An explosion was accompanied by heat, a burning, searing monster that tried to devour him as it flung him across the hall and against the far wall as easily as a child might toss away a rag doll.
He never heard the snap of bones the impact caused.
IV.
Henry Grady Memorial Hospital
Trauma & Burn Unit
Butler Street
Atlanta, Georgia
Three Weeks Later
Lang was dead.
He was sure.
Otherwise, why would he be visited by the persons he knew were deceased?
On the other hand, being dead meant an end to pain, right? His pain was far from at an end. Sometimes he ached and burned over every inch of his body; at others he could localize his suffering to a leg, an arm, his back. The pain was always red, blurring his dim sight like a curtain of misery that separated him from whatever world he was in, either real or ephemeral.
The only real thing was the pain.
It was like a slowly rising and receding tide. At times he could get his head above it, see the universal Light that blinded and feel the agony wash over him. It was all featureless, soundless red. Then, he would be pulled back under into a wet, warm stygian black he had begun to think of as "the Womb," a place where there was no discomfort, only a mellowness and a sensation of floating in space.
That was where the dead were.
As though in a fever dream, he saw his cubicle at the agency's Frankfurt station: a dim, grimy building across from the Bahnhof, where he had spent the bulk of his career. He had graduated from college with a liberal arts degree that, outside of academe, proved worthless. When he was looking around for a job, the agency had a certain appeaclass="underline" lurking in the shadows of Eastern European cities while countering the machinations of beautiful spies…
The experience had proved to be more Dilbert than Bond.
After months of training, Lang had been assigned not to Operations but to Intelligence. Instead of glamour and excitement, his daily chores included monitoring a number of Eastern European newspapers and telecasts.
With a single exception, he had never ventured from friendly soil.
Then he had met Dawn, the woman who became his love, his soul mate and his wife. The collapse of the Evil Empire had meant cutbacks in the agency's budget and resulting reductions in force. It had been to please Dawn, though, he had quit the agency and gone to law school. A small matter. He would have invaded hell had she asked.
Once his law practice began to blossom, Dawn declined. A loss of appetite and weight resulted in a visit to the doctor and a death sentence. Lang had watched the daily dying of a woman in her early thirties as she metastasized into a wrinkled crone, a sack of bones with claws for hands. He had visited her hours a day, making promises and plans they both knew would never be kept.
She died with him at her bedside, her cold face shimmering through the tears he made no effort to staunch.
He fell into a hole every bit as black as the one into which he now sank.
But Dawn was here. Not the pitiful skeleton his wife had become but the full-bodied beautiful girl he had married. She whispered in his ear, sorrowful at his pain and reluctant to leave him.
He would have liked to have joined her.
Then there was Janet, his sister, and Jeff, her adopted son, both dead, murdered in Paris. Across the void, he heard her laugh, scoffing at life's inconsistencies. Jeff still had his baseball cap on backward, was still clad in drooping shorts that almost reached his ankles. Forever Lang's ten-year-old best pal and frequent coconspirator against the established order.
They both seemed glad to see him.
Do the dead enjoy?
Then there were the people who were alive. At least, he thought they were.
They came only when Lang had his head above the dark tide, when he was in so much pain he could see them only through eyes he could barely open, hear not at all though they seemed to be speaking.
He was fairly certain some of them weren't even there.
Francis, the black priest, Janet's former confessor and Lang's best friend, was there more likely than not, his prayers doing Lang about as much good as they had Janet and Jeff. But Lang appreciated him coming even if visitation of the sick was part of the priest shtick anyway.
Sara, his secretary, came less frequently, for which Lang was grateful. The first two times, she dissolved into tears and had to be led away by a woman in white. The next couple of times she tried to speak but Lang could hear nothing. He was vaguely aware he had an office and a law practice that needed some sort of attention and that was probably where Sara went, but it all seemed very far away, remote from the black tides that engulfed him.
And he was probably dead anyway.
Then there was Gurt, the one he was fairly certain wasn't really there. A couple of years after Dawn died, Lang had been in Rome and taken up where he had left off with Gurt Fuchs, a German national and coworker at the agency.
Tall, blonde and looking like a travel poster for her native country, she moved through a crowd making men stare and women jealous. She had taken temporary leave from the agency to come to Atlanta and she and Lang had lived together for a year or so. Lang had dreamed of marriage and the family he had not had with Dawn. Gurt was not interested. She inexplicably announced she was going back to work in Europe. He had not seen her since.
Not till now anyway.
If she was really there.
Which he doubted.
Either way, they had exchanged more wisecracks than statements of affection. If he could, he would tell her how much he had loved her, although romantic conversation was hardly his forte or hers.
Now it might be too late.
Either Gurt in the flesh or as a chimera would enter the lenslike edge of his vision and stand at the foot of his bed, speaking words that to him were only silence. She hadn't aged since he last saw her, a time span he simply was unable to calculate, so it was unlikely she was real. Reinforcing the idea even more was the child that grasped her hand, a blond little boy with eyes the color of cornflowers.
There was something vaguely familiar about him, although Lang's pain-racked brain simply refused to figure out what. He peered at Lang with the curiosity a child might display toward an insect specimen skewered on pins in an exhibit box.
Then the White Angel would appear and Gurt and the child would leave.
The White Angel, the woman whose face changed frequently but who always presaged Lang's return to the Womb.
Lang had no idea how long he had been slipping from one world to the next. He only knew he woke up one morning, really woke up. He could hear voices and footsteps outside his room, fuzzy but sound nonetheless. He could see without the blurred edges at the perimeters of his vision. He recognized smells of a hospital, antiseptic, starch and, he thought, pain.
Father Francis Narumba sat next to the bed in full priestly regalia, reading what Lang could see was the sports section of the Atlanta paper.
"How're the Braves doing?" Lang asked, the first words he could remember since… well, since he wound up here.
Wherever "here" was.
Francis looked up, as startled as if one of the icons on his altar had spoken.
Perhaps more so.
"God be praised! I thought…" He smiled. "Debitum naturae."
Debt to nature, Latin euphemism for death.
Francis was also what Lang described as a victim of a liberal arts education. Lang and the priest made a game of Latin aphorisms.
"Debemur mori nos nostraque," Lang replied, surprised how easily he did so.
Francis put down the paper and came to stand over the bed. "Horace was right: we and our works may be destined for death, but it looks like you aren't quite due yet."
Lang struggled to sit up only to find he was too weak. That was when he discovered the tubes stuck into the back of his hand.