Two Songs This Archangel Sings

by George C. Chesbro

  “Easy, Mongo. You’ve lost a lot of blood. Start moving around too quickly, and you’ll pass out again.”

  “How long have I been out?”

  “A little more than an hour; you had a nice nap, but considering the shock to your system and the blood you’ve lost, it probably wasn’t long enough. The lights came back on about ten minutes after you fainted. I cleaned you up a little, and managed to stitch the wound.”

  “Jesus. With one hand, no less.”

  Veil shrugged, then wiggled the fingers of his right hand. “The arm may be in a cast, but I can still use the hand. Suturing is a little skill I picked up out of necessity during the war, when I had to tend to my own knitting, so to speak. I think I managed to clean out the wound pretty good with peroxide, and the sutures will keep it closed until we can get you to a plastic surgeon to have it done properly.”

  “I’m sure the sewing job you did is as good as I’m going to get anywhere.”

  “Wrong. You could end up with a nasty scar, and I can’t be sure there won’t be an infection. I poured a bottle of peroxide in there, but the rag you used to stanch the bleeding was covered with green paint; you looked like a Christmas decoration. As soon as I get some herbal tea down you, I’m going to drive you to a hospital emergency room.”

  “The wound bled a lot, right?”

  “Indeed.”

  “And the stitches you put in will hold until it heals?”

  “As long as you don’t do a lot of walking on your hands or opening doors with your head, they should.”

  “Good. I’ll pass on the trip to a hospital. I’m too old to worry about my looks, and a scar on my face is probably just what I need to put a good scare into my enemies.”

  “Mongo—”

  “I don’t want to have to answer a lot of questions, Veil,” I said seriously, “and that’s what will happen if I go to a hospital emergency room. I can’t very well claim I cut myself shaving. I can always claim I was slashed by a mugger, but then somebody’s going to want to get the police involved. Considering our somewhat complicated situation, I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

  “You could have a point.” Veil paused, grinned. “All those cute little co-eds who already think you’re so sexy will really go crazy with lust if you show up in class with a huge scar on your forehead. Then again, you may be asked to head up the school’s German dueling society.”

  “I’m not teaching any longer,” I said, trying and failing to keep the bitterness I felt out of my voice.

  Veil raised his eyebrows slightly. “No?”

  “You don’t know about it, but the university lined up with everyone else who tried to squash Garth and me while we were looking for you. Madison’s people got to both the police and the school. The NYPD suspended Garth, without pay, for supposedly aiding and abetting a criminal—me; Christ, they assigned him to tag along with me and then busted his ass for doing precisely that. The university took all my classes away from me and started making noises about taking away my tenure on the grounds of moral turpitude. Then they offered me a raise and the chairmanship of the department after it was all over. I told them to shove it, and I submitted my letter of resignation yesterday. I wanted nothing more to do with those people.”

  Veil studied me for a few moments, then slowly nodded his head, perhaps sensing that my aborted teaching career wasn’t something I felt like talking about. “I’m going to make you some of my super-duper herbal tea,” he said at last. “It will perk you right up.”

  “I’d rather have Scotch.”

  “Somehow, that doesn’t surprise me at all,” Veil said, walking away toward the entrance to the kitchen. “First, the tea.”

  “I feel like a Goddamn old lady,” I called out, slowly sitting up on the edge of the bed, then bracing myself with my hands and closing my eyes when the room started to tilt.

  “Why?” Veil called from the other side of the partition.

  “I don’t usually pass out so easily.”

  “Hey, my friend, when somebody bounces a shuriken off your forehead and you lose as much blood as you did, the only reasonable thing to do is pass out. Ask anybody. You’re lucky you have a thick skull. Incidentally, I’m sorry I wasn’t able to stop him from doing that. I should have kept a closer eye on him.”

  “You’re sorry you weren’t able to stop him?! I was the one with the gun, remember? By the way, that was some number you did on him. But why the hell didn’t you just bop him on the head with your nunchaku, or stick a knife between his ribs?”

  “You’d already put a bullet in his shoulder,” Veil replied dryly. “It didn’t seem quite sporting for me to use weapons.”

  “Sporting?!”

  Veil came back into the bedroom carrying a huge ceramic mug filled to the brim with a steaming, perfectly foul-smelling liquid. “Well, you’d been telling me what a bad-ass this guy was, and he obviously thought he was a bad-ass, along with his various employers. I was curious as to how he’d fight; I thought I might learn something.”

  At first I thought he had to be joking, but when I looked into his face I could see that he was serious. I shook my head in amazement. “Jesus Christ. I knew you were damn good, and I never doubted that you could beat Kitten, but I never imagined that anyone could have done it so easily. I think I’ll start calling you sir.”

  “Drink this,” Veil said, handing me the mug. “Watch it; it’s hot.”

  I sipped at the disgusting brown liquid, almost gagged. “What the hell is this stuff?!”

  “I told you; super-duper herbal tea. Mother Kendry’s magic healing potion.”

  “It tastes like you washed your socks and jock in it after our last workout.”

  “Drink it; all of it. It will make you feel better.”

  He was right about that. With Veil occasionally prodding me by raising my elbow, I drained off the mug. The throbbing in my forehead eased dramatically, the room no longer threatened to turn upside down on me, and I felt decidedly stronger, less groggy.

  “So,” I said as I set the empty mug down on the bed’s side table, “now we have to figure out what to do with our departed assassin.”

  Veil nodded as he sat down next to me on the bed and absently adjusted his sling, which he had changed. “If we call the police, they’re going to be all over the two of us; Kitten just doesn’t look like your average burglar, especially in this neighborhood.”

  “You got that right. If they identify him—or if they can’t identify him, which seems more likely—the cops are going to be leaning very heavily on us for explanations, which we can’t give. Shannon’s done his part, and we’re all home free at the moment; but it’s all over if anyone manages to make a link between that dead assassin and Orville Madison. If the cops check with Interpol, they’ll find out that Garth filed a request for information on a guy that turned out to be Henry Kitten. A lot of worms will come crawling out of a lot of cans.”

  “Worms,” Veil said, and smiled thinly. “You feel up to helping me with a little spring planting? I’ll reward you with a Scotch from your special reserve I keep under the kitchen counter.”

  We gained access to the alley, which was blocked off from the street at both ends by rusting chain-link fences, through a triple-bolted steel door in the basement of the gutted building. Clambering through a treacherous jungle of rubber tires, twisted shards of rusting metal, various unrecognizable objects, garbage, and a host of scurrying, dog-sized rats, we finally made our way to the mound of junk on which the broken body of Henry Kitten lay askew, leaking blood from all its orifices. Along the way I’d picked up half of a broken steel pole, with one jagged, splayed end. Veil kicked aside some soggy cardboard, and I began digging with my makeshift shovel in the soft, rotting earth which had been exposed.

  “Easy does it, Mongo,” Veil said as he leaned back against a tangled pile of lumber and steel. If he was the least bit concerned about having a corpse buried beneath the windows of a loft where he lived and worked, he certainly didn
’t show it. He’d assured me that it would be at least a hundred years before anyone found the remains of Henry Kitten, and—considering the neighborhood—nobody in the next century would give them a second thought. Our conversation-spiced spring planting expedition might have seemed a tad macabre to me if I hadn’t been so happy to be rid of Henry Kitten. “You don’t want to start that wound bleeding.”

  “Listen, pal, with that tea you gave me I feel like I could staff an entire gravediggers’ union by myself. What the hell is in that stuff? Cocaine?”

  “Just herbs. It’s a recipe I picked up in Laos, from the Hmong. Very good for whatever ails you. I’ll give you the recipe, if you’d like.”

  “No, thanks. I’m not sure I could handle it.”

  Veil selected a jagged wood stick from the pile he was leaning against, gripped it tightly in his left hand and began helping me dig. “How’s Garth?” he asked quietly.

  I paused in my digging, leaned on my pole, sighed, and shook my head. “No change from the way you saw him three days ago at Langley. He’s just … gone away. His eyes are open, but there’s no life in them; they look like dull marbles. He blinks, breathes, pisses down a tube into a bag, shits through another tube into another bag, gets fed through tubes in his nose, and doesn’t object to being massaged and rolled into another position four times in every twenty-four hours.”

  “EEG?”

  “Damn near normal, which is what’s so frustrating. Maybe I could accept the fact that my brother’s become a zombie if there were some sign of brain damage, but there isn’t. All of his organs seem to be functioning quite normally, considering the fact that he’s totally sedentary, but there’s nothing going on with him. He reminds me of the way I found your loft that night; all the lights are on, but there’s nobody home.”

  “Are you satisfied with his care?”

  “Lippitt says it’s the best, and I have no reason not to believe him. You know, the clinic is at Rockland Psychiatric Center, but it’s a secret Defense Intelligence Agency facility, staffed by their people and under their control. I don’t know enough about what’s required in Garth’s case to be in a position to evaluate the care, but all of the equipment looks like state-of-the-art, there are plenty of nurses who really seem to care running about most of the time, the food is good, and the rooms comfortable. There’s a shrink for every three patients. The place is run by a shrink named Charles Slycke, who doesn’t seem to care for me very much.”

  “What’s his problem?”

  “Beats me. I only met him this afternoon, before I headed down here, but I sensed a lot of hostility. Actually, I don’t give a shit what he thinks of me just as long as he sees that Garth gets the best care.”

  “I’m sorry, Mongo.”

  “Yeah; me too. It’s a bitch.”

  “Maybe if I’d handled things a little differently at the end, if I hadn’t put that gun down where he could reach it, he wouldn’t have snapped the way he did.”

  “Hell, you were surrendering to him,” I said, feeling bitterness well up in me. “How could you have known what was going on in his head? If anyone should have picked up on what was about to happen, it was me.”

  “Come on, Mongo. It’s not your fault.”

  “You say.”

  “Lippitt says. If you can’t trust the head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, who can you trust? He says Garth would have died if he hadn’t been taken off the case he was working on and assigned to tag along with you.”

  “He may have been trying to make me feel better.”

  “No. Lippitt wouldn’t do that, Mongo. That old man loves the two of you like sons; he loves you enough, and knows you well enough, not to lie to you.”

  “There’s more to it, Veil,” I said distantly as I suddenly heard ghosts from the past whispering, laughing, in my ear. “Something … very bad happened to Garth and me a few years ago.”

  “During the time when you disappeared for more than a year?”

  I swallowed hard, nodded. “It was a bad thing, Veil; body breaking, mind bending.”

  “So I gathered from some snippets of conversation between you and Lippitt I picked up,” Veil said carefully. “I take it Lippitt was involved.”

  “I can’t talk about it.”

  “Okay,” Veil said easily.

  And then, naturally, I began to talk about it. It was time. “It was an act of utter madness called Project Valhalla,” I murmured.

  Under the vacant, unseeing eyes of a dead ninja, I proceeded to tell Veil about Siegmund Loge, a Nobel-winning scientist, and his plan to save the human race, essentially by destroying it and turning our species into … something else. This quintessentially mad genius had constructed a mathematical model, the Triage Parabola, which had convinced him that humankind’s self-destruction, within a time parameter of twenty to three hundred years, was inevitable. We were doomed, because of a propensity to murderous tribalism and religious nonsense that Loge believed was embedded in our genes, to join the thousands of other species that had become extinct over the aeons since life had emerged on earth. Humankind was just one more evolutionary dead end.

  Loge’s solution, his plan to hoodwink Mother Nature, was to loose an epidemic that would affect every man, woman, and child on the face of the earth, playing havoc with the genetic code in human DNA and causing every member of our species to rapidly devolve to something resembling the primitive creatures our prehistoric forebears had been, in the hope—Loge’s word—that we could, over a few hundred thousand years, once again evolve into humans, but without the crippling psychological, intellectual, and moral cracks in the human psyche he considered fatal. There would certainly be no more large-scale wars, holy or unholy, since all the guns, tanks, and planes strewn over the planet would be nothing more than objects of curiosity to the creatures we would become, and it would be all we could do to learn once again, through the glacial crawl of millennia, how to manipulate sticks and stones.

  The Valhalla Project.

  He was a clever one, that Siegmund Loge, with a most curious fantasy. The problem was that he had the intellectual and technological capacity to make the nightmare a reality—if only he could find a way to iron out a few minor kinks that had developed along the way in his chemical formulations.

  Alas, the Frederickson brothers, with their decidedly mixed bag of genes, would turn out to be just what the doctor ordered, as it were.

  To lay the groundwork for this ultimate experiment in social engineering, Loge had masterfully exploited precisely those pockets of infection in the human spirit he deemed to be the genetically based time bombs that would eventually kill us all if not scraped out. Incredibly, there were individuals and groups all over the world who were helping him, in the remarkably naive—but predictable—belief that whatever it was he was up to would serve to make their particular group or religious faith supreme on earth. Loge had been not only a scientific genius, but a genius at collecting the unquestioning loyalty and aid of true believers all over the world. And it made no difference at all that each group of true believers believed something different about him. Indeed, the seemingly infinite capacity for individuals and groups to be religiously and politically manipulated was a point Loge went to great pains—both literally and figuratively, for both him and us—to make to Garth and me. Loge controlled the fanatical loyalty of dozens of religious communes circling the planet. Each commune was insulated from the others, and each had a radically different theology. The one belief they shared in common was that Siegmund Loge, whom they called Father, was the Messiah, or God incarnate.

  What they didn’t know was that they were to form the human seedbeds he would use initially to grow and then to spread the genetic holocaust he’d planned.

  But the persistent kinks remained, and he could not infect his commune members, his Children of Father, until he had worked out a proper formulation for the serum that was to be the principal agent of the epidemic.

  Garth and I had ended up with our systems f
illed with the stuff as the result of an attempt to kill us. Normally, an organism—animal or human—injected with the imperfect serum died a quick and horrible death as its cells, their genetic code hopelessly short-circuited and confused, almost literally “exploded,” resulting in a mass of melted flesh, feathers, scales, claws, fangs …

  But, for some reason, the serum “took” in Garth and me, and a slow, controlled process of devolution began taking place in our bodies. It was just what Loge had been looking to achieve, and thus we became human Petrie dishes, the “keys to Valhalla” Loge could use to solve his problems and launch his holocaust—if we could be caught, dissected, examined. We weren’t too eager to be dissected, but neither were we too enthusiastic about completing the transformation into whatever beasts we were slowly but inexorably changing into. He needed us to destroy the world, and we needed the knowledge in his head—or thought we did—to keep from being destroyed. For almost a year, until it came to a cataclysmic end in fire and ice in the Arctic, the Valhalla affair had threatened forever to alter not only the Fredericksons, but our entire species.

  It had been a real bummer—not least because the basic premise Loge had gleaned from his Triage Parabola and acted upon, that we were inevitably doomed to extinction within a relatively brief time, remained unrefuted. I was convinced that Garth, who had suffered the most, had never fully recovered from the horrors of Valhalla, and the thought persisted that Valhalla—perhaps residual effects from the serum combined with the poison he had ingested—could very well have something to do with his present condition.

  “Jesus Christ,” Veil said in a hollow voice when I finished.

  “Aside from the people who were involved, you’re the first person who knows anything about this. Lippitt feels there are serious national security considerations, and I agree with him. It’s hard to know how people would react.”