Chris Holm - The Big Reap

I lowered the blade, raised my free hand to Magnusson’s soul. It crumbled like chalk between my fingers.

My vision dimmed. My meat-suit failing.

I slipped away.

Exquisite. Excruciating. As if some sadistic needle-fingered creature was tearing every nerve out of my meat-suit’s body one by one like a gardener yanking up a particularly pernicious root, and running them across a bed of lemon-juice-soaked sandpaper before lighting them on fire.

It took moments.

It took forever.

And then, next thing I knew, I was in Guam.

“Good evening, Collector. You’re looking well.”

She was lying, I was pretty sure; I must’ve looked like shit. My leg-wound seeping lymph through its bandages, my thick dark hair on end, my meat-suit’s early-twenties baby-face dusted here and there with patchwork stubble. Of course, the fact that Lilith was lying to me was no surprise.

That she was complimenting me, on the other hand, was a major cause for concern. It set off big red lights and klaxons in my borrowed brain. Then again, that could have been the booze. Cause I’m not going to lie, by the time she tracked me down, I was pretty fucking drunk.

I opened my eyes and lifted my head up off my threadbare beach towel, propping myself up on one elbow, which dug into the powder-fine sand through the thin layer of tropical-fish-printed fabric. The sun was setting over the Philippine Sea, a disc of lava that bled orange across the horizon on either side where it touched. As the green afterimage of the brilliant sunset faded, I saw that Lilith was standing some ten feet down the beach from me, her creamy white skin untouched by sun despite our tropical environs. And my, how much skin she showed.

She wore a string bikini of royal blue, stunning against her pale white skin, three scant triangles covering her naughty bits, intended, it seemed, more to heighten anticipation than out of any sense of the demure. A gauzy white sarong was tied about her waist and fluttered in the southern breeze, as did her thick mane of lustrous red. Her feet were bare. Nails painted crimson, hands and feet. My footprints cratered the white sand in a meandering dotted line from trail head to where I lay just above the high tide line, churning the beach in a rough circle around my chosen spot, but Lilith stood among a field of pristine white.

The beach was empty but for the two of us. Faifa’i Beach is secluded even by Guam’s standards, a jounce along a pitted gravel road into the jungle and a hike up the narrow cliff-walk trail past the rusted anti-aircraft gun leftover from World War II, and across a narrow wooden footbridge over roiling surf. Most of its visitors don’t relish the thought of making the sun-drunk trek back to their four-wheel-drives in darkness, which means they clear out early. Me, I don’t give a shit. If I fall and break my neck on the walk back, smart money says I wind up right back in Guam anyway.

Besides, I wasn’t planning on walking back. My plan consisted of polishing off this-here bottle of rum which, I was surprised to discover, I was well on my way to doing, and passing out till morning. Far as I was concerned, the universe owed me a drunken night beneath the stars in a balmy tropical paradise after the cosmic bitch-slap that was reseeding. When my last meat-suit kicked, I found myself eyes-open on the floor, puking blood and grand-mal seizing in the middle of some cheesy island bar. Patrons huddled over me, eyes wide as those of the lacquered fish that graced the walls, while a short, lined Japanese woman dressed all casual and fanny-packed like she was on vacation held my shoulders down and wailed. By the time the ambulance arrived, my trembling ceased. I stopped puking before we pulled into the hospital. But despite my best efforts, I couldn’t convince the docs to let me go, nor the poor, distraught woman who — language barrier aside — I was pretty sure was my new meat-suit’s wife to let me out of her sight. So after a night spent tossing and turning under her watchful, worried eye, I gave up on my new ride — a salt-and-pepper Japanese man of maybe fifty — and hopped a ride in the fresh-faced, indigenous Chamorro kid with whom I shared a room. He was maybe twenty-two or -three, and from what I could gather, came in sometime yesterday thanks to a sea-urchin-stick in his left leg while cliff-diving with his friends. I waited till my meat-suit’s missus ducked out to use the bathroom, and then body-hopped on over, puking in the trashcan beside his bed and pulling his privacy curtain before walking, flip-flopped and board-shorts-clad, right out of the hospital. I lifted a wallet out of some dumb-ass tourist’s beach bag, and then spent twenty minutes trying to track down a toothbrush and some toothpaste to get the taste of vomit out of my mouth, finally hitting paydirt at a strip-mall drugstore with signs in English, Mandarin, and Japanese. Woulda bought a pack of cigarettes there, too, but I feel shitty smoking in a meat-suit that’s gonna keep on breathing once I vamoose. Better to save the death-sticks for the already dead. Once I was minty fresh, I rounded out my shopping spree with a bag of fast-food burgers and a bottle of rum, and set out to find a nice, quiet patch of sand where I could drink away the memory of dying yet again.

I shoulda known Lilith would come along all pretty-like and ruin my fun.

“Evenin’ yourself, Lily,” I said. “Pull up some beach and stay awhile.”

She hates it when I call her Lily. It’s kinda why I call her Lily. But this time, instead of correcting me, she just plopped down on the beach beside me. We sat awhile in silence, our eyes trained on the horizon, watching as the sun was slowly extinguished by the sea. As darkness descended, she plucked the rum bottle from its resting place between my knees, and took a long, slow pull. Then she offered it to me. I drank as well. Her lips tasted of peaches.

“Lily, are you all right?”

She took so long in responding, I began to wonder if she would. “The Truce is broken,” she finally said. “The peace has failed. The heavens are at war.”

I digested her words a moment, took another swig of rum. “Funny — you don’t sound too happy about that. There was a time you looked to spark that selfsame war.”

She looked at me. Her eyes were pained. “There was, indeed. For centuries, it’s all I thought about. And if given the chance, I’ll regret that fact for centuries to come. It was a foolish act of rebellion against an absent father whose crass withholding I should have long ago accepted. It’s mortifying, really, the lengths to which I was willing to go for just a moment of His attentions — even if those attentions were in the service of punishing me. Now, I realize the cost is simply too high — and the payoff far too meager.”

I was taken aback by her words, so blunt and so unguarded. Not once since New York, when she conspired to jump-start the End Times by framing an innocent girl for a vicious crime and attempting to condemn her soul to hell, had she ever admitted what she’d done. Not once had she expressed remorse. I was beginning to think she was incapable.

And yet…

If there’s one thing I should have learned in all my years with Lilith, it’s that she has a limitless capacity to surprise.

“If heaven and hell are at war, what’s to happen to the human world?”

“It’s difficult to say. This is but one of many realms, one of many potential battlefields. And this war has little to do with humankind, so as yet they remain untargeted. But of course, no realm is safe, and none of them will remain untouched. Already, many demons of the lower orders have taken the declaration of war as tacit permission to act on their more base desires without fear of reproach from their superiors. Surely you’ve heard the reports of mass rape and roving death squads out of central Africa, where resource-scarcity, ethnic divides, and political uncertainty leave some among the local populace ripe for plucking, and all too eager to succumb to demonic influence. Greed and envy have reached the boiling point throughout the whole of the Western world, where corporations who recognize no borders seem intent on choking the life from the very people they used to rely upon as customers. False prophets abound in the Middle East, preaching doctrines of violent intolerance. And all the while the gluttonous masses try to pack the gaping wound of their aching souls with yet more useless shit because they too can sense the shift — some paying heed to the hateful whispers of those demons who reside in dreams when that fails, and taking up arms against their fellow sufferers. In the absence of the constant ministrations of the Maker’s many servants, your world has been abandoned to the base corruption that lies beneath. It’s a veritable feast of sin — perpetrated not as part of any grand design, but instead by lone operators for sport — and it threatens to consume your kind just as surely as any overt offensive.”