forty-five:
how a world ended
OKAY, BEFORE I explain to you what happened while my face was being chewed off by felis mythicus giganticus, let me tell you the good news: I was certain now that Anaita’s power really did have limits.
Knowing that wasn’t a lot of help right then, what with the fangs and the drool and the huge jaws crushing my skull, but it meant that we actually had a chance. Not a good one. Not even a statistically significant one. But a chance.
See, nobody (at least nobody like me) actually knows where the high angels get their power. “Direct from the Highest” is what we’re told, and that may well be true, but I’m pretty sure there’s more to the story. The power is rationed, apparently by rank, and the higher up the ladder you go, the more pure force the angels in question can bring to the dance. Someone like Anaita, one of the chief powers of the Third Sphere, could bring a great deal of it to bear where she wanted, on Heaven, on Earth, or even here on Kainos. In fact, she had a great deal more freedom to use power on Kainos because the place pretty much belonged to her. But this was the kicker: she didn’t have the right to that power.
So Anaita could call on far greater resources than she needed, far more than Sam, Clarence, and I could ever hope to match: if angelic power were water, she had a fire hose the size of the Holland Tunnel, and we had squirt guns. But just like someone using a fire hose, the water had to come from somewhere, and so did whatever heavenly reserves she was drawing on. More important, she had to disguise the fact that she was using it, because any massive deployment of angelic force was going to attract notice Upstairs.
I’d been suspicious that she destroyed such a small portion of Kainos during her scorched earth hissy fit. Yes, she wanted to preserve the place, but she never really found out whether I was there or not, and she hadn’t managed to capture Sam either, who was at least as much of a threat to her secrets as I was. That suggested that she didn’t dare use that level of force for very long. Yeah, she could come down and rain destruction like a helicopter gunship, but only for so long before someone back in Heaven was going to start wondering what she was doing.
Which explained why she’d mostly worked through others, sending Smyler after me instead of just obliterating me with a snap of her fingers, and using Sam and the other renegade angels to do the groundwork of populating Kainos.
The big cats were the final giveaway. The monsters were the manifestations of Anaita’s power, yes, but she was using them because they were a comparatively thrifty way to get rid of us. Create something with hunting instincts, muscles, talons, and fangs, then turn it loose, and you get much more bang for your buck than just vaporizing everything in front of you. The fang-toothed kitty tasting my face at that moment might have been nasty, but it was actually a sign of weakness. Anaita was trying to take us down on the cheap, because she needed to keep what she was doing hidden from Heaven.
I promise you, I didn’t spend as much time thinking about all that at the time as I just did describing it.
The cat-beast had me down, but it hadn’t yet found a way to get its jaws squarely around my skull, and I was doing my best to hang onto my facial features, hitting, kicking, squirming, rolling. Still, several seconds of that hadn’t done me any good, and I was already running out of strength. I pulled the knife I’d stashed in my boot, wishing really hard that it could be something longer, stronger, and sharper than a leaf of flint with string wrapped around one end to make a handle. I knew I wasn’t going to make any major puncture wounds with it, so I just started slashing at everything I could reach, trying to cause pain. This might have been the imaginary sort of giant cat, but until I learned otherwise, I was going to assume that its nose and mouth and eyes were its weak spots, like almost any other predator.
Sadly, I seemed to be learning otherwise, or else I was just pissing it off. It bit down on my hand hard enough to make me drop the stone knife, and when I punched its nose with my other hand it only reared back, mouth wide and teeth very obvious, ready to go for my throat. Then something hit it.
Crock! That’s the noise it made, like someone throwing a large rock against the side of a concrete building. The cat reeled and stumbled back a step, one half of its face suddenly a different shape and oozing gray stuff that might have been blood. Clarence swung his club again, a stone the size of a volleyball tied into the fork of a thick branch, but only managed to hit the beast on the shoulder this time. It shook its head and snarled.
One of its eyes was gone, or at least lost in torn tissue and broken bone, but the cat was nowhere near dead. Clarence tried to yank me away by my collar and only yanked me onto my ass instead, but I’d found my spear, and just managed to lift it high enough to pierce the creature’s throat as it came at me. The force of its leap knocked me over again, but the spear had struck home. The cat twisted and contorted itself, trying to get a paw on the stick wagging in its neck.
I grabbed at the spear, got lucky, then braced myself and tried to force the beast toward the second pit, but even with half its head crushed and a spurting hole in its windpipe, Godzilla-Garfield was still intent on killing me.
One rear paw slid over the edge of the pit into empty space, but the thing began to push back hard against the spear, as if it knew what I planned. So I let go of the spear and threw myself at the giant cat, hitting the creature low in its body, right in the ribs. My weight and momentum pushed it flailing and snarling over the edge. I went with it, but most of my body landed on the rim of the pit, and Clarence caught my leg.
It may not have been a real cat, it may have bled gray, but it died just like any desperate, angry living thing on those sharpened stakes at the bottom of the hole. Not that I spent long watching it.
“Where’s Sam?” I gasped as I used Clarence’s arm to pull myself back to safety.
“In the house.” Clarence had reached some kind of battle clarity, exhaustion and fear canceling each other. His voice was like a robot’s.
“Then let’s fucking run,” I suggested.
I stole one look back at Anaita, who did not appear too upset by the destruction of her pets. Made sense if they were things she’d just made, but it didn’t help my plan any: I wanted her angry. Not to the point of burning down the house and all the rest of us with one pissed-off gesture, but close to it. Clarence and I dug across the drifting snow and black ash toward the building. Luckily for us, Anaita felt no need to hurry.
“Duck!” I shouted at Clarence as we burst through the door. I grabbed his head and bent him down to keep him from getting tangled. “She’s coming!” I shouted to everyone else. Not that they needed to be told. The door we had dragged shut behind us simply flew apart, with a snap-snap-snap chorus of broken timbers and a whuff of displaced air, then the Angel of Moisture glided through—right into the web of ropes and rattles the pilgrims of Kainos had strung in the entranceway. As she thrashed her way angrily through this minor distraction, several Kainos men and women stood up from their hiding places on the second floor landing, screaming wordless battle cries (okay, shrieks of pent-up terror) and letting their arrows fly. None of them had been living in this place long enough to become marksmen, but enough of the wooden arrows struck Anaita to make her cry out in rage. She ripped loose those that pierced her, flinging them away as though they were no more than burrs and stickers from a walk in the country.