Nephilim Morning

Nephilim Morning
(January 2007)
Josh MacLeod

“After the snow, there will be ice.”
          That’s what she said to be over the phone, but I wondered if I’d misheard her over the car horns. It’s winter in spring, traffic is backed up the devil’s arse so far it’ll be like a second Fall once it comes out again over the blessed overpass and the 3 dollar a minute psychic is trying to give me my future, tell me my destiny in her little cubicle in the middle of nowhere, probably remembering the ads and wondering where the sexy girl in lingerie was, and if she existed at all, doing the same lousy job, milking the same marks while corroding her soul with petty lies instead of grease as some fast food hole.
          I wonder if she’d meant lice; I thought it had cleared up, but some things are more persistent than ex priests in a bathhouse.
          “There will be rain,” she added, a low beep under the last word giving it an ominous note. I hung up the phone rather than pay more money, drumming the steering wheel and looking at the cars in front and the cars behind. Another idiot was honking his horn, as if his modern medicine magic could change anything at all.
          I wanted to get out and rip his head off. Both of them, just in case he did some thinking with the hat rack too.

Black ice has always fascinated me; how it can hide. Everyone is afraid of fire, but it’s the cold that should worry them. I wonder if nature is trying to make up for the pleasure of dying in the snow and falling asleep rather than screaming in a burning inferno.
          I know what those are like, because I was born in one. Even demons have children, after all, though people called us giants and sterile out of envy. It’s hard to justify rebelling when your parents were the first rebels, the real ones, when they rebelled for your sake. Hell of a guilt trip, in the literal sense.
          I bought the time share up here mostly to give me time away from them, from everyone else. And I started killing them. I didn’t mean to, but it’s like everything else: it’s hard to stop things, and it’s easier each and every time. I’m not up to a pack a day, though the one fire in the tenement came close.
          It doesn’t change anything. They still go up, or down. Mostly down, because the Elected are chosen long before they’re born and nothing I can do can change that. They get to pass go, everyone else goes to jail.
          I’ve met a few of them who knew, handing out their two hundred dollars to whores of all shapes and sizes, buying every drug they could to get enough pleasure in before the purity of heaven lobotomized them into a singing sexless chorus for the tone-deaf bastard up in the sky. I generally hurt them, if they ask, if only to delay heaven on earth.
          Everyone keeps saying it’s going to happen soon, but I keep fighting it. A death here, a message there. There’s others too, down Below, fighting the same fight, for the one place where we can be free. And these damn hairless apes have no clue what it means to live here, free of Heaven and Hell, between Above and Below and all other shitty euphemisms.
          They’re the only ones that are free, and they keep wasting it, throwing away their brief moments in the sun. And they wonder why I kill them. Honestly. I know I’ll have to stop, soon, or risk causing the emasculation called paradise.
          But they are so damned annoying and smug I want to kill every last one of them.
          And there little dogs, too.
          Because, who doesn’t want to kill little dogs?

I give in and honk the horn, fondling the plastique detonator beside me on the seat. Soon. Soon I’ll go home again.
          But before then, I’m bloody well selling the time share before some fucked up rapture devalues it. I love that place.
          I wipe the first tear away, quickly, thinking about ice, and rain, and wonder if I can kill her first, thank her before the Holy Light comes down and turns her into a drone.
          Not for $2.99 a minute, I won’t.

Another horn, an end of patience and the car is hot, though not as hot as home. I only hope I’ll get leave soon enough to come back and sell the time share for one last trip to Disneyland, and a few more bodies saved from God.