Sleeping Late On Judgement Day (11 page)

The Black Sun wouldn't come back, of course, at least not to that room, especially since the cleanup crew had been and gone while I was out. I took a brief, nose-clamped look just to check, but the place looked clean and ready for occupation. I unclamped. It smelled like it had just been painted. Yes, some of Heaven's employees are a lot faster and more efficient than Yours Truly. Still, when I let myself into my own place, I couldn't help feeling like I could still smell decay from upstairs wafting through my air vents. I also knew there were going to be questions from Heaven about what the cleaners had been getting rid of, and why I knew about it.

But I couldn't deal with any of that stuff right at that moment, because I was stressed and completely exhausted from lack of sleep. I righted the upended furniture and cleared away some old socks and empty cans and bottles at the same time—a frenzy of cleaning that lasted at least a minute and a half. Then I stretched out on the couch, put on some quiet music to cover the midday noises from the street, and let myself get tugged down into unconsciousness.

And yes, the chain was on the front door again, the panel in the closet had been nailed back into place, and my gun was very, very close to my hand.

 • • • 

I woke up because somebody was knocking at my door. It could have been Girl Scouts with my seasonal Thin Mint assortment, or Amazon Scouts with more fast-food pies, or even Black Sun Scouts with a shipment of Blood Libel Mallomars, so I checked the spyhole before opening.

It was Clarence. Since he was one of the few people I didn't think wanted to destroy me at the moment, I let him in.

“Hi, Bobby,” was his unambitious opening.

“Hi, yourself, Junior. What the hell are you doing here?”

“Hey, that's nice. I drop by to see you and that's what I get?”

“The only times you've ever come to see me is with Sam. Is Sam with you?”

He shrugged. “No.”

“Then why are you here?” It came out more unpleasant than I'd wanted. I was losing patience with visitors, known and unknown, and I was still stupid and cranky and felt like I'd barely slept. I looked at the clock—past 5:30 in the afternoon. Getting dark soon. Maybe it was time to rise up after all. “Sorry, it's been a tough day. Come on in. Can I get you something to drink?”

He stepped in, but not too far in. He'd seen the place before, so it wasn't disgust keeping him out, and in fact it looked better than usual after the tidying. “I can't really stay, Bobby. I just wanted to see how you were doing. You haven't been down to the Compasses lately. Did you know about—?”

“Walter Sanders,” I said, cutting him off. “Yeah. And he doesn't remember anything useful.” Clarence knew some of the story about Walter, like the fact he'd probably been stabbed by someone who wanted to get me, but he didn't know I'd seen Walter in Hell, or that I was now convinced that Anaita had arranged it. Until I knew for certain who among my angelic comrades was really working for whom, I was keeping a lot of this stuff to myself. “What about a drink? I have milk. Still liquid, even.”

Clarence made a face, but he still didn't come all the way in. “Really, I can't . . .” The kid seemed a bit nervous, actually. “My ride is waiting downstairs. I just wanted to say hi.”

Before I could respond to this preposterous statement—who would come all the way to my apartment and walk up the stairs just to say hi? To
me?—
a car horn honked outside. Wondering if it really was Sam and this was some elaborate maneuver to trick me into going out, I went to the window, unlatched it, and leaned out. There was a fairly pricey-looking recent model car double-parked in front of the building. (I had no idea what kind of car it was. That's my gripe with the modern ones, they all look the same—like running shoes for giant robots, every damn one of them.) The person standing next to it, who had presumably leaned in to honk the horn, saw me and waved. He was vaguely familiar, good-looking, blond, and wearing what looked like an expensive cable-knit sweater.

“Oh, hi!” he called up. “You must be Bobby. Can you tell Harrison to hurry, please? We're already late for our reservation.”

“Harrison” was Clarence's official earthly name, short for Haraheliel. His co-workers just called him Clarence because we were jerks.

I smiled, sort of, and nodded to the man before withdrawing. I did not wave. I never wave.

“Harrison?” I said. “Your ride wants me to tell you . . .”

“I heard.” He was scowling like a scolded child, but there was something else going on, too.

“Who is that, anyway? I feel like I've seen him somewhere.”

“That's Wendell. He's one of us—an angel, I mean, an advocate. He works up in San Francisco, mostly around Cow Hollow and Dogpatch.” Now the kid actually colored, reddening from cheeks to forehead. “We're kind of seeing each other.”

“Okay.” I didn't know what else to say. You think with an afterlife as fucked-up as mine that I have any inclination to judge anyone else's? Hell, I don't even have the
time
to judge anyone else. “But I wish you wouldn't have brought him here.”

“Bobby, I told you—he's one of us!” He stopped, and I could see him going pale, the beginnings of anger. “Or are you trying to say something else?”

“Shit, kid, I don't care if you date buckaroos or kangaroos. But I don't like everyone knowing where I live, even if they're on our side. Shit,
especially
if they're on our side. I can't really trust anyone right now, and it's been a bad couple of days.”

“Really?” Now he felt bad for me, which made me want to hit myself in the face, but someone else had already done that. “I noticed the bruises and cuts. What happened?”

“Look, don't keep your friend waiting. We'll get together, and I'll tell you about it, but not tonight.”

Eventually I persuaded him to go back and join Wendell and his stylish sweater, but even after everything else that had happened to me recently, it still felt a little strange. Clarence had never come to my place on his own before. Was it really that important to let me know he was gay? I'd already half-guessed. Or was something else going on?

Great
, I thought.
Now I don't even trust the guys who I'm going to have to take into battle with me.
And that was bad, because I was pretty certain into battle was just where I was going—and soon.

I
HAD ONE
more client after Clarence left, a woman who breathed her last in a hospice in the hills, a peaceful exit after a long struggle with cancer, and although there were a few issues with the woman's past, the prosecutor could deliver nothing serious enough to keep her from reaching the bosom of Abraham (or whatever exactly it is we help people reach).

Honestly, I wish I did have more answers for you. I wish I knew more about how things work. That would make a much more informative story, especially for those with a theological turn of mind. But I don't. I'm an ordinary angel—a grunt. There are lots of us. Some of us live on Earth and wear mortal bodies and try to defend people's souls against the lies (and sometimes unpleasant truths) of Hell. Beyond that, I just don't know much. I mean, I regularly see the joyful saved both in Heaven itself and the Fields outside, but I can never get a clue to what they're thinking and feeling: it's like trying to talk to one of the people working at a theme park when they're in character.

When I got home from the job, I put on some music, opened a beer, and began studying a bunch of information Fatback aka George had sent me. Nothing in the material was all that startling, but my porcine pal's covering email provided some unwelcome news:

Bobby, here's a bit more on the B. Sun and a lot of material about Persia. Honestly, I could dump hundreds and hundreds of articles on you about Persians in the Bay Area, but I'm trying to weed out the stuff you don't need. If I'm getting it wrong, let me know.

You'll have to do it by email, because I'm going out of town. I can't take this place anymore, I don't know what's going on, it's like living in that Amityville movie, so I had Javier and his sons clean out the trailer and they're going to take me to go see this special vet I know near Visalia, where I can lie low. I'll only have my portable equipment, but I can still help you out if you need it. But I just can't stay here. I'll be back in a week or so, I think.

So even the swine were starting to desert the sinking ship. Not that I blamed George at all, after having seen one of the things that was actually haunting my place, but I was beginning to get a bit paranoid. First, dancing nature spirit Foxy Foxy wouldn't talk to me. Now George had been chased off to some luxury pig spa in Tulare County. Even Clarence the Junior Angel was acting a little loopy. What next? It's not like I had a lot of friends in the first place.

There wasn't too much new stuff in the Black Sun files George had sent, just more bits and pieces about what was turning out to be an ugly organization even without the neo-fascist politics. Everybody seemed to agree that they were one of the “New Nationalist” organizations, but their membership seemed to come from many different nations, and they seemed to get nationalistic only about countries with a lot of white people in them. The local Black Sun Faction was predominantly American, with ties to the Aryan Brotherhood prison gangs, but a Norwegian guy named Baldur von Reinmann was one of the up and coming leaders of the American branch.

Baldur wasn't the guy in charge of the whole Black Sun, though. Even Fatback's multiple sources couldn't agree on who that was. The most they could come up with was that some shadowy guy who called himself “The Imperator” had been the power behind the organization since the fifties, which made him pretty damn old.

I also found suggestions in George's material (because, remember, he fishes in some weird backwaters) about the Black Sun's distinctly dark-magic interests, and even a couple of vague references to the swastikids (or “Nightmare Children” as everyone else seemed to call them, despite my name being better). Some sources went so far as to suggest that the N.C. were not the worst critters the Imperator and his friends might employ on “traitors, unbelievers, and other mongrel-loving scum,” as one charmer—his online name was “Hammer of the Jews”—posted on an obscure racist message board. These were only rumors, of course, and to my irritation not a single one seemed to suggest anything about what to do when an infestation of swastikids hit your apartment. Killing them one by one with a silver knife, as Oxana had done, was appealing but seemed like it could get pretty tiring.

Enough with the neo-Nazis and their ugly little allies. I moved on to the Persian stuff, quickly grasping why George was frustrated with such broad parameters, but I did learn a few things about Persian-Americans. They were also called Iranian-Americans, but a lot of them preferred the first, not only because it separated them from the current Iranian government but also because it underlined their ethnic pride. Not everyone in modern Iran is Persian, see? The US has the most Persians anywhere outside of Iran, and now your history lesson is done. Oh, except that many, if not most of them, came into the US in the early 1980s when the Ayatollah and his crazy Islamic fanboys took over.

But most of what George had sent me was even less informative, primarily social news about various civic functions highlighting Persian-Americans. Occasionally a crime or some other big news threw a spotlight on some facet of the community that didn't get discussed much, but mostly it was a parade of difficult Middle-Eastern names without much context and therefore without much use. I did see a few names crop up over and over again and decided that what I needed to do was pick an arbitrary date, probably 1980, and look for names that came up again and again after that point. I could do some of that on my own, but I was going to have to hope George could manage some of it while he was getting his Swedish back-bacon massages and seaweed trotter-wraps, or whatever this special pig doctor did to make him feel fresh and happy.

 • • • 

I wandered out to get dinner and bring back another six-pack. When I returned to the apartment house it was getting dark. The Amazons had left a note on my door that said, “We go out but we call you later,” which was nice of them.

A check around my place with a flashlight found nothing swastika-like hiding in any of the corners and the loose board in the closet still firmly nailed into place. (And backed-up with about fifty feet of duct tape, just for added certainty. Those four-armed crawlers might be able to travel the dark dimensions, but I felt sure even they were no match for enough duct tape.)

I needed to share these new wrinkles with Sam, so I called and left a message and hoped he'd be back from the Third Way soon. Then I watched a bit of a Warriors game, but the basketball season was too young for me to care a lot, and there were too many new players this year I didn't know very well. Propped up on the couch, the TV rattling away in the background, I found myself getting sleepy and let myself drift.

Yes, I had my Belgian automatic right next to me. Loaded with silver slugs, too. I'm casual, but I'm not entirely stupid.

I woke up to that sound again—not the quiet scrape of creepy little children's fingers in a closet, but the thump-thumpity-thumpty-thump of something bouncing haphazardly against my window.

It was a different window this time, in the bathroom, and it was hard to reach because I had to half-lean on the sink while standing on the edge of the tub. The glass was that kind you can only see through a little, like a bunch of little round funhouse mirrors, so I couldn't make out what was out there, except it looked about the size of a sparrow, but it certainly had the same disturbing habit of going
thump, thump, thump
. There was no way I could get the window open fast enough to lean out and grab anything that wasn't already both extremely stupid and bleeding to death, but I eased up the window a few inches—the bumping stopped—and then turned off the bathroom light and retreated to sit on the closed toilet seat with my toothbrush glass in my hand.

Whatever-it-was came back a few minutes later and began bumping again, this time on the upper part of the window. I waited as patiently as I could, and considering the thing couldn't have been much larger than a finger puppet, while I was full size and combat-trained, I was surprisingly nervous. Because it wasn't natural, see. I know that sounds odd coming from an angel, especially one who's been to Hell, but you don't expect anything in Hell to be normal. In your own apartment, you expect normal. You
need
normal. So I sat there and tried to keep my breathing even, and eventually the thing bumbled its way down the window and then flopped onto the windowsill where it bounced around for a moment, wings buzzing. It was no bird, or bug, that was for sure—even in the dim bathroom I could see that it was too big to be an insect, and its wings were too small for a bird. I waited until it had bumped along a few inches, then I shot up from the toilet seat and clapped the glass over it.

It didn't even fight, that was the strange bit. A bee, a wasp, you put a glass over them and they get angry. This thing just kept diddling along, as though its mission in life was to bump against glass, but whether inside it or outside it didn't matter much.

I got up and flicked on the light. If I'd been hoping it was a crippled bird, I was disappointed. It wasn't a bug either—I'd been right about that. But even in the bright light from above the medicine cabinet, I still didn't know what exactly it was. Except that it was extremely and obviously
wrong
.

Quick description: Imagine a small frog. Now imagine that frog owed money to the Mob, so they took it out back and gave it a severe beating, deforming its face so that it almost looked like a tiny, ugly dwarf, and also breaking several of its bones that later healed back crooked. Now imagine the frog instead of being a healthy shade of green or even brown was mostly gray and blue and extremely slimy. Oh, and don't forget the dragonfly wings in a lovely shade of translucent crimson, and the three eyes, also red, glowing like the LEDs on your DVR.

I stared at the thing I'd caught for a long time, wondering if I should just go find a hammer and beat it to jelly. It clearly didn't belong on Earth, but if it was some kind of spy or assassin creature sent by the Black Sun, they seemed to have chosen badly. After throwing itself against the inside of the glass for a while, it just squatted and let its wings curl. Its mouth moved oddly, as though it was having trouble breathing, and it occurred to me I could just let it suffocate, or even hasten the process by sticking a lighted candle in there or something. Yes, I know that sounds cowardly, but if you'd seen it you wouldn't have wanted to touch it either, even to kill it. Trust me—you'd have moved out of the apartment and called in an airstrike. I mean, it was
ugly.

At last I got a round chunk of cardboard that had most recently been part of the packing for a frozen pizza, then slid it carefully under the glass. The thing didn't really have feet, more like a pair of mushroom stems that might have been made from slug-muscle, but it didn't seem too bothered by the cardboard and just stepped up onto it as it slid underneath. Then I took the whole weird package to the living room.

I put a heavy book on top of the glass, then went to see if the Scythians were back and could identify it as one of the Black Sun's special friends, but they were still out, although it was now almost ten at night. I went back to my place, half hoping that the thing had knocked over the glass and managed to escape the apartment so I wouldn't have to deal with it, but the horrid little lump was still sitting on my cheap coffee table, staring back at me with three eyes' worth of incomprehension. I'll say this, it didn't seem particularly malicious, but even if it had been wearing the face of a famous Hollywood star, it wasn't going to get many dates.

It was making the mouth movements again, which made it look more than ever like something crooning invitations across a dark swamp—melted frog seeking melted mate. Taking pity, I lifted the bottom of the glass just a little to let in some air, and when I did so, I heard something thin and squeaky coming from inside the glass.

Words. I swear by the Highest, actual words. In English. I could make out only one, “
revenge,
” but that was enough.

What the hell
was
this thing?

I went to the kitchen and rummaged around until I found the strainer I'd used the last time I cooked anything for myself, which had been spaghetti. The answer to your next question is: Probably about fourteen months earlier. I brought the strainer out, put it over the glass, then rattled the whole thing until the glass tipped over.

It certainly didn't hurry, but eventually the flying frog-thing bumbled out of the sideways glass into the larger enclosure of the strainer. It settled its grotesque little body again, blinked all three eyes, and said,
“Dearest, dearest Bobby . . .”