The Gospel of the Font

Chapter 8

I groan and try to focus my eyes in the aftermath of the car's Olympic tumbling routine. There's blood rushing to my head so I can tell we're upside down. The air I'm breathing has a smoky smell to it. I hear the trickle of unknown car fluids leaking onto the pavement and the faint jingles of glass shards falling on a twisted steel frame. The engine seems to have shut off.

I focus my blurry eyes on my arms. Small trickles of blood run down my forearms from small shards of glass embedded in my skin. My t-shirt is torn in a few places and splattered with blood everywhere else. I can feel without even touching it that I have a knot on my forehead. I vaguely remember my head slamming into the side of the car on either the first or second roll. I'm in bad shape, but I've lived through an Egyptian hotel falling on me, so I can handle a car wreck.

"T...Tim..." I groan out. I haven't turned to look at the driver's seat yet, mostly out of fear of moving my neck. No answer. Dammit, Tim, you had better not be dead over there. "Tim!" I cry a little louder. Finally, a faint moan comes from my left. Good, he's alive. "Are you alright?"

"Hanging out with you is becoming hazardous to my health," Tim says softly. I laugh a little as I attempt to move my neck. I turn it very slowly, making sure I'm not met with the sound of my spine snapping or the feeling of sudden, sharp pain. When I feel none, I turn my head normally and look at Tim.

Tim is lying on the roof of the car. Since we pealed out without putting our seat belts on, we were at the mercy of gravity and inertia during the crash. He's pretty banged up looking, too. He's covered in tiny abrasions and there's a half-inch thick trail of blood running down the right side of his face from the top of his head. He looks like shit, but he'll live, same as me.

"Can you move?" I ask.

"I... I think so," Tim answers. We both squirm slowly out of our awkward positions on the car's roof. I can feel the glass shards in my hands being pushed deeper under my skin as I brace myself against the mangled metal of the car's ceiling. Tim's car wasn't in great condition to start with. The cloth along the ceiling was already shredded and sagging, but now it was covered with broken glass, too.

We both crawl onto the ceiling and ease our way out of the windows. I feel cold grass when I place my hand outside the car. We've flipped completely off the road. There is more glass in the field we've rolled into, so I still go slow getting out of the car. I push through the pain of having countless, tiny glass shards dig farther into my skin. Finally, I'm able to stand and regain my balance. I'm lucky that nothing is broken.

"I warned you, Faith," calls a familiar voice I've got tied to a pretty bad memory. In the wake of the disaster, I'd forgotten that swerving to keep from hitting that damn angel was what got us into this mess in the first place. I look up at him but say nothing.

Allustar is standing on the sidewalk now looking down at us. He's dressed as he was at the hotel, like a character on Mad Men. We've rolled into the ditch off the side of the highway and there's a small, grassy knoll between Tim's mangled car and the road. Allustar glares down at me from the top of the knoll where the sidewalk runs.

I have an angel looking down on me from on high; that's just fucking perfect.

"You were warned there would be consequences for disobeying the word of the Lord," Allustar says. He isn't budging an inch. He's still up on his little hill, perfectly content to look down upon us like insects.

"Who the hell is this guy?" Tim asks as he makes his way around from the other side of the mangled vehicle.

"Remember when I was telling you about my angel stalker?" I ask, keeping my eyes on Allustar. "Meet the angel."