And Brie starts crying again and I wince, waiting for “Donato” to slap her some more.
But the filthy dogs laugh at each other and the one in front of me has his crotch right in my face and—
What did you say? … Oh, that’s just nasty. “Bite him in the dick?” … Like, that’s what you got? … Uh, huh… Stupid … little … bitches.
So let me ask you something, geniuses. What are you going to do about the fact that you are strapped to a chair, huh? And there’s another guy with him? And who knows what other assholes are outside, so—eh, you aren’t learning anything down here. I can’t believe I brought you.
What? Well, if I was an angel, sure that would work. A lot of things would work, wouldn’t they? I would probably already be talons deep in this stinky bitch’s guts, watching him scream while I caw and cackle at his buddy and beat him senseless. Yes, Bravo!
However… Now, do you remember what grandpa Jump told all of you about what comes after that word? … You’re right. So you should know that today, I’m not an all-powerful archangel at all, and here comes the truth.
International wave … Incoming wave … Incoming wave…
“Accept!” I shout it without even thinking. SMACK! I take a slap to my face. I taste the coppery metal of blood in my mouth, and I work my jaw and I spit, but trust me, my mother’s hit me a few times and the bitch can swing, so my ear’s ringing, sure, but my wits aren’t beat out of me yet. “Help-help-help!” I yell behind me.
And I think Brie gets it, because she starts screaming, too, “Help us! Help us! Please help us!”
I don’t think Donato and his breath-stinking, gold-toothed buddy know what to do, because they don’t hit either one of us.
And I can hear the voice on the other end of the phone, yelling and crackling, but I can’t understand it and I don’t recognize it either. But I don’t care who it is, and I yell again, “Holo!”
And the room lights up with a little blue glow from the 3D projection of my wave tablet. But it’s behind me on Brie’s side of the cell, so I can’t see who it is.
Brie screams, “Bab—Mrs. King, help us!”
SMACK! And after that, Brie doesn’t say another word.
“Oh my God, Oh my God!” and that’s my mom’s voice on the holograph, “Brie? Brie!”
Blue light flashes around the room—one of them has my wave tablet. And they struggle with it—probably never even seen one before. And I can hear them yelling at each other in Spanish. And then they are yelling at my tablet.
“Mom!” I yell. And I know where we are. I’ve been in plenty of the minimum ones, but never like this. “We’re in a Protection cell in Cancun and Tessa’s dead.”
I barely notice the gold-toothed one coming back, before a bright star shoots through my head and I scream at the top of my lungs and then another blinding light. And then everything goes dark.
Yes … of course she’s dead. There was a stainless gurney in that room with us, and the only look I got at her—she wasn’t moving, I’ll tell you that. What? … No! … She’s better off. Because why? … I don’t—really, you’re gonna ask me that? … Because she got raped, too, that’s why. I already know that. Tessa couldn’t have lived after that.
Calm down, calm down. Listen, it’s going to be okay. If Salvation can handle—I’ll be okay. Look, I’m not going to lie to you, Man-monkeys are some twisted bitches. Maybe some of you squeamish—you might not want to watch this next part. I already know what happens, it’s pretty bad. Nothing compared to what comes after, though.
RAPE
— LXXXIII —
THE DRIVE TO her husband’s office scraper downtown was horrible. Babette listened to the thunder from drone strikes and then the sirens went off. And all kinds of crazy citizens were jamming up the roads.
She had to hold her little pistol on her driver at one point and tell her, “Drive on the sidewalk if you have to, but you better get us around it.”
“What about them?” the girl had asked. “There’s citizens everywhere.”
Babette knew that the tall, blonde twentysomething was just another one of her husband’s concubine spies. She would just as soon have shot the girl in the head and driven herself, but Babette was in a hurry. Anyway, she knew the girl had skills. She was a trained “VIP tactical security pilot,” Frank had told her when Babette complained about her husband’s slutty new driver. Soon after the girl showed up, Babette decided that if her husband was going to screw anyone he wanted, then she would, too.
“What citizens,” Babette had said to her. It hadn’t been a question, and she knew the girl clipped at least one unlucky pedestrian as they sped down the sidewalks.
Citizens were always causing traffic delays. What did they need to keep guns for? They didn’t have anything worth stealing anyway. If a citizen wanted a gun, they should just join Protection. Though, Babette knew that you didn’t “join” Protection. That’s who was behind all the drone strikes and the guns were what they were after. She knew that … all about that.
She knew Frank’s company made the scent-tracking drones that Protection used to find anything combustible down to the size of an ant’s ass.
They tested the scent-seeker modules at the security ports first. If an incoming citizen, or any other lowlife entering the country, tried to bring something even remotely resembling explosives on a plane or a ship, the sniffer drone would scent it. Then, depending on the color of the security threat at the time, it would automatically call a Protection team to come snatch that person up … or simply terminate the domestic terrorist right then and there.
In fact, one unlucky idiot had brought a relic smoke lighter with him and the butane fluid in it had got him a one-way trip to the 5150. The nuthouse cracked his skull open like a … well, like a nut. Babette knew all about that, too.
Once Protection proved out the scent-seekers at the ports, they equipped every Vengeance drone in the sky with the modules. Now, a citizen would have to bury a gun so far underground in order to keep it hidden that it would be virtually useless to have it. And if he did get stupid and dig it up—get a little gunpowder residue on his hands—a Vengeance’s scent-seeker module could find him in a couple of hours.
Kaboom! Babette thought. She grinned a little, but then she looked down at her breasts and closed her eyes. She shook her head a little and frowned. “Asshole,” she muttered.
Her driver had looked in the mirror when Babette said it. “Excuse me,” the girl frowned in her mirror at her as she careened the car down the sidewalk. Probably when she ran over the citizen, Babette thought.
“Not you, sweetie,” Babette had said to her. Then she smiled and waved her gun at the girl to get her to turn around. “You just keep your eyes straight ahead and don’t talk. Pretend you’re sucking my husband’s cock.”
That shut her up.
Babette stood in Frank’s office and pointed her little pistol. She alternated yelling and waving the gun at him. “You have to get her out of there! I’m not letting you—that’s not happening to her.”
Frank held his hands up and gingerly pressed the security alarm under his desk with the tip of his shoe. He only had to keep his wife busy for three minutes—the elevator ride up from the detention cells beneath the street—five minutes at most. He could do that. “Easy… Taaaake it easy,” he said. “She’s going to be fine. Nothing’s going to happen. Just fine.”
Babette waved her pistol. She didn’t even care if he blew up her breasts. It wasn’t happening to their daughter, too. “Don’t ‘Babs’ me, you bastard—you know… I—I know that’s bullshit.” She shook the barrel of her gun at the wave tablet on Frank’s desk. “So pick that thing up and get her out of that shithole.”
“I reeeally want to,” Frank said. He paused longer than he normally would—ticking off seconds in his head—before he spoke again, “It’s just … not … that … simple.”
“She’s your daughter!” Babette yelled past the tears streaming into her mout
h. “You’re just gonna…? How can you do that? She’s coming back here all messed—what, you think you can just buy her a new set of tits and say happy birthday, sweetie? You telling her to buck up, Frank? You bastard!” She pointed her pistol at his head and grabbed over her other hand, holding the pistol grip with both now. “I should—I should—”
Babette’s mascara streaked down her face. Back before they got married, she had thought it would be a good idea to work side by side with Frank at his company. It was a short-lived delusion, because part of being her new husband’s secretary meant she was also a negotiating tool for him to use … any way he saw fit. Just another corporate asset.
On their honeymoon in Cancun, Babette had experienced that fact firsthand. Though she hadn’t remembered anything until it was dragged out of her during one of her therapy sessions, over a year later. Once she finally remembered being drugged and raped in a Mexican Protection cell for the sport of one of her husband’s business buddies, she threatened to divide from him and take half of everything he had. Three days later, she had new implants in her breasts. A couple of days after that … she got her gun.
Frank moved his hand to his necklace and pulled out the little medallion that held the beginning of Babette’s end. “Careful,” he said to her, “There’s nothing to be gained here by—”
“You think that thing—I don’t give a”—Babette was well on her way to hysterical—“go ahead, push it, see what happens.” She laughed a little “mental patient off her meds for a day” hysteria. “I bet I—which one you think is faster, the Judgment or one of these bullets? You wanna find out?” She raised her eyebrows up so high that it stretched at her cheeks. She shook her head and she squeezed the trigger. “Let’s find ou—”
Bang!
One of the greatest things about his company’s sleep serum drug was that depending on the subject’s mood—agitation, in Frank’s wife’s current case—the dosage could be dialed up or down to match it. A dose of Judgment could take a person either way.
If a Protection interrogator wanted a detailed testament, he would keep the amount low. That would produce a nice, euphoric, waking sleep that mimicked the old heroin high … without the vomiting and addiction, of course. Then that protectant would spill the details of damn near anything.
If a Protection interrogator wanted some pain thrown in—if he needed a quick and dirty testament from a protectant—he would just dial up the dosage a little. Of course the side effect was that the information would be sprinkled with all manner of cursing and profanity and hallucinating delusions.
Then again, if an agent wanted to skip the long-winded testament and go straight to the execution phase of a Judgment overdose… If he wanted to kill someone and avoid all the blood and bullets and booming sounds, then … the sky was the limit.
When Frank tripped the executive protection alarm in his office, the Prime Officer Protection agent on duty in the basement of the K&T scraper hadn’t known what to expect.
Most of the offices at Genesis had hidden wave feeds that he could have watched on his wave tablet—assessed the threat, and then responded with better information, matching the dose in his dart-pistol to the disaster in a room. However, the Prime Officer of K&T had his office suite swept for wave snatchers and hidden feed cameras on a daily basis.
So when the agent poked his little pistol through the centurion slit in the security hall adjacent to Frank’s office, he would recount later in his post-incident briefing and subsequent blizzard of paperwork, that he shot the PO’s wife with an injection of “medium” load and “average” potency.
And that it was a “split second” before the woman’s “unauthorized firearm discharged” and she “fell to the floor.” Which, as Protection protocol clearly stated, was why he brought in a clean crew and immediately ushered her to the sanatorium facility.
According to the woman’s CID badge, she would be spending another three days in one of the State’s premier complimentary accommodations. This time, however, it would be the 5150 sanatorium scraper across the street—the Fifty.
— LXXXIV —
FAITH, HE THOUGHT. Father Benito Octavio Benedetti. That’s what they used to call him. It was half an eternity ago if you counted the time like a Man-monkey did. But every being’s eternity was different and Father Ben—he could hardly think of himself as a man of faith anymore. His wings sagged as he realized the depth of his own self-deception. Which was nothing compared to the secret he had kept from everyone else.
His Book of Blood was a tale of revolution and he wrote it in his own blood to overthrow the Devil. And for that, Rain pardoned Faith for everything he had done. He was brought into her flock—the faithful followers of Rain almighty, the brightest soul in all of the eternities.
An angel’s death was excruciating, and Dal—that liar, Lived—had killed Faith in a most violent and painful way. But it wasn’t before the reborn father was able to deliver his final words of wisdom to all the angels in the arena.
It was a sermon that he had waited a lifetime to deliver. A speech to motivate angels to move mountains—cast dictators out of power at the hands of the very ones they oppressed. And in the end … it had worked.
He had never intended… Faith smiled, remembering Jump’s words as they sat together in the father’s church on the night before the great cleansing of the garden. “Intentions are like assholes,” Faith’s fallen friend had told him. “Everyone’s got ’em … and they’re usually full of shit. You gotta decide who you are, then be that. No intending to it.”
So who was he? … What kind of angel was Faith?
Yes, he had been forgiven, but not for his greatest sin. Absolution for that could only come from one place, and she was locked down in the dungeons.
Faith had flown to the entrance of the dungeons below the great arena … so many times. After every night of judgment, he would wait until the stadium cleared. Some nights it took forever for the grandstands to empty. The cawing and screeching and crowing and cackling seemed to last for hours.
Every angel in the two Heavens enjoyed a good trial and the judgments were intoxicating to watch. Even if they weren’t, no one was allowed to miss the condemnations and salvations. Keeping faithful and faithless followers pacified and obedient was an art more than a science. Every ruler in all the eternities had their hands full with that.
But when the judgments were over and all the golden guardian angels had flown back to their posts and barracks, Faith would tentatively fly to the entrance to the dungeons and just … hover.
He knew Babette was down there—condemned as one of the worst souls imaginable. For she had let her own daughter be raped at the hands of… And when he thought of it, Faith would fall to his knees on the floor of the arena. Tears blurring his eyes, he would look up through the roof at the stars in the black and wonder if there was any truth up there. And if there was, could it ever find its way to his love in such a dark and desperate prison?
Faith had come to this point many times before, but today was different. Today … he stood up, fluttered to the portal and watched it twist open. He landed in front of it, closed his wings tightly against his back, and then he stepped inside.
Faith stared at Rain’s seal on the iron-barred gate to his once-lover’s dark and desperate cell. “How…?” The words just weren’t there. “I never intended to—”
Bathed in the blackness at the back of its cage, all that could be seen of the woman he knew when he was a priest were glowing red eyes, piercing into him like red-hot pokers burning through the black of his past. But this creature in the cage was no woman now. It spoke in a raspy and raw voice, “To wha—” The creature coughed, hacking to clear its throat. It spit and then it spoke, “Intended to what, bury your faith in my pussy?”
The sound of its voice repulsed him, yet the memory of who it once was aroused him at the same time. And he closed his eyes, trying to control his swelling weakness—his own feelings of faltering faith.
&nb
sp; “Half a—” the voice crowed and coughed. “Really, half an eternity you waited?” The creature growled and Faith watched its eyes move in the darkness as it paced back and forth. When it stopped, the eyes turned toward him. “You make me wait for over half an eternity? I’m glad my master burned you, you whining old cock!”
And a great cawing and screeching sound roared from down and across the passageway.
The creature snapped its jaws a few times at the sound—Faith could hear its teeth chomping. Then it stopped. “I’m sorry. Yes, well … mmm, it’s been … it’s been a long time, Benito. How did you stay away from my little baby that long? Do you think you can find her friends? So dark down here.” The voice was barely female now. She laughed and then growled. “Maybe you should just lick your way to them,” she whispered. “That always worked for you.”
A putrid smell of rotting blood wafted to the edge of the cell and then through the bars on the gate and into Faith’s nostrils. He sniffed hard and then coughed and choked and spit at the taste in his mouth.
Mere seconds later, all manner of creature and being—foul and feathered, ferocious and fecal-smelling—began wildly cawing and crowing and howling. There were even some soft yelps behind him that sounded like barks, which made Faith pause. Because though demons, devils and dark souls were all spared annihilation in the great arena … there were no dogs in the dungeons.
An unfortunate bite when Rain was a child—back in Life’s eternity—sealed the fate of canines beyond reasoning with her. Canines would have no souls. The law was second only to her “don’t touch me” covenant. And Faith glanced over his shoulder, into the darkness of the cell on the other side of the tunnel. Nothing stirred there.
A dog? Faith thought.
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