This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2012 by Harambee K. Grey-Sun
All rights reserved.
Book design by Phillip Gessert
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ISBN: 9780989266109
ALSO BY
HARAMBEE K . GREY - SUN
BloodLight: The Apocalypse of Robert Goldner
The mind is its own place, and in itself Can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n.
John Milton, Paradise Lost, Book I
ONE
Robert Goldner bent the light around his body, making himself invisible.
No alarms went up. Better, no gang signals. The kids stayed put. They appeared to be minding nobody’s business, just waiting for the day of reckoning. Eight years after the emergence of the White Fire Virus, though, Robert damn well knew the younger the potential threat, the greater the potential danger.
It was a Friday afternoon in September, and none of the kids seemed to have anything better to do. The nine boys and two girls probably should’ve been in…junior high school, from the looks of it. But they were hanging out in front of a pizza place and a check-cashing shop. Smoking, joking around, dressed like thugs-in-training. Robert wondered if they were just truants or if they were staking out territory early, waiting for the needy folks who were done with their workweek to come by and cash their paychecks. Big kids, or little criminals?
Hard to tell what anyone was really up to these days. Easier not to trust anyone.
Six, seven, maybe even eight years their senior, Robert could probably take them. But he didn’t like fighting kids, even if they thought they were adults, even if such confrontations came with the territory of being a Watcher. Anyway, he needed to conserve his strength for the hunt.
He maneuvered through the cluster, none of the kids suspecting a thing. The parasites inside Robert may’ve been slowly killing him, but thank fortune they didn’t leave him defenseless. He stayed invisible as he ran on toward the target house, five blocks away.
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod…
Funny—lines from Hopkins’s poem about the grandeur of God often shot through his thoughts during this part of the hunt. The poet had surely seen his share of wretched scenes from the big picture of a downtrodden human family and its ravished home. Hopkins may not have witnessed as many underpass-and bus-stop-dwelling Jellyheads, the shit-and-piss-stenched fiends of no permanent residence strung out on Jelly Raptures, sprawled out amid the irrepressible scatterings of condom wrappers, broken beer bottles, 7-Eleven chili dog boxes, and all the rest of it, but life wasn’t all that wonderful one hundred and fifty years ago either. Still, Robert couldn’t bring himself to share the poet’s optimism that “nature is never spent.”
Oh, well—“Don’t Worry, Be Happy.”
Funny how he often recalled the lines of that dumb rhyme during these hunts as well.
What was the worry anyway? The odds were against his surviving to witness humankind’s last day. He could die within the next few seconds, stopped cold on the way to potentially winning this week’s mystery prize. He might even be successful and come out a hero, only to have the billions of parasitic microbes living in his skin and blood cells kill him shortly afterward. Generations have trod, have trod, have trod…
This one was a long shot, he’d been told. Probably a Friday afternoon wild goose chase. But he was never one to waste time. On the sidewalk and across lawns, he moved as fast as he could in jeans and a windbreaker. If he’d been wearing less, he could’ve moved even faster, gliding over the ground, skating on thin air. But, invisible or not, he wasn’t about to strip down to his drawers.
It had nothing to do with shyness. He’d never been accused of being infected with modesty. It was his actual infection that was the problem. Baring too much skin to light was equivalent to inviting the parasites within to feast—get drunk then unruly. Hopefully, though, never to the extent of what he saw when he rounded the corner.
Robert had actually heard the sound of it first, the labored breathing like the sound of a large sack of junk being dragged slowly over a gravel road. Even in silence, he would not have missed seeing the man, naked except for his underwear, socks, and one shoe, propped up against the blue postal box in front of a seemingly deserted apartment complex.
The man didn’t have much further to go. Even from forty feet away, Robert could see the patches of skin that had fallen off, patches matching the thinness, brittleness, and colors—if not exactly the size—of maple leaves in autumn. It was a clear day, and the sun shined freely. The parasites had overdosed, and the man was being eaten away, rapidly, by the frantic microbes inside him. The Virus was claiming him, overtaking him, exposing more and more of his insides to the outside world, the world empty of anyone who’d see—except invisible Robert.
The man was beyond blind at this point. But Robert remained unseen as he studied him, approaching ever more cautiously lest the leaking radiation resulting from the man’s death throes envelope him, causing the parasites within Robert’s body to go ballistic.
No more than a dozen skin patches had fallen from the dying man, and what was still hanging on was turning the hue of rice paper, or the color and texture of tree bark, dotted all over with dark silver glitter that sparkled from black to red to orange to yellow to green to blue to indigo to violet and then briefly to silver before going back to black, each piece of glitter sparking through the color-cycle at its own unique pace.
Robert had seen it all before. It wasn’t all that shocking. He did briefly wonder what Hopkins might think of this Pied Ugly; certainly not “Glory be to God for dappled things—” But Robert’s brief imagining turned back to stark reality as he stepped nearer, looked closer, and saw something unusual.
The man still had skin covering most of his abdominal area. Robert concentrated and pushed his vision down the spectrum into the range of x-rays, trying to figure why the wheezing man’s stomach appeared be getting redder than a cranberry as it swelled more and more with each breath.
Robert saw through the layers of skin and muscle. He saw the man’s intestines breaking all of their bodily connections to form one long worm.
Part of him wanted to wretch, but Robert couldn’t take his eye away.
A chunky vomit, looking like milk four weeks past its expiration date, oozed out of the left side of the man’s mouth as the intestine-worm thrashed violently in the limited space provided to it inside the self-destructing body. It didn’t take long for the thing to find pathways around rotten, mushy organs and bones that were more flexible than pipe cleaners, the head and tail of it writhing and wriggling in opposite directions as it searched for freedom.
In his time, Robert had seen a lot that was fantastic and horrific, but when one end of the intestine-worm wriggled out of man’s anus as the other end simultaneously wriggled out of his mouth, he almost lost it—his consciousness, if not his sanity.
Robert backpedaled and turned, almost tripping over his own feet, then trotted a few steps more to regain his balance. Covering his mouth and nose with the inside of his right elbow, he put three fingers on the face of his right-wristwatch. The man was dead, but it would be nice to have the authorities swing by and pick up the body before some roving hooligans found it and did who knows what with it.
After transmitting the message to his superior, Robert glanced back once more at the corpse. There but for the grace of medication goes he.
Robert shook his head
to stop his full-body shudder then continued on his way.
He ran just under a sprint until he came to the quiet, middleclass neighborhood. He slowed, paying extra-special attention to his surroundings as he jogged toward the target house. It had a manicured lawn, an empty driveway, a wreathed front door, and plenty of windows—with closed blinds. Blinds Robert couldn’t see through, with or without his x-raying vision. This wasn’t another Friday-afternoon wild goose chase.
He used his right-wristwatch to contact his superior again. Robert had a hunch, a good one, and he needed backup—a few cops, some FBI agents, or something even better. The superior’s response: all official authorities were occupied elsewhere. Something about gunfire and explosions in the area of Pentagon City. Robert and his partner would have to handle this hunt, together and alone.
Sure. His partner. The partner who should’ve been by his side since daybreak. The partner Robert hadn’t seen since the day before. Just a little more than a year older than Robert, he wasn’t acting much better than the truants on the street corner, minding nobody’s business.
Robert used his left-wristwatch to send his partner a message he knew would go unanswered. He then continued his reconnaissance.
As the minutes passed, his sense of dread increased. Whatever story was hidden inside that house, it was one full of terror, and one eager to be told. Robert would have to make a decision, soon, about whether he was willing to hear it alone.
TWO
Blessed are the stingy, for they know how to preserve time and money as well as energy—all precious resources in these damnable times.
Darryl Ridley still remembered the first time he’d heard the bad joke: on late-night television, nine years ago. It was harder to figure when the dumb joke morphed into an actual creed. Hell, for all he knew, it had been around for millennia. Maybe it was humankind’s first Big Belief.
Big or small, the woman in front of him had somehow managed to live by it for the greater part of her thirty-four years. It was just one of many terrible beliefs she held. Darryl was sure he could change her mind about all of them, here and now.
It was just the two of them, standing in the middle of the three-bedroom house she used to share with roommates. Just Darryl and the woman he affectionately called “T,” the first initial of her first name. The reason she’d called in to work sick and invited him over on a Friday afternoon was clear, but he’d accepted the invitation for a very different one.
She was wearing a pale pink chemise and nothing else. She could’ve been wearing a burqa for all he cared. What he wanted from her, he could only find by looking deep into her naked eyes.
He took off his shirt.
T. started to say something but stopped to stare. She was evidently taken by the sight of his bare stomach, chest, and arms. Darryl knew the faint lavenderish skin-tint she’d seen during all their previous intimate moments was deepening, darkening, and becoming more conspicuous. She was speechless, watching his skin modify its tone.
It was all a matter of skillful concentration. Whatever else they were doing inside of him, Darryl had long ago figured out how to make the parasites work for him. He didn’t give a damn about whatever the government’s propagandists said. At a certain point in a relationship, Darryl wanted the woman, or man—whatever the case—to know there was something different about him, something beyond rational explanations, something that could change lives.
“I’m not your lover,” Darryl said as the woman’s eyes slowly rose from his chest to meet his. His irises faded from their usual shade of violet and gradually brightened, approaching the color of wisteria. “I’m more like an angel.”
His corneas twinkled, and the air around his body filled with suspended particles, looking like not-quite-clear raindrops, each of them smaller than a thumbtack.
The drops multiplied. After an uncertain number of them had appeared, they moved, scurrying until gathered into two crescent shapes that hovered just above and behind his shoulders. Before T. could say anything, the crescents unfolded, cascading down and down in waves of intangible watery light. When it was all over, two large, radiant wings featuring various shades of violet extended from Darryl’s back.
The wings burned with a chilled glow. The skin on Darryl’s bare arms, chest, and stomach sparkled with pinpricks of silver.
His would-be lover looked at everything and everywhere except at Darryl’s smiling face. In order to finish the process he started, though, he had to get her to focus on the right target.
“Like all angels,” he said, “I am essentially a messenger.” He extended his hand to her. “I can give you something better than sex, something that can erase all false notions of love from your pretty-pretty head.”
Perhaps entranced more by the sight than the words, the woman stepped forward and placed her hand in his. Darryl drew her closer. With his other hand, he raised her chin until their eyes met; he then twinkled his eyes twice more to establish a psychic link that would make their two minds temporarily one. With confidence, he could now shut his eyelids and finish sharing his message with her through a kiss.
There was a faint buzzing sound when they touched lips. When they separated moments later, viscid strings of saliva kept them connected until Darryl stuck out his tongue, wound the nectarous strings around it, and swallowed them all with a smile.
T. opened her eyes. Darryl knew if everything had gone as intended, she wouldn’t see his smiling face for several seconds. She’d see nothing but a mélange of beautifully strange colors, beyond violet, all of them dancing with, around, and into one another, maybe communicating an otherworldly message to her with their movements.
“Next time you see a clear blue sky,” he said, “don’t think of displaced seas. See it as a symbol of the haven for those escaping Love for Peace.”
Darryl kept his smile as he backed away from her and turned toward the front door; it wasn’t until after he’d turned the knob that he traded it for a different expression.
He bent the light around his body.
It was the last time he’d see the woman. He had nothing more to say to her. There was nothing more he could do for her. It was time for her to move on, live the rest of her celibate life spreading the word, and the word only—pay the act of charity forward. If the loving acts of his teenage years resulted in him contracting the White Fire Virus, the least he could do was use his parasite-given talents to keep others from falling into love’s careless traps.
He was just one man, but it was clear as day he was doing a much better job at curtailing the spread than those who got paid for it.
The consensus among US government officials and other interested parties was that there was no need for the general public to know the skin of Virus-carriers was not only hypersensitive to the properties of light but many of the infected could also, within a very limited range of their bodies, manipulate the properties of light, bending it and other forms of electromagnetic radiation to their will. They weren’t gods; they were humans. Very sick humans. Most chose seclusion over attention-grabbing antics. Regardless, government researchers and doctors and the officials they advised all figured general ignorance was the best policy until they themselves could figure out just how all these electromagnetic tricks were being performed. So what if the more vocal and flamboyant carriers of the Virus made no secret of their true condition and what they could do? They were sick, in body and in mind. Incurable. Not to be believed or trusted. And most often, such types ended up being shot, or “disappeared.”
Even more amazing than some of the beyond-belief abilities many of the carriers displayed was the fact most people seemed to buy into the Heartland Security Agency’s propaganda campaign: what credulous witnesses saw was nothing more than random acts of generic magic. The success of the campaign had the related-but-inverse effect of people not heeding the warnings about contracting and spreading the Virus. After all, it affected less than .002% of the people on the planet, so it was really nothing to worry abou
t. But those who worried least were those most at risk. As a clever Heartland Security official once described them, the biggest risk-takers were “those young men and women unwise enough to make promises of undying love to one another, and dumb enough to make haste to seal those promises with quick moments of nude stupidity.”
Some carriers spread it before realizing they even had it, before experiencing the seizures that could send their broken minds to a place worse than Hell. The White Fire Virus wasn’t the deadliest sexually transmitted disease, but it was the most worrisome. Those who knew all about it knew to be concerned. And some turned their concerns into creativity.
Darryl didn’t believe himself to be a literal angel, but thanks to the Virus, he could pretend well enough and long enough in order to drive his special message home.
He and T. had dated for about five weeks. When he first saw her in the nightclub, she was chatting happily with girlfriends about her engagement to someone Darryl knew to be an unrepentant philanderer. Darryl had a low opinion of the man, and he had an even lower opinion of the wonderful idea T. had conjured to make sure her husband-to-be stayed loyal and settled: she’d have him get her pregnant, before the wedding. The husband would just have to stay loyal with a baby on the way. It was an idea Darryl had overheard T. express to friends over the third round of appletinis. Sitting halfway across the room, he hadn’t been able to tell if she was serious. It was such an atrocious idea, but it had been spoken by someone Darryl had figured to be a desperate thirty-something; there was a fifty-fifty chance she’d make a serious attempt to carry out the plan. So Darryl had introduced himself, right then, using every talent available to him to charm her. Soon the engagement was broken.
Since that first night in a crowded watering hole, the two of them had dined at some of the area’s most intimate restaurants. They’d been on several private boat rides. They’d gone horseback riding. They’d been to the aquarium and even the zoo. They had done everything but what most American lovers say is the highest expression of love. Darryl knew T. had wanted to since day one. Today she thought she’d finally have her way.
Broken Angels Page 1
