A Guardian Angel

by Williams, Phoenix

  Nothing, except that Andy Winter was standing in the doorway.

  “Leroy,” Andy greeted the man, nodding.

  Leroy froze in place when he saw Andy. He stood up straight, realigning his cashmere sweater. The shock on his bearded face faded into an all-knowing smirk as he chuckled. “You found me,” he breathed.

  “I did,” Andy replied.

  Leroy continued to his bar and began pouring out two glasses of scotch. “How?” he asked as he began fingering over the long line of bottles on the shelf behind the bar.

  “Loretta told me,” Andy replied. “Before I killed her.”

  Leroy was silent and he stared over at the former hitman in horror and disbelief. “Loretta?” he asked through grief.

  “Yes,” Andy answered. “Drink?”

  Leroy numbly passed Andy one of the glasses he had poured out and started downing his own. Andy accepted the drink and sipped slowly on it. His eyes never left Leroy's.

  “So what happens now?” Andy's former boss asked him.

  “You know,” Andy answered. He took another gulp.

  Leroy's smile grew large and tight as he nodded. “Yeah,” he whispered. He moved back to his chair beside the fireplace and gestured to Andy to sit across from him. Andy obliged.

  “I've done what I needed to do,” Leroy started after tossing back the remainder of his scotch. “The right people are in place. My empire will exist after I'm gone. It's a system that works, Mr. Winter. Finally, a system that works.”

  Andy listened in silence. Graves sweated.

  “Do you think people were happier before?” Graves continued. “Do you think that just because they didn't use guns, the federal government wasn't killing people? Poverty, Andy. You understand poverty, I know you do. That can be fixed. We can fix it! All of the broken systems of the old world – healthcare, education, welfare, the election process – they must be rebuilt from the ground up in order to function. No more high priced medication, no more denial of insurance. Everyone can pursue a college career and everyone can feel safe knowing that food is provided daily. It's all in the infrastructure. Everyone thought it would be impossible, that those systems would bankrupt the government. But not with the right people, Andy. I tried to do the right thing!”

  “I know,” Andy whispered.

  Leroy's voice picked up speed. “I am a satire. What I've done is reveal what kind of illusion society is. Equal, unequal; rich or poor. Everyone has the basic power to change the face of the world. The basic power to kill each other,” he explained. “Society is just an unspoken agreement to coexist. It gets broken a lot, but it's amazing the faith that people have – ”

  Andy cleared his throat. Terror gleamed in the older man's eyes. He knew there was no talking his way out of justice.

  “I'm not proud of how I did what I did!” Graves yelled. He was in tears. “But I am proud of what I did. We did terrible things – I did terrible things, Andy. If I could make those things right, I would. But they were the right choices to make. The only choices. Please, Andy tell me that you understand.”

  “Be quiet,” Andy ordered. Leroy obeyed him. “Are you ready?”

  Leroy swallowed hard and continued to stare at the assassin. Andy lifted his handgun and rested the barrel against the aged man's forehead.

  Closing his eyes, Andy killed Leroy Graves.

  PART IV

  -----------------------

  HARBINGER

  -Chapter Thirty-One-

  Days Gone By

  Once again, Andy Winter dreamed. He was alone in a starch white suit – spotlessly white. Impossibly white. The corridor he stood in was short, with a fork before him. Behind him was darkness. The walls too were vibrant and pale as snow. Light seemed to pour out from the cracks and seams of the structure. Fog rolled in from the darkness and layered the atmosphere with thick cloud. Andy felt warm here.

  He stepped forward, then stepped back again when he heard someone approaching him. The silhouette came from the right hallway, quick and confident in its stride. It was impossible for Andy to make out any features of the woman until she was only a yard or so away.

  It was Haley. She was hard to differentiate from the fog and the glow that was stuck in his eyes. Her hair swirled around her face like gusts of smoke. Light flooded and washed over her. She was dressed in a bright blue dress as if she attended a wedding, pinned with fine broaches and flowers. Her face was soft and delicate like a child's, her lips parted seamlessly as she spoke.

  “Save me,” she whispered. Her features dimmed, the color vanished. “You. I need you.”

  “Haley,” Andy said as soft as sound could be.

  She turned away from him for a moment, squeezing her eyes tight. “It hurts,” she told him. Her lips trembled in pain. A tear fell over her velvet cheek.

  Concern was there in Andy's eye as he watched over the beautiful crying woman. “What hurts?” he asked her. He reached out to touch her face, but she moved. Something about her spirit seemed so inconsolable and tormented. Like a ghost. She glided as she walked away from him. The fog began accumulating over her and the light brightened, engulfing her. She started to vanish.

  “Haley!” Andy called after her. She stopped walking.

  This time when she turned to face the man, the fog cleared like the Red Sea in Moses' stride. Behind her, the hallway opened up into a large ballroom with rich, polished wood floors and sparkling chandeliers. There was a magnificent ivory grand piano in the corner of the room before a sea of exquisite stone tables and chairs. The bar was nothing short of a divine work of art. There was a look in Haley's eyes as she gazed into Andy's that was stone cold dead. Love never graced these grayed, lifeless irises. As soon as the fog had cleared and Andy could see the ballroom, it all ignited. Flames grew from the wood, splintered and roared over the fine furniture. The piano fell over itself in a large pile of embers. Chandeliers fell to the ground and shattered, tossing specks of light all about the place. It all burned.

  “It hurts!” Haley screamed. Nothing but pure agony and terror filled her words.

  Without warning, she flew backwards as if pulled on a reel. Her scream loitered in the room as she zipped back into the fire. Andy tried to look away as her hair began vanishing and her face blistered and cracked. Her flesh melted away as her cries gurgled, and all that remained was a skeleton that toppled over and puffed apart as ash.

  Andy cried. The terrible image remained in his mind as the fire spread. Flames invaded the hallway until everything around Andy burned. It didn't hurt him at all. It wasn't even warm. Andy appeared to be impervious to the fire, walking through the burning room as if it wasn't there at all. Smoke filled the air, getting thicker than the fog at this point. Andy continued down the corridor until he was in the heart of the beast that roared and crackled in the ballroom. He drifted along without purpose. When he stopped, the corridor had caught entirely.

  “Andy,” a compassionate voice spoke through the crackling of the fire.

  He turned his head to the bar which burned slower because of its dense material. Behind it, Max poured out two drinks.

  “Max?” Andy's voice cracked. His eyes filled with tears again.

  Max placed one drink on the edge of the bar for Andy and took a swig of his own. “How are you, friend?” he asked. After a pause, he gestured to the glass he poured for Andy. “Drink?”

  Andy obliged. After his first sip, he said, “You're never in here.”

  “They needed me,” Max replied. “They're understaffed.”

  It became difficult for Andy to choke back on his tears. “Where – where were you?” he asked.

  Max smiled, then chuckled. “Drink,” he said.

  Again, Andy did as he was told. The flames that reflected in his glass danced as he lifted it to his lips. After he swallowed, he open his mouth to speak, but Max shushed him.

  “I'm still dead, Andy,” Max explained. Andy sobbed at the word. “There's nothing you
can do about that anymore. You can't save me. I have always been dead. But she isn't.” He pointed to the middle of the room where Haley had burned to death. “You can still save her.”

  “How?”

  Max leaned in, his face close to Andy's. His eyes were warm and filled with life. “You do whatever it takes, Andy,” he told him. A smile unzipped on his face, happy. “Go brother. Save her.”

  Andy started packing the moment he woke up. At first, as his body heaved out of bed and he set about his tasks, he had no idea why. But in a matter of time, the dream started to creep back into his ears, with Max repeating to him, “Go brother. Save her.” The sun started to peer over the hills to the east as Andy dressed. The sky was a bluish gray. Clouds blanketed the town. Darkness occupied the hotel room that Andy had taken over after the Rift. It was filthy, old and spoiled food all about the area and dust covered most of the surfaces in visible layers. Andy had kept all of his things in one corner by the bed, the only acceptable portion of the room. He ignored the rest of it, with little to no motivation to clean it up when he first arrived. For the last two months, Andy laid and slept, surviving off of whatever he could find. Most days he didn't have the energy to get out of bed. On the other days, he barely went farther than a block away before he found supplies.

  The town he resided in had been abandoned about nine weeks prior when a gang of religious anarchists set off bombs in the local church. They had threatened the citizens, to which everyone packed what they could and fled. When Andy had arrived about a week after that, he killed two of the bandits and wounded the last.

  “Where'd you come from?” Andy had asked the man after he confirmed the other two kills.

  Grunting and snarling, the man gave no answer and instead struggled to grab his hatchet off of the ground. He whimpered and moaned as one hand clutched onto his shattered kneecap, the other dancing over the gravel of the local gas pumps toward his weapon. Andy stepped on the injured knee. The man shrieked in agony, halting in his pursuit of the ax to writhe in pain.

  “Did you hear me?” Andy questioned, barely audible over the man's howls. “What nation are you from? Who are you with?”

  “No nation,” his victim replied in between struggled breaths. “Just the Army.”

  “Who's army?”

  “God's.”

  Andy chuckled as he stood up. He lifted his foot off the man, who bent over himself and clasped onto his knee. The former hitman strode a couple steps over to the hatchet and lifted it off the ground. He walked back over to the bandit, who tried to push himself away from Andy along the ground.

  “Now, I'm going to try to word my question one last way. What group are you from and where are the rest of your friends?”

  The man stopped crawling and started to laugh like a lunatic. He spat toward Andy.

  Without any idea where Andy could go at this point, with nowhere safe for him to stay, he remained sedentary. This bleak morning was the first time in a week that Andy left the hotel. A bag was slung off his shoulders and his loaded gun holstered on his belt. Without any hesitation, he climbed inside an abandoned Toyota Corolla that he had laid claim to at the beginning of the war.

  He liked it most because the radio worked.

  Andy had no real idea where Haley Flynn could be. He did his best to stay up to date with the news, but there was no television or newspapers that ran to the abandoned town. All he had was the car radio, which he used sparingly. Gas was much harder to acquire since the pumps had shut down, but Andy had gotten experienced at siphoning gas from abandoned vehicles. The last that he had heard of Haley was a small blurb about her organized protests of the American War. She was in Washington D.C., one of the main last footholds of the United States of America. Congress had sealed its doors and turned off their phones, quitting the business. A handful of lawmakers stayed to do what they could, which soon became apparent was nothing. Haley had gathered a group of optimists and volunteered for Congress. In their demonstration, they explained that the position of law cannot be vacant and now is the time to display civil duty. She had encouraged everyone to step up and take a role in building the country back up. The story seemed to have little to no interest to the general public in comparison to the others.

  Andy never heard about the result of that effort. That was over two weeks ago, he recalled as he turned the radio on for the first time in as long. His car purred onward as he started his drive east.

  “...of attacks on small towns and villages in territories occupied by both the Federal States of America and the Decree Nation. Leaders from both states have placed over twenty high ranking officials of the Knights, including the chief general of the terrorist organization, on the top of their Most Wanted Criminals lists.”

  A separate voice, recorded somewhere with a lot more wind than the studio, came in. “The nature of their attacks, the brutality they show our soldiers when they capture them is designed for no other purpose than to scare people.” Andy recognized the voice. It was the vice president of the Federal States of America, Adam Lizarre. “Their cowardice is something to pity, not something to fear. They follow no international convention of fighting, killing innocent men, women, and children in an obscene, inhuman manner. We live in volatile times, my friends. War is on every doorstep of every home in America. Brothers and sisters are now divided, meeting each other in combat and bringing a wave of violence and destruction that this country had not seen in over a century and a half. Our strength matters now more than ever. We cannot allow monsters on our lawn. These criminals will not escape punishment. Justice will be loud.”

  The station was quiet for just a moment before playing a short saxophone segue, then the original reporter spoke. “Aid continues to come in from overseas. The United Kingdom, China, and Saudi Arabia have been some of the largest contributors of supplies airlifted to the more isolated parts of the country. Foreign doctors and volunteers have flown in to help in heavy combat areas, treating the wounded and feeding our troops. The bulk of the fighting has been centered around metropolitan areas, particularly east of the Rocky Mountains.”

  A male voice came in, continuing from the previous report. “Sixteen Federal soldiers were killed late last night when a bomb was detonated in the middle of I-25, north of Denver,” he said in as flavorless of a voice as human tones can achieve. “Reports say that half a dozen anarchist insurgents used a school bus to block off the road. Explosives had been wired to the vehicle, which detonated through a pressure-triggered electrical system. There are twenty injured soldiers in medical care.

  “In San Francisco, conditions have worsened for the Decree soldiers who are now on their fourth morning of the Golden Gate Siege. Russo forces have pushed the Nationers past their primary supply depot in the city. Decree President Barringer has declared his outrage at the leadership of the Federal States and the United Nations, saying that they are, quote, 'letting these opportunistic bullies come and slaughter their own kin without so much as a word to say about it.' The United Nations replied with a press release, denouncing any recognition of the Decree Nation as a state of any kind. Federal president Fesgen has not officially replied, but experts believe that he will aid the men in San Francisco. There are eighty-two current casualties for the Decree Nation. The count for Russo forces remains unknown.”

  Andy bent his neck down a bit in order to see the sky. Rain clouds had begun accumulating in the air, dark and menacing. He sat back and smirked. With his eyes on the road before him, he reached for the knob to change the channel on the radio, but paused.

  “It has been sixty-eight days since the Decree Tower attack and the beginning of the American War,” the first reporter said, her voice crystalline clear. “Remember everyone: we are all humans. God bless America, which ever one you hail.”

  The Beatles' “Here Comes the Sun” began playing. Andy retracted his hand from the knob. He listened in silence to the music as his car hummed over the highway.

  -Chapter Thirty-Two-


  Heart of the Valley

  Morning drifted up from below the earth, rising and warming the air around the military camp. Insects chattered and clicked with impressive volume, humming from the woods on the hills, rolling down into the valley. The lightest layer of fog trickled over the soft earth and the dew encrusted blades of grass. The camp was set up on a large plot of concrete at the bottom of the valley. Beige tents were bolted down into the concrete and several metal crates of munitions were placed around the camp. There was a guard tower on each corner of the camp, against the cinder block wall that surrounded the concrete plot. Humvees were parked at angles by the entrance of the facility where the road withered off, alongside a set of orange vans.

  Men crawled over the surface of the camp like ants, moving to and fro with various tasks. The concrete was stained with burn marks and blood. Decree soldiers in their unique orange fatigues pulled bodies across the facility, lining them up on the grass outside the wall. There was a long row of them all, men and women in Reserve uniforms. The flag of the United States was patched onto their shoulders.

  Bits of rubble littered the makeshift street. Shrapnel laid twisted near some of the more damaged vehicles. A few men kept lookout on the towers, drinking water and swapping stories as they watched their peers continue the cleanup. Most of the battle that had taken place here had been cleaned up and removed by the facility's new occupants. Now, everyone was just getting rid of the bodies that were hidden in isolated pockets around the camp and rounding up the supplies into one designated area.