by James Maxey
He hadn’t understood it. Even in the aftermath of the Rapture, it didn’t make sense to him. So he’d begun reading books written to explain the symbolic language of the Bible, which later led him to study cabala, which set him on his quest to understand the world he lived in by understanding its underlying magical foundations.
Jobless, unable to pay his rent, he’d moved into his grandmother’s abandoned house where he’d studied every book he could buy, trade or borrow to learn magic. So far, every book was crap. Alchemy, astrology, chaos magic, witchcraft—bullshit of the highest order. Yet, he kept reading. He tested the various theories, chanting spells, mixing potions, and divining tea leaves. He was hungry for answers. How did the world really work? Pre-rapture, science answered that question.
But science, quite bluntly, had been falsified. The army of angels had carried away his understanding of the world.
Allen now lived in a universe unbounded by natural laws. He lived in a reality where everything was possible. Books were his only guide into this terra incognita.
* * *
The whitewash dried, leaving a blank sheet twenty feet across. It was pristine as angel wings. Allen crept carefully across it, having bathed his feet in rainwater. He wore pale, threadbare cotton. He’d shaved his head, even his eyebrows. The only dark things in the room were his eyes and the shaft of charcoal he carried. He crouched, recited the prayer he’d studied, then used his left hand to trace the outer arc of the summoning circle. The last rays of daylight faded from the window. His goal, before dawn, was to speak with an angel.
With the circle complete, he started scribing arcane glyphs around its edges. This part was nerve-wracking; a single misplaced stroke could ruin the spell. When the glyphs were done, Allen filled the ring with questions. Where was Mary? Would he see her again? Was there hope of reunion? These and a dozen other queries were marked in angelic script where each squiggle held meaning. His hand ached. His legs were cramped from crouching. He pushed through the pain to shape the letters precisely.
It was past midnight when he finished. He placed seven cones of incense along the edge of the circle and lit them. The air smelled like cheap after-shave.
He retrieved the polished sword from his bedroom and carried it into the circle, along with Solomon’s Manual. He opened to the bookmarked incantation and spoke the words. Almost immediately, a bright light approached the house. Shadows danced on the wall. A low, bass rumble rattled the windows.
A large truck with no muffler was clawing its way up the gravel driveway.
Disgusted by the interruption, Allen stepped outside the circle and went to the front porch, book and sword still in hand. The air was bracing—the kind of chill February night where every last bit of moisture has frozen out of the sky, leaving the stars crisp. The bright moon cast stark shadows over the couch, end-tables, and lamps cluttering the lawn.
Allen lived in the mountains of southern Virginia, miles from the nearest town. His remote location let him know all his neighbors—and the vehicle in his driveway didn’t belong to any of them. It was a flatbed truck. Like many vehicles these days, it was heavily armed. A gunner sat on the back, manning a giant machine gun bolted to the truck bed. The fact that the gunner sat in a rocking chair took an edge from the menace a gun this large should have projected. Gear and luggage were stacked on the truck bed precariously. A giant, wolfish dog stood next to the gunner, its eyes golden in the moonlight.
The truck shuddered to a halt, the motor sputtering into silence. Loud bluegrass music seeped through the cab windows. It clicked off, and the passenger door opened. A woman got out, dressed in camouflage fatigues. She looked toward the porch, where Allen stood in shadows, then said, “Mr. Frost?”
Allen assumed they were asking about his grandfather. The mailbox down at the road still bore his name—his grandmother never changed it after he died, nor had Allen bothered with it after his grandmother had vanished.
“If you’re looking for Nathan Frost, he died years ago.”
“No,” the woman said, in a vaguely familiar voice. “Allen Frost.”
“Why do you want him? Who are you?”
“My name is Rachael Young,” she answered.
The voice and face clicked. The intelligent design girl from his last class. “Oh,” he said. “Yes. You’ve found me.”
The driver’s door opened and closed. A long-haired man with a white beard down to his waist came around the front of the truck. “Well now,” the old man said, in a thick Kentucky accent. “You’re the famous science fella.”
“Famous?” asked Allen.
“My granddaughter’s been talking you up for nigh on a year,” said Old Man Young. “Says you’re gonna have answers.”
“We looked all over for you,” said Rachael. “The college said you’d gone to live with your grandmother in Texas.”
“Texas? I don’t have any relatives in Texas.”
“No shit,” the gunner on the flatbed said. “Been all over this damn country, chasin’ one wild goose after another. You better not be a waste of our time.” The dog beside him began to snarl as it studied Allen.
“Luke,” said Old Man Young. “Mind your language. Haul down the ice-chest.”
“Sorry we got here so late, Mr. Frost,” Rachael said, walking toward him. She was looking at the sword and book. “Have we, uh, interrupted something?”
“Maybe,” Allen said. “Look, I’m a little confused. Why, exactly, have you been looking for me?”
“You’re the only scientist I trust,” she said. “When we used to have our conversations in class, you always impressed me. I really respected you. You knew your stuff. Since your specialty is biology, we want you to look at what we’ve got in the cooler and tell us what it is.”
Allen wasn’t sure what struck him as harder to swallow—that she’d spent a year tracking him down, or that she remembered the tedious cross-examinations she’d subjected him to as conversations.
Luke, the gunner, hopped off the truck carrying a large green Coleman cooler. It made sloshing noises as he lugged it to the porch. Luke was middle-aged, heavyset, crew cut. Rachael’s father?
Luke placed the container at Rachael’s feet. Rachael leaned over and unsnapped the clasp. “Get ready for a smell,” she said, lifting the lid.
Strong alcohol fumes washed over the porch. Allen’s eyes watered. The fumes carried strange undertones—corn soaked in battery acid, plus a touch of rotten teeth, mixed with a not-unpleasant trace of cedar.
“We popped this thing into Uncle Luke’s moonshine to preserve it,” Rachael said.
Despite the moonlight, it was too dark for Allen to make out what he was looking at. Rachael stepped back, removing her shadow from the contents. Allen was horrified to find these crazy people had brought him the corpse of a baby with a gunshot wound to its face. The top of its head was missing. The baby was naked, bleached pale by the brew in which it floated. There was something under it, paler still, like a blanket. Only, as his eyes adjusted, Allen realized the baby wasn’t sharing the cooler with a blanket, but with some kind of bird—he could make out the feathers.
When he finally understood what he was looking at, his hands shook so hard he dropped his sword, and just missed losing a toe.
* * *
Allen lit the oil lamps while Luke lugged the cooler into the kitchen. Allen only had a few hours worth of gasoline left for the generator; he wanted to save every last drop until he was ready to examine the dead cherub. While Luke sat the corpse in the sink to let the alcohol drain off, Allen gathered up all the tools he thought he might need—knives, kitchen sheers, rubber gloves, Tupperware. Old Man Young was off, in his words, “to secure the perimeter.” (“That means he’s gone to pee,” Rachael had explained once her grandfather was out of earshot.) Rachael was outside now as well, taking care of the dog.
To take notes during the autopsy, Allen found a black Sharpie and a loose-leaf notebook half filled with notes he’d made learning ancient Gree
k. As he flipped to a blank page, he said, “I can’t believe you shot one of these. I thought they were invulnerable. I saw a video where a cop emptied his pistol into one. The bullets bounced off.”
“Invulnerable?” Luke asked. “Like Superman?”
“Sure. Bulletproof.”
“You think a brick wall is invulnerable?” Luke asked.
“Is this a rhetorical question?”
“Suppose you took a tack hammer to brick wall,” Luke said. “Would it be invulnerable?”
“Close to it,” said Allen.
“How about a sledgehammer?” asked Luke.
“Then, no, of course not.”
“A cop’s pistol is a tack hammer,” said Luke, as he freed the rifle slung over his shoulder. “This is a sledgehammer. .50-caliber. Single shot, but one is all I need. This thing will punch a hole through a cast iron skillet.”
He nodded toward the cherub draining in the sink. “This pickled punk never stood a chance.”
“Not a particularly reverent man, are you Luke?” said Allen. “That’s pretty harsh language to be calling an angel.”
The back door to the kitchen opened and Rachael came in, followed by Old Man Young.
“Whatever the hell this is,” said Luke, “it ain’t no damn angel.”
“It looks like an angel,” said Allen. “I got up close to one during the Rapture.”
“Shut your fool mouth!” snapped Old Man Young. To punctuate his sentence, he spat on the floor. “Rapture. Rachael, I thought this fella was smart.”
“He is smart,” said Rachael.
“He’s a mush-brained idiot if he thinks the Rapture has happened,” Old Man Young said.
Allen was confused. “You think it hasn’t?”
“I’m still here, ain’t I?” Old Man Young said. “I’ve been washed in the blood of the lamb, boy. I’m born again! When the Rapture comes, I’m gonna be borne away!”
Allen cast a glance at the sink. “Maybe Luke shot your ride.”
“Naw,” said Luke. “I was at the Happy Mart when this little monster started dragging off some Hindu guy. I ran to the truck and got Lucille.” Luke patted the rifle. “Saved that fella a fate worse than death.”
“But—” said Allen.
“But nothing!” Old Man Young said. “Second Samuel, 14:20, says that it is the wisdom of angels to know all things that are in the earth!”
“A real angel would have known to duck,” said Luke.
“And it wasn’t the Rapture,” said Rachael. “The creatures took people at random. Yeah, they grabbed some self-proclaimed Christians. But they also took Hindus, Buddhists, Muslims, Jews, and Scientologists. They took Tom Cruise right in the middle of shooting a film.”
“Yeah,” said Allen. “I saw that.”
“Heaven ain’t open to his kind,” said Old Man Young.
“So how do you explain what happened?” asked Allen.
“Demons,” said Old Man Young.
“Aliens, maybe,” said Rachael.
“Government black ops,” said Luke.
Allen had heard these theories before, and a dozen others. The Young’s weren’t the first people to disbelieve the Rapture. None of the alternative explanations made sense. Genetic manipulation gone awry, mass psychosis, a quantum bleed into an alternate reality—all required paranoid pretzel logic to work. He was still scientist enough to employ Occam’s Razor, cutting away all the distracting theories to arrive at the simplest conclusion: God did it.
“I admit, what happened doesn’t match popular ideas of the Rapture,” Allen said. “I’ve studied Revelations in the original Greek, and can’t make everything line up. I’m no longer convinced any ancient text has a complete answer. But I get little glimpses of insight from different sources. Maybe God used to try to communicate with Mankind directly. Maybe he spoke as clearly as possible, in God language, but people weren’t up to the task of understanding him. They all came away with these little shards of truth; no one got the big picture.”
“Son, I’m up to the task of understanding,” said Old Man Young. “The good ol’ King James spells out everything. If you don’t understand, you don’t want to understand.”
“If you think it was the Rapture,” asked Rachael, “why would God have been so random? He took rich and poor, young and old, the kind and the wicked. It makes no sense.”
“To us,” said Allen. “But when I was a senior at State, I helped out on this big study involving mice. We did some blood work, identified mice with the required genes, then separated them from the general population and took them to a different lab. I wonder if the mice left behind sat around wondering why they weren’t chosen. They would never understand our reasons.”
“That’s your theory?” asked Rachael. “We’re lab mice?”
“No. But maybe the gap between our intellect and God’s mind is larger than the gap between mice and men. Our inability to understand His selection criteria doesn’t mean He acted at random.”
“Son, you’re proving what I always say,” said Old Man Young. “Thinking too much makes you stupid.”
Allen nodded. “Thinking too much hasn’t made me any wiser or happier.”
“Don’t pay attention to Grandpa,” said Rachael. “We need a thinker. We need someone who can study this body and tell us what it is.”
“Why didn’t you take it to the cops?” asked Allen.
“If the government knew we had this, we’d already be dead,” Luke said.
Rachael frowned. “I think we might be endangering the world by not showing this to the government. Not that there’s much government left.”
“Which is more proof it weren’t the Rapture,” said Old Man Young. “No Antichrist.”
Which was true. America had been through eight presidents in the last year. Anyone displaying even modest leadership skills quickly became a target of the legions of Antichrist stalkers roaming the capitals of the world. What was left of day-to-day civilization was staggering on more due to momentum than competent leadership.
“This is what the Illuminati want,” said Luke. “Chaos. When they seize power, people will kiss their asses with gratitude.”
“Since Uncle Luke shot it, he gets to decide who sees it,” said Rachael. “Also, it’s his cooler.”
“I’m not the trusting sort,” Luke said. “But Rachael says you’re a good guy, and smart.”
Allen rubbed his temples. “You think I’ll know the difference between an alien, a demon, or a black-ops sci-fi construct?”
All three Youngs looked at him hopefully.
“Okay,” he said. “I’ll go power up the generator.”
“I’ll come with you,” said Rachael. “Jeremiah’s stalking around out there and you don’t want to run into him alone.”
“Jeremiah?”
“Our dog,” said Luke. “He’s killed more men than I have.”
For a second, Allen considered whether the oil lanterns might not provide enough light after all. Then, he clenched his jaw and headed for the back door. If you’re going to cut open an angel, you may as well do the job right.
* * *
The corpse looked slightly yellow under electric light. Allen weighed the angel on his bathroom scale and found it barely topped ten pounds. Aerodynamics weren’t his specialty, but the cherub’s wings seemed slightly more plausible. Swan-sized wings could support a swan, after all, and they weighed more than ten pounds.
Allen started his exam in the obvious place—the hollow bowl of the skull. He’d never dissected a human before, but what was left of the cranium looked normal. It was bone. He recognized bone. Somehow, he’d expected angels to be crafted of material more grand.
His first real clue that he was well outside the realm of known biology came when he took a close look at the torn skin peeling away from the skull. He found a visible, subcutaneous layer of something that shouldn’t have been there, on a human body at least. It was a thin, fibrous material, like cloth. He tugged on a frayed thre
ad carefully with his tweezers. He couldn’t pull a strand of the tightly knit material free. He could see, though, that it was porous—blood vessels and nerve fibers ran through it. Whatever this was, it had grown under the skin, rather than being implanted.
“I’ve never seen anything like this.”
“I’ve eyeballed it up close,” said Luke. “It looks like Kevlar. Sort of.”
“Score one for black-ops,” said Allen, pausing to jot a few notes.
“Aliens could use Kevlar too,” said Rachael. “Stuff better than Kevlar.”
Allen moved on to the wings. After twelve months soaking in moonshine, they had a dull, grayish tone to them. It wasn’t difficult to pull a feather free. Without the body on the butcher’s block, he would have supposed he was looking at a seagull feather. Intuitively, this made sense. If God had designed feathers as the perfect tool of flight, why not use the same blueprint for both angel and bird?
But flight wasn’t simply a matter of having feathers, as any chicken could attest. A cherub’s chest didn’t have the depth to support the muscles to power these wings, did it?
He flipped the cherub over and felt its breasts. The muscles under the soggy skin were rock hard. He noted the cherub had nipples and a belly button. Was God simply fond of this look? Or was there a cycle of life in Heaven? Angel fetuses developing in angel wombs, angel babes suckling at the breasts of angel mothers?
He tried to cut open the cherub’s chest. It proved impervious to the butcher knife.
“Try this,” Luke said, handing him a folded knife. Allen flipped the knife open to reveal a ceramic blade, black as onyx and razor sharp.
