A God to Fear (Thorn Saga Book 5) (22 page)

His voice trailed off into nothingness. He shook His head, and His shoulders sank lower. He stared blankly at His bare feet. One of the vines that coiled around His arm slithered toward His hand, then licked at it with a thin, forked tongue. Brandon tried to hide his surprise when he realized it was not a vine.

“It doesn’t matter,” God said at last. “We’re all just infinitesimal specks circling one small star in all of space, after all. Why should any of it matter? It’s all so arbitrary.”

Before Brandon could formulate an answer, Thorn shook off the angels who’d been holding him. They moved to capture him again, but a wave of God’s hand stayed them. Thorn remained where he stood as he spoke.

“You’re just like Wanderer,” he said.

That
got God’s attention. He jolted to His feet and straightened His back. The snake twined tighter against His arm. “What did you say?”

“You just want to be in control,” Thorn said. “When You can’t have it, You explode into a rage or You sink into despair. You’re a child.”

“And you’re a
virus
! You’re no larger than a molecule next to Me! I could crush you in—”

“Go ahead. Crush me! Run Your tests and ‘save’ us all from ourselves. You’ll never create the great races of humans and angels that You want, because You can’t admit that You don’t know what’s best for everyone, and that people who think differently from You—people ‘beneath’ You—might have worthy ideas.”

“I am fair and just in all things.”

“Then why work to create reasonable people when they’re only allowed to think one way? When You intend to punish everyone who disagrees with You? You want people to be free on
Your
terms, under
Your
rules, just like Wanderer. Using dogma and deception to manipulate people into Your version of freedom is not true freedom.”

“And you know better?” God said at almost a yell.

“You’ll never find out if You keep striking down or imprisoning anyone who dissents.”

God huffed, then plopped back down onto His throne. His face was turning red. “You won’t listen to Me. It’s all your fault, you know. None of you demons would listen to Me.”

“Maybe if You stopped condescending to us and started loving us like You claim to, we’d be more inclined to listen.”

The beginnings of a tear formed in God’s eye. His breathing became shaky, labored. The snake raised its head off His arm, then looked around as if probing to ensure its safety. God saw the motion, lifted the snake, and unwound it from His arm. He set it on the gold beneath His throne, and it slithered down the steps, smudging the gold with the greasy trail left in its wake.

“You Yourself said that we’re good people,” Brandon said. “We just want to live our lives on our own terms. Is
that
really so awful?”

Thorn strode halfway to the throne’s stairs, his elegant black shoes clanking against the golden ground. “End this,” he said. “End the ignorance, end the dying. What do You say?”

Heather’s slim fingers slid through Brandon’s, and she held his hand, her eyes still focused on God. The Creator watched the snake make its way down the stairs, then soil the golden rug as it began its long journey across the room. “I say…”

Several of the angels in the room leaned slightly forward. Brandon held his breath. Thorn’s fists were clenched, his whole body tense. God’s tear quivered in His eye, but refused to fall.

Finally, He leaned back in His chair, sighed, and smiled.

“No,” God said.

He flung His hand toward Brandon and Heather. A blinding burst of energy erupted from it, engulfing them. Brandon gripped Heather’s hand like a vise as the room’s walls receded, falling away into blackness. His sense of balance spun out of control. Every direction was up, but also down. Heather’s arm pulled taut against his. He tried to hold on to her, but she was ripped away. She screamed.

Something was pressing into Brandon’s neck, something rough and cold, disturbing his sleep. Someone nearby was talking too fast for him to understand. Was it those demon-things again?
I need to run. They’re gonna kill me if I don’t run.

Memories of dead family members and ominous other dimensions pulled Brandon up into the waking world. But when he opened his eyes and saw the fading light of late dusk, the sidewalk speckled with dried black gum, and the man in the business suit yakking on his wireless headset about some client’s account, Brandon’s dream world beckoned him back down into slumber. His blood was still rushing from the nightmare, but no nightmare could be worse than his reality.

He tilted his neck to the left and reached his bad arm around to feel a rusty old bolt protruding from the streetlight’s pole. It had left a sore indentation in the back of his neck.
How long was I out?
The sun had been high in the afternoon sky the last time he’d seen it, and now the sky was darker than the sleep he’d just woken from. Thank goodness he’d dozed off under the shade of the shopping plaza. Had he not, he might have gotten sunburned again and been forced to live near the river’s cooling waters for a week or two.

The businessman carried grocery bags in one hand—likely something he’d picked up for his wife or kids on his way home from work. He didn’t seem to notice that Brandon was there until he paced a little too close to him. Then he puckered his nose and scuttled away to escape the stink. Brandon didn’t even bother to hold up his jar of change. Busy rich folks never gave him money. Only the poor, who could partially understand his situation, ever helped him out.

Fatigue caressed the backs of Brandon’s eyelids. Something urgent about his nightmare stayed lodged like an ice pick somewhere in his mind, but then, his nightmares were always like that. One of his squad was always stuck in some ratty old shack in rural Zabul, taking fire, impossible to get to. Or sometimes it was Brandon himself cornered behind the walls of his OP, screaming for help as enemy bullets tore through his flesh. He’d wake from those nightmares panting, a cold sweat glistening on his skin. This nightmare had been tame by comparison. And weird, too.

His stomach was clawing its way out of his belly. Had he eaten today? Maybe not. He checked his jar. Two and a half dollars could buy him a little bit of fast food, at least.

The grease on Brandon’s tattered clothes made a
slurp
as it separated from the metal of the streetlight he’d been leaning on. He’d needed a shave more than he’d needed new clothes, but that had been a week ago, and now he cursed himself for spending money on something as trivial as a razor. His joints protested as he stood on his little cardboard mat, torn from a box he’d found in a dumpster yesterday. Where was his cardboard sign? Had it blown away while he slept? While halfway to standing, he spotted it under a nearby bush, so he slunk back to the ground, to his hands and knees, to crawl over and grab it.

“Hey there.”

The voice stopped him in mid-crawl. A woman was standing over him, tall and blond, but wearing sneakers and a T-shirt that downplayed her natural beauty. Brandon plopped his butt back on the sidewalk, then closed his arms and legs inward, scrunching his body up into a ball. In high school he might have had a chance with a girl like this, but damn, did she have to walk up to him
now
, weeks after he’d last bathed, as he wormed across the concrete to find his “homeless please help” sign? He didn’t even want her money. The embarrassment was too great.

“Hi, hon. Do you remember me?”

Brandon glanced briefly up at her, then back down. “Nope,” he said, although the brightness in her eyes and the slight upward curve of her lips did seem familiar.

“It’s good to see you,” the woman said. “I feel like I’ve never even met you before, though. This is so wild.”

Brandon started to rock back and forth and hum a meandering tune. If this lady thought he was crazy, maybe she’d go away.

“There’s not much time,” she said. “I found the transit door we came in through—it’s not far, and it wasn’t locked. It might get us back to Thorn, but I need you to show me the way. Will you come with me?”

Whoa. Playing crazy ain’t gonna get me out of this one.
Kids liked to tease Brandon by testing the limits of what he’d do for money, but this woman hadn’t offered money, and her voice was bereft of derision. She seemed too old for the games of teenagers anyway.

“My name is Heather. I know you. I know you very well. Please. This is worth fighting for.”

“Ain’t nothing worth fighting for,” Brandon said, wobbling his head back and forth in a loose interpretation of a head shake. “A man in power says we gotta fight this group of people one year, then the next year we gotta fight that group of people. ‘They ain’t us,’ the big man always says. ‘They don’t think the way we do. So we gotta grind ’em into the dirt they came from.’ Dirt’s all it is, you know. All anything is, or ever will be. I got no reason to fight over a bunch of dirt.”

Heather’s trace of a smile bent downward. She kneeled next to him, reached her hand toward him…

He flinched away. Why was she trying to touch him? Why wasn’t this pretty girl running away? Everybody ran away whenever Brandon started talking about the war.

Her fingertips lighted on his oily hair, then combed through it ever so gently, without touching his scalp. “Oh, Brandon,” she said. “What’s happened to you?”

Being touched again after all this time felt like spiders crawling on Brandon’s skin. He ducked his head away from her hand. “Lady, I was just another corn-fed, churchgoing Florida boy, told I was special. Told I was doing the Lord’s work. But that turned out to be a boldfaced lie. Ain’t no Lord’s work, and there ain’t no Lord. And without Him, I’m weak, I’m nothing, and nothing matters. That’s what they told me anyway, and now I live like that’s the Bible truth. I guess I’m proving ’em right, huh?”

Heather finally stopped looking at him, thank goodness. Her eyes seemed sad, though. “Yeah,” she said. “I think that happens to a lot of people.”

Ah, shit. Now I feel guilty.
Brandon hadn’t meant to make such a pretty girl so sad. Maybe if he scooted a few feet away from her, she’d get the hint that he wasn’t good around people.

But when he tried to back away, she took his hand in hers. She took his slimy, soot-covered hand like it was a precious gem in need of great care. She looked into his eyes, and for a moment, those eyes were too mesmerizing to resist. “I get it,” she said. “You had a purpose, and it turned out to be based on empty air, and that hurt you. And that really sucks. I’ve been there. It’s hard to trust again after something like that. But in the end, that’s just
one
purpose. Just because that purpose was groundless, it doesn’t mean that all purposes are groundless.”

She spoke well, and Brandon liked her Midwest accent. The cadence of her voice felt like it could clean the grime from his hands, clothes, face, and hair, then pour inside him and clean up his heart, too. Who was this strange girl approaching him at night, offering him a new reason to live?

He certainly needed a new reason to live.

Brandon closed his dirty fingers around Heather’s clean ones, smudging them up. He didn’t like touching or being touched, but the gesture came as easily as slipping into old clothes.
I know this girl. Somehow, I know her.

“Well, it’s not like I know everything,” he said. “Maybe I’ll come with you, just for a little bit. Just to see what you’re talking about.”

Heather smiled. A big, wide, dazzling grin.

I could get used to that grin. I really could.

Near the dumpsters where Brandon had found his box, Heather found a weird glowing door. The door led them through a dark hallway—a very dark hallway, in fact. After fifty or so paces, the white floor disappeared into total blackness and Brandon couldn’t even see Heather an arm’s length in front of him. She was nearly sprinting in the darkness.

“Hold up, hold up,” he said. Half of his brain told him that this was war. It was dark outside, and they were running from enemies, and he badly needed night vision goggles. The other half of his brain insinuated that a wrecked Cessna should be somewhere around here. He squeezed his left arm to check if it was still hurt, but no, he’d gotten that wound in Afghanistan, years ago. They spun around and around in his head, those memories that may or may not have been. Something about a high-rise condo?

“Can you lead the way from here?” Heather asked.

Brandon scoffed at the ridiculous question. But when he leaned against a wall, he did feel a sense of place. If he followed this wall long enough, it would lead around a corner to the right, and then…

“Where do these hallways lead?” Brandon asked.

“Everywhere, I’ve been told.”

“Huh.”

Holding Heather’s hand, Brandon strode through the black, turning right, then left, then right again, not knowing exactly where he was going, but feeling like he’d been here before.

They soon came to another of the glowing doors. This one was bigger and wide open, and radiant light streamed through it. But how was that possible? It had been nighttime at the shopping plaza.

When Heather saw the door, she pulled him forward. They burst through it, running ever faster. Brandon tried to take in the mountains, the waterfalls and rivers, the glittering golden city stretching out below them, but Heather didn’t give him a moment. They charged toward a big, fancy-looking building atop a cliff. As they ran, Brandon could see little people with wings flying around the skies.

Heather led them to a small gate in the side of the grand chateau. No one met them there, so they ran right inside.

Are we in Heaven?
Brandon thought absently. The thought was absurd, but wow! Minutes ago he’d been having nightmares about the war, and now he was running through an exciting adventure dream with a beautiful woman. He was sleeping again, obviously.

A low, guttural voice slowly rose in Brandon’s ears as they ran. It wasn’t particularly loud, but it was so clear that it seemed to come from right next to him. No one was there but Heather, though.

“They rebelled against My wishes,” the big voice was saying. “They had a choice. I had none.”