“Your destiny has already been written,” said the angel, Azzael. “And it is time, my child.”
“No, I am your child,” Ben said angrily. “Remember?”
Ben pulled a thick, sharp hook from a deep pocket. “Angels don’t seem to make such good parents. Look at you—you love her as if she were your own daughter. Yet you’ll stand there and watch me do this. As I find out what this angel is made of.”
««—»»
Adam had nothing to do inside Containment #5 but watch spirits pass from wall-to-wall, there at the CDC: Catacombs of the Disturbed Checked-out. He’d been able to watch the news at first. The government-controlled media wasn’t even able to hide the terror anymore-or at least use it for ratings. They were gone too, just like everybody else. The Emergency Broadcast System was on but no one hung around—or survived—to broadcast anything. Panic and Pandemic equaled zero.
He tried to pass the time doing lists aloud. Anything to keep from pondering his circumstances, a prisoner where no one was alive to let him out. How would he get to Laura? And yet he believed she was safe. He had faith; he had to hope.
Which made him think of another list, though a short one.
Atheist—There is no God.
Agnostic—There is no way to know if God exists.
Anarchist—Doesn’t care if there is a God.
Polytheist—There are many Gods.
Monotheist—There is one God.
Pantheist—There is only God.
Ecstacist—All gods are God.
Mystic—There is only one interconnected whole.
Indigo—Each of us is a church, where the part of God that lives in us makes our possibilities limitless.
How long had he been in containment? A week? How many days had it been since the stranger from ruined Italy’s flesh mountain came to #5 and broke the hand blisters, releasing what plagues into the air? Adam had no way to keep track of day and night. But the dark-haired beast had appeared right after Laura’s visit.
The ghosts of Due Rose were the only ones to do the walk through him, leaving Adam with scourge’s gift of the red lesion in his hand. None of the apparitions here ever touched him.
Was Adam already dead? No, Paul Anson’s team had thoroughly examined him.
His thoughts went round. I only dream I am alive. Or do I dream I am not?
There were some who thought such supernatural appearances were nothing more than snapshots of vivid history, caught in the grooves of chronology’s unprecise and unpredictable continuum.
People in the final throes of devastating contagious disease couldn’t be up and walking around. Not some photographic memory from time then.
What or who could have brought out all these bane-driven souls, an event corresponding too closely with the release of the blisters to be unrelated? Adam recalled what he feverishly told Paul after escaping from Italy. “It isn’t coincidence but synchronicity.”
A boy so abused, that his rage was—almost—uncontainable.
But how (did you know this) could a boy cause Pacifica, Italy, World’s End?
The flashes Adam had suffered lately, some no longer than an electron’s single spin, came sneaking back.
Twitch
in dream
rabid fall.
Storms ‘Eye’
gouged bloody abstract
no hollow to torture.
Screaming on hooks.
Billion Faces,
Black Water.
The Nanosecond Sore.
Names written in eye-searing gold upon a ceiling.
How he’d cowered at first as the rain came down, storming blood. His mother lay only a couple yards away, skull virtually shattered to nothing, only her sad face whole—a mask, a cruel joke, nothing impossible for the vengeful archangel Michael. His father of an earthly handsomeness lay beside her, one hand draped across her hip.
Feathers, thin, and hollow bones through which the wind blew…
And now, a creature held a baby wrapped in an orange blanket. He recognized the being from Due Rose’s angelic choir. The leper Mateo had identified it as Azzael, leader of the Watchers. Adam knew that word. Watchers, are also known as the bene ha’elohim.
Also known as
the
Grigori.
Adam’s breath froze.
It wasn’t from the San Gregorio Fault, off the coast of San Francisco, that the suggestion for his name originated.
The angel…walked away… The boy could see the terrible scars on her bared shoulders…where wings had once been.
“Never scream.”
“Do you dream of falling?”
“I fell.
“I fell.
“I fell.”
She beat him, stomped him, removed his right eye, hung him from hooks in a dark basement, had terrorized him all his life.
Adam fell.
Billions fell.
««—»»
“Adam? Please don’t be dead. It was so hard for me to get here. I love you, Adam!”
Soft brown hair brushed his cheek. Curled in a fetal ball on the floor, he opened one eye to see his wife’s worried face.
All he could think was, Would you love me if it turned out I was someone else? If it turned out I was something else? Unborn, doing the living for another?
He wouldn’t ask for that. There was no way he could tell her.
“Laura, how did you get here? How did you get through security?”
She pointed to the open door.
“The electricity went out in Atlanta just after I got here. I couldn’t get in any door at first. Seems the whole facility was in lock-down. Then the electricity came back on…”
“We have an emergency back-up system.”
“Would that account for the roar and popping I heard?”
“Shouldn’t have done that, no. I helped design #5.”
“Once I got in, I…I couldn’t find anybody else alive. Oh, sweetheart, I was so scared. I thought it meant you must be dead. But thank God!” Laura hugged him, kissing his face repeatedly. “We’ve got to go… That man you told me was coming—he came all right. He killed Marianna as she attacked him. He started to kill me, but then he suddenly disappeared. Right into thin air. Is he a ghost, too?”
Adam stood and helped his wife to her feet. He noticed she walked unsteadily.
“Laura?”
“My stitches…what I get for running. We’ve got to hurry in case the security switches back on and we’re both trapped.”
Each checkpoint was wide open. Fortunately, the alarm had shorted out. No power surges should have been possible. Bodies were everywhere, including scientists in protective garb.
The elevator opened, surprising Adam since it was part of the same containment measures.
“Did you take this elevator to reach me?” he asked, puzzled.
“Yes. I could hardly have taken the stairs,” she replied. “Why?”
He guided her in, gave his voice and retinal identification.
They were taken up to the first floor. Adam saw Paul’s ghost, diseased and wandering among so many. He grabbed Laura’s hand, pulling her close as they hurried to one of the building’s rear doors. A row of Civil War Union soldiers stood as if at feverish attention, shaking until their sabers rattled. Out in a parking lot they could hardly see the cars for the mist of microbes and spectral misery.
“Where’s the van?” Adam asked.
Laura clung to him as she pointed to a different vehicle. “I came in Mrs. Bryder’s car. You know, our neighbor? She’d died and the van was wrecked the last time I tried to get out here. Keys are in it. I didn’t think anyone was around to steal it. Even the outside security here’s gone.”
They both tried not to breathe as summer swelter carried the rotting of Atlanta’s dead in uncanny silence. Neither the howling of dogs nor the drone of flies.
No more cars traveled the roads. There was only wreckage—some of it licked by flames—to be gone around.
Chapter 15
————
“…religious man lives in the time of origin, the time of the myths. In other words, he emerges from profane duration to recover an unmoving time, eternity.”
The Sacred and Profane
– Mircea Eliade
————
There was no dusk between day and night—only sullen light, then abrupt and dangerous darkness…somber as the interior of a mausoleum. Driving the last few blocks home would have been the obstacle course from hell, if not for the headlights which Adam kept on maximum beam. In that harsh illumination Adam watched what he first mistook for fireflies, moths, crickets, June bugs. The shapes were wrong and they were multiplying in the air.
They can’t be…no… These bugs were too large. Viruses were tiny, visible only under a microscope. And viruses can’t reproduce outside the living cells of their hosts. If those hosts died and there existed no others to replace them, viruses became lifeless organisms, not… Impossible! How were these not only obviously viable, but…replicating? What had they mutated into? Did they no longer require a host’s metabolic cells to stay active—or were they living off something else…
No, they couldn’t be living off the ghosts. Could they? Is there truth to “ectoplasm”, that tangible substance, supposed by mediums and ghost hunters to make up apparitions?
It couldn’t be the air which was composed of gases. Since—providing this was global—the plants, including the ocean’s plankton had perished, photosynthesis had ceased. Very soon without the manufacturing of oxygen, the atmosphere would suffer.
Adam knew this desert was total, worldwide.
Yet how did he know this?
Every time he blinked he could see it. Many places at once. Even to nuclear submarines at the bottom of oceans, ghosts under crushing amounts of water penetrating the hulls to have that last dance with the crews. And missile silos, power plants, research facilities, every one leaking radiation. Their alarms screamed to deaf ears. The explosions which may have resulted would never be history, with no one to know.
Whatever had put a hold on damage from Pacifica and Italy was powerless to restrain this.
Perhaps this time they didn’t try.
Had Earth guardian angels?
Watchers, bene ha’elohim, Grigori.
“Everything has a beginning and an end,” Adam muttered as he pulled into their driveway. But perhaps Fate wasn’t what it used to be.
“Why are our lights on?” Laura asked. “I thought…”
He touched her hand. “I put in a generator. Remember that big storm last summer, knocked out the power? Including the air conditioning? You damn near died from the heat.”
Her skin felt clammy.
“Are you okay?” He also touched her face.
Of course she isn’t okay, idiot, he thought to himself. The city has perished, horribly, around her. She was almost murdered by a madman. (Whom Adam was somehow a part of.)
“I’ve started bleeding again,” she answered. “Please, honey, get me in the house. Quick!”
He jumped out of the driver’s side of the car, ran to the passenger side, opened her door, and picked her up. He carried her as one gently carries a sick child, into their home.
“Will you carry me to the bathroom?” She sobbed, in great pain. “I don’t think I can walk.”
“I’m here, baby,” he said, crossing the living room and going down the hall. He shifted her modest weight slightly so he could open the bathroom door. He reached to turn on the light—
His fingers came away wet and sticky. The stench caused him to reel with nausea, almost dropping Laura. She slipped down to stand.
The first thing he saw were words painted in blood upon the walls.
First wall: I wish that I could… win my Laura back from death…
Adam knew it to be a quote from Petrarch.
Second wall: How Do You (Dream) Yourself To Be?
Third wall: Ben Azzael
Over the tub:
16
1+6 = 7
Number of the lonely mystic
An orange baby blanket hung on a towel rod under this name. He knew the blanket, seen it in his vision of the angel Azzael with the infant. On the sink were two enormous pieces of paper, obviously torn from a gigantic book. They had two quotes, purported to be from The Enantiodromia. Adam didn’t recognize them, although they were in his handwriting. “Our savior comes stained in blood and chemicals… But there is no salvation for us…”
Adam moved slowly to the tub. The shower curtain was pulled closed. Adam pulled it back to reveal the tub—and Laura’s body. Chopped into 16 chunks. The hands had been removed from arms, bisected at the elbows, removed from the shoulders. The feet had been removed from the legs, bisected at the knees, removed from the hips. The torso was in three pieces, first separated at the waistline, the top cut vertically between the breasts. She had also been decapitated. Considering there was so much blood in the tub, she must have been killed in it.
The killer had doused the body in bleach and ammonia, a combination of these two creating chlorine gas so dense it should have knocked Adam flat, yet somehow only burned his sinuses and made his eyes water. There had also been a can of soft golden-orange paint, left over from a year ago when Laura had redone the downstairs bath in mango. The mess had stained her remains this color.
Ben Azzael
Ben Azzael
Ben Azzael
Ben Hur (What?)
Judah Ben Hur (How did that get into his thoughts?)
Helel Ben Shahar
Judah Ben Hur, Judah-son of the House of Hur.
Helel Ben Shahar, Daystar-Son of the Dawn. (Lucifer) Ben Azzael, Son of Azzael.
Azzael. (This monster claimed to be the son of an angel?)
Adam’s mind chewed at it. He didn’t turn around. He knew Laura wasn’t there. That hadn’t been Laura.
Azzael. Azzael. Azz-ael. Azz. Pronounced Ah-zzah-el.
Oz-ah-el.
Oz.
Oz Island.
The connection was a shock, like a lethal jolt of electricity. He was there, on the beach where the team had found the bodies of the kids. The Disney towers still stood, yet had greatly eroded. Adam went in.
There was a small old house inside. A single room at one end was gone, torn apart by earthquakes and a giant tsunami that somehow left the rest of the building untouched.
Adam heard a voice. “Laura was my wife through you. I loved her, through you. The children she carried—and lost—were mine. You were only ever a dream I sent out to live the life I couldn’t have, being trapped here. You weren’t supposed to grow into somebody separate from me. Come to me. I have waited so long for you.”
Adam saw a flash of the angel, holding the baby, in the room that had been destroyed. Azzael knew the boy was about to rebel against the years of torment, unintentionally causing Pacifica. Neither Azzael (who was a prisoner then) nor the other Watchers could prevent this. But after the room with its (3+6+0 =9, 360° of dungeon) circle was shattered, Azzael escaped—taking the infant to safety. The Watchers kept the catastrophe as limited as they could.
So how did this creature get out to murder Laura—in what? A fit of jealousy?
Adam didn’t care. Maybe he had begun as some sort of projected dream form, but he had enough free will now to kill this bastard.
Astral projection. Was that how Ben Azzael did mischief? By sending out his soul in any form he wished? Why didn’t he just do this to start with, instead of creating Adam? Perhaps it was limited. Maybe with such a strain it weakened him. After all, Ben Azzael was only the id half of himself, having put the ego into his ‘double’.
No matter, Adam wanted revenge for Laura, for himself, for the ear
th.
He entered through the door that had belonged to that third bedroom. It came off its hinges when he touched it. He walked down the buckled, rotted floor of the hall, pausing before the center bedroom. He’d picked up a large, frighteningly gnarled club of driftwood from the beach, without consciously considering the action—or its obvious consequences.
Standing in the entrance to Angela SaclasEX’s room, Adam stared at the boy in the circle. It was just a boy beginning his teens—not a man. So much like Adam had been, when that famous photograph had been snapped in the painted desert. Only then he’d remembered nothing. Hey, Pinocchio…not a real boy! Now his head swelled to bursting with memories. But they weren’t his memories.
The kid in the circle was naked save for his skin, demonic names burned into it. Several front teeth were missing. He had a raw red socket were his right eye should have been. There were two monstrous scars on the backs of his shoulders.
There was a nine-foot circle surrounding him and a skeleton with its bones rearranged.
“Did you know that, being three-quarters angel, I don’t have to eat? Only I thought I did have to…at first. I ate her. It was really gross.”
He sounded so young.
“The outer layer of the circle is salt, one grain thick, laid particle to particle. She used my right eye for the second circle, rubbing the wet tissue until nothing remained of it. And the innermost circle—that was created when her blood spattered, gushed, arced. It didn’t go beyond the circle or into the two outer layers. It just soaked everything inside,” Ben Azzael explained, his squinted eye truly haunted. “She’d planned it to be that way, knowing I would become trapped if I let her blood within those first two circles. She intended to be that sacrifice, so long had Angela craved death. And the death of earth.”
The angel stood in a dark corner. Adam wondered how long Azzael had been with them.
“She knew all along what she drove me to do, what she turned me into. She could have committed a far simpler suicide, but she didn’t possess enough power to take the rest of the world she resented with her. It was what she’d trained me—needed me—to do for her,” the boy continued. “The only happiness I’ve ever had was through you, Adam. As more and more I became the dream self and you became more authentic. I couldn’t even feel Laura’s touch or taste her lips anymore. My loneliness pushed me back to where I was when Pacifica happened. I didn’t even know I’d done that until my meditations revealed my responsibility…”
Containment: The Death of Earth Page 22
