Seraph

  “You're an angel.” My mother would always say that. What mother wouldn't call her son an angel when he brought in the groceries for her or cleaned his room without a request? No mother.

Although, if she were alive today, she'd know that I was nothing like an angel. If she had lived just four years longer than she had, she would completely understand why I get sick to my stomach at the mention. The heavenly beings my mother wore around her neck every day of my life would bring her to tears to speak of.

They dropped down in no fashion anyone could recall on the ninth of May, 2016. The sun was shining. I was sitting on my lawn thinking normal bullshit twenty three year old thoughts when the sky opened. The clouds parted suddenly and the blue of the atmosphere behind them pulled into itself so tightly, it disappeared. The air around me turned to putty in my lungs and I gasped as I fell into the grass.

The boom was piercing. Frequencies low enough to jostle my bones. I looked up into what looked like a void in the sky and saw bursts of light, flashing and dissipating like fireworks in calm water. I ran into my apartment, tripping and gagging as I went to hide myself from whatever it was that was happening to my sky.

Around the world, buildings were collapsing on top of families. Concussions from the sheer sound were rendering people incoherent, unable to get away from chaos and out from under people's thundering feet. The changes in pressure tore through ear drums like tissue paper. The world was a panic and no one knew whose arms it had been carried under. There was no warning as to just how much trouble we were in. It had begun before anyone even knew we should have been preparing.

Television had stopped broadcasting, the radio went silent. The only long distance communication that still reached anyone was through CB radios and even those didn't reach as far as we had hoped. There were no camps, no road side stops to rest and collect your thoughts. Cities turned into rubble etched pathways between holes in the ground. We were not winning.

The back roads and small towns hadn't been effected quite as badly as the major cities where the Absence had originally opened. If you sat on top of a tall hill overlooking level land, you could see two or three at a time, looming over tall buildings rippling like heat on pavement.

In the quieter parts of the United States, there were still bodies burned into concrete. Ashes still littered small houses, twirling in the breeze through open doors. These were the places I walked. The closer people were to protection, the safer they felt, the sooner they met their death. Entire towns emptied, small minded folk to the major cities; big city suits to the quiet suburbs. Every escape route ended with lines of Them, grabbing full grown men by the hair and breaking their bodies.

Soon, people stopped running. They gathered, slowly, planning and hoping, constantly moving. It took a long time before anyone figured out how to kill them and once we did, They cracked down with a viciousness rarely seen by anything on Earth.

Children were lured into the woods by bright lights and pretty women singing to them. The screams baited mothers to follow them, hysterical with their fear, unable to protect themselves. Husbands followed, determined and suddenly grieving. Entire families, dozens in a day. I was never surprised why They thought we were so stupid. The emotional circuitry between humans creates a complicated issue for survival. I prayed every day for evolution.

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I trudged directly behind the treeline when out of the dark, I heard a bird call. It stayed silent for a few moments and heard it ring out again as I began to lower my weapon. That's no Saint. I took a step forward into the woods.

Without warning, they grabbed me roughly by the shoulders of my jacket and yanked me off my feet. My knees hit the ground and I was gagged. A hood went over my head and I felt a sharp, cracking pain on the crown of my skull. Darkness.

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I came to, the hood had been removed but my gag was still in place. I could feel dried blood on my forehead when I looked up and the saliva on the dirty rag in my mouth tasted something awful. I huffed through the restraint and the man in the office chair opposite me turned to look.

He was broad with muscular arms and a thick neck. His large hand held a crude pencil he was using on what looked like doodles of knife designs. His hair was buzzed short on all sides and was long on top, dark blonde and straight. Down from his sideburns grew facial hair, shaved from his chin and lip with a sharp line. Wire framed glasses sat idly on the brim of his nose. He looked at me over them.

“You're awake. Good. Sleep alright?” He was ironically cordial. I rolled my eyes and shook my head, trying to push the muzzle out of my mouth. A grin crossed his face, his lower jaw jutting out in amusement. “Alright, alright...” He stood from his chair with a groan and walked over. He reached behind my head and untied it, jerking it out of my mouth. “Better?” I rolled my tongue around my mouth a few times before nodding.

“Thanks.” He sat back down.

“It's sharing time,” he said as he clapped his hands and rubbed them together excitedly. I turned my head away from him and narrowed my eyes.

“Excuse me?”

“No one just wanders around waiting to be picked off. Everyone always has somewhere to go or someone to get to. Wife?” He leaned on the arm of his chair, his weight tilting to the left slightly.

“No wife,” I corrected.

“Kids?”

“Uh, no.”

“Father. Mother?” I paused at his last guess, a heart sized object lodged in my throat. He caught it.

“Momma's boy, huh? I understand that. I take it she isn't waitin' for you anywhere?” I shook my head again.

“I'm not going anywhere. I'm just walking,” I spoke grimly, hoping he'd stop grilling me long enough to tell me what the hell he had me grabbed up for. He gave me another anticipative glance and nodded his head once.

“I'd like to know if you're someone I should off here or invite to tupperware parties. Can I trust you, can I not? Just give me an answer and we're all good, brother.” Stubborn bastard.

“You're the one that grabbed me! I'm a hundred miles or more from the first Absence I witnessed and haven't found anyone worth hanging around with.” He raised his eyebrows and lowered his voice.

“Now listen. The fact that you've lived long enough to walk a block much less a hundred miles is a fuckin' miracle. That interests me and makes me feel like you're someone worth keeping around. If I'm wrong about that, then I've just opened up my operation to compromise. Do you see my problem?”

“What kind of operation are you exactly that I could compromise? Just let me go and we don't have a problem.” I could feel my voice raising in pitch and volume, my fight-or-flight response rapidly approaching but also greatly inhibited. He stared with an unsettling stillness. My chest heaved with my effort to slow its intake and release of air. Keep your cool...

“Let me rephrase,” he said breathing deeply through his nose. “Should I kill you?” The weight of the question took me by surprise and I could tell that trust had become currency. Without knowing him, I knew he would kill me the second I proved him wrong were my answer to be no. I had never broken a promise in my life.

“Yes.” The moment I answered, I regretted it. I felt blood rush to my face and my heart pick up in pace. I feared I had just agreed to something without even knowing it.

“We're the guys getting torn to pieces...” He turned back to his drafting table. “Is that something you'd be interested in? Jumping out of a hole directly in front of a bunch of monsters hoping they die first? It's nothing pretty and it's nothing glorious and every time we kill one of those motherfuckers, three of us die right alongside them. Does that sound like something you could spend your miserable life doing? We're the guys that get torn to pieces but we're the men that still love our country and justify our losses with that simple thought.”

I waited... thinking about what I was about to say and what it meant. I bit my lip and stared at the ground as the pros and cons filtered through my head. Glancing up, I set my jaw and took a breath.

“I'll help.”