Hell For Feathers Ch 07

Chapter 7: I Got Down on my Knees, and I Pretend to Pray

Skyler and Ashley had secreted themselves into another unoccupied hotel room at the top of some spire in some metropolis... somewhere. They had done what they always did when left alone with a bed, with the new addition of Skyler's own extension. Her 'front tail,' as she sometimes called it. Ashley was not convinced that Skyler had suddenly discovered euphemisms, and would gladly let her call it a cock.

The pair made great use of the unused bed, tangling up together and fucking to the point of exhaustion. They were both surprised they had a limit that they could reach.

Skyler was spread across Ashley's chest like a blanket, only moving when Ashley lifted and lowered her with her deep breathing.

"How are you feeling?" Skyler said softly.

"I feel great." Ashley whispered back. "That... was so good."

"Yeah, it is. This partnership has worked out amazing so far." Skyler smiled. "I think we should all team up an angel with a devil."

"There's not enough angels." Ashley said. "We're outnumbered like a million to one."

"Tyranny of the minority." Skyler said. "That's fine, we'll just have to team up many devils for each angel. You're open-minded to group sex, right?"

Ashley whimpered. "I sort of hope you're joking..."

"I am."

"Yeah, the desire for monogamy is still pretty strong... I won't tell you not to mess around if you like, but if you had a demon friend you wanted to bring along, I guess..."

Skyler said. "You really don't know how bad it is down there, huh? There are no such thing as 'demon friends.' Just cellmates. Most will step on you if it'll make their boot smell better. Or worse. But there's no sense of community and there never will be. There will never be enough demons willing to cooperate to make a significant difference against the ones who just want to knock everything back down."

"It never seemed that bad, when I'd poke my head down there..." Ashley confessed. "But then again, I wasn't stuck there. It was just like passing through a bad town, rather than living in it."

"Have you ever gotten to know someone from the pit before you met me?" Skyler asked. "And I don't mean 'know' in the classical sense, I mean really got to know them."

Ashley grew still. "Only once..."

Skyler noticed her change in demeanor. "Wow, she must've been bad, if that's how you think of her."

"It's... not a fun story."

Skyler leaned on Ashley's shoulder. "Tell me."

Ashley looked over. "I can show you."

They stood up. Ashley put her arms around Skyler. Skyler hummed as she put her head on her shoulder. It was amazing how different she felt about being in the grasp of an angel. With a thought, Ashley opened a portal in the floor, connecting them to some other room. Ashley let them drift gently through the floor and out the ceiling of some other room.

The new room wasn't nearly as nice as the last one. Dim sunlight catching the dust and shimmering through broken blinds and tattered curtains. Cracked linoleum tiles faced mold-stained drop ceiling tiles in this empty square room with nothing in it but a plastic chair... and a stainless steel IV stand.

Skyler looked to her surroundings, to the disgusting, dusty floor she was standing on. "Oh, ew." She jumped into the air, a pair of sneakers appearing on her feet before she touched ground. "What is this, an abandoned hospital?"

"Wasn't quite abandoned when I was here, but yeah. This was a closed wing of a hospital that has now evidently completely shut down." Ashley pointed to the floor. Four oblong runnels were dug into the tile, evidently where a hospital bed had sat for a long time. It had covered the floor long enough to leave a ring of dirt around where the bed had stood, creating a nearly perfect negative impression. It didn't say much for this hospital's cleanliness, if a mop had not once passed through here while the bed was still there.

"What happened here?" Skyler asked.

"I was watching the surface, as I do. I was looking for... you know, demon behavior. I found something really, really strong. This kind of activity would normally inspire a huge response, but... nobody had found it and nothing in the immediate are was changing or warping. It looked entirely contained. So, I went down to check it out.

"But... I couldn't get in. Someone had created a time warp so strong that when I tried getting into it, it was like pushing into a brick wall. I probably would have dislocated something if I had tried to force it. Luckily, there was a movable partition wall that was inside the time warp, so I just put a portal on that and got in, rather than pushing through the edge."

"I don't mean to interrupt..." Skyler said. "But you're saying one of us made a time warp so strong and so slow that an ANGEL couldn't get in?"

"Not 'couldn't,' but she sure made it difficult." Ashley said. "She definitely wasn't thrilled to see me, grabbing me by the throat and holding a scalpel up to it. Not like that would have cut me, but I eventually got her to calm down. It was just me, her... and a patient in the bed. An older guy with a beard, balding, gaunt, hooked up to a bunch of machines. None of them seemed to be giving him any comfort. He was moaning and grunting through his breathing contraptions. He was shaking and struggling, but didn't have enough strength to even sit up or lift his head from his pillow."

"Who was he?"

"A local sheriff, and later a state senator. Nobody famous on the national level, and not someone we might notice when watching the entire world... but certainly not a person who had served with any degree of honor. Illegal immigrants dying of thirst in his custody, pregnant women miscarrying in holding cells, prejudice, rape, organized crime, suborning prosecutor malpractice and perjury, election interference... I don't remember it all. She regaled me with his long rap sheet. I wasn't yet in the market of taking the word of a demon, but I believed her. It felt like she was telling the truth.

"Somehow, this demon had learned what I have told you, how our realm isn't the afterlife of the surface-dwellers, and that it is not the realm of the Creator. Evidently, she found it unacceptable that this man might not be punished after his death... at least not by us.

"So if he would not be set to the pit and punished after his death... then she would take matters into her own hands."

"How?"

"She was clever. She'd somehow found a gap in how the time warp magic works." Ashley said. "Let's say you were terminally ill with whatever form of disease, and the doctor's knew you had exactly twenty-four hours to live. Life doesn't really work like that, but for the sake of argument... if you warped time and sat in your bubble to live out your last day, how long would you get?"

Skyler thought about it. "Well, I would think you'd only get the day as you experience it in slow-time, and then you would die, and your body would decompose at that rate? Maybe slower because maybe bacteria or whatever can't get to it as easily, like if you died in a walk-in freezer?"

"That's logical. In fact, if someone was poisoned IN a time warp with hemlock or something else that shuts down breathing muscles, I think that would kill someone in the slow time. But that's not how it works with death by natural causes." Ashley said. "If someone was fated to live a single more day, they get that entire day as measured in real time. Even if a demon finds you in a hospital, dying of metastasized liver cancer and suffering from mini-strokes and blood clots... and that demon decides that this day needs to last... longer."

Ashley stared at the space where the bed once stood, picturing it in her mind.

"A lot longer."

"How much longer?"

"I've never really been able to properly figure out how long, since we don't possess that skill. And I wasn't there when she started this infernal trap. But since I can consult you now... how hard would you have to try to make the time in a room this size proceed so slowly... that the molecules in the doorway stood as heavy as earth, as solid as a wall?

Skyler's eyes bugged a bit at the thought. "I doubt I could... I haven't even turned a second into a minute. It would have to be hundreds of times slower than real time. Maybe thousands."

"This might also be why there was so much... demonic energy present." Ashley said. "I picture it like writing too slowly with a quill and the ink just soaking into the paper. Time was moving so slowly that the window looked like night because the light was entering the room so slowly."

"Goddamn." Skyler mumbled, then remembered herself. "Oops, sorry."

"It's fine..." Ashley waved her hand down in a dismissive motion. "Anyway, I offered her a way out, the way I had let myself in. The machine she wished to create was set. She could have just let it run and observed it from outside, now that I was there to make an exit. But she would not take it. She didn't even want to watch him through the portal or the window. She insisted she had to make sure that his pain lasted as long as possible. I even offered to stay there and keep her company... not really knowing how much time I was offering, but that's immortality for you. She said that wasn't necessary, and didn't want anything to distract her from watching him.

"So... I excused myself from the room, and let it play out in real time. I quickly checked around to make sure that no humans would stumble on us, but the entire wing was not in use. For some of it, I just watched her sit there, flashing around like a time-lapse.

"What was hours for me... must have been literal years for her. Years of NOTHING but watching his agony. Hardly anyone who ever lived had suffered so much. I'm not even sure why I let it happen. If she was relishing in his misery, I probably would have pulled the plug. I have no patience for earnest sadism. But there was no glee in what she was doing, if there ever was any. No satisfaction. She didn't eat or drink, she didn't stand up or pace. She just sat there and watched like a teacher staying after school with the rascally student.

"Eventually, he stopped moving, and she sat there with her head down, so I went back in. The second we made eye contact, she started crying. She didn't say anything. She just grabbed me and sobbed. At first, I wasn't sure why. I thought maybe she just... didn't want to return to the pit. Maybe she had spent so long with him that she was just relieved that it was finally over. Whatever was happening, I just didn't want to send her to the pit after all that. It didn't seem right."

Ashley's hand vanished into a small portal. She took out a short, spiky dagger, almost like a long needle. It wasn't a weapon crafted to intimidate, only to do a job.

"So... I took this dagger and I stabbed her in the back. She took in a breath, never to let it out. She looked at me, and realized it was finally over. She relaxed, went limp... and slipped away."

"You killed her?"

"I freed her." Ashley said. "What would sending her back to the pit even accomplish? What was even left of her? I didn't know how you punish someone who sacrifices that much time to make sure that someone faced SOME form of retribution. It was like running a cassette over and over. Eventually, it just wears out. Whatever kind of man he was before, the torture just obliterated his horrible personality. But it did the same to her, leaving her with nothing but her pain. And when he was gone, she was left just as hollow, eaten away by her hate.

"I checked the sheriff to make sure he was dead and not just catatonic. His hair and beard broke when I touched it, it was so thin and long. His teeth were all short and stubby, like he had ground them down to stumps clenching them together in agony. His jaw muscles felt like bone. But there was something in his mouth. Before he died, she had stuffed his mouth with... prefabricated communion wafers."

"Why?"

"Isn't it obvious?" Ashley said. "Save him right at the end and send this bastard airmail to paradise. Like sending a corpse with an infectious disease to an island nation... AND deliver the message... now he's YOUR problem."

"It could also have been a way to... make sure he didn't show up in the pit." Skyler said. "Would that even work? I don't think I've seen any dudes in the pit, but maybe it's segregated like a prison."

"Well, I don't think she consecrated the wafers, so that almost certainly wouldn't work. She basically just filled him with gluten. At any rate, I couldn't control whether the sheriff was punished any further, but... perhaps I went to the sheriff's house and uncovered some evidence of all the stuff that went down to local law enforcement..."

A disappointed look crossed her face. "And then I took it from THEM and left it somewhere for a journalist to work with when it looked like they had buried the stories. As it is, they're fighting that man's legacy with the humans. We'll see how far it goes."

Skyler hummed. "I am glad you seem to be familiar with the idea of... bad cops."

"More than you might expect." Ashley shook her head. "I know you're not fond of our system, but it would be worse if they were in charge."

"But at least you can DIE to escape their authority." Skyler folded her arms, and right after, threw them open again. "But then again... why didn't she go back to the pit if you killed her? I've... experienced some bad fates when I clawed my way up here in the wrong part of town and I just reappeared down there, same as if I died down there."

"If one of us does it with a weapon like this, then... yes, you leave this world." Ashley said. "Breaking your neck or whatever would just send you back to the pit like if you were hit by a train, but we have the power to always bring you there without violence. If we see the need to do this, you don't go the pit, and you certainly don't go to where I'M from."

"Then where?"

"That's the question, isn't it?" Ashley sighed. "I would guess nowhere. I really hope that after all that, I didn't send her anywhere worse. I just hope she is at peace."

Skyler shook her head. "If there is a 'nowhere,' why is it so necessary to throw us into the fire? If I knew this little loophole... I might have fought even harder to just get you to end it all."

"That's why we don't use our weapons unless we absolutely have to." Ashley said. "Our weapons don't even work against us." Ashley rematerialized the dagger and poked it into her midsection. Neither weapon nor thorax ceded more than a centimeter, and the weapon simply stopped like an unsharpened pencil pressed into a chalkboard. "When I stabbed her, I went right through her and got myself."

Skyler touched Ashley's stomach where the weapon had struck her. Nothing but lovely hard abdominals... "I should do sit-ups." She muttered.

"Why? I don't." Ashley returned the weapon to the closet. "And your tummy is beautiful."

"Yeah, but you called it a 'tummy.' That's a bad sign."

A small silence.

"What if one of us actually killed an angel, somehow?"

"That's pretty much impossible."

"But what if?" Skyler insisted. "I don't know how, and I don't really have the dark imagination for revenge that I once had. But if it did somehow happen... then what?"

Ashley sighed. "Have you ever accidentally stepped on a bee?"

"Not that I know of." Skyler said. "No bees down there. Lots of roaches and locusts. No idea what they eat down there."

"There are some varieties of insect that will sense when one of theirs is killed. They might bury them, like ants, or they might be able to smell it... and the whole hive of bees will come after you."

"And kill them?"

Ashley shook her head. "It hasn't happened since I've been around. But it would be ugly."

Skyler took a breath of stale air. "Having fought my share of angels... I greatly prefer the cooperation that we currently are enjoying."

Ashley kept looking at the empty space where that man had spent years suffering. "I do, too."

More silence. There wasn't even the constant hum of machines or fluorescent lights that usually accompanied this environment. This environment was just so... dead.

"So... that's the only time I got to know a demon before I met you." Ashley said. "She was immensely powerful, and she used it to do the work that she thought we angels should be doing. And when she was done, I did something that I thought was justified, that relieved her of her pain... but if I did that during my first life, I would have been sent to where you were. Only after I proved myself in that life and they entrusted me with these powers am I allowed to make a decision over someone else's life. I always felt like I made the right decisions. Even now, I think what I did was merciful. But ever since we really got to know each other, I can't help but feel some doubt."

Skyler closed the space between them and held Ashley tight. "I trust that you made the right decision."

Ashley brought her arms up and held her back.

No dagger appeared in Ashley's hand.

"What did you do with her body?" Skyler asked, stepping back out of the hug. "Did she turn to dust or something?"

"No." Ashley said. "It didn't seem right to bury her... or to have her cremated. So I did something we're not supposed to do."

"What?"

"I found a mostly flat surface on an asteroid and opened up a portal for a moment, sending her through... off into space. Now she can fly free through the eternities, unencumbered with her burdens."

"Free..." Skyler looked out the window through the broken, dirty blinds, the thin strips of light reminding her of prison bars. "That would be nice."

Ashley got up beside her. "Want to go someplace nicer?"

"It won't be hard to find a place nicer than THIS..."

Ashley transported them both to a lovely green field, a single apple tree growing out near some boulders. It almost looked posed, as if some photographers had rolled these rocks up near this tree for someone to sit on and look artistic.

This place slightly confused Skyler. "Apples... is this Eden? Did you take us back in time?"

"This is SPAIN."

"No, I feel the Almighty's unblinking eye on me. Better take off all my clothes and pretend I'm ashamed of my big wiener. Why was Adam so bothered by this when he had the biggest wiener BY DEFAULT?"

Ashley just chuckled, mostly a scoff.

Skyler did not follow through on this threatened nudity. Both sat under the tree's shade and snacked on some apples snapped fresh from the thin boughs.

Skyler looked at the half-eaten apple in her hand. She sneered as if she'd seen a worm in hers.

"You alright?" Ashley asked.

"These apples aren't that good." Skyler chewed her mouthful like it was a scrap of newspaper.

"Yeah, they're not." Ashley inspected her half-eaten apple for worms. "I know precious little about food, but I sure know what an APPLE is meant to taste like."

"They're not awful or anything, but... yeah, not what I was hoping for."

Some more unenthusiastic chewing and crunching. The apples at least had that distinct snap and bite that must have been so tempting so long ago.

"You ever hear about Johnny Appleseed?" Ashley asked.

Skyler nodded. "I haven't been in the pit THAT long. He's that guy who traveled the country planting apple trees, right? Wore a pot as a hat?"

"I think that part's apocryphal. But I have to wonder... did all the apples he made... all taste like this?" Ashley said. "These little... almost crab apples? Apples are heterozygomatic, so--"

"They're WHAT?" Skyler interrupted. "You're using those four dollar birdbrain words again."

"So, if you plant a seed from some apple, it won't become an apple tree of that kind of apple. The seed contains lots more information then gets used. With people, you have the genetic information represented in both parents and can't really get it from somewhere else. An apple has more information, and the alleles can scramble up into something that is different from the parent tree. It could turn into... whatever sort of apple. It's the same thing with avocado. Just like apples, they have to splice avocado plants onto the stalks of something else to make them into the giant Hass avocado that everyone likes."