Chapter 40
The statue had fallen too, shattered beside her body.
As he’d run to it, Tadeo’s six legs had, with each step, weakened, then shrunk, folded.
It wasn’t long before there were bare, human feet beneath him, and his wings were gone, his clothes absent like he were naked Jesus choking on the crucifix, crying out to know why God would do this to His own son.
And Tadeo felt nothing, initially, hollow, like that were not a person he was approaching, not a friend.
A girl, Joana. Those around her didn’t stop to crowd around, many hadn’t even noticed; a shower of bullets speared in their direction, followed by the booms of a couple remaining tanks.
The people were fighting; the people were dying.
A silver bird struck nearby, collapsed a home against the person standing beside it; it must’ve been a warning to Tadeo, who didn’t flinch, who stared at Joana.
She would have wanted all the people in the world to keep fighting like this, even after she’d fallen.
‘Your child hands had come over my own, not much older, and you taught me to shoot.’ He’d said he was a monster of biblical proportions; he didn’t need a gun.
Her hardened brown eyes — an attempt at a wise, aged glare.
She’d always wanted to look older. She’d insist that she looked like her father, but it was really her grandmother she looked like.
She’d insist she had the aim of an assassin, and she did.
Often, Tadeo and her would go out to eat.
A year ago, she’d said: ‘The ground grows nopal, tomato, and corn. It doesn’t grow liberation.
If we want to taste it, then we have to plant the seeds.
’ But she couldn’t do it alone; no one can harvest without friends.
The resurrected Tadeo had craved violence more than anything, craved destruction. ‘You told me that violence was good, even necessary.’ He could be good, even as a killer. He could do good.
Coming to kneel in her blood, Tadeo touched her skewered body.
Dante had said he liked her, while he and Tadeo walked and talked home, said he appreciated someone who worked hard.
‘You two would have been good friends too.’ He’d loved them, he realized.
‘I loved you.’ Tadeo had fought beside them, couldn’t bring himself to be angry at them for betrayal.
And yet they were dead. Empty-lidded, Joana’s eyes were dark, and Tadeo gazed into them as he heard the woman who’d lead him here, Lupina, scream in agony, other shouts following after hers, from all those around him.
‘What harvest?’ Tadeo had told Joana. ‘I only have two hands. Dante is dead, my mother can’t work.
We are losing everything. No, we didn’t win, Joana.
We’ve lost. We’ve lost.’ It had all meant nothing, and the soldiers were still firing on the town.
At the end of the world, they still hated him, all of them.
At the end of the world, hate was all they had left.
Tadeo had nothing left, too, but hate. Clenching his jaw, remembering, oh, remembering it all, the days of his childhood, the blooming fears, the trafficking, the fights with his mother, his father, missing for days, his body, swinging beneath an overpass, the soldiers, pulling them apart with his hands and teeth, running into the empty fields, fighting, wanting to do good.
It hadn’t been enough. God had cursed him.
It was not enough. There would be no harvest. It hadn’t been enough for Joana.
It hadn’t been enough for Dante. There was nothing left.
He didn’t hear the angel of the lace veil, Dina, approaching behind him through the boiling of his blood. Hate, at the end of the world.
He would make them all suffer.
“I,” the devil was whispering somewhere far away, “feel his rage.” Outside, the rotting body of Babylon, nearly dead, trying to burn out in a blaze of glory to take the rest of the world with it.
“I can feel him in the greatest moments of his agony — when he died, when he resurrected. It was the same when the Beast, my child, was in other bodies. What has united them all across time has been hate.” Slow, Satan turned away from the throne he’d been facing to the defeated chief prince, not many steps before the devil and far from the closed doors that Baal had dragged him through before locking them.
Dim, reddened light leaked through tall window panes — the shine of the moon falling onto them like blood.
In his own golden chains, Michael's wrists were tied behind his back. He was standing, though partly slumped forward, jaw still bloodied and open. Lowly, he asked, “Why am I here? I told you to kill me; or will you force me to kill you instead?”
“Be quiet, dog,” spat Baal, stepping up behind the prince. “You wouldn’t be stupid enough to try again, are you?”
Michael glared forward, grunting. He couldn't afford to waste time like this. He was worried for Joana. If he failed in preventing the apocalypse, he was killing her. ‘I must not surrender. I must stop this. There is still time.’
Satan said, “I’ve talked to the king of Babylon.
I’ve told him to stop the attacks on that town, but—” A hesitance, then his voice returned sharper.
“He’s erratic. He calls on God now to save his soul.
” Satan laughed. “Thousands of years that I’ve stopped the end of the world, and now that you’ve allowed it to happen, you come to me with regret. ”
Michael felt his armored hands curl into fists. “I’m not the one who started this, Satan. You did this. The moment you rebelled in Heaven. The second you had that child! You wanted to create, Satan. Well, you have created now. Is it everything you wanted?”
“You want me to kill you,” Satan said so low that it was almost a growl, “but I won’t.
I want you to feel every second of the apocalypse you’ve created.
But, for now, I need to use you. You will do as I say, and you will step into the offices of the king, you will command them to stop in the voice of God. ”
“No,” said Michael.
Satan’s voice struck like a whip. “If you won’t do it, the bombing will blow apart that girl you care so much for.”
Michael clenched his teeth, and he spoke through them: “I’m not your weapon.”
“It’s all you’re good for,” answered the devil. “Angel of weapon. Without anyone to wield you, you're useless. You stand for nothing.”
“I stand against a world that is wicked and corrupt,” Michael replied. “And I know who is responsible, who I must destroy.”
Baal finally spoke again: “Michael, what the fuck is it that you want?” He stepped even closer, grabbed his arm, though the chief prince almost growled in response. “Satan and I both defeated you — him on Earth and me in Heaven. Accept it. Maybe bow down to the only one who can save the world now.”
“If he wanted to save the world,” Michael said, “he’d kill himself.”
Immediately Baal grabbed a fistful of Michael’s hair, yanked hard enough to make the archangel hiss, stumble, before he was shoved down onto his knees.
Michael thrashed, growling again, but God’s chains at his wrists were the one thing completely unbreakable to the angel of strength.
“Pray to him. Pray for forgiveness and maybe I won't rip off your scalp.”
Satan hummed, then quietly said: “The world is wicked. I know that. And it is by my design.” He tilted his face down at the broken chief prince.
“What has bound every anti-Christ together is hate, and always, the Beast chooses the bodies of princes, princesses, of wealth and power. It’s not often that the Beast chooses someone who the world has so rejected.
It must’ve thought it would succeed in its apocalyptic plans if it hid in some dark corner that I would never look.
At the same time, I know that the Beast is not a being that thinks.
It is hardly rational. It is pure emotion, pure rage.
” His voice dropped to a murmur, “You’re correct.
This world is evil because of me. I rule it.
It’s mine. However wicked and evil it is, it’s mine, my world.
” Voice rising, he looked out a window into the ruined Earth.
“It will do as I say. You will do as I say.”
‘Michael,’ Satan thought. ‘I won’t kill you.
I won’t kill you. I want to rip you apart limb from limb.
I want to dig my teeth into you.’ The devil thought of the damn king again; then, he thought of the emperor of Rome who’d fucked him until he lost his mind.
‘I can’t let you die.’ His jaw was so clenched that he thought it’d begin to crack, and his blood burned until it rose up into his eyes in red flames.
‘I abhor you, Michael, so much that I can never let you die.’
“Go for the king,” Satan commanded Baal. “Order him to come here. Tell him that we have an angel of God for him to listen to.”
“Yes, Satan,” Baal replied slowly, and Michael coughed out some dribbles of blood as the regent of Hell removed his claws from his hair, but then he paused. “But what if he… refuses to come?”
“He will listen to me,” Satan said, words paper thin. “He will obey.”
“The world does not listen to you,” Michael gurgled. “You are not God.”
“There is no God,” the devil seethed. “There is only me. I’m the only thing left, Michael. And it’s true what you say, what you’ve always said. I’m not God. No, no, I’m greater than God.”