Guinea Pig (17 page)

Their signs were everywhere. But of the Fallen themselves, he'd never seen one. And he'd never heard of them physically destroying the world. Not outside of the movies.

Finally Elijah asked the question that mattered if the bishop was right. He didn't want to ask. But this was the meeting he had called even if it was going strangely. He had to ask. “What chance do the Fallen think they have?”

“A man with a soul who from what you have said has been confirmed in the faith. A Christian even if lapsed. But at the same time a creature with the power of the angels. He walks between two worlds, and as the transformation continues his power will grow.”

“The Fallen surely believe that if his power grows sufficiently he will become a Fallen angel like them. But one with a soul and free will so that he cannot be cast down by God for disobedience. He is permitted to disobey. He can free them. And in doing so he will bring about the end of days.”

The pastor thought about that for a bit. Trying to work out whether it was madness or wisdom. And while it sounded like madness, there was still something in it that would not let him dismiss it out of hand. Maybe it was the fact that much of the world seemed to have descended into madness of late. And how were you supposed to pick out the true madness from the false? He didn't know, save that he knew it had to be done by faith.

“I've spoken to William Simons, come to know him a little bit. Twice since he has finally learned of what Doctor Millen did to him. And while he is no saint he is a good man. His faith may be stretched, but I do not believe that he would ever willingly do as you fear.”

“Willingly?” The bishop stared at him. “Perhaps not. But the Fallen will whisper to him as they whisper to others. They will lie to him. Deceive him. Confuse him. And when they are finished he may not know what is right and what is wrong.”

“He knows what's right and wrong Bishop Benenson. And there seems to be little anger in his heart. Only sorrow and despair. And a need to spare those he loves as much pain as he can.” Which was why he had the pastor writing letters for him. Letters to send to his family when the time came. Far from angry as he had every right to be, the man was resigned to his fate.

“He no longer knows how to read and write. He is seeing hallucinations. What he knows is becoming less by the day. And what he will believe if someone whispers it into his soul becomes greater with it.”

“So what do we do?”

Elijah decided that there was no point in debating the theology of nephilim any further just then. Only in the practical.

“We do whatever we have to do to save the world. And that has to begin with the government. They have to be told of this. Maybe their scientists can do something where Doctor Millen cannot. And when things change as they must and Mr. Simons becomes dangerous, they will have to contain him. If they can.”

“Dangerous?”

“At some point Mr. Simons will look to open the gates. Maybe if he is a prisoner that can be stopped. He may be the most dangerous man in existence. And by the end he may not even be a man.”

“That's -.” Elijah tried to think of a word to say what that was, and suddenly discovered that he didn't have one. It was madness, but it might also not be. It was a violation of a man's rights, but if the bishop was right it might also be the only thing to do. Certainly it was a sin against William Simons, but at the same time he had the thought that the man was moving beyond caring. The last time he'd seen him William had not only been resigned to his fate, but also wandering mentally. You could see it in his eyes. The way they lost focus every so often. The way he looked away and when he did you felt that his thoughts were far further away than whatever they gazed upon. William was slipping away, little by little.

“I know.” The bishop answered him even when he couldn't finish his own sentence. “But do we have a choice?”

And as he sat there staring at the bishop, Elijah suddenly realised that he couldn't answer him. He didn't know what was right or wrong in this. That was an unusual thing for him. But he suspected it was something that was going to become more common as time went on.

Chapter Nineteen.

The lightning touched down beside Will and it startled him. But only a little. For hours it had been the same. The massive storm was currently covering the entire city and according to what he'd heard on the radio much of the state. And like everything that had gone before it, it was causing terrible destruction. Those planes that had been hit while in the air had crashed. All their lightning protection systems had been completely overloaded by these bolts. Cars everywhere were exploding. Some of them were actually melting, such was the ferocity of the lightning. Where it touched concrete the concrete exploded. Roads and buildings were slowly being blown apart by it. Power to half the state was down. Wires and transmission plants had been destroyed. Fires were once more burning out of control. And no one had any idea how many more had been killed.

No one could explain what was causing it. There was no wind, no rain, no storm. The sky was a perfect blue and the sun was shining brightly. Again. This wasn't the sort of whether for lightning. And no lightning strikes on Earth had ever been so powerful. Nor had there ever been so many at once. Not in recorded history. So what else was new?

In fact there was only one thing that Will did understand: the pattern. This disaster, whatever it was, was growing. Growing more intense, and covering a wider area. There was a pattern. The sink hole had only affected the clinic. The ice storm fifty square miles. The lava bombs had rained down over the entire city and its surrounds. And now the lightning was covering half the state. When this was over and the next disaster hit, how bad would it be?

Evacuations were no longer possible. Not just because of how many were affected. But because as this thing grew it was engulfing the evacuation points. Already he knew that those who had evacuated the city were once more in danger. Many of the refugee camps were in the new strike zone. And he knew that it would only get worse.

The radio had only two pieces of advice for everyone. First; stay inside. Second; stay away from anything metallic.

Will could do that. But he wasn't sure that he really wanted to. These days he was beginning to suspect that a nice quick death would be a mercy. The pain from the changes was bad but he could deal with it. The changes to his mind he couldn't handle. And they were getting worse. All of them.

He cycled between acceptance and fear. Some days he was okay. Able to accept that he was slowly dying. That piece by piece that which made him William Simons was being dismembered. Other days he found himself terrified of what was coming. Usually that was just after he'd discovered another piece of his mind had gone missing. Or when he'd woken from another incoherent daydream.

Physically he was changing at pace. The transformation was speeding up. His skin was now completely golden in colour, and he was actually glowing. Radiating golden light. He guessed that the light was in effect a halo, except that he had thought that saints had halos and angels had wings. But then he had thought a lot of things and probably none of them were true. And at least it didn't hurt.

The pain in his guts had now subsided though they still spent of lot of time churning away and gurgling. But as if to make up for it the pain in his back had become much worse again. It was something to do with the wings slowly growing out of his back as they pushed their way through his skin and attached themselves to his spine and other bones. Everything hurt back there. Every vertebra in his back ached even though they no longer moved or flexed in any way. His skin felt as if it was being torn apart. And the wings themselves ached too. He could feel them now. They felt almost like limbs, except of course that they were only stumps. He guessed the pain was similar to that of recent amputees.

His maleness had gone. He didn't actually know when, he'd just discovered it a day or so before when he'd gone to relieve himself and discovered that he had to sit down. It should have upset him. It should have scared him. But it didn't. Not any more. In the end it was just another change. And unlike some of the others it didn't hurt and it wasn't as if he was ever going to have to worry about being with a woman again.

He was eating like a horse, his body crying out for food day in and day out. But he was still losing weight. In fact when he stood on the scales he weighed in at just under a hundred and fifty pounds. He'd lost fifty pounds in a month. His arms and legs were like bean poles with huge muscles everywhere. His waist was at least six inches smaller than it had been judging from the way his pants hung off him. But as if to compensate his chest was becoming larger. There was also a bony growth extending from his sternum. He had a horrible feeling it was like a bird's chest, designed to have muscles attached which would help him flap his wings. Thus far he couldn't do that. He did wonder what it would feel like when he could though. And whether once they were that large there would be any clothes at all that he could wear. At present he was wearing his old jeans with a belt with half a dozen extra holes drilled into it and a T-shirt from the abandoned variety mart down the road. The T-shirt was ten sizes too big for him, and still with the bones growing out of his chest and the wing stumps on his back it barely covered him.

There were other, newer changes. He had no more eye teeth. At some point they'd flattened to become pre-molars. He didn't know when. His eyes were far sharper than before, able to see things further away and strangely, he could now see different colours. Colours he simply didn't recognise. There was also something different about his lungs. About the way he breathed, though he simply didn't understand it. And his heart was beating in a whole new rhythm. Faster than before and with extra beats as well. He could feel it like a living thing within him as his blood pumped furiously. Or was that the effect of having two hearts? He suspected that it was.

A few weeks or so before he'd discovered that angels couldn't sit. Not only was their spine too rigid to bend, their wings simply didn't allow them to move the same way people could. They could walk but not sit. And his stumps, though still only three or four inches long, also prevented him from sitting. He now had two choices: stand or lie down. Soon he knew they would be limited even further. As his wing stumps grew further he would be unable to lie on a couch or anything with a back. They would simply push him too far forward as they pressed into the seat back.

But it was the mental changes that were the hardest to deal with. Discovering that he could no longer read or write had been a frightening experience. A shock like no other. But it hadn't been the last one. It was only the first.

He was losing his understanding of things. Basic things. He'd found a gas cylinder for his camp stove a couple of days before and thought about bringing it back even though he didn't really cook anything except water. But even as he'd thought about it he'd suddenly realised that he didn't know what to do with it. He didn’t know how to screw it in to the stove. Or how to operate the device. Yet it was something so basic a child could do it. He believed that somewhere deep inside he still knew how to do it. But for the life of him as he'd stood there staring at it, he'd known he couldn't. And it wasn't only the stove.

The car was a mystery to him. As he lay there staring at its remains he knew he couldn't drive it. Not even if it had been in working order. He could remember driving it. He could remember operating the machine, turning the wheel, moving the shift, tapping on the pedals. But for some reason he couldn't seem to understand why he'd done those things.

His general knowledge was also disappearing. For years he'd been studying classical history. His thesis was on the fall of Rome, the factors that had led to its collapse. And yet these days he found it hard to remember all the details of the fall. The names of the different players. Even the names of the cities.

His intelligence was sliding away.

But as it vanished other things arrived. Delusions maybe. He could see people in a whole new way. When a soldier occasionally wandered down the street he saw more than just the man. More than the body and the clothes. He saw the soldier's emotions. His fear or boredom. His desire to be somewhere else, perhaps with loved ones. And he didn't see these emotions written on his face. It was something he saw within the man. 

His nightmares had grown stronger. Now he could see them all the time. Sometimes they were only faint. Sometimes they were so powerful that they were almost physical. Like things he could reach out and touch. He could see those below who cried out for his help. Who begged for him to free them. He could see those above who called out their love for him and begged him to join them. And he could feel himself struggling to fly between them. Unable to navigate the tricky eddies and currents of the wind. Unable to either rise or fall.

As he lay there on the couch on the front porch looking out over the city, watching the impossible lightning strikes touching it every couple of seconds while black smoke once more filled the sky, Will wondered where it would end. In death, or in something worse? And would it just be his end? Or everyone's?

Except that if his life was to end it wouldn’t be as a result of the lightning hitting him.  It would not touch him. He had survived the sink hole. The ice bombs had missed him. He hadn't even been scratched by the exploding shards. The lava bombs had all missed him too. It was as though he was protected in some way from them.

He wondered if he was being protected by the white haired woman? These days he felt her and the other white haired people all around him, though when he looked at them they were never there. Never where he was sure they were. He was almost beginning to think of them as ghosts. But they weren't ghosts. While he couldn't see them and he didn't know where they were, he knew they were real.

A series of lightning bolts touched the top of some of the city’s tallest buildings, taking his attention away from the riddles he couldn't answer. Instead he watched curiously as bolts danced around the rooftops and the sparks flew in all directions. Like sky rockets exploding, though not in the air. It looked so beautiful, but he knew that if anyone had been on those roofs they would have been killed instantly. Electrocuted, perhaps even incinerated.

Beautiful but deadly. Wasn't that one of the laws of nature? That the deadlier a thing was the more brightly coloured it often was as well? In which case he had to wonder just how absolutely gorgeous the next strike would be. Assuming he was still around to witness it. And if he was still around whether he would be able to understand what it was by then.

Maybe he thought, the best thing he could do now, was to simply enjoy what he could. Before it was too late. Before he forgot how to enjoy things.