Chris Holm - The Wrong Goodbye

A crushing blow from nowhere set off fireworks in my kidney. Something inside me went all wet and loose. I’ll be pissing blood if I get out of here alive, I thought. The notion didn’t fill me with warm fuzzies.

Now, I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking why didn’t I let nature take its course and say sayonara to this poor pathetic meat-suit? After all, just two days back I was rooting for the bug-monster to kill me, so why not? Why bother busting ass for the privilege of wandering smack into the middle of an angel/demon grudge match when I could take my chances with reseeding and hope I wind up possessing someone hale and hearty and way the fuck away from here? And believe me, I get where you’re coming from. But there’s a couple things I’m privy to that you’re not.

Thing One: dying fucking hurts.

Thing Two: dying really fucking hurts.

How bad does dying hurt? So bad that even if shit’s hitting the fan full-on and you’ve got no other choice, you still stop and check the math to make sure it don’t add up another way. And yeah, OK, I’ll cop to trying to goad the bug-monster into killing me, but there were extenuating circumstances —namely the fact that I was (mistakenly, as it turned out) pretty sure he was going to kill me anyway. So I wasn’t so much rooting for death as I was for him to make it quick. Big difference.

Besides, the key to a successful reseeding is luck, and lots of it. Luck’s the difference between winding up in a millionaire meat-suit with a private jet or an invalid in an adult diaper without enough spare juice to raise his head, let alone allow you to hop hosts.

Now do I strike you as the lucky type?

Yeah, that’s what I thought —which is why most times I’d just as soon take my chances in the here and now, regardless of the crappiness of said here and now.

Sick of getting pummeled, I crawled toward where I figured the door was, but ran into Danny’s cot instead. I started to turn around, and then I got me the beginnings of an idea, so I stopped. My fingers traced the cot’s metal frame until I found the hinge. Then I folded it in half and climbed under. It was a tight fit, me hunched inside my makeshift Aframe tent, but it was better than being crushed to death. It was, at best, a temporary solution; the way this place was filling up, I had to get through that crawlspace and into the outer chamber fast if I wanted to keep this meat-suit breathing.

I tried sliding the whole shebang forward, toward the door. Too damn many rocks in the way. I looped my hands around the frame and lifted, figuring I’d use it all umbrella-like and knee-walk over, but the uneven terrain required all fours to maneuver, which is to say I tipped over and wound up on my face.

I won’t lie —tipping over hurt. Hurt enough it took a sec to realize I wasn’t getting pummeled anymore. I could hear shit falling, sure —louder every second, in fact, suggesting this room wasn’t going to be a room much longer —but it was no longer reaching me. Seemed the cot had gotten wedged against the wall, building me a little fort. But by the creaking of its frame, it wasn’t going to stay wedged for long.

I clawed over rock and dirt and the still-hot cinders of the torch, mindful not of the scratches and burns I inflicted on myself in the process, only of the door, of freedom, of away . A few seconds of blind groping and I found it. The aperture was narrower now, and riddled with loose stone, but there it was.

There it was.

A sound like a thousand hoofbeats as the ceiling caved in, and the darkness around me imploded. I dove for the passage as the cot crunched beneath the sudden weight. Hot, stale, dusty breath chased after me as all the air in the heap of rock that used to be a room was expelled along with me. And then the ceiling of the crawlspace popped overhead like a crack spreading through glass, the sound zipping past me in the darkness and letting me know I wasn’t out of the woods yet.

I scampered through the short passage and into the slightly larger outer chamber of Dumas’s socalled monkey house, only realizing I’d left the crawlspace behind when the echoes of its collapse reverberated off the walls around me. All I wanted was to collapse as well, bloodied and spent as my egress from Danny’s burrow had left me. But the muffled booms of the angels’ continued onslaught, and the constant patter of pebbles on the dirt floor, suggested that wouldn’t be prudent. Suggested that Danny’s hidey-hole was only the beginning. Suggested that if I didn’t get my ass out of these caves and into the open desert air, my ass was gonna get a whole lot flatter.

So I kept moving.

Finding the fissure that connected the monkey house to the main cavern wasn’t easy. Damn thing was only sideways-me wide, and in complete darkness, every nook and cranny in the cavern wall felt like pay dirt. I must’ve circumnavigated the chamber twice before I finally found it, and beat to hell as I was, squeezing through was no mean feat. But, halting though my progress was, it was progress, and eventually, I spilled from the crevice, tumbling to the dirt floor and squinting against the sudden light.

Sweet Christ, was I sick of falling down.

Turns out, though, much as it hurt, that fall was lucky as all get-out. Not like it was strategy or anything —I was just beat up enough I was having trouble supporting my own weight, is all —but still, it was lucky nonetheless. ’Cause when I fell, I wound up hunkered behind one of them rock formations that juts up from the floors of caves —stalagmite or stalactite, I can never keep them straight —and so I managed not to run afoul of the angry angel.

I should’ve known that this light I stumbled into was too bright, too white —too pure to be cast by torches alone. Should’ve recognized it for what it was. Because I’d seen light like this before. Breathtaking. Painful. Glorious. Deadly.

The light of God’s grace.

The light that emanates from His most trusted servants —and from His deadliest assassins.

Most times, were you to spy an angel topside, you’d never know it. They, I don’t know, seem to dim their natural light, and project a sort of vague suggestion of human form that your eyes slide right off of. I mean, you register the basics. Eyes? Check. Hair? Check. Two arms? Two legs? Yup and yup. But if I were to ask you what color those eyes were, or was the hair cut long or short, you’d have no earthly idea. Which makes sense, because an angel is a celestial being; there ain’t nothing earthly about ’em.

This guy, though, he wasn’t bashful. Wasn’t subtle. Wasn’t hiding his true nature. Which, quite frankly, means me saying “guy” wasn’t quite accurate. But junk-having or not, tall and hulking as he was, “guy” and “he” seem closer than the alternative. Seem as close as this earthly, imperfect language of ours is gonna get.

The angel stood naked in the middle of the hall, lit from within and shimmering like a mirage on the horizon. Like pavement on a hot day. Like a reactor on the verge of meltdown. He was eight feet tall if he was an inch, and he was so beautiful —and so goddamn terrifying —I didn’t realize until I heard his captive speak that he was not alone.

The voice I heard was low and rumbling, and in a tongue I did not speak —a tongue I could not speak, full of sounds no human could ever hope to make. Though the canyon beyond the cave raged with sounds of battle —screams of anger and of agony, and countless explosions far less muffled than before —that voice cut through them all, and reached my ears as though from mere inches away.

The voice was Psoglav’s.

The horrid dog-beast was on his knees before the angel —a posture of necessity rather than penitence, given that the angel had in his hand one of Psoglav’s wrists, which he held twisted over Psoglav’s head, keeping him immobile and in no small amount of pain. Though if Psoglav’s acid tone was any indication, the hold still left him somewhere shy of accommodating.