Winds of Change

by Jason Brannon

  Leland nodded. “One of the fallen is responsible.”

  “So which one of us is it?” Jesse Weaver asked. “Is there a test of some sort to determine which one of us is the bad angel?”

  “There is,” Leland said calmly. “But the ones of you that aren’t imposters won’t enjoy it.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Chuck said. “We need to know. You need to know. Will you be able to stop what’s happening if you can just figure out who’s responsible?”

  “The vengeance of the Lord will be administered,” Leland said. No longer did he seem like the jovial old fellow we had met all those hours before. Despite his youthful appearance, the new Leland seemed positively immortal, like an ancient judge surveying the world through highly-sensitive eyes.

  “The test,” Kenneth Weaver reminded him. “What’s the test?”

  “Every angel that was ever created has a cabalistic mark. The mark is never in the same place on every angel.” Leland unbuckled his belt and pushed his pants down off of one hip. True to his word, there was a small symbol that looked like a botched tattoo. “That is the way my name is written. No matter what guise I take I can never rid myself of the mark. The fallen will still bear his mark.”

  “So you want us to strip?” Steven asked.

  “I’m not taking my clothes off,” Ashley stammered.

  “Got something to hide?” Pete asked.

  “I’m not giving you guys a peep show,” Ashley retorted.

  “I wouldn’t ask it if it wasn’t necessary, but it is,” Leland replied calmly. “The vengeance of the Lord must run its course.”

  Ashley chewed on this for a moment. “None of the rest of these goons have to look, right?” she said at last. “You’re an angel, you should be immune.”

  “Even angels are prey to temptation. That’s how nephilim are created. But I am focused in my task.”

  “Let’s get to it then,” Jesse said as he started to unbutton his shirt.

  Out of courtesy, we let Ashley go first. All of us turned our backs and waited as Leland inspected her. Twice I caught the Weaver boys trying to sneak a peek and grunted to show that I saw them. They didn’t care and kept craning their necks for a glimpse of nude flesh.

  “Do you have to look there?” she asked. None of us turned around although the urge was tempting.

  “The mark is different for every angel. I must be thorough.”

  Lucky devil, I thought.

  As Leland conducted his examination, I gave the rest of the guys an examination of my own. I wanted to know which one of us was the imposter. Nobody really seemed nervous or antsy about the possibility of being found out. It was also difficult to discern anything by observing body language. The fallen angel was clearly a skilled actor.

  “What happens to the angel when you find him?” Pete asked, shifting his weight back and forth on the balls of his feet.

  Leland pulled a knife from a sheath beneath his shirt. “I will cut the angelic mark out and reduce him to a mortal man. Without his mark, his deadly influence will be gone and I will kill him.”

  Begrudgingly, we all let Leland examine us. I felt like I was back in high school getting my sports physical.

  Leland’s mood got progressively worse. It was clear that he wasn’t finding what he had hoped. In a way, it was disturbing to think that things had gotten so out of hand that an angelic warrior couldn’t handle it. Yet it was also somewhat of a comfort to think that the traitor wasn’t among us.

  “I don’t understand,” Leland said when he had finished. “I was positive it was one of you, but none of you have the mark.”

  “I think you just wanted to play doctor,” Pete joked uneasily. Nobody else laughed.

  “Is it possible I have missed something?” Leland asked, his face full of questions.

  I looked at the group and wondered where someone could possibly hide an angelic mark. It was only as I noticed Ashley running her fingers through her mane of lustrous chestnut hair that I realized where the mark was.

  “You didn’t check anyone’s scalp,” I said.

  Ashley instantly went rigid.

  Leland looked at her and then at the rest of us. Her reaction obviously meant something to him. It certainly seemed suspicious.

  “Get away from me,” Ashley said, taking a step back from Leland. “It’s not me.”

  “You knew who I was all the time,” he said.

  Ashley held up the feather she had shown the rest of us. “I didn’t know anything. What are you talking about?”

  Immediately Leland began to chatter in a foreign language of some sort. He was speaking in tongues, I now recognized.

  “You know what I’m saying,” he said in English. “You understand me, girl. This is your language too.”

  “It’s not,” she maintained, fear twisting her face into something not nearly as beautiful as before. “I’m not responsible for this.”

  Slowly, Leland circled her like a ravenous dog eying its next meal.

  “Help me. Somebody,” she pleaded.

  The building began to tremble around us. It felt like we were in the epicenter of an earthquake.

  Now, Leland no longer looked like either the mild-mannered young man of moments before or the jovial old fellow we had met in the beginning. His eyes blazed with yellow fire, and his face was chiseled with determination.

  “I should have known it was you from the start,” he growled.

  “Aren’t any of you going to help me?” she pleaded. “Jesse?”

  Jesse Weaver eyed her carefully, unsure of himself. Only moments before he would have easily allowed her to fill the void that Vera had left behind, but now, that void seemed to have its own distinct advantages.

  Ashley turned away from all of us and focused on Leland. She looked like a frightened little girl. The act was completely convincing too, but the rumbling building presented a much more convincing argument than Ashley’s facial expressions ever could. We knew it was only a matter of minutes before we all were buried under tons of rubble.

  “The building’s going to come down at any minute,” Chuck said as items fell from the shelves and hit the floor, the sound akin to dropping a thousand hammers all at the same instant. I couldn’t understand most of what was being said around me. The only way I knew what Chuck was saying is because I could read his lips.

  “Let’s go,” I said, making a waving motion with my hand. None of the others needed any reason to question me.

  The only problem with my plan was that we had to run right past Leland and Ashley to get to the exit. We tried to slip past them as they circled each other. Although neither Leland nor Ashley touched them, Pete and Steven both turned to piles of salt before our very eyes. I wasn’t sure which of the two was responsible, however, that was the exact moment that Leland changed into Alastor, casting off every element of humanity. It was impossible to watch the transformation take place. Racking was falling down all around us, and merchandise was piling up in heaps on the floor. All I could see for sure was a blinding white flash of light that reminded me of those nuclear bomb tests on television. Then the angel was there, looking nothing at all like the depictions most commonly dramatized in stained glass.

  Gone were all the flowing robes and gleaming halos. All that remained was a hard, weathered figure that looked like he could have been a bounty hunter or in a biker gang. He positively dwarfed Ashley.

  Ashley backed away from Alastor, screaming for one of us to help her; not one of us stopped running. Still, I for one wondered why she hadn’t transformed like Alastor had. It made me wonder if we were doing the right thing by leaving her there to fend for herself. I nearly went back for her, and then thought better of it as a huge section of the roof fell in behind me.

  The last thing any of us saw before the building caved in was Alastor poised to bring down the sword on Ashley’s head. She still looked like a frightened, innocent woman and nothing else. Feeling ashamed of myself, I turned and ran as Alastor started speaki
ng in tongues. Clouds of dust swirled around us and the store as we fled to the parking lot. Yet this was no ordinary dust. This was all that remained of hundreds and hundreds of souls. Undoubtedly, the dead had gathered to watch this final showdown and to cheer Alastor on - or to condemn him. At this point, I still wasn’t sure if he was a good guy sent to deliver us or if he was the cause of all our troubles.

  It’s difficult to say what actually went on inside the store after that because the building caved in at that point. We could still hear Alastor speaking in tongues and what sounded like screaming, but that could have been the sound that the steel beams made as they were twisted and bent out of shape by the weight of the collapsing building. I wanted to believe that. I didn’t want to imagine those sounds coming out of Ashley’s mouth.

  We all stood there, staring at the destroyed store, wondering if it was possible that anyone, even angels, could have survived. Yet, neither Alastor nor Ashley crawled out of the wreckage. I don’t think we really expected them to.

  The dust fell around us like rain, coating our heads, shoulders, arms, chests, legs. It was like standing in a blizzard. It felt like someone was tapping their cigarette out over our heads.

  “Do you think it’s possible that Ashley wasn’t what Leland said she was?” Chuck asked.

  “She never changed,” Jesse reminded all of us. “And what about Wayne? How do you explain him in all of this? If Ashley was a fallen angel, then Wayne would have surely known about it.”

  “You can’t explain it,” I said. “Out of those of us left, Leland was the only one who was completely and totally by himself. Jesse had his family, Wayne and Ashley had each other, Pete and his buddy came in together. Steven, Chuck, and I had worked together for long enough to know that none of us were angels. That left only Leland. I don’t think there’s any question about what he really was. The only question that remains is which side he was truly on. Was he the one who saved us from certain death or was he the one who brought death with him?”

  “So you think he was the bad angel?” Jesse asked.

  In my mind, there was only one way to find out. I started walking toward the restaurant. Soon after, I could hear the footfalls of the others behind me.

  I knew the answer to the question long before we ever went inside. The buzzing of flies was oppressive. And loud.

  These bodies hadn’t been reduced to dust. They had been massacred, mutilated, defiled. I gagged at the sight and moved aside so the others could see.

  None of them got more than a five second look before turning away.

  “I would say that Leland was most definitely the bad angel,” I said, wiping my mouth with the back of my hand.

  “Alastor, the executioner,” Steven reminded us. “There was a good reason for his name.”

  Yet I realized something else once we walked back to the store. I thought back to the feather that Ashley had been holding. It had been white. Leland, or Alastor, or whatever his name had been had been covered in maroon plumage, which meant that there really had been another angel lurking somewhere nearby. The fact that Ashley had found the feather made me suspect it had been hers all along.

  The dust had settled when we finally made it back to the danger zone. I think I was the first to spot the hand sticking out from the rubble like a flower sprouting up out of graveyard dirt.

  “I see a hand!” I shouted, running toward the rubble pile. One of the fingers twitched slightly. It was Ashley.

  “Help me!” I screamed, but the rest of the group was already hard at work clearing away broken sections of mortar and steel. Ashley wasn’t buried very deeply, but she was seriously hurt. I knew she wouldn’t last long.

  She smiled at me as I cleared the debris away from her face. “He’s gone now,” she whispered through bloody lips. Her face was covered in a mask of sheetrock dust. She looked like a ghost.

  “Alastor?” I asked. Ashley nodded slightly.

  “Wayne and I were sent to kill him. He’s been a source of curses and death for as long as I can remember. He was the orchestrator of the Egyptian plagues, and that was still when he was loyal. Things have changed since then. Before, he killed for God. After he turned his back on The Father, he killed for enjoyment. That’s all this was to him - a game.”

  “But Wayne went willingly to his death.”

  “He didn’t die. Nobody ever saw him change, did they? We weren’t sure what disguise Alastor would take, and the only way Wayne could be sure was to scout. We knew our plan would work better if it appeared that he was dead.”

  “So where is he now? Where was he when you and Alastor were fighting?”

  Ashley smiled. Her red lips were now coated with dust. It looked like she had been eating powdered donuts while wearing lipstick. It was the look in her eyes, however, that ruined that impression.

  “Who do you think brought the building down?” she asked. “Who do you think held Alastor while the ceiling caved in on top of us? I know Wayne seemed like a jerk, but everything you saw between the two of us was an act. It had to be that way until we figured out what sort of face Alastor was wearing. Wayne and I are immortal; Alastor is immortal too. We can, however, pass from one existence to another. You might call it death, but to us, it’s just a way of getting closer to God. Because we’re angels, we’ll all return to the throne when we pass on. God will handle things from that point on. He’ll punish Alastor for the things he’s done.”

  I wanted to ask more questions, but there wasn’t time. I reached for Ashley’s hand. The moment I touched it, she exploded into thousands of pure, white feathers. It resembled the transformation that many of our customers had undergone as they stepped outside the building and turned into nice, tidy hillocks of sand. But I knew that Ashley’s metamorphosis had purpose, had meaning. Hers wasn’t the result of some rogue angel’s games. She was going to God. Given the number of people who had died, I’ll bet she had to wait in line to see the creator.

  As it turned out later, the damage had been confined to a very limited area. Astronomers tracked the shooting star that fell that night to a remote section of the highway not far from our store. It was simple enough to make the necessary jumps in logic: that’s where Alastor had come from. That’s how he made his appearance.

  Of course, the astronomers didn’t know anything about angels. Wisely, we didn’t mention it either. Nobody would have believed us. As it was, we had to spend three days in an Army quarantine. The stay would have been lengthened by talks of cherubim and seraphim. Instead, we stuck to Chuck’s initial theory of a chemical attack by terrorists, and that seemed to do the trick. It was an explanation people were ready to accept.

  The military unit didn’t actually arrive, however, until the next afternoon.

  Not knowing what else to do, we spent the rest of that day sweeping the asphalt, shoveling as much of the dead as we could into trash bags, and pondering the nature of God. Our brief encounter with angels had transformed lives, affected families, and completely reshaped beliefs. And while the winds of change hadn’t turned any of us into hillocks of sand, we were new creatures nonetheless.