Though the muscles in his neck were screaming, the former Guardian angel could not—would not—lower his head. He could see the other figure lying upon the slab now. It had once been an angel. Francis guessed he was likely one of the few who had managed to escape the tortures of Tartarus, reverting to barbarism on the plains of Hell. Now his stomach had been opened, the skin peeled back.
Something that could have been a mountain crumbling roared somewhere outside the cave, and the angel tilted his shaggy head slightly, listening to the sound.
“The changes are coming closer,” he said. “I wonder what it will be like when he’s finished?”
“What the fuck are you doing?” Francis demanded. A while ago he had expected to be dead, but now? He had a front-row seat on the crazy bus and it didn’t show any sign of slowing down soon.
“It’s all about change, really,” the angel said. The glowing scalpel disappeared somewhere inside his robes. “Take this poor beast, for example.” He gestured toward the angel on the slab.
“You wouldn’t believe the changes his body has undergone, living the way he did . . . changes that I never foresaw, and I was partially responsible for his design.”
Responsible for his design? Who is this madman? The thought coursed through Francis’s fevered brain as he fought to keep his head up.
“His internal workings have evolved to survive the rigors of Hell,” the angel continued.
Francis had no idea what this lunatic was talking about, but as long as it kept him from using the light-saber scalpel to open him up, he could keep right on talking.
“To survive what is coming, we must all evolve. I learned that quite a long time ago, but I’ve only recently come to truly understand it.”
The angel approached Francis, and he squirmed on the slab, but to no avail. He wasn’t going anywhere.
“But I knew that things were finally about to come around when I found you out there. It was a surprise, but not really.”
The angel reached out with a bloody hand to stroke Francis’s bald head.
“I knew you would be coming; I just didn’t know when.”
The scalpel was in the angel’s hand again, and all Francis could do was stare in horror at the figure looming above him.
“I was always proud of the Guardian’s design,” he said.
“Who the fuck are you?” Francis growled.
“You don’t remember me . . . yet,” the angel said with a smile that would have given Charles Manson the creeps. “But you will.”
He leaned toward Francis, one blood-encrusted hand holding the former Guardian angel’s head steady as the scalpel once more slipped effortlessly into his skull.
Like a hot knife cutting through butter.
CHAPTER NINE
Remy helped Jon bury Nathan as the sun started to set over the Arizona desert.
They were silent as they shoveled dirt over the poor man’s battered corpse with tools they had found after foraging through the wreckage of the biodome.
“Tell me about him,” Remy said, desperate to ease the uncomfortable silence.
“Nothing much to tell, really,” Jon said. He had begun to place large rocks atop the fresh earth in an attempt to keep the desert predators away. “He was a good man . . . a kind man, and I loved him.”
Jon looked at Remy with a sad smile as the tears began to flow down his dirty cheeks.
“There, I said it.” He looked skyward. “I said it, and the heavens didn’t open up, and fire didn’t rain down from the sky.”
“Did you think it would?” Remy asked him.
Jon shrugged. “Relationships like ours were frowned upon in the Sons,” he said. “So we kidded ourselves by ignoring our true feelings . . . lying to everyone around us, as well as ourselves.”
The man looked back to the fresh grave, then bent down to retrieve more rocks.
“How pathetic is it that only after he is dead can I say it out loud.” Jon shook his head in disgust. “You should have left me to die under the rubble.”
“He knew that you loved him,” Remy said.
Jon laughed bitterly. “Yeah, I’m sure he did.”
“I can sense these things better than most, but one would have to be in a coma to not see and feel the connection you two had.”
Jon knelt beside the grave. He stayed like that for a little while.
“Thank you for that,” he said finally.
“It’s the truth.”
“Well, thank you anyway.”
“You’re welcome,” Remy said.
Jon stared at the grave again. “It’s kind of funny,” he said. “I can still feel him around me.”
“Not such a bad thing, is it?”
“No, not at all. It’s really kind of nice.”
“We should probably think about going,” Remy suggested.
“Yeah,” Jon said.
“From what I remember of the map, we’re going to Louisiana, right?” Remy asked.
“Louisiana it is,” Jon agreed. “But we’ll have to be careful. It has to be done just right, or it could be disastrous.” He seemed to almost physically shake off his emotions, and was suddenly very professional. “The first thing we need to do is find some batteries for my hearing aid, and then get ourselves cleaned up. I doubt the Daughters of Eve would talk to us if we look as though we’ve just fought a war.”
“Do you think they will talk to us?” Remy was curious, given the feud between the two groups.
“Sure,” Jon said. “Right before they find out who we are, and try to kill us.”
Fernita Green reached into her bucket of filthy water and removed a rag.
“Here,” she said to Mulvehill, handing him the dripping cloth. “Start scrubbing. Anyplace you see this writing.”
For some reason he took it, soapy water dripping from his hand to patter on the threadbare carpet.
“Listen, Fernita,” Mulvehill started. “Why don’t we talk about this . . . ?”
“There’s no time to talk,” the old woman snapped as she frantically rubbed at a blackened smudge on the wall. “I have to get it all off.”
Mulvehill wasn’t familiar with the scrawl, but it looked old, and he got an odd, itchy feeling at the backs of his eyes when he looked at it for too long.
“All the things I forgot,” Fernita said as she scrubbed. “The more I wipe away, the more I remember. . . . It was horrible . . . just horrible.”
The old woman was sobbing as she dunked her brush into the bucket beside her and brought it out again to scrub at the wall.
Cautiously Mulvehill knelt beside her, feeling the spilled water from the bucket soak into the knees of his slacks as he gently put his arm around her. “It’s all right,” he tried to console her. “Everything is going to work itself out. Why don’t we take a break, talk a little, and see what—”
“They were burnin’,” the old woman said, staring at him with eyes red from crying. “All those folks inside, they all got burned up because of me.”
Mulvehill felt horrible. Fernita Green was in genuine pain; he could practically see it eating away at her.
“He was trying to kill me,” she said between sobs, and then with a desperate moan she attacked the wall again, rubbing with all her might to make the markings disappear.
“Who, Fernita?” Mulvehill asked. “Who was trying to kill you?”
The old woman slumped forward, sliding down the wall until her face and hands were touching the ground. She was exhausted, barely able to hold herself up anymore.
“The angel,” she said into the floor, and he thought for sure that he must have misheard her words.
“Who?” he asked again, squeezing her tighter.
“The angel,” she said again, raising her head. “The angel wanted to kill me.”
“Shit,” Mulvehill said, fingers of icy dread tickling the length of his spine. “This just keeps getting better and better.”
Jon and Remy were at a motel on the outskirts of the Sonoran Desert, cleaning up before beginning their search for the Daughters of Eve.