The man had been judged, executed, torn apart and burned to ash, and if Rain hadn’t shown up, they would have annihilated him for all the eternities, too.
But the last Jump had heard of him, Rain had pardoned him and the “old cocksucker,” as Fury liked to call him, was safely tucked in Heaven with the rest of the self-righteous hypocrites on the mountain. He could barely remember the last time he saw the man.
Jump took a half step forward. “What’s he doing fluttering around down here?”
Jump had moved in front of her, so Salvation had to take a step to the side in order to see the fluttering father again. Something wasn’t right. She whispered to Jump, “He came out of the—”
“Hey, father!” Jump yelled across the arena at him. His voice boomed a little too loudly and the sound echoed off the grandstands on the other side.
They both watched as the figure jerked to a stop and hovered in place, looking all around the arena for the voice that probably just scared the shit out of him.
Salvation eased up next to Jump and, she didn’t know why, but she continued to whisper, “A bit jumpy, don’t you think.”
Jump closed his eyes and lowered his head a little. Salvation had always had a bit of a “featherbrained” sense of humor, even in life. “Oh, that’s just pathetic,” he said, clucking a little. “You are no good at that. You know that, right?”
“What?” she said. Then she frowned at him. “No-no, I mean he is—he’s acting funny.”
“He’s a priest,” Jump said, “and a nutbag. You know what they do to them in there.” Of course it was blasphemy to belittle the author of the book that started the revolution in Hell, but he knew Salvation wasn’t ratting him. He might take an ass-chewing later. At worst, he’d get the cold wing for a night or two. But benevolent god for a daughter or sweet salvation for a wife aside, he’d say what he wanted, deal with the consequences later—it was kind of a motto.
Jump turned his head toward Salvation so he could enjoy the look of disgust on her face. “Of course he’s acting funny. They probably let him out of his straitjacket so he could go find a little purgie to pump.”
Jump was reckless, and a brute of a warrior as archangels went. Salvation knew that. She had witnessed it too many times.
Most hounds in the new Hell learned their lessons well—pain was a wonderful teacher. But Jump… Over and over again, he was so much like a big anvil that she could beat her head against until her feathers bled and he still wouldn’t listen. So it was no surprise to her that he did nothing when she yelled, “Shields!”
Jump watched Salvation spin around, slam both of her wings together behind her back, and crouch down so fast… The first thought that flashed through his mind was that she was having some kind of PTSD reaction to being back in the arena where she was killed. “Battle-beak,” he’d heard more seasoned archangels call it, because instead of slowly bobbing your head like a pigeon before a big fight, a scared-shitless angel would slam on his shield and nod his head like they were having a seizure.
Jump looked down at Salvation’s shining shield. He could just make out little golden specks of light in its reflection. “What are you…?” And it looked like the little specks were getting bigger. He turned back to look toward the father again. “Shit!”
It wasn’t hard for him to recognize the gold streaks, rocketing across the arena at them. Kill ten billion souls in the garden—he had seen a lot of tracer rounds in his “career” as a Man-monkey, not to mention fire-feathers in his new job—flaming, ballistic quills, rocketing across battlefields like shooting stars of death, cutting assholes and angels to pieces.
He spun just as the first feathers clanged against Salvation’s armor. Jump slammed his huge wings together a split second too late and a bright gold fire-feather pierced into his back and started melting into his steel plumage. And the searing pain shot up his spine and he yelled, “Motherfucker!” It was his favorite pain “killer.”
“Get down!” Salvation yelled at him. “You’re going to get shot!”
“I am shot!” Jump yelled. “Get that thing outta—aaaah! It’s burning.”
Salvation jumped up and straddled her man’s back, shielding him from the rest of the volley of feathers.
With a searing spike sticking out of him, Jump’s wings couldn’t fit together to make his protective shield. But the firefight—ambush was more like it—was over faster than it started. Whoever it was stopped as fast as they started firing.
That couldn’t have been the father, Salvation thought. There weren’t many fire-feathers—a dozen, maybe, twenty at most. Considering an archangel could fire hundreds of flight feathers with a single combat spin, Salvation knew they were lucky.
She looked across the arena in front of her. The feathers that missed them were busy burning bright gold holes into the grandstands. When she was sure there weren’t more on the way—couple of seconds maybe, because she still had to get the burning one out of Jump’s back—she stood up and spread her wings hard. The burning quills stuck in her shield, splintered and sparked and fell to the ground.
Then she spun fast and loosed a couple hundred of her own feathers back toward where the golden streaks started. She watched her own grey-streaking feathers fly across the arena and embed in the grandstands. Then they burned down to sparks. There was no sound. She zoomed in and looked around. Whoever fired at them was already gone.
Salvation reached down and, without a word from her or a whimper from Jump, ripped the burning gold spike out of his lower back.
“Goddammit!” Jump yelled. Then he felt the hot liquid oozing down his back. “Fucking molasses.”
Salvation threw the spike to the ground and then plucked out one of her own flight feathers and began to heat it up to a bright red glow. Another feather from behind it—like shark’s teeth—filled the gap in her wing back in.
Jump screeched in pain. “You gotta burn—aaah!”
Salvation pressed her red hot feather onto the wound in Jump’s lower back. It burned and seared and smoked like the branding iron they used on the whores and whoremongers during judgment. Then she pulled it off. “Stay still,” she said, because squirming around caused scars.
Jump had plenty of battle-brands. He screeched and grimaced and stood up and said, “That”—his face contorted in pain. He reached behind him, trying to rub it—“is gonna leave a fucking mark.”
As long as he was cussing and bitching, Salvation never feared for her husband’s life. It was when he stopped that things were serious. She looked across the arena at the portal entrance to the dungeons. “What was he doing in…?”
“Blind bastard was shooting at us,” Jump said. He tried to bend over, but it pulled at the feathers and freshly-melted flesh on his lower back, and he screeched. “I’m gonna kill him!”
— LXXXI —
FRANK KING LEANED back in the big leather chair in his executive office, and then he crossed his feet on top of his huge glass desk. He looked out the window.
The forty-eighth floor of K&T’s downtown scraper, Genesis, overlooked most of the city. On any day that the fog didn’t drown it in gray mist, that is. Today was one of those days where he couldn’t even see the old granite sanatorium right across the street.
He looked at his wave tablet, flat on the glass desktop by his feet. And he waited for the call that would tell him the deal was solid.
One thing Frank learned early on in his career, synthesizing highly lucrative drugs in the K&T research and development department, was that if he wanted to speed up the time to market—avoid all the red tape and rigmarole of State compliance bribes and bellyaching, not to mention the humanitarian assholes gumming him up with picketing and paperwork—he needed to move all of the human trials … to Mexico.
That had worked like a charm for a long time. Mexico had so many impoverished “citizens” that there was no shortage of uneducated, starving farmhands who would volunteer to get injected to keep their overblown Catholic families in b
eans and babies for another month.
But when one of his “investigational” drugs resulted in a few hundred permanently “drunk” Mexicans, wandering the streets blathering, and pissing blood on anything and everything in their path, until they finally ran out and just keeled over and shriveled up on the side of the street… Well, even starvation seemed better than becoming the equivalent of a mindless zombie with no bladder control—it got real hard to find local volunteers south of the border.
So K&T had contracted with the Mexican Protection agency’s interrogation division to help them “Procure Investigational Trial Subjects,” the secret internal memoranda stated. The cost was minimal and pretty standard for a waste-world “handshake” contract—a couple of villas in Spain, three Masari sports-guzzlers, and one G12 private aircraft. Tiny drops in the multibillion-credit bucket of blood money that K&T would make after a successful human trial.
The hardest things about the negotiations were the personal “tokens” that the Mexican agents wanted in exchange for their corrupt cooperation. Most of them had a taste for supermodels and wavestars, which weren’t a problem, because those people were used to the game.
Throw enough credits at a person whose depth was that of the average Seattle rain puddle, and they would do just about anything. Hell, Frank knew they would do anything. He paid and “tested” all of them before he put them on his corporate jet and flew them to their new “gig” in Cancun.
Sure, some of them got roughed up—a couple of them pretty badly—but credits trumped crying … in any world he knew. Unfortunately, a few of the “corrupt cocksuckers,” as Frank liked to refer to his new business partners when he came home to bang Babette, had more “juvenile” tastes.
International wave … International wave … International wave…
Frank pulled his feet off of his desk and leaned forward in his chair. He looked at his wave-tablet and said, “Identify.”
Identity unknown … International wave … International wave…
Frank frowned. His geek IT pukes could figure out whether a call was domestic or not, but the State still controlled most of the technology that made identifying International wave ID’s possible. And he knew State had too many international “friends” to give up that techno. The list of dictators that they didn’t want anyone to know they were friendly with was huge.
Regardless, checking was just a habit—deciding whether he wanted to take a call or not—but he already knew who was on the other end of this wave. “Accept,” Frank said. Then he picked up his little transparent wave tablet, held it up to his ear, and put his feet back on his desk. He held the tablet with his shoulder while he reached his hand down the front of his slacks and adjusted himself.
The voice on the other end sounded angry. English, Spanish, or incoherent gibberish, angry was angry.
Frank pulled his feet down and sat up in his chair. He spoke into his tablet, “Whoa-whoa, slow down. What do you mean, unusable?”
He listened while a low-level Mexican Protection agent with a piss-poor understanding of English tried to explain how one of the two girls Frank sent to Cancun for his boss, had become “unusable” in his translation.
“How in the…?” Frank spoke into his phone. Then he thought about it. “Wait, which one?” he asked. If it was… There would be no end to his wife’s wailing.
Frank understood only one word of the response—“chichis.” He knew which one that was. He breathed a little easier—Babette’s bitching avoided—though it hardly solved the business problem.
Then the agent was speaking some bullshit, back and forth between English and Spanish, and Frank started to get pissed. Normally, he would have had one of his supermodels in training—one of the ones who had made the trip to Cancun before and picked up a little Spanish along with her case of crabs—interpret for him. But he wouldn’t risk that on this “transaction.”
“What the Christ is ‘juicio’?” Frank asked. “No-no, I don’t care what it is. No, listen—stop talking, dammit! Two? What the—I already sent you two! I just saw them on the tablet not more than thirty minutes ago. They were both fine. So if one of them got “unusable,” that on you.”
There was a long pause, and then some more broken English mixed with Spanish, but the request was clear.
“Oh no,” Frank spoke at his tablet. Bleating wavestars and babbling bimbos was one thing, but ferrying more minors south of the border? The paperwork was insane, and the credits to get a minor without a passport or an immunization history…? This one had been expensive enough.
Two extra off-the-books private flights, a full battery of immunizations, not to mention the syringes, a Mexican villa complete with catered party, and the expensive bottle of Tuaca he gave the one with the tits, after he made her “thank” him for paying for her flight. What was her name? he thought. Tess-something?
She was one of the new members of his daughter’s pussy posse. It would’ve been cheaper to contract a Protection team to go down there and kill the son of a bitch he had to deal with. “Tell that—tell your jeffy or hefe, or whatever, I’m not sending any ‘uno mas’ nothing. Nada, you hear me. Nunca—no mas chicas. Use what you got.” Then Frank pulled his wave tablet away from his ear and spoke at it angrily, “Terminate.” Then he threw it at his desk, and it spun across the top of the slick glass surface and then it arced in slow motion, off the other side before it disappeared over the edge. “God dammit!” he shouted.
— LXXXII —
WHEN I WAKE up this—like, I don’t even remember going out. And I’m groggy and everything is pitch black and it’s hard to breathe. Feels like I’m suffocating or choking or something. I need air.
And there’s something on my head and face and I try to move, but my arms and legs are tied down … to something. A chair, maybe? Because I can feel that I’m sitting down. Then I remember. “Tess?” I whisper. Nothing… “Tessa,” I say it a little louder.
There’s a little crying behind me and then a voice whispers back, “Em, you have to be quiet.” And then Brie is whimpering behind me, and it sounds like she’s trying not to, and she’s just—I can feel the fear. “Please, please, please!”
And that is not Brie’s normal voice. I’m a little freaked out myself, because this whole resurrection thing is going totally shitty. I can’t control a bit of it. “I’m trying,” I whisper at her. “What’s happening? Where’s Tess?”
And then Brie just starts crying. “I don’t know, I don’t—they took her body … somewhere.”
I struggle against whatever I’m strapped to this chair with, but I’m going nowhere.
“Don’t do that,” Brie whispers. “I—I tried to—”
“Where are we?” I whisper again, trying to turn my head behind me. “I can’t see.”
“Please,” she’s trying to whisper, but now it’s more like hissing, “I don’t want them to come ba—”
We both hear the laugh at the same time. And we both go dead silent, because it’s like, whoever it is, is right in front of me. Then someone yanks my head and pulls at my hair. And whatever was on my head comes off and some of my hair rips out with it. “Ow!” I yell, and then I squint my eyes at the light. “You bast—”
SMACK! Then the voice says, “Surprise, señorita!”
The sting across my cheek is nothing compared to how bad my ears hurt when Brie starts screaming behind me. And it’s a hideous, terrifying screech and she barely pauses to catch her breath before the next high-pitched wail starts.
And one of the men—there’s another one behind the one in front of me—Protection agents from the Mike? He starts laughing at Brie. And he walks across the room and past me and I shut my eyes, because I just don’t want to see it. SMACK!
And Brie’s still screaming, but mixed with crying now, and—SMACK! And he’s still laughing at her.
“Stop it!” I yell at him. “You’re hurting—you bastard!”
And I can tell that Brie is trying to stop crying, but she’s gett
ing close to hysterical, alternating screaming and whimpering. And he just won’t stop. SMACK! … SMACK! … SMACK! Every time Brie makes a sound, the guy hits her.
And the other one moves closer to me and he laughs, too.
I look at him. His unshaven, sweaty face smiles on its way down toward my head. “Get away from me, motherfucker!”
He leans down and his mouth is right in front of my face. I can see the spittle in the corners of his lips, and the gold fillings on his two front teeth, and the leftover lunch between them and it’s just sick smelling. His breath is nasty when he speaks, “Your little friend…” he says. His English is shitty—he’s never left Mexico. “…she like to doing the screaming.”
Then I start whimpering and shaking and I bounce up and down in my chair, because I just wish Brie would pass out so she didn’t have to get hit anymore. And I look and the room is big and—but it just feels like the ceiling is caving in and the walls are going to crush me. And stomach acid rises up in my throat and it stings and I cough.
And—SMACK! The sound comes from behind me again. And I just don’t know how Brie is not passed out, but at least she’s quit crying, and now she’s down to a little whimper. And I hear her spit, and then she struggles to say, “God please … please don’t…”
I can almost taste the sweat on the motherfucker’s face when he speaks again, “Es bueno, you know,” he says. His breath feels hot on my face. “Because, Donato … he like to doing the hitting. Sometime, I think…” And he stands up in front of me and looks over my head and he laughs and then I hear the one behind me—Donato? He laughs too.
And then I try to be quiet and not move or say anything, because at least he’s not hitting Brie anymore.
Then the one standing up in front of me pushes himself at my face and I think I see something moving underneath his pants, pushing on the outside of his zipper, like it’s trying to get out. Don’t let it get out, I think. Then he says, “I think he like to do the hitting … better than the fucking. Eh, amigo?” And he laughs and spit sprays down on my forehead. I close my eyes and think about praying, but for what? To who? I don’t know.
TF- C - 00.00 - THE FALLEN Dark Fantasy Series: A Dark Dystopian Fantasy (Books 1 - 3) Page 33