“I am Samael, the Angel of Death.”
His eyes grow wide. “You have come to slay us?”
“No,” I reply, firm but gentle. “Not today. To be sure, your soul is mine for the taking when your time has come. You bartered away your immortality for the power to know good from evil. Now you know good from evil, but nothing else. This is something else.” I gesture toward my erection. “Adam, this is called a penis.”
“Apenis.”
“Penis. Just plain penis.”
“Just plain penis.”
“Except that it is anything but plain. Do you see how all creatures multiply upon the earth, birds and beasts and creeping things? This is how they multiply. It produces seed for more humans to grow.”
“I have seen this seed. It is very warm and soft,” he says. “I planted some in the river.”
“Good for you, Adam. But the river is not a good place to grow humans. Not the river or the field or the mountaintop. The only ground that will grow humans is Eve.”
She looks frustrated by this turn in the conversation.
“Why must I grow humans?”
“Because Yahweh has cursed you. You will grow humans out of your body, and the man will use his penis to put seed inside of you. Beneath that triangle of black hair is a vagina, and it leads to a womb. That is where the humans will grow. See the vagina on Azrael? Lie down, Azrael. Spread your legs. See, Adam, how I put my penis in the vagina?”
Adam nods very seriously, pushes an unsuspecting Eve onto the ground, and forces his way into her. “It hurts nicely.”
“It is not nice,” says Eve. “It hurts not nicely at all.”
“That is because you are cursed. Adam will use his penis not only to plant new humans inside you, but also to rule over you. His penis makes him angry and strong, and he will beat you and subjugate you because of it.”
“Something is happening,” Adam says, beginning to twitch.
“Very good, Adam. You are planting your seed.”
“Are you planting your seed, Samael?”
“I am, but it will dissolve into air when Azrael and I do.”
“It hurts nicely.”
“Yes, Adam. It hurts nicely. Do this every day until Eve’s belly swells.”
“I will do this every hour until her belly swells!”
“You will not,” Eve reproved.
“He rules over you, woman,” I say. “Yahweh has made it so. He will do this whenever he wishes. If you do not wish it, you call it rape, but Yahweh does not punish rape. Not yet, he doesn’t. He has some learning to do, too.”
“Will the new humans grow out of my womb?”
“They will grow in your womb, but will come out of your vagina.”
“They must be very small new humans.”
“Not small enough. You will have terrible pains when they come out. You may even die. One in three of your kind will die when they try to push their babies out.”
“Why must we die?”
“You are cursed.”
“I do not want to have these new humans come out of me.”
“It is not your choice. You are cursed. And if humans do not come out of you, all humans will die forever.”
Adam pulled away from Eve. “Perhaps I will not do this every hour. It was interesting at first, but now it seems like nothing.”
“Will this make my mate even more changeable and stupid than before?” Eve asked. “For if it does, I want no part in it.”
“It is not your choice. You are cursed.”
“I will go take a nap,” Adam said.
“You go, Adam. You have learned to plant humans and to enjoy the plowing of the field. You even know the pleasure of planting your seed where it will not grow.”
“I will go take a nap.”
“You go, Adam. Eve, remain with us. We have things to show you about how to find some small enjoyment in this. And, though Yahweh will forbid it, we will show you even how to be rid of the new humans if you do not want them.”
“I thank you, angel Samael. There must be some way to lessen the weight of this curse.”
Already it begins.
In Barrington, a drive-by shooting kills a couple of drunken businessmen; they were supposed to die by getting behind the wheel, hitting a tree, and going through the windshield.
On the south side, a black boy drowns, swimming in an industrial area of Lake Michigan.
A Latino gang leader has a heart attack at twentythree and dies, watching television. None of it makes any sense, but I’m having trouble keeping up with all of the deaths. I’ve signed off on seventy-two that were mediocre, and I’ll go back to redo the other thirteen.
How could I be having trouble? Time is nothing to me. Or, once it was. Once I could move through it without effort. Now, it is a struggle to tear my mind away from the Burlington station house where she works on her stacks and stacks of papers, or the unmarked squad car that she drives to scene after murder scene, reviewing the details in her head. The seat next to hers, whether in the car or in the station, is empty. I should be in it.
How about I take Keith down to Griffith for another slaying? That would bring her down to Sergeant Michaels’s territory again. Or maybe I can stage an aborted copycat killing. Once she arrives, we could discover it was someone else, and then have time to talk. But there aren’t supposed to be any deaths in Griffith until Friday, and none that could use a serial killing until after Keith would be gone.
Keith and Donna, both.
We’ll see what these seven days bring…
Serri was enormous. She had been pregnant now for twenty-nine months. She could barely breathe. She could not lie down, nor sit, nor stand, but only lean on that seven-hundred-pound bulk. Lean and eat. All the food went to the enormity within her. It had broken her spine at the pelvis, and her skin and muscles had distended around the huge blob. Her legs had shriveled to twin nothings, thinner than her arms and hanging limp over the stranded pelvic bone. It was a wonder she could defecate and pass urine, but it all oozed continually forth, pushed more by the pressure of the giant baby than by her musculature. Ephraim had wanted to kill the monstrosity when he discovered it could not be his. He had wanted to kill the baby and the wife, both. But when ten months became fifteen, and the pelvis broke free, he knew she bore the child of a fallen angel. He would not dare incur the wrath of the angels, nor of the Nephilim, who knew then of the pregnancy.
It would have been more humane to slay the woman at nine months. Perhaps, though, this was better punishment.
“Kill me, Ephraim,” Serri pleaded, not for the first time. “If ever you loved me, kill me.”
He did not respond. He had given up responding to that moan. Besides, the two Nephilim that crouched above the mud and rubble walls of their hut, holding the thatch roof aloft in their monstrous hands, would crush them all to pieces if he did.
Thirty months. That’s what they had said was typical for Nephilim births. Thirty months. Still, they had been willing to work some of their dark magic to speed things along.
The red snake of blood on the ground beneath Serri was the first sign. Shortly after came the long, shuddering tear of flesh stretched past its limit. Her dying, thrashing screams mingled with the deep bellow of the gigantic baby. It was the size of an ox, and its cry was a fitting bray.
“Hello, Sergeant,” you say.
Even in the dark of the moonless midnight, I can see you are tired. I shouldn’t have brought you down here like this.
“Hello, Donna,” I reply. I’m not wearing a uniform, but just casual clothes, a little rumpled, like I was pulled out of bed, too. That’s a little silly since it would take you two hours to get down here. I hope you won’t be angry when you see the scene. “The body’s through here.” I point to the light-streaming door of the trailer home. The thing glows like a lantern. Even the hole in the roof is sending out a patch of light to splash against the brown-leafed boughs of an oak, along the ditch behind the trailer park. The plastic police line moans in the wind. The neighbors seem afraid to approach it. They cluster in black knots, like flies preening just beyond a carcass. In a way, that is what they are.