Angelic Potential. A serial novella.
1. Trsiel
As Lenny scratched at the metal with his nails, he refused to wonder how much time he had before the power came on. The machinery would cycle any second. Like a drowning man, he clung to the knowledge that he was relatively safe, something that could not be said of everything downriver. Desperate, he jammed his head into the box and began to tear at the connections with his teeth. Bite, bite, spit. Bite, bite, spit. The poorly soldered wires were coming free in clumps. He heard a throbbing hum come to life nearby, perhaps two hundred feet to his left. No time left for spitting. Inside him, a dam burst, and he felt the dog in his blood arise as if from a great sleep. His world shifted and blurred, and the teeth in his mouth felt several sizes too large.
Two thousand miles away, an angel named Trsiel put a Metallica CD in the car stereo. With the cash from her last job she’d bought a new car, a BMW, and she figured it was as close to a blessing as she’d ever get. The body was really good this time, too, none of that off-the-shelf crap. She reflected for the thousandth time on how dull angelic life was. Humans got all the fun. Technically, as a divine and fundamentally commandment-compatible Being, she couldn’t actually covet the creatures, but she did a damn good job of trying. Privately, it stunned her how thoroughly they failed to think anything through. Take the whole “in God’s image” thing. In two thousand years, no one had realized why God created Man with vices coming out of His butt. Of course, humanity was getting too powerful for its own good. They were getting messy. It was easy enough to deal with small murders, even small wars, but in an age of world wars and bomb blasts…. Lost in thought, Trsiel almost missed her exit. Angels could fly, of course, but you risked the danger of a Believer seeing, and that could get you expelled. In theory, anyway: the Powers hadn’t tried that maneuver since Lucifer.
Two thousand miles away at the Hoover Dam, a man who might have been named Kevin was about to die in a flood. Kevin had over two thousand sins to his credit, most of them connected with his habit of coming home drunk and beating his wife. Another man, call him George, cheated on his taxes and nicked the occasional pack of gum from the convenience store. He was about to be drowned as a result of a rather complicated series of events involving Kevin’s concussed body and a half-dead tree. Witnesses of the event would later compare it to a quite graceful Olympic dive, only sideways, and resulting in the loss of human life instead of rather good marks from the judges. Eight hundred sinners in total would die that day, all within a one-hour period. Eight hundred bodies would be recovered, identified, grieved over, and disposed of. Meanwhile, fifty or so battered men and women would come out of the Hoover Dam Massacre (as the papers would call it) dazed and in shock. Fifty or so men and women would have miraculous escapes from the greatest loss of life through flooding ever experienced in the United States of America. And within the next year, fifty or so men and women would very quietly dedicate their lives to public service and good works within their respective faiths, all of them with a freshly restored—fervent, even—belief in the higher power that had spared their lives. Meanwhile, one particularly battered atheist would die in an embarrassing accident some years later. His friends and family would comment sadly that maybe the luck that had saved him from the flood had run out at last. It wasn’t luck, as it happened, but they were close. Two thousand miles away, an angel named Trsiel was smiling.
And another two thousand miles away (in a really complicated direction), a fallen angel named Lucifer was reading. Were it not for his name and the temperature of the place he inhabited, he could have been mistaken for a man, and a man of strict piety. Most angels, or demons for that matter, had never read the Bible. It was considered—well, holy, certainly, but mostly just embarrassing. Most Christians were comfortable with the Bible because of the belief that they were sharing a script with the ones On High. Of course, over years of interpretation, reinterpretation, misinterpretation, commentary, censorship, mistranslation, apocryphal additions, and omissions accidental, intentional, and everywhere in between, the King James and its equivalents came down to a pretty bastardized version of what was already a fairly poorly thought-out endeavor. Trying to put God in human terms was a bit like trying to explain the Pacific Ocean to a drowning ant, only a lot more so. Yes, God made the Earth, and lo, there was much rejoicing, but God is a craftsman. A carpenter builds a chair with axes, lathes, saws and sandpaper, but to build the Earth, God flicked electrons into orbit around protons and neutrons with his fingertips and kneaded genes with his palms. Tell a carpenter to build a table and he’ll order supplies and construct it using tools. If you give that carpenter a block of wood and two hundred pounds of sand and tell him to build you a glass-topped coffee table with his bare tongue, you will begin to appreciate the difficulties of creation. Lucifer marked his page somewhere in Leviticus and turned his weary eyes to the day’s newspaper rack. One of the difficult things about being Below is that you got out of the loop. You didn’t find out about Potentials until they got in the news, and even then you had to sift and interpret: you had no chance of getting in on the action unless you sent someone to cause it yourself, and that was…tricky. They hadn’t gotten more than a few thousand recruits in months. As Satan pulled the day’s Chicago Tribune off a shelf, he wryly wondered if Heaven was questioning the wisdom of converting sinners in batches. Organizing them all must be absolute Hell.
Trsiel was killing this month. She grinned and stepped out of the BMW to face a wall of paparazzi. Even for a consummate actress, taking on the persona of a pop singer was a bit tricky, but it fit her personality perfectly, and she welcomed the…benefits package. An odd quality came into her eyes at that last thought, something not quite flame, not quite shadow, and her mind drifted to the pair of men she’d had discreetly sent to her hotel room. There was a bond of celibacy that lay over an angelic being, a bond that was lifted when an angel became mortal. Humans could engage in the pleasures of the flesh any time two of them got the inclination. Angels had to wait.
When Lenny woke up, the electrical hum around him was like bliss. It was like consumption, like fire, like being burnt. He lay in the flames for a good thirty seconds before stirring, relishing the doze of the amnesiac. Then the numbness wore off, and he sat bolt upright, gagging on wire and solder and blood. His body was broken in a million places, his nerves were frayed, and his mind was an indiscriminate lump of pain that strained against his forehead and made his limbs pathetically weak. Blurry eyes made out the Nevada side of the river in the distance. Where the dam had been, there was just space, and his memory lurched back to him. His mouth had been leaving a wire when the power came on, but the saliva made a circuit, and when his body had gone rigid, he had dropped away from the box. The timing had been cruel. Lenny could feel pain stifling his thoughts, and the smell of burnt hair and the strange metallic taste in his mouth made him whimper. His heart was beating much too fast, and it was getting faster. He tried to cough out some of the rasp in his throat. It came out as an inhuman growl, and the attempt brought up more blood, which made him choke and gag. He would die soon, powerless, and alone. He tried to roll onto his stomach, but the canine muzzle that had sprouted grotesquely from his face had other ideas.
Two thousand miles away and four hours later, Trsiel exited her first-floor hotel room via the window. She opted for a battered Toyota that was parked four rows away from her BMW. The license plate numbers spun like slot machine wheels when she unlocked the door, and the blue Tercel suddenly gave the impression of slicking its hair back. An observant onlooker might have sworn that the car lengthened by at least a foot in less than ten seconds. She wasn’t transforming the car with deliberate effort, but one of the curious effects of angelic presence is that even inanimate objects become desperately eager to please. The car pulled quietly out of the hotel parking lot and slid down the driveway into a sudden chill. The dawn swallowed her whole. There was a brief pause, and the night performed the weather equivalent of being violently sick.
Trsiel was cheating, and cheating with reckless abandon. Her willingness to take risks had won her a lot of respect with the Powers That Be, and she was exploiting it, exploiting it desperately. This was illegal and immoral, but the river angel had always believed that you made your own luck. The streets that had been as dry as death just an hour earlier were now rivers that pounded with earth-shattering force, turning trees into javelins and hurling them through seventh-floor windows. Utility poles lay scattered in the streets like discarded cigarettes, snapped into halves, thirds, and quarters. The heavy fog that enveloped the city at ground level oozed through alleyways and down highways and over waterways and through buildings; it was black, opaque, and smelled strongly of sulfur. People seemed to be evacuating upwards, and the rooftops were already thick with confused crowds, pointing and shouting. Two hundred sinners would die, thirty-eight saints would be saved, and Trsiel, who was now hurtling at eight hundred kilometers per hour through the most perfect ground cover ever conceived, would get yet another promotion. The flood and fog unrolled itself before her car like a red carpet. The Toyota Tercel was now a convertible, and it was flying. Today, there would be no witnesses.
When she hit Lincoln, Nebraska, the angel pulled over and put the top down.
News of the flood reached Lucifer’s ears two hours after it started. He knew it was Trsiel immediately. Only an idiot would look at the fog and flooding streets and not think of the river angel. It was probably a follow-up from the Hoover Dam assignment. Trsiel had moved up through the ranks so many times, she probably outranked the Metatron—of course, she’d never actually give an order to the Voice of God. She seemed mostly intent on fieldwork. He’d heard some amazing rumors, of course, but even if there was a grain of truth in any of them, they pointed to little more than a passion for the hands-on aspect of her job. Lucifer put down the pencil he’d been using to make notes with, a thoughtful expression settling onto his crimson features. He pulled a crumpled Marlboro out of his robe pocket, lit it on the wall, and took a long drag. There would be consequences this time. You don’t just steal a car and flood your way across the United States. That wasn’t what angels did. Say what you like about The Man Upstairs, he liked his tradition, and the devil was reasonably certain that a one-woman angelic killing spree could get him pretty pissed off. Lucifer rather liked Trsiel, and as he reached for a San Francisco Chronicle, he wondered if he should send somebody after her. As he idly did the crossword, he decided that it was probably best to let it run its course.
There is a collective consciousness that inhabits cities. It might be a hive mind, or it might be mob mentality, and it’s probably a little of both. Churchgoing Christians will recognize it immediately (and accurately) as something different: a congregation magnified, hundreds of thousands of people crowded together in an uncomfortable and dark place all trying to follow each other’s lead. In downtown Chicago, a tentative calm had descended upon the city. Since many of the churchgoing Christians in the city were struggling with the newfound belief that the rapture was upon them, the city’s collective panic had petered out a sort of cautious, thoughtful optimism. In an upper room of the Art Institute, a curator that had just spent half an hour trying to rescue Grant Wood’s American Gothic and Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks from the floodwaters was now curled up in a corner contentedly eating his lunch, with the two priceless paintings leaned against the wall next to him. After a bit, Nighthawks overbalanced and clattered to the floor, and he opted to let it stay there. It had been that sort of day.
From her hotel in downtown Chicago to the Las Vegas Strip (through which her car had carved a long furrow of blackness in the ocean of neon), the drive was 1,810 miles. Trsiel arrived in Boulder City only three hours after the collapse of the dam—not the fastest cross-country road trip in history, or even the fastest attempted in a Toyota, but certainly impressive. She parked next to the upper tier of the river and kicked the door open, apparently unhindered by the fact that the brake mechanism was a pile of dust somewhere in Utah and the driver’s side door had fused in place. She stood tall in the dawn haze, expensively ethereal dress billowing behind her, and gazed serenely at the wreckage. Ahead of her, where the dam had been, there was empty space. She took a step forward, and another, and the steps became a purposeful stride. The air fused under her feet as she strode towards the western bank, solidifying into a substance that defied logic, twisted the eyes, and was probably only breathable in Los Angeles. Bodies lay scattered like scattered matchsticks beneath her, splattered in the thick mud and bobbing in the eddies of the river. They looked nearly untouched. This way, the families of the deceased would all have open casket funerals. No one would look on the bodies with revulsion, but with respect, as it should be. It was a signature death, and knowing the artist, they probably hadn’t suffered for long. She was halfway across the river before she saw the Arizona bank loom out of the fog. She knew exactly where she was going.