MILWAUKEE, WI 2016
*
Cocoa. Vanilla. Cinnamon. Libation ingredients and snack seasonings reserved for emperors and king-and-court in epochs past. Flavors-above for mouths-royal, too precious for filthy mouthed peasants like you or me. The candy Ethel hands to the man on the bus that day-re-day includes ingredients most of the ghosts never tasted or heard of in life. It was precious before she gifted it, sacred because Ethel gave it.
Lucy’s lieutenants train troops on the ash plain, at end of time, and bring them here after, a sort of “why we fight” exercise. Handful of people-living-people on that bus that cold morning and a platoon of the reverent dead here to see St. Ethel Mason before they get shipped off to wreck god’s ineffable plan in the name of choice or at the very least chance–so this woman and the multitude like her don’t have to die again and again-again forever in god’s little vain melodrama-diorama.
Mortal beings, the Milwaukee bus has a handful (all Ethel’s colleagues) and at least a dozen fire-eyed ghosts. Each infernal ignited by Lucifer wears the cheap black suit of a G-man’s opposite. Their bodies are whole-not-whole, cunning metallic mods and prosthetics as precise as living flesh hold the dead men in Lucifer’s service together, painfully and imperfectly.
There’s no red-and-blue red-and-blue, no siren-woop. Heaven’s feds in two trucks race-chasing the bus like prey don’t wish to announce or declare.
Reality. In-time. Mortal frame of reference. The driver sees a blacked out SUV that double-take disappears before her brain tells her she’s upside down and she’s struck blind for less time than it takes to get foot from gas to brake. Ethel swears she hears roller skates. And the kid that’s her co-worker few rows back hears interference cross-talk on headphones–ghost of an East German number station defunct before the wall came down. Bus slows a bit and chugs on down wintry road in Milwaukee. Bus driver has just decided she had an acid flashback when time stops with two fed trucks, staggered formation, broadside-bracketing the bus.
Not for Driver, for every living being, time is continuous. When Heaven’s Feds flip the sirens, time-the-world’s-time stops all about the ghosts. Lucy’s troops in the tin-can scramble, reach for shoulder holsters, but the Feds got the drop. Staggered bracket SUVS crewed by allegedly angelic dead men in balaclavas and tacticool stand on the sideboards, weapons raised. They rake the truck and whatever those guns fire incinerate-annihilates the infernals, burning them past ash. The rounds past harmlessly through material and through living, mortal, in-time flesh with barely an itch-tickle, burn, or stabbing sensation.
The freeze-frame passengers catch quite a few strays that pass virtually-harmlessly through them on their way to target. What’s a little exotic radiation between friends? And if these particular virtual particles give the doomed Saint Ethel a tumor on her way to her god-ordained doom? “So be it” said Authority, and it was.
And if it should come to pass that some innocent commuter, one less crucial to god’s ineffable plan catches a tumor down the line? “So be it” said Authority, and it was.
*
ELSEWHERE/WHEN
*
1990-something and the “End of History!” shit still abounds and resounds, echoing painfully on austere economies and elders’ ears. That’s when some group of somebodies starts brazenly ghosting the richest men on Earth.
Texas oil man, walking cliche with a 20-gallon hat embedded in the (closed) steel door of his panic room–ass-facing out and a boot half off as if dragged.
Arms dealer (of a sort) settles in for his hour long morning shit. Big bald butcher sits up and into a garrote loop held in hands phased-through solid wall. Screaming neighbor starts the relay-chain to call Earthly authorities to find another “puddle”–a rich man (or their servants) dead, done, gone and half melted into solid matter in the doing.
The band plays on where the band is society-economy-history (and the idle rich are mostly plug and play replaceable anyway) but take a great gouge out of them at a given time-space and the story line–the bland processional march to an endless repeating apocalypse in fire or ice or both hits a hiccup-bump pothole-gouge and gets glitchier.
Every challenge, every ‘battle’, every change to time and the plan, some great number of gossamer filaments, temporal fibers, are clipped free from the ouroboros’ rigid, repeating coil–god’s timeline. Every gouge frees a fiber-filament from the ever-weakening thing-itself: the coil that firm gird-sustains the universe first draft.
Tit-for-eye-for-tat-for-eye and then some. Conflict in-and-of the heavens escalated over-and-through time. ‘Proportionality’ was not a consideration in the step-staggered escalation so much as war, this kind of war, was invented in-the-doing.
For every mighty man, rich one, or henchmen Lucy’s insurgents end. Heaven’s Feds raze a training camp at the End of Time or ambush a squadron of Infernals (or a dozen) with the swift-efficient brutality of the Milwaukee raid writ above.
The misery snaking through history offers Lucifer many past many eager recruits over the 10,000 year tome of man. Bodies re-writ and lit with the first star’s flame. Ghosts with patched holes and odd-alloyed prosthetics filling out their G-man uniforms. An endless stream of lonely bitter dead that didn’t deserve it and wont deserve their fated deaths next time and so on-and-forth past forever.
Waves of dead men snatching and ending Very Important (the most important) living one by one ripped out words then phrases and whole pages of god’s text. Lucifer’s rebellion battered rigid-authored-fate and freed enough temporal filaments in the firmament to weaken the ring-meant-to-be-eternal. It was the paradox bombs that severed it, ended what was and freed what is-and-endlessly-proliferates.
*
CLEVELAND, OHIO 2020
*
Fall in Ohio. Erie is a living lake in this era. And the city is a pleasant-enough place full of Ohioans being very midwestern, passive aggressively navigating a morning commute and sighing heavily. The morning light on the city, every damn city and inch of dirt the sun touches is blessed with that burnt amber pink-and-purple bruise. The calm light that calls a warning to sailors. The lazy sun that crawl-climbs half-ass autumn low-high in the sky.
The good folks of Cleveland and the pretty decent ones and even the bastards went about their day, quite a few remarking that it was “crisp” or what a “nice freakin’ fall” it was or exclaimed and proclaimed their love of sweater weather. Pumpkin squash, and its essence, were consumed in great quantities.
Later morning light, lovely in its own right, lit off a plane in the sky. No one marvels at the mundane miracles flying over Cleveland or anywhere else, the jet-powered soda cans piloted by primates. One plane, a Droh-ing Model 696 has an extra passenger–a man that was a man.
There is a jump seat ass of the plane folded down for a ghost. He emerges from shadow, firm flesh out of place and time. Ball cap low over aviators and the uniform of cheap suit. Half his face steel rictus-grinning. Half his body, is held together by cunning mod-prosthetics that in turn cunningly conceal a paradox bomb. The metal hand grafted to the man holds a piece of foil, gold and purple, gifted him by a saint.
Steward finally notices a surprise passenger on the plane. Startle scare hops. “Sir you can’t be here…” The sight of the man held whole by welded metal, his true face flesh and steel-rictus grin, takes language from the Steward.
The bomb in the dead man does what bombs do. The mundane horror normalized in safe country by action film and in country made-unsafe by munitions begins. Shrapnel wants to rain on Cleveland. Fire tries to dive from the sky on anything and everything below. A commuter jet engine, most of it, bee-lines for a city bus just to freeze, hang and rubber band back to the source of the blast that tossed the metal ballistic in the first.
In its last moment the plane’s once-mighty engine creaks, cracks, crunches beer-can smaller-still-and-so-on to singularity. From there the engine, every bit of it, falls further to non-existence and annihilation. As the thing goes its greatly increased mass drags by association the ones that labored to make and maintain the plane toward a hole in the whole of time and space and god’s text looming and growing over Cleveland.
The rip-tear, the time storm born of a paradox bomb will slowly grow in size and power till it takes the man that conceived of the plane it just ate. The devouring maw will come to claim the foundry that readied the metal and the ones that first thought of the plane and their whole lines and later the very concept of flight.
Lucifer strolls along the shore of Lake Erie, unperturbed, dark curls ruffled by the annihilating wind that tugs at the tips of the waves. He lights a Laika and waits, watching people to bricks to buildings fall up into the growing maw. Lucy listens to the people wailing, the lamentations. Time grinds forward, tries to. Great unseen gears grind and fracture, throw themselves to jam the apparatus they were meant to move.
As above, so below, the mortals go mad as ever growing portions of everyone and everything are erase-forgot and memories of things that cannot be are physically removed from brain tissue by broken physical law. When it takes the Rock and Roll Museum, the lacuna begins its feast on art and symbols. Not long after, not one being can sing or speak or signify at all. The people of Cleveland and every other place under a maw, every place, bleed bruised brain out their ears and fall upon each other feral and howling.
Lucifer lights another Laika and another, heart hard to the all-consuming end he wrought. Lucy smokes tobacco that was born stale and stares through the suffering waiting for the one they summoned: God. When the allegedly almighty arrives, they will settle things as immortals do–with a knife fight.
*
END MORNINGSTAR 5