor of ruin. There was no food on the air. She daydreamed of blossoming trees, their honeyed leaves calling to her, her stomach growling vociferously now, loud enough that other animals, had any been nearby, could hear it.
She took a tender, careful step out of the cave, pawing at the earth a few times to make sure it wasn’t too slick to bear her weight. Then another awkward step. Then another. Soon she was completely out of the cave, treading on soft, muddy, but stable ground.
Triceratops made her way down the hill, then moved quickly to the smoldering tree line, the forest so thick with lingering smoke that she couldn’t see more than a few lengths in front of her. But she didn’t stop, her feet still carrying her forward, pressing on through the forest, her ravenous hunger drawing her ever deeper in search of something to eat.
She walked for nearly a mile before finally arriving at a large, blooming copse of ripe fern trees, their leaves glistening, drooping low with the weight of rainwater. While patches of forest around them had burned, this little thicket remained untouched, a feast that could last her days if nothing else found them.
She bit off the lowest leaf, chewing and swallowing quickly, barely able to savor it. There was little doubt in her mind that this was the greatest meal of her life. Hungrily she attacked the tree, tearing away leaf after leaf until her stomach finally began to relax, her pace becoming more leisurely.
This was a meal. Triceratops thought of the others and wished she could share it with them, and it was only then that it really began to sink in that they were gone. She would never see them again. She had no herd. She was alone.
We Are Where the Nightmares Go and Other Stories Page 7