If a tree falls in the middle of the woods and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound? It does, and I hear it. I hear the wind shifting in the air. I hear the flapping of wings of the still-feeding carrion. I hear the steady pumping of self-sufficient machines. Each of these are disruptions of the norm. Everything now is quiet. “Silence is Golden,” they had said in Sunday school in the Before. If that is true, then this world has become El Dorado. Every piece of mortar, metal, and wood reverted to that purest form of alchemy. All of those expeditions of greedy men, all the death, all the blood. All they had to do was wait. Wait for that day. Wait until now. Now all is quiet.
I make sounds, of course. Sounds I have become accustomed to that were at first unnatural to me. In the Before I remember the sound of footsteps, of leather on concrete or blacktop. I remember heavy breathing and talking. But when the Silence came, when I survived, I made more sounds. Things I never noticed before. I could hear my stomach breaking down the food I found. I heard my bones creaking as I walked. I heard every beat of my heart. You don’t realize the noise the world makes. The white noise of cars and people and planes and machines and sewers. You don’t notice until it goes away, like turning off a TV that was only playing static. Like the flick of a switch. Quiet. Silence. Golden.
But gold has always been stained blood-red, and so the cycle continues. The Before didn’t just become the Silence. Nothing is that simple, nothing that absolute. The Before was filled with life, with sounds. People. I don’t remember how many. No one does. But of course no one does. I don’t, therefore no one does. But there were plenty. Plenty enough to bring about the war and then the Silence. Enough to bring His wrath. Enough to end the Before and make such a thing as the Before. There’s not enough now. That’s why I hear the tree in the woods.
Who I am now is not who I was in the Before. No. Some would even say that I became an entirely different being in the End, if there was anyone around to say it. Battle tends to change people, but this battle made people. It made me. I survive. That is what I do now. It would be my occupation if I were employed. I have reverted through my species. I fight and hunt and gather food. I am Neolithic now. The End made barbarians out of humans and I embraced it. If He truly has a purpose for us all, than this must be mine. The nexus of humanity. All roads lead to me. War has brought us to the brink of extinction, yet I remain. The war, the End, has given me a life that I never had in the Before. It took the End to give me a purpose, and I gladly accepted. Like everyone else, though, I never saw it coming. No human, hell, no being knew that the End had come. He knew no better than we did the results of the End or when it was going to happen. He doesn’t have absolute control like most people think. He was as much a witness to the chaos as humanity. As much a victim of the Fallen as us. It happened sort of like the story of Noah that I remember learning about in the Before. We had fallen into disarray like the people then. We had become stupid and destroyed the world ourselves, more so than the Fallen could have ever guessed we would. The End had already begun, but we were all too blind to see.
Then the battles started. Constant, brutal. And no one knew what they were fighting for. The possessed soldiers shot each other and shot themselves. The ground became saturated with blood, literally in some places. I can remember the satellite images on TV. Brown desert faded into red clay. Red where it should be brown. Enough to see with your own eye. But when the red clay became a red sea, the real End began. Three days after the Battle at Megiddo was lost, the Fallen returned to Earth.
He wasn’t some goat-man with red fur and horns. He was beautiful. He was mesmerizing. He was the face of love and lust and two thousand years of hate and anger. And he released it on the world, on humanity. Some called it Armageddon. Some called it Judgment Day, others Retribution. Whatever they called it, it was all pain and fire and passion. It was all death. In the Before, I had thought that the electric chair must be the worst way to die. Now I know that ripping is. I’ve seen a man ripped and I know that from the way his eyes bulged and rolled and the animal-like sounds that came from his mouth that it was the worst way to go. A soul isn’t meant to leave you body like that. It’s connected. And when it gets torn out of you without going through death first, there’s no question that death becomes a welcome fate. And when death is welcome, that’s the worst way to go.
The man that I saw get ripped, his name was Luke. See, I wasn’t always alone. I wasn’t always the only one left. When the Silence settled in, there were thousands of survivors, “Evergreens” we called ourselves. In the End, the grass and trees and marshes and plains had died with the rest of the world. It all turned brown, that is except the red parts. But the evergreen trees were still there, still green. We though we were pretty clever. We were wrong. Humanity was still alive then, when the Silence began five years ago. Now, it’s just me. In the beginning we banded together, made our little group, did the Hollywood method. But it didn’t work. We didn’t know what we were fighting or how to fight it. It was useless. All we did was make it easier for them to find us. To rip us like I saw them do to Luke.
Luke and I had gotten close in the Silence. You could say we led the Evergreens. But that was a mistake. Don’t get close to anyone; you’ll just loose them. I don’t have anyone to loose now. I don’t get that luxury. There was a lot of luxury then, lots of people to get close to, and Luke and I had gotten close. Like brothers. We fought and resisted the Rippers, agents of the Fallen. And for a while we did all right. Not good, but not dead. All right to us was different than all right in the Before. We lost sixteen people in a week once. That was a good week. But most weeks were all right. The Rippers were everywhere, so we couldn’t stay in one place, and we couldn’t move. We had to fight them head on. It was bad at first. We used weapons made by militaries for humans to kill other humans. In five years I have yet to see a bullet stop a Ripper. Than we tried theories we had heard about working on ghosts and demons in the Before. Most of them were shit, but some got the job done. They don’t like salt, that’s not a myth. We started emptying buckshots of their bearings and filled them with rock salt. That’s when we started surviving instead of dying. But we never did good, just all right.
It was four and a half years ago when they got Luke. There were three of us left then: Luke, Tom, and Me. I haven’t thought about Tom in three years. The Rippers were having a hard time with finishing us off. I guess they still are since I’m still breathing, still have my soul. We had gotten smarter, better equipped, and smaller. But we had also gotten closer. Not just Luke and I, but we had gotten closer to Tom. We didn’t know his soul had a price. We didn’t know the demon inside him. We had been hiding out in tunnels under New York for a few months, the old subway system. Hiding for longer periods of time got easier as our group got smaller. We had been confident that we could stay in the underground labyrinth for up to a year. Then, one day we were surrounded. They swarmed and spared Tom from the attack. They grabbed Luke and ripped him right there, right in front of me as I ran, escaping through the tunnels into the lifeless city. I remember that Tom was crying amidst the scum. I hope he cherished those last few drops of water. Where he’s at now, no water has ever been.
A year and a half later, I tracked Tom down, the soulless bastard who owed it to the Fallen. The one who sold us to the Rippers. He had been turned, a spawn of hell fire, as a reward for his treason. He was living, if you can call it that, in a mansion in Northern California with all the redwoods. All the green. He had been not only rewarded with power and demonhood, but with riches and wealth. Wealth that didn’t mean a thing in a dead world. He was part human and part demon, and powerful as hell. Rock-salt didn’t work on him. Bullets didn’t work either. He was a bastard of hell and heaven and nothing would take him down. But I remembered something from the beginning of the Silence. When we were figuring out how to fight the Rippers, I had found an old, obscure text. I had memorized a passage in the book in Latin, that sounded like it would help and saved it for a day I hoped would never come, for a foe I hoped I would never have to fight. Tom fit that profile. I recited that verse in Latin and smiled as Tom’s body turned into ash prompted by the sacred language. There’s no water where he’s at now. I haven’t thought about that night in three years.
Five years since the Silence began. Four and a half since Luke’s soul was ripped from his body by demons. Three since I exorcised Tom. Since then, I have been the only living thing that possesses a soul on Earth. Rippers aren’t alive. Rippers are the lowest form of hell-spawn. Even Tom was given dominion over them. Sure, they have a body and a soul, but the body is dead and the soul has been damned. Rippers aren’t even true demons. Rippers are tortured souls who make a deal to end their torment. “Bring innocent souls into the fire to save your own skin. Make the righteous burn.” And that’s what they did. Once they ripped a soul from a body, they could throw it into the Pit regardless of where it deserved to go. Make them suffer in their stead. And there are so many of them. So many willing to torture the innocent. So many willing to serve the Fallen.
The Fallen didn’t come in the End to enslave or rule or anything of that sort. He came to exterminate. His quarrel wasn’t that he wanted power or domination, but that he simply hated humanity. Milton was right about the Fallen after all. His anger stemmed from his origins, his angelic nature. After all, he is an angel albeit one that has fallen from grace. When he returned, his sole purpose was to destroy our race, to put an end to His creation, the one that He dubbed better than angels. And while the End did most of that, there were the ones that survived, us Evergreens. And yet he stays in the shadows and waits. He sends those Rippers to retrieve our souls instead of finishing us off himself. I want to meet him, to have the chance to fight him, even if there was no way I could beat the son-of-a-bitch, I still want to try. He owes me that. He owes me for killing off humanity. He owes me for taking Luke. He owes me for making me the only one left. He owes me, and I will make him pay that debt. I want to shout and call him out, yet I don’t want to make it too easy for him to find me. If I yell, the Rippers could hear me for miles. I am alone in this world, alone with the sounds and the lack of them, alone in the Silence. Golden and blood-red, literally in some places.
Hiding from the Rippers gets harder every day. They learn your favorite places and wait. They search the open ground like hyenas looking for scraps. I have become the scraps. The remnants of humanity. They search and wait and all the while, they don’t make a sound. That is the scariest thing about them, the quiet. They have footsteps and make sounds when they run, but when they rip the soul out, it’s absolutely silent. Only the body the soul is leaving makes a noise, however unearthly it may be. But they are silent. I’ve gotten to know the sound they make when they sneak up behind you. The naked feet slapping the ground. The strange noise that your ears get confused by and take a minute to steady themselves. I’ve gotten to know the sound they make when they burn after the rock-salt rips through their dead flesh. These sounds I’ve become accustomed to as much as my stomach, my bones, and my heart.
But then a few days passed since I heard the naked feet and the burning flesh. No attacks. No running. No silent soul. Up until then I would rack up a body count every day. Attacks almost hourly. Three days and no body count, no Rippers. The Silence became the nothing. That day, I walked around in the open, in daylight for the first time since the Before. Nothing attacked, nothing snuck up, it was just nothing. It was just me. No dead men with damned souls tried to damn mine. And in the silence, in the nothing, all I wanted was to be attacked, to feel a presence other than my own. I wanted to see one of them just so I could say that I saw something. But nothing came.
I had been hiding in the Deep South for a week then. Louisiana looked much different without the green. It provided pretty good cover with all the shacks and shanties, but it was cover that I wondered if I needed anymore. I didn’t want to go outside again that day, to face the emptiness out there. But, it was just as empty inside as it was out there. My shotgun went with me as a habit and because it’s all I had left of life. Of a life after a life. But when I ventured outside, I walked into a dream, outside wasn’t real. The marsh that was dead and brown had turned green and I could hear the insects and frogs and crocodiles. The trees, they had leaves and vines growing on them. So many sounds, they were nothing like naked feet or burning flesh. My stomach and my bones and my heart went quiet. Everything was alive and I didn’t want to wake up because I must have been dreaming.
There was a man sitting on the porch outside the shack, his back turned to me at first. I approached, gun trained at his back.
“Who are you?” I asked.
“I Am,” he told me, his voice a quiet, calm baritone. I didn’t have to inquire further to realize who the man was. I dropped the shotgun to my side and walked towards where the man sat.
“Why I am I dreaming?”
“You’re not,” He said and smiled. It was a lonely smile, one that he seemed to have practiced forever so that you almost think that it is genuine. I rounded the chair he sat in and saw His face for the first time. His age was absolutely indiscernible. Upon first glance, I would have said the man there was in his sixties (his hair a salt and pepper color that didn’t have enough pepper and wrinkles around his eyes and mouth), but his eyes were those of a young war-torn soldier, a deed blue rung in pain and understanding. As I stood there, a chessboard, table, a second chair, and another man materialized on the porch. I Am was sitting across the table from a man I recognized: The Fallen. I recoiled and raised my shotgun. The man who called himself I Am raised His hand and my gun was gone without the slightest indication that it had ever been there. The Fallen smiled and I wished I had learned enough Latin to send him to the Pit, but I didn’t.
I Am pointed to a chair that wasn’t there before. “Sit, please.”
I did because I had no other choice. I felt heat coming off of the Fallen and I knew that he must have just left home. I wondered to myself why he didn’t kill me or rip me right then, when I was so close to him, but he just smiled.
“Today is special,” I Am had said, “today is good.” I couldn’t remember what day or month it was.
The Fallen spoke and I heard his voice for the first time. “We have come to an agreement,” he added and his tone was oddly soothing.
“What is it?” I wondered aloud, honestly curious as to what accord they could have come to.
I Am kept His smile. “You are special. From you, all will be saved. From nothing will come everything.” When he said this, I looked around the marsh and had to agree.
“What you must understand,” the Fallen continued, “is that history as you know it has been destroyed. From now on, your name will be Adam, regardless of what it was before. All of that must be forgotten.” I thought of Sunday school in the Before.
“You will be the forefather of all new nations, of the New Jerusalem,” I Am told me.
“You were meant to be this leader,” the Fallen stated, “It is your destiny.”
“Why did you try to kill me if this was my destiny?” I asked him. It was hard to try and keep the bite out of my voice and I knew that a little had slipped through.
“Because that was the way it was supposed to be.” His statement also had a nip to it.
I Am nodded in agreement. “Humanity had to die in order to be reborn.”
“I am still alive.” That time I had not tried to hide the defiance that boiled inside me.
He agreed. “You survived because you are a good person.”
“You survived because you are also evil,” the Fallen added. “One cannot exist without the other. Being wholly righteous or wholly evil are both wrong. Having the right balance is perfection.”
“No man can be perfect, but you are close,” I Am said.
“No that’s not true,” I almost yelled. “ I am nothing more than a man who survived.”
The two immortals sat in silence for a while and thought. What grand thoughts went through their minds I could not even begin to speculate on. I became impatient with them, and wondered what they truly wanted with me, but my thoughts mostly dwelt on the renegade angel to my left. What was burning inside me wasn’t the question of my destiny, but of why I Am had allowed the Fallen to make a deal with him.
“Why is the Fallen here?” I finally asked I Am, at first only addressing the ageless man. When I didn’t receive an answer, I turned to the Fallen. “Why will you let me live if you hate my kind so much?”
“This time, the world will be different,” he answered. He grinned, but this time it was the grin of a kidnapper who just received ransom.
“Why is he here?” I asked I Am again.
“He has been forgiven.” He answered, one of the first straight-forward ones he had given, and it seemed to pain Him to say this.
“Why?” My tone was obviously emotional, anger bordering on rage reverberating through my words.
He smiled that lonely smile again and looked at me with his blue soldier’s eyes, the ones that had seen more than they should have. “Because everything must begin anew.”
“What will happen to him?” I asked, indicating the Fallen.
“He is to return to grace and regain paradise.” I Am answered and again, I noted a bit of regret in His voice.
“You ask too many ‘why’ questions,” The Fallen bit, raising his voice as he addressed me. “Do not question the methods of we beings.” His eyes were unmatched in color and depth to any set that I had ever seen. They seemed to probe at his very soul, a task I didn’t believe was too farfetched. “It is so because everything must begin anew.”
I looked around the marsh and it had become a great city of ivory and gold.
“This will be your kingdom, New Adam,” I Am said, “if you make it so.” Then we were in the jungle, full of life and green.
Then the Fallen spoke up and said, “Life will spread under your rule, if you make it so.” Then we were in a great hall and there were children running people walking in throngs.
“This could be your family, New Adam. Your own flesh and blood, if you make it so.” I Am told me and at this he averted his eyes so as to hide an expression. The Fallen seemed to take offense to this, or at least get mad, then the thought struck me. The Fallen hadn’t made a deal with I Am, I Am, the great Creator, had made a deal with the Fallen. He had waved a great white flag and made a truce, and I was a part of the sweetened pot. If I wanted to ground that train in a hurry, I would have to act quick.
“You keep saying ‘if I make it so’. How can I make these things so?” I asked.
“You will have the powers of a Creator,” I Am explained, “the power to invent and create. You will be a better Adam than the one before you.” If I hadn’t figured out that something was wrong with I Am a minute earlier, this one would have surely caught me on. Upon this revelation, the gifting of amazing powers unto me, I Am hung His head in a surprising display of defeat. A cruel smile crossed the Fallen’s face.
He added, “You will be a great king, and the world would belong to you. This is how it should have been in the beginning, but man was stunted. You will be a better Adam than the one before you.” His smile was evil, like it was in the End, when he returned to destroy everything. “You are going to be the new Adam and there is nothing you can do avoid that fate.”
I Am sat in silence, in what seemed like defeat, something I believed would have ripped a million souls in the Before. I saw this and thought to myself that I would have to be a better Adam than the one before me.
I felt my shotgun that wasn’t there before in my hand underneath the chess table, because I had made it so. The rock-salt had been blessed by the long dead Pope and soaked in holy water because I made it so. Perhaps I was a better Adam than the one before me.
“Thank you for my gifts, Father, I will use them well.” As the words fell from my lips I raised the shotgun. I pulled the trigger and the Fallen turned into ash, his screams burning away into nothing, into silence. When there was nothing left of the great adversary, of the Fallen, I Am spoke to me. “Why did you do that?”
“Because, I am still alive. Because he deserved the abyss. He deserved the Pit. I am not Jesus, I can’t turn the other cheek. I would rather live in this dead world than one where he has been forgiven. I will be your new Adam, but only if the Fallen seen his last day.”
After I finished, I Am looked at me for what could have been a minute or a year. Finally, and with what I realized after a while were tears, he simply said “Thank you.”
No comments:
Post a Comment