But Lived was a liar, wasn’t he? That devil would say anything to get what he wanted. “I just can’t believe…” she muttered, “He did all of that. And that wasn’t the first ti—”
“Mother,” Rain said. She searched for the words. She felt that the two liars in the dungeon were manipulating everyone toward an end that only they understood. Yet Jump was gone, Fury was still missing, and from what little Life and Lived divulged, Faith was with them. Which was to say nothing of the flock of little hatchling purgatories that Fury was “training.” Yet, the immediate issue seemed more pressing to her. She had never seen her mother’s love and trust in her father falter. “You cannot believe anything they said. You know this.”
“You saw it,” Salvation looked at Rain and said. “You saw what he did. You sent him—wait, you sent him down there. Did you know he…?” She really didn’t want the answer.
“He chose to go,” Rain said. “He knew what needed to be done, and he did it.”
“But you,” Salvation said. “What kind of…? That was monstrous. He’s an—”
“He is the Great Dragon of Judgment!” Rain shouted. “You say I am naive. Do not delude yourself. Judgment … justice, these things have cost.”
“But what about mercy?” Salvation asked her. “And compassion? What happened to you? Isn’t there any of that left?” She shook her head and put her face in her hands. “What about love? How will…? How can he … after that?”
Rain fluttered over, and gently pulled her mother’s hands down from her face. “Those are the most beautiful of things, yes,” she said. “However, they also come with the highest sacrifice. And though I may disagree with her on most things, Life is correct about some. To the benefit of all. He can find peace, for those who are well, have no need of a physician, but those who are sick…”
“He is lost,” Salvation sobbed. “I don’t know if I can ever…”
Rain’s tone was sadder this time. “Do not be hasty with judgment,” she replied. “It is a sharp and dangerous sword, as likely to kill with its hilt … as it is to condemn with its tip.”
Salvation looked up slowly. Tears trickled down her cheeks as she looked into her grown-up daughter’s eyes. “How did you get…?” she said. But there was something behind Rain’s words. When she looked closer, there was the tiny start of a tear, welling up in her daughter’s eye. She hadn’t seen that since… And no mother’s own suffering could take priority over that. “What’s wrong?” she asked. “You don’t cry, not since … the Med.”
It wasn’t the time, but then again when was it going to be? Rain had hidden herself as long as she could bear, sheltering in front of her parents’ blindness and denial that she had long since grown up. The fabricated acts of a little girl, peaking from behind the hidden truths that she was becoming a young lady.
It had helped keep her father’s “talk” thankfully delayed. She knew if they ever had it, he would smell it on her right away. Rain knew her father was not the monster her mother feared him to be, but whatever he was, he was certainly not naive. He would know.
Salvation had been easier to fool. Rain knew her mother’s mind still lived with her little angel back in Life’s life. The Amy that Rain had been was etched into her mother’s right heart. Her mother most likely harbored images of stroking Amy’s hair and humming softly to lull her to sleep. What mother would want to leave that memory behind?
Rain pondered her response, but she could feel the time running out. Life and Lived had a plan, she smelled that in the dungeon. She could also smell something else—something foreign and unfamiliar to her and that could not be good. But try as they had, she and Salvation had simply been talked in circles by the two lying devils. Whatever it was would have to wait.
Even with half an eternity at her back, the relativity of how long time could be had been hard for Rain to understand. Until she had something that she desperately wanted … immediately. The liars’ plot would soon be rooted out—her father was single-minded once he pointed his anger at something. Rain had finally witnessed the truth of that in the dungeon. But her new urgency needed to be dealt with.
“Mother, she has to…” Rain said. Then she stared into the fall.
“She has to what?” Salvation asked.
“She has to … find herself.”
Salvation’s face went blank and her eyebrows raised up. “Rain,” she raised her voice, “you … you’re in love.”
Rain stopped and fluttered to the floor. She stood motionless, staring at her mother, and then she slowly folded her wings behind her back. There was no going back now. To lie would be to go against her own word. “We must get her out,” she said. “She has to find forgiveness in her hearts … or she will never be redeemed to Heaven. And we can never be—”
“Oh my God,” Salvation said, blasphemy or not.
— CIX —
WHEN FATHER BENITO peeked out of the medical room, the long hallway was lit up with flashing red lights. The lights above the big steel doors to each cell alternated the darkness from a crimson, hazy bright to total black.
He gripped onto the first agent’s submachine gun and felt the pockets of the man’s black combat vest for the extra clips. He didn’t know why, but he knew who the voice in his head was, spurring him forward and giving him advice. The first command was, “Get all his gear … and the weapon.”
But he wondered what the voice meant by, “You won’t fail her this time, Benito. I won’t let you.”
This time? he thought.
The sound from the alarms was louder in the hallway. He eased to the center of it. Where am I?
“Interrogation wing,” the voice in his head answered almost immediately. “They were preparing you.”
Benito knew what that meant—he would have been put on trial, given Judgment, and then raped and beaten in that room until he was condemned. I have to get to her!
“We—you will,” the voice said.
Then all of the speakers above the cell doors blared a horn-like blast and then a voice crackled a little too loudly, “Benito Octavio Benedetti, you are hereby remanded to Protection. State your compliance.”
Benito found the remote wave-eye peering at him from the ceiling. Then he slowly raised the agent’s MP7 and sent a short burst of 9mm rounds into it—Brrt!—getting the feel for the gun. And the wave-eye’s lens burst, and metal and plastic and glass showered the floor beneath it.
“Time to go!” the voice shouted to him. “She’s down the hall, number five. Go!”
Benito looked above the door to the room he’d just killed three people in. He shook his head as he read the number. Three… She was only two doors away. He turned and ran.
Another explosion outside rocked the building again and Benito stumbled and fell to the ground. You will never make it, he thought to himself.
“Get up,” the voice said to him. “Have a little faith.”
Faith. Benito didn’t have much left, if he had any. How could he? If there was a Hell, he couldn’t imagine it would be any worse than the building he was trapped in. He pushed himself to his feet.
The clanging alarms were deafening now, and the alternating red and darkness made the place feel like Hell, too. What he imagined it to look like. And he wondered where the—
Brrrrt-brrrrt-brrrrt! Bullets zinged past Benito’s head so close that it made the alarms sound quiet, and he instinctively grabbed at his ear and then he ran. He searched for the number on the door through the dark red alternating light.
The darkness was helping him, as a Protection agent would have surely been able to hit him from the other end of the hall. But the black was also making it hard to find the number above the door. It’s only two doors, Benito, he thought to himself, Mother of Mercy.
And then there it was, and he rammed into it with his shoulder as he pushed on the big bar handle. And he grunted. Locked!
“Shoot it! Shoot it!” The voice in his head was more urgent now.
And Benito backed
up two steps and a bullet grazed the back of his thigh—“Aaaah!”—and he raised the gun and sent a huge burst into the lock—Brrrrrrrrt!
Sparks flew, metal blew back from the door, and brass casings showered the floor, clinking on the concrete, barely audible between the alarm clangs.
“Ram it down!” the voice shouted.
Benito rushed at the door with his shoulder and burst into the cell. When he saw what was inside, the last two ounces of faith he was holding onto were ripped out of his soul.
The two men had their interrogating, raping black pants halfway up. And Benito went wild.
Brrrt-brrrrrt-brrrrrrrrrrrrrt! He sent the remaining rounds in the gun into the first one, the one behind her. The bastard flew backward, body jerking and jolting wildly until he slammed into the side of the room, and then fell sideways to the floor, leaving a huge stripe of blood on the gray rock wall. And then—click-click-click—the submachine gun was empty.
Number two had his pants up, and he rushed at Benito.
“Hit him in the face with the gun!” the voice in his head shouted.
And Benito punched with both arms, just as the second one got to him, catching the man just under the nose, and he heard a crunch and the bastard flipped backward.
“Knife,” the voice in his head yelled. “Use the knife!”
Before Benito realized it, he was on top of the second bastard, stabbing the combat knife he’d taken off the agent. He yelled and screamed, and then he grabbed the handle with his other hand and he stabbed down at the man’s chest with both hands. High over his head and back down again he plunged the blade, until he heard the voice again.
“God help me…” it said, but this voice wasn’t inside his head this time, and it was softer. It was in the room and it sounded beaten. “Benito … please … please help me!”
— CX —
I KNOW HE’S a priest! Like, what did you little purgies think? Look, I don’t care if you resurrect as a man, a monkey or a moron with a robe on, you think Life gives a shit about that? She’ll crack you like a rookie, just as soon as look at your dumb asses. So get it straight! This isn’t redemption in there, this is pure revenge, plain and simple. You either do it—
What? … No, I just told you, this is resurrection, not redemption, and resurrection’s a bitch. First time or the fifth, doesn’t matter. Not to him, not to her, not to—Who? … Ha, ha, ha, very funny. Yes, smartass, it matters to them. But like, those agents died a long time ago. They’re soulless… . Redemption for them? Like that’s happening. Jesus Christ, that job is all about suffering! Can’t you see that?
Could they? … I guess they—shit, I don’t know. That’s like, up to Rain or some shit—I don’t have the power to—stop asking me stupid questions that aren’t about this. You little bitches, you are never going to leave the nest, are you? Why they stuck me with a flock of pee-pissing purgies…? That’s what you are, you know—humping hatchlings.
You try to do this job … this dumb … Man-monkeys will eat you alive! Get hard, whining little purgies, else Life’s gonna spike you to a cross and burn ya. Why am I even…? Start figuring it out or I’ll cut your wings off myself.
What? … Me? They already caught me. You know that. That’s how this mess started, remember? Bet your tail feathers that the clock’s ticking on that shit. I figure I got like, one day left before they find me in here. Once they do … they’re finding you too.
Oh my G—stop squawking, stop squawking! Listen, fold your wings around you and hang onto your talons, little purgies, because Hell’s about to get hot.
— CXI —
FROM INSIDE THE nothingness, Jump watched Fury’s fall.
One day, he thought. That’s what those two liars told him. Parents … prisoners … punishers, the thoughts drifted through his mind.
By now, Jump knew that Rain and Salvation had probably figured out that he wasn’t coming back. And that meant they would go looking for him. They wouldn’t like what they found.
To someone—citizens, gods … angels, it didn’t matter—anyone who hadn’t had to do it… Until they were held accountable for the truth in the words of a testament, no one had a clue how to interrogate someone like that. Misinterpret the words of a protectant? Your fate would be worse than theirs. That was a certainty. God or government—failure was for the fallen and that was not what anyone at Protection “signed up” for.
Language was like that—words started wars. That was another universal constant. Mess up the translation … burn in Hell.
Been there, done that, Jump thought. Not goin’ back.
Jump was going back to Hell, though. His own, not Life’s life. He knew she was planning on trapping him back in the garden. The rest of them, too. And it wouldn’t be one eternity this time. She wasn’t satisfied with two thousand years as God on the first… Come to think of it, he had no idea how long she had been the Protector. But there was no reason for him to believe she’d settle for only one more shot at it. Life was a lifer—she would never retire.
No, he got that information, although they probably thought he couldn’t smell it on them. Life and Lived each planned to take back the garden and rule over it forever. Little tyrants didn’t like their toys taken away.
That meant Rain’s prayer book was right. If a fallen went back and took revenge instead of seeking redemption… Hell, salvation, forgiveness, or vengeance—it didn’t matter which one they prayed for. If they wanted it bad enough, they would have to ask “God”—the one from that eternity, not Rain’s. And that meant Life would have to exist … as a god, not some ravaged and raped prisoner in a dungeon between Heaven and Hell. Life would have to be the ruler—the Protector—to answer a fallen’s prayer. And Jump knew there could only be one of those.
It was the same as the garden. One day in eternity—longer than he realized back at the great cleansing. Life couldn’t build the whole thing in seven days, any easier than Jump could burn it down in one. But burn it he and Salvation and Fury had, and that day lasted … forever, it seemed.
But one day to an archangel or a god wasn’t the same as it was for a Man-monkey, or the little Woman-monkey he had to go and “save.”
Relativity of time, he thought, what a bitch.
Not only did it feel like some events took forever, while some raced by like Fury flapping her wings, but the eternities overlapped on themselves, too. One Man-monkey’s events might happen at a totally different time than an archangel’s perception of them. The two liars tried to explain it to him. And in between dodging his fire-feathers and Jump pounding Life with the literal interpretation of her “Word,” they had almost twisted his mind in a knot.
He knew that’s what they were trying to do. So after he paused to take a rest, when he started back up, he said, “Then this is going to feel like two eternities for you.”
Next week, next month, or the next ten seconds watching himself as a PAIC in life, Jump knew what Fury wanted more than anything. He didn’t blame her—that incestuous, raping bastard’s soul ended too quickly … both times. Pitched out a window for serving Judgment to Jump’s daughter, Amy, or cut to pieces at the Battle of the Books under Fury’s wings and talons, Frank King hadn’t suffered nearly enough either time … in Jump’s not so humble opinion.
That’s what Fury went back for—revenge on her father. It was the only reason she would seek out the assistance of the two liars, because if Jump had it figured right, the girl would never ask Rain.
Faith… That one had been harder for Jump to understand. The man was hiding something when he was a priest and it seemed he still had secrets as an archangel. But once he whipped and beat the disgusting creature that Lived kept for a whore in the dungeon, the whole thing made sense. That part of it anyway.
The brief period Jump knew the father back in life, the man had been searching for something more than faith. You couldn’t talk to faith, smile at faith, laugh with it or any other thing that would give a man comfort.
Blind, booz
ing old cocksucker, Jump smiled at himself. Faith was blind as a bat … back in life, anyway. He could barely find anything without his glasses. But what the father was really searching for was love, and when he didn’t get it from God … well, that wasn’t really the type of love that a Man-monkey went looking for in the first place.
Jump almost laughed out loud. You can’t fuck faith, he thought. Though after his interrogation of the creature-bitch, Babette, apparently that wasn’t true.
And when sucking on his little tin tit full of State swill didn’t give the father enough comfort, Babette had offered him something else to—Jump scrunched up his face at the thought.
His last recollection of the hideous creature was from the dungeon, but back in Life’s life, he had caught a glimpse of her at Frank’s loft.
She hadn’t looked all that good after he sent a couple of feathers through her chest, though. He guessed she looked good enough to a priest who had long since seen the backside of middle-age, especially one who had probably never seen the backside of a woman in his entire life. Anyway, blondes weren’t his type.
The father ending up in Purgatory and then Hell for abandoning Babette at the Fifty? … Only one place the archangel, Faith, was going to go back to for his redemption.
Redemption or revenge, Jump knew those were the stakes. For an angry archangel there could be no greater reason to tempt the Devil or his concubine bitch, Life, for that matter.
So once Jump beat the truth out of them, he cut his own deal with the two liars. That was in the book, too. He had to willingly “ask” for Life’s help. Never mind that by that time, she was pretty compliant. And he said to her, “Wages of sin—stings like a bitch, doesn’t it?” He remembered her trying to go back on the deal she cut with his father, the Devil. Only this time, it would be Jump who reneged on their deal.
Jump watched Fury’s fall. He stared at himself as a vengeful PAIC, all dressed up in his black attack-suit. His rook-rags at the Rook never looked so tightly pressed. And he watched himself reach his black glove into his jacket pocket. That’s where the syringe was. Jump knew that from before. He would never forget that day.
TF- C - 00.00 - THE FALLEN Dark Fantasy Series: A Dark Dystopian Fantasy (Books 1 - 3) Page 46