Kent Kelly - Archangel

“But they ain’t dolls.

“Driving, oh it’s slow and endless and ever on. You can’t, you ain’t even see but your own frail and ghosted headlights, beams of a drowning glow like vapor spider-webs, swirling maybe twenty feet out in front of you. And you behold , the things them headlights catch in their failing candlelight, you close your eyes so many times and when you hit something soft, soft piles you need to go through, you hit the gas and you just slurry your way through all those bodies and all the low hills that they have made, Lord receive them, choked body-floods with them cars ring all around.

“The people, it seems so many in their dying wanted only, only to… they crawled out of their car windows and they held each other until the end. Piles in the middle of every street where those people all went fetal, buried by the other splayed ones up on top of them, all burned and hollowed out like scarecrows, where all them other burning and dying piled on.

“And oh, the world it is feasting on its ashes. Hungering, howling, the ashes of everything. It’s like the Beast, twisting, dead and feasting, and he’s disintegrating while he drags himself everywhere on all his thousand hands. Phantom hands made of smoke and dust, crawling over all.

“Them ashes, they slither across the road in sticky cables, tentacles of dust that keep together somehow. It’s like some glue made of melted plastic bags that keeps all them ashes together and turns them into churning snakes. It is horror to see, those snakes smogging across beneath and up your headlights, some flying and some crawling, all made of concrete shards and beads of glass and lumps of dead women’s hair.

“The roads? They are the hollowed veins of this old earth now, the termite tracks eaten through the flesh of the endless black. They’s all the world is now. But the lines , the lines that those veins are all cored away and railed on — the breakdown lanes, them yellow dashes for the passing zones — those are the lifelines now. In the dark, the lines will guide you. Those lifelines, they tells you when you’re driving true, they’s tell you as you’re crawling along, following their last threads up into the maze of wreckage.

“You think you guided well and on, you go. But then the wind howl up, and the ash-snakes come a-winding and the world is all a-swirl, tentacles of dust. That sound, them snakes gliding, it’s like dead people sighing all around you. I know that don’t make sense, but that’s what it feels . Endless, endless sighs of the lost, the fingers of that ashen Beast feeling their way through the dark, clawing away the road in front of you. They’s migrating, ever and ever on, ever east. Them’s fingers crawling all over your car on their pilgrimage into darkness.

“Hell come to all souls now still alive, those few souls that the fingers might be crawling to. No forgiveness, no power going to save them.

“And then you drive on and the dust clear with a great moan and the gashes in the sky, the sky is glow-lined . The sky is black cloud in circles, it’s like you’re looking up from the eye of some hurricane straight into a thousand upside-down drains spiraling ashes into the air, that crimson sun enthroned over his wasteland of burning dust, oh I don’t even know how to tell you.

“And the one greatest storm, on high. Archangel .”

“If there was a God, he’s done with us now, his failed experiment. The world is all dried out now, all we are is ashes. The hourglass is turned over, and the bloody husks of sand, of us , are all flowing out upward into that feasting sky. That is all. That is all there will ever be and you know this, you see as you drive on in the endless. And then the great wind come and then — O thank the spirits — all your beholding is gone again.

“And a new black crystal storm is coming, oh it’s time to drive a little faster over the dead and follow those road-lines like strangle-wire into the ever night, like fragile painted spider-threads high into the mountains.

“And let me tell you, Mrs. S.-G., the blind night? She is a mercy laid low compared to all you see in that black and cinder radiance of the day, the Burning World under the Archangel.

“May we be blind, may we never see the path we played behind us.

“Jesus forsake us. Jesus, walk away.

“That blackest storm I went through? She went and gone, on my way up into the mountain. Remember, I was gone up into the west, on to Black Hawk and then to find you. That storm crawling east on all its claws, He’s got another storm coming soon, I know.

“You want out of here, you got to hurry. There be nothing to stop the wind next time, all the trees done burned up, all the grasses gone, and without the green the world’s old skin has been peeled back to set free the fire-blood and the earthen bone. It’s all become dust now, and the dust be the dead people and all their Hondas and Infinitis and all their piles of stupid things.

“Oh I know, I lay as guilty as them all.

“That’s what I fear, the next storm with nothing to be held down. Only the wreckage might be keeping down what’s left of the elder world, that’s all there be now. There’s no forests, no skyscrapers nailing down the tapestry no more.

“But through all that Great Dying, from the Fire, I made it here, oh I did. All the way to Black Hawk, sweet way up known to my heart because the missus, Jenny she like to gamble, see? And pray that I don’t mind.

“Deep dark over mountain, to Black Hawk I knew the way even at twenty feet a span, even the glow and gaslight crawl of my old burned-out car. Plowing through those piles. Headlights all aglow forever on.

“But I did stop and out to look back once, to try to loose my bowels upon the road. What I did see? First nothing. There was only a sound like the cries of dragons welling up from beyond the horizon make me look, bellowing of those dragons given birth out to the east. I had stopped just before I made my black car crawl up that pass, there was horrible sounds below all where Denver once was.

“And those roars did push a little moonlight and burning cloud to light the way for some time.

“And let me tell you what I saw: that wind, that cyclone with everything in its belly but the rain, she was so strong she was pulling up cars, flipping dead bodies into cartwheels, tumbling Mack trucks like they was toys. That cyclone and her dragon’s hoard, that pile of twisted everything, they’s all rolled up in piling hills now out to Kansas and left out to decay. Huge piles of death and tumble, all waiting for the rain.

“I not tell you? The rain, she starting when I come in. Yes, still somehow it rains. Dark and thick as greasy ice and warm upon your face, leaving stains on you so deep you never will come clean.

“And when she rain, I believe that whole range of wreckage hills, that endless ash out to Kansas is going to turn itself to mud. And that mud, that’s going to bake out and harden into concrete, a concrete made of cars and skulls and torsos without legs and all our ashes, that concrete going to set itself hard as stone.

“So next the storm, the Great Storm, it going to start all over again. Beat that concrete with the thunder, hammer those bones with blackest rain. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. I bet you anything, best part of this God-lost world going to be buried ten feet deep in another hundred years.

“Who knows? Maybe, somewhere a hundred years from now, a flower dare to grow. Maybe somewhere too, some young hand be there to pick that flower, and some mind to dream. To wonder what lie beneath.

“But that’s all, that’s all yesterday. You won’t see as I have seen, if you journey through the storm-eye. Go soon. Keep to the mountains best you can. Should you drive quick, between that first storm and this Great One’s rising, you might just behold a Hell-world with a crimson sky and misted ashes flying. A brighter, dying twilight.