Azrael

by William L. DeAndrea

When he came back through the house, Will saw that the TV set had turned itself on to The Weather Channel, a high-numbered channel on the tuner of the local cable system.

  Neither Will nor his wife watched The Weather Channel, but sometimes it just popped on. Donna thought it was funny, one of those electronic mistakes that no one can explain and that would be too much bother to have fixed. Will thanked God for the millionth time that he had found Donna.

  He turned off the set. He was glad it hadn’t happened with Jimmy there. There were explanations, but not to have to explain was best.

  Will got a fleece-lined car coat from the closet and went back over to the church. He climbed the steps to the tower room. In a closet up there, behind some spare choir robes (which reminded him: Sunday, he’d have to urge the congregation to take a greater interest in the choir) he found the transmitter. He took it out, placed it on a small table by a window, and switched it on. It was already tuned to the proper frequency.

  He waited for his leader to bounce and scramble between satellites and earth stations, through wires and waves.

  This must be important, he thought. Again. They weren’t supposed to beam the summons to that special device in the television set at this time of day, except in the direst of emergencies. And two of the direst emergencies in one week was quite a lot.

  A few seconds was enough. He put the headset on, pushed a button, and said, “Azrael. Responding to Control.”

  They insisted on being called “Control,” but he used them as much as they used him. More. They helped him with his purpose; he was thwarting theirs.

  “Azrael.” The Reverend Mr. Will Nelson was impressed. Borzov was making this transmission in person.

  PART SIX

  Chapter One

  HIS NAME HAD BEEN Roger Brude. Of course, it still was, but not to the World. Not even to Donna. It was vanity to seek recognition, or even appreciation, and pride was a Deadly Sin. Even in a time as sinful as this, a man who tried to live a good life, to follow the Word, to help others, could not avoid being noticed. Temptations to pride would be all around.

  That was why Roger lived his public ministry under the name of another, the man or (as Roger was convinced) the angel, who had shown him the end of his confusion. It was the closest Roger could come to the kind of tribute his late friend deserved—a whole life lived in his name.

  Roger had been born in West Virginia, but he had lived all over as a child—as far north as St. Paul, as far south as San Antonio. His father was a bookkeeper with a knack for finding employment at firms that were about to go out of business or be swallowed up in mergers, with his father’s job being ground up in the belly of some already overstaffed corporate accounting department. Dad would get a severance check and a reference, and the family would move on.

  When he was younger, Roger would cry at night over these dislocations. He was always the New Kid, and the New Kid was always the enemy. And they would try to make him fight.

  It was sinful to fight. Roger knew that. His mother mentioned it repeatedly, read it from the Book. It was a sin to fight, except when you fought for the Lord. It was discussed at length around the family table, the one that had covered more distance, it seemed, than a space shot, and there was really no way he could construe making the other kids stop tormenting him as fighting for the Lord.

  “The Lord was spat upon,” his father would say around a mouthful of meat loaf. “And reviled. He took it. He forgave, and even blessed, His tormentors.”

  “Don’t talk with your mouth full, dear,” Mom would tell Dad, then turn to Roger. “But your father is absolutely right. The whole thing is, we have to try to be like the Lord.”

  “But He was God. He was perfect.”

  “We still have to try. Do you think your father likes it that none of his jobs seems to last more than a year? That worse bookkeepers keep getting the promotions, men ten years younger—even some women now—are making more money than your father does, just because they’ve been lucky enough to stay in place and build up seniority? Do you think he likes not being able to buy us a house because he has to keep moving around the country like a fugitive because of bad luck and bad timing? Do you think he likes that?”

  Roger had thought the question rhetorical, but his mother pressed on. “Do you?”

  He turned to his father. “Do you, Dad?”

  Dad’s mouth moved a lot before any voice came out. When it did, it sounded strange. “No, son,” he said. “I don’t like it, especially.”

  “Of course he doesn’t,” Mom said triumphantly. “Only a worm could like that kind of treatment. But your father is a God-fearing man. He doesn’t go around beating up the boss every time he gets laid off. He doesn’t grab him by the collar and scream about how unfair it is, even though it is, of course. He goes on, doing the best he can. You know why that is, don’t you, Roger?”

  “Because our reward is in Heaven.”

  “Because our reward is in Heaven. Worldly things don’t matter. God is the only Judge that counts, and Heaven and Hell is where the real justice is done.”

  So the family kept moving, and he was still the New Kid, and they still tried to get him to fight. And he would run away, so they marked him yellow and continued to torment him, or ignored him completely. Or he would give in to sinful human nature and fight them. And most of the time, he would win.

  That was both the glory and the pain of it. Because he was actually quite good at this fighting stuff. He was a big kid, and strong and healthy. Mom said he reminded her of his father. Dad had never looked especially big before, but Roger took another look, and guessed that Dad would be pretty good-sized if he would pull his shoulders back a little and stop letting his head slump forward the way it did.

  Roger had good posture. Teachers always told him. They seemed more impressed with his posture than with the good marks he got in school. A’s in everything except math. Roger didn’t want to be good in math. If you were good in math, they might try to make a bookkeeper out of you. Roger honored his father, but he’d had enough of that life already.

  But he had a good body, and a good brain, and fast reflexes, and things that hurt other kids, caused them physical pain, had to hit Roger a lot harder before they hurt him.

  And when they taunted him enough to make him forget his parents and the Lord and fight anyway, he just didn’t care anymore. He already knew he was sinning. He knew every bruise he got would bring a scolding (“He that spareth the rod hateth his son”) so he would do whatever it took, and he would win.

  That’s when the real pain started. Because even when he won, he never won anything. Sure, the other kids would accept him, would want to “be his friend,” but what was that? What good was a friend who cost you part of your chance at Heaven? Who wanted the respect of a fool who would only respect someone who was willing to hurt him?

  Roger grew up alone, except for Mom and Dad, of course. Then the accident happened, and he lost them, too.

  It was Roger’s junior year of high school. They were living in Pennsylvania at the time. They’d been there over two years, longer than Roger could remember every staying in one place. They’d been there because Dad had run out of places to go. The factory closed down, and there wasn’t another job to be found. Dad collected unemployment; they scrimped, and they got by. But the unemployment was almost up, and the prospect of Welfare faced them. As Mom said, unemployment was bad enough, but Welfare would be a disgrace. Roger worked at a hamburger joint after school, but he couldn’t help much.

  One hot night, while Roger was at work, Dad and Mom went out for a ride, probably to get some air. They’d sold their air conditioner to avoid temptation, with electricity so high. A ride in the car was about the only way to cool off, and with gas the way it was, even that had to be restricted.

  A policeman came and pulled him out from behind the grill. Roger had never been so embarrassed. He hadn’t done anything wrong, at least not what the police thought of as wrong.

  But it wa
sn’t that. The policeman told him Mom and Dad were dead, crashed into the abutment of an overpass on Interstate 70. It was kind of a mysterious accident, since witnesses said they didn’t swerve to avoid a hazard or anything, just swerved from the lane into the concrete piling.

  Roger was sure he knew what it was. Something had broken in the car, the brakes or the steering. He told the cops, and asked them to find out what it was, to save other people from crashing.

  They said they looked, but they didn’t find anything wrong with the car. They started trying to tell him about his father, but Roger got very upset, and told them not to try to slough their incompetence off on somebody else. He apologized later. Maybe the flawed part had been burned up in the crash. He was sure the police had done their best. He consoled himself that Mom and Dad had found True Justice at last, and all the bad luck would be made up for, and all the striving for goodness would be taken into account.

  Now he had to face his own life. He was completely alone, now. Well, never completely. He summoned his strength, and he prayed, and it came to him that as soon as school was done, he would join the Army. Yes, he would be fighting, but he would be fighting for Freedom. Fighting for the Lord.

  He did very well in Basic Training. He requested to be sent to Vietnam. He met Will Nelson soon after he got there. They were assigned adjoining bunks. But something special happened. Will just seemed to fall into treating Roger like a friend, as though Roger had grown up next door to him in Chicago.

  They talked a lot, about their lives and families. Will was a recent orphan, too. That is, his mother had died years ago. His father, a policeman, had been shot by a drug dealer. He’d been working his way through college (there were no other relatives to go to for help) when the low number came up in the draft, and he decided to go and get it over with. “Save something up, get GI benefits, cut down on the work hours, stay awake in class for a change.”

  Will seemed to take things with a stoicism that would have been impossible for Roger without the Lord’s help. Will claimed not to believe in the Lord.

  “Whatever happens, happens,” he would say. “My father had plenty of chances to go into private security, but he insisted on staying a cop. You put yourself out on the street between the pushers and fucking crooked politicians, you’re asking to get shot. Like the kind of idiot who’d volunteer to come to Vietnam.” He’d grin at that, since he’d told Roger he’d volunteered himself. Roger reminded him. Will said, “Maybe I feel like shooting somebody myself,” and laughed.

  Then came the night patrols, one particular night patrol. They were supposed to tempt the enemy out of hiding. There was a reason for that, but Roger never learned what it was.

  “We’re dead,” Will had said, smoking a last cigarette before they pulled out of camp.

  “You think that way, we will be,” Roger said.

  “This is a suicide mission. I won another lottery.” Roger had tried to protest, but Will went on. “You know, I bet we’ve cost the government something like a hundred thousand dollars each in training, equipment, pay, transportation, and food.”

  “So?”

  “So, when someone is willing to spend money like that to set you up to be killed, you’re better off dead if you ask me.”

  Roger asked him, as a friend, to stop, and Will, as a friend, did. The sergeant called, and they went on patrol.

  They succeeded. They tempted the enemy into attacking. And it was a suicide mission. Fire came from alongside the path; fire came from the tops of trees, from in front of them and behind them. Roger was hit three times. He went down, lost consciousness, and died.

  He must have died—either that or he’d come so close no one could tell the difference. Because it was routine for both sides to cut the throats of anyone who managed to survive the killing fire. Will had been spared. He was sick and confused, but he was alive with his throat intact.

  His only coherent thought had been to find Will. He had to do it by dog tags because several of the corpses had no faces, and one had no head. Somehow, Roger got to his feet and staggered back toward camp. He would have stayed with Will, but the many creatures of the jungle who grew fat on death were beginning to work, and Roger didn’t want to wind up on the menu by mistake.

  He was found, after a few days, field-treated, then transferred to a hospital ship for surgery and flown back to the States for recuperation.

  And counseling. They gave him counseling. A lady doctor, sympathetic, but somehow too sincere, told him not to worry about his guilt feelings. She said survivors of incidents like this often felt guilt.

  Roger smiled and nodded and thanked her for her help, but the idea of guilt had never occurred to him. He had been dead, or hopelessly close to it, but he had been spared. Only God had the power to do something like that. God had saved him for a purpose. He didn’t know yet what the purpose was, but strength and prayer would lead him there in God’s own time.

  People came around distributing Bibles to the men in the hospital. Roger was happy to see them—his own had been lost in the jungle. He had a dream once of it taking root, fertilized by the essence of his buddies, and converting the Communists by the miracle of itself. Roger knew how silly that was as soon as he awoke. He was alive. How many miracles did he want?

  In any case, he had a Bible, and he read it, and in Exodus, he saw it. The Lord sent the Angel of Death among the Egyptians and took the firstborn son of each household. And he saw more. The Angel of Death visited not only the Egyptians, but the Philistines, and others. Individuals as well as groups. Every individual, in fact.

  Some background material reminded Roger that in non-Biblical Hebrew (and Islamic) lore, the name of the Angel of Death was Azrael. “Help of the Lord,” it meant. It was Azrael who greeted each soul as it left the body and escorted it to Judgment. And it was Azrael who was sent to perform the merciful harvest of souls when God’s great Plan said they were ripe. Roger did not believe that the firstborn of Egypt suffered when Azrael called. That would be cruel, and God was Good. They had simply been taken to a better life, perhaps Heaven itself, even though they were not of the Chosen.

  Death today was so cruel.

  And then he knew why God had spared him.

  Will had prepared the way, with his talk about money being spent to get people killed, and the inevitability of death in those circumstances.

  It was a truth so blazingly obvious that Roger had almost been blinded by the realization of it: When someone is so determined to have someone dead that he is willing to sacrifice money and his immortal soul to see it done, the death in question is part of God’s plan for us, and is therefore inevitable.

  What was needed, then, was someone who understood this, who treated it as the holy mission it was. Who executed the Will of the Lord with compassion and mercy. Who delivered the soul into the Hand of the Lord without suffering and without judgment.

  “That ye be not judged,” Roger whispered.

  What was needed was a modern avatar of Azrael.

  And he had been chosen.

  He would accept the honor, but not in his own name. When he was released from the hospital, he went to Chicago, to the Bureau of Records. He knew Will’s birthdate, he knew his father’s and mother’s names; it was easy to get a certified copy of Will’s birth certificate. He became Will Nelson.

  Roger stole nothing from his only friend’s life but his identity. He did not try to get transfer credit from Will’s old college when he enrolled in a different school. He didn’t even use his friend’s high school record—he told the admissions officer the transcripts had been lost and took a battery of tests to make up for their absence.

  He kept to himself, pretty much, except when he was cultivating the criminal element on campus—the drug dealers, the gamblers, the pimps. He made much of his Army training. He intimated he was insane and acted in a way to back up the claim. Soon, he was introduced to some of the big boys. He was offered a commission. There was a student, a distributor, who was skimming
the profits. He was to be put in the hospital and taught a lesson.

  “I’m not a teacher,” the new Will Nelson said. “And I’m not in this business to leave witnesses.”

  The bravado impressed them, as he’d known it would. He was handed another commission, across the river in the next state, someone who had skimmed more deeply, and for a longer period of time, and who had already been warned once.

  Azrael had paid him a visit. He had rendered the man unconscious with chloroform, then he’d done what he could to help him on his way before putting him in his garage with the motor running. The authorities said suicide, in fear of his associates. The job was done so smoothly, in fact, that even Roger’s employer had his doubts. Roger convinced him, and his ministry was born.

  He met Donna about the same time. Donna was a home ec major. Roger saw her as a tangible sign from the Lord that he was following the right path. She understood him, and she made him happy. Once he met her, he was never lonely again. And she was a good woman, a wise woman. She was good enough so that when Will (for he was coming to think of himself now as Will—he was Roger to himself only while engaged in Azrael’s work) had to leave campus over a weekend on one of his increasingly frequent business trips, he never wasted a fraction of a second worrying about her. She was wise enough to know she never had to waste any time worrying about him, either. By the end of sophomore year, they were engaged.

  Before long, he started working for the Russians. He wasn’t sure how they learned about him. He suspected that someone in the drug business was working for them. He suspected, in fact, that the Russians had a lot to do with the drug business, that they thought by pouring poison into America, they could weaken and destroy her.

  It was this kind of situation that gave the new Will Nelson an occasional small glimpse of the machinery of God’s plan. Will felt sure that just as one of the effects of pesticides was the breeding of super bugs, the ultimate effect of the flood of drugs would be to breed super Americans, by killing off the morally weak, the foolish, the self-hating.