CW: animal cruelty or death, violence, blood or bodily fluids, bodily harm, death or dying.
“Beloved men, recognize what the truth is: this world is in haste and it is drawing near the end—therefore the longer it is, the worse it will get in the world. And it needs must thus become very much worse as a result of the people’s sins prior to the Advent of Antichrist, and then indeed it will be terrible and cruel throughout the world.”
This whole business, it all started right about when I burned my church down. Not one I went to, or ministered at—I mean the one built around me, raised by my very own personal worshippers, so they could do their sacrificial reverence to me in private. Might’ve done it earlier if I’d only known that was an option, but one way or the other I’d definitely had enough by that point, eighteen damn years’ worth of it. Frankly, cousin, if you’d only known these people the same way I did, I do believe you probably would’ve done it too.
So picture this, if you can: I’m up on the podium, enthroned in front of a shrine of bones with a Hand of Glory on either side of me, my head already sweaty-aching under a crown made from ten different kinds of horns that bites into my scalp so it doesn’t start to tip askew. Got me wearing a black goatskin robe, uncured, rough and stinking; got a reversed cross in pig’s blood drawn on my forehead, so thick it draws flies that sting and cluster ’tween my brows, buzzing like a bad light socket. Twenty naked fools already down on their knees inside the hexafoil, knocking their heads on the ground and scratching themselves hard enough to open wounds—thirteen still robed and masked likewise with their backs turned to the wrangle and a dagger in either hand, supposedly poised to guard us all against incursion. And then, to top it all off, out come the reverend and his sister-wives with a bag of live-caught feral cats and a brace of three-foot skewers.
Preaching from Jubilees like always, chanting away as the blind and swinging mass of cats growls and hisses against each other, getting ready to make them scream. Telling them dirt-faced fools how lawlessness increased on the earth and all flesh corrupted its way, alike men and cattle and beasts and birds and everything that walks on the earth, all of them corrupted their ways and their orders, and they began to devour each other, and every imagination of the thoughts of all men was thus evil continually. Continually, continually, continually.
And didn’t that make ’em all writhe and moan, cousin, just like the words were stuffed with fentanyl cured in crack, or what-have-you . . . well, didn’t it? What do you think?
Yeah, that’s right.
They say good people have a light around them, and that’s true. It licks and laps, sweet like dripping honey, almost edible. But then there’s the others, lurching around, all driven by their own little seeds of darkness, their slime-mold souls—their flesh spored like fungus, turning from within. And I grew up amongst the latter, living symbol of that black angel-sized hole they all claimed to yearn to throw themselves down into. Constantly being told how special I was, how the ruin I instinctively sowed around me had to be nurtured with deliberation, whipped up high like a fire fed by cruelty and filth. How without me to do it before, none of this ridiculous gothic shit they spent their time caught up in would be anything but simple human perversion, the same old lust and hate and murder cops have been cleaning up after since a hundred years before the last millennium’s turn.
They found my mother under a pile of trash after the seven-year cyclone went by, that particularly strange one, a swirling mass of live insects and fire, caught-up animals cooking and bleeding out, rotten garbage of every sort. Rivers burst their banks as it passed by; graves gave up their fruit, the dust and bones of ages past spread miles wide, human ash forming fulgurites with each red lightning strike. The moon eclipsed the sun, turning it blue-black, and fields scored in the storm’s wake became fallow. All these omens: surely, my birth couldn’t fail to be something special, considering my mother was a virgin when the winds came for her. Or so the reverend always claimed.
She was comatose when they pulled her out and dead by the time they cut me from her womb, nine months later, but that didn’t matter, supposedly; just a vessel, the reverend used to say, a necessary step along the low road to the low god. Said god being whoever sowed the seed of me inside her, thus making me harbinger of a long-awaited uprising against the cruel archon who made this awful world, condemning us to live encased in dumb meat until it finally rots enough to fall back off. To set us free.
I’ve heard this shit all my life, cousin—same as you, probably. It never gets more likely, but it sure does get wearing.
That tide of stupid whispers, wet with drool, all ready for the show. All flesh, all flesh, corrupting its way; all flesh, all flesh, corrupting its way—and then the first cat gets dragged out by its scruff, and I’m just done. Done with all of this stupid shit, forever.
So: “Put that down,” I tell the sister-wife nearest me, my voice so seldom-used she barely looks like she recognizes it, a grating, dusty thing. Adding, as she hesitates: “I said, DOWN.”
“Now, Little Horn,” the reverend calls me, placatingly. But I can feel it in me now, coming up through me, the way he always taught me it would; the true speech, a desert wind blowing straight back from Megiddo, wrathful-raw and rank. That it would be there when I reached for it, when I finally wanted to reach for it. He just never thought he’d be the thing to make me want to, I guess. I mean, why would he?
But: “That’s not my name,” is all I say, by way of reply, and I shut my eyes. Find that door inside my mind, the red one; open it, recognize what’s crouching there, in the dark behind. Let it recognize me, in turn. Then open wide myself, everywhere at once, and tell it to come on out.
And I light that whole fucking place on fire.
• • • •
The cats got out okay, in case you’re wondering. Nobody else, though; I made damn sure of that before I walked away, stepping out of the fire seemingly unburnt, yet still hot enough on the outside that my first few footprints came down all smoking and gooey on the road’s asphalt, ’til my skin cooled enough to draw dust. I was naked by that time, of course, but smeared all over in ash and other debris, which probably made me seem clothed from a distance. Still, someone did slow down to take a gander after a while, which is when I figured out I’d forgotten about that dumb fucking crown of horns.
You know how it is, cousin: Antichrist’s a position, not a person. There’s hundreds of us around might fill that particular slot, we only knew we had the right to try for it. But most of us don’t, no more than most of the normal sheep-folk surrounding us know their ownselves what they’re capable of, under truly special circumstances.
So we wander about instead, hunger-driven—collide and tangle, vaguely aware of each other in proximity like tigers huffing each other on the wind, similarly carrion-breathed, and aroused to heat by the scent of it. Enjoy each other’s company a while, in season, though like as not we won’t cleave together more than a shortish spell; we tend to breed true only with normal humans . . . if you can call your regular range of devout Satanists “normal.”
Wandered down along a road a while, then, enjoying my solitude, for all I didn’t expect to be alone for long, ’cause we never are. People move towards you like iron filings towards a magnet, drunk with praise—fall in love with you and want to do things for you, and you can’t convince them otherwise, not even if you try. But they always destroy themselves for you, over you, or self-destruct if you refuse their tribute. And if you let yourself get angry with them, they’ll be attacked, or have an accident, or commit suicide. You have to accept their worship or you’ll be alone, the reverend always said, but to do so is to know you’re a seeder with no driver sowing death everywhere you go, even unto the end of the world. Just a (semi-)human payload, continually moving towards Armageddon.
(I always know where to shoot. I always know where to go. Which way to step so the bullet hits whoever’s standing next to me. I always know where the fight will be, and I walk through it, unscathed. I am a weapon, made for nothing but final war.)
Fire and blood, bitches.
So when this nice young man got out of his car and took some steps towards me, calling out worriedly: “Lady, you okay? Anything I can do for you, lady?”, I simply smiled. I’m no lady, son, I might have said, if I’d wanted to; not a ma’am, not a missus, not a miz. Just a bad thought, the kind that hurts to think. A scream walking ’round on two legs, searching for yet another mouth to fill.
I was hot, though, that’s true enough—hotter than even I like to be. And my head hurt.
“God wants you kept safe,” he told me, practically panting with the prospect of doing some good, ’long as it wouldn’t cost him too much. “I can drive you wherever easy enough, you need me to. No trouble.”
I nodded, smiling wider yet. “The god you mean’s a fly on a dead dog’s eye,” I replied, mildly. “But go on and do whatever makes you happy, I suppose.”
A mild, surprised frown. “Excuse me?”
“Oh, I doubt even I can do that.”
Here he shook his head just a bit, eyes slightly aflutter, sure he couldn’t possibly have heard what he just did. Then stepped back, and opened the door for me.
“Climb in,” he told me, and I did. We pulled away, Carrie Underwood blasting.
“Bet you just love this song, don’t you?” I asked. “‘Jesus Take the Wheel’ . . . sounds kinda dangerous, to me.”
“Uh huh,” he agreed, nodding, then sniffed. “Oh wow, that’s some kinda stinky—what is that, you think, exactly?”
“That’d be me, I’m afraid.”
“We should do something about that—get you some normal clothes, wash off that stuff. Get rid of the whatever-it-is on your head, too.”
“Probably, yeah.” Gave him a sly look, then, pupils sliding horizontal, yellow-flaring in the dimming sun. “Think your girlfriend might wear the same size as me?”
• • • •
A few hours later, just as twilight became full sodium-glare night, I let that boy drop me off in front of an all-night roadside diner called Meg’s Big Bite, dolled up in pink from head to toe like Devil-baby Barbie. Meg like Megiddo, I found myself thinking; there was a coincidence, or maybe not. Since oh so very little is, in our lives.
When I walked in to find you already there, therefore, that’s why I maybe wasn’t as surprised as I otherwise might have been.
Saw you sitting there and knew immediately what you were to me, cousin—what we were, to each other. Felt the hair at the back of my neck first stiffen a bit, then sleek back down again once you looked up and shook your head, just a bit.
“Like coffee?” you asked. “I ordered us a pot.”
“Hm, could be,” I replied. “Gotta be better than goat’s-blood brewed with moonshine, one way or the other.”
“Shit, I hope so,” you said, eyebrows hiking. “Sit on down.”
We examined each other for a minute or two, staring across the red-checked plastic tablecloth. You were taller than me, probably older—had olive-tinted skin and hair the same vaguely reddish shade as mine, drawn back in a mass of braiding on one side, shaved almost to the scalp on the other. Your eyes were heavy-lidded, lashes thick-dark as mascara above and below but the same basic colour as mine, too, that sly light yellow-brown from some angles, molten gold from others. Hazel, I’ve heard it called, but that’s just the sheep lying to ’emselves, trying to boil it down any way they can into something recognizable. Plus those same slitted pupils, too: slanted and weird, oval on occasion, never fully round. A pair of black moons floating in an alien sky.
“Some call me the Nail,” you said, “on the internet, anyway. And they call you Little Horn down at that hillbilly Left Hand Path honky-stomp of yours, or used to.”
“Yeah, and some call me Kiss My Ass, ’specially when I’ve just laid the hellfire down on ’em,” I told you, voice finally smoke-free, but no less gravelly. “So who the fuck are you really when you’re at home, or even when you ain’t?”
“Beata Callander, nice to meet you. Am I your first fellow antichrist?”
“. . . Pretty much.”
“Me too, or almost. Interesting, huh?”
“Interesting how?”
“Oh, just exactly how hard they all work to keep us apart. And maybe why.”
Me, I’m not too educated, as such; the reverend made sure of that, or tried to. But you, cousin . . . someone took a good long time making sure you could conjure your own opinions and formulate your own insights into arguments; someone taught you debate wasn’t just necessary, but essential. I’d’ve liked to’ve grown up in a house like that.
So: “You tell me,” I suggested. To which you took a little bow, and did.
“My parents were Sunday go-to-meeting kind of Satanists, at best,” you began. “I mean, they practiced, off and on; made their obeisances, but didn’t do much else. To them, this was like some sort of beauty pageant or something—a community thing. Competition to build character. One of us I met later on, though, his parents’d built a cult like yours around him out in the woods somewhere, not quite Manson-level, but not quite not. I used to call him Damon Hellstrom, ’caused I knew it pissed him off.”
I poured sugar in my coffee, enough to hold a spoon upright. “And what happened to him?”
“Good question. I passed through there a while back, saw everything was coming up roses—lots of tattooed pussy-slash-ass, a functioning meth kitchen, bundles of money and all the bodies buried deep enough nobody’d come sniffing around, as yet. Then I came back two weeks ago, found nothing but a burnt-out shell and a pile of corpses, his very much not amongst them.”
“Sounds sad.”
“Well, the guy was a world-class asshole even without the whole End of Days thing, but yeah. Particularly by implication.”
I shrugged, downing most of my coffee-syrup in one long, tooth-aching swig. “Might be he didn’t want some bunch of naked morons rubbin’ up on him all the time anymore, tattooed or not,” I suggested. “’Cause . . . some people just don’t, you feel me? Gets wearing.”
“You’d know all about that, I guess.”
“Yup.” You shot me a glance and I met it, levelly. “What, you think I was gonna deny it? Being an object sucks—of worship, or otherwise. I wanted more.”
“More than ruling the world for a thousand years? Some expensive tastes you got there, cousin.”
I snarled. “Stop lookin’ ’round inside my head, bitch.”
“Aww, but it’s so hard not to.” Adding, as I fumed: “Listen, I’ve been where you are and you know it, just like you know the drill: How we get blamed for everything even when we’re not responsible for it, because strength is terrifying and we’re literally strong as hell. That’s why all our lives, great and terrible powers will conspire to destroy us, while equally terrible powers will die to keep us safe. Thus, that cult of yours was yours, to keep or to kill, because strength makes its own laws. And if they were dumb enough to think different, too bad for them, right? You’re the goat, not the sheep; you lead, you will never be led.
“So: Listen to your own voice above any other, save that of Him who made you. For you will move armies like chess pieces, in your time; you are the scythe, the torch, the ram that breaks all doors and levels the final playing field. You will Prepare the Way.”
“Or I’ll call myself Peggy, get a job in a library. You don’t know.”
“Kind of think you’d have to be able to read, for that,” you replied. “Or at least have a legal birth certificate.”
“Oh yeah, ’cause I’m that kid from The Omen—Derrick, or whatever. Right?”
“Damien, and so am I. Potentially, at least.”
“Lucky you.”
“Lucky us.”
You smiled at me then, full force, something I’d never hitherto been on the other end of. It was . . . powerful, I guess is the best way to put it. Made me think yet again on the whole question of incarnation—were we Nephilim in reverse, or something altogether different? Just demons who’ve slipped inside human bodies and forced them to replicate an amalgam, some tadpole of evil waiting to bloom into full frog, or maybe something from outside space-time forcing a little bit of itself inside, moving us around like human-skin finger-puppets? Are we a mask, or a mirror? When we speak, are our voices ever our own, as opposed to an echo wrapped ’round a lie . . . low-key devil-daddy whispering through us, murmuring bad advice in every ear we meet?
We both knew the creed, like you’d said. How each of us was a weapon, so we needed to be pointed, be primed . . . and the worst part of it all was realizing how we didn’t live for ourselves alone, how we couldn’t. How we were at least half-human, which really should give us free will, and yet. The very idea of our own individuality might just well be another illusion, one so good even we couldn’t help wanting to believe in it.
“Yeah,” you agreed, doing that annoying mind-reading thing once more. “The Nazarene had it pretty easy, all told; he came here alone. Didn’t have to battle it out with a bunch of other saviours-to-be, like sharks in their mother’s belly, ’til one of them got born and the rest became calories. But the only way one of us will rise is by ingesting the others, becoming the most singular, the sum of All.”
“Says who, exactly?”
Your grin widened. “A very good question. Too bad none of us seem to ask it.”
I was taking a second to absorb this particular idea when the other diners all began first turning ’round in their seats, then getting up and drifting towards us, starting to loom and cluster. Seemed like we must’ve kick-started an extra helping of the usual effect, sitting down both together like that; pretty soon, everybody within a certain radius was gonna start in on genuflecting and humpin’ our legs while carvin’ IT’S ALL FOR YOU all over ’emselves with the tableware, or some similar kind of shit.
“Oh, I love you so much, Little Horn,” one old lady to the left of us told me, raising her shaking hands my way; “No you don’t,” I snapped, recoiling right before she could connect, and took a spiteful jolt of pleasure out of the pain that flashed through her eyes as she watched me brush her worship aside. While you just leaned past and laid your hand on hers before that hurt could turn inward, gently telling her—
“Yes, I know it’s disappointing, but that’s life sometimes, isn’t it? So look me in the eyes and believe me when I say you can just walk away—you don’t have to kill yourself because she rejected you, after all. Just go sit in the john for fifteen minutes or so and cry ’til you feel better; stay out of her sight, she’ll forget about you soon enough. Okay, ma’am?”
The old lady shook her head a bit, like she was trying to clear it. “Okay,” she replied, eventually.
You patted her hand, then let go. “Perfect. Have a nice day, now.”
“Gonna do that with all of them?” I asked, watching the old lady wander away, while the others drew closer. But you shook your head.
“Was kind of hoping you’d help out, actually,” you suggested, “before we start a riot, and the cops get called. Or the TV news.”
I frowned again, sighing. Then said, finally:
“. . . ugh, all right.”
Entirely without planning to, we rose and turned together, in a weird sort in unison—didn’t quite hold hands, or even touch, but I nevertheless felt something flicker between us: a jolt, a spark, a charge. Your strength recognizing mine, making it, or me . . . us both . . . just that little bit stronger. I glanced back at you, only to watch you smirk in reply: Quite the trick, hmm? Yeah, it was. A trick and a treat, energy humming at almost the same pitch through the holes between our atoms, sewing us together and the rest of the world apart—
—but this was exactly when the night outside ripped wide, allowing the twisted-’round, hooflike foot of yet one more of us to step through onto the very same road that boy had driven me in on, and fire bloomed bright as reality sealed itself shut once again behind him.
“Aww, crap,” you cursed, at my elbow.
Back in the Middle Ages, people spent an inordinate amount of time making drawings of what they thought Hell might look like, let alone how the things that lived there’s bodies might be arranged. Given their own circumstances, I guess it makes sense that they usually fell back on what they knew: streets full of shit (often on fire), dead folks covered in boils and blisters from the plague (also often on fire), demons that looked like worms and scorpions and toads and such, with their entrails hanging out and their dicks all covered in thorns, napalm vomiting from all the usual orifices (along with all the unusual ones).
The reverend, he had a corkboard set up in the back of my church with versions of what the Antichrist was supposed to look like pinned all over it, from mosaics and statues to paintings and woodcuts and whatall—had ’em up there for everyone in the cult to study, I can only suppose, just in case they forgot what they were keepin’ an eye out for. And I must admit, the whole thing seemed nothing but ridiculous to me, given that I’d seen the photos they took of my mother, after all. Knew what I saw when I looked in the bathroom mirror, too—one more human being, more or less, occasional goat-eyes aside. Exactly like you, cousin, in other words, or that asshole you’d told me about at the top of our conversation, give or take the dangly bits.
This new sumbitch outside the diner, though, he had what I could now hear you loudly thinking were all the Hieronymus Bosch accoutrements: face in his gut, face in his ass, faces for pecs, with a tail twice as long as his three-foot cock and the both of ’em dragging on the ground, spreading liquid crap behind and pre-cum like lit gasoline before. As he turned, I saw how four crumply supernumerary wings like hunks of melted garbage bags had busted out his back, both above and below the shoulder blades; eyes blinking all up and down his spine like landing lights, too, and a mouth that sported three rows of teeth nested one inside the other plus a pair of dusty black lips split in front like a lion’s, stretched wide from ear to double-pointed ear.
I elbowed you in the ribs. “And just who,” I demanded, “is this motherfucker, exactly?”
“Don’t pretend you can’t tell, cousin,” you replied, grimly.
“Same guy you’ve been pussyfootin’ ’round warning me about? Yeah, I’m gettin’ that idea.”
“Well, screw me for trying to be subtle. I thought we’d have more time ’til he got here.”
“Uh huh. Screwed that one up, now, didn’t ya?”
It was damn hard not to stare, all told, so after a second or so I didn’t even try. Just heard the reverend in the back of my head, wittering on, singing his way through every Jubilees translation available through Google: For in this time there will be many, many, many like Legion, though only one ascends. And this asshole definitely looked like he was aiming to be the One in question, even if it meant he had to eat his way through the whole rest of his entire generation.
“Shit, man,” I said, with a mixture of disgust cut with sneaky semi-admiration; “old boy sure has put some effort in, ain’t he? And me, I wasn’t even born with horns.”
“Don’t think he was either, truth to tell. Check those faces, one by one—they seem pissed off to you, too?”
I did, and they did; the eyes flashed yellow, weeping blood, each pupil identically side-slitted. Plus, that sludge he was passing had bone fragments in it.
“Oh, ugh. That’s not gonna happen to us, is it?”
“Not unless we either chow down on every other antichrist left alive, or slather ourselves in ketchup and wait.”
I shook my head. “Fuck that shit,” I said, to which you laughed, and nodded.
“Damn straight,” you replied.
And this time you did reach out to take my hand, or I took yours. Doesn’t really matter which.
• • • •
We’re not supposed to work together, even against a third—that’s part of the creed, too. Selfishness, not self-sacrifice; strength, not weakness. To admit fear is to make yourself vulnerable, in the Devil’s Bible. For who is like unto the Beast? Who is able to make war with him? Only one, and He’s not here.
(Yet.)
But in the meantime . . .
Our looming, roaring Cousin Number Three, yet one more brother from another mother—or why not call him the Beast, since he’d certainly done more’n enough to earn the moniker—must’ve felt us touch from way ’cross the parking lot, that spike, how it roiled and spat, hooking deep into each of our worshippers’ medullae oblongata at once (’side from that old lady in the john, I’d venture a guess). How it jerked them ’round in unison, made their eyes fall on him all at once, and let the lamentable spectacle of his florid self-injury flush anything else they might have had in mind away like poop down a chute. How they howled out jackal-pack style, chucked a couple of chairs through the diner’s front windows, then started swarming full-bore towards him without even stopping long enough to kick out the last few shards as they went.
One man in a trucker hat cut his wrist wide open but kept on running, barely slowing down even once he’d bled out far enough to fall over, so his own momentum slammed him up against the Beast horizontally, trapping that sharp-swinging demonic dick-head between the dying man’s body and the Beast’s own thorny ankles. The rest either tripped over him or leaped him like a stile, scrabbling headlong, climbing each other like ants. They broke over the Beast in a wave, tearing at him with their nails, no matter how bad his blood burnt on its way out.
Ha! Got you, fuck-stick.
The Beast screamed out like an Aztec death whistle, mouth gaping so wide it tipped the whole top of his skull back like a fuckin’ muppet’s. Gonna puke fire all over ’em, I thought . . . but no, that wasn’t it at all, turned out. I only wish it had been.
Aww, what the—
Ever see a guy rise up on those raptor-sized claws at the back of what should be his heels, puff his blinking chest out like a rooster and cum ropes of flame over everything around him like a firehose, a stream so hard and hot it melts whatever it touches, like lava? No? Well . . .
. . . just count yourself lucky, then. Wish to fuck I could power-wash the sight of that out of my mind, and I’m half-Satan.
“Gaaah, Jesus H. CHRIST,” I heard you retch from beside me, automatically, then yip as the Carpenter’s antithetical name sliced your tongue open, spitting blood. I felt the sting of it pass straight through one ear and out the other, a searing migraine-thread, and narrowed my eyes against the pain, left one blooming red with burst blood vessels.
“Time to put on the whole damn armour, cousin,” I told you, fisting your hand in mine and digging my nails in, deep enough to yank you back to yourself. Saw you nod again, out the crimson-tinged corner of my gaze—then straighten up, grimly, throwing our twinned palms out together towards the Beast and shooting him the double horns.
The Beast looked back at us, still engorged, and laughed: long, loud, like us making our final stand was the funniest shit he’d ever seen. He was ashy, dripping, mainly lit by his own secretions; a few smoking remnants of various diner patrons kept on crawling blindly ’round his hoof-feet, almost too scorched to moan, while they waited to get stomped on. I watched the faces of all those relatives he’d devoured thus far trying to scream for them, and failing.
“Get rrrrrreadyyyyy, cousinnnnns,” he told us, in a voice like rocks being ground smooth. “Thisssss . . . is going to hurrrrrttttt.”
Your hand in mine, tight. Tighter.
That jolt.
“Sure is,” you told him, grinning back. And I knew just what you meant.
Because—
• • • •
All my life, ever since a certain point, I’ve known myself not just weapon but sacrament. The body and the blood.
Fire runs hot through all three of our veins, always has. The Lightbringer’s genetics at work. With you and me, though, cousin, that means something extra.
I cast myself back to my church, the cleansing of it, wiping the slate clean with summoned conflagration: Blood as a halo turned outwards, not inwards, burning anyone I cared to touch. Reach up under my skirt, slap a red hand across someone’s face and they go blind, start to melt, as the fruit of my sour womb infects ’em. Saints and martyrs have a similar sort of power, or so the big-C Church claims—rose-scented decay, generative damage, life-giving. Wound as superpower, sweet and pure, bringing life instead of death; where their severed heads fall, a font of healing water springs up.
But me, again—you and me—
—we ain’t no saints.
Like the Beast, we’re doomed to make stuff hot, make forces intersect. To call the storm, bring locusts, turn the fields to salt. To drink this whole world’s blood and eat its flesh at once in a spasm of de-Creation, leaving it desolate and naked. For with me, the time has come for bitter things.
“Gonna turn your head so far backwards, you’ll be looking up your own ass forever,” I told him—my voice in your mouth too, coming from everywhere at once, echoing like feedback. Reaching out, calling to my brothers and sisters he’d already swallowed, offering them vengeance; hearing them know their time had come, and answer. An awful choir risen from every atom of his bloated body, singing destruction’s song.
And then, just like with my church, we lit that fucker up all together, but oh so very much harder. A tiny little taste of Armageddon. So hard that when we were done, there was nothing left but the crispy bits, blown up and away like sparks into a dark, dark wind.
• • • •
We paused then, panting, contemplating letting go. Which is when we heard that slow clap from somewhere near and turned, instead.
He was standing back in the diner’s ruins, maybe where that booth we’d once shared used to be—a man, or something like it. The face and form he’d put on hinted at Robert Johnson by way of Stagger Lee, classic crossroads style; had goat’s eyes and a pork pie hat pulled down low to hide his spiky nubs. And his voice, now . . . I felt it all through me, threatening to pick me apart the same way you and me’d just done the Beast, cousin. I know you felt it, too.
“. . . Lucifer,” you said at last, quietly.
“Beata,” he named her in turn, inclining his head. “And you, Little Horn . . . ah, you. Here is my beloved, in whom I am well-pleased.”
I both understood the compliment and wanted it, fiercely, which made me want to shut his mouth with a punch.
“Which of us you talkin’ about here, exactly?” I demanded.
“Hm. Why not both?”
We exchanged a glance.
“Ain’t that against the rules?” I asked.
Another half-nod, half-shrug, infinitely fluid. “Oh, but rules can change, always . . . we know that, if anybody does. Remember the creed, girls: unlike the rest of His sheep, we don’t have to accept, to forgive or forget. Don’t like the way the world is? Change it. Fight, and victory will be given to you. It’s your birthright.”
For You were made to rise, to be served, to rule. To set all about you against each other, killing for my favour.
“Victory,” you repeated, nodding. “But not forever. Right, Dad?”
“Says who? Revelation was written by Christians, after all—what did you think it would claim? So rise up and take what’s yours, daughters.”
“Oh yeah? And what’s that?”
“Everything.”
I paused, then, just for a minute. Saw myself sometime in the future, maybe with you, standing in front of our opposite number—Lamb to our goats, born again at his own absent Father’s whim, to mop up and start over. Heard one or the other of us saying how if rules could change then might be we didn’t even have to be enemies at all, no more than the world had to end, and knew in that moment how we could have offered the Beast we’d just slaughtered the exact same choice, he hadn’t been such a disgusting piece of crap. How two thousand years of scripture could be brushed away in an instant with one simple pair of phrases: I don’t have to fight you, not really. I never did.
No point in saying that out loud right now, though. Educational deficits aside, one thing I’ve never been’s completely stupid.
“What makes you think we want it?” you asked him.
“What makes you think you have a choice?”
Thinking: but wasn’t that your sin, originally? Thinking you had the right to choose?
“Pass,” I said, finally. “Thanks, ever so, but . . . no.”
“Yeah, me either.”
Our low-key devil-daddy spread his long-fingered hands, smiling politely. Correcting us gently, as he did—
“Not yet, you mean.”
And was gone, leaving us alone once more, together.
• • • •
“So,” you said, after a long, slow while of us walking down the highway, watching the horizon lighten. “Still want to call yourself Peggy?”
“I’m thinkin’,” I replied.
