Fires Rising (12 page)

…promises man the end of days.

He focused upon Timothy's waiting gaze, the boy's eyes sharp beneath a mask of filth and fear. Without hesitation, he spoke with authority, the shaky fear lessened: "We were brought here by God to fight a war.
All
of us. And we will adhere to His command. Why us? I do not know. But there is a reason, for God never acts without just cause or purpose. We will uncover this purpose, and use it to gain strength against the evil that promises man the end of days!"

He waited here to see if any of the men would recognize the haunting phrase. They didn't. They all stood there unmoving, looking at him respectfully with a willingness to go along with his contained strategy. Even Rollo.

Why?

Because, like me, they have all been brought here for a reason.

He swept his gaze across the pitiful group, and said, "Before we move on, before anyone else gets hurt, let's try and figure out why
we
were the ones that were called here…"

H
e is walking amid a colorless landscape pitted with destruction. A city of death surrounding him, buildings and streets destroyed, their occupants long vanished. He is the last man standing, God's final living, breathing creature on an earth buried beneath the severities of apocalypse. The skies shine red and black, the clouds thick and permanent, swollen with fatal acids. Black rain pours down on him, dousing his skin with disease. Should he live beyond this day, his flesh and blood will wither and rot, not long after his mind finds itself buried beneath the infection, suffocating from brutal oppression, entirely unable to comprehend the annihilations that have taken place.

But for now, he remains whole and lucid, gazing out upon the torn landscape, eyes heavily poisoned from witnessing its cause.
He
was the one who made this happen.
He
was the root cause of this destruction, simply because he had not found the strength within to defeat the evil that had promised man the end of days.

A wind picks up. Wet debris flies into his face. For a moment, he shields his eyes, then takes a breath of searing pain and peers down at his hands. Here he sees blood, warm and wet against his skin. He gazes at his bare feet. The wounds are there too, bleeding out from punctures in his heel bones. He struggles to utter through split and bleeding lips, "Stigmata," his voice beaten back by the bitter vacuum and pouring rain that surrounds him. He holds his bleeding hands up to the dark, pregnant sky, screaming, "Noooo!" Rivulets of blood wash up his forearms to his wasted biceps and shoulders. Black bolts of lightning fill the sky like dead branches.
 
"I am no savior…" he whimpers, utterly drained of strength, a sudden stench of ozone filling the dense air.

"
But you are, Antonio", comes a familiar voice from behind. The accent is thick with Italian heritage.

"Mother…" He turns to face her. She stands before him, only feet away, the black tattered robe shrouding her frail body billowing in the tainted wind. She is unaffected by the years of dementia that had contaminated her mind and body. She is entirely normal looking, perhaps as she might have been had she not been stricken with disease in her later years.

She places a gentle finger across her pink lips. Here he sees the ruby ring of scars she'd for years claimed to wear upon her finger. She speaks softly, eloquently, the wind tossing her gray hair across her face. "God has placed the blood on your hands because you have lived your life free of sin. He sends to you a message Antonio, and you must heed it. If you so choose to deny his appeal, then this will be your consequence." She waves a hand beside her, motioning toward the ruined landscape.

"
M-Mother," he stammers, dehydrated eyes unable to provide the tears they aimed to produce. "How…?"

For a second time she silences him with a finger against her lips…just as she used to do when he was a child. The ring on her finger is darker now, the scars thick and wrinkled. "Antonio…long ago Christ came to me, and united with me, leaving with me this ring of flesh upon my finger. As the Creator and Savior's bride, he delivered to me my son, with a purpose that remained to me unwhispered in my time on earth. I kept his faith hidden until the day I was called to sacrifice myself into the arms of His divine will. I went to Him, in Heaven, and celebrated the marriage that has no end—and it is why now, Antonio, that you can see the ring I have worn for much of my life."

He pulls his gaze from her eyes to her finger, where she displays the ridge of flesh she professes to be the ring of Christ.

"Fear not, my son: it was Christ who made you choose faith for empowerment in my dying days. After I was gone, you maintained your faith steadfastly, which enabled Him to behold the strength in you.
You are His son.
And now, he needs you. Do as He says, Antonio."

He steps forward, thinking of the faceless man his mother had told him about only once when he was a teen—the man that had come into his mother's life, fathered him, and then left, never to return.

Was this 'man' Jesus Christ?

Suddenly, from within the tattered shell of a nearby building, a dog appears. It is large and black, with eyes as red as fire. It begins to bark ferociously. Pilazzo moves his glance back and forth, between the dog and his mother, who now bears lacerations upon her forehead that spell out the word
CHRIST.
Blood seeps down from the jagged letters into her eyes, which remain unblinking. "Mother," he calls, but she holds her hands forward and steps back, fading into the gray environment and leaving him with an alarming choice of parting words: "Your church awaits you…"

Alone now, he looks back at the dog. His heart pounds with terror. The dog kicks up wet black ash with its hind legs, and approaches him, foam-burdened jaws growling furiously.

Pilazzo shoves his bleeding hands toward the dog. Pain attacks his body at five distinct points: his hands, his feet, and at the right side of his torso.
Where Jesus was speared.
He cries out in the words of the Apostle Paul, "I bear in my body the marks of the Lord Jesus Christ!"

The dog releases a series of barks…and then leaps at him.

He holds his bleeding hands high and screams for his mother…

…b
ut she didn't come. Instead he woke from the feverish nightmare on the floor of his bedroom, buried in terror, darkness, and a vague form of consciousness. He remained there for a long period of time, allowing the seconds to evolve into minutes, the minutes into an hour or more. His breathing remained slow and painful, his lungs rattling as if mired in pneumonia. His mouth was parched, and so were his eyes, and when he tried to open them, his lids stuck to them painfully. He reached a hand out and touched the familiar knobby texture of the rug, then raised a finger to his face and gently peeled his eyes open, one at a time.

The first thing he saw was the Mother-of-God nightlight he bought during his last trip to Rome, the small bulb within painting the room in a pale yellow glimmer. He rolled his eyes up toward the mirror,

(your church awaits you)

and then more quickly, to his hands, which in his dream,
and in my waking state
, had bled with the marks of Christ.

They were unblemished. Unmarked. He shook his head with both denial and confusion. Had he dreamed it all?

He struggled to his feet, groaning as the bones in his back grated and popped. He was dimly aware of his head throbbing, feeling as it had on those occasions he'd drunk a bit too much red wine with dinner, and had woken with a hangover. Silence ruled the world around him. He leaned up against the dresser to rub his eyes. The room rocked and creaked back and forth. His legs and feet tingled with numbness.

Out of the blue, his mind began to pick up some images from his dream. They came back to him in glimpses, reminding him of the horrific landscape he'd visited, and the inauspicious words of warning from his mother. For a moment he considered trying to make sense of what he saw, but the fearful warning of coincidence rained down on him again, overwhelming him too much to think it all through.

Still, his mind taunted him:
my mother, the bride of Christ. Me, the son of Christ?
In life, she used to claim the ring of Christ on her finger. He'd always feigned his belief in her by nodding his head and touching her finger, and then he would smile and pace away, assuming her religious fanaticism as something swayed by the perils of her dementia.

But now, he wondered.

It was just a dream, and nothing more.
Or was it? His dream-mother had alluded to a message he'd received in his waking state, (
your church awaits you)
, and that he had no choice but heed it, lest he suffer the apocalyptic environment surrounding them (
the evil that promises man the end of days)
. It was just as the homeless man in the confessional had alluded to—and just as Monsignor Sanchez had mentioned. All additional coincidences, trying his mind.

Scared, he ran a trembling hand through his hair, feeling sweat. He peered over at the clock on his nightstand.

It was dark.

Was the power out?

Couldn't be. The nightlight was on, jutting from the socket behind a frosted glass shell. He focused upon the Mother-of-God portrait hand-painted on the shell's surface, her wide glossy eyes aimed remorsefully toward the wall above his bed.

Your church awaits you…

He stepped to the doorway, felt out the light switch on the wall. With his eyes still fixed on the nightlight, he flipped it up.

Then down. Then repeatedly, up and down.

Darkness lingered.

He gripped the doorjamb and stuck his head out into the hallway, now a taunting, pitch black hole, the nightlights once guiding him to his room also extinguished.

The power
was
out.

Everything, except the Mother-of-God nightlight in his room.

He gazed back at it, intently now.

The Mary-painting's eyes were no longer aimed above the bed.

They were peering directly at
him
.

Gasping, he lurched sideways from the room into the sheer darkness of the hallway. His mouth wrenched. He was petrified, unable to define the sudden blur between that which was perversely real and utterly insane. He fled unsteadily with his hands outstretched, bumping into the walls like a mechanical toy. He opened his mouth to shout out, but only weak sobs escaped his bone-dry throat. He touched blindly along the right wall and came to an opening. He shoved his head into the unseen bedroom. "
Is anyone here?"
he cried out breathlessly, not seeing but knowing that he was the only man left.
Like in my dream.

He received no response.

Short of breath, he continued down the hall, fear sapping the strength from his body as if his blood were being drained. Tears rained from his eyes, leaving warm tracks against his cheeks.

He heard a noise.

Is that…music?

The next door he arrived at was closed. He leaned against the paneled surface, heart slamming so hard that it nearly blocked his ears from hearing the light play of Bizet from the turntable behind the closed door.

Monsignor Sanchez's room.

He pressed an ear against the door, listening closely and realizing suddenly that something sounded
off
about the usually familiar classical music. It could have been the swell of immeasurable fear ripping through his body, mind, and soul, that had him so confused and perhaps delusional…but in this surreal moment, he was almost certain of what he was hearing.

The music…it was
playing backwards.

Silently, he ran a hand along the door and grasped the knob. Instantly he was reminded, before succumbing to his dream, of standing at the threshold of his own room and receiving a jolt of static electricity upon touching the doorknob. The same thing happened now. Only now, in the darkness, he could see it: a flash of blue light, like a burst of sheet lightning through a rain-soaked window. It gloved his hand for a split second, and then vanished, leaving blotches of imaginary light dancing in his sights. And it
hurt
, more so than any static shock might cause, as though he'd just barehanded a few dozen volts of electricity off an exposed wire.

Despite the pain, he maintained his grip, and turned the knob.

The door moved forward with a loud creak.

He stepped into Monsignor Sanchez's room.

Like his own room, there was a tiny bit of light in here: the same pallid splay from the bathroom he noticed during his earlier visit. The room was vacant now, eerie beneath the indistinct wash of light and play of backwards Bizet. He eyed the turntable against the far wall and could see a small dark glow on the record's surface as it not only spun backwards, but seemed to skip over and over again: the same few seconds of music blaring from the tiny inset speakers. He stepped to the aged turntable, hearing now something else in the six or seven seconds of
Farandole
playing in reverse.