“I believe so,” Rain said.
“You believe so,” Jump said. “Uh-huh.”
Now they’re both doing it, Salvation thought. Then she looked at Jump.
Jump caught her gaze, but he ignored it. “Wanna know what else?” he asked them both.
Salvation grumbled a little. When Jump got his self-satisfied grin—right before the catastrophe that he’d been warning her about was just about to happen… He actually enjoyed being right more than he was ever concerned about the disaster.
“Yeah,” Jump said to her, “you know that’s not good, don’t you?” Then he turned back to Rain. “Whoever she sends … only one way back.”
And then there was more grumbling and fidgeting from Salvation.
“Uh-huh,” Jump said to her. He raised his eyebrows and got a fake smile on his face, “But wait,” he continued, “there’s more.”
Rifling through the Bible during church as a kid, then rereading it so he could understand all of the clergy he had to deal with on the job each day… Then there was the father’s unholy Book of Blood that he had to interpret to save … well, every damn thing… Jump had gotten pretty good at “interpreting the Word.” He figured if the God-dogs could do it, how tough could it be?
So he read and read and reread for hours, sifting through hidden meanings, finding the truth between the … “misinterpretations” Father Benito had made him start calling them. Because that’s how language worked—nuance and nonsense. Say one thing and mean another, it was just like Protection. Because what “protection” really meant was punishment and pain, and he knew that’s what would happen to Fury if they got a hold of her.
“Let me just read you this part here,” Jump said to them both, “see if you can figure it out.”
Rain looked at Salvation. “Do we have time for—?”
Salvation shook her head at Rain, raised her eyebrows a little.
Jump read the passage, “ ‘And the Chosen One’s children did mourn at her passing, and she was thrown into the pit with her lie. And thus it came to be that she was resurrected in their hearts and minds.’ ”
Salvation looked at him. She knew better than to take the bait. Her husband figured he knew exactly what it meant, and whatever he had figured out, it wasn’t going to be good.
“And so that is where I placed them,” Rain said to him, “just as the text instructed me to. They are both in the pit, no more than a memory to those they once oppressed.”
Jump smiled and looked at his wife. “Now ya see,” he said to her, “that’s exactly what I’m talking about. Plain English—just like guns. You don’t put it in plain English, and everything is open to—you see what I’m talking about, right?” He looked at Rain and then back at Salvation. “She’s smart as hell. But you go writing all holier-than-thou shit, and everyone reads it a different way. So then that means none of it’s the truth … and all of it is. And that’s just another way of saying something is a lie.”
“What?” Rain asked. She knew her father had to come to it on his own. Otherwise, she would never have given him the book. And it wasn’t as if the Protector could order him to do it, especially under the “benefit of all” covenant that gilded and guided Rain’s hand in every decision she had to make. But a task like this one her father had to figure out for himself.
“Right here,” Jump read them the passage again. When he was done, he said, “Same pit as her lie? … You don’t get that? Let me ask you a question. What if life is not for eternity? What if this little section right here means that life—she is eternity? What then?”
Rain and Salvation’s eyes got bigger and they looked over Jump’s shoulder at the text.
Then Jump said, “The big lie—L.I.E. You tell one long enough, pretty soon that’s the God’s honest truth.”
Jump’s blasphemy fluttered out of Rain’s throne chamber, along with any hope they had of “ferreting out the truth the easy way,” as he put it. Everything from there on would be the “other” way.
Rain wanted Fury found—she needed her found. Because Fury was the only one who understood both sides of her. The weight and the responsibility of eternity and the need to be young and free—the yin and yang of power that Rain felt after she perched on her throne. But now she knew her friend understood it, too. Fury was trying to find truth, while she was trapped in her own lie.
— XCVIII —
I’M STILL OUT, or in the dream or some other shit, because everything is still black and there’s another song in my head. But like, I don’t recognize a word of it.
Rain’s reign go away,
Boil my blood another day.
If the night turns into day,
Burned to ashes you shall stay!
And I’m freaking out, because the last thing I remember… Where are all those wicked little shits anyways? I think. And I have no idea, but I—I think that singing sounded like… But there’s just no way she’s down here.
RAGE
— XCIX —
JUMP KNEW HE was missing something, but he couldn’t quite rage his way to it. Some little hidden “gem” in between the lines and the lies in the resurrection prayer book that Rain had somehow dug up.
Book of Birth? Another goddamn book of the “benevolent.” He was getting fed up with reading them. Self-serving pages full of piss.
Rain had said she found the book in an “unknown” library. She would only describe it to him and Salvation. Jump had never even heard of a library in the two Heavens, and he had been everywhere in them—up, down, sideways.
But it made sense that the lies had to be written down somewhere, and Rain assured him the library was real. She also assured him that he would never see it. That little statement of defiance annoyed Jump even more.
Transparency… Sooner or later, every ruler in the free and forgotten universe decided it was a bad idea. No use having a bunch of pesky archangels, or citizens for that matter, questioning the validity and stupidity of your decisions. They just wouldn’t understand, anyway. How could they?
Jump wrinkled his face and held up the book to look at it again. Book of Birth, he thought. Brains, babies, or buttholes—he didn’t care what they were called—he was about to give a couple of “lost” archangel wannabe-Protectors a lesson in the “book” of brutality. A book that he helped write, coincidentally.
He gripped his whip and slowly flapped his wings across the arena toward the portal entrance to the dungeons. Jump needed time to steel himself—turn away from anything left, human or angel, and go to the dark place in his past. The place where only pain existed … and punishment.
Jump was alone—the only Protection interrogator ever who preferred, or had been allowed, to do the job by himself. That was a long, long time—it seemed like another life. Some other person that he no longer remembered. But what he did remember was how to get information out of someone. Someone who had every incentive in the world not to give that information to him. After all, what greater incentive was there to stay silent than the loss of your life after you spilled your guts?
There had been no question of whether or not Rain and Salvation could help in some way. Jump wasn’t going to let his wife see him in that “light,” and a bright, white “queen” couldn’t allow herself to be bathed in the blackness that it took to get the job done.
“Plausible deniability,” they used to call it before Protection’s time: pretend it never happened. Or if you got caught at it, you had absolutely no clue it was happening on your watch. Didn’t matter if it was a Protector or president, or priest for that matter—deny, deny, deny. Outlast any inquiry you allowed to take place. And over and over again, citizens proved it was the best strategy for getting them refocused on their own misery and off of questioning the authorities.
Jump knew Rain had manipulated him into the suggestion. He let her. And whether it was “cleansing” the garden for a power-hungry and maniacal monarch, or torturing that same butterfly to save one of his own, there were just some j
obs that needed doing. Once someone, ruler or rapist, was convinced of the justness of their cause, there was no end to the evil they would do to defend it.
It didn’t matter that, effectively, the two conniving liars were his parents—and that was some nightmare to wake up to—Jump’s job … was to do the job. That was what he was good at, the best at.
Protection just called it “Taking Testament.” And though most of their language was meant to distort and deny the truth, the process of beating and raping a confession out of someone… The name was about as literal as they ever got. They took testament from someone … along with a whole lot of other stuff. In fact, when an interrogator was finished, there wasn’t a whole lot left to take.
Jump fluttered his wings and landed in front of the portal. He still couldn’t understand why Fury wanted to leave Hell. She was twice as angry as him and probably just as damaged and depraved. Hell was home … for them both. But one truth he was able to lift out of the lies in Rain’s book: whoever a Protector was going to resurrect, they had to want to go back. “Free” will—he was starting to get a handle on Life’s understanding of the concept.
Push a person into a tight enough box, and they will beg you to let them out. In the version in Life’s head… In fact, when Jump thought about it real hard, he had to laugh out loud and his voice echoed through the empty arena. Obey and you will be blessed. Disobey and you will be cursed, he thought. Lies aside, for an interrogator, or god gone rogue, there was no truer Bible verse than that.
Jump stepped toward the portal. Time for Life—God—to taste her own words. The portal twisted open and Jacob Oliver Blake, Protection interrogation agent #1, stepped through the entrance to the dungeons. And before the portal twisted shut behind him, he shouted to the entire cadre of caged creatures in the place, “Ladies, before this is over, you shall worship no god but me!”
— C —
GO BACK TO move forward. Life and Lived both told Faith it was the only way. Save himself, then save Babette. And he wondered. Faith knew the exact moment he had failed her … and that was exactly where he would resurrect.
Father Benito listened. The voice seemed far away when it spoke to him, “Clear.” And his chest heaved upward, and a blinding spike of pain shot from his chest to his eyes. Then it felt like he was choking—not breathing.
And then, all of a sudden, it just came over him and he was in it. Benito was in that light, and he came to a beautiful place, a sense of knowingness. Then everything made sense. It wasn’t a dream—dreams were never clear. This … this was like fine crystal, and he felt himself smile. It had been years since he had lost his faith, and now—now it was coming back.
State doctors—if you could call the experimenting butchers that anymore—called it the “dying brain hypothesis” and they tested it as often as they had protectants to experiment on. It was the idea that when the brain was under stress, it released a flood of neurochemicals that created flashes of light, peace and calm.
The father knew that these weren’t brain impulses, and he saw his body floating below him and he saw a bright light again, and then the voice said it again, “Clear.” It sounded farther away this time. He felt a smaller fist hit his chest.
He wasn’t afraid, after all he had been through this same feeling before. At least four times that he could remember.
During the thirty-three minutes he was “gone,” Benito remembered spectacular music and aromas he had never smelled before. Beautiful scents like a cross between jasmine and lavender. But others … others were vile, and they violated his nostrils with putrescence and he faltered.
Could it…? Surely he wouldn’t go there if it were? He had been faithful and he had served, and more importantly, he had yet to fulfill his destiny. Yet no one had spoken to his heart. Then he saw Babette—his dove—lying on a silver table, torn to shreds, bleeding and alone.
Then he was jerked back to the bright lights and there was a magnificent gate made of pearls. And they all—he had no idea who the others were—stood in front of it as it pulsated brightness. But when he looked closer, there were people—his people—and he recognized them. There was Babette, and a woman he had performed marriage rights for, and Babette’s daughter and others he recognized but couldn’t remember. Those seemed like decades-old acquaintances, now familiar friends again.
But the calmness and lack of pain—the serenity was everywhere at once.
Then he was jerked away from it and he remembered something about being beaten and bleeding … and bullet casings falling silently by his face … and the flashes of fire, and his ears were hurting. And he was above it watching an agent fire his rifle in slow motion and then the little brass casings fell like shiny tan snowflakes, slowly to the floor, right by his own head.
Then it just felt like sleep and he couldn’t tell if he was awake or resting. And he wondered if he would wake up. If he did, he would tell them, all of them, Heaven was a real place.
That had been Benito’s job for more than half of his life, but he had lost the fire of faith in that belief. He had needed only to look around him at the vileness and sorrow of Man to extinguish that flame and believe in the mission his own father entrusted to him. Then he preached from his pulpit with such an obvious lack of conviction that his own clergy leaders began to question his commitment.
The church investigated him and spied on him constantly. He was even sent back for re-seminary in order to rekindle his resolve. But he recoiled and turned inward, praying to God as his mother taught him. And when no comfort came from his faith or from the Lord, Benito had turned to the comforts of Man.
At first, it was just a sip of State swill now and then. Then it was more—liquor. But then in one euphoric night—too much swill and a late-night confession from one of his parishioners—he fell through the cold cracks in his faith, down and into the warm and wonderful wings of a dove. And it was good.
But no matter what Benito did to convince himself he would not burn for it, he couldn’t silence the little voice in the back of his mind, telling him that somehow, someday he would be punished for his sins. The liquor helped douse the flames of his guilt, but it could hardly extinguish a fire that was started and stoked daily by people who blindly accepted the truths they were told.
Benito knew if the church ever found out… They could never find out! Excommunication was for offenses that the church could cover up, but a priest of the largest church in Seattle, breaking a covenant? Fornicating and falling in love? Such events were heresy of the highest order and would simply wind him up at the Fifty downtown, quietly condemned as an inconvenient truth of the church. Then that would lead them to the other thing.
Condemned would be better than anything at the Fifty after that. The father knew that. Dead and in Hell for his sins, or strapped to a chair at the Fifty, slowly going insane? The father figured there was precious little difference.
“Clear!” and the voice was louder again. Almost too loud, and the father winced at the pain in his chest and he tried to grab at it, but his arms wouldn’t move. Then his eyes were blasted with bright white light again and then … nothing—darkness.
Then Benito heard it, “Waaake uuup!” This was a different voice, it felt far away and it sounded like … a bird screeching at him?
The darkness turned brighter and then a light descended down at him from above. Benito was back on the table in the middle of the room, staring up at a doctor and the two nurses from the hall. And behind them the two agents with their guns pointed at him. But he ignored them and looked straight up to the bright light. Beautiful, Benito thought as the light slowly grew bigger. Simply magnificent!
“Benitohhh, you have to get … up…” and that was squeaking and cooing—the voice was a bird. But it … spoke to him.
And the bright light grew steadily closer, and it got larger and then there were wings around it.
An angel, was the thought in Benito’s head. More real than I dreamed! But if seeing was believing, the fathe
r’s faith in his purpose was slowly fluttering back down from Heaven.
He watched the wings flap in slow motion, like a huge duck or a goose, landing on the river, lazily hovering downward to alight in the middle of he and his father’s decoys.
And as the wings grew closer, Benito noticed that the feathers weren’t normal. Then there was the sound of steel against steel, like pouring the metal credits from an offering basket into a drum. Even that sound was like music in his ears. “Get up, Benito,” the voice said again. It was more familiar to him when it cooed this time, “You do not die today. You cannot.”
As familiar as the voice was, it felt like it was more sure… Almost as if it knew when he did die, so certain that it wasn’t today. Benito watched the wings get closer and closer. And then the bright light cleared up and became a shimmering bird. It was covered in feathers, the same as its wings. The only parts not covered with metal plumage were… Talons? Benito thought. But its palms weren’t feathered … neither was its face.
Benito smiled up at … himself … as an angel. He frowned—he was hallucinating again—just like then—this wasn’t an angel at all. Another dream, he thought. Your mind still plays tricks on you. Then he remembered. You are dead … again.
It was the only explanation. The last earthly thing he remembered was the orderly being shot to death and the blood. Then he had failed to give the man his last R’s. So if this was really an angel, he wasn’t going to Heaven. It hardly mattered—he knew how the Fifty worked. Sooner or later, they would wake his mind back up and he’d wish he was dead.
“You are stronger than this, Benito,” the flapping bird said, hovering barely above his chest now. “And I told you, you cannot die today.”
TF- C - 00.00 - THE FALLEN Dark Fantasy Series: A Dark Dystopian Fantasy (Books 1 - 3) Page 43