Ed Walker stayed close to us but didn’t actively participate. Still, he was a constant presence even when he was a dozen yards away, and it was clear that Walker had clout no one else did. Several times I saw Mayor Weng look over at him as if to make sure he agreed.
“Our people here are all hard workers,” Weng told Sam and me. “All achievers, and they’ve got young, healthy bodies, but we’re a little short on engineers and military folk.”
“I’m hoping we don’t need those things,” I said. “Other than the special volunteers, we’re not planning anything that requires real expertise, just labor. In fact, after we get set up there, I want all your people who aren’t actually involved to move as far away as possible.”
“You won’t have much trouble convincing them,” she said. “We’re all pretty shocked by what happened to the others. None of us wants to die again so soon.”
At last, all our mental lists cross-checked, Weng and Farber went off to do their own organizing and, I suspect, deliver a few pep talks. I finally had a chance to talk to Sam without an audience.
“What about the God Glove?” I said. “I asked last night, but you obviously didn’t want to talk in front of Clarence.”
“No, I just didn’t want to get into an argument in front Ed Walker and all those the other people. Kinda sucks for human morale, to watch angels call each other names. Because I can’t use it, B.”
“It’s the only real power we’ve got.”
“I thought I already told you about this. We all had them, all of us Magian angels. And when she did her Wicked Witch number, Phidorathon tried to use his glove against her. He burned up. Ed Walker was there—he saw the whole thing, but he didn’t know what was really going on. He thought it was something Anaita did to Fred, but I know better. That’s what happens when you try to use something like the God Glove against the Power that gave it to you.”
I tried to hide my disappointment, but he could see what I was feeling. We’ve known each other too long not to know things like that. “Can it at least let me make one private call on the Mecca cube?” I asked. “Without Anaita finding out?”
“Don’t know. Maybe. But she’s probably going to know about it.”
“Well, my idea would work anyway—not that it’s going to work, but in a hypothetical sense it could all still work even if she intercepts the call. She’ll still show up. But she’ll be a lot harder to beat.”
“I’ll do my best, B.” Sam punched my shoulder. It sort of hurt. “I say we think of it as an interesting challenge, a bunch of stone-age savages trying to take down a goddess.”
“They’re not stone age.”
“But their technology is. Our technology, too, because that’s all you and I have to work with. Let’s face it, this is going to be one of those Butch and Sundance things.”
“Yeah,” I said. I hope I didn’t sound as miserable as I felt. “I just hope the rest of these folks survive so someone will remember the cool things we said as we were blowing up.”
“Yeah. Me too. I was planning on, ‘Oh, shit!’ How about you?”
“Well, now I’m going to have to think of a new one, since you’re using mine.”
• • •
It was a long walk through the hills back to the house, and although everybody was reasonably young and fit, more than a few had sustained injuries in their initial escape from Anaita’s deadly tantrum, so the line got a bit strung out. If it hadn’t been for the cold air and snow flurries, and if I’d been wearing something warmer than a light jacket and t-shirt, it might have been a pleasant winter’s walk in the California hills. Except, of course, this wasn’t the same California, and back in the real one, autumn wasn’t even technically over yet. There was definitely a time slippage between here and Earth, and it made me wonder about some of the other differences.
“Not that much, really,” said Sam when I asked him. “When we first got here, nobody died, of course. That’s one of the reasons this group is so worried and fucked-up now. They thought of this as the afterlife, and afterlife usually means immortality.”
“What do you mean, nobody died. Should anybody have?”
“One of the men, African guy named Chima, had a tree fall on him when we were timber-cutting for the new houses. See, after the first few weeks it was pretty clear we were going to need more housing, so we made hand axes and started cutting down trees to make log cabins. None of the people here have really done this stuff, and some idiot planned his fall wrong. Chima couldn’t get out from under it. He should have died on the spot—that was a couple of thousand pounds of hardwood—but not only didn’t he die, his bones knit back together in about a week, and he was up and around again not too long after that. He didn’t even limp. I’d introduce you to him, but he was one of the people near the house when Anaita showed up.”
“Shit. So he actually died three times.”
“Maybe. That would probably be the world record for humans, but since he hasn’t come back this time, I don’t know how proud he’s feeling about it.”
“Anything else different here that we can use? People with odd abilities?”
“No. The mortals we brought here, the pilgrims as they call themselves, are just tougher than at home, but not stronger. Harder to kill—or they used to be.”
“Damn, man, stop cheering me up so much.”
• • •
The Kainos pilgrims started getting spooked even before we reached the great field of bare, devastated ground. I can’t really say I blamed them, since I was feeling that way myself. I suppose I should have been thinking about my life, reviewing my failings and my (very occasional) successes, thinking about my friends and loved ones, but except for a simmering bitterness that I probably wasn’t ever going to see Caz again, I could only focus on what was in front of me. It’s a protective mechanism. Just do your job. Just put one foot in front of the other. When you see the enemy, pull the trigger—although there were no actual triggers to pull in this case. Boil everything down to staying alive, think about the other stuff later, that was my plan.
Except there was one other thing. I’d thought I hated Eligor, the archdemon, the all-time nasty fucker of the millennium, but it was nothing to what I’d come to feel about Anaita. Eligor, bad as he was, was my enemy. He was just doing his job, even if he enjoyed it way too much. In the Highest’s scheme of things, at least as far as I could tell, he was doing exactly what he was supposed to. But Anaita, she was supposed to be like me, defender of the helpless, protector of the innocent, instead of what she was: an astonishing, gigantic, fucked-up pile of evil.
Whatever happened, I was praying I’d at least get to hurt her somehow. That alone might be enough to make it worthwhile. I wanted to be the mosquito that gave her a big ugly bite just before she was throwing a chic party for the other VIPs. I wanted to be her pimple on prom night.
• • •
We reached the charred ground shortly before the house itself rose into view above us. Considering it sat on a hill in the middle of nothing, you’ll have an idea of how much territory Anaita’s snit-fit had destroyed. We crunched across the cinders. Faint, windblown drifts of snow were accumulating, but not enough to cover the destruction, only to stripe the burned ground with undulating streaks of white, like lines of cocaine on a black light poster. We hiked across this great circle of ruination, the pilgrims scattered and trailing behind us, and I couldn’t help thinking about some of humanity’s other death marches—Bataan, the Trail of Tears. The chill, the lifelessness of the terrain, the faces of the people we’d brought here, all worked to drag me down into hopelessness. Sam hated seeing those expressions more than I did, I’m sure, since he had personally recruited dozens of the pilgrims.
We got to the house and gave it a quick inspection, but it was just as we’d left it, empty as a bill collector’s heart. A sifting of snow had accumulated beneath windows blown
out by Anaita’s attack. We found what we needed, then got to work inside and outside, toiling in the cold like medieval peasants, digging and chopping and tying knots. Mostly digging. We stopped to drink water occasionally, more for the feel of stopping than any real need for a break. Sam was right—the pilgrims were a hardy lot, and the grim but determined mood seemed to have infected nearly everyone. Only Ed Walker seemed opaque to me, doing his part but always as though in his mind he was somewhere else. But where? That was a question that worried me. He’d overheard us the night before, when we thought we were alone, and he’d heard enough of my plan to angrily demand answers. He’d never seemed very satisfied with them, but to tell the truth, I wouldn’t have been either. It was a pretty damned desperate plan, and that was being charitable. Walker had reluctantly agreed, but he’d hardly met my eye since, which added to my feeling that the whole thing was too precarious to work, too crazy. And this was me, the guy who made crazy plans like clouds make rain.
At last, about an hour before sunset, we had done all we could. Sam called together Ed and Mayor Weng and Farber, her deputy. “It’s time,” Sam said. “Get your people out of here. I want all the noncombatants as far away as they can get in the next thirty minutes or so.”
“Thirty minutes,” said Farber. “Well, we’d better synchronize our watches.” We all turned to stare at him. “It was a joke,” he said, a little sheepishly. “Because, obviously, we don’t have watches.”
“I’ve actually been to Hell,” I said. “And you know what? All the comedians there were German.”
He gave me a look of mock recrimination that made me smile. It didn’t last long, but it was a nice two seconds of humanity. I hoped it wasn’t my last.
“So is it go?” I said.
Sam looked around. “Looks like it.”
“God loves you,” I said to Mayor Weng and her pilgrims. “And all of us, I hope. Now get out of here.”
As they hurried away across the snow and drifting black grit, we sent Walker and his volunteers to get into position, then after a last check, Sam and Clarence and I went into the house. I let Sam open the Go-To-Mecca Box, which he did only after pulling on the brilliantly glowing second-skin that was the God Glove. It looked like the end of his wrist was one big sparkler, but I knew it was only a birthday candle compared to what Anaita could muster, and we didn’t dare use it against her anyway.
“I think the cube is ready,” said Sam. “But she may have noticed that I flipped channels, if you know what I mean, so make it fast.”
I did. I kept my call brief and to the point. “It’s time,” I said—just that.
When I’d finished, Sam hung up the cosmic phone and adjusted it back to its original setting, which was a hotline right to Anaita, Angel of Moisture and goddess of our personal ruin, then he opened the channel. I held my finger to my lips for silence until we crept a little farther away, then Clarence and Sam and I began to talk normally, as if we didn’t even know our words were flying right to Heaven and directly to our deadliest enemy. We didn’t have to wait long to get results.
It started when my ears popped, a sudden change in pressure like a cupped blow on both sides of my head. I looked at Sam, and he nodded then hurried over to adjust the Mecca cube one last time. No need to speak. The pressure increased, and with it came a definite tang of ozone and an electrical crackle that I could feel on the hairs of my arms and neck. We all took a breath and stepped outside.
She stood there in snow flurries that turned the depth of the background into flat black and white static, like a television transmitting only the last whisper of the Big Bang. No glass or potsherds now: she looked like something out of a classical painting, like Juno or Minerva stepped out of a frame and into the world of men, bigger than life size and unutterably, astoundingly beautiful. She had two cats on leashes, tiny compared to what they’d been when I last saw them, not lions this time but something long-eared and tawny. If it hadn’t been for Anaita being more than seven feet tall, and the shimmering ripple of her garment, which was more light than fabric, she could have been a rich and gorgeous actress walking her exotic pets. Except we weren’t in Beverly Hills, but at the end of an entirely different world.
“Doloriel.” Her voice was honey, love, and regret. The anger of our last meeting was gone as if it had never been. “Why do you fight me? Why didn’t you just do as you were told?” She turned to Sam. “All your friend had to do was bring you back, and we would have been merciful.”
“We?” Sam asked. “You mean you and the person you pretended to be?”
She looked amused, almost. “Pretended? Do you mean the guise I wore to recruit you? There was no pretense, only secrecy. Didn’t I do what I said? Isn’t this world beautiful? Didn’t I make it just as I promised, and give it to the ones you brought to me?”
“Then burned the shit out of it and killed a bunch of them,” I said. “Not exactly what one expects from an angel. Not what usually happens in paradise.”
“Yeah,” said Clarence, but he didn’t say it very loud. Still, he was standing in there. He hadn’t faced her the first time, of course. Maybe that helped.
“Why are you such a troublemaker, Doloriel?” Anaita didn’t sound angry. In fact she sounded exactly like a mother worried by a foolish child who won’t learn. “You have been a thorn in my side since the beginning. So unnecessary.”
“I didn’t do anything to you. You sent that stabby maniac after me. You’ve done nothing but try to destroy me.”
“And you’ve tried just as hard to destroy my work,” she said, but still calm, still more in sadness than in anger. “You and that report you made. We should have had months more to build here, years of Earth time before the others found out about this place. Instead you upset everything, you silly little creature, ruined a plan whose glory and beauty you can’t even conceive. You dare to complain to me about what I did? I should have incinerated you the first time you interfered with my project. In fact, I should have done it earlier. At the very start.”
Which made no sense, since other than the report, which I had to make because of the heat I was getting from my superiors when I found out about Ed Walker’s missing soul, I’d done nothing to her. Seemed to me that my involvement had caused trouble for Sam, who’d been the one to recruit Walker, far more than it had Anaita.
Or did she mean something else by that? At the very start . . . ? Not that it mattered now. I could think about it later, if I was still alive and my thinking parts hadn’t burned up. “Look, just leave these people alone, leave this place and Sam alone, and I’ll go back with you.”
She looked at me for a long time—it seemed long, anyway, as we stood in the fluttering snow—then let out a laugh like a bird’s song, haunting, sweet, and very, very brief. “Imagine! You’re going to offer me a bargain. You, Doloriel, who have done so much to spoil triumphs you are too ill-formed to appreciate.”
I suddenly remembered something Heinrich Himmler had once said in an address to his SS men, who were weary and horrified by implementing the Final Solution. “That we should have to do such things and still remain decent men,” he told them, “that is true heroism.” Anaita really was insane. I had never thought an angel could be, but she was. She believed herself to be so obviously right that everything else no longer mattered. In fact, everything else barely registered.
“Fine,” I said. “No deal. So come and get me.”
“As you wish, Doloriel. But I will not dirty myself again with you. I don’t want your filthy blood staining my raiment.” She dropped the leashes.
The cats leaped forward. By the time they had taken a couple of steps they were growing, and as they raced toward us across the snow and ash they kept on doing it. Eyes like glowing amber, big as lions, then bigger, they sprang across the ground so quickly I could scarcely have counted to three, even if I had enough air in my lungs and spit in my mouth to do it. The nearest one leap
ed, a huge, gray-brown shadow, even as I took my first stumbling steps backward. It crashed to the ground in front of me, skidding through ash. Then it was gone into the black, rectangular hole we had dug. As it fell onto the sharpened stakes at the bottom of the pit, the cat’s initial snarl of surprise exploded into a maddened howl of agony.
The second cat was already in midair. It jumped easily over the exposed trap, but when it landed it was slightly off to the side, so instead of the second trap swallowing it, the covering of boards stolen from the house, along with scavenged branches, fell inward as planned, but the monstrous cat still had enough solid ground under its paws to scramble to safety. Safety for it, of course. Not so safe for me.
Those were the only two pits we’d had time to dig.
I wasn’t thinking much about pits or digging at that moment, though, because the second cat leaped again as soon as it found its footing, something like a thousand pounds of claws, teeth, and rock-hard muscle flying through the air toward me. I couldn’t even get my spear into the dirt to brace it before the thing hit me. We rolled over and over, and although my head hit the ground so hard that, for a moment, I didn’t quite know where I was, I could definitely tell that a mouth full of sharp teeth was about to tear my face off, and that I no longer had a spear in my hand. Then the massive jaws snapped down, and the world disappeared into a deep, foul, and extremely slobbery darkness.