J King - Angel of Death

They will not reach Indiana.

It will be a car accident. That much is simple on the Dan Ryan Freeway. Husband and wife both, at intervals, break into tears at how beautiful their wedding has been. That fact will make the moment’s inattention even easier to arrange. The difficulty is organizing a suitable end for such promising young lovers. He drives. The roads are dry and cold this January. The shoulders hold filthy snow. The sky is white like paper.

His brown hair is combed back long, like a prophet’s, and his beard is coarse and reddish. His blond mustache disappears against lightly freckled skin. From a distance, he looks Amish, or Lincolnesque. He does not disapprove of either impression. He talks. He talks and talks, in a fluid, self-impressed bliss of hopes. The breath pulsing in and out of him fans the eager flames in his eyes. He pauses now for a comment from his bride, but when she does not immediately volunteer, he turns up the CD player and points at intervals toward it, as though a guitar solo could be seen as well as heard.

Sighing at the sublimities of feedback, he clutches the wheel in large, strong hands. Since puberty, those hands had moved with the rhythm of mantis claws. It makes sense. He has spent much of his adolescence in trees.

A bit of egg and Canadian bacon is perched on a groin fold of his thin canvas pants. Ratty deck shoes leap from gas to brake to gas again in the graceless dance of young nerve on the Dan Ryan. Despite an athletic build and a freckled tan from life guarding, he is no true athlete. His disabling fear of competition extends even to card games and attempts to drive through Chicago. His bride sits beside him, glowing in their first morning together. Her oval face and bright hazel eyes are intense. She listens, mostly because she loves him, but also because she has nothing to say about the bizarre flurry of fancies he spins out. This particular eruption will be spent as quickly as all the rest. She waits, patient and powerful. A force of nature, the bride is both fragile and indomitable.

Her shoulders shiver beneath her coat. Long-nailed fingers flick the heat control to the foot well symbol. Those actions are enough to draw the man’s attention. He looks suddenly concerned – no, worried – and reaches out one of his mantis hands to fumble inexpertly with the temperature controls. She stretches and yawns. His attention drifts from levers and knobs to her figure. The drifting asteroid has been snagged by the grand silence of a spinning world, and he curves inward, willingly and eternally captured by her. Oh, how deeply they will be mourned – twin roses plucked just as they begin to open. If this were the sixties, there would be a folk song. Now is the moment. They both must die, and I know how it will happen.

He glimpses me. I stand in the salty freeway lane before him – the slow lane, in which they are overtaking a semi that rumbles along in the center lane. He can see me for but a moment. If I were real, my pierced feet would even now be striking the undercarriage as my shins break upon the bumper and my loincloth is sucked from my shattering pelvis into the front grill. Bleeding hands would strike the fiberglass fenders as my pierced side slides in its own blood and water to send my thorn-crowned head through the windshield to slay him. But I am not real. He swerves, too late, loses control on a sheet of black ice, spins once completely and strikes a cement piling of an overpass.

The impact has the sound of a plastic toy being crunched.

Then it is done. That quickly, the car is stopped. The man sits, dazed, scraped, bruised, but otherwise untouched. The oblivious semi roars onward. In the empty windshield space, the next vehicles slow. Emergency lights begin flashing like mournful fireflies. January bites cold against the man’s hot red belly. The rumble of traffic slows, like the sudden reverent hush that comes to a crowd when something has gone terribly wrong. He has often thought that a fatal accident should stop traffic: human death should never occur conveniently or unobtrusively. A man after my own heart.

“That was… close,” he says hoarsely, realizing only then that he has screamed his throat raw. He turns to his bride and sees only the sheared away edge of the car and the cracked piling that now brushes his right arm. He blinks, uncomprehending at first, and looks into the back seat, as if she will be sitting there. Gone. Folded away in metal and plastic. He turns forward again and watches the cars and their firefly lights. One of his mantis hands lifts to the horn and honks it twice, a bleating sound. He begins to pick glass out of his body, tossing the bloody fragments out onto what is left of the hood.

They aren’t enough to kill him, he knows. Nor is the shoulder dislocation, already swelling beneath a strained strap. Nor is the bleeding band of his forehead where it crunched against the steering wheel.

But he will die tonight. He is not strong enough to survive this.

The planet has been destroyed, and the asteroid flies free again, pelting toward a sun that waits, fiery and voracious, ten or twelve hours ahead.

(I would not have done it the other way. The bride would not have committed suicide. Even had she tried, her own elemental flesh could not slay itself. She was life.)

He, on the other hand, is treated, counseled, and given a room at the University of Chicago Hospital. Despite his sore shoulder, the tree climber makes his way down from a third story window to the ground, walks along the South Side, is mugged and beaten when it turns out he has no money, continues to the Skyway, and leaps, tattered and bleeding, from a viaduct to land before a semi.

As I say, he was a man after my own heart. Not so long ago, there was a madman who talked to God. (Any mortal who hears the true voice of God goes mad, just as any mortal who sees God is slain by the sight.) This man truly spoke to God and was truly mad.

Divine madness allowed him to rise to power over his small, oppressed nation, brought to its knees by a series of hardships caused by the old regime. The madman wanted more land, better land. But the land he wanted was full of people already – lesser people, slave races. They needed to die. God agreed. God told him to kill every man, woman, and child of the lesser races. Genocide, purification of the land for the divine, master race.

And the madman succeeded. In a ferocious rush, the tiny country took on the world. City after city fell. The madman’s soldiers rounded up the lesser races, and according to God’s will, slew them and buried them in vast mass graves, or burned their bodies away to ash and bones.

Do not be surprised by this. God has not only the right but the obligation to decide when everyone will die. Whether God decides that ten thousand should be slain all in one day, or over the course of fifty years, God decides when they will die. Assuredly, he slays them, and sometimes in their multitude, like a man mowing grass or spraying for termites.

Yes, I assure the quality of individual deaths, and the tool of my work is sometimes a madman like Keith McFarland. It is not merely my right to slay via such mortals as he, but my solemn obligation to do so. Just as I have been assigned by God to oversee the deaths of individuals in their thousands – sleeping, driving, working, eating – so the mad dictator was assigned by God to slay men and women and children in their hundreds of thousands. Either God could not stop these mass executions, or he would not stop them. A God who could not stop them is not God. A God who would not stop them has ordained them.

Either there is no God, or the mad genocidal dictator was God’s servant.

“So Joshua took all that land, the hills, and all the south country, and all the land of Goshen, and the valley, and the plain, and the mountain of Israel, and the valley of the same; even from the mount Halak, that goeth up to Seir, even unto Baal-gad in the valley of Lebanon under mount Hermon: and all their kings he took, and smote them, and slew them. Joshua made war a long time with all those kings. There was not a city that made peace with the children of Israel, save the Hivites, the inhabitants of Gibeon: all other they took in battle. For it was of the LORD to harden their hearts, that they should come against Israel in battle, that he might destroy them utterly, and that they might have no favor, but that he might destroy them, as the LORD commanded Moses.”