Kent Kelly - Archangel

“Enough!”

If she did not act at all, he would die. If he died as a result of her actions, she would tell herself that it was inevitable, that she had done good work and done no wrong, and she would forgive herself. Somehow.

There is no one to hear your sins, Sophie.

“I don’t care. I’m alive. Let me deal with the living.”

Silence at last within her mind.

“All right, then.” She considered. Silas would need to be sanitized, bathed. A shock to the system. The water might kill him and it might not. But the filth and septic toxins of his burn-flesh surely would. His torso would need to be slathered in burn ointment, and then she would need to start sewing shut any open wounds that would reveal themselves as his burned skin sloughed off.

“Sewing,” she mumbled, not realizing she was using her sister’s voice. “Like Girl Scouts, Sophie.” She giggled once, to keep from screaming.

If any of the fabric of the shirt or the boxer shorts was ever going to come off — and, by coming off, reduce the one hundred percent chance of fatal infection — it would have to be now.

The logistics of this were still confounding. There was no time.

She opened the shower, turned the water spigot’s indicator more toward hot than cold. Then, holding her breath, slipping her hands gently under Silas’s armpits, she pulled him standing.

The flesh beneath his arms was hot, pulpy and pliant with blisters both ruptured and unopened. His head lolled again and he did not regain consciousness, but he gave a moaning sigh. The black foam bubbled out and trickled down his chest. She lifted him all the way upright; no resistance. How could he be lighter than only minutes ago?

Because you are in Hell, because this is eternity.

“No.”

In. She stood with him in the shower, sharing the cascade, one final rite before the end.

The water pulsed over him, over Sophie’s face as she tried to cradle him up against the wall. He crumpled and fell against her. Sweet-smelling mist puffed up, flitting little bits of black burned flesh and the shreds of moistened scabs into the air.

Sophie gagged, a stark inhalation turned into a rush of stomach acid from the other direction. She vomited over her shoulder, fell, and landed on crackling knees, struggling to balance Silas down between her legs.

He twisted as he fell with her, crying out, and she turned him so that his back would be cleansed by the pure cascading water.

There.

He screamed.

His arms went around Sophie’s neck, and his fingers dug into her back. “Stop,” he begged her. “Stop. Please. Puh. Puh…”

He fell unconscious once more, a merciful oblivion.

Tears and water and disgorged bile ran down Sophie’s face as she quickly turned him, cleansing his shedding flesh as best she could. His skin was not only blistering then, shedding, it was turning from African American brown to lobster red. Turning hard and shiny. There was not as much blood as she had hoped. Hardly any of the shirt was coming off. Where there were creases, the folds betweens his fingers, and in the clefts of his skeletal armpits, the layers of tissue were turning to jeweled translucent sheets of once-flesh, surfaces which shone like melting plastic. Skin fell off his back in sheets. Pus leaked out of soft spots which hardened around the divots between each of his vertebrae.

He barely woke in her arms, then. And he murmured, “ Itches. Jenny, can you scratch that?” An almost-scream thereafter, a breath turned into a wheeze. A cough of something greenish mixed with spittle over her shoulder. “Jenny? So cold .”

Sophie shushed him, turned him, and the burnt remnants of the man swirled down the drain. His sloughing flesh smelled like burning cinnamon pried up sweet from beneath the rind, whirling in little tendrils down to darkness. Shreds of wasted human being sucked away, deep beneath the world.

He’s melting. Oh, he’s melting down the drain.

Sophie giggled madly. She bit her lip, stifling herself.

The fingers of Silas splayed out toward the end, when there was nothing more of him that was liquid, when all the blood and pus and sanies (Or filth, or stink, or whatever you call it) had washed away. Something glittering emerged between his shaking fingers. A blackened and partially-melted wedding ring was perched upon one finger, and a dark crescent hollow beneath it showed where the finger that bore it had once been much larger.

The waters fell. Sophie stared at that crescent, that hollow between his bony finger and promise gold, for a very long time.

The ring, it wanted to come off. Even in delirium, barely conscious, Silas kept the ring from washing away by clasping it with his thumb.

“Oh, God, hurts .”

She shushed him, held him as she would her only child.

“Help me hold,” he said. He palmed the ring. She held the hand that kept it.

The most curious detail came into focus then as Sophie, crying, interlaced Silas’s fingers with her own. Some of his fingernails were beautiful, crystal blue. It took her a moment to realize that these were beads of molten glass, something he had touched when it was hot, perhaps a melting window or a vase. These sapphire beads of melting glass had fused with his fingertips, and each had cooled there. The glass, too, was a part of him now.

His head bobbed up. It was as if he had been sleep-talking, and now his voice was raw and loud as it rang out back and forth along the shower tiles. “Jenny!”

Sophie did not speak.

He cried out again. “Jenny?” Pleading this time, searching. Trying to touch her face. Looking for her with eyes closed, and finding a stranger there. Then: “Oh, Lord Gabriel. Gabriel, forgive.”

And Sophie rose straighter with his body cradled up against her. “It’s going to be okay. It’s okay.”

Silas sobbed, his face trapped between her neck and shoulder. Water pooled in the cleft there and took his tears.

There was one last part of him to wash, his face. Sophie turned Silas’s head beneath the falling waters, and even as he wept he screamed there all the more. She braced his wrists, and pinned him there. He was easy to conquer, he was nothing. There was nothing else she could do.

One patch of flannel, toward the end, pulled itself apart in a fraying line and fell from him. It swirled around the drain.

Seven hours after, perhaps. Or eight? Such things no longer mattered.

Silas shivered, despite his bandages, as Sophie layered another of Tom’s blankets over his cot. He opened one of his eyes.

She bent her ear to hear his words, to hold them in her memory. If he was going to die she was determined to honor him. She had failed Peter, she had tried to do this in her love for Tom, but her one-sided sendings to those dead men had been matters of solitude. This man, here, she could watch the beauty wreath itself and all the life go out of him. She could speak, reassure, and she could be there.

Silas was the first survivor, perhaps the only, she could ever usher to his peace.

As she bent to hear his whisper, she waited. When it came, it was soft and urgent and it was this: “Damn, I’m hungry.”

She lifted her head back away from him. Surprise and a born affection wrinkled their way up her brow. She smiled, she cupped her hands over her mouth and almost laughed. Silas’s other eye opened, just a sliver of burnished gold reflecting light. But this time, he tried and failed to prop himself up on his elbows.

A look of lackadaisical annoyance appeared upon his face. It was a mundane expression, a thing of the luxurious world which had just been savaged away to nothingness. It almost looked like he was waiting for a bus that was a few minutes late, and he was about to tell someone standing next to him what a piss-off irritation that could be.