Hell followed with us, p.24
Hell Followed with Us, page 24
It doesn’t hit all at once. At first, it’s a crushing weight slamming down on my hand, like the world has been dropped onto it, then something wedging all the little bones apart, and then the pain of it finally snaps, and I scream.
“The sinful blood has been let!” Reverend Brother Ward cries, pulling out the blade, still shiny with my blood, and handing it off to Brother Tipton. This wasn’t supposed to happen, what is happening, what the fuck is happening—”You have felt half the pain of Jesus just as you, blessed Seraph, will follow in His footsteps and continue our journey toward God.”
I stare at the black hole in my hand, just like the black hole in Dad’s head, streaming rot-tinged blood into the river. I think I’m screaming, but I’m not sure because I can’t hear a thing besides the howling of the river, the howling of the monster between the trees, and the howling of Reverend Brother Ward.
“Let the water wash away your sins; let yourself be cleansed by the blood of the Lamb!”
Ward grabs me by the shoulders and plunges me into the river.
The beast between the trees, monster of fangs, feathers, and flesh, Seraph—it chooses that moment to explode.
The agony is instant. White-hot burning from my hand to every inch of me, climbing up my spine to the spot behind my eyes. My vision cuts out under the murky water of the river, and my hearing comes rushing back all at once, shrieking. My body is being dragged to shore, and every bone creaks like branches in a storm. I fall to the river rocks and vomit up what looks like an organ, almost whole, a bundle of wet black flesh that washes away with the tide. Sister Kipling grabs one of my arms, and Theo grabs the other, and I scream and pull away but Sister Kipling grabs my hair and holds me to her chest.
She’s barking orders, “To the lab! Get the fuck out of here!” Then Theo is on the ground, clutching a broken hand, and I think for a blurry moment, Did I do that? just as his index finger snaps on its own. Brother Abrams clutches his skull before it splits down the side, revealing a gaping maw of teeth. Reverend Brother Ward stares at the dark liquid trickling from his mouth, dripping off his chin.
Something moves underneath the bloody skin of my back before erupting—the raw, new flesh ripping me to shreds, then a second, then a third, unfurling and tearing me apart.
I realize, as Mom and Sister Kipling drag me into the grass, that they are wings.
And then, in the last second, even through the pain, another—I did not give the order. I did not whisper for the Graces to turn on their masters. My word will not spread from Grace to Grace like a plague, dragging this horrible place down into the flames.
Nick will not be coming for me.
We have made so many mistakes. Am I the only one unable to sleep at night?
—Sister Kipling’s notes
There are no bodies on the culling field today, so it can’t be real. There’s no buzzing of flies, no metronome dripping of blood. A crow hops from branch to branch in search of food that isn’t there. The water flowing down the stream is fresh too, so clear I could drink from it.
The beast isn’t here. No fangs, no feathers, no flesh. I touch my face, and my fingers meet smooth cheek instead of exposed teeth. There are no open sores on my legs, just plain white skin. I’m not in my dress, either. I’m in the clothes I’m supposed to be in—baggy shorts and a black jacket, sneakers instead of standing barefoot in the water.
New Nazareth is silent. Not a body exists except my own.
It isn’t right.
I need to find the beast.
I leave the stream and go to the student union but find nothing on the roof. All I’m offered is a beautiful view of campus, with a bonfire of red and orange leaves lighting up in the gold of late afternoon.
Why am I still this? Why am I still no different than I was weeks ago? There’s no tongue weighing down my jaw, no open wounds to feel the wind. I’m just a boy standing on a roof, alone. But I shouldn’t think about it too hard. When I’m here, I’m not out there. Going out there means having to deal with the pain, and nothing hurts right now.
And there shall be no night there; and they need no candle, neither light of the sun; for the Lord God giveth them light.
For the world will burn under the weight of it.
I walk across campus until I make it to the old health center, Sister Kipling’s building. The laboratory, the office, the examination room. I muscle aside the glass doors and follow the basement stairwell all the way down to a deep, oppressive hall.
At the end is the room I am being kept in.
A narrow sliver of glass cuts through the door, offering the only glimpse inside that isn’t hidden tight behind laboratory walls.
I press my face to it. It’s cold. It feels more real than anything ever has here.
A bulging white eye surrounded by rot stares back.
That’s me.
Surely I come quickly. Amen. Even so, come, Lord Jesus.
* * *
Even through the hellfire, talking:
“How much longer?” Mom. Her voice is choked. I think. Choked? Over me? “It looks—”
Sister Kipling: “You don’t have to watch if you don’t want to, Reverend Mother.”
“I do. Answer me.”
Shuffling. “At least a day.”
A day?
A day?
A day?
* * *
The pain is in an ebb now. It comes and goes like the tide, in and out. Big changes, then little ones to fill in the gaps.
I stretch my hands, and shattered-bone claws carve tracks in the floor of the isolation room. I want to stand, throw myself against the walls, tear the door off its hinges. But I am exhausted, and my wings weigh me down. Fleshy newborn things. Heavy and useless.
My neck and chest are sticky with black bile. My dress is stained and torn, and my unholy mess of a body has escaped it. It destroys the perfect whiteness of this room. Good.
Across from me, there’s a two-way mirror halfway up one wall and a small hole for people to speak through. That’s why I can hear voices, murmuring.
Mom says, “How’s Brother Clairborne?”
“He’s fine.” Sister Kipling. “The effects were minor. Reverend Brother Ward and Brother Abrams are under observation now. Tipton wasn’t so lucky.”
“Poor souls. It happened so quickly.”
That agony—was that me? Did I do that?
“It’s fascinating, really, how even latent microdoses of the virus react in Seraph’s presence. A side effect of the blooming, causing a mirror effect in nearby infected tissue. It should calm in time, once the virus settles, but—”
“As long as it happens quickly.”
Please, God, if You prove Your existence by making this stop, I swear I’ll follow You for the rest of my days.
Then, of course, proof that Mom has dug faith into me like thorns under my skin, like a tattoo I can’t carve off, like trauma: Even when my chest splits open the next second, I think, But He still might be real, and I’m just too broken to feel it. It’s my fault.
* * *
Another ebb, another pulling back, another breath. My hair falls out in clumps. Blood and Flood rot have mixed together on the floor into something wine colored.
My body is too big for itself. My limbs are long, like they’ve been stretched on a rack, bending in places they shouldn’t and packed with muscle and tumors. Painful barbs jut from my shoulders and the curve of my wings, right where little spikes grow into feathers. I press my face against the tiles and gasp for air.
I wonder how Nick, Erin, the Watch, and the rest of the ALC are doing. There’s an emptiness in my chest where something used to be, and I can’t tell if it was another organ I can’t keep track of anymore or the sinking feeling of failure. Nick and the Watch were right there, waiting for me, and my body tore itself to pieces before I could raise my hand and turn the Graces against the Angels.
That was my one job, and it fell apart because I waited for Reverend Brother Ward to make me bleed.
I failed. And now Nick and the rest probably have no idea what to do.
Neither do I.
The door opens. Sister Kipling comes in.
She’s the opposite of saintly, with her hair unwashed and glasses sitting crookedly on her nose, though there’s a look in her eyes like she’s about to be martyred any second. Watching for arrows or burning stakes.
She created the Flood. She built Seraph. She killed so many people to make me, she turned me into a monster, and she can’t look me in the eyes. The Angels have made her a living saint, and she doesn’t even have the decency to take advantage of it. They’ll let her do anything, and she spends that leniency staring into the middle distance, hardly ever blinking, her hands wracked with tremors. I have never once seen her pray. I have only ever heard her talk in whispers, except for the terrible moment on the riverbank.
She’s going gray. Her glasses are held together with tape at the temples. The crosses on the back of her hands look like they were done weeks ago, not years, almost painful in how swollen and raised they are.
She says, “I wanted to talk to you. Without your mother.”
Sister Kipling sits at my head, as if she’s kneeling at the altar of my body. I have no sense of myself anymore besides the fact that I am not what I once was. I’m too tired to see my body from the eyes of others, in the terrible way transness demands—always existing both inside and outside myself, judging as an observer. Now, I am a pile of flesh on the floor, everything hurts, and I do not give a shit.
She says, “I just wanted to say I’m sorry,” grabs one of the budding feathers sprouting at my shoulder, and tears it from me.
Pain rips through the delicate, dying skin, and I shriek, moving faster than I have in hours to slam into her tiny body and drive her to the floor. I’m hunched over her, towering over her, limp wings sagging and claws digging into the floor inches from her skull. My arms tremble under my own weight. I’m so, so much bigger than her. Her neck would tear so easily. A drop of saliva falls onto her collarbone, and she chokes down a whimper.
I should kill her for what she did. She deserves it. Dad told me to make them suffer.
“Please,” she says.
Please…what?
A cold pit settles in my stomach, a horrible contrast to the fire still searing through me.
I step back, my wings dragging on the floor.
She wants me to kill her.
“No!” She reaches for me, snatching for my jaw the way soldiers hold their Graces. I rear back, and she grabs me by my half-broken arm. “Seraph, please. Please.”
This is all her fault—everything she’s ever done to me, to the people who came before me, every single person who suffered as the Flood broke them apart. I should tear her to shreds, drag her by the leg and bite it off, and crush her body under my claws.
“I know you hate me,” she says, clinging to me, “and you have every right. I understand. If it’s any consolation, we’re all going to Hell for what we’ve done.”
She—
Our living saint is saying the Angels are going to Hell.
Our living saint is…a heretic?
No. No, it doesn’t work like that. She can’t be. She created the Flood. She built Seraph from the ground up. She destroyed me, she destroyed everything. And now she’s trying to repent her repentance? Now she feels bad? Now?
She’s so close. Her face is so close to my fangs. I should just end her. End whatever bullshit she’s trying to pull, end this pathetic attempt to trick me.
But I can’t.
Even though my jaw is dislocated and my insides bubble up when I speak, I manage, “Why?”
“Why?” Her lip trembles. Her hands find my face, and she holds me close, like she’s trying to cradle me, keep me away from the stained white walls and bloody floor. “We have made so many mistakes. I never should have wanted this.” Her eyes are glassy—with terror, remorse, martyrdom. It scares me. “If I can’t take it all back, I can do this. Please, let me do one thing right.”
Mistakes. Let her do one thing right.
But why now? Why is she coming to me now, when I am this—not when she could have stopped this, when she could have never stepped into the Angels’ arms in the first place? Why didn’t she stop when I begged her to? Is it now that she can look me in the eyes and see what she’s done?
I speak because I have to. “Mistakes.”
Sister Kipling says, “Yes. A mistake.”
“I could tell Mom,” I say. “Have you killed.”
“If you want me dead, you can do that now.”
I snap my teeth at her. She squeezes her eyes shut and does not move.
She says, “Lord, just make it quick.”
So I sit back and watch. Watch the heaving of her chest, the quiver to her lip, her fingers clutching her stained white coat.
A heretic. It’s too good to be true.
Nobody who has caused this much suffering deserves an easy ending. She doesn’t get to do one thing right to take even the smallest weight off her soul.
God will judge whether she has truly changed her ways in her heart, but I don’t have the luxury of being sure. I’m fucked no matter what I do, so I might as well try.
She can let Nick know I’m still alive.
O sacred head now wounded, with grief and shame weighed down, now scornfully surrounded with thorns, Thine only crown!
—Angel hymn
The pain eases eventually, like most pain does, and God has nothing to do with it. It’s less the ebbing of a tide and more watching a tsunami wash back out to sea, taking everything with it except bones and exhaustion. It’s the kind of exhaustion where even breathing is a struggle. Where you’re almost asleep, but you barely have the presence of mind to close your eyes.
The door opens again. I pick my head up the best I can, expecting to see Sister Kipling, but standing in the threshold instead are Theo and Mom. Their eyes are wide like they’ve never seen a Grace before. Like they’ve never seen a monster or blood.
“Oh God,” Theo whispers.
“Brother Clairborne,” Mom chides. “Don’t take His name in vain.” Her voice isn’t as sharp as it could be. It wavers, unsteady and small.
Good. Let her see what she’s made of me.
“I’m not,” Theo says. “God, look at you.” He starts into the room, and Mom tries to follow, but Sister Kipling appears in the narrow space between them, murmuring that she should give us some space. Mom jerks back—”That’s my child,” she says—but Theo takes the opportunity and shuts the door behind him.
He smiles. “Hey.”
He’s carrying a pail of water and a towel over his shoulder, and there are two things about him that are different. One: His left hand is bandaged. Creeping out from under the gauze are cracks like mine, the edges of lumps and broken bones.
And two: There is a little spark inside him. Something that calls to me, one of my neurons wormed inside his brain. Milling around like ants, firefly sparks, feathers.
“Sorry,” Theo says. “I know I’m staring. I just—wow. Look at you.” He takes the towel off his shoulder and kneels beside me. “How are you feeling?”
I take my first words slowly, try to make my mouth and throat do what I’ve always done, just form the words and put them out there. Instead, I choke. My body worked when Kipling was here, so why won’t it now? It doesn’t come naturally anymore. I have to force it, the way you have to blink manually when you’re reminded of your eyelids. And when I do make a single word, it sounds like something else, an animal putting together sounds in a rough mockery of human speech.
“Better,” I say, and it is awful.
Theo dunks the towel in the water, picking up my head so he can clean the black sludge off my neck and chin. His fingers trace my jaw. “Good. Sister Kipling says it’s all over. I swear, it looked like one of Dad’s old zombie movies. Did you know he used to be a horror buff before all this? I think it’s why he likes the Graces so much.” He squeezes the towel, and gross water splatters onto the floor. “I think I’m starting to see the appeal.”
He stretches out one of my wings. He has to step back a few paces to get its full length, huffing a little under its weight. Once it’s laid along the floor, he starts working through the feathers: smoothing them out, picking at pieces of skin trapped between them, preening. The wings are white like everything else in the room, but the color doesn’t make up for how ugly they are, like the rest of the white things I’ve ever known. There is nothing smooth or beautiful about them, the way angel’s wings are in paintings. They’re fleshy and twisted, the kind of wings a human body would make if forced to build them out of materials it wasn’t meant to have. Six of them, giant and sickly and useless, only good for being tucked up against my sides.
And for being a symbol. From Mom’s letter to the faithful: For when Seraph spreads its six wings and screams, it strikes the fear of God into the hearts of all who witness.
“You look tired,” he says. I am. “But if it means anything, I’m proud of you.”
He leans down to my face. He’s so small now. I used to be a few inches shorter than him but even down here, curled up on the floor, I am menacingly large.
He kisses my forehead anyway.
“And your mom is too,” he says. “Even if she’s not good at showing it.”
I rasp, having to force every word. “I don’t want to hear it from her.”
Theo sighs. “I know. I’m sorry.”
I reach for his bandaged hand, my claws enveloping his entirely. He undoes the strips of gauze for me, letting them dangle to the floor.
It’s still recognizable as a hand. Five fingers, a palm, a wrist. But it looks like it was run through a wood chipper and sewn back together. Pieces of bones jut out—some breaking the skin, some just pressing up against it like they’re straining to escape—with muscle and discolored flesh holding it together.
