Jump: The Fallen: Testament 1 (29 page)

No, those people know that their only hope. . . Their only salvation will be to hide until it’s all over, and then come out at the end of it, pretending that someone else made the mess and they are humanity’s last hope of cleaning up that “other” guy’s mistakes.

Today, my sweet Salvation and I are here for two little raping and murdering souls, in particular. It'll be a bonus if they're holed up with their PAIC boss—the bastard from the roof where I jumpstarted this whole messed-up journey.

It’s a little-known fact—at least outside Norway—that
in
Norway, expensive State-funded construction projects have to include some kind of work of art. . . . I shit you not. “State” funded. . . They say it like it's some kinda separate entity that allows the rest of the population to enjoy the fruits of its labor and generosity. The reality—God or government—you work for it, they take it, tell you to be grateful when they give it to someone else.

And as we stand outside the door, marveling at the roof and vault entrance—the hole down to this rat trap is filled with highly reflective stainless steel, mirrors and prisms. They all act as a beacon, reflecting polar light and shining a network of two hundred fiber-optic cables that gives the place an eerie blue and green glow. And I shake my head at the whole gaudy waste of citizen-slave blood, sweat and tears.

Salvation can tell I’m grinding up a rant in my head. You don’t live with someone that long without being able to read their fucked-up, revenge-filled queues.

“Jacob. . .” Shit, that’s her reprimand voice. “You need to stay under control. Amy is still up there with them.”

And she’s right. Brightest angel or not, we both know who Rain’s dealing with.

“What?” I say, “I’m just gonna let ’em know we’re here. And it’s Jump.”

She knows that’s bullshit and she plugs her ears and pushes out all of her armored feathers. And I spread my wings as wide as they’ll go—right in front of the security feed by the entrance—and I screech a scream out that is louder than anything I’ve yelled since this day of judgment started.

And Salvation is blown backward, and all the mirrors and all the prisms explode into a fine glass mist, completely obliterating the beautiful benevolence of the State government of Norway.

When the first six scurry out, I let Salvation cut them to pieces with her pinfeathers and quills. They barely get off any shots, before they are bloodstains and brains. Then we step over the steaming puddles of rat bile and the severed limbs and heads, and walk to the big concrete door.

And Salvation knows they’re inside—she says she can smell them. I wonder how, but I'm not asking the question, because all I can smell is my own vengeance, bubbling like acid from my stomach and burning the back of my parched thirst for payback.

If the big door did make them feel safer before, it doesn't after Salvation rips it open like a tiny sardine can. And then there’s running, and gunfire and smoke, and yelling and shouting and screaming. And when we both spin and send hundreds of ballistic fire-feathers into the fray, limbs and blood and guts and brains splatter the inside of the big vault. It's like shoving rats in a blender, and I can only hope that the ones we’re after are still living, because this fate is just too good for them.

But when we slice and cut our talons through the ones left alive, Salvation stops over two of the chopped-apart bodies and stares. And then she starts to cry.

By the time I calm her down, I’m more pissed than when we poked our way into this nest. Women and crying just makes me want to kill whoever caused it.

“That's them,” she says.

It’s all she has to say. Five billion souls in, we both know that revenge is bittersweet at best. It leaves an ice cold, empty pit in the middle of our stomachs that begs us to keep trying to fill it with boiling hot blood. The only problem, every time we do . . . it just gets colder.

We never do find the two raping, murdering interrogators’ boss. Sometimes the eagle gets the rat, and sometimes the rat slinks away.

Does Salvation feel any better having quenched her thirst for vengeance with blood? Does judgment feel worse that we didn't find the bastard? Well, if you're asking if I think it was worth it—did we get what we came for?

When Salvation’s done thinking whatever she has to, she sniffs a little and wipes her face. Then she says, “Does any of this matter?”

I look around the bloodstained, concrete graveyard of limbs, and then I breathe in a great big whiff of gunsmoke and guts. “Not to them.”

— LV —

FROM MY PERSPECTIVE, six and seven billion souls go out kinda like they came in—one minute there were five billion souls on the earth, begging the State to feed, clothe and protect them, and in the blink of an eye . . . there were seven. And eight, nine and ten aren’t a whole helluva lot different.

Then, before the three of us know it, the journey to judgment and justice for the earth’s ten billion souls is almost complete. I say almost, because before we started I was crystal-clear on where we would end the day.

I gotta tell ya, for three angels from the rain-drenched streets of Seattle, talon-tuckered at the end of a tough day of delivering God’s will of the Word, there is no place quite like the sun-soaked sands of the Middle East.

And perched at the pinnacle of the Burj Khalifa—the highest man-made structure on Earth—it feels like the breeze is the breath of angels, warming and fluttering our feathers with gusts of hot air from the desert below.

The Burj makes the scrapers in Seattle look like scrub brush under a towering pine tree. It was built by over seven thousand skilled workers trucked, flown, or billy-club-kidnapped in from South Asia. They were paid around six credits a day. The back-busted laborers got about half that much. Yes, the world has come a long way from the slaves at the pyramids on the great Giza Plateau.

“Makes you wonder,” I say.

“Wonder what?” Salvation asks.

And for a girl that spent most of her mortal life sucking on her mommy’s silicone tits, living in a dream world bought with her daddy’s raped and pillaged credits, this sight is as real as it gets for Fury. She gives me a look and says, “Don’t go fucking this up. Come on, look at this shit, it’s awesome.”

And I have to admit that the view is incredible—no wonder birds like to sit on top of buildings. But I know this place is just filled with more rats. I can smell them inside, waiting for their credits to save them, because by now there is no doubt that this day is their last.

“Just. . .” Fury says. “Look, I’m wiped. Can we just enjoy the view for a minute? South America sucked. And Africa? Why the fuck did that have to be me? So don’t fuck up Dubai for me, okay? I always wanted to go here with my—”

And then I think she gets it. For richer or rougher, this is her new family. And revenge-filled, angry heart or not, we’re the only ones who give a fuck what happens to her now. We might be the only ones who ever did. She stares at the sun setting across the ocean—crimson and red—the colors of the day. “Motherfucking Dubai. . .” she mumbles.

Dubai. Where the wealthy and wonderful go to get away from it all. All the lawsuits, all the molestation charges, all the taxes, all of the rest of us cretins of civilization. Highest building on Earth? Not anymore. We level the whole place—send it back to the sand as the sun dips below the sea and the world turns to darkness. The whole thing would have crumbled anyway, crushed beneath the weight of the wealthy’s thirst for more.

— LVI —

MILLIONS OF FAITHFUL and fallen angels rested and wondered about the Word of the two heavens, rustling their feathers and watching in anticipation from the grandstands of the arena. Seventh days were always long, but as seventh days went, this had been longer than most.

Building it or breaking it apart—it really didn’t matter—a tough day transporting souls in or out of the garden was exhausting work. But this time had been different, there was the smell of revolution in the air—an unholy discontent, worming its way from the husk of the eternal sameness of the faithful and faithless snowflakes. And a tremor rumbled through their beliefs as they watched the darkness—the great black nothing—descend upon the garden.

Their Dark Angel of Light stood at the center of the huge arena. Only he and Life truly knew what was coming. He watched the black nothing descend, just as it had before.

The Protectors had played this godly game since time was created, and he longed for it to be his turn atop The Great Mountain of the Eternities. A lion to replace the lamb and then the lamb to replace the lion. Back and forth, upside down to downside up—such was the Word.

But somewhere along the way, the Protectors had all become drunk on their own thirst for power. The dark more than the light, but the call to stay on top of the mountain had touched them all. He felt that when they joined. So Dal looked for an edge—something he could use to tip the scales of judgment in evil’s favor. Something to anchor him at the peak . . . and then allow him to stay there for all the eternities to come. Then one day—another boring, soul-sucking day—a priest lost his faith . . . and then wrote a book. And Dal knew when the next Fallen appeared, it was his chance.

Men had written books about their experiences with
her
since she had taken her throne back at the dawn of this eternity. But none had written a book that spoke to him. So this priest’s unholy word against humanity and its destruction caught his eye, and he summoned its word and took it in for his own. And their own seed, Jump, became his pathway to dominating and enslaving Life for all eternity. She would be his queen. Not that she wasn’t already, but now she would be his slave.

— LVII —

AS LIFE ENTERED and fluttered to the center of the great hall, the cooing and clucking wasn’t as loud as it had been. As the faithful grew nervous, she paused to find the words that would calm her children.

The road had been long on this current eternity. The sands slipped slowly through the hourglass, but now her time—her reign—drew near to a close.

To a being of the light and a deity of the first truth, the Word had been all that she had to maintain control. But the faithful and the fallen began to question that word. They searched for meaning in it and fell into disbelief.

When it started, she had little concern. It had happened before and she had dealt with it harshly, swiftly, with fear and punishment. But whipping a slave was only effective so long as the slave minded being whipped. So when the misery of daily life in the garden surpassed the punishments she sent, the power she drew from the faithful slipped into decline.

Now she could feel him, hot and hateful, impatiently waiting for his time. Her Dark Angel—she could scarcely think of Dal that way any longer—would soon rule over her with the flaming fist of a master, once slave. It was the ordained order of all the eternities, that the Protectors should trade role for role, but she had grown to believe it an unacceptable fate.

She had sent word to her children, over and over again, commanding them to worship her words, and condemning them for the mere thought of his. It had not been enough. Try as they might, the children of the garden had not been able to rid her of his impending rule. And now, in the final hour of her reign, she grew more desperate. He would not know her as she had allowed before.

It was directly from the Word, specifically to this purpose, and of him that she spoke to the gallery, “My children. . .”

The roar of feathers, ruffling steel wings, cut her speech. She waited impatiently for the clucking and the cawing of the angels in the gallery to settle. Once it did, she continued, “. . .as my time draws to an end, be sober-minded—be watchful. For your new ruler prowls like a roaring lion, seeking only to devour. For even he disguises himself in darkness as an angel of light.”

She kept him in the corner of her eye as she spoke. If he came at her, she would unleash her wrath, but it would be far better for him to fall back into his pit at the hands of his own followers . . . and hers. Cast down at the hands of his faithless would be worse than when she did it herself. She smiled.

Another term—remain in power. It was all a ruler ever wanted.

— LVIII —

DAL COULD SEE that Life was coming at him sideways, but that was
his
way, not hers. Slithering through the garden on his belly was a trick he had mastered. He had done it time and time again, sneaking in and out of humanity’s dream, convincing them that he did not exist, and better, that she did not either.

But the author of the book was his hole card, his ace of faith. The dark, blasphemous
Book of Blood
sealed that one’s fate, and the father became one of the Dark Angel’s faithless flock. Not even the Chosen One’s champion of light could change that. She had tried and failed to ferry his soul in and out of the great hall unnoticed, but once the father got his wings, she was captured.

“Bring out our Faith!” Dal yelled to his followers. “Bring me the priest.”

And two golden angels flew from the side of the arena. Each held an arm of the newly minted angel of the Dark Word of the
Book of Blood
—Faith, bonded and chained around the neck. They dropped Father Faith at the feet of their master and pinned him to the ground with their talons.

Dal would give them the show first—let them see his power over the Dark Word’s author. Then he would kill the only one that could alter his future. It was a simple plan.

He slithered next to Faith, knelt beside him, and snarled. His wings spit fire and his tongue lashed at Faith’s face. “Speak, priest,” he said. Then he looked at the Chosen One. “Tell us our fates.”

The father coughed and yelled and squinted at the pain in his back and arms—talons pierced his newly grown plumage as his captors’ claws squeezed past his steel feathers into his flesh and bones. But he spoke from his own faith, not hers or his. He said, “The judgment of my world is now the judgment of this world . . . and the rulers of this world will be cast out from it.”

And a roar went through the gallery—the faithless and the faithful cawed and clucked loudly.