In the dungeons, wailing demons and abandoned souls spit vile bile through the bars of their cells and offered little more than insult as assault. It would be good for Zepar to rub up against dangerous demons out in the open where a godling stood within reach of blood-drenched feathers and ravenous fangs.
“Wet,” Uzza grunted at Shax. Then he asked Lucifer, “Where do we go?”
Lucifer turned and smiled at him. “What I love about you, Uzza,” he said, “practicality…” He looked at his own followers—they would hate it worst. For Hell was a comfortable blanket that an archangel demon wrapped themselves in to stay warm and cozy by the light of flickering flames from the lake. But constantly bathed in the bright light of his former lover… Life’s light was so bright that the godlings would most likely welcome a chance not to squint. And Zarzi would enjoy it most of all. He turned to her and said, “Seeds grow fastest and finest bathed in ever-moist bed of rain-drenched dirt. Is this not so?”
“The light of Heaven,” Zarzi said, and she almost touched them together as she shuddered and flapped her wings in front of her. “We flutter precious feathers to emerald forest—saintly Seattle!”
— CLXXVIII —
BARBARA TENDED TO the burns on my back while I listened to the sweet sound of her voice. It helped with the searing pain and the knowledge that, though it was clear I couldn’t be killed, God would continue to try anyway.
“How many times you say you died?” Barbara asked. “Pretending I believe you … which I… You sure are a wild one, I’ll say that. Let’s just hope you can—”
“Counting today?”
“Of course, counting today,” she said. “Jesus, Mary and Joseph, that’s where we’re at, ain’t it?”
Then I had a thought. “Where are we?”
“Right here,” she said. “Right—oh yeah, they haven’t got you to that part yet. I’ll—you listening? Because I don’t wanna waste my breath if you ain’t listening. Not again.”
Barbara didn’t realize it, or maybe she did and she just wasn’t saying, but I would never miss a word of warning she spoke again. Still, the way she talked… I guess it gave me courage to start sticking up for myself. And lying face down on a cold wooden table, her spreading salve up and down my burning spine, and the fact that I died … for the fourth time… “Does it look like I’m going anywhere to you?” I asked.
I think she was almost as surprised as I was. “You don’t have to get snippy about it,” she said. “Just passing the time, that’s all. I’m trying to help you, ya know.”
“Why?”
“What?” she asked. Now I had her as confused as I was. To tell you the truth, I liked that.
“Why are you helping me?” I said.
“Because your back is completely fried. And if I don’t fix it, it’s gonna—”
Not like I could see it, but hearing her description of my burns didn’t help me feel better. “How … how bad does it look?”
I would come to understand that Barbara didn’t spread sugar on the way she saw things. “Mighty bad,” she said. “You’re gonna have a big ol’ scar.” She paused and, I assumed, looked more closely at my back. Then she touched me very gently, but I can tell you the pain felt anything but gentle.
“Aaaah!” I yelled. “Don’t … do that again … please!”
“More than one of them,” she said. And she was pretty matter-of-fact when she gave me her judgment of my prospects for recovery, “Meds ain’t gonna fix that one. Gonna need to give you some ‘J’ just to get you off this table.”
“Some what?”
“Oh, come on,” she said, “J—Judgment. Don’t tell me you don’t—rural zone farm boys”—I heard a little glass clank on the table behind me—“how do they find you idiots? Listen, I got a little treat back here, and it’s gonna make you feel better and that’s all you need to know. You’re gonna see angels and bright colorful lights and you’ll be all happy. You’re gonna forget aaaall about your burned-up back. Okay? You’ll just wake up in…”
I stopped listening to her. I thought about waking up in the State Med-mart and the “vitamin” shot that the doctor gave me. And then I thought about my eyes and my glasses. “I don’t want any—”
There was a tiny tingling twinge in my neck, just before everything went black.
I didn’t know if it was a dream or if I was dead again, but the feeling was the same. Darkness surrounded me and there was no sound.
“Hello,” I said. I was hesitant, because that last one I saw was pretty mean. I was sure that I was dead again. “Where are you?” Because I was also certain that there was an angel somewhere in the black. I wondered what Barbara shot into my neck.
“There is no call to shout, Benito,” the voice said. It was familiar and I tried to—and then the tallest and strongest looking angel I had ever seen, of the three I’d dreamt of, anyway—flapped out of the darkness and landed right in front of me. “My ears are not your eyes,” the huge eagle said.
I craned my head up to look at him. He was covered in bright silver feathers that looked like … the scales on a salmon. They glinted rainbow in what little light shined—it seemed to come from above him—and his feathers looked as sharp as the way he stared at me. The only thing on him that was bare was his face. It was hard and chiseled and as serious as the Colonel ever was. But the Colonel did not have wings.
“Benito,” the angel said, “I wished … I wish for more time, but time is coming and you have much to do. Too much to dally yourself with the daughter of the damned. They plan to burn you and—”
“They already burned me,” I said to him. “Now I’m dead again—the same game—imagining I’m talking to an angel until I wake up.” That’s how I had it figured.
He frowned at me a little. “Is that what you believe?” he asked. “This is simply mind’s distraction?” His head bobbed and he cawed a little, and then his voice was louder and a bit screechy when he spoke, “I believed he had… There is no time for talk. They plan to burn you,” he said, “and then she will gain advantage. You must not let this happen.”
“I told you,” I said, “Father D already burned me.” I thought about it for a second. “This morning … I think. Why did they…?”
“That was to root you out,” the angel said. “They have searched for you … for years. I wished you prepared. They’ve been testing—like every other one of you. We believed that they would not discover—”
“Every other one of who?”
“No more,” the angel said. “Listen to wisdom’s words carefully. You must escape punishing prison and you must hide. I can show you no more, for this eternity draws to a close and we cannot be allowed to fail its purpose.”
“Escape?” I asked. “To where? I don’t have anywhere left. They—he killed them both.” By then I had figured out who was responsible for my parents’ deaths. But I had more questions than I would get answers. “Fail at what?”
“You have faith, Benito,” he said. “Its shield protects you.”
So far at Saint Samuels, it was clear that faith was something that was going to be beaten into us. “I don’t—faith in what? What am I supposed to believe in? I don’t even know what they want me to do? No one tells me anything and they just beat us and—”
“Faith … and escape is inside yourself,” the angel said. “That is how you are here now, and that is how you must leave this place. That is all I may offer.”
“There’s … there’s nothing—Father Dominic said there’s nothing out there.”
The angel screamed at me like a hawk or an eagle or something. Then he scowled. “Father Dominic is anything but,” he said. “And the entire eternity is out there, Benito, and you are but frail boy who must become a strong man. Earlier than intended, I regret. That heathenous hyena believes in neither Heaven nor his Hell, and he does not offer assistance, I assure you. Deity he now serves, wants you dead … for good measure. But she does not know the truth. Were it otherwise, he would have spiked y
our head above the iron gates to his ‘seminary’ by now.”
“But how do I…?” I said. There was no way I could escape. “Where can I hide? This place is like—they lock me in my cell every night.”
“I told you. You are here, are you not?” the angel said. Questions with questions. I knew someone like that.
“Yes…”
He chuckled.
“What’s so funny?”
“It is… I forget who you are,” he said. “Who you will become. Time is not a straight line of life, Benito. The Man-monkey way to track it is one in a sea of many.”
I silently hoped whatever Barbara shot into my neck would wear off soon, because talking to him was scaring me more than standing in formation.
As if he could read my mind, he said, “I do not offer fear, it is merely—you believe you are lying on a table, asleep while she-devil’s daughter mends you, when the reality… Depending on your mind’s truth, you may be beating the Hell from two lapdogs of liberty right this very instant.”
“What are you talking about?” I asked. I had never beaten anyone … in my entire life.
He laughed again and I made a face at him. “I … apologize,” he said, trying to stop. “It must be confusing for you.” And then he looked up and got fidgety and his head began to bob and then it stiffened, like a nervous duck about to take flight to escape off our river. “I informed him as much, yet I could not persuade plot’s parent to allow me to assist you. He was correct, however—she would surely smell assistance as certainty. I can offer … observation. The best place to hide strength from your enemies, Benito … is behind weakness. Hide inside yourself.”
And with that, he flapped his huge white wings and slowly flew up. The angel grew smaller and smaller until he was a tiny speck of light, high above me. Then he vanished—gone into the complete black of my understanding of what in Heaven’s name he was talking about.
— CLXXIX —
THE BLACK MARKET down by the waterfront used to be the place where the rich and unaccountable came to buy overpriced urban produce and watch mongers throw freshly netted fish. But Pike Place Market found itself in the putrid path of the State’s plan to pump the sins of Seattle’s bursting urban zone population through a twenty-foot diameter pipe under the street. The pipe terminated as a huge twisted opening—a colossal sin-spewing sphincter of sewage that was the Northwest Quarter’s collective anus.
Using gravity to flush the sewage that those millions created, State disposed of the pee and poop every morning—just like I did back at Saint Samuels—into the only treatment plant left large enough to deal with the volume, the Pacific Ocean.
And once that happened, no respectable citizen could stand the stench wafting up through the manhole covers along the market, let alone shop the sidewalk for greens, or buy fish that were caught while swimming through that very same filth.
As wet as the street was from the constant Seattle mist, the commerce dried up like a desert and the farmers stopped bringing in produce and the fisherman stopped throwing salmon for the smiling citizens, and then the only thing left to do was to shove a pike through the severed head of the entire putrid place and fence off the market … for good. What crept and crawled its way up through the smell and between the razor wire to replace it was completely illegal, mostly immoral, and could barely be called a market by any State standards.
The Black Market—“Bravo Mike,” the Protection agents who won’t enter it call it now—is nothing less than a wild west show of shops and the shady shysters that run them. The citizens have a saying, “All the shops at the Mike aren’t bad, but all the bad shops are at the Mike.”
Once the downtown food riots started, State allowed the Mike to exist to give the citizens a place to pacify themselves. State controlled the vice—citizens could get liquor and smokes at the Mike. Everyone knew that State supplied those to the shopkeeps. And once State confiscated almost all the firearms that could be used to fight back against them, the only thing left was for the Clergy to control the citizens with fear and faith.
The … fornicating? Well, I learned long before I left seminary that the Clergy had exclusive control of that.
You can get just about anything you aren’t supposed to have at the Mike … for a price. But you have to be a shrewd haggler, because there are no dummies there—all the dimwits are dead. The shopkeeps that survive know to put the bestsellers up front, hide the good stuff in the back, and keep the guns underground—the three “B’s”—beans, bullets and “bagina” a good friend of mine likes to call it. Not necessarily in that order.
I’m barely through the razor-wire gate before the third one… The harlots and hookers are at me pretty fast. “Hey there father, fancy a fuck, do ya?” They are hardly subtle, and this one lifts the rain-soaked and mud-stained front of her long black dress to show me what I’ll be missing.
Her habit is not just some nun fetish costume—I know where she earned it … and how. “Not today, Sister,” I say. I tip my head to her and show her my empty hands as I pass. “I am sure your wares are worth it, but I haven’t got the credits.” I don’t judge her—I know what she’s been through. And I’m beyond casting stones at this point in my faith.
“Aw,” she says, “some stray cat already caught your cock, has she?” And she knows my tribulations, too. “Don’t like me guts then, father? Right enough—I can share. But I bet I got somethin’ under here to mend them scars on your back. Six credits, it is. I know you got that … tucked down in your little purse.”
I won’t be forgetting my scars anytime soon, but she’s right about one thing, I do have my coin purse. It has more than six credits in it—what kind of shepherd would I be if I didn’t skim a little from the Clergy collections for my flock each week? But I can’t afford to have anyone know that.
Priest or not, there’s a dozen ways to die at the Mike and a pouch full of credits is high on the list. Anyway, what I’m after will take most of what I have. I only hope it’s enough. Molasses is expensive.
By the time I bump and jostle my way through the crowd to the other end of the street, I’ve fended off the adulterous advances of three hookers, hell-bent on showing me something none of them suspects that I’ve seen already, one angry beggar with a freshly broken finger, and an unlucky man who thought that a knife was the best way to take a priest’s purse. Heaven rest his soul.
I’m not apologizing for anything—everyone down here knows better. Breaking the rules at the Mike has consequences, and just like God’s Word, the wages of sin are death. Only difference is that the execution of penalties at the Mike are carried out quicker.
“Get outta the fucking way!” a voice yells.
I spin toward it and—Betty boot! Grab the heel, fall back with it! Twist it and roll backward, pop up and spin around! My Shandian mind runs through my reaction faster than the girl or I comprehend it. And she goes rolling through the drizzle-soaked dirt turned to mud.
But then she’s up like a furious and ferocious feline—quicker than I would have guessed—and she’s on her way like she’s on fire. In two seconds, it’s as if I never even threw her to the ground. That’s Martial Law training, and no mere citizen can afford—
“Stupid cocksucker!” She yells back at me. The little trash talker never breaks stride or glances over her shoulder. Her orange hair twists and swirls behind her like angry flames as she runs.
“Whoa,” I almost yell when her two fellow jackers bump into me from behind. They blaze past, running through the rain, splashing the mud with their freshly jacked boots. The boots are too clean to have walked here in them.
They don’t get twenty yards before an old woman… Though gauging age nowadays is difficult—State and Protection can blast the gorgeous out of a woman’s face much faster than the sands of time. This one’s in her forties, I’d estimate, but she’s looking an old-world sixty-seven.
She runs up next to me, winded from chasing them, and then she hunches over for a second. When she
stands up, a little King-killer .22 caliber pistol comes out from under her dress—an ancient weapon, rusted from the salt air, I imagine… Probably underground for years, I think. Even her voice is older than it should be when she yells at them, “Here it is then,” she says, but it’s not loud enough that the girls can hear her. And her pistol is up and she grips it with both hands—she knows how to use it. “Ya little criminal cunts,” she mutters, steadying herself and starting to squeeze.
I hear the metacarpals in her trigger finger tighten and crackle, and then the street goes into slow motion—she’s gonna hit at least one of them. Which one of them, I don’t know, but if it was me … I’d aim for the flaming red hair.
The drizzle stops, and the marketgoers on the crowded street freeze and the Mike-market turns into an iceberg. The woman’s lips are pursed and her right eye is squeezed shut—left-handed, I think—and in an instant there’ll be a quick “crack” and one of those girls will go down and then Protection will be in here with their big angry armored guzzler. I can’t afford the delay today.
My hand shoots at the woman like burning lightning compared to the cold frozen perception of the marketplace. I punch her elbow with my thumb and her trigger finger pops straight out with the rest of the fingers on her left hand, and then I snatch the little pistol, pressing the button to drop the clip as I do. I catch the clip in mid-air and shove it into the hidden pocket on the front of her dress. Then I ram the little pistol’s slide under my armpit and squeeze and push, and the steel slides and the bullet from the chamber falls out and onto the ground. Then the entire market speeds back up to a bee-buzzing hive of hustlers and heathens.
I move in close to her, put the pistol back in her dress where it started out—I’m no gun-grabbing State Protection agent, and down here I know she needs it to protect herself.
Before she can raise a ruckus, I quickly retrieve a ten-credit coin from my purse—careful not to reveal its origin—and place it in her still-frozen open palm. Then I twist on the pressure point on her elbow and her hand clamps shut around the coin. “This should cover the cost of the boots,” I say to her, looking into her surprisingly heavenly hazel eyes. “I apologize for the inconvenience, lovely lady.”
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