I finally cut out a pig and herded it through the chute, into the barn. By then, I was covered in the same slime as the sow, but I had successfully completed my task and was pretty proud of myself for it.
“There,” I said, wiping my face with an equally muddy sleeve, “one pig, ready for dinner.”
But before the Colonel had me kill and butcher the unlucky pig, he asked me, “Why did you pick that particular one?”
At least I knew the answer to that. “He gave me the least trouble.” Though, considering the amount of grime I was gunked in, “trouble” was as relative as time.
“That is exactly the right answer,” the Colonel said. Rarities did happen. “There may be hope in Heaven for you yet.”
Young as I was, I was still confused, but as I said, curiosity… “Why?” I asked. It was, after all, one of my favorite questions. Any kid’s, I guess I know now. “It wasn’t like she was going to get away.”
But my dad never outright answered my questions, no matter how curious—he rarely hit me over the head with the point of a pickaxe. He preferred to bluntly rap me with the handle several times first. “So, Benito Benedetti”—he could get condescending too, now that I think about it—“which pig would you rather be? … The one who’s the least trouble … or the one who gets killed last?”
In hindsight, I should have taken his advice a little more to heart. Figuratively and literally, in case you’ve forgotten.
— CLIII —
STANDING OVER THIS dead angel, lying on the floor of the nave of my church—the rows of pews as empty as Tuesday—I’m staring at the huge cross from the steeple. It’s covered in black oil and protruding from the few guts this angel has left.
I’m not sure which emotion I should be having. Am I sad that one of God’s faithful has fallen? Or, am I relieved that this dangerous creature is dead?
I have only ever dreamt of what they might be like, and each one of those visions has shown different sides of the humanity I know. Some are angry and vengeful, some are arrogant and indifferent, a few are kind and comforting—though that’s a rarity—and some of them … are just as scary as I believe Hell ought to be.
But those were dreams—I’ve been “taught” not to believe them—and like I said, unless I’m face-down on my desk drooling, this is no dream.
A real live dead angel, I think. What will they think of my visions now? It’s a defiant thought, I know, but… I guess you don’t know yet. Best to leave that reasoning for its proper place in my testament.
I bend down on one knee and get a good look at his feathers. It is a he … from his facial features, I mean. As for their genitalia—I’m afraid it will have to be seen to be believed.
I chuckle at myself. For a man of the cloth, a more ironic statement cannot be made.
His feathers look … hard, like metal or steel possibly. Gray and jagged and sharp, by the looks of them. I’m hesitant to touch them and find out, dead owner or not. “From which Heaven do you hail, my fine feathered friend?” I mutter. Believe me, it makes a difference.
— CLIV —
MY CHILDHOOD HOME in Duvall was surrounded by rivers and flatter than a mashed potato pancake, so it was the ideal place to grow our own food. That’s what the Colonel said. Well, when the whole town wasn’t flooded, that is.
I knew from my mother that her Bible had a story about a man who endured forty days and forty nights of flood—God raining down judgment—his wrath due to another disappointment in his children.
I read the story of Noah in her book, but for a child of the Northwest Quarter… Us children of Seattle were accustomed to being rained on about three hundred days a year, so a cautionary bedtime tale about some saint or another, floating aimlessly at the edge of starvation and near-drowning on a boat for a month…? Well, to a waterlogged kid from the soggy, foggy and boggy backwaters around the edge of Seattle … that just sounded like December.
My mother said once that God liked to warn his children of impending judgment with torrents of water. If that was true, her Bible’s God let us know his feelings about every third year.
But my mom explained to me how we needed the great rivers to rise and overflow every now and then, so they could spread the nutrient-rich silt—replenish the drained and dusty land with the fruitful seeds that would allow the crops of the future to grow stronger than the last. Without that, the fields of the faithful would simply become “barren and unfruitful,” was the way she put it.
Back then, I thought she was talking about our farm. Now I—I guess we both know who she was talking about, don’t we.
“The river washes away the sins of man,” she said. The scrapes and trenches and burned ash that we scratched across the land, cutting and digging into the soil like crows and bears and skunks, taking turns ripping apart a dead carcass in the forest.
My mother’s lessons were upbeat like that. My father, however… I learned that Man was a plague—a locust. That … the Colonel made crystal clear. “And one day,” he said, “man will eat himself out of house and home … and then he will spread to his neighbor’s house, searching for food. He’ll come to your house, Benito, with an uncontrollable hunger. And if there’s no food … he’ll eat you.”
So that was why we needed to grow our own food … and protect it. I never questioned the why of it, I just did what I was told—I “worked the dirt,” like the Colonel told me to.
Looking back, I’m not sure if the lessons could have penetrated all the sweat and the grime I was constantly covered in. Most of their benefit sunk into my mind … too little too late.
Our little five-acre plot of ground spread out flat right next to the towering river dike. And my dad and I worked it while that big dirt berm hovered over our heads like a frozen wave of God’s wrath that, when it thawed—whenever he got disappointed in us—would break and crash right down and drown anything in its path, just like that crazy Noah’s flood in my mother’s Bible. And like I told you, about every third year, that is exactly what God did with our river.
The rain would come and the spring thaw in the mountains would hit just right, and then that river would slice its way through the dike like a Kansas twister tore through a rural zone trailer park. Raw, angry, and indifferent to the suffering and loss of life that it caused. Another act of my mother’s benevolent God.
Over the years, we mounded up a huge mountain of pig poop and dirt in each pen so that the pigs could climb up and escape from God’s rain. The only thing that saved us when the river did that, was the fact that our house was built on ten-foot, greased, telephone-pole stilts.
I only heard the story from my mom, but when the Colonel built that house, he made sure that God’s river of wrath couldn’t wash us away with the rest of the sinners. The bottom of the only floor in our one-story house was dead even with the top of that dike.
How my dad knew to do that? I could only give you the hindsight from two thousand years of conjecture and stories I heard, so I won’t even try. But I would assume that if he got those telephone poles the way my mother said he did, today… Excuse me, in the final part of the eternity I lived in, the Colonel would have been dead in three days.
As it was, his three days came later.
I don’t remember much more about the Colonel than the constant tests and questions he would ask me, trying to pull answers out of me at the same time he was shoving the knowledge in. To tell you the truth, he was a very quiet man. And by quiet, I don’t mean he talked softly. It was more like when he said something to you, you knew it was important, because if he was going to take the time to say it… I stayed quiet and paid attention to him—my mother said there was wisdom in every drop of sound he dripped.
My mother, on the other hand, was always talking. It was up to me to ferret out the important parts. Or maybe they were all important, now that I think about it. There was just so much that I couldn’t keep up. But she was the one who taught me everything I understood to be the truth at that time about her God. It wa
s only later that I would have to figure out whether or not she lied to me on purpose.
The lessons I got from my mom came from direct statement of fact, as she read and interpreted them from the big brown leather book she called “The Book of Life”—her Bible. If it wasn’t a prayer before we ate, it was driving all the way into the dirty gray heart of the once beautifully green Emerald City—Sunday mass at the Saint James Cathedral in Seattle.
We listened to the priest—well, my mother listened, I read her Bible—for an hour, sometimes more. It is difficult to read, alternating standing and kneeling a dozen times in an hour. For a kid, the whole thing was boring. The only part I liked was after church.
When the sermon was over, my mother took tea and ate carrot cake with her church-lady friends, while I played with the other kids.
In hindsight, it was anything but play.
— CLV —
I STARE DOWN at the oil dripping from the cross that’s punched through my “daydream’s” stomach. Black blood, my mind thinks. And this angel is covered in it.
You may think that I should be surprised by that, but there is a very good reason that I’m not. I’ll get to my book—my personal “bible”—later.
Right now, if I’m going to save this poor peacock from his Purgatory, I’m going to need some blood. Angel blood to be more specific. I know just where to get it.
Of course he’s not—well, yes, the way you understand it, he is dead. However, dead doesn’t mean what you might think. Dead to an angel is … different.
When they carry your immortal soul to… Listen, this is not the time or the place for a dogma discussion, so let me just say that in order to save this angel from Life, I’m going to have to pull him from out of this death. Because who knows how many he has had.
I look at the black oil again. Only one place to get that, I think. “I hate the ‘Mike,’ ” I mutter to myself, fully aware of where my hate has led me.
Sure, I try to convince myself that I truly do hate the thieving, thirsting-for-blood Black Market downtown, but the truth is, the place is magnificent … in a completely practical sense, mind you.
I told you—only the truth.
— CLVI —
MY MOTHER AND I drove to church every Sunday in the Colonel’s prized possession guzzler, and that took credits. More because the car was so fast and even more so because my mother liked to drive it that way.
The Colonel complained about that … often. It took almost an hour to get into downtown Seattle from Duvall, and he knew that there were better uses of our limited credits, not to mention the waste of time, he would tell my mother.
He was certain that there was a perfectly good church in downtown Duvall. One that would be glad to rob the credits that we saved on gas.
In his mind, I’m sure, that was the Colonel’s “lesser of two evils” scenario. He certainly wasn’t getting my mother to skip Sunday sermon altogether. He would have to face my mother’s “adamant” for that.
Because my mother was “Adamant,” she would tell the Colonel. That’s where I learned a lot of my vocabulary—my mother’s explanations to my father. And adamant meant she wasn’t changing her mind. That was all it took most times, but I do remember the Colonel making a one-hearted effort to have her leave me behind.
The ground needed gutting and our pigs needed feeding and… There was no end to the reasons that he would give for me needing to stay and learn to “be a leader not a follower.” In fact, I seem to remember him saying that I wouldn’t learn what I needed to survive, with all her Bible and babying.
I had no idea what he meant at the time—we were surviving as far as I could tell—but when I asked my mother, she told me I would become a respectable and well-mannered young man and not just my father’s “creation.” That was good enough for me, because rolling in pigpies or church? Like I said, lesser of two evils. So off to Sunday sermon I went, “wasting a whole half a weekend being completely unproductive.”
It never bothered me that the Colonel put it to my mother that way. Unproductive seemed to mean I wasn’t muddy and wet, covered in poop, slopping pigs or digging through dirt. What did bother me was that Max was not allowed to go with us. My mother was adamant about that as well.
Church didn’t allow dogs.
It was funny, because before it all happened, darned near every other establishment of any kind allowed people to bring their dogs right in with them. “Especially if you got credits,” the Colonel would grumble and say.
I remember going to the coffeehouse in town with my mom one morning. This lady set her little twisty-haired yipper up on the counter while she cracked out her credits for a cup of J-laced caffeine. When I looked at my mom, she had the same scrunched-up look on her face that she got when she caught Max licking his privates.
She took special care not to touch where that dog had been sitting on the counter. We never went back to that coffeehouse again. I thought it was because of that dog, but later I realized that soon enough no one who wasn’t rich bought much of anything that they could make, grow … or steal.
Max? … I thought I told you about… Maybe not. I apologize. I was getting there. I don’t really like talking about my dog, but I know we have to, so we’ll get to Max, too. Don’t you worry about that.
As a boy, the lessons I learned from my mother might have come from someone else’s book, but the ones from the Colonel came from “the real book of life,” he used to say. “The manual for the living.”
When I told him I was already reading that Bible at church, he said Life wasn’t someone you could learn about in a book. He said that Life was a miserable bitch and the only four lessons she was going to teach me would be delivered by way of pain and suffering and then death. And the best thing I could hope for was to be damn sure I didn’t have to learn any of them twice.
I asked my mom what my dad had meant, but she got her “frying-pan” look and I got sent to bed early so she and the Colonel could “discuss” something.
Every kid in the world knows what that means, and Max and I lay on the floor with the door to my room cracked and we listened.
The Colonel never “toned it down,” or “let me come to my own beliefs in my own time,” as I had overheard my mother warn him to do that night. It didn’t matter then, because most of the time I had no idea what he was talking about. I do remember his words, however. Most of his talks I could tell you verbatim.
It was like he knew the truth of what would happen before anyone else did. Looking back, that’s what it was—the cold hard truth of the future. Watch and learn—the only truth that Life has to offer.
So I gathered everything I could from the Colonel through observation and mimicry. But those lessons didn’t last long, because when I was eight … maybe it was nine … well, it was three scary “tests,” I can tell you that. Maybe it’s easier to count that way. Kids remember scary things. I was no different. The terrifying things? We’ll get to those later. “Even piss has its proper place and time,” a good friend of mine used to—still says.
But that was a long time ago and recounting it… The years are jumbled now. Two eternities will do that to you—angel or Man-monkey or miserable demon.
I don’t care if you are a righteous angel in Rain Almighty’s Heaven or a wicked archangel in the Great Dragon, Jump’s, wicked new Hell, a thousand years is a long time and an eternity has two of them. So, two eternities into my new existence, you will have to forgive me if some of the details of my life in Life’s garden escape my memory.
So … maybe I was eight or nine or ten—it hardly matters—because I remember the important parts clearly, like the day my parents simply disappeared. That happens to people, as you also well know. It does—did, anyway. I’ll get to that, too. That was the worst thing.
The other three things … came first.
So … Max … yes.
You might think that it sounds like I was all alone on that little farm, being constantly molded and guided by my
mother’s Bible and the Colonel’s “isms.” That maybe that was why all of this happened—how I came to the path that led me to author damnation and destruction in my book—but nothing could be further from the truth. I wasn’t alone.
I’m dating myself again, but before Protection agents were the only ones allowed to have dogs, and before citizens started eating them as one of their few sources of protein, and long before the State used an executive order to nationalize the entire production and distribution system for the delivery of calories to its burgeoning supply of bread-begging citizens… Before State added canine carne to the food pyramid, and Protection rounded up all the dogs—catching the cats proved futile—and hauled them away, barking and howling, stuffed in huge tractor-trailer semis … I had a dog named Max.
Max was a milk chocolate Labrador Retriever. His coat was so smooth and so beautifully brown that I would swear if you licked him, he would taste just like a chocolate bar. It was probably from all of the leftover pig parts my mom fed him.
We couldn’t or we didn’t buy dog food. Because burning credits on petro for a once-a-week church run was one thing, but the Colonel certainly wasn’t crazy enough to crack them on pet food. So any time we slaughtered a pig, Max got everything we weren’t going to eat.
It wasn’t much, but the ears and the feet and the tail and even the snout were standard table fare for my dog. And after my mother cooked the bacon, Max got the grease poured over whatever was in his dog dish that day.
Sometimes that grease and guts was all there was. And his coat was shiny brown because of all of it, she told me. Yes, my Max wasn’t only likable, I believed he was lickable. Fortunately, Max would never give anyone the chance to test that belief.
“He’s a licking fool, that dog,” the Colonel joked—he rarely did that. “That dog would lick a porcupine if it let him.”
As if he could understand him, Max tried that, too.
My father watched me without a word. It took me a couple of hours of Max whimpering, lying on my lap while I pulled out all those hooked quills with a pair of needle-nose pliers from the barn. He didn’t move the whole time. I think it was because I was one of the few people that he trusted.
TF- C - 00.00 - THE FALLEN Dark Fantasy Series: A Dark Dystopian Fantasy (Books 1 - 3) Page 57