Upon This Rock

by David Marusek

  Poppy pulled the flap from the marble and dropped it on the ground. It skittered about as it coalesced.

  The thing that Poppy didn’t understand: If the Final Battle had truly begun here in the keep, or even if this was only a minor opening skirmish, wouldn’t the bleachers of Heaven be straining as all the saints and angels leaned forward to watch them? Shouldn’t he be able to wave his arms to get Heaven’s attention? What need did Martha have of a flare?

  Without the skin tag, the key was now a perfect, mirror-surfaced sphere. It was heavier than a cannonball and impossible for Poppy to shot put far into the lake. So he simply stood at the edge of the shore and dropped it in. The marble did not flutter as it sank but plummeted straight down into the depths.

  “Thank you,” Martha said. “It was the correct thing to do.”

  When the flap, now a golden pea, had cooled, Proverbs came over to pick it up.

  “Leave it,” Poppy said.

  “I can keep ahold of it while you pray, lord.”

  “I said leave it.”

  If the flare was so essential to the success of the angel’s mission, maybe Proverbs wasn’t its best courier, in spite of his warrior’s spirit. Just the other day the boy’s head hurt so bad he couldn’t see straight. Now he crushes men’s skulls.

  Who then? Who should he send on a one-way trip to Japan? It was one more thing to pray over.

  “We’ll be taking that break now,” Poppy said, turning toward the tunnel. His boys followed in his wake. Their lights lurched down the tunnel and faded from sight.

  Do pray, Master Prophecy, but pray fast.

  BS3 1.0

  THE FIVE PROPHECY men paused at the gate to regard the dead ranger lying in a pool of his own blood.

  “He would’a killed me,” Proverbs said.

  “I don’t doubt it,” Poppy replied. “He was a violent man.”

  They left the keep, and Poppy padlocked the sally door from the outside. Hosea and Proverbs escorted Corny down the slide. As soon as they reached the bottom, Adam started talking.

  “I couldn’t say this in the keep, lord, because she’s always watching. She might be watching now, but I gotta say it.”

  “Enough with the windup!” Poppy snapped. “If you got something to say, Adam, just say it.”

  “Yes, lord, sorry, but Martha has been pilfering our supplies.”

  “What? What supplies?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe all of them.”

  “You don’t know?”

  “I know how she made their guns ‘impotent’.”

  When they got to the yard, Poppy sent Corny into the house to go lie down and took the others to the prayer cabin with him. Adam dropped a handful of .44 Magnum rounds on Poppy’s desk.

  “These are from Ranger Danger’s handgun,” he said. He used pliers to remove the lead slug from one of them and tipped the brass case upside down. No gunpowder fell out. “A dud. They’re all duds.”

  Poppy examined the empty brass. “How did she get the powder out?”

  “How did she melt trees?”

  Poppy returned the case to Adam. “So what? She disarmed the feds, not us. Proverbs’ gun fired, didn’t it?”

  “Yes, lord, except it came from the house, not the keep. I’d bet the ammo that’s been sitting in our armory is bad.”

  “That’s insane. Why would she do that?”

  Hosea said, “I don’t know why she would, lord, but she already done it to our propane canisters.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  Adam said, “I tried telling you about it last week, lord.”

  Adam related Proverbs’ discovery that half of their newly purchased propane stock had inexplicably leaked away. And not only their propane but their firewood too. About six cords of what Hosea had stacked was missing.

  “And remember how it took a whole forest to fuel her flare?” Hosea said. “She can burn wood, but maybe she prefers stronger stuff. Maybe that’s why she wants to send Proverbs to go get himself killed by radiation.”

  “If that’s true,” Poppy said, “I can’t help but wonder if all of Father God’s angels are as incompetent as this one.”

  “Maybe they’re not,” Proverbs said. “Maybe she’s no angel in the first place.”

  “Don’t talk stupid. She may not be in the first rank of angels, I’ll grant you that, and she’s clearly unqualified to hold the key to the bottomless pit, but she’s still an angel and a warrior of the Father. She thinks like a warrior; it’s all about her mission. If she took stuff from us, it was in the name of her mission. That’s how soldiers think.”

  “That’s not what I meant, lord,” Proverbs said. “I meant she can’t be an angel because there are no girl angels in the Bible.”

  “Of course there are. Are you a Bible expert now? What kind of bullshit is this? There’s lots of them.” But as soon as the words left his mouth, they sounded false.

  “Name one, lord.”

  “Well, there’s . . .” Though there were many mentions of angels in Scripture, only two of them were actually named — Michael and Gabriel — and three more fallen angels: Satan, Abaddon, and Beelzebul. Nevertheless, unnamed angels abounded in both Testaments and were referred to by their pronouns. Poppy pulled his Bible from the holster and began to flip through to notable angel passages to look for an angelic she or her.

  “You just need one, lord,” Proverbs said, repeating his father’s own logic with Ginger.

  “I know that!” Poppy said, slapping the book shut. “This might take some study. Why don’t we go inside and eat. Then you can take care of the bodies while I pray on this and everything else.”

  The boys got up and put on their parkas.

  “What’s that?” Adam said. The dog was in the yard, barking his head off.

  Hosea went to the window to look out.

  “Holy crap.”

  BS4 1.0

  GINGER HAD GIVEN Deut a lot to think about. None of it was true; it couldn’t be. But if it was, it would explain a lot of things about her sister. Deut had wondered, for example, why Sarai’s corrections always took place in the prayer cabin and not at Worship Time like everybody else’s. Or why she seemed to change so much after Mama went away on vacation. They all missed Mama, but only Sarai seemed to turn away from the family, and from her, her own twin.

  Still, the devil was a master in concocting believable lies, and that was all it was, a believable lie. Anything else was unthinkable. Still, Deut wanted to go inside and confront her sister about it that very moment, except that she couldn’t imagine how to ask her if their father had — what? — what was it he was supposed to have done? She could never utter the words Ginger had used to describe it. Language.

  So rather than go to the house, she stayed out in the bathhouse with Ginger and finished the laundry. She pulled the washing machine inside to thaw the clothes that were frozen in its tub. While they thawed, she hung, sorted, and folded the earlier loads. After a while, Ginger came over to help, and they worked in companionable silence on opposite sides of the table.

  Crissy Lou had curled up near the barrel stove and gone to sleep. Every little while Ginger went to the window to check the yard. Deut fed the stove. At one point, Crissy Lou picked up her head to listen to something, and both Ginger and Deut went to the window. It was Poppy and the boys finally returning from the keep. But where were the rangers?

  Poppy sent Corny to the house while he and the rest went to the prayer cabin and stomped their boots on the porch before they went inside. The prayer cabin window lit up.

  The nearly full moon bathed the yard in cold, grey light. But where were the rangers? Where were they?

  CRISSY LOU LEAPED to her feet and commenced to barking most furiously. She ran around the bathhouse whining to be let out. She bolted through the door the moment Deut cracked it open.

  “They’re back. They’re back,” Ginger sang, dashing from the window to the clothes pegs where she had hung her outerwear. Deut went to the w
indow to look. Three men shuffled through the snow to the two sno-gos that were still parked in the yard.

  “I’m sorry, but I have to go now,” Ginger said, pulling up her snow pants and slipping into her parka. “I can’t stay, but I promise I won’t say anything about your brother. I’ll find a place where everyone can live together, if it comes to that.” She continued talking, apologizing, and promising as she pulled on her gloves and hat and headed for the door.

  “Wait!” Deut said. “Look!”

  “What? I can’t. They’ll leave without me.”

  “No, they won’t. Something’s wrong. Come here and look.”

  “I can’t.”

  Crissy Lou started barking insanely outside the window, and Ginger came over to look. The three men stood in the moonlight on either side of the sno-gos with their arms dangling at their sides. The dog was barking at them from inches away, but they didn’t even seem to notice her.

  “What are they doing?”

  “Nothing, so far as I can tell.”

  “I have to go. They’ll take me to town.”

  “No, look at them first. Two of them are in their shirtsleeves. Look. They should be freezing themselves dressed like that.”

  It was true. As they watched, one of the men, Ranger Danger, sat astride one of the sno-gos, but he sat facing the rear of the machine. The other two piled on the same machine, also backward.

  “This is not good,” Ginger said.

  There were shouts and the slam of a door, and Poppy and the boys spilled out of the prayer cabin into the yard. They shined lights on the men, who dismounted the machine and fled. They men didn’t run but toddled, like babies, toward the Stubborn Mountain Trail, falling and picking themselves up again, with the dog snapping at their heels.

  BS5 1.0

  THE SALLY DOOR was still padlocked from the outside, the way Poppy and the boys had left it. But the larger portal, the gate itself, was open. It had been opened from the inside.

  Adam, Proverbs, Cora, and Sarai accompanied their father. Hosea, Deut, and Sue were left behind to guard Ginger and watch over Corny and the household.

  After removing their outerwear and donning hardhats, the holy posse proceeded to the main tunnel, but Adam told everyone to stop.

  “This is where Ranger Danger beaned Corny,” he said, pointing to blood stains on the floor. “But where’s the ranger’s blood? There used to be a pool of it right over here. Now it’s gone along with his body. Did he collect his blood before he left?”

  They walked up the tunnel in silence. Proverbs split off from the group at the machine room. On the second level, Adam and Cora went to the storeroom chamber while Poppy and Sarai continued to the cistern on the third level. The angel wasn’t there, so they waited for the others.

  Proverbs came first. “Two of our barrels of motor oil and all of our gasoline barrels are empty,” he reported. “One of the acetylene tanks is empty too.”

  When Adam and Cora arrived, Adam reported, “About a third of the ammo I checked is no good, and the rest is iffy. Much of our high-energy food is gone — whole cases of cooking oil, bacon, nuts, corn syrup. The cans and jars are unopened but empty. Same with the sacks of beans, rice, and sugar. We didn’t have time to check everything, but almost all the rolls of visquene, vinyl flooring, tarpaper, paint, varnish, and adhesives are missing too.”

  Poppy led the group up the tunnel to the rock pile. There they found the angel. Her inner light was completely extinguished. Her last remaining wing had been hacked off and was lying nearby. Her once-powerful arms were slashed to the bone. Her porcelain skin was scorched and blistered. She lay absolutely still.

  “Is she dead?” Sarai asked, horrified. To her, Martha was still an angel.

  Martha stirred and turned her head toward them. “The Father’s grace be upon you,” she said. “Greetings, special daughter. Do not be troubled by my appearance. I am not dead. Angels are not alive in an earthly sense, so we can’t die. The damaged body you see before you is but an outward manifestation of the injury to my celestial being.”

  “Which means your celestial being is hurt!”

  “Enough!” Poppy said. “What happened here, angel? Where are the dead men?” He tipped his headlamp to illuminate the boulder and large stone where the agents had fallen but were no longer lying. Gone too was their gore from the rocks. “I would’a never left them with you if I thought you’d turn around and resurrect them.”

  “The men were not resurrected.”

  “They were! I saw them.”

  “You saw puppets dangling from the devil’s strings.”

  “Explain.”

  “The tone of your voice is offensive, Master Prophecy, but I will answer your question because you have a right to know. Shortly after you and your sons departed, I felt the presence of a powerful spirit, and I came here to investigate. I was ambushed by Camael, the Bringer of Destruction, an old foe of mine. He had been riding one of Obama’s men but had kept his presence hidden from me until that moment. When your son dispatched the agents, Camael was forced to reanimate them because of their usefulness to him in the fallen world. They, especially the man called Nabor, are well placed in the ranks of the Antichrist, and it would have taken too long for Lucifer to groom their replacements.”

  Poppy scratched his chin. He had to admit it sounded plausible. “And the key? Did they take the key with them?”

  “Nay, I am pleased to say. Nay, thank the Father, they did not. Much of the credit for that goes to you, Master Prophecy, for hiding it where you did. I cannot begin to think of the damage to the Father’s plan its loss would have caused.

  “Yet now that Camael has found me, he will be back with legions of devils and men. Your son’s journey to Japan is more critical than ever. If he is ready to depart, I will give him instructions. I have made all his travel arrangements.”

  Poppy said, “That brings up another matter. I can understand why you would need to consume a forest to fuel your flare, but why steal from me?”

  The angel raised herself on her elbow. “Steal is a strong word, Master Prophecy. Think twice before accusing an angel of stealing. Angels do not steal, lie, or fall victim to any of the other vices of men, but one. Pride is our weakness. Pride banished Lucifer from Heaven, not larceny.”

  Poppy continued, “Then what do you call taking the very fuel and food we rely on for our survival?”

  “I think the word you’re seeking is ‘borrow.’ Fear not, when this battle is concluded, the angels will replenish your stores seven times over. You shall not want for anything. That is a promise. And if we don’t win, no one will survive long enough to care.”

  Despite everything, Poppy wanted to believe her.

  “Is there some reason why you didn’t tell me about all of this borrowing sooner?”

  “Verily, I didn’t think it was necessary. But now I see that men and angels have grown apart for too long, and men have forgotten how to trust in the nature of angels.”

  “Is that so? Then why don’t you refresh this man’s memory. What is the nature of angels I should trust in?”

  “Gladly. As you know, angels are creatures made of pure spirit, whereas men are spirits clothed in matter. Your spirits are bedazzled by all of the wonders of the physical world that surrounds you, and so you cannot easily see spirits with your earthly eyes. Therefore, when we angels manifest ourselves to you, as I am now doing, we must, perforce, borrow a little matter from your world to become visible. I have been forced to borrow even more matter to counteract the evil that has befallen me and to stand guard over the key. Believe me when I say I have used the bare minimum of your stores.

  “And believe when I say that all will be restored in due time — with interest.”

  Poppy spat on the ground.

  Martha said, “That appears to be a gesture of disrespect, Master Prophecy. Do you mind explaining why you behave in this manner?”

  “You’re good, Martha. I’ll give you that. You had me fooled. So
tell me: how come there are no female angels named in the Bible? How is it that you’re the only girl angel in Heaven?”

  “But I’m not. That is, I am neither a female angel nor a male angel. Again, allow me to remind you, angels are pure spirit with no need for gender. Only when we manifest to you humans, who are consumed with sex, are we compelled to choose one or the other. In biblical times, men had authority, and women did not. Is it, therefore, any wonder why we chose to appear solely as males in those days? Today’s society is more diverse, and we are competing for your children’s attention with princesses and robots. Therefore, in the modern era, we angels are just as inclined to appear as female angels as male ones. But in truth, it is all, as they say, window dressing. For I am neither male nor female nor anything in between.”

  “Also in biblical times,” Poppy added, “before the Flood, angels slept with human women and begat the race of giants. That requires something more than flim-flam ‘manifesting,’ you can be sure. It requires male seed, and you can’t make jism out of acetylene gas and gunpowder. Or can you?”

  Gathering new strength, Martha rose to her feet and towered over the humans. “Just what are you implying, Master Prophecy?” The angel didn’t seem so ragged as she had a moment before. Her wounds had vanished, and fire blazed in her eyes.

  If she meant to intimidate Poppy, she failed (though his offspring clung to each other behind his back). Poppy took a step forward and said, “Go ahead and insult my intelligence again.”

  “Know this,” Martha said. “I’m getting a little tired of your doubting nature. Your parents should have named you Thomas instead of Marvin. I understand that the task ahead is frightening and that you may be reluctant to undertake it, but that’s no excuse to heap insult upon this servant of God.”

  “Bullshit!” Poppy said. “Go ahead and pretend I’m insulting you. Listen to me, angel. I’m not insulting you; I’m rebuking you.”

  “Careful, mortal. Think about what you’re saying, for your life and your family’s life depend on it. I am no devil, but if I were, would you really want to be pissing me off? I don’t think so. It makes me wonder if you truly read the Book of Job.”