Sid and Silvia were unconscious in a tangled heap on the floor. Sid’s trousers were down, Silvia’s were not.
The butcher had little in the way of thought. Retribution wasn’t even in his vocabulary anymore. The man had been crowned so long now (only a week, but a week in such agony…) he was mostly insane.
But he was not mute.
He roared at the top of his voice, his back arched, like he was screaming his pain clear to the roof of the hall.
He was inside, but his was the only voice in the entire area, loud, even, over the constant shouting of the wind, and the pool hall’s steel sidings lent the roar power, rather than robbing it.
His wailing sounded like the cry of a dying man.
But he wasn’t dead, wasn’t even dying. Not yet.
He carried on, until, finally, they came. They always did. They answered his call and carried his burden now that he could not.
He swayed, not quite dead. Sid had cut him badly, in many places.
But it didn’t matter, and when, later, they began to work on the siblings, binding them with wires and barbed wires, the butcher took no satisfaction. None of them did.
He just cried. Maybe for himself, maybe for them. He didn’t know anymore.
Same as Sid and Silvia would cry. And they wouldn’t know the reason for their tears, either.
42
A little later, a long way across the carcass of London, a crowd gathered to hear their preacher speak. A crowd such as this took time to gather. It wasn’t like getting a pub football team together for a photograph. It wasn’t the same as organizing an anniversary party. It took time to gather because it was a big congregation. The premiership football, royal anniversary.
Before the skies fell, it might have been considered a large crowd. Now, in the deserted wastes of a broken capital? It was a congregation unlike any England was likely to see again.
The basest emotions are often raw and powerful and ultimately contagious. They jump from person to person, and in this crowd they leapt like fire eating up dry wood. Burning, too. Burning the crowd raw, their clapping hands and idiot faces curling in on themselves like immolated corpses.
Every man, woman, child, watched a tiny speck on a balcony. That was all that was visible from the rear of the crowd. That balcony had once held lords and ladies and kings and queens.
Now they were no more.
A great square spread before the palace. A road, lined with unblinking men and women, each in awe of the speck, in thrall to the voice that boomed forth from the speck. The speck, a man in a wheelchair, was the flames, and the people were mere tinder.
The Preacher. The Exalted Corpse. The Dead King.
His little kings stood like sentries before the gates to the palace. None could pass. No one wanted to. They bathed in his speech, in the sight of him, though it was hard to see anything other than the man’s head above the stone balustrade.
A crowd that spread from the palace, through the square, along the road, into the park.
The man’s voice was not amplified by technology, but primeval power. By emotion, fear, awe…
The man was frail. He was not old, not any longer. But he was broken. His voice was not powerful. But he spoke softly and his congregation heard, swayed, smiled, cut, pierced.
The little kings watched not their lord, but the ranks of the faithful. They did not blink, nor tire. They had no need of sustenance or rest.
Tireless, because they were not dead and nor were they alive. They were blessed.
Like the faithful wished to be.
The faithful made crowns and pierced their flesh before they threw themselves prostrate before the Exalted Corpse.
The Exalted Corpse smiled and they felt his benevolence. He smiled, up above, in his chair, and they scratched and flailed at their skin.
Ten thousand strong or maybe more. It is hard to tell when a crowd becomes large enough.
It didn’t matter. Together, the congregation was all. It was the new dawn, the dark embrace of the purple light beneath the setting sky, the awakening of pain and the burning heart of this newly ravaged land. A new people for a new world. A people for the end of days.
The faithful. The zealots. The butchers. The little kings…
All listened and felt loved.
Finally, before the waiting crowd, that tiny speck pushed himself up from his wheelchair, and beckoned forth a small cadre of his little kings from the darkness of the building behind him.
The little kings emerged from the palace onto the balcony, and they brought with them two captives. Two nonbelievers. Once upon a time, the large, muscled man had been named Sid, the pretty, petite one, Silvia.
They bore many wounds, but both still fought and struggled, despite the barbed-wire bonds holding them back from tearing into the preacher. Sid’s eyes were full of pain and murder. Silvia’s eyes were glass with fear and self-pity.
“Behold!” cried out the Exalted.
Softly he spoke, yet with enough assured power to reach each and every man, woman, and child of his faithful.
“Behold my benevolence, even as the unfaithful rise against my children.”
A soft sigh, like a final breath, unfolded across the crowd. Then, silence. Expectation. Silently they waited on their miracle and gazed up at their messiah as he bade them, arms high, to watch.
Before the waiting, crying crowd, the Exalted Corpse performed. With a hand held together by metal pins, he sliced off a piece of his own flesh. Just a sliver—he only had so much to go around.
Neither Sid nor Silvia could speak. Barbed-wire cut into their cheeks, holding their mouths open. The siblings’ gargled words might as well have been aimed at the deaf. The little kings paid their struggles no heed, but held the pair firm while the Exalted Corpse placed his undying flesh into their mouths.
Silvia cried. Sid still fought, despite the agony and the spiked wire tearing at his flesh.
The Exalted placed a hand upon each of their brows, giving his blessing with his precious flesh.
“I will raise you high in my people,” he told the pair, and laid a slow kiss on Sid’s forehead, and then Silvia’s.
“Let them go,” he told the little kings who held the pair.
The apostles obeyed instantly. Sid and Silvia could do nothing but fall to the rancid carpet on the balcony.
They flailed and bucked, convulsions that bulged out their eyeballs and made their tongues fat and stupid. Froth, white froth, poured from their mouths. Noisily, they attempted to vomit, to scream or cry out. But here in the church of the Exalted one, not a single soul would come forward to spoil the miracle.
The crowd’s expectation was heavy, though they could not have seen the couple who bucked and frothed with terror on the once-red carpet beside their exalted lord.
Sid first, then Silvia, fell still. Their flesh was awash with blood, their flanks dark with shit and other fluids. Their faces bulbous with death, but peppered with barbs and squeezed tight with wires.
“Behold the miracle of my flesh!” said the Exalted Corpse, his voice soft and insane.
No one but him and his little kings could see anything, but still the crowd roared out its joy.
The man sank back into his chair, tired now, and nodded to his little kings.
He did not need to explain.
The people came to see him, yes. But they came for affirmation, too. For the proving, for the sacrifices and the retributions. For the resurrection.
The little kings used clippers to free the siblings’ limbs of wire, but not their faces.
With no more than a puff of air despite Sid’s weight, they picked Sid and Silvia up from the floor, then, after pausing so that the waiting people could see the bodies, they heaved Sid’s and Silvia’s bodies over the side of the balcony.
The thump was followed by a soft sigh throughout the crowd.
Then, nothing. Not a sound. No chatter, no footsteps. Upward of ten thousand souls, silent and waiting expectantly for the miracle they ha
d been called to witness.
A minute passed. Two. Perfect silence from the crowd, and even the wind stilled for a time, it seemed. Then, audible in the quiet, the soft, soft sound of cloth and flesh, stirring on the cold stone ground.
The cracking of bone and metal scraping against stone as the dead brother and sister rose on their broken limbs and straightened their shattered spines. Sid and Silvia turned their torn faces toward the balcony. Not ignorant of the crowd. No. Just in awe. In awe of the exalted.
Not dead, not undead. But raised up. Raised up to love him. To exalt him.
Sid’s and Silvia’s torn faces were awash with tears as they stared up at the man on the balcony.
The man on the balcony raised his arms to his new apostles, to his little kings, his butchers and the zealots and the faithful of his people who came to see him. Him.
“Such is my love,” said James Finley. “Such is my love.”
43
Evening was a subdued affair under the canopy of dust in the atmosphere. The quality of the light change, just a minor thing. No sunset, no streetlights flickering on across the city. Maybe three or four minutes in which there was a kind of dusk, then blackness. A darkness so complete that nothing remained visible after the dull sunset. No moon, no stars. Black skies and dusty air, so it seemed like a man might breathe in night itself.
The fires that tore apart the city early after the first impact had largely died down. A few smaller fires flared from time to time, but in the distance and nowhere near bright enough to pierce the heavy dark.
The winds did not abate with darkness, nor the odd warmth. Winter should have been in full flow, but the air was warm and sticky, dusty and laden with filth. Poisonous, perhaps, even, but the men and women that lay down outside the palace in the fullness of night did not care for their health.
Perhaps the Earth, in its entirety, was swaddled in the same filthy blanket of dirt. Perhaps there were pockets, still, where the sun shone through. It did not matter to the faithful.
And it did not matter to James Finley, because he could not die.
As his people put their heads against the cold and unforgiving pavement to sleep and wait, wake and worship, James Finley bade one of his little kings to wheel him to the dining table. The table would have served state functions. For now, it served him and his little kings, and the two new apostles of his faith.
Sid and Silvia were unable to speak or close their mouths. Tears flowed freely from their eyes. They could not even manage to chew the food placed before them.
Blessed, indeed, thought Finley. Just like him.
Blessed with undeath. “It is exquisite, is it not?” said Finley.
The pair could not reply. The little kings could speak, but would not unless addressed directly.
“This pain…pain beyond compare. It’s a rare gift. Not many know such pleasures. To feel this, and yet live? A rare gift, is it not? Rare, indeed.”
Finley grinned at the pair, from whom he expected no dissent. His newest creations. Two creatures of true worth. Dark souls, reborn to his service.
“But it requires sustenance, no?”
Finley pierced a slice of human flesh on his china plate with a heavy silver fork. He placed it on his tongue, then rolled it around his mouth, like a fine slice of roast beef, before chewing happily and swallowing.
“Unfortunately, you won’t heal. Nor, I think, will I. It’s a trial. No mistake. But we all pay the price, don’t we?”
Following a small nod from Finley, a little king stepped forward and began to feed tiny morsels of flesh to Sid and Silvia in turn. If they gagged, the little king rubbed their throats until they swallowed, like you might a dog balking at a worming tablet.
“It’s a new world, my apostles. A new world. A world of miracles and angels. A world of…magic? Yes. I think…yes. Magic.”
Finley was largely held together by metal. His flesh was stitched, his bones firm with metal that held them together since he’d fallen from his own building, to wake shattered, but undead, in the middle of the maelstrom. He could stand, but the pain was so intense when the pins that held him together shifted that he could barely maintain conscious thought. Like some kind of rapture, the pain of standing swallowed him so completely he could barely think or speak, but swooned, ecstatic.
“Magic,” said Finley around another slice of soft flesh. His steel pins glinted in the soft light of the candles burning on the giant table. “I tell you…don’t know you’re names, I’m afraid….who would have thought it?”
Neither apostle replied. The little king serving them continued to feed them small pieces of human meat. The little king’s service was impeccable, and his manner tender. Like a parent feeding a child in the hope that the child would grow strong and hale.
Finley shrugged in response to their silence. His shoulders and arms worked reasonably well. The worst of his injuries were from falling from his building. Falling before Frank Liebowicz had managed to fuck everything with his thick-headed notion of revenge.
Finley’s legs, hips and spine had been broken so completely that it had taken the man who’d pinned him together again a whole week, working Finley through the pain and out the other side, into this bliss he now knew, this enlightenment.
Finley remembered the week well. Every single blessed second, every scream, every piercing…he remembered how he’d started out crying and ended up laughing. Laughing while his savior knitted his bones together with steel.
Finley smiled kindly at his two favored apostles.
“You’re more than little kings, you two. You understand that? You understand that you are loved? That I have raised you high up among my faithful?”
Finley watched the man and the woman for some sign of understanding.
Nothing but tears and the dregs of soft flesh and a little blood from the rare meat on their chins.
He shrugged again. “No matter. Early days, I suppose. Early days.”
“Enough,” he said to the man serving Sid and Silvia. “Enough for one night, I think. Fetch them, would you? With me. I may be a patient man, but angels, I fear…not quite so much…no…not quite so much…”
With a nod, Finley had his servant push him from the table and through the palace. The halls and rooms were well-lit with candles. Finley led, in his chair. Sid and Silvia, broken and useless, were carried by the little kings who followed.
“I’d like you to meet a friend of mine. My angel. Now, for a time, yours, too…”
After the long corridor, they finally entered a grand room. A fire burned in a large fireplace, throwing firelight across the room they entered. Two beds had been placed in the room. A tray of steel surgical instruments between the two. A high-back chair with a man sitting upon it. He read a book by the firelight, but closed it as his company entered the room.
“Ah, Mr. Finley. Good evening. Good evening. And my two new friends? How do you do?”
“Early days,” said Finley to the man who remained seated upon the couch. “They’re not quite up to much.”
“No matter. The doctor is in.”
Finley laughed at his angel’s joke, maybe a while too long. The little kings placed Sid and Silvia upon a bed each.
The man rose. Naked but not shy at all. He produced a cigarette from the air and took a satisfying drag without ever seeming to light it. He puffed smoke out through his nose, sending two long streams from his nostrils. One swirled around Sid, the other around Silvia.
“Sid and Silvia,” said the naked man. “Sid and Silvia…brother and sister…”
“I wondered…they don’t look much alike, though.”
“Don’t suppose it matters, one way or the other, eh? Good work, though, Finley,” said the naked man. “You have outdone yourself. Cigarette?”
“Don’t mind if I do,” said Finley.
The naked man and Finley smoked in silence. Finley, happily.
The naked guy just smoked. He liked smoking. Liked it a lot.
Eventuall
y, it was the naked man who broke the companionable silence.
“Well, Master Finley, I think I’d better shake a leg. Got some work for these two. Things are all coming together nicely, I reckon. Bit of a job to do here, then I’ll be off, I think… Yep. I’ll be off.”
“You’re going?”
“Soon, soon. Don’t let it worry you, though. I’ll be back. I’m always around when you need me, right?”
“Right,” said Finley. “Right.”
“Right,” said the naked man. “Good. Now be a good chap and fuck off, would you? I’ve got a job of work to do, and you’ve got people to see, haven’t you?”
Finley smiled and nodded. Not offended in the slightest, nor phased by the fact that the naked man was really very naked.
“Good show,” said the man around his cigarette, which for a time dangled forgotten from his lips. He did not wait to see if Finley left or stayed, but forgot him entirely while he went to work.
Finley nodded and a little king, who’d been standing patiently in a dark corner, wheeled him away.
The naked man held the steel on the table up to the candlelight, smiling at the simple effectiveness and blunt barbarity of human surgical tools. Knives and clippers and saws, nails and pins and staples. He smoked while he worked, of course, but hygiene was the least of his concerns.
“Doctor’s in the house, Sid,” he said, blowing smoke at the crying man. “Now let’s get this silly wire off so we can have a nice chat. I’ve a little job for you and your sister. You’ll like it. It’s funny. Trust me. Everything’s funny if you look at it the right way.”
Time passed. Hard time.
Some time passed quickly, like when a man and his woman were fucking, maybe. Time passed differently, though, when it was under the blanket of pain, of sickness.
This wasn’t sickness. This was doctoring. The slow kind, the good kind.
Sid, Silvia, the naked man, none felt tired. Nor would they ever. Sid and Silvia were dead, not dead, undead…something akin to angels themselves.
The smoking man wasn’t in the market for dying. Hadn’t been for a long time. He’d been…waiting? Dormant? The truth was frustrating for the smoking man, but best he could figure was that he’d been waiting a long, long time, in the wings. Now?
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