Winds of Change (10 page)

“The more I think about this, the more
convinced I am that the air has nothing to do with the changing,”
Chuck said once we were finished brooding over what we had done to
Vera Weaver’s body.

“Please, Einstein, elaborate,” Pete said.

“Think about it. We’ve opened that door
twice. Some of the air outside has gotten in.”

“So what does that mean?” Ashley Richards
asked. “That we should discount the biological agent theory?”

“I’m leaning more and more toward something
supernatural,” Chuck said. “I think Leland Kennedy knows more than
he’s telling. He may not be responsible for any of this. But I’m
willing to bet he has an idea about what’s really going on.”

Not surprisingly, Leland didn’t answer the
walkie-talkie when we tried calling him.

III
.

We moped the rest of the day. None of us had
any ideas about what to do next. The snacks from the vending
machine were depleting rapidly. At the rate we were eating and
drinking, there wouldn’t be enough left for more than another day
or so. Still, those mundane rituals were the only things keeping us
sane at that point.

I think all of us were just about to go out
of our minds with boredom when the walkie-talkie squawked. It was
Leland.

“Well, well,” Chuck said into the radio.
“We’re glad you decided to grace us with your presence again.”

“I’m coming back,” Leland said. “Get ready
for me and pray that I make it through a second time.”

“What prompted that decision?” Chuck asked,
looking a little confused. Leland didn’t answer. I think we would
have been surprised if he had.

It only took a few minutes for Leland to
travel from the restaurant to our store. Somehow, he knew exactly
where to find us. I don’t remember any of us telling him that we
had locked ourselves in the break room. Yet, that’s the first place
he looked.

“Howdy folks,” he said, pushing the door open
and holding it there. Strangely enough, none of us turned to
salt.

“How could you be so sure that we wouldn’t
die when you left that door open?” I asked.

“Let’s just say there’s a little more to me
than meets the eye,” he said with a smile. I knew by the way he
smiled that we were in trouble. It was like staring at a
piranha.

“He
does
have something to do with
this,” Pete muttered.

“Easy,” Leland said, holding up his hands. “I
didn’t say I had anything to do with this. But I do know what’s
going on.”

“Explain yourself,” I said.

“I believe in God. I believe in God’s wrath
too. Think about the instances in the Bible when He shows that
wrath - the Great Flood, Sodom and Gomorrah, the Plagues of Egypt.
When God wants to punish lots of people at a time, he usually uses
unconventional methods. He also gives plenty of warnings that he is
going to exact such punishment unless repentance of sin is made.
Noah and his family had months to spread the word. Jonah was given
a chance to find righteous people in those evil twin cities. The
Pharaoh was counseled time and time again by Moses on what would
happen to his people if he didn’t free the Israelites. God didn’t
just wake up one morning and decide to destroy the people of the
earth without giving them an opportunity to atone for their
wrongdoings.”

“Make your point,” Steven said, standing up
beside me.

“My point is that God has nothing to do with
this plague on mankind. Neither do terrorists.”

“Who are you really?” Chuck asked.

Leland sighed for a moment. “There are many
names I go by, most in tongues long forgotten by man. The one most
commonly used now is Alastor.”

“The executioner,” Steven said, remembering
his earlier interpretation of the Vera’s message when she spoke in
tongues.

“He’s the angel that opened one of the seven
vials,” Pete murmured.

“
What
are you?” Ashley asked, pulling
the feather out of her shirt pocket and holding it to the light. It
glowed with a faint luminescence. While she was clutching the
feather tightly, you could see all the bones in her hand, like she
had her palm against the lens of a flashlight.

“I’m an officer in the Army of the Lord,”
Leland said.

“I don’t believe you,” Kenneth Weaver spoke
up.

“Me either,” Jake added.

“I don’t blame you,” Leland said calmly.
“I’ve kept a secret from you. You have every right to distrust
me.”

“Why are you here?” Terry asked.

Leland considered his answer for a moment.
“I’m here because I knew something like this was going to
happen.”

“You knew?” I said, hardly believing it.

Leland nodded. “I would have tried to stop it
had I known who to go after, but the world is wide, and the
disguises are many. I got here a few minutes before the world
changed. I knew that I was in the right vicinity, I just didn’t
know who to pinpoint. The enemy has many faces.”

“I don’t understand any of what you’re
saying,” Pete said.

This time it was Jesse Weaver’s turn to
speak. “I think one of us in this room is responsible for what’s
happening in the world. He went to the restaurant because he was
convinced it wasn’t any of us at first. Now, I think he’s convinced
it is.”

“This makes sense,” Chuck said. “Whichever
one of us is to blame knew that we thought the air had something to
do with the change. That’s why the bodies disintegrated when
exposed to the atmosphere outside. That’s also why none of us
inside this room changed even though some of the air undoubtedly
found its way in. The angel was preying on our fears and beliefs,
giving them life and breath. It was letting us think what we wanted
to.”

Leland nodded. “One of the fallen is
responsible.”

“So which one of us is it?” Jesse Weaver
asked. “Is there a test of some sort to determine which one of us
is the bad angel?”

“There is,” Leland said calmly. “But the ones
of you that aren’t imposters won’t enjoy it.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Chuck said. “We need to
know. You need to know. Will you be able to stop what’s happening
if you can just figure out who’s responsible?”

“The vengeance of the Lord will be
administered,” Leland said. No longer did he seem like the jovial
old fellow we had met all those hours before. Despite his youthful
appearance, the new Leland seemed positively immortal, like an
ancient judge surveying the world through highly-sensitive
eyes.

“The test,” Kenneth Weaver reminded him.
“What’s the test?”

“Every angel that was ever created has a
cabalistic mark. The mark is never in the same place on every
angel.” Leland unbuckled his belt and pushed his pants down off of
one hip. True to his word, there was a small symbol that looked
like a botched tattoo. “That is the way my name is written. No
matter what guise I take I can never rid myself of the mark. The
fallen will still bear his mark.”

“So you want us to strip?” Steven asked.

“I’m not taking my clothes off,” Ashley
stammered.

“Got something to hide?” Pete asked.

“I’m not giving you guys a peep show,” Ashley
retorted.

“I wouldn’t ask it if it wasn’t necessary,
but it is,” Leland replied calmly. “The vengeance of the Lord must
run its course.”

Ashley chewed on this for a moment. “None of
the rest of these goons have to look, right?” she said at last.
“You’re an angel, you should be immune.”

“Even angels are prey to temptation. That’s
how nephilim are created. But I am focused in my task.”

“Let’s get to it then,” Jesse said as he
started to unbutton his shirt.

Out of courtesy, we let Ashley go first. All
of us turned our backs and waited as Leland inspected her. Twice I
caught the Weaver boys trying to sneak a peek and grunted to show
that I saw them. They didn’t care and kept craning their necks for
a glimpse of nude flesh.

“Do you have to look
there
?” she
asked. None of us turned around although the urge was tempting.

“The mark is different for every angel. I
must be thorough.”

Lucky devil, I thought.

As Leland conducted his examination, I gave
the rest of the guys an examination of my own. I wanted to know
which one of us was the imposter. Nobody really seemed nervous or
antsy about the possibility of being found out. It was also
difficult to discern anything by observing body language. The
fallen angel was clearly a skilled actor.

“What happens to the angel when you find
him?” Pete asked, shifting his weight back and forth on the balls
of his feet.

Leland pulled a knife from a sheath beneath
his shirt. “I will cut the angelic mark out and reduce him to a
mortal man. Without his mark, his deadly influence will be gone and
I will kill him.”

Begrudgingly, we all let Leland examine us. I
felt like I was back in high school getting my sports physical.

Leland’s mood got progressively worse. It was
clear that he wasn’t finding what he had hoped. In a way, it was
disturbing to think that things had gotten so out of hand that an
angelic warrior couldn’t handle it. Yet it was also somewhat of a
comfort to think that the traitor wasn’t among us.

“I don’t understand,” Leland said when he had
finished. “I was positive it was one of you, but none of you have
the mark.”

“I think you just wanted to play doctor,”
Pete joked uneasily. Nobody else laughed.

“Is it possible I have missed something?”
Leland asked, his face full of questions.

I looked at the group and wondered where
someone could possibly hide an angelic mark. It was only as I
noticed Ashley running her fingers through her mane of lustrous
chestnut hair that I realized where the mark was.

“You didn’t check anyone’s scalp,” I
said.

Ashley instantly went rigid.

Leland looked at her and then at the rest of
us. Her reaction obviously meant something to him. It certainly
seemed suspicious.

“Get away from me,” Ashley said, taking a
step back from Leland. “It’s not me.”

“You knew who I was all the time,” he
said.

Ashley held up the feather she had shown the
rest of us. “I didn’t know anything. What are you talking
about?”

Immediately Leland began to chatter in a
foreign language of some sort. He was speaking in tongues, I now
recognized.

“You know what I’m saying,” he said in
English. “You understand me, girl. This is your language too.”

“It’s not,” she maintained, fear twisting her
face into something not nearly as beautiful as before. “I’m not
responsible for this.”

Slowly, Leland circled her like a ravenous
dog eying its next meal.

“Help me. Somebody,” she pleaded.

The building began to tremble around us. It
felt like we were in the epicenter of an earthquake.

Now, Leland no longer looked like either the
mild-mannered young man of moments before or the jovial old fellow
we had met in the beginning. His eyes blazed with yellow fire, and
his face was chiseled with determination.

“I should have known it was you from the
start,” he growled.

“Aren’t any of you going to help me?” she
pleaded. “Jesse?”

Jesse Weaver eyed her carefully, unsure of
himself. Only moments before he would have easily allowed her to
fill the void that Vera had left behind, but now, that void seemed
to have its own distinct advantages.

Ashley turned away from all of us and focused
on Leland. She looked like a frightened little girl. The act was
completely convincing too, but the rumbling building presented a
much more convincing argument than Ashley’s facial expressions ever
could. We knew it was only a matter of minutes before we all were
buried under tons of rubble.

“The building’s going to come down at any
minute,” Chuck said as items fell from the shelves and hit the
floor, the sound akin to dropping a thousand hammers all at the
same instant. I couldn’t understand most of what was being said
around me. The only way I knew what Chuck was saying is because I
could read his lips.

“Let’s go,” I said, making a waving motion
with my hand. None of the others needed any reason to question
me.

The only problem with my plan was that we had
to run right past Leland and Ashley to get to the exit. We tried to
slip past them as they circled each other. Although neither Leland
nor Ashley touched them, Pete and Steven both turned to piles of
salt before our very eyes. I wasn’t sure which of the two was
responsible, however, that was the exact moment that Leland changed
into Alastor, casting off every element of humanity. It was
impossible to watch the transformation take place. Racking was
falling down all around us, and merchandise was piling up in heaps
on the floor. All I could see for sure was a blinding white flash
of light that reminded me of those nuclear bomb tests on
television. Then the angel was there, looking nothing at all like
the depictions most commonly dramatized in stained glass.

Gone were all the flowing robes and gleaming
halos. All that remained was a hard, weathered figure that looked
like he could have been a bounty hunter or in a biker gang. He
positively dwarfed Ashley.

Ashley backed away from Alastor, screaming
for one of us to help her; not one of us stopped running. Still, I
for one wondered why she hadn’t transformed like Alastor had. It
made me wonder if we were doing the right thing by leaving her
there to fend for herself. I nearly went back for her, and then
thought better of it as a huge section of the roof fell in behind
me.

The last thing any of us saw before the
building caved in was Alastor poised to bring down the sword on
Ashley’s head. She still looked like a frightened, innocent woman
and nothing else. Feeling ashamed of myself, I turned and ran as
Alastor started speaking in tongues. Clouds of dust swirled around
us and the store as we fled to the parking lot. Yet this was no
ordinary dust. This was all that remained of hundreds and hundreds
of souls. Undoubtedly, the dead had gathered to watch this final
showdown and to cheer Alastor on - or to condemn him. At this
point, I still wasn’t sure if he was a good guy sent to deliver us
or if he was the cause of all our troubles.