Skyborn The Divine

15: Arsenal

Halfway around the world, four men and two women skulked into the gloom of an unlit parking garage. They wore tattered old coats, combat boots, and fatigues that were decades too old for modern military. Their faces were hard and in varying states of uncleanliness, some with makeup to suggest homelessness, some with scars and crooked noses that betrayed a life of hard conflict to a anyone with a trained eye. There was no need to cover their faces. The weakness in the security here, they'd discovered weeks ago, was that the cameras relied on the lights for a clear picture. If one cut the power to those lights, they could render the cameras useless. And so they did.

Even with the cover of darkness, they were careful to remain unseen. Even if the cameras footage could never identify them, they wanted to leave nothing to chance. They scurried along the walls low to the floor like rodents. They carried gas cans that sloshed with something that was certainly not gasoline. They stacked these containers at the bases of four different concrete pillars and waited.

One of them, the only one with a cleanly shaved face, went to each pillar one-by-one and deftly arranged wires and electrical devices with the speed of long, careful practice. As he worked, the sleeves of his shabby coat rode up his arms, revealing elaborate tattoos inked in large Gothic letters. They read, "No Gods. No Devils. Only Men."

The job was done thirty-seven seconds faster than they'd planned. It gave them more than enough time to disappear into the city alleys and derelicts before the show began. They saluted the man with the tattoos before scattering in different directions, each one of them taking a different planned route back home across the sea. Only one stayed behind with their leader. They stood shoulder-to-shoulder, admiring a job efficiently and discretely done.

One of them stroked his beard thoughtfully. His face was creased with concerns.

The other one pulled the sleeves of his coat back down over his tattooed arms and looked at his brother's face.

"What's got you so worried, Eustace? It was a pretty clean job."

The one stroking his beard looked down at his brother's tattoos and back up to his face. The tattoos were recent, and he wasn't sure he cared for them. He just wasn't sure why.

"When I signed up for this, I knew we'd be fighting enemies." He gestured to the bombs they built around the pillars. "I just didn't know it would be like this, Virgil."

Virgil shrugged his shoulders, like he didn't see what the big deal was about the eighty gallons of explosive gel they'd placed in the garage.

"Demolition was one of the first things he taught us, Eustace. It's part of our core doctrine." Virgil made the holy sign of the arsenal with his hands by bringing his them together and lacing his fingers together, pointing them straight out.

Eustace did the same, but his face didn't soften.

"That's not what I mean. I guess I mean that I didn't think our enemies," he pointed up to the concrete ceiling and to the building above it, "would look like this, you know?"

Virgil turned to his brother and placed his hands on his shoulders almost tenderly. He looked at him like a priest might look on a wayward soul.

"Brother, this is why you were never chosen to be a cleric. You have the skills, that's for sure. You've got the grit. But you lack the vision. You know who the real enemy is." He pulled up his sleeve once again, baring the illuminated words "No Gods" so colorfully and artfully rendered, Eustace could still easily read them in the dark.

Eustace bowed his head and nodded. He was a man with doubts he could not articulate, with convictions and fears that could not quite reconcile themselves into outright acceptance or denial. All that left him with was complicity.