TF- C - 00.00 - THE FALLEN Dark Fantasy Series: A Dark Dystopian Fantasy (Books 1 - 3)

by Steve Windsor

  I know he’s my father, and I know in my head—and I should say “gross” or “eww” or something like that. I mean, that’s what I would—what I should say, right? That’s what I would’ve said … then.

  But that’s not what I say, and I don’t even know why, but the words float out of my mouth so easily, “Cut this tape off for me, Daddy.” And that is not a voice I’ve ever used before. For sure not with him. “I’m hot and sweaty.”

  I’m staring at his face. It’s about all I can fu—all I can do. And now I—I don’t want to curse, but goddamn I feel good! And I don’t know why, but I don’t even think that’s a curse word, is it? Hell, I don’t care! Or maybe it’s just f—I can’t even think it.

  Then I hear Brie. “Mr. King,” she says, “can you untie me? I gotta pee first. And I think Em can…” And she giggles.

  Before what? I think. And Brie’s voice sounds kinda wrong—not how I think she should talk to my dad. It’s kinda like … when she’s talking about jacking the Mike, or when she’s drunk or something.

  “She can wait,” Brie says. And she giggles some more. “Because like, she all ready screwed my boyfriend. She’s fine. She doesn’t need—did you know that? … He told me that.”

  I laugh at her and then I giggle, too—I did screw her boyfriend. Didn’t cum, though. It was over too fast, was more like it. But that wasn’t now. It was later than this, and it was his fault … and I don’t even care. When I talk again, I slur, “He tol’ you? I can belief… What a big baby!” I think I feel—yep, I’m drunk. “Yes … I … did, and he sucked…” And I laugh and shut my eyes. “He sucked, I sucked, we all sucked. Gooood stuff!”

  Then I think I hear something rip. More rips, and then Brie’s laughing behind me and giggling. “Whoa,” she says. “Wheeeee, we’re flying!”

  And I open my eyes and it’s blurry and I blink a couple of times, but that doesn’t—it’s all foggy and stuff. And I squint real hard, and there goes Brie. Whee! I think. And she’s flying, and it looks like Daddy’s carrying her. That’s so nice. Oh, that’s sooo pretty! “Flutter, flutter, little fairy,” I say.

  And Daddy flaps his wings and they flyyy away.

  “He’s a dirty little dog,” I giggle. I close my eyes and my head bobs, and I jerk it back up. “Bimbo…” I say as the door shuts. She’s so—I don’t even care—it’s fun. I just feel … good. And that’s a good thing, right. This is silly—my voice is silly. “Blonde Bimbos.” They’re jus’ … nasty.

  — XCIV —

  SAFELY BACK IN their cell after resurrecting Life’s favorite guard dog, she and Lived casually watched the fall. The thick, dank air of the dungeon was cut by knives of cawing and crowing, and screeching and howling from—it was getting harder and harder for either of them to tell whose followers were whose. But they were both accustomed to the constant sounds of despair and torment from the fallen. It would have concerned them more if the dungeon cells were silent.

  Once Life finished the Prayer of the Protectors, Rain’s seal had been suspended and a portal in the cage of their filthiest fornicator, Frank the dog, had opened. Then Lived commanded the dirty animal to step through it. When the beast resisted, Life whale-moaned and cawed down the hall at him.

  Then the humping hound of Lived’s hell, Dogg, leapt through the portal and disappeared.

  Every angel’s fall was different. For an archangel, to fall from grace was to question their very existence. “How could God create me this way?”, “Why am I here?”, “What made me this way?” And one of the biggest ones, “If God made me, then why was I cast down?”

  But the most important question any angel would ask once they relived the horrors of the life they only thought they knew, “How do I get back to Heaven? Or Hell, as the case may be?” Falling was a scary thing … but it wasn’t the scariest of things. Resurrection was worse.

  If an angel chose to go back to Life’s garden—they had to choose—the life they thought they remembered was never the same. Because pigeoning around in the past was a tricky business. And if a Man-monkey caught an angel—figured out what it was… Well, the one time the Man-monkeys caught a fallen angel from heaven—the first time they caught one of God’s children returning to the garden—they nailed him to a cross, stabbed him with a spear, and then let him bleed to death like a criminal.

  No angel in either of the two Heavens had volunteered for that fate since. Now, resurrection was no better than punishment. Yet it was unclear who the punishment was intended for, because an angel back in life could either be a Man-monkey’s worst nightmare or wind up as his next midnight snack.

  Life turned her gaze from the fall. “This was her life?” she asked.

  “How she wanted to remember it,” Lived said. “Intoxicating, is it not?”

  Trapped for half an eternity with her devil turned raping beast, Life had finally begun to understand the magnitude of the miseries that she had wrought upon women. “By the time she returns, she will be less than Hole,” she said.

  “You blame Hole for this?” Lived said. “This is your doing, not hers.”

  “Spare me,” Life said. “You would have tormented her far worse.”

  Poison her own words and use them against her—it was always Lived’s best response. “ ‘I have two daughters which have not known man; let me, I pray you, bring them out unto you, and do ye to them as is good in your eyes.’ ” He let that verse sink in for a moment. “Tell me, my love, is it better that he give her to strangers for them to violate, or simply follow your words and tend to the matter himself?”

  “You are a … a twisting liar!” Life said. “These are not my words, they are—”

  “Oh,” said Lived, “they are in your Bible, so naturally I just assumed…”

  “Yes, yes—they have misinterpreted and bastardized its entirety”

  “They did,” Lived said.

  “What?”

  “Did.”

  “What are you…? Oh, yes,” Life said. “So they did.”

  It was easy to forget that a fall was simply an angel’s way of interpreting and making sense of their past life. It was closer to a hallucination than any reality from the past. Questions and regrets and sorrows an angel remembered on the way down were just part of their judgment, the real precursor to resurrection itself. Nothing was true … but to a falling angel, everything was real.

  And that was the key—belief. If enough fallen angels believed in something … or someone, then who was to say what was real and what was not? Because laws were only obeyed when people believed they were real—that the judgments of the ones who made them were just. And it did not get any more “real” than Fury’s fall.

  “Why did you choose…?” Life turned back to watch the fall. “What makes her so special?”

  Lived would not tell her why he had chosen Fury to start the revolution—return things to the way they had been before they were both cast into the dungeons. If they could twist her up enough—and they had plenty of dark souls to send down to do that—then by the time she hit bottom, she would think that down was up. Which was perfect if one wanted to overturn a young whelp and her reign.

  Lived smiled at his cellmate. He knew she was becoming distracted by the fall, watching one of her precious children of the garden resurrect her nightmares and beliefs. But he might have to remind her again who her master was. His snakes stirred beneath his feathers. It could wait. So could they. “It is really quite simple,” he said. “She is the only angel Rain takes counsel with, for all of her … ‘advice.’ ”

  “Ah,” Life said. She had already known the answer, but deception was in her nature. She might be able to send her children back for their belief, but for Life there was no going back for hers. She smiled and grinned into the image of the fall. “Ironic,” she said softly.

  Lived furrowed his brow at the back of her head.

  Life could feel her temporary master’s gaze behind her. His breath was hot on her neck. She smiled to herself, then turned h
er face to a straight-lined blank slate. Then she turned around. She looked into his eyes and then down at his snakes, busy wriggling, trying to squirm themselves free from their “master’s” restraints. “It seems that Rain—our little bright light … has a blind spot.”

  They both looked back at the fall. Their hound, Dogg, was just finishing up with the second one in the cell.

  Life hadn’t felt anything but disgust for her “lover” for a long, long time, but watching her guard dog take pleasure in his work had her stirring. She would pretend as long as she had to, but even a deity had desires—many, many desires. “He is a despicable and filthy animal,” she said, “yet he does take pleasure in serving his master. Tell me, how do you control—when he is finished, how will you keep him at bay? Presumably, you are not going to let him roam the streets. I don’t think that will end well, if I remember correctly.”

  Lived laughed out loud and the rest of the dungeon cawed to join suit. When he was finished, he said, “Strutting around with a crown on your head, claiming to be a king, was sure to draw attention to him. The wrong type of attention. I warned you of this.” He chuckled as he remembered yet another one of Life’s swelling legions of debacles. “It was a miracle that they didn’t burn him at the stake.” He paused to see if Life would respond, but she remained uncommonly silent. No doubt feeling the truth of his words, he surmised. “But no one pays heed to a stray dog, digging and scratching in a dark and dank alleyway, sniffing and smelling for a place to bury his bone. And we know just which alley to point him at.”

  For Lived, the insatiable devil, had a personal pet of his own. Far down and across the tunnel, a small roar echoed down the halls. Then it turned to low growling and screaming like a cat in heat.

  And Lived smiled and gazed down the passageway at the cage that housed Hole—the whoring demon-angel that he knew in every way imaginable. “Isn’t that right, lover?” he cawed.

  — XCV —

  THE ARCHANGEL DEMON, Dogg, was a “dog.” The disgusting canine concubine that Life kept in his cage as her own “boy-toy” pet. Before, she had fed him with her own dark desires whenever it suited her. And compared to her current cellmate, it was debatable which one was worse.

  Dogg was full of hell and fury, sinister and seductive as a Man-monkey—such an incestuous and conniving bastard—that his soul had trouble converting to even a dark demon’s form. Locked in the dungeons for his crimes against one of Rain almighty’s most cherished friends, Dogg simply got worse.

  His eyes caved in and his belly got fat, and he grew fangs that were misshapen, like his crooked crotch-snake’s crawl. His claws were constantly filled with the remnants of rock, broken free from scratching the floor in his cell after he’d just taken a shit.

  And like any dirty dog, left untrained and to himself, he rolled in his own excrement whenever he thought about … whatever a dog thinks before he frolics in his own filth.

  But the worst thing about him wasn’t the smell. The most vile thing about him was that he was the worst leg-humping nightmare of a bitchin-heat-sniffing hound that had ever been married with one of Life’s monster snakes. Dogg was simply the worst demon in Lived’s hell.

  But as hideous as the humping hound had turned after the end of his life—as bad as Frank King looked after Jump threw him out a window and watched his sack of bones splatter on the street below—when Life resurrected the vicious and vile Man-monkey back to the land of the living… In Dogg’s egotistical version of his recollection of being alive, he looked as smooth and as seductively sinister as any “heartbreaker and cherry-taker”—he liked to joke with himself in the mirror—could look.

  His hair was jet black with the wave of a parade float princess. And no matter how many bloody bodies he remembered chewing through at the Battle of the Books, his teeth were shinier than Life’s pearly white feathers.

  In Frank the dog’s resurrected version of the land of the living, he was a god, as beautiful as any one of them had been. A projected delusion that helped him in more ways than his favorite—violating the faith out of innocent souls.

  Dogg licked the blood from the corner of his mouth. Then he smiled and stared down at the woman, still strapped face-down to the gurney inside her “suite” at the sanatorium.

  Her back was clawed bloody and some of her hair was pulled out. And there were bite marks on her buttocks that oozed deep red blood.

  Dogg adjusted inside the front of his pants—his snake too limp to protest—and he tucked his white shirt in tight under his belt. Then he rolled his shoulders around until he was satisfied that his shirt was as near to perfect as he could get it. “And that’s that,” he said. Then he turned around, getting ready to leave.

  “God…” the woman’s voice barely made sound, “please … help me.”

  Dogg stopped in his tracks. He didn’t turn back. He looked at the door to her interrogation cell and squinted just a bit, debating. “You’re fine,” he said, frowning. “Everything’s gonna be just fine.” And then he growled. “And you got it backward—the name’s Dogg, bitch,” he said. “You remember, don’t you, Babs?” Then he opened the door and left.

  As Dogg walked down the long, dark hallway—barely lit by the flickering red bulbs inside their iron-cage housings above the doors to the cells—he glanced at the priest walking toward him from the far end. And then a little song popped into his thoughts and he bobbed his head back and forth and shuffled his feet a little lighter as he silently hummed the tune:

  Two little love birds lying in bed,

  One rolled over this is what he said.

  Little bird, little bird why so red?

  Don’t you know you’re already dead?

  By the time Dogg finished amusing himself with his little bedtime ditty, he was almost to the priest. And he sniffed first and then smiled and looked the shaking little man up and down as they passed.

  The old man’s knuckles showed signs of scraped blood, hastily washed raw. He rubbed his Rosary with one hand, and cradled and gripped into his disgusting book with the dirt-filled fingernails of the other.

  The first thing Dogg smelled was the liquor on the man’s breath, and then the putrid-piss smell of fear and the acidy taste of anger behind it. Then a faint scent of the dried blood on the pages of the book, rammed into Dogg’s nostrils and he almost salivated. He barely smelled the gunpowder and grease on the gun.

  As he passed the wrinkled old God-giver, Dogg let out an involuntary growl. He smelled the man’s thoughts and smiled. Then he raised up his hand and leisurely pointed his finger and thumb like a pistol. He winked at the priest and curled the corner of his mouth. “Khik,” he clucked.

  The priest stumbled and almost fell.

  “Careful with the booze, Benito,” Dogg said to the priest. “Makes it hard to wake that little snake up.” Then he turned back toward the exit and kept walking, faking a few barks as he sauntered. “You’ll meet your God soon enough, girls,” he shouted behind him. And then Dogg pushed the doors at the end of the long hall, and he howled as they swung slowly closed behind him, “Owoooooah…”

  — XCVI —

  FATHER BENITO WALKED carefully down the long hallway inside the interrogation wing of the sanatorium—K&T’s private torture facility underground and across the street from the Genesis building at the Fifty. He knew that’s where Frank would send her.

  Babette had waved him in hysterics, screaming at him through her wave tablet, yelling something about Frank kidnapping their child.

  She had threatened to kill her husband more than once during Benito’s and her “talks.” She had ranted and raved about what an animal he was, but when Benito turned the wave to a hologram, Babette was shaking a gun. And when she looked over her shoulder and yelled for her driver to bring the car around to the front of the tower, he knew that she was finally serious.

  Benito begged her not to go. He was clear across town, and there was no way he could get there in time to stop her, but she terminated the wave before
he could reason with her. He was left standing in his office, alone with a decision.

  Going after Babette was a difficult choice to make, but he had done far more dangerous things, infinitely more life-threatening. So he dug up his gun—it was buried in the basement, right next to his book. He worked so fast to resurrect his little personal protection pistol that he nearly ripped out a fingernail and scraped all of his knuckles bloody.

  The drive through the rain to the big brick sanatorium building downtown was nerve-racking, and Benito’s guzzler was almost sideswiped by several Protection vehicles speeding past him. Then some Traffic Compliance agents had detoured him around a roadblock down the street from the sanatorium, and he thought he would never make it in time.

  Sirens and gunfire were nothing new on the streets of any major urban zone. The drizzle-drenched streets of Seattle were no different, but diverting a well-marked vehicle of the clergy meant bigger trouble than Benito had ever seen.

  Church vehicles were behind only Protection “snatch and bag” teams when it came to traffic right-of-way. Even emergency vehicles had to yield to a clergy-marked guzzler. That could only mean one thing—something worthy of a MARR, Protection’s Mobile Assault and Resistance Response vehicle, filled with Citizen Compliance twentysomethings, black-clad and ready to black-bag someone for interrogation.

  When Benito swiped his ID badge and scurried into the building, gunfire and explosions echoed from a few blocks down the street. He thought he had heard huge crashes of breaking glass, too.

  After he walked through the evaporators, just inside the front door, his mouth dried out and it felt like there was sand in his throat.

  K&T Enterprises had invented the technology to create the zero humidity zones—“Z-zones” or just “Z’s,” in citizen slang.

  The Z’s were one of the few technologies that actually made some citizens’ lives easier, especially if they were the ones who had to mop miles of smooth floors inside an office scraper. But for anyone who worked inside or visited one of the huge buildings, it was better than walking around all day like a slowly drowned rat. Every scraper in the city had Z’s to keep Seattle’s liquid “sunshine” outside where it belonged.