CHAPTER 43
There were whispers coming from one of the back pews of the church; a male and a female voice. Barnem heard this and looked to the back. From my spot on the floor, I couldn’t see who it was but the Seraph smiled menacingly.
“How’d I know someone like you two would be showing up?”
“Barnem,” a cheery male voice called out. A few footsteps later and two figures were standing beside my bleeding body. I couldn’t see their faces but the young man wore cargo shorts and sported these pristine white sneakers. The woman wore a white top and had sandals under her long black skirt.
“Ever since Cain told me who took over—” Barnem was cut off by the fist bump the male was offering him. The Seraph rolled his eyes at it instead. “I knew you two wouldn’t be able to let this go without showing your faces.”
“Barnem,” the female said finally. She had actually been caught up staring at me. Both of them were barely human. I’m saying this and can barely comprehend it myself, but she was “off”. It wasn’t that her features weren’t normal—skinny arms with light tone in the bicep; long, ridiculously curly brown hair flowing to her shoulder. Nose, mouth, ears—all present. But also, all crudely done. Every single one of her traits were stretched to their limit, pulled cartoonishly to a degree. Her arms and ears and neck were tube-shaped, as if filled with florescent light bulbs instead of bone. Her head was done as if traced with a plate in mind, and her eyes were perfectly round. Rounder than round: two long ovals sitting alongside a nose that seemed fashioned with a protractor. Her creepy eyes, with at the equally ill-conceived green retina, blinked down at me.
“It’s great to see you. We were wondering if we could have a word?”
“I’m busy,” Barnem barked.
“It will only take a little of your time,” the male insisted, and instead of acknowledging Barnem telling him to fuck off, they both stepped over my pool of blood and found seats. The war angels around us had become still, almost like statues.
Barnem didn’t sit. He only crossed his arms and waited.
“Would you like to start or …” male weirdo began.
“I can,” the female said. “You can chime in if I miss anything?”
“Of course. Of course. Oh! Wait! I’m sorry. I’m sorry. That one. That one bleeding on the floor. She should …” He pointed at me as if I was a bag of garbage someone had forgotten to throw out.
The female leaned, in trying to whisper. “Should we meet with her separately before he murders her? It’s all confidentially and stuff, but as a way of, you know, getting to know our consumer?”
They gave each other a high five.
“Love it. You’re right. We would have to call HR.”
“Again,” Barnem shouted. He then brought his voice down as the hole in his face danced. “I’m in the middle of a ritualistic slaughtering. Whatever the hell you two have to do can’t happen after?”
The male made a pained face. “Ooo, yeah. I’m sorry. No.”
“Okay. Sent,” the female said. She had been fiddling with a small device, a cell phone I’m guessing, and then dropped it on her lap as if deciding to not care anymore. The way she blinked those crazy eyes was severely freaking me out. “Let’s just do it and when we hear back, I’ll figure out the paperwork stuff on our end. That Angel of Death left already, too. Right? Could have consolidated all of our meetings, but guess we’re not that lucky.”
“Hey, mortal,” I heard the male say in a cheery voice. “Care to join us?”
Before I could reply, one of the soldier angels picked me up and sat me upright in chair it had fetched. Barnem glared at me but remained standing.
Now in full view of them, I could really soak in the freakish way these two overly cheery people looked. With such arms and legs, they looked on stilts. Standing, they must have been ten or eleven feet tall. The male had a side man-bun and was clean faced, but everything about him was dumb to look at. I felt like I was staring at a New York City’s street artist rendition of a human being if they were drunk, high, and had never met one in real life. The extra-long ovals at the center of his eyes were blue and were staring down at his phone as he tap-tap-tapped away with his exaggerated fingers. Then, crossing his legs, he set the phone aside. To his partner he said, “So I just contacted Katty … you remember Katty? Christmas party last year? Had a little too much to drink?”
“California wildfires Katty?”
“That’s her. That’s her. She’s funny.”
“She’s a bitch.”
“She’s a bit of a bitch, yeah. But she owed me a favor. And guess what?”
“What?”
“She gave us some extra time down here.”
“Awwwesome.” Another high five. The female looked at me. “It’s so that you don’t die in the middle of this Exit Interview.”
“This is—” I sat properly, realizing that my lopped off arm was no longer a problem. The bleeding had tapered off. The intense pain had also stopped, as if muted, and I sat staring at the severed lump just below my elbow as if something horrifically traumatic had happened to someone else.
“So I’m Bill. This is Ada.”
“Hi!”
“We are here to help you navigate the staffing process.”
“And we’re here to make things as painless as possible. Whoops, sorry, ay,” the being known as Ada said, leaning forward and tapping me on the knee jokingly. “We appreciate your time and know that you have places to be.”
“So. On a scale of one to ten, ten being pleasant and one being awful, how would you rate your experience on this plane of existence?”
Barnem spit. “I never thought I would live to see the day that the Enthroned would come down to Earth to handle shit like this.”
The being known as Ada prickled, but her partner—the being known as Bill—cleared his throat and went into his pocket. “You know I forget that it’s been a while since you’ve been back to HQ. Just to let you know, there has been a restructuring of the goals and focus and just overall policies of the company in an attempt to better synergize with the ever evolving needs of our core market.”
“Is that fucking English?” Barnem took the card. “Glory? You rebranded Heaven … ‘Glory’?”
Ada beamed. “Check out the slogan on the back.”
“‘Glory is Bliss’? What does that even mean?”
“On a scale from one to ten,” Bill continued, “ten being extremely satisfied and one being not satisfied at all. How do you rate the support the company has given you during your employment?”
“How do I rate the company? This company? The company that demoted me to this hell hole in the first place? The company who locked me, a Seraph, in flesh and blood and shit and piss? You two have the balls to ask me that? After fucking aeons of fucking putting up with their stupid wars and disease and the Macarena?”
Barnem held up the card in his hand and then crushed it. Without saying a word, he let the wad fall onto the floor.
Ada tapped her chin. “So is that a zero?”
“Zero. Yes, zero. Now fuck off. I’ve got a job to do,” Barnem said, pointing back at me.
“I guess we can wait until he’s done,” Ada not-so conspicuously whispered to her partner. Bill sighed but threw up his hands like what can you do.
Barnem dislodged the sword from the ground.
“This isn’t right.”
“Shuttit, Grey. I already told you that I’m not here to hear you beg.”
“I wasn’t talking to you. I was talking to them.”
The creature known as Bill sat forward, genuinely interested. “Yes?”
“I’m not the Beast!”
As my voice echoed along the walls and high ceiling, behind me, I could hear that Barnem had stop short.
Out of fear that he was starting to figure things out, I walked toward
the ones Barnem called the Enthroned, gripping the stump of my arm. Getting this close was proof positive that these two were nowhere near the spectrum of normalcy and it made it easy to chart them across their levels of weirdness: Barnem, ordinary; Cain, taller and longer than ordinary; and now Ada and Bill—freakish caricatures of the ordinary. They didn’t even blink their eyes properly. Sometimes downward. Sometimes rolling upward with the lower lids. To me, the way they darted and tilted their heads to inspect me reminded me of giant birds.
“I am not the Beast. It’s not inside of me. It’s not whole.”
The being known as Ada cocked her round head, once to the left and then to the right. “Your aura is completely black, child. Signs of the Beast are around you.” Her cellphone rang and she held a long finger for me to wait.
Picking up where she left off, the being known as Bill tried to continue chastising me, but it wasn’t long until his cellphone rang as well. Apologizing, he picked up the call. There was only one side of the convo that I could hear from both of them
“Yes. Yes, of course.”
“I’m actually here with the both of them.”
“No. She’s still alive.” (Ada winked at me.)
“Yes. He’s here,” Bill said, gesturing over to Barnem.
“I’m sorry. What now?”
“And you’re sure about this?”
They both gave each other nervous glances and then hung up their phones.
Barnem took the opportunity that my back was turned to seize me by the back of my neck and slam me face first into the floor. But just before the sword came down over my neck to end it all, Bill croaked, “Stop!”
This only delayed the Seraph for a few seconds. He put a tighter grip on the hilt and drove the blade down.
“I said stop!”
Barnem went flying, struck by something I couldn’t see. Whatever it was rocketed him through the front end of the church. Enraged, he stood up and yelled, “You have no right.”
“You have no right,” Ada explained. “You were about to kill this woman without fulfilling the rites. There is an order, Barnem. An absolute order. And it must be carried out.”
“Just think of the paperwork—”
“Shuttup!” Voice shrill and now maddened, Barnem lost it. “I am charged in killing the Beast and she is the Beast. They are inside of her. I know it. She killed the demon and … and … and why are you all staring at me?”
Bill leaned forward. “What is that? That on your face?”
“It’s …” Barnem lifted a hand to give some excuse for the hole in his cheek, but suddenly froze when he noticed that something was off.
From out of this hole, a black beak nipped at his finger.
“This … can’t be.” He turned to me and yelled, “When did you—”
Barnem frantically fell to his knees and crawled over to the pool of blood and severed arm that was his handiwork. Picking up my mutilated limb, he inspected the palm only to find the large, gaping hole I had used to shoot D right into his mouth during our scuffle.
He turned to me as the large black leeches formed all across his skin. “Grey! You b—”
He couldn’t finish his sentence as D—having reverted to his original pudgy demon self—burst out of the side of his head with a large crack that exposed all of his teeth and scalp on that side. The Shade rolled in the air and landed on my shoulder.
Barnem, somehow still standing, was going to give the angels around him the order to attack, but he instead vomited several liters of black blood.
“What. Have. You. Done?”
Seeing the black tendrils coming out of the Seraph sent the the Enthroned scrambling at the sight of it. Ada scurried back, nearly falling out of her seat. Bill covered his mouth.
“Corrupted? A Seraphim?”
Barnem couldn’t talk. His words were muffled behind the blood and by how bad his face had been butchered. The skin dangled like loose meat.
But he was pointing. Pointing at me and D.
The blood continued gushing down his neck, cascading down the silver chest plate, and soaking into his hair. The black leeches’ wriggling intensified.
Barnem drew his sword as black boils burst all over his arms and face. With his only good eye locked onto the me—the woman who he had planned to kill since her birth, the woman whose life he regarded below everyone else’s—he charged.
Ten silver spears pierced his chest from above, each one striking the floor of the cathedral so hard that it split the plates. The soldier angels were moving toward him. Barnem screamed at them to halt, to stop, but the black blood was now streaming out of his back in tendrils with piranha-like mouths, each one biting and snapping at the air around him. A battle axe sank halfway into his torso and seemingly stopped as it got lodged in his spine.
With these holy weapons protruding out of his body, his flesh collapsing slowly, the Seraph simply stared at me. I knew then that he hated me, maybe more than ever, at that one given point. And just in case he didn’t, I figured I’d remind him.
“Hey. Hey, Barnem. Psst. So I was sitting here wondering what cool shit I was going to tell you before … you know, you die. I’m sort of inclined just to say that I’ll see you in hell. But yeah! That’s totally going to happen now. You and me. Roomies forever.”
Barnem’s million mouths let out a garbled wail, only to have one of the warrior angels stomp on his skull from behind. The Seraph’s head split open under the weight of it and maggots spilled out of the broken skullcap.
“Well!” The sound of the being known as Bill scared the living hell out of me. I totally forgot he was sitting there. “I want to say that this was pleasant, but I also don’t want to lie.”
“Say, Bill,” Ada peered over at me, “if Barnem was corrupted, how is the rite going to be carried out? She still needs to be killed. And all of the Shades seem to be present. You think we can call in someone to sub for the time being?”
“Possibly.”
“No.” I pushed myself off of the ground, slowly because I only had half the force, and stumbled over to the two beings. “Barnem cheated. He forced this, this entire thing to happen. This wasn’t divinity or fate. Just one asshole’s attempt at moving up in life.”
Bill placed his fist under his chin. “We know. We were told so by the ‘Powers that Be’.”
“The Powers that Be is our marketing and research strategy team. Really cool bunch once you get to know them. They were the ones who called.”
“That still doesn’t change the fact that this needs to be done.”
Thinking fast on my feet, I yelled, “It’s an inconvenience.”
Ada tittered. “Excuse me?”
“You heard me. The End of Days has greatly affected my way of life. Not in a good way,” I exclaimed, pointing to my stump. “If you knew Barnem pushed the clock, then when was it actually going to end?”
“Hmm.” Bill leaned his large face into me and checked his cellphone. “According to this spreadsheet … um. The world was scheduled to end … a week from next Thursday.”
Ada sighed and swiped downward on Bill’s screen.
“Oh right. I mean ten thousand years from next Thursday. Ooo that’s a very different number.” Before I could follow up, the being known as Bill interrupted. “Fine, fine. We’ll keep the original date. But only because it’s a pain to change the Event List once it’s out. I think that everyone set their vacations around it and I’m not going to be that guy.”
“I guess you’ll need compensation for any damages one of our ex-employees carried out,” the being known as Ada sighed and took out her own cell phone. “You won’t die here, I’ll call it in, no probs.”
I didn’t have to think; my mouth just opened and it spilled out.
“I don’t want to be saved.”
The being known as Bill raised one of its weird
eyebrows.
“This isn’t about me. I want … it’s my sister.”
“As you wish. Name?”
“I’m Amanda Grey.”
“No. Your sister’s name?”
“Petty … Petunia Grey. Oh, and Donaldson. Jeffrey.”
The beings known as Ada and Bill looked at each other.
“Well.”
“Yes. Can you believe it? Self-sacrifice for loved ones. That’s—”
“A means of redemption, I would say.” Ada nodded feverishly. “Yes. This is grounds for total absolution of sins.”
“Pious credit recovery.”
“Yes. Quite.”
“So?” I asked, totally confused. “Does this mean I don’t have to go to hell?”
“Yes,” Bill stated. “You have been absolved.”
“Wow. W-well, thank you!”
“As long as you signed the User Agreement at the start of your life, we can rebuild your—” Bill tapped Ada and showed her his phone. “Ooo. That feature won’t be rolled out in your reality until 2047. Sorry.”
The being known as Ada tapped away at her phone, then slipped it away. “Okay. Petunia and Jeffrey. All Done. We have to go.”
Suddenly, my body began contorting and bending themselves into knots. The power that D had granted me to fool Barnem—that of six of the seven Shades—was now going wild in my body. Short, dumpling D raised his spaded tail in the air and I felt the birds boring up from my insides, burrowing up my throat. Five Shades flew from my mouth, but D quickly sucked them up in one hearty puff. His body swelled through the phases of his transformation until finally his adult form was hunched over me. Just as he reached out, the warrior angels bore their weapons at him before he could zap me with it.
The being known as Bill pointed a long finger at him. “Don’t mistake our dedication to quality customer support for weakness, creature. The mortal made her choice. If you in any way attempt to save her, we won’t wait for a prophecy to smear your foul existence across the timelines.”
AlcyLeyva_AndThenThereWereCrows_EbookFormatting_Nook Page 28
