Kent Kelly - Archangel

“Up here in the mountains, it’s all the little death. The great black of Denver is nothing up here; we’re west, wind teething away there down into the east. We’s shielded, some.

“You see, time I got to Black Hawk, stopping and plundering cars still whole and eating dead people’s sandwiches, emptying out their water bottles, wrapping my hands up in their gloves, I found me in a world all a-run of twilight. Some elder trees still burning, mostly forest and boulders splashed up over the cliff-sides like boxes of crud and burnt matches thrown up all over like Pick-Up Sticks, aiming the same direction. Dead trees pointing falling down, pointing me to here. I was reading the passage of wind, you see.

“So I go in the opposite way, I push over the dead bodies, slurry and crackle, drawn on by those lifelines, and then those blown-down forests pointing me the destiny. Pointing me to you.

“See, Black Hawk a blessed whore-girl of a gambling town. She didn’t get hit, not precisely. Old girl’s not vital enough to ever be a target, and she’s shielded by the mountains from all sides.

“But oh, she got the firestorm. Those fire cyclones, before I come, they level that town good. Ameristar, she gone. Yeah? I see you know the place. Tumbled-up police cars, one ambulance and even a truck or three. Some protest or something, from what few pieces I could see.

“All right. We stop awhile now.”

“Yeah, Black Hawk I did make it through. Fewer died in the streets there right away from what I tell. But every casino, every hotel, every parking garage? The better built, the harder they come down. The bigger they stood, the darker the blood- and oil-stains down all that rubble’s sides.

“Every place not shaken down got burned up, taken up. Temperatures like that, Mrs. S.-G., well, it’s like my welding days. Liquid glass and metal turn to fire. Concrete do burn, with all that gunk running down it’s gullet. It’s like hot paint and glue made of furniture and people, hot glue stuck atop a stone. That stone get baked black, and the glass and the metal and those poor dead souls, well they’re the glaze.

“You never can go back there. This you got here, this buried castle your Tom build you, is a paradise. Black Hawk, she’s not like what you think you might see, with hollowed-out shells of buildings all a-honeycomb, no. No Hiroshima there. Wet and drying ashes everywhere. She’s more like smooth , still-flowing stumps of black crystal with bits of dead people locked inside, all stuck and tumbling slow, down ditches and down stone-pile, like flies drowned in amber.

“The really pathetic thing, see, is on both sides of town, outside? The highway. The air got sucked out of the sky, and all these people, they asphyxiated. Didn’t get burned, they just drowned without air, if you know what I’m saying. Shockwaves blew all these people into piles and waves, like corn and heaps of crumbled chaff. Course those motes of chaff they large, they’re all heads and hands and pieces stuck in still-tied shoes.

“Many those unburned bodies, they’re over to west and east of town, but it’s… I don’t know. It’s beautiful, if you can understand me in my blasphemy. No? They’re all laid out like patterns made by the wind, like a painting made from the dead. A painting for anyone looking down from the sky.

“A painting by the Archangel.

“Okay. So I was going, coming along to you. Rain starting then, yeah. But things aren’t as wet or cold as you might think. Lot of the scavengers and flies and such? All dead, people aren’t rotting so much as they’re drying out. All you see when you’re driving, threading through all those cars with the hugging people piled up squished between them, worse thing there is the bodies with the gases.

“Sun brighter, when the winds snuffed out. For a time, he more crimson and laughing down on Black Hawk. This before the burning. Bodies bloating and popping, sometimes you’ll be driving and you’ll see a pile of the dead, twisting and contorting and their mouths opening to the sky. Like they’s moving.

“There’s no such thing as zombies, I tell you that right now. Just those dead drying out and their gases, their rotting and their last breaths all releasing themselves. Some of them do move ‘fore they rot all away. It’s like a mist, some of it with the rot in it that you can see. Red crystals in the air, ever rising.

“And through the cracks in your windshield, you taste it, too.

“Made me drive right through that ruin all right quick, let me tell you. Ain’t much left to my burned-out car now, but with me at the wheel she’s a battering ram. Yeah, two frantic stops for business but still, I made it through.

“And then there’s here. Up in the cave. Those people out in your waterfall, your secret tunnel, your shaft and your ladder down? I think I follow those damned souls almost all the way here. You see, I followed that police car.

“That’s right. Who you name Pete, remember, he was alive back then.

“I saw the wink of his car’s tails. Up in the distant cinder-light, that rising crystal mist, as I was first coming down into Black Hawk. They, in his car, was on the other side. As I was descending and forcing my way in, that car he was going up 119 the other side of town. You’d think you couldn’t ever see something like that, miles away. Not even with the dark alight and Black Hawk all in twilight after storm.

“But that police car, he was pushing dead cars aside, glittering in the red come down in a rain from out that bloody sun. He was pushing the dead aside and making waves, making a wake in the wreckage, moving slow. That what I saw. The hollow of almost-clean upon the road. I’m sure I even saw little specks, half-burnt-up people, come hobbling out of that car to siphon gas from other wrecks.

“Yes, he had several people in that car with him.

“I decided they were wise, you see. Not only was it a police car, but whoever those people was, they’d survived . How many specks got back in that car, after they siphon and leave one of their own tumbling out behind upon the road? I don’t know. I decide I’d follow them, but not close. Not so close that they might see.

“Oh, no. The living, you can’t trust no one now. You need other people, but there’s no one you can trust. We, you and I, we may be nearly the last two good souls to breathe.”

“All right. We can talk about that. You’re right, I hiding that from you.

“Not as many died as I care to say. No.

“Thirteen times from out of Denver, I meet the living. It goes like this.

“You roll down your window and hold your breath, you call people by names. If you don’t know their name, you just pick one. ‘Mike? Mike, is that you?’ See, because the real people, they’ll talk to you and scream for help. But most of the people ain’t real, most of them are things .

“Most of these things , the once-people still crawling out there, they ain’t men or women or kids no more. They’s of the Beast, the human is all burned out of them. They’s the hollow men.

“There’s nothing inside them not burned away, but hate and hunger and rape and desperation. See, the most primal needs, the instinct of the dying? They kill as much as they can, before they die. That’s the hate now born inside of them, eating them alive.

“They eat everything that moves. They’re worse than zombies, they’re the living. This ain’t no fantasy, this is the real horror. What people really are, when all that civilization is burned away and there’s only agony, no hope? Hate, that’s all that they are.

“I don’t stop for most, especially after one. I see a girl stooped in the breakdown lane, where US-6 become CO-119. Yeah. Not older than ten, she was eating another soul. Yes, that is what I am saying. And she ‘look’ up at me, my engine sound. Her eyes were all blown out.