Thomas Sniegoski - Walking In the Midst of Fire

The rain was torrential. Remy unfurled his wings, extending them in such a way as to provide cover from the onslaught as he scanned his surroundings.

He saw that he was in a city of some kind, but from its dilapidated appearance, it had been abandoned for quite a long time. An electric chill passed down his spine, as he was reminded of a recent cable television program that tried to show what the world would be like after mankind had gone.

After humanity had died.

From what Remy could see, this was pretty damn close, and the bleak surroundings also reminded him that a fate even worse-looking than this could very well be waiting for the planet if he didn’t get all the facts straight about a certain murdered angel general.

He took to the air, flying above the cracked and weed-covered streets, the vegetation pushing up defiantly through the asphalt. The air was rich with the smell of the ocean, and as he flew higher he saw that he was on an island in the middle of a choppy gray sea.

Interesting , he thought, gliding back down, still on the lookout for Malatesta and, if he was lucky, Prosper. Searching for something—a sign that would give him a clue as to where he was—he landed in front of what looked to be an administrative building. Sticking out from a clump of twisting vines beside the building, Remy found a rusted sign with what appeared to be Japanese characters on it. He brushed away some mud, and could just about make out the name: GUNKANJIMA.

“Gunkanjima,” said a young voice over the pelting downpour. “Battleship Island.”

Remy spun around, hiding his wings away.

“That’s all right,” the pale little girl in the tattered, pink Hello Kitty raincoat said. “I already know what you are—no sense in hiding it.”

“Hi,” Remy said, dropping the bent metal sign. “What is this place?”

She was wearing torn and faded blue jeans, and sneakers split at the sides, as if too small for her growing feet. “Used to be a coal-mining facility, but then it got turned into a prison during a big war . . . the second one . . . war number two.”

“World War Two?” Remy helped her.

She nodded and he got a better look at her. The child couldn’t have been any older than eight, but her skin was terribly pale and sickly looking.

“The Japanese kept Koreans here and forced them to work really, really hard,” the little girl stated. She was poking around in the dirt with the toe of her sneaker. “A lot of people died here.”

Remy moved a little closer.

“Do you live here?”

She stopped digging with her toe when she saw that he was getting closer. “Of course I do,” she said, warily. “I live here with my brothers and sisters.”

The little girl was Nephilim, of that he had no doubt. This was where they were kept, for what reason he had no idea.

But he was going to find out.

“I wouldn’t come any closer if I was you,” the child warned.

Remy stopped where he was. “I don’t mean you any harm,” he told her. “My name is Remy. . . . What’s yours?”

“Kitty,” she said, smiling simply. She pointed to the chubby white corporate symbol on her torn raincoat. “That’s what they call me ’cause I always wear this coat.”

“That’s quite a coat, and a really nice name,” Remy told her.

“Thanks,” she said, kicking at the dirt in earnest.

“So you live here with your brothers and sisters?” Remy asked.

“Uh-huh,” she answered. She squatted and began digging with her hands.

“Do you think that I might be able to meet them?”

Kitty stopped digging, turning her pale gaze toward him.

“I know what you’re up to,” she said.

Remy shook his head. “Not up to anything, Kitty.”

“You’re like that other angel,” she said. “The one who was all nice and everything, but was really mean.”

Remy could see that she was getting upset. He backed away a bit, hoping that if he kept his distance . . .

“Gareth said that you want to teach us to kill and stuff,” she said suddenly. “To be an army . . . to fight a war . . . World War Three!”

“Is Gareth one of your brothers?” he asked, trying to calm her down.

“Yes, he’s my oldest brother and he didn’t want us to do any fighting for the angels so he ended up doing something really bad.”

Remy knew what Gareth had done.

“He killed an angel, didn’t he?” Remy said. “Gareth killed an angel called Aszrus.”

She was picking at stuff in the dirt again, pulling things out, looking at them, and tossing them aside.

“Yes, he did,” Kitty said. “And he got into really bad trouble . . . but that was before they knew he had powers.”

Remy didn’t quite understand. “Powers?” he asked. “What kind of powers?”

Kitty was still poking around in the mud. She shrugged her shoulders. “All kinds,” she said. “We all got ’em now—well most of us. Some of the babies don’t.”

Remy felt that horrible feeling begin to form in his stomach, the horrible feeling that told him things were much worse than he thought.

“Do you have powers?” he asked, realizing as the words left his mouth that it might not have been the question to ask right then.

Kitty was looking at him again, and smiling.

“Uh-huh,” she said. “Do you want to know how I know so much about this island?” she asked.

Remy didn’t respond.

“All those people who died here a long time ago?” she asked. “They told me.”

She poked at the things she’d been pulling from the mud and dirt.

“Here are some of their bones. If their bones are here, they’re here, too.”

Remy watched as a thick mist seemed to erupt from the muddy bones, growing in size to form a grayish cloud that transformed into multiple ghostly shapes with eerily burning yellow eyes.

“Guess what my power is?” Kitty asked, and then she started to giggle.

It didn’t take a rocket scientist to know that something bad was about to happen.

“Kitty, you don’t have to do this,” Remy tried to persuade her. “I don’t mean you, or your brothers and sisters any—”

“I control the ghosts!” she proclaimed. “And I can get them to do whatever I want.”

“Kitty,” he tried again, calling forth his wings because it might be necessary.

“Get ’im!” the child ordered.

The ghosts glided through the air, their mouths open in a disconcerting psychic scream that Remy could hear— feel —inside his head. He tried to evade them, flying up into the rain-filled sky, but the spirits clung to him, swarming around his body, filling him with the weight of their sorrow.

As hard as he tried to shake them, the ghosts held on, filling his thoughts with the pain and misery they had suffered there as prisoners of the Japanese. Remy was having a difficult time concentrating. He crashed into the side of a nearby building, breaking one of the few panes of glass that had managed to remain intact.

The ghosts wanted him to know them—their loves, their hates, what they so desperately missed. He knew it would be impossible to escape them, so he landed, dropping to his knees on the muddy ground. He wrapped himself in his wings and rocked to the psychic onslaught, experiencing each and every thing they wanted to him to know.

Remy could feel the heat of life slipping away from him, the spirits eagerly taking anything they could use to manifest themselves more strongly in the living world. He felt cold, and colder still as the ghosts of Gunkanjima grew more powerful.

It was time to make his move. Calling upon the divine power that resided within him, Remy communicated with the disembodied dead, telling them that it was time to move on.