“Step through,” I said.
“You first, fearless leader,” said Clarence, and so I did.
And stepped out again into a cold, winter forest. But this wasn’t anything like what I’d seen the first time I’d come through, when we escaped the museum. When you hear the word “forest,” you usually think of trees, but the only treelike thing about the scorched pillars standing all around us were their half-exposed roots in the black, ruined ground. The devastation extended as far as I could see along the hillside where we stood—devastation, corruption, destruction. From where I stood, I could not see a single living thing.
“Anaita’s already been here,” I said. “This isn’t good. It’s not good at all.”
“Damn it, Bobby, I hate when you say things like that.” Clarence turned in slow circles, staring at the ruined forest like a child who has just realized he’s alone in a supermarket and his parents have disappeared. He took a step and little puffs of ash rose into the air around his shoes. The sky seemed bleached almost white. We were surrounded by silence. “Because you’re usually right.”
forty-two:
wrath
IT WAS a place I’d barely even seen, a place whose connection to my own life was mostly negative, and yet as we made our way across the devastated landscape of Kainos, I was on the verge of tears.
Oddly enough, part of my reaction came because the destruction was limited: I could still see the unsullied mountains and the pristine sky. Looking at those I had the same sense of wonder, of connection to something deeper and more real than reality itself, something that had struck me so hard on my first, brief visit just a couple of days earlier. It made the destruction seem even more pointless.
But what upset me the most was that it wasn’t simply devastation, all the scorched trees and gouged earth, but fury. The destruction was vengeful, and it was personal. This was no act of nature, despite the rifts in the land twenty feet wide and unguessably deep, or the burned trunks of huge trees scattered in all directions as if by a hurricane. This was the work of a very, very angry, very powerful being. An enraged goddess, I felt sure—an avenging angel who had thrown off the restraints of Heaven.
Almost swimming in deep black and gray ash, we finally crested the nearest hill and could look down on a valley at the outer edge of the devastation. It was sickening to see the wreckage of the forest on this large a scale, but that wasn’t what first caught my eye. On the far side of the field of char that had once been a rolling meadow, bisected by a river that was now only a blasted, empty ditch, stood the house I had seen twice from afar, once in person with Sam and once through the door in the fun house the first time Sam had opened it in my presence. It sat like an unwieldy spacecraft on the top of a hill that could have been the scorched, blast-cracked launch pad of some abandoned ruin of the Soviet space program. But the house itself was completely untouched.
Clarence and I stood staring, surprised into silence. It seemed like a mirage that might shimmer and disappear if we made any noise.
As I stood there, staring at something that shouldn’t exist—or at least not looking like it did, like a nice house in the hills in a real estate add—I realized for the first time that something else odd was going on: Clarence looked just like Clarence.
Now, normally when you’re standing next a person who looks like that person, it’s no big deal. But when you get to Heaven, you always look like an angel. And, as I discovered, when you wind up in Hell, you look like something that belongs in Hell. So why was Clarence standing beside me wearing his button-collar shirt, and his windbreaker that looked like he ironed it, and his suede shoes that always looked like they belonged on the feet of a rich old European man? (I accused him once of wearing Hush Puppies, and he was really insulted. “These are Ferragamos!” he said, I guess the same way I might say, “It’s got a 426 Hemi engine!”)
I looked down at myself and saw I was also wearing basically the same thing I’d worn during the trip through Shoreline Park, except now with a layer of ash and dust—my jacket, a black t-shirt, a pair of dark jeans, and the work boots I like because a) they’re black, b) they’re not half bad to look at, and c) you can kick the shit out of someone with them if you have to. I tell you not to compare my wardrobe to the kid’s, but because finding myself wearing exactly the same clothes in an entirely different reality was hard to figure. Remembering my gun, I checked my pocket, but it wasn’t there. So, same clothes but no other objects.
“Are you wearing a belt?” I asked the kid.
“Yes.”
“And you were wearing it before we got here?”
He gave me a puzzled look. “Yeah. Why?”
“We’ll talk about it later. Meanwhile, we have to figure out what to do. And I have. We’re going to go check out the house.”
Now his expression changed from puzzlement to Seriously Contemplating Mutiny. “No way. You’re joking, right? Because if that’s the only place around here that doesn’t look like a bomb dropped on it, then the person who did this is probably inside.”
“I don’t think so.”
“Oh, then let’s go, sure. ‘I don’t think so’ is all the assurance I need to risk whatever we’re risking here. What are we risking here, by the way? Just our bodies, or our souls, too?”
I laughed, but it wasn’t because I found anything very funny just now. “Let’s put it this way—if there were such a thing as soul insurance, I’d be calling my agent.”
Clarence looked pale—no, he looked pale green. There’s a difference. “And we’re going there, why?”
“Because it’s there. Because it didn’t get blown to shit and matchsticks. And because we’re trying to find Sam, and it’s the most obvious place he’d leave a message, or at least a clue where he is.”
“But it’s so . . . exposed.”
“And so are we, standing in the middle of all this nothing. Let’s get to getting.”
It would have been an odd house even if it stood in the middle of nice neighborhood instead of the remains of downtown Hiroshima. It was too tall, for one thing, four or five vertical stories in a box only about half as wide as it should have been. From this angle the tower at the top was much more visible, and looked less like a cupola and more like a steeple.
It set me to thinking, but I kept my thoughts to myself because Clarence was like a spooking horse, all nerves and eye-whites. Of course, that was really the only sane reaction to trying to sneak up on an angel, a genuine Warrior Queen of Heaven, with nothing but our bare hands. Hell, my own mouth was so dry that if Anaita had appeared in front of me, I couldn’t even have spit at her.
Up close, the ring of devastation looked slightly less complete. I could make out the remains of a couple of paths and the ruins of more than a few outbuildings, although “ruins” was a stretch, because what we really saw were only the scorched outlines and ordered ash where buildings had once been, before the firestorm. A ghost of a grassy verge still fringed the place, like the hair of a dying monk, but the grass had turned gray, and when I reached down to pick some it crumbled to dust in my hands.
“Shit,” said Clarence in a whisper. “She just burned and burned and burned.”
I almost warned him to keep quiet, but of course if Anaita was in there and listening, she’d probably heard us long before that. It made me wonder again how much power she had used here and how she managed it. That’s one difference between the higher angels and the schmuck angels like me and Clarence: We were limited by the physical fact of our bodies, the bodies that Heaven gave us. (People are limited that way, too—it’s called “being mortal.”) But the important angels, as well as bigtime demons like Eligor, could channel a much larger amount of power than I could ever hope to. It still wasn’t unlimited, though, and that reminded me of the line from Gustibus that I’d modified: Follow the power. Not like now, where we were walking across its effects, but in terms of figuring out how the whole mess worked. Clearly, Anaita was very strong here; as powerful as she’d been on Earth, probably more so. When we’d met on Earth, she hadn’t been able to do anything like this, or she would have just grabbed me for my brainwashing, then evaporated everyone who followed me into the museum. Not to mention that she wouldn’t have been anywhere near as occupied by the closet full of bugbears I’d dumped on her. But here, maybe second only to Heaven, she could call on the energies of something like a force five hurricane.