The Fall

by Michael McBride

  “You must give the evil back unto the serpent, allow it to consume your sins,” the man said in the same patient, loving tone he might have used to talk to her as an infant. “Let it purify your body. Your soul.”

  He maneuvered awkwardly until his right knee pressed her sternum toward the floor, freeing his other hand to open the jar.

  A tiny serpentine head arose from within like a cobra from a basket. Its forked tongue flicked several times, tasting her scent, eyes appearing to immediately come to life.

  The woman screamed with all her might, thrashing and bucking, trying to knock him from atop her. Her clawed fingers tore at his clothing, peeling back the flesh wherever her nails could bite into his skin.

  With the jar in his right hand, he grabbed her to either side of her face with his left, squeezing her cheeks hard enough to force her lips to part, her teeth threatening to snap at the roots and fly onto her tongue. Slowly, he lowered the jar, the eager snake arching into striking position. Phoenix watched in horror as the serpent struck at the air, hissing and spitting, then slithered over the rim of the jar directly before his terror-widened eyes, dangling down toward her open mouth.

  Phoenix gagged ferociously, finally tearing his hand away from the woman’s wrist. Blinking dazedly, he scrabbled back into the corner, slapping even more of the cooled oatmeal onto the concrete. He heaved several times, back arching like a startled cat, loosing naught but a long strand of thick saliva to connect him to the floor. When he returned his attention to the woman, she was already to her feet and staggering toward the door.

  “Wait!” he called, uneasily pushing himself to his feet and stumbling after her. She stopped, outstretched hand grasping the doorknob. Phoenix tempered his voice. “Please.”

  She neither turned around nor opened the door. She just stood there, rooted in place.

  “Why do you let him hurt you like that?” Phoenix whispered, unable to shake the horror of what he had seen, what the woman’s own father had done to her.

  He had seen it through the eyes of her memory.

  Her greasy hair whipped side to side as she answered him with a shake of her head. She still didn’t turn around.

  “He’s a very angry man,” Phoenix said.

  “He’s a humble servant of God,” she whispered in a voice so small he could barely hear it.

  “No man of God would subject anyone, let alone his own daughter, to that kind of cruelty.”

  “You don’t know him. He’s saving my soul.”

  “What have you done that would require your soul to need saving?”

  She stood there silently, shifting her weight nervously from one foot to the other as she appeared to be contemplating his question.

  Rusted water dripped from the pipes running along the ceiling.

  “The Rapture is coming,” she whispered. “You of all people should know that.”

  “I know nothing but what you’ve allowed me to read on the rare occasions where I’m granted enough light to do so.”

  “You will bring the end of days. My father has foreseen it.”

  This time Phoenix was quiet.

  “Is that why you keep me here?” he finally whispered.

  “I’ve said too much already.”

  “Please,” Phoenix whispered.

  She could feel his stare on her back, her skin positively crawling.

  “He knows he can accelerate the Second Coming through you. You’ll be the one to help carry us all to Heaven.”

  The room was silently still between them, as though all time and reality had frozen, interrupted by the click of the doorknob, urged by a flick of her wrist. She drew it inward.

  “Please,” he whispered. “Help me.”

  She stopped, still holding the doorknob, but didn’t turn around.

  “Don’t let him hurt me anymore. Not like he hurts you. Not again,” he begged.

  “He’s saving my soul.”

  “You can save it yourself.”

  She hesitated, her back still to him, her free hand clenching and unclenching with a grinding of knuckles.

  “How?” she whispered.

  “Help me.”

  “I would only end up damning my soul,” she said, stepping through the doorway and slamming the wooden slab shut behind her. The locks thunked into the woodwork as he imagined that must be the sound one hears from inside his coffin while the final nails are driven in.

  Phoenix slunk back into the corner, pressing his back to the wall and slumping to the floor. He thought about the girl at the edge of the stream, the girl from his dream, her porcelain legs dangling in the cold water prickling her flesh.

  More man tears, she had said.

  Phoenix needed to get out of the basement. The urge had become imperative, as though it was the only biological impulse his body was capable of sending, stirring his guts and aching from the marrow of his bones. He knew that if he didn’t get out of the cellar soon, it would prove to be his tomb. He was as sure of that fact as he was of anything he had ever known in his life. And the only way he was ever going to be able to get out was to convince the woman to help him.

  His fate was in her hands.

  He just wished he knew how to get through to her. Today she had spoken to him, but more importantly, she had listened. A seed of doubt must have taken root somewhere within her. He needed to feed it, nurture it, coax it into blossoming.

  Time was running low. He could feel it as though with each grain of sand that passed through the hourglass, his life force drained from him and into the cold, hard floor. Phoenix may not have known what it felt like to truly be alive outside of this godforsaken room, but he sure as hell knew what dying felt like.

  Closing his eyes, he focused on the sounds of his breathing, which often made it at least feel as though he wasn’t alone in the room.

  Small clicking sounds filled the muted darkness.

  Phoenix held his breath, willing his heart to slow, and listened.

  The clicking grew louder, coming from all around him now. He opened his eyes, but could still glean no detail from the darkness.

  Something small crawled across his foot. He reached for it, but it easily evaded his grasp and raced away.

  A dozen more tiny creatures scurried over his feet, several veering and scuttling up his legs. He grabbed one, pinching a crisp shell between his thumb and forefinger, and brought it to within an inch of his face. Small legs waved at the air.

  “Hello, friend,” he said, setting the insect into the middle of his open palm. “I haven’t seen you around here before.”

  The roach raced down his wrist and dropped into his lap.

  Once he knew what they were, it was easy to decipher the sounds around him. Scuttling feet tapping on the pipes above, scurrying down the walls like geckos, carpeting the floor. Phoenix carefully rolled onto all fours, sliding his hands and knees through their crawling ranks. They circled the mess of oatmeal on the floor, venturing no further. The lip of the bowl was resplendent with them, though none dared to take another step.

  “Where did you all come from?”

  The roaches crawled all over his arms and legs in response.

  “Go ahead,” he said, smiling. “Eat up.”

  With that, the insects attacked the mess of soggy oats, swarming all over it with the frenzied sounds of clicking and legs scratching on exoskeletons. The bedlam lasted for several minutes, until finally Phoenix heard the sounds of miniature legs climbing up the walls all around him, clamoring over the pipes and woodwork overhead, slipping through the cobwebs on the ceiling.

  Silence settled over the room like a tarp.

  He slid his hands over the cold concrete where the oatmeal had been. It was barely damp. The bowl was completely empty as well; every last oat had been licked out.

  His stomach growled, but he could live with some minor discomfort. He’d finally made some friends after all. Where had they come from? Where had they gone? He slid his hand across the floor beyond the bowl, his fin
gertips knocking the spoon with a metallic clatter. Tracing the edge, he followed the shaft of the spoon toward the end, but it didn’t terminate in a widened scoop as it had moments before. He picked it up, turning it over and over in his hands. The spoon had been whittled away to the point that the handle terminated in a sharpened tip. The roaches had apparently consumed more than the oatmeal. He closed his fist around it, sharpened blade pointing toward the floor, and swung it through the air several times. It screamed like a diving eagle.

  Scrambling back to the bed of straw, he plucked out the longest and thickest stem he could find, parting it cleanly down the center with the knife. It provided only the slightest resistance.

  Phoenix opened his left hand and ran the tip of the blade across his palm. He felt the warm blood spilling from the wound long before the bite of the cut.

  Flopping onto his rear end, he stared at the weapon in the darkness. The razor-honed edge glinted even in the absence of light. Left hand clenched to staunch the bleeding, he slid the utensil beneath the straw and lowered his body atop it.

  Though his heart was pounding and his palms sweating, he smiled excitedly.

  The time had finally come.

  IV

  Northern Iran

  ADAM’S SHOULDER WAS KILLING HIM. HE DIDN’T KNOW HOW LONG THEY’D been swimming, but it felt like forever. Occasionally, they’d cross between enormous caverns, where the bottom would rise enough to stand on, giving them a few precious steps to take the strain from their aching limbs before dropping back off into the deeper water. Now, they were in the middle of who knows where, and he was beginning to lag behind the others, whose splashing sounds grew farther and farther away. How long would it take them to notice he was gone?

  The wound in his shoulder stung as though someone was sifting through the gash with a branding iron.

  “Hey,” he gasped, taking in a mouthful of warm water that tasted like the business end of a match. He tried to call out again, but was barely able to keep his chin far enough above the water level to breathe, let alone form words.

  His fingers started to tingle, simply beginning to fall asleep as though he was sitting on them.

  “Guys,” he sputtered, blowing bubbles across the surface.

  Their splashing had grown faint, now echoing like a distant plane on a still summer’s day.

  “I will help,” a voice whispered, so close he could feel the warm breath tickling the fine hairs in his ear.

  A hand settled over the wound on his shoulder. A radiating feeling of warmth blossomed from the wound, pulsating through first his rapidly numbing arm, then slowly flooding his entire body.

  “I saw the way you looked at the little girl,” the voice whispered.

  “Mûwth?”

  “It has been a long time since I have seen what I saw in your eyes.”

  With renewed vigor, Adam treaded water, spinning himself in circles to get a glimpse of the man he knew to be within inches of him, yet neither his kicking legs nor swooshing arms brushed against anything.

  “What are you talking about?” Adam asked in the same hushed tone.

  “Hope.”

  Two hands suddenly clasped his head over each ear with a loud clapping sound.

  Damp breath on his forehead.

  Pursed lips.

  A kiss.

  The hands withdrew and Adam jerked backward, nearly submerging himself, thrashing wildly.

  “The seed is in you, Adam,” the voice whispered in a thousand tongues from all around. “Cultivate it. Allow it to take root and blossom. Nothing can stop what must come to pass, for it has already been set in motion. You have been spared this day. Go forth Adam, and spread your seed.”

  With a whoosh like air being sucked through a crack in a pressurized seal, the voices merged into the wind, and then were gone.

  Adam floated there, amidst the slight sloshing of water from his exertion, the gentle lapping of the resultant waves against the rock walls around him, the dripping of condensed fluids from the ceiling above.

  Smothering darkness.

  Plip.

  Ploop.

  There was no sound of paddling ahead.

  No sound at all.

  “HEY!” he screamed, buckling his head back and shouting into the darkness flowing above him like a suspended pond of tar. His voice echoed away into oblivion.

  Plip.

  Plip.

  There was no resultant sound of leathery wings pounding against one another, having been startled from their slumber to swarm like gnats. No flapping sounds. He tried to pry apart the darkness to ascertain any detail at all.

  Ploop.

  In fact, he couldn’t remember having heard any sort of life down there beneath the mountain other than them at all.

  No fish or aquatic life more complex than single-celled protozoans could survive in the alkaline water.

  The world was dead down there in the darkness.

  He rocked back and screamed to the heavens, splashing violently.

  Plip.

  Rolling onto his stomach, he started swimming as fast as he could in the direction he thought he had been facing when he had last heard the others.

  * * *

  Keller’s knuckles grazed solid ground first, followed quickly by his knees. He palmed the smooth rock surface beneath and propelled himself the last yard with his dwindling strength. He crawled forward, peeling away crusted reams of sulfuric salts and moss dried to the consistency of lichen before finally arching his back and launching a putrid spray of aspirated water onto the cavern floor with a slap. Heaving convulsively, he retched until there was nothing but dry heaves and a strand of repulsive saliva dangling from his lower lip.

  “Everyone,” he gasped, sucking for breath while trying not to inhale any of what he had already cleared from his system. He huffed and wheezed before finally pushing himself to his knees and slapping the dangling spindle of sludge from his lip. “Everyone all right?”

  “I think so,” Thanh whispered from somewhere in the darkness to his left. She gagged and rolled from her stomach to her back, finally regaining enough energy to drag her legs out of what was beginning to feel like boiling water.

  “I didn’t think I was going to have to be a damn Navy Seal for this tour.” Kotter’s effort at levity sent him into a throng of convulsive heaves punctuated with a splatter of fluids. “I think I must have swallowed half of the water down here in this sewer.”

  He let out a wet belch that stirred Keller’s gut to roil, but he shunted it quickly by pinching a hand over his mouth and nose and swallowing whatever rose in revolt.

  “Are you all right, Adam?” Thanh asked, leveraging herself against one of the stone walls so she could sit up. She pulled her hair into her fist and wrung the water out in a stream that reminded Keller of his biological priorities.

  The silence was disturbed only by the scuffing of Keller’s boots and the metallic zip of his zipper.

  “Adam?” she asked, louder this time.

  With a slurping sound, the warm water lapped against the rocky ledge they had crawled out upon.

  “Come on, doc,” Keller called through a shake of his body and the quick zip that followed. “We don’t have time to screw around.”

  Plip.

  Silence.

  Ploop.

  “Adam?” Thanh called, rising to her feet.

  “Adam!” Kotter added his voice to the chorus.

  “Newman!” Keller bellowed, his echo thundering through the caverns both ahead of them and behind. A chunk of rock broke free from a wall somewhere in the darkness and splashed into the water.

  “We are near the place I was telling you about.” Mûwth’s Arabic accent was unmistakable. “Surely he will have caught up with us by the time we have found my medallion.”

  Neither Thanh nor Kotter cared a whit about the man’s stupid medallion. Right now their only thoughts were of finding Adam and getting moving again. Time seemed to stand still there in the darkness beneath the mo
untain, but undoubtedly it was still flying by in the world above. Neither intended to find out what was going to happen if they were late for the extraction.

  Keller, on the other hand, had a keen interest in the man’s medallion. If, indeed, the stories the man told were true and not simply fabricated to convince them to bring him along and provide safe transport for him through a desert about to become a war zone, then a solid gold disc may prove invaluable if they missed their transport liaison. He wasn’t about to be stranded on Iranian soil when their deadline passed. Granted, he didn’t know precisely what sort of offensive the US would launch, but he was sure that based on the threat of an atomic holocaust on American soil, their response would be both swift and proportional, which meant more than strafing Baghdad with some tomahawks and cruise missiles from the ’Gulf. They already knew precisely what swift meant; the fuse had been lit. But what was proportional to an atomic threat against four of the most heavily populated cities in the western world?

  He had never truly agreed with the new administration’s reactionary politics and knee-jerk responses to everything from the astronomical cost of oil to the rising interest rates at home. Washington D.C. and the American infrastructure had degenerated to the point where everyone from congressmen to the President himself were dogs at the pound barking back and forth through their chain-link cages. Maybe someone slipped and let the tip of their tail peek through one of the links long enough for some ambitious mutt to take a nip at, but otherwise they just paced in circles, raising a ruckus, waiting for the man with the big bag of chow to come through and fill their bowls with their daily bread. And like so many dogs, a child can only poke them so many times with a sharp stick in the eye before even the weakest and most timid of mongrels will snap and tear that whole damned arm off.

  Some moderate sized town, probably somewhere between Iraq and Syria, would be mercilessly annihilated. The sand would be turned to glass and whatever remained of its former inhabitants would be carried on the nuclear wind.

  If that meant Keller was going to have to take that man’s medallion and trade it to some outgoing freighter captain to get himself anywhere beyond the Caspian Sea, then so be it. If he had to kill this man Mûwth to take it from him, then he would do just that. He was not going to be stranded here in the Middle East, watching for death to rain from the sky. He’d sooner peel the Arab’s skin from his bones and wear it as a disguise, than face the fate these sand jockeys had coming.