Sleeping Late on Judgement Day

forty-two: wrath

IT WAS a place I’d barely even seen, a place whose connection to my own life was mostly negative, and yet as we made our way across the devastated landscape of Kainos, I was on the verge of tears.

Oddly enough, part of my reaction came because the destruction was limited: I could still see the unsullied mountains and the pristine sky. Looking at those I had the same sense of wonder, of connection to something deeper and more real than reality itself, something that had struck me so hard on my first, brief visit just a couple of days earlier. It made the destruction seem even more pointless.

But what upset me the most was that it wasn’t simply devastation, all the scorched trees and gouged earth, but fury. The destruction was vengeful, and it was personal. This was no act of nature, despite the rifts in the land twenty feet wide and unguessably deep, or the burned trunks of huge trees scattered in all directions as if by a hurricane. This was the work of a very, very angry, very powerful being. An enraged goddess, I felt sure—an avenging angel who had thrown off the restraints of Heaven.

Almost swimming in deep black and gray ash, we finally crested the nearest hill and could look down on a valley at the outer edge of the devastation. It was sickening to see the wreckage of the forest on this large a scale, but that wasn’t what first caught my eye. On the far side of the field of char that had once been a rolling meadow, bisected by a river that was now only a blasted, empty ditch, stood the house I had seen twice from afar, once in person with Sam and once through the door in the fun house the first time Sam had opened it in my presence. It sat like an unwieldy spacecraft on the top of a hill that could have been the scorched, blast-cracked launch pad of some abandoned ruin of the Soviet space program. But the house itself was completely untouched.

Clarence and I stood staring, surprised into silence. It seemed like a mirage that might shimmer and disappear if we made any noise.

As I stood there, staring at something that shouldn’t exist—or at least not looking like it did, like a nice house in the hills in a real estate add—I realized for the first time that something else odd was going on: Clarence looked just like Clarence.

Now, normally when you’re standing next a person who looks like that person, it’s no big deal. But when you get to Heaven, you always look like an angel. And, as I discovered, when you wind up in Hell, you look like something that belongs in Hell. So why was Clarence standing beside me wearing his button-collar shirt, and his windbreaker that looked like he ironed it, and his suede shoes that always looked like they belonged on the feet of a rich old European man? (I accused him once of wearing Hush Puppies, and he was really insulted. “These are Ferragamos!” he said, I guess the same way I might say, “It’s got a 426 Hemi engine!”)

I looked down at myself and saw I was also wearing basically the same thing I’d worn during the trip through Shoreline Park, except now with a layer of ash and dust—my jacket, a black t-shirt, a pair of dark jeans, and the work boots I like because a) they’re black, b) they’re not half bad to look at, and c) you can kick the shit out of someone with them if you have to. I tell you not to compare my wardrobe to the kid’s, but because finding myself wearing exactly the same clothes in an entirely different reality was hard to figure. Remembering my gun, I checked my pocket, but it wasn’t there. So, same clothes but no other objects.

“Are you wearing a belt?” I asked the kid.

“Yes.”

“And you were wearing it before we got here?”

He gave me a puzzled look. “Yeah. Why?”

“We’ll talk about it later. Meanwhile, we have to figure out what to do. And I have. We’re going to go check out the house.”

Now his expression changed from puzzlement to Seriously Contemplating Mutiny. “No way. You’re joking, right? Because if that’s the only place around here that doesn’t look like a bomb dropped on it, then the person who did this is probably inside.”

“I don’t think so.”

“Oh, then let’s go, sure. ‘I don’t think so’ is all the assurance I need to risk whatever we’re risking here. What are we risking here, by the way? Just our bodies, or our souls, too?”

I laughed, but it wasn’t because I found anything very funny just now. “Let’s put it this way—if there were such a thing as soul insurance, I’d be calling my agent.”

Clarence looked pale—no, he looked pale green. There’s a difference. “And we’re going there, why?”

“Because it’s there. Because it didn’t get blown to shit and matchsticks. And because we’re trying to find Sam, and it’s the most obvious place he’d leave a message, or at least a clue where he is.”

“But it’s so . . . exposed.”

“And so are we, standing in the middle of all this nothing. Let’s get to getting.”

It would have been an odd house even if it stood in the middle of nice neighborhood instead of the remains of downtown Hiroshima. It was too tall, for one thing, four or five vertical stories in a box only about half as wide as it should have been. From this angle the tower at the top was much more visible, and looked less like a cupola and more like a steeple.

It set me to thinking, but I kept my thoughts to myself because Clarence was like a spooking horse, all nerves and eye-whites. Of course, that was really the only sane reaction to trying to sneak up on an angel, a genuine Warrior Queen of Heaven, with nothing but our bare hands. Hell, my own mouth was so dry that if Anaita had appeared in front of me, I couldn’t even have spit at her.

Up close, the ring of devastation looked slightly less complete. I could make out the remains of a couple of paths and the ruins of more than a few outbuildings, although “ruins” was a stretch, because what we really saw were only the scorched outlines and ordered ash where buildings had once been, before the firestorm. A ghost of a grassy verge still fringed the place, like the hair of a dying monk, but the grass had turned gray, and when I reached down to pick some it crumbled to dust in my hands.

“Shit,” said Clarence in a whisper. “She just burned and burned and burned.”

I almost warned him to keep quiet, but of course if Anaita was in there and listening, she’d probably heard us long before that. It made me wonder again how much power she had used here and how she managed it. That’s one difference between the higher angels and the schmuck angels like me and Clarence: We were limited by the physical fact of our bodies, the bodies that Heaven gave us. (People are limited that way, too—it’s called “being mortal.”) But the important angels, as well as bigtime demons like Eligor, could channel a much larger amount of power than I could ever hope to. It still wasn’t unlimited, though, and that reminded me of the line from Gustibus that I’d modified: Follow the power. Not like now, where we were walking across its effects, but in terms of figuring out how the whole mess worked. Clearly, Anaita was very strong here; as powerful as she’d been on Earth, probably more so. When we’d met on Earth, she hadn’t been able to do anything like this, or she would have just grabbed me for my brainwashing, then evaporated everyone who followed me into the museum. Not to mention that she wouldn’t have been anywhere near as occupied by the closet full of bugbears I’d dumped on her. But here, maybe second only to Heaven, she could call on the energies of something like a force five hurricane.

That was bad news for us, of course, although it made me feel better about not having a gun. (Because it would have been as useless as a cock ring for a Ken doll, I mean.)

But if the battle plan I had begun percolating, back on Earth, was to have any chance of succeeding, we definitely could not afford to get into a shooting war with the Angel of Moisture—a pretty good joke, now that I thought about it, since I was wading through gray dust and black ash as dry as corn starch. We had to outsmart this superior being. Somehow.

Clarence hung back a little as we got near the house, but I had already decided that if Anaita was around she’d know we were here, so I decided on the direct course. I walked up the steps, leaving little ashy outlines of my shoes on the otherwise unblemished wood. The house wasn’t painted, but it didn’t look like it ever had been, and the ruination all around didn’t seem to have touched it: the wood was the color of Philippine mahogany, healthy and solid, with no sign of damage. It gave me a mental picture straight out of The Wizard of Oz, with Anaita as Wicked Witch, standing on the roof and spraying death all around.

“Bobby . . .” Clarence said nervously, but I ignored him. I mean, I know people say I charge into things without thinking, but what difference was that going to make here? Should I have stood on the porch in the middle of that lunar landscape and called, “Yoo-hoo! Anyone home?”

I pushed the door open and found myself in the middle of what was clearly the main room, a large, high-ceilinged hall with several doors leading off it, like something that had once been a barn but had been converted into a family room for a very large family. The furniture was beyond rustic, rough and tied together with cords, not nailed, no paint or stain on anything. One wall was mostly taken up by a huge medieval fireplace. At the opposite end of the room stood a closed cabinet, simple but unlike the handmade objects everywhere else. In fact, it looked a bit like something that, in the old days, used to hide a television set, although I doubted they got cable here, or even satellite. There were also lots of tables and rough benches, but no sign of any people. To continue the children’s stories theme, it looked like the Three Bears’ had built a casino in the middle of the forest, and then gone out for one of their long walks before opening it.

“I don’t think anyone’s here,” I called back to Clarence. My voice echoed. A furious, fiery angel made of broken shards of glass and pottery did not appear. I walked over to the big, square cabinet and pulled open its hinged doors. Light leaped out, startling me, but it was not the bright beams of a psychotic angel about to burn me to charcoal but the cool, misty light of Heaven, or at least as much of it as we ever saw outside of the real place, Upstairs.

What was inside the out-of-place cabinet was a cube of solid, shifting light—something I’d seen before. We had one in the advocate’s office downtown, where it was kept under lock, key, and the grumpy, watchful eyes of Alice the dispatcher. The cube looked like it was made from a single piece of crystal, but it was a lot more powerful than even the wildest New Age imagination could grasp. It was used to communicate directly with Heaven. Sam called that, “Going to Mecca.” I’ve never been the reverent type myself, so I only used the one downtown when I absolutely had to.

The problem with this particular cube was that it was almost certainly linked not to Heaven but to Anaita, and only to Anaita. I immediately shut the cabinet doors and moved away from it.

Continuing the investigation, I poked my head briefly into a large side room that appeared to be a kitchen, except the only appliance was a huge, beehive clay oven built into one wall. The ash in front of it was undisturbed. Whatever had destroyed the outside hadn’t even shaken the floor in here. I headed upstairs to the next level. The stairs, like the walls and roof, were very, very solid. I was beginning to think the house had been brought here—or created here—as a whole, and then the cruder furniture had been added by Sam’s Third Way souls as part of their new life.

But where were all those Soul Family Robinsons? And where was Sam? A nasty thought kept whispering that if I went outside and looked carefully, I might find ash outlines of more than just buildings—maybe even of something Sam-shaped—but I kept pushing that thought away.

The upstairs floors seemed to be mostly bedrooms, although that word is stretching it a bit. They were a lot more like the barracks at Camp Zion, with wall-to-wall bunk beds made in the same Tom Sawyer Island style as the rest of the furniture. These, at least, gave some sign of being slept in, the thin wool (and, again, very handmade) blankets tossed in disarray. It had clearly been something less expected than a military reveille that had got this group moving.

I was inspecting the dorms on the next floor up, trying to get a rough idea of how many people had lived here, when I heard Clarence call me from down below. He sounded a bit uptight, but why shouldn’t he be? “Be there in a second.”

“No, I think you should come. Now.”

Oh, shit, was my first thought. He’s found a body. I reached into my pocket out of habit, but there was no gun to be drawn. Usually I hate carrying them, because then I keep having to use them, but I hate it even more when I need one, and I don’t have one. My gun control dilemma in a nutshell.

“Bobby!”

“Coming, Junior.” I clomped down the stairs, making lots of noise so he’d hear me and unclench. “Just take a deep breath and hold your . . .”

I didn’t finish the sentence, because as soon as I saw Clarence standing in the middle of the dining hall I also saw the guy who was aiming a drawn bow at him, a very wicked-looking arrow balanced on the string, pointing right at the kid’s guts.

“Well,” I said in my calmest voice. “What have we here?”

The man with the bow turned to look at me. He was whipcord thin, with a narrow face, somewhere between twenty and thirty years old, and smeared with ash. He also had a healing scar on his forehead that went through one eyebrow like the San Andreas fault, giving him an expression of mild surprise, but his eyes were cold and hard, and his mouth was set in a thin line that said, “Don’t push me, because I’d love to put an arrow into this guy’s chitlins.” The weird thing, though, is that he looked somehow familiar.

“Who are you?” he demanded. It’s always a bit hinky when you change astral planes, since everything sounds like what you’re used to speaking, but I was pretty sure he was speaking actual modern English, despite being dressed like one of those guys in Last of the Mohicans, pseudo-Native-American gear of leather and fur and ragged cloth. (Okay, I didn’t actually read it, but I watched the hell out of that movie.)

“We’re not the ones who burned this place up, if that’s what you’re asking.”

The line of his mouth stayed as taut as his bowstring. “It’s not. I saw what happened here. Who are you?”

I wasn’t quite sure if somebody who’d watched Anaita trash the area was going to be thrilled with more angels, and I didn’t know what the rules here were as far as me and the kid dying painfully with arrows sticking through us. Would we come back? Not that I could afford to trust resurrection these days anyway. “Bobby. My name is Bobby. And this is—”

“Harrison,” said Clarence, and despite being on the verge of kebab-hood, the kid shot me an evil look. “My name is Harrison Ely. We’re not your enemies.”

“Be interested to know why you think that’s true,” said the man. There was still something about his face that struck a chord, at least what I could see of it under the ashy pseudo-camouflage. “But I think I’d better leave the questions up to the rest.” He moved the drawn bow off Clarence long enough to gesture toward the door. If I’d been close enough I might have tackled him then, but I wasn’t. So I didn’t. “Go on,” he said. “You first. And make it quick—I’m not staying here any longer than I need to.”

• • •

I won’t bore you with a description of our entire journey, except to say that as we left the house and its charred perimeter behind, the scenery became increasingly impressive. No, that’s a stupid, weaselly word. It wasn’t impressive, it was stunning. Gorgeous. Transcendent, even; as affecting as the first time I’d seen it. As we made our way out of the grassy foothills and up into the lower reaches of the mountains, I again had the strangest sensation of being under the influence of psychedelics. I don’t know if you’ve ever taken them, but the “is”-ness of everything becomes almost heartbreaking. Water is so unbearably transparent and yet full of color, and moves so strangely. Light is more refracted. Textures are astounding, and details you would otherwise overlook, like the pattern of bark on a tree, become as intricately fascinating as the most engrossing piece of art. And everything, simply everything, seems almost to glow from within, as if it has been constructed just for you to see at that moment and admire in its peak of perfection.

Kainos, once we got away from the site of Anaita’s apparent hissy fit, was a lot like that. Not because we were on drugs, and not because it was somehow supernatural, but because it was sort of ultimately natural, like a landscape created to remind people that we were part of nature and nature was part of us. Each tree seemed to bask in a certainty of its place in the universe. The soil was pungent with the smells that soil can give you, and they were all, even the slightly foul ones, just glorious. Even the rocks seemed to have a presence, like fascinating people. But I think it was the sky that really did me in. It was just a sky—blue, high, and full of streaky clouds—but for nearly the first time in my life it felt like something that was truly the crown of creation, the milky sapphire that surrounded us, and in which we were all fortunate to live.

“It’s a beautiful place,” I said at last, because I felt like if I didn’t say something the feelings would make my chest explode.

“It is,” the stranger replied, and for a moment the watchful look on his face eased. “When I first came here, I’d just walk. Walk and walk for hours. Lie on my back and watch the clouds. Like being a kid again.”

And then I recognized him. It was something in the light as he looked up that brought back a photograph I’d seen in his house, one that had been taken when he was about the age he appeared to be now, hiking up a mountain somewhere, looking young, healthy, and full of purpose. Completely unlike what he’d looked like when I’d first seen him in the flesh, in fact. He had been pink then, very pink, and very, very dead.

“Edward Walker,” I said. “You’re Edward Lynes Walker.”

He turned so quickly I didn’t even have a chance to step back. The arrow on the tight-drawn string was only about three inches from my left eye. “How do you know me?”

I considered telling him how his death and the disappearance of his soul had started me on a journey through a world of craziness, had nearly got me killed or worse a couple of dozen times, and eventually led me even into Hell itself, but I decided it could wait until I had a better idea of how things stood here. “I knew you when you were alive,” I said, which wasn’t exactly true, but I had spent a lot of time studying the living Ed Walker, so it wasn’t a complete lie, either.

He wasn’t content with that, but I drew the line and politely refused to say more until we got to wherever we were going. He threatened me a little, but I could see his heart wasn’t really in it. He might have shot me if I’d tried to disarm him, or maybe even if I’d tried to run, but he was at heart a scientist and a humanist and couldn’t quite work up the anger to skewer me in cold blood. At last, and none too graciously, he told me to get going again.

The journey lasted through the dying afternoon, and I had the pleasure of watching the sun setting in a world I’d never visited before. Except I felt pretty sure I had.

“This is Earth, isn’t it?” I said.

“Bobby!” Clarence thought I was going to try to trick Walker, and he clearly didn’t feel as confident about the man’s unwillingness to murder as I did.

“Yeah, it is,” Walker said. “Seems to be, anyway. An Earth without people. No farms, no cities, no dykes or canals or roads. Not even Native Americans stringing salmon nets across the river.”

“Huh,” I said. “Place looks a lot happier without us, doesn’t it?”

“I guess so,” Walker said. “Now, a little less chatter or someone’s going to hear an unfamiliar voice and put some arrows in you, and maybe hit me by accident. I hate those kind of accidents.”

I took the hint.

We hiked up what looked like a deer track, out of the scrubby oak forest and into something altogether more northern and more hoodoo. The air turned tangy with the smell of resin, and soon we were surrounded by redwoods and pines tall enough to block the light. I thought we must be getting close, since the cover was deep enough for hiding pretty much anything you wanted to hide, but I was still startled when a high-pitched voice out of the trees said, “Stop or you’re dead.”

“It’s me, Sharif,” Ed Walker called. “We’ve got company. Run ahead and tell them.”

“Will do!” said the voice, which sounded like it belonged to a young boy.

A few moments later we reached a level promontory. Men dressed in the same caveman-chic as Ed Walker appeared from the shadows, quickly surrounding us. They all had homemade weapons, cudgels, spears, and more bows, so I kept my hands visible and tried to look harmless. Clarence was doing it too, like a new kid on his first day of school.

“Give them some room,” a familiar voice called from back in the woods. Our captor walked us forward, through a good-sized crowd who had come to stare at us, until I could see a group of men and women around a small fire whose glow was almost completely blocked by the stones piled around it. Sitting in the middle, still wearing the tattered remains of the suit he’d had on the last time I’d seen him, but also wrapped in skins and rags as well, sat Sam. “That you, B?” he called. “Hey, and the kid, too! I was beginning to wonder if you were coming. Took you guys long enough.”

“I just got your message,” I said. “In fact, you were over in my neck of the woods, what, yesterday? So it hasn’t been very long. You okay, man?”

“Yesterday on Earth. It’s been a good bit longer here.” Sam laughed—not the cheerful kind. “So, what do you think of the place? I hope you like it, old buddy, because I don’t think any of us are going to be leaving.”