Sleeping Late on Judgement Day

thirty-one: ragtag

“WHY?” I asked, although I didn’t really expect Anaita to tell me. As usual, I was simply trying to find time for my brain to function. It takes a while to get into gear when you’ve just barely escaped death by jelly monster and then find out you’re about to be eaten instead by large cats made of broken glass. I mean, seriously, who else has shit like this happen to them? “Why?” I said again. “What have I ever done to you?”

She looked more human now as the glass and stone and bits of enamel tile began to blend together into something more like the woman I had met in her fortress home, but she was still so clearly far, far beyond me that I couldn’t even imagine a way to fight back. She’d just traveled a minimum of several miles in a few seconds by projecting herself into her own goddess-sculpture, complete with matching glass-shard lions. No wonder she’d been able to send Smyler all the way to Hell after me—Anaita must have been burning through reserves of energy like a collapsing sun. But how long could she keep that up without someone in Heaven noticing?

Long enough to take care of a small irritation like Bobby Dollar, apparently. She loomed above me, shining like a fever dream, and she was terrifying.

“Why?” Her voice somehow both thundered in my ears and dripped with sweetness. I could hear the childlike tones she favored in Heaven and her deep goddess voice at the same time, as if they spoke in perfectly measured harmony. “That is what your kind always wonders. I have my reasons, but they are not for such as you.” She looked very calm, a half smile tilting one side of her mouth, the Mona Lisa of divine vengeance. “Be assured, though, you have earned what is coming many times over.”

“And what’s coming to you?” Sam said, stepping forward. “What have you earned, Anaita? Or should I call you Kephas?”

Well, my buddy had finally accepted the truth, just when we were both going to be dissolved into random atoms. That was something, I guess.

“You need call me nothing. You are no longer useful.”

She sounded grave, not triumphant, as though she really would rather have solved the whole thing with a civilized discussion over tea and little sandwiches. I couldn’t help wondering, after so many thousands of years of identities taken up and discarded—goddess and angel and the Highest alone knew what else—whether a true Anaita even existed anymore. What happened when an immortal forgot what she’d been? Was that madness?

She raised her hand and the glass cats snarled, a sound like someone cutting stone with an angle grinder. “You are a traitor, Sammariel, and you will be dealt with just as summarily as Doloriel.”

“Traitor? What about the Third Way? What about building Kainos so humankind had a hope of something better after death than more slavery?”

For a moment the cool mask slipped a little, just the tiniest bit, to show the furnaces behind it: Anaita didn’t like being called on her own hypocrisy. Her eyes narrowed to jeweled slits. “You know nothing, angel. You understand nothing. You have no right to question me.” Sam fell to the ground, holding his head and groaning as though a terrible noise was screeching in his ears. Then she turned toward me.

“Now, Doloriel.” I braced myself, ready to leap toward her, determined to at least bite her a couple of times before I got euthanized like a mangy old stray. I shouldn’t have bothered. She lifted a hand, and I couldn’t move—could not fucking move an inch, as if I had suddenly been embedded in the clearest, cleanest glass you can imagine. Thank God I’d just taken a deep breath, because I couldn’t take another. Only my heart and brain seemed to retain their functions.

“Let him go!” Oxana shouted. “You fat Persian fuck bitch!”

“Really?” said Anaita, looking at me. “This is your army? A pair of mortal Scythian whores and Sammariel the traitor? You truly have scraped the bottom of the barrel to assemble this ragtag, Doloriel.”

Halyna shouted. No, I don’t know what it meant, either. “Not afraid of you! We will—!” She didn’t finish. Anaita waved a hand without even looking, as if dismissing a bad joke, and both Amazons were flung backward, skidding through the rubble to lay tumbled and silent against the far wall.

I could only stare as Anaita glided toward me, bleeding light in all directions, hand held out as if to bestow a blessing. She was beautiful, inhuman, and so far out of my league that I had been an idiot ever thinking I might have a chance. Instead, the Blue Fairy was simply going to take back Pinocchio’s misspent, marionette life.

Caz, I’m sorry, was all I had time to think.

Her hand touched my forehead, and I burned—a cascade of electrical fire from my skull down through my spine, all the way to the ground like a bolt of lightning. My muscles all pulled wire-tight in an instant; I could feel them trying to tear loose from the tendons. It was as bad as anything that ever happened to me in Eligor’s torture factory. I wriggled helplessly, like a live fish tossed onto on hot coals.

But I didn’t die.

Anaita’s hand was freezing cold and scalding hot at the same time—but not in a physical way. It was as if she’d reached directly into my soul and meant to yank it out by the roots. The pain was incredible, but as it blazed something came to me, a semi-coherent thought that made its way up past the clamor of my shrieking nerves, my panicked, dying thoughts.

Why is it taking so long? In some weird way I could sense that pain wasn’t the point of what was going on at all, merely a byproduct. Because Anaita wasn’t killing me. She was changing me.

And this, for no reason I can explain, felt a thousand times more frightening than simple suffering, or even death. I didn’t want to be made into some mindless, happy angel, just another placeholder in the divine plan—anybody’s plan, let alone Anaita’s. But I could feel it happening, feel things inside me shifting and becoming almost liquid, my thoughts finding new paths like dammed rivers forcing their way into fresh channels.

I wanted it to stop. I wanted that more than I’d ever wanted anything, except maybe to have Caz back again. I wanted it to stop. So I tried to stop it.

I’m telling this now because I’m still trying to make sense of it, but in the moment there was no sense—there was no time. What was happening had always been happening. I was lost in a swirling river of color and light and flashes of understanding, all as disconnected as leaves caught up by a powerful current, sloshed together then pulled apart again with no sense or meaning. I could feel Anaita’s hand where it burned coldly against my skin, but I could feel more of her than that, as though somehow she was also inside me, rearranging the things that made me what I am—Doloriel, Bobby, the me that rides inside and thinks these thoughts and gets the rest of me into trouble time and time again. And as I tried to fight back against Anaita’s terrible, intrusive tampering, I experienced other things too, things that were part of me but not part of me. Visions more real than any of my other memories. Sacred pictures. Nightmares and echoes.

Dust swirling, and sky and sun lancing down through it.

Fallen rubble. More dust. Something heavy, pressing me down, trying to stop my heart.

A woman’s face, not Anaita’s, far more human, smeared in dust and dirt-caked blood, eyes half-closed.

And, distantly, the cry of a child, the hopeless, hitching wail of a child who cannot be comforted.

There’s no way to explain this without making it even more confusing, but I felt as though I’d been in a dark room for years, then for just a second someone had finally opened the curtains to let in the fierce, startling, all-revealing light of day. I knew I was feeling truth. It was something greater than power, greater than the glory of Heaven itself, and I wanted more of it. It wasn’t just bits of unremembered memory, I knew. It was Truth.

But Anaita sensed my resistance and pushed back, and that access to bright reality, a reality I’d never felt before and would always hunger for afterward, suddenly vanished.

With it went hope. For a bare moment I’d thought I had the strength to defy her, to beat back the things she was doing to me, but I had been wrong again. Her anger was as ancient and cold as pack ice, and she handled my soul like it was an ugly, broken toy. My very essence was being squeezed into oblivion. Nothing subtle now, no rearranging, no changing, just the pressure of oblivion, growing greater and greater as she crushed what I was, compacting what felt like the very molecules of my being until darkness began to bleed through everything, light and sound and thought dying. I was gasping for air and getting none, thoughts roaring with blood-red light, then fading into a black as silent as zero.

I could not speak, but I knew enough to call her what she was.

Liar! I thought. I know you now!

But I didn’t. I had already forgotten. All the bright truth that for an instant had seemed so clear had been sucked away into the vacuum of nothingness.

Nothing.

Then light and noise rushed back in on me, as though I had popped up from beneath an ocean of tar, back into the world. Alive!

Anaita lifted her hand. Her face, beautiful and terrible with living light, was twisted into a grimace of something stronger than surprise: sudden rage made her eyes blaze almost red.

Something had changed. Something black was now throbbing in the middle of Anaita’s chest, the swing of a metronome, a needle on Eternity’s dial, vibrating, slowing.

An arrow.

I turned my head, which seemed to take years. Halyna stood some twenty feet away, covered in the powdered remains of a fortune’s worth of antique statuary, tactical crossbow in hand. Everything was moving so slowly! Oxana limped up beside her lugging one of the AR-16s—those brave women, so brave!—and the flames from the gun’s muzzle unfolded like flowers, bloom . . . bloom . . . bloom . . . I saw the bullets stitch their way along the wall as Anaita actually staggered back, again with aching, unhurried gravity, like a building toppling. One step—her other hand came up—then another, and then she bumped against the wall beside the bare panel where her mosaic had been. The moment seemed to hang. The Angel of Moisture extended her arms toward the Amazons, as slowly as paint dripping in the sun, and I couldn’t do a thing.

Ten thousand shards of glass leaped away from her, flying across the intervening distance like a horizontal ice storm. They ripped into Halyna, the closer of the two. Oxana dove to the side, but I saw glass tear into her as well, freeing tiny rills of blood that lifted and spread like more flowers blossoming. It seemed to take half a minute before Oxana hit the floor.

Then suddenly everything was moving fast again. The glittering lions snarled and fell back beside their mistress, troubled for only a split-instant in the real world. Released from the power of Anaita’s hand, I had stumbled and almost fallen, but I caught at the wall and kept myself upright. For an instant I was confused, because I had been in that spot along the wall, that same spot, only moments earlier, as if time had looped around. But why did that seem so important? Why couldn’t I remember?

Anaita yanked the arrow from her chest, dislodging bits of glass and stone, and threw it away. Sam still lay sprawled on the floor, and both Amazons were down. In an instant Anaita would send the lions to finish them off, then turn back to me. I had resisted to my utmost, but it hadn’t been enough. And now she was angry.

The thing I needed to remember came to me then. I took a staggering step along the wall, reached up to where I thought, hoped, prayed it would be, and opened the Zipper I had closed only minutes earlier.

As I dove to the floor, angry bugbears spilled out of their prison, exploding back into the real world in great stretching globs of purple black, as if a dam had broken and released a river of animate goo. They flowed down onto the floor and over the nearest stone and glass lion in a second. They flowed over Anaita as well, and for a moment I hoped she too might vanish for good under a heaving blob, but instead I saw light and heat lance out through the pulsating waves of jelly. If there had only been one or two of the creatures it would have been over right then, but all the bugbears were out of the Zipper by now, furious at their imprisonment, and they followed the others in what looked like a feeding frenzy. The translucent glob that had swallowed the Angel of Moisture stretched and bellied out, and I could smell the hideous stench of burning bugbear, but they were old, strong things and they weren’t so easily beaten, even by someone as powerful as Anaita.

But she would win, that I was sure. We had seconds at the most.

I scrambled across the floor to Sam, dragged him to his feet, then staggered toward the Amazons. Oxana was on her hands and knees trying to get Halyna up, but one look told me that it was too late. Halyna was pin-cushioned with pointy shards of glass, many in her chest and throat, and had lost so much blood that it spread for several feet around her.

“It’s no use,” I said, dragging at Oxana, but she fought me.

“Halya!” she screamed, a heart-piercing sound.

We had no time. I put my fingers to Halyna’s throat where the pulse should have been, but it was only for Oxana’s benefit. “She’s gone. I’m sorry, but we have to get out of here.” I grabbed Oxana again, held her tight. “Come on!”

She wasn’t crying, but her face was lost, just lost. “No. Not go. Only with her!”

It was pointless—I could tell Halyna was already dead—but I knew it would be impossible to get Oxana moving without bringing her friend’s body. The burning smell was getting stronger. I scooped and levered up Halyna’s limp weight, then slung it over my shoulder.

“Where?” Sam asked. He looked as bad as the women, bloodied and ghostlike with dust.

“The door down in the office. The door to the Third Way.”

He shook his head. “She can follow us!”

“She can follow us anywhere else just as fast, but that door will get us out of here quicker. Come on!”

Stumbling through the shambles of smashed exhibits, skidding on broken glass, we waded past the seething, burning, bruise-colored swamp that was Anaita swarmed by bugbears. Something as bright as the flame of a welder’s torch was burning inside the mass, and I could tell things were going to get ugly in this particular vicinity real soon.

Halyna’s limp weight almost tipped me over going down the stairs, but I made it somehow. Sam was standing in front of the marble rectangle, the God Glove on his hand. He said, as if to nobody, “You realize if she’s locked it somehow, we’re fucked.”

There was nothing to say to that. We were already fucked so many ways they could have dedicated an entire revision of the Kama Sutra just to us.

As Sam gestured, the line down the middle of the marble rectangle glowed, but only for a moment, a seam of pure white radiance. Then it was gone, as was the wall and everything else, replaced by what I can only describe as a froth of bubbling light. Sam shoved Oxana through, then followed her. I took a deep breath, clutched Halyna’s body close to my chest, and leaped after them.

• • •

Grass. That was the first thing I noticed as I fell forward, grass beneath my feet, then I tumbled, and it was against my chest, my head, all of me, even up my nose in spiky, tickling profusion. When I stopped rolling, I dragged myself to my knees. I seemed to have lost Halyna’s body on the way through, but in the first moments that absence barely registered because of what was all around me.

One of the strange things about being me is the way “beautiful” and “horrible” keep squishing into each other. Only seconds beyond what had seemed like certain destruction, we had landed in paradise.

We were in a forest glade, but what was around us was as far beyond the usual state park picnic area as Heaven was beyond Hoboken. The vegetation was so vividly green it seemed to have been freshly painted. There was never a sky so blue, so triumphantly skylike, and even the gray mountains I glimpsed through the trees seemed to have been constructed specifically to give people a reason to use the word “majestic.” Some extremely eccentric gardener might have watered everything with pure psilocybin, just to grow these beautiful, heartbreakingly realistic hallucinations. But they weren’t hallucinations. This was real.

I would have happily stood there for hours, drinking it all in. But I had just realized there were only two of us in this magic place. Only Sam and me.

“This way,” my buddy said. “Hurry. We’ve got to get rest of the Third Way people moving, get them hidden. Who knows what she’s going to do now we got her really mad?”

Even in the middle of all this perfection, I was suddenly empty and hopeless. “They’re gone. The Amazons, Sam. They didn’t come through.”

He stared at me, then slowly turned and looked all around. “Shit. They’re not angels. Of course, they couldn’t pass through to Kainos.”

“But other souls came here, all your volunteers . . .”

“Souls. Not bodies.”

“But Halyna . . . she was dead, Sam.”

“Then her soul’s somewhere else. Being judged.” He started through the trees. “It’s shitty luck, but now we have to save the ones we can, the rest of the souls here.”

“No, Sam. I can’t just leave them.”

He spun and came back to me. “One of them is dead, Bobby. You just said so.” He wasn’t angry, just confused and hurting.

“That doesn’t matter. You don’t leave a soldier behind if you can help it. You know that. Can you open that passage again?”

Now he was angry. “You want to go back to that museum? To Anaita?”

“Just open the doorway or whatever it is. Oxana and Halyna have to be somewhere. Maybe I won’t have to go all the way back. Maybe they’re . . . in-between, somehow. I don’t even know what that means, but I have to find them.”

He only thought about it for a second. “I can’t come with you, Bobby. I owe it to the Kainos people to stay and help them.”

“I know. Just do it.”

“I can’t just open it, or it’ll dump you right back into the museum, so I’ll try to open the far end somewhere else. But I’ve gotta warn you, I’ve never tried anything like that. And after everything today, I don’t know if I’ve got the strength.” He lifted his hand, closed his eyes. A moment later a shaky vertical shimmer of light appeared beside me. “I don’t know how long I can hold it, or exactly where it’s going to take you. I’m hoping it doesn’t just drop you into—”

“Don’t say it. I’ll find out in a minute, anyway.” I took a quick last sniff at the clean air of this brave new unfamiliar world. Why do I only get these fleeting glimpses of happiness, these moments, then they’re ripped away again? “Hang in, Sam. We’re not beaten yet.” But my buddy looked pretty damned beaten, and I had no doubt I did too. “Remember our motto—confusion to our enemies!”

Then I left paradise behind and climbed back into the light.