And then they laughed—Rain and Salvation. And Salvation let go of Jump’s arm.
They all closed their eyes because—sunshields or not—when Rain laughed nothing could protect you from her white light.
When the two of them quit clucking and chuckling, an awkward silence filled the stillness of the pit and the fiery lake. Jump stared at them.
Rain spoke first, “So, either of you care to tell me why I come down here and find this place abandoned … on a judgment night, no less? Now, I must warn you, it is no coincidence that this is the first time I have been to the lake in … years.” And she looked at Salvation and winked. “I like what you have done with it. At least you are making some progress.”
“I like it the way it is,” Jump said. “No need to change what ain’t broke.”
Rain looked at Jump again. It was the second time he had surprised her since she had arrived. “Not a single profanity,” she said. And then she looked at Salvation, straight-faced. “Maybe you can change—”
“Fury is missing,” Jump blurted. He was tired of the game. “And she’s got a whole pack a little purgatories with her. Now, unless you are down here to help us find her, you might wanna just let us get to it.”
They all paused at that. It wasn’t uncommon for archangels to take matters into their own hands—use their own interpretation, their own judgment when carrying out the Word. But there were no judgments, no orders to carry out in either of the two Hells—or down in the new garden, for that matter. Fury was training new archangels of the second Heaven and that duty didn’t require leaving the lake.
“I see,” Rain said.
“See what?” said Jump.
Rain had a touch of disgust in her voice when she spoke. “Well,” she said, “it’s no wonder you two aren’t running around down here with your plumage pulled back. All alone, empty nest, with no one to care if you are—”
“Oh my God,” Salvation said. Blasphemous, forbidden word or not… “I can’t—I’m not going to be able to deal with that.”
Rain frowned at Salvation. “Careful, Mother. I shouldn’t have to remind you—language.” And she looked at Jump. “One good thing I guess I learned from you, Father.”
“Damn straight on that,” Jump said. “Revolutions, little girl. Every last one of them started with words.”
“A lesson many have paid dearly for us to learn,” Rain said. She turned back to Salvation. “Wouldn’t you agree?”
Salvation hung her head a little. “Yes,” she said. She herself had paid the price—burned to ashes at the Battle of the Books at the end of the last eternity. “Forgive me, I—I…” This far into her daughter’s eternity, she really had no excuse.
Jump rolled his eyes. “Relax,” he said to them both, “she and her little buddy are locked in their little honeymoon suite, fu—”
“Jump!” Salvation shouted. She tried not to make eye contact with Rain when she raised her eyebrows at him.
Rain stared at both of them with a blank face.
Jump got the message. “I’ll talk to her,” he said. “Give it a rest.”
“Please,” Rain said. “I am not as naive as you may think.” As the one responsible for the fate of billions, making her mother squirm was one of the truly enjoyable activities she had left. “And you two, armored up and angry war faces on both of you,” she said. “I hope that’s not what it’s like.”
“Oh, no-no-no,” said Salvation. “I just—I can’t.”
And now Jump and Rain had a good laugh.
Once Rain and Jump stopped laughing at her, and Salvation quit picturing her little angel “growing up,” she said, “No more … please. We have to find them and I don’t have any idea where to start.”
“Okay, okay,” Jump clucked and chuckled himself back to serious. Then he faked like he was wiping a little tear out of the corner of his eye—the time for real tears was long past. Then he thought about it for a second. “Maybe she’s got them in the arena … or destroying the dungeons, playing master and slave or some other messed up—”
“It seems to me,” Rain interrupted her father. She knew their “talk” was coming soon enough, and she knew that he would give her the truth of how it all worked. The more important truth was, she had a truth of her own to tell, but right now there was a foul smell in the air. She could taste the seeds of revolt—it wasn’t the first time—and she had spent enough hours with Fury to know that her friend would go looking for trouble when she was bored. As soon as Rain had felt it, she knew who needed to go investigate and clean it up.
Whatever flaws her father had, Jump had no match in his ability to extract the truth from an unwilling conspirator. Rain wondered how he did it, but she instinctively knew never to ask.
She continued, “I was just thinking, that whenever my rules are being broken… Any time the Word of this eternity is being challenged, it is usually by the author of the book from the last one who’s behind it. And that’s usually at her evil master’s ‘request.’ ”
“Ohhh … shit,” Salvation said.
“Dammit,” Jump said to Rain, “you should have smoked those two when you had the chance. Punished them once and for all the eternities.”
“Sometimes…” Rain said.
Jump and Salvation watched as Rain turned and fluttered toward the entrance to the portal up to Heaven.
Rain continued to talk as she slowly flew toward the exit, “…it is much better to let someone live with their own failure … than to end their suffering for them. And sometimes”—Rain paused, stopped floating away and turned around toward Jump—“sometimes it is better to let people discover the truth on their own. To learn for themselves. And maybe, just maybe, they will come away more enlightened for the experience.”
As Rain disappeared through the portal, the truth of why Fury was missing … went with her.
Jump looked at Salvation. “Was she talking about me?” He turned back toward the portal. “Or her?”
“She’s so old,” said Salvation. “I just can’t believe—”
“You think she’s already…?” Jump said.
“I try not to think about it.”
— LXXV —
ONCE I’M DONE preaching to my little purgatories, I look down at the bag of blood PA that I just knocked to the bottom of this alley. What the hell was a Protection agent doing in here? I think. Last time, I just ducked into this garbage alley and then Tessa and—
“What did you do?” and I know that voice for sure. Brianna, pretty much my best friend, runs up next to me. “Holy shit, Em!” she yells at me. She barely stops running before she bumps into me. She’s got her own Betty-boots on and she’s panting like crazy, sweating down the front of her shirt. Brie sweats, totally sexy, but it makes her blonde hair look like shit. “Oh, bitch,” she says. It’s like her favorite word. “You have motherfucked us.” One of her other favorites, mine too, I guess. And she nudges the guy a little with her toe, making sure he’s dead. But I’m telling you, he’s dead. I can smell it.
Let me tell you little rookies something, the first time you see a dead one… Let’s just say there’s no prepping you for that.
First time you see a messy sack of bones that used to be a living Man-monkey, the only thing you’ll care about is ripping out its soul so you can get back to warm yourself by the fire with your friends. Because listening to grandpa Jump tell you some more of his warrior stories is way better than cleaning up Man-monkey guts.
Yeah, maybe you do know that, but when you—but like, after this, I don’t know if I even wanna be back here. Anyways, Man-monkeys tend to freak out about death, so just be careful—they’re unpredictable cocksuckers.
When Tessa runs into me, I almost trip over the Protection brute’s body. “Tess?” I say to her. It’s still a little weird to be back here. I don’t know how long it’s been since we’ve all been gone, but seeing Tessa makes the last eternity feel like yesterday.
“Glad you squeaked out, too,” I say to her.
“Now come on, we gotta ditch.”
“Why’d you…?” Tessa says. “You condemned him?” She always asks like, totally obvious shit.
And I’m back in the garden with a bang. Two best friends and in deep shit faster than I was prepared for. My return isn’t quite the way I planned it, so run we do. Out the other end of the alley and down a side street and then like, out into the crowded sidewalks. Then we start walking—just three little rich bitches, strolling and rolling with the citizens. Nothing to see here.
As we walk, I’m calmer than I would’ve been back as me—ten billion judged and executed souls since the last eternity—
What? … Okay, okay, three billion, but mine were harder. How many souls have you brought back from an eternity? … Uh-huh, that’s what I thought.
My fuzzy math aside, it’s hard for me to get worked up about one rookie Protection agent. Tessa, on the other hand—freaking. Part of the job, purgies. Better get used to that.
But for sure, if Tessa doesn’t stop wigging, we are getting caught. I forgot how she was on the Cancun trip. And she’s grabbing my arm and her eyes are flitting around, looking for more Protection agents. I know they aren’t coming.
How? This close to my dad’s office scraper… Even pumped up PAs don’t want to mess around with his building. That’s real security in there, not PA pussies.
I never noticed it—guess I should have—but it’s raining. Seattle, go figure. It’s totally weird though. I know I lived in it before, but I can hardly remember what rain on my skin feels like, and I shiver and goosebumps raise up all over me. And I don’t remember exactly what that means, but it’s not good.
All I can remember is that Hell is hot, and Rain… You know, she told me that she never liked the Seattle drizzle either. So now, Heaven is pretty much like the Phoenix Quarter in the summer, too—sunshine and saints and sinners, all blazing hot. I miss home already.
And the three of us are almost to the big automatic portals that twist open into my father’s building—King and Tamanos Enterprises’ Headquarters. K&T, the makers of pretty much everything … good and bad. I eavesdropped on daddy Frank and my mother enough to know that there’s more credits to be made off the bad stuff.
Looking back… Hell, being back here is weird enough—the past or in my mind—but knowing what I know about my father and knowing what he did … I don’t think the ass-kicking I gave him at the Battle of the Books was enough. In fact, I know it wasn’t. And that’s the main reason I’m—
I watch as Brie goes down without a sound, falling in slow motion in front of me, clutching at her neck. And blood spurts from between her fingers from the bullet hole in her throat.
I know she’s been shot, because a split second later, Tessa and I hear it—BOOM!
And Tessa grabs my arm and she looks at me with wild eyes and yells, “Run!”
Then we both sprint as fast as we can toward the portal into the K&T scraper and I get there first, but Tessa slams into my back like a brick, and I hear another loud boom as we crash through the glass door and into the lobby, rolling over each other through flying shards of glass. Then I feel the hot blood on me. No clue if it’s mine or hers or both.
And what the…? Like, I got no idea what the hell’s happening, but I roll and jump up as fast as I can, because whatever it is… This never happened! I think. Then I yell down at Tessa, “Get up, bitch! We gotta get the—” But when I reach down to grab her by the hand, I pull her arm up and it’s not attached to her anymore. And I look down and she’s bleeding out faster than anyone is going to save her. I’ve seen that before. And I drop her arm.
Tessa screams and I look into her eyes, and then they roll back and she starts flopping on the floor. Blood is spraying everywhere—all over the light-blue industrial carpet. And I jump down on her and try to pin her down and put my hand over her shoulder, but like, a severed arm?
Blood sprays me in the face and she screams again and says, “My… Get my arm, Em. I want my arm. Don’t let me…”
And then she slumps over and she’s gone, and then the lobby goes nuts. There are screaming bitches everywhere—men, women, dudes in black.
“Motherfucker,” I say to myself, because those are the building’s security sentries, overtrained and contracted from Protection to guard … who knows what my father has in the basement of this scraper, but that’s where they all come from—the door to the basement.
And now there’s a half-dozen of them racing at me—guns up and plastic body armor clacking against itself as they run. I’m not getting away from them, so I spin, preparing to release. It’s pure instinct, I know, and in another life—a different eternity—I would have loosed a few hundred fire-feathers at them and cut them all to pieces. Probably wasted a bunch of stupid, citizen gawkers in the process. But now’s not then and like, nothing happens. Because my wings are camouflaged—tucked hard next to my spine—they’re not going anywhere.
I guess I look pretty stupid, like a pirouetting ballerina, spinning around on top of her friend’s blood in the middle of the lobby. But I’m no angel today, and now I’m—
A split second later, they are all on top of me, yelling and swinging billy clubs at me and shit. And there were actually only five of them—one of them’s a chick. You believe that? But it feels like a dozen as they pummel the angelshit right out of me.
And I can feel my bones breaking and I’m screaming and they are yelling and then everything just kinda mutes and slows down. And then none of it hurts anymore and I can feel my face scraping back and forth across the lobby’s industrial carpet and I’m staring across the light-blue floor at Tessa’s eyes and she blinks. She’s still alive? And then I see her mouth my name with bloody lips. And then she closes her eyes and goes limp, and blood runs out of the corner of her mouth.
I hear my skull crunch and then the brightest star I’ve ever seen—brighter than beautiful Rain—flashes all around me. The last thought I have, Rain help me! Then I’m out, black, nothing. Nothing but the song—
With wings and stings we angels poke,
With fire and fury and black smoke.
We dream of things that most don’t,
Because some can’t and some won’t.
— LXXVI —
FRANK KING STARED through the one-way glass in the observation room adjacent to Protection interrogation cell #2, deep beneath his company’s research facility—the scraper he code-named Genesis.
His daughter’s unconscious body—soon to be corpse if he didn’t figure something out—sat slumped, facing across the room at the dark half of the cell, seated in one of the two stainless steel chairs that every interrogation cell had. The spotlight above little Mercedes’ head cast a shadow around the legs of the chair … and her legs, strapped to them.
Frank glanced down at the freshly cleaned, stainless steel grate on the drain in the middle of the cell, under the table. The concrete floor sloped down from the edges of the room, forming a slightly sunken, cone-shaped bottom to an otherwise rounded room. The drain was still wet from the previous occupant and a tiny puddle of blood mixed with water hovered around the holes in the cover.
The stainless steel table in the middle of the room was oval-shaped and the legs were metal tubes. In fact, there wasn’t a single edge in the room that a protectant could injure themselves on. Because inflicting bodily harm on a protectant was the sole responsibility of the two-man teams from Protection’s interrogation squad.
Interrogators were hard men in their twenties. Men who had their consciences brain-scrubbed out of them so they wouldn’t get in the way of extracting … anything they were told to. They would beat, bend over, and butcher anyone and everyone who ended up on the wrong side of the room’s observation glass. The incentive, of course, was an “all orifices open” policy that Protection gave them as long as they produced results. They could extract or inject anything they needed, from or into a protectant to get answers. The consequences for failure were well known.
Fran
k still had a part of him that wanted to rush in and free his daughter from the tape that was the only thing stopping her body from falling out of the chair and onto the floor. That’s the drugs, he thought. And he would know—his company invented them.
It wasn’t that Frank harbored some sense of bond or duty toward his only daughter, it was more that he was indignant that someone would dare remand something that belonged to him.
The chivalrous parts of Frank died a long time ago. The parts left now knew there were far bigger, more lucrative things at stake. “What happened?” he asked the Protection Agent In Charge standing next to him.
The PAIC pointed his black, glove-covered finger at the glass. “She and two other females stole some Protection issue armor from a contraband shop we were tracking in the Black Market. When the market owner tried to stop them, one of them assaulted him and then they all fled.
“We tried to get her quietly, unfortunately a pedestrian compliance agent was in a garbage alley, relieving himself, and when she ran in there… We were planning to pick her up at the PA’s precinct, but she—”
“No…” Frank said.
“She martial-lawed him up pretty badly,” said the PAIC, “before she crushed his trachea and left him condemned in the alley.” The agent paused, letting the consequences sink in. “Any idea where she would get that kind of training?”
Frank was silent. There was no need to talk about what they both already knew. Credits bought protection … from Protection, the cut-loose from accountability, brutal state agency that was responsible for securing “Peace and Prosperity” … at all costs, financial or freedom.
The rich knew that the “prosperity” part really meant commerce, and that was mandatory. Anyone in the way of that… The “Peace” part was an all-too-commonly forgotten option, secured with violent compliance. Goods needed to flow, one way or another. That’s why the State allowed Protection to look the other way at the Black Markets. In truth, the “mike’s” were some of the most efficient ways to “Pacify the Populace”—keep the citizens just below revolt.
TF- C - 00.00 - THE FALLEN Dark Fantasy Series: A Dark Dystopian Fantasy (Books 1 - 3) Page 29